People game their social scores by being provocative edgelords. There’s almost no incentive on social media to conform. And every incentive to stand out.
Just look around at our political situation, you see far less conformity, and extremes in political expression. We even elected President Edgelord.
Yes, provocation is a viable strategy for clicks and audience-building, but few people are attempting that, and among those who do it's not the only strategy.
Everywhere else -- in corporate America, on Facebook, at churches and family gatherings, even with many friends -- conformity is still the norm, and there are more landmine topics than ever.
I don't think its "social cooling" as much as its a fracturing of social media into edgelords / influencers + their fanboys.
Everyone seems to have their own parasocial relationships with some podcast / youtuber / media personality. The fanboys want to conform to their tribe of fanboys and what the influencer wants. The influencer usually wants to sell something.
> People game their social scores by being provocative edgelords.
Sure, some people are shooting that moon, but that's a tiny fraction of the rest—let alone the lurkers—who are keen on maintaining employment and wedding invitations.
Provocative, sure. But people are generally provocative within a very narrow, uninformed window. Taking an extreme view on a hot political issue. Democrats are stupid. Republicans are evil. Science is broken and unrecoverable.
There is very little room to have a nuanced perspective. You'll lose viewership on BOTH sides.
Most people don't want to get harassed and attacked at the level Trump gets so there are strong incentives to not do what he did. Saying there are no reasons not to do it is just ignorant, most people prefer peace and quiet over drama.
Joining the crowd to express approval for extremism (or equally extreme disapproval) has a much lower bar than making the "top-level" statements you refer to, though. Inflammatory content is constantly rewarded with a firehose of such "engagement", and it's coming from the vast populace that's supposedly averse to drama.
Social media in 2017 was very different than social media in 2025.
There was a gradual change from social media with your friends to social media, look at these videos chosen by the algorithm to keep you on our platform.
Back in 2017 it was already changing but not nearly as much as where we’d find ourselves in 2025.
I think people could definitely come to the conclusion of being able to game your social score by conforming in 2017, all you had to do was post a few nice pictures but more often.
The quiet ones are conformists and they eventually conform to the extremists if that's all they see. Many people who think they are moderates probably aren't actually or won't be over time. There is no "radical centrism".
That's why I still think Bernie would've taken the Dems to victory in 2016. Extreme beats extreme. Hillary was just too normal.
The Americans (†) who grew up with constant surveillance (social media, cameras everywhere) aim for ordinariness. The entire generation is less likely to express a non-consensus opinion than prior generations. For good reason: with everything being recorded and broadcast, personal errors are both accentuated and persist longer with no corresponding rise in upside. Bold opinions and creative ideas are simply too risky under such an equation.
I find this sad and worrisome. I like chaos and healthy disorderliness. I enjoy skilled conversationalists with fresh ideas. And I worry about a "chilled" populace too afraid to express morality when it becomes socially inconvenient.
(† Footnote: It isn't just Americans but youth coming of age in every culture. The "social cooling" effect is more pronounced among Americans as they exhibit greater variance in expression in the first place and thus have more to move toward the baseline.)
People say this but is it true? Young people, for instance, increasingly say that political violence may be justified. That doesn't sound like a safe opinion.
Because yesterday I learned that 30% of Americans think political violence may be necessary to fix the country[0], which was gathered from anonymous polls I presume, yet I see almost none of it online and certainly not in mainstream media.
And the censorship is certainly not helping.
My friend got multiple warnings and temporary bans on reddit for suggesting that:
- The only hope for democracy in Russia is a violent revolution. From what got banned and what didn't, we gather it's OK to talk about revolution, less OK about violent revolution and not allowed to talk about killing people. Well, how does reddit think revolutions work? People have to get killed or have a very high chance of being killed to give up power "voluntarily".
- That their dictator should be sentenced to death by the ICC and executed. She managed to appeal this one because she phrased it as a court ordered killing ("execution") with the caveat that the court would legalize anyone killing him (since the ICC cannot reach him to arrest him but somebody close to him might be able to do it and could use protection is he managed to escape).
So pro-tip to avoid _some_ censorship: frame it as a change of law or a legal process.
I’m not sure exactly how you mean it, but a lot of the discourse around political violence itself fits in the Overton window of acceptable discourse, so this doesn’t surprise me too much.
But I find statements outside of the Overton window to be punished quite severely, and I think most people now understand that you can very easily lose your job for stating the incorrect thing.
If a politically violent movement breaks out and is successful enough to become even quasi-mainstream, having a history of supporting them may be the only safe opinion.
My best friend from school days has a son who’s now in 7th grade.
Recently, when we were talking about him, we realised his school years are far less dramatic than ours. We had drama, lots of bullying, tears, fights, and mean things were done.
In contrast, his son’s school days are absolutely harmless and benign.
I know it’s n = 1 and maybe we were very unlucky back then. But it also makes me wonder if any chaotic experience is worth having.
This massively depends on where you are located and on the school itself. A 5 km difference can be a completely different world. When we moved in 2018 one of my kids could not immediately go to the school we favored. But the other one could and then in the next year the fact that he already had a brother in that school would give him preferred access. Those two schools could not have been different. The one was an endless list of tragedies, fights and other crap, the other was on a completely different level, never a problem and this seemed to hold true for different classes in that same school as well. I think the cumulative effect of that one year was such that he ended up going to a different level of secondary education, even though cognitively the two brothers are not all that different.
So that's n=2, not quite n=1, still anecdata but maybe it will help someone who thinks that all schools are equal and good.
I think it is really hard to extrapolate from single examples. My first two years were a little like that. Then I had to repeat a school year, got in the nicest class imaginable and had five incredibly fun years that I look back at with a lot of fondness.
Having a kid myself, I think life is much worse now. There is the constant unconscious fear of getting filmed, etc. It was much easier for my generation to just experiment, do stupid stuff, etc., you know being a child/teenager, without the fear of repercussions.
From what I've seen, all that has happened is that aggressors ("bullies") are better at hiding it.
When it was OK to beat somebody up (for pleasure or social status), they did that. Now, violence is being painted as the greatest evil. So instead they get pleasure and gain social status by less visible kinds of aggression, such as verbal, social and online abuse.
And, worse, the victims have a harder time fighting back because
- Fewer people notice the abuse - fighting is visible but veiled insinuations or in-jokes at the victim's expense are hard to notice and understand by onlookers.
- Responding to verbal abuse with physical retaliation would be seen as an escalation.
> The entire generation is less likely to express a non-consensus opinion than prior generations.
I think that's pretty arguable, and I'd want to see actual research. Certainly kids today are wildly more likely to embrace Stuff that Pisses Off their Elders than at any time since the 60's counterculture revolution. Think gender fluidity and pronoun choice, body modification, protest culture, rejection of career paths, embrace of the "neuro-atypical" as routine personality types... all that seems qualitatively but inarguably higher than when I was growing up 30-40 years ago.
This just happens to be the consensus opinion for their group. Kids have never cared about being accepted by people 20 years older than they are; kids have always cared about being accepted by their peers. Social cooling means that dissent from their peer group is harder.
> And I worry about a "chilled" populace too afraid to express morality when it becomes socially inconvenient.
The social cooling effect always existed. It is just, previously, information and reactions traveled way slower. We are just adjusting to the new speed. Culture is a complex emergent product of the various basic human interactions. My guess is that this product doesn't make much sense when reactions travel fast as culture changes very slowly.
So instead, the future will be culture-less. You decide your behavior everyday based on your first few (100) shorts/snaps/tiktoks of the morning. It does help that these snaps disappear by tomorrow. This new society will have no memory.
It helps to be already social isolated and socially suicidal. The freedom to think and speak, once again resides in a barrel and not with those who emptied it, who must stick to stagnant ideas with no explanation and prediction power.
(the sun will disappear August 23, 2044).
True science. true knowledge puts itself to the test, by performing predictions and miracles.
Everything else just ain't.
Typed on a miracle, a electrically state-full rock, predicatively turning up and on every morning.
> For good reason: with everything being recorded and broadcast, personal errors are both accentuated and persist longer with no corresponding rise in upside. Bold opinions and creative ideas are simply too risky under such an equation.
Or, repression will build up for so long that it will explode.
How do you think the current political climate has shifted this? It seems maybe individuals won’t express a non conformist view as easily, but politics has grown more extreme in terms of what acceptable positions are in the first place.
I'm shocked how all this crept up across society. Maybe I was just naive, but still. A society is a very subtle fabric, and the last 20 years distorted a lot of aspect of this fragile equilibrium.
I feel both bad and good about the concept of "social cooling."
It's nothing new. Societal pressure is as old as humanity. Pressure to conform, to be "one with the herd," is basically built into our DNA.
Constant surveillance is simply a new feature of an old pattern. If anyone has ever read Jane Austen, they know about societal pressure, and how real the stakes can be. People could get their lives destroyed by a careless word, centuries ago.
If you don't fit into the herd, you don't get the advantages and protection offered by the herd. The outliers get picked off by the predators.
But we need to give up quite a bit, to fit in. For some, the cost is too high.
Even the "outliers" get commoditized. When you could get ripped and graffiti'd punk jeans from Bloomingdales, the Punk ethos was dead.
Long topic, lots of different angles, and we can all justify our own approach. Not sure there's any answer that would make everyone satisfied.
It worries me that "the herd" is not anyone I know in person, not anyone I respect, not anyone who loves me, but an abstraction that helps someone else make money, or helps someone else win an election.
I think that is an obvious bad thing.
It is one thing to say like "I won't call my friends' political beliefs stupid when we're hanging out" versus "If I want to criticize my government, I should use a ULID and not my legal name."
I honestly love this as someone who never has a consistent identity in terms of the name I use online and not keeping a long history such as re-creating accounts whenever it is convenient.
This is especially relevant on social media platforms where I don't want to feel like someone can just dig up something I've said or shared 5 years ago and use that against me. It also helps me stay myself without changing my behavior to align with others.
True, you don’t need to be impossible to be fingerprinted. If someone really wanted to track you manually using databrokers, be my guest :)
But for most people here I think it’s about not being the easiest prey. And make the automatic and general algorithms hard to track you.
Unless you rotate IPs and browser fingerprints for each identity and alter your visited sites, usage patterns, typing speed and style, mouse movements etc. etc. the data brokers will be able to connect your ”inconsistent” identities.
Most attacks on people are done by those who just google your name and see what comes up so some very minor privacy work helps a lot. Its a lot of work to be completely safe but its very little work to be basically safe.
"I have no idea who you are talking about leave me alone you freak."
if data is linked to me via some vague data that is based on similarities there's no world where that can be used as a trustworthy source or at least not putting doubt into the person who is using such data as often times it also links to a bunch of incorrectly assigned data. It's like trusting LLM's with everything they say.
This website analyzes speech to find your probable alternative names on HN. It’s probably easy to recoup a few more signals to find your name on other apps:
thankfully my speech patterns naturally shift over time for who knows why, sometimes I start using commas too often. Sometimes I start my sentances with capitals, however, it's rare to see me put too much thought into things I write.
sometimes i just dont bother using the shift key at all
For this you need to change more than just account. The way you write is your fingerprint. Concrete example with HN accounts was posted and tried several times.
Good but temporary. Big tech has your browser fingerprint against that plus LLMs will probably be able to match it again by text using cosine similarly.
Maybe you use tails everywhere and run what you say through LLMs to rephrase. Might be OK then.
The good thing about younger zoomers and alpha is they've already incorporated this into their lives, so none of this is grotesque or surprising. They've adapted their culture to match.
Yeah, it's fascinating how seamlessly younger generations adapt to the tradeoffs. Privacy feels less like a right and more like a strategic resource they know how to manage
This was an interesting time. In some ways I felt like the internet was even more bifurcated then than now, between US political parties. This is when primitive chatbots, before GPT LLMs, could have mostly only been used by large nation states. This is when concerns about significant numbers of bot accounts on reddit became plausible. It felt like a time when the internet was being manipulated in a more subtle way than it is now.
As other people have noted, this is an old site, they also note that genz have partially learnt from our mistakes, and turned to ephemeral media, amongst other things.
The rise of AR glasses will of course kneecap anonymity in "real life"
Interesting. We’re not dealing with actual overcrowding now, but with the constant din of social media and news, society feels overcrowded. You used to be able to live in blissful ignorance of what was happening in other areas, but now you can only do that if you avoid news and social media completely.
Yes, I can't help but think that things turned out exactly the opposite of how this site predicted. In my view, it would be a good thing if people were a little more self-conscious about what they wrote on social media!
re "behavioral sink" that wikipedia article is kind of a credulous stub that's missing the pile of criticisms of the "Universe 25" experiment (lack of reproducibility, much of the dysfunction being attributable to how the setting trapped the population in each other's scent+sight lines, akin to shoving humans in a transparent panopticon and calling it a test of urban life)
I'm more concerned about the fact I have no idea if the article and the HN comments are all AI generated or not. Can you tell if this comment is AI or not?
What happens when social discourse is polluted by noise that is identical to signal?
If I reply yes, would you believe me? Am I even replying to a "you" right now, or was it a comment posted by a call to requests.get() by some AI agent?
Readit News
People game their social scores by being provocative edgelords. There’s almost no incentive on social media to conform. And every incentive to stand out.
Just look around at our political situation, you see far less conformity, and extremes in political expression. We even elected President Edgelord.
Everywhere else -- in corporate America, on Facebook, at churches and family gatherings, even with many friends -- conformity is still the norm, and there are more landmine topics than ever.
Social cooling is real.
Everyone seems to have their own parasocial relationships with some podcast / youtuber / media personality. The fanboys want to conform to their tribe of fanboys and what the influencer wants. The influencer usually wants to sell something.
Sure, some people are shooting that moon, but that's a tiny fraction of the rest—let alone the lurkers—who are keen on maintaining employment and wedding invitations.
There is very little room to have a nuanced perspective. You'll lose viewership on BOTH sides.
There was a gradual change from social media with your friends to social media, look at these videos chosen by the algorithm to keep you on our platform.
Back in 2017 it was already changing but not nearly as much as where we’d find ourselves in 2025.
I think people could definitely come to the conclusion of being able to game your social score by conforming in 2017, all you had to do was post a few nice pictures but more often.
Both conclusions can be right at the same time.
That's why I still think Bernie would've taken the Dems to victory in 2016. Extreme beats extreme. Hillary was just too normal.
I find this sad and worrisome. I like chaos and healthy disorderliness. I enjoy skilled conversationalists with fresh ideas. And I worry about a "chilled" populace too afraid to express morality when it becomes socially inconvenient.
(† Footnote: It isn't just Americans but youth coming of age in every culture. The "social cooling" effect is more pronounced among Americans as they exhibit greater variance in expression in the first place and thus have more to move toward the baseline.)
Because yesterday I learned that 30% of Americans think political violence may be necessary to fix the country[0], which was gathered from anonymous polls I presume, yet I see almost none of it online and certainly not in mainstream media.
And the censorship is certainly not helping.
My friend got multiple warnings and temporary bans on reddit for suggesting that:
- The only hope for democracy in Russia is a violent revolution. From what got banned and what didn't, we gather it's OK to talk about revolution, less OK about violent revolution and not allowed to talk about killing people. Well, how does reddit think revolutions work? People have to get killed or have a very high chance of being killed to give up power "voluntarily".
- That their dictator should be sentenced to death by the ICC and executed. She managed to appeal this one because she phrased it as a court ordered killing ("execution") with the caveat that the court would legalize anyone killing him (since the ICC cannot reach him to arrest him but somebody close to him might be able to do it and could use protection is he managed to escape).
So pro-tip to avoid _some_ censorship: frame it as a change of law or a legal process.
[0]: https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2025/10/02/day-1717...
But I find statements outside of the Overton window to be punished quite severely, and I think most people now understand that you can very easily lose your job for stating the incorrect thing.
This is gonna get downvoted for sure because HNs bias, but based on current events, it's only the left that does that.
Right-wingers may say hurtful words but don't seem too keen on murdering opponents for political reasons or disagreements. At least not yet.
Recently, when we were talking about him, we realised his school years are far less dramatic than ours. We had drama, lots of bullying, tears, fights, and mean things were done.
In contrast, his son’s school days are absolutely harmless and benign.
I know it’s n = 1 and maybe we were very unlucky back then. But it also makes me wonder if any chaotic experience is worth having.
So that's n=2, not quite n=1, still anecdata but maybe it will help someone who thinks that all schools are equal and good.
Having a kid myself, I think life is much worse now. There is the constant unconscious fear of getting filmed, etc. It was much easier for my generation to just experiment, do stupid stuff, etc., you know being a child/teenager, without the fear of repercussions.
When it was OK to beat somebody up (for pleasure or social status), they did that. Now, violence is being painted as the greatest evil. So instead they get pleasure and gain social status by less visible kinds of aggression, such as verbal, social and online abuse.
And, worse, the victims have a harder time fighting back because
- Fewer people notice the abuse - fighting is visible but veiled insinuations or in-jokes at the victim's expense are hard to notice and understand by onlookers.
- Responding to verbal abuse with physical retaliation would be seen as an escalation.
I think that's pretty arguable, and I'd want to see actual research. Certainly kids today are wildly more likely to embrace Stuff that Pisses Off their Elders than at any time since the 60's counterculture revolution. Think gender fluidity and pronoun choice, body modification, protest culture, rejection of career paths, embrace of the "neuro-atypical" as routine personality types... all that seems qualitatively but inarguably higher than when I was growing up 30-40 years ago.
The social cooling effect always existed. It is just, previously, information and reactions traveled way slower. We are just adjusting to the new speed. Culture is a complex emergent product of the various basic human interactions. My guess is that this product doesn't make much sense when reactions travel fast as culture changes very slowly.
So instead, the future will be culture-less. You decide your behavior everyday based on your first few (100) shorts/snaps/tiktoks of the morning. It does help that these snaps disappear by tomorrow. This new society will have no memory.
(the sun will disappear August 23, 2044). True science. true knowledge puts itself to the test, by performing predictions and miracles. Everything else just ain't. Typed on a miracle, a electrically state-full rock, predicatively turning up and on every morning.
Or, repression will build up for so long that it will explode.
https://criticalissues.umd.edu/feature/academic-self-censors...
Deleted Comment
I feel both bad and good about the concept of "social cooling."
It's nothing new. Societal pressure is as old as humanity. Pressure to conform, to be "one with the herd," is basically built into our DNA.
Constant surveillance is simply a new feature of an old pattern. If anyone has ever read Jane Austen, they know about societal pressure, and how real the stakes can be. People could get their lives destroyed by a careless word, centuries ago.
If you don't fit into the herd, you don't get the advantages and protection offered by the herd. The outliers get picked off by the predators.
But we need to give up quite a bit, to fit in. For some, the cost is too high.
Even the "outliers" get commoditized. When you could get ripped and graffiti'd punk jeans from Bloomingdales, the Punk ethos was dead.
Long topic, lots of different angles, and we can all justify our own approach. Not sure there's any answer that would make everyone satisfied.
I think that is an obvious bad thing.
It is one thing to say like "I won't call my friends' political beliefs stupid when we're hanging out" versus "If I want to criticize my government, I should use a ULID and not my legal name."
Oh, hell, that's even older.
Criticizing the government has always been fraught. The founders of the United States signed their death warrants, when they signed the Declaration.
This is especially relevant on social media platforms where I don't want to feel like someone can just dig up something I've said or shared 5 years ago and use that against me. It also helps me stay myself without changing my behavior to align with others.
concerned_with_privacy: true,
online_usernames: ['kachapopopow', ...]
}
;)
As someone else mentioned, most likely you've been fingerprinted. But at least yes you can't be looked up directly, only if someone uses a databroker.
if data is linked to me via some vague data that is based on similarities there's no world where that can be used as a trustworthy source or at least not putting doubt into the person who is using such data as often times it also links to a bunch of incorrectly assigned data. It's like trusting LLM's with everything they say.
https://stylometry.net/user?username=kachapopopow
NB: Seems offline, but it was quite efficient !
sometimes i just dont bother using the shift key at all
Deleted Comment
Maybe you use tails everywhere and run what you say through LLMs to rephrase. Might be OK then.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363 (2692 upvotes, 1099 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882 (389 upvotes, 190 comments)
Like Oil Leads to Global Warming, Data Leads to Social Cooling - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38482582 - Dec 2023 (15 comments)
The reputation economy is turning us into conformists (2017) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28744471 - Oct 2021 (204 comments)
What Is Social Cooling? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25746131 - Jan 2021 (246 comments)
Social Cooling (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363 - Sept 2020 (1058 comments)
Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882 - June 2017 (185 comments)
The rise of AR glasses will of course kneecap anonymity in "real life"
But I look at the general collapse of "civility" in the USA and cant help but think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
Yes, I can't help but think that things turned out exactly the opposite of how this site predicted. In my view, it would be a good thing if people were a little more self-conscious about what they wrote on social media!
What happens when social discourse is polluted by noise that is identical to signal?
Is there anyone else out there?
If I reply yes, would you believe me? Am I even replying to a "you" right now, or was it a comment posted by a call to requests.get() by some AI agent?
Deleted Comment