Ask HN: Learning to interact correctly in online communities as a neurodivergent
I often encounter negative reactions in online communities, such as downvotes, being mistaken for a troll, and being misunderstood constantly. It also happens in person, although to a lesser extent, since I can rely on my body language and close friends to help convey my message, as they probably know me so well to infer my meaning from my, I guess, strange communication pattern. Weirdly, on the other hand, when it comes to explaining something I get complimented on how clear I make it (cue the comment "you could make a child understand quantum physics").
The negativity I face online, though, has led me to withdraw from participating in these communities, opting instead to lurk. The toll it takes on my mental health is significant, which also makes me worried about the reactions I might receive here, but I chose to post on HN because I believe it to be one of the most tolerant online communities, so I'll bite the bullet for what may well be the last time.
All in all, I'm at a crossroads and unsure of how to proceed. I've considered trying to imitate others, but I find it difficult, if not impossible. I've also attempted to use AI as a crutch, the way I "use" my friends to help me "translate" my thoughts, but that has often resulted in even more negative feedback. It has gone on and off for 15 years and I haven't made much progress. So, do you have any actionable suggestion? Thanks.
Actionable suggestion that I use for myself: ask yourself mutiple times WHY you're posting something. If you're satisfied with your reason(s), go ahead, be yourself, learn to have a thicker skin.
This has helped me to not post when it was simply me having a knee jerk reaction. It also help to consider what you're getting from it and what you're giving others.
When you reset to your default habits and possibly get bad reactions from people, be honest and evaluate how you communicated and whether their reaction is really not warranted (in your perspective). At times, I've been inconsiderate and obnoxious and got bad reactions. I try to accept that because any other reaction would actually be unexpected. Yes, we all mess up sometimes.
This is a good advice. Another technique, write but don't hit the post button. Let it sit there for a few hours, then re-read and think what others would interpret.
It's nothing to do with you. Be yourself, find your people. Personally, I consider this site to be an exhibition of personality flaws. (Not everyone). Serious egos hell bent on convincing themselves of their intelligence, people who seem to live in highly toxic environments and project that on to people from elsewhere, people who can't stand someone having a different or unusual opinion, ... It's not you, there are all sorts out there. Ignore it all, have your say, ready the pinch of salt, and be entertained.
You might find it easier in primarily neurodivergent communities. In my experience, Mastodon has a lot of neurodivergent people - there are (at least) two servers especially for us, neurodifferent.me and autistics.life.
Also, don't use AI - it sounds wrong and bland. For me, I tend to adopt the writing style of what I've been reading recently (it's most notable when I pause what I'm writing and come back to it after reading something from the 1800s) so I might recommend reading it for a while to get your brain in that mode and then maybe posting, if you also do that.
Best of luck!
I agree about having AI write the text, it's usually easy to tell that something is off. I do wonder if there's some merit in having AI analyze and give feedback on comments prior to posting them. Something along the lines of: "How might this comment be interpreted by readers?" and iterating until the feedback is positive.
> I'm at a crossroads and unsure of how to proceed.
Have you considered that perhaps online communities are simply unhealthy and withdrawing (at least to lurking) is the best course of action?
I think some are healthy and some aren’t.
There are places where people will help you with your photography problems (dpreview.com) or who will get close to you and enjoy your avatar and praise you (VRChat) and then there are places where people believe there are two kinds of people and you better know what kind I am (Twitter clones)
Hard to make a recommendation without a diagnosis, hard to make a diagnosis without information. You don’t have a posting history on HN so I can’t observe the behavior you’re talking about which would be the obvious place to try some debugging.
(you could look through comments of my HN comments and occasionally see someone point out a sign of my condition)
Also, every online community has a different set of standards (not to mention a different number of trolls). What flies on HN might not on NextDoor, and vice-versa.
Maybe OP can point us to online forums where they've posted, and/or provide some examples of conversations where they've been misunderstood?
Could you please provide an example conversation?
One of the things that I’ve found interesting about neurodivergent people who are sometimes offensive is that they are not abnormally hard to offend. I’m not neurodivergent so I hesitate to speak to your experience but perhaps try this.
Before engaging, ask yourself, if positions were reversed how would hearing this make me feel? Is that how I want people to feel when reading what I wrote?
Treat it like a chess game. If I do X (call out their ignorance for example) they will do Y (feel attacked and shut down). Do I want them doing Y? If not, what do I want?
Everything you say and do, does things to other people’s thoughts and emotions. If you want them to feel good, follow the feeling good script (honest engagement with their positive qualities, friendly behavior, active listening, positive engagement with what they’re saying) if you want to pick a fight follow the fight picking script (say rude things, call names, make people feel bad)
Sorry if that all sounds stupid. While following my own advice I realized that what I said could sound painfully obvious, and maybe is offensive and patronizing. In my defense I don’t know what’s obvious to you and what is not.
So if it helps and made you feel good you’re welcome. If it’s offensive or I made things worse, I apologize. (See what I did there? Predicted how what I said might make someone feel)?
In the past I’ve had some people accuse me of being a troll. On reflection, I found I was lonely and taking an opposing viewpoint not with the intent of upsetting anyone, but with the intent of having a discussion and to keep it going. Also, because some people had very black and white views on what I thought was a more nuanced issue, so I was trying to help people see that nuance. People tend to engage more when debating against someone who they feel is wrong, than with someone they agree with. While this probably wasn’t healthy, it did help fill the void for a while. It did hurt when people would twist that into me being a troll, as that was never my intent. The first couple times it happened I spend a lot of time reading and re-reading the exchange to try and figure out what I was doing wrong and couldn’t figure it out. Of course there are people who simple use the term to discredit someone when they run out of arguments for their views in a debate, a standard ad hominem argument.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten better about noticing when I’m headed down that path and stopping myself, or simply disengaging with online communities where there is a lot of one-sided thinking that triggers my need to try to provide context or explain the other side (even if I didn’t necessarily agree with that other side, I felt like I could see where they were coming from and tried to help other people see it too, so there is less of a rift).
I’m not sure if this is similar to what you’re going through, or helps you I see a motivation you may have not realized. If so, I did find disengaging from sites like Reddit helped a lot.
Here at HN, when I first joined I read the guidelines[0] (and a few times since then). I found it really helped to make me more aware (though I’m sure not perfect). The community here also does a good job of regulating itself and sticking to the principles, which helps. Bad behavior isn’t rewarded like it is many other places, and the lack of an inbox system keeps things from getting out of hand.
In person communities are almost always better. If you have those available to you, use them. Online communities are a poor substitute when overused.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There’s a real art to pulling people into conversation about their views without being cast as a caricature. People often frame their beliefs in opposition, and learning to recognize when you’ve suddenly been substituted with a straw man - when your counterparty is no longer discussing something with you, but arguing with Twitter/their parent/their own younger self - helps take some of the sting out of the troll accusation.
This is the thing I have been seeing more and more which I was attempting to push back against in a lot of my conversations. If people are thinking for themselves and being honest, I don't think they can perfectly fit into the little boxes people are assigned by all the caricature designers. And you're right, once someone assigns a box to you, it is very difficult to break free of it, especially on the context of a one-off online conversation.
I truly believe that most people want the same things, we just have different opinions on the best way to get there. If we can focus on those shared goals, and use those as a vehicle to discus the different options to get there, maybe it would help for everyone to start off with common ground and avoid casting anyone with a different opinion as a villain. I've probably been somewhat naive thinking this can change or I can help shift it, even if just with a few people, but I don't like the idea of giving up hope and accepting that this is just the way it is. I want to believe in the future we can openly discus different and unpopular ideas with the shared goal of finding the best solution to move us forward toward those shared goals. At the very least, I expect this of our politicians and leaders, and am continuously disappointed.
Being honest with yourself about your motivations is huge. If I had to give advice on the art of conversation, whether online or off, it would be these points:
- Be honest with yourself about your motivation: while you may be saying X, are you really implying Y?
- Always take the high ground; don't escalate someone else's negativity
- Be kind, even when being snarky
- Give others the benefit of the doubt when they're saying something that could be interpreted either positively or negatively
4chan is waiting for you.
The ride never ends
Don't bother, the internet is not the real world. The unreasonable man changes the world, not the other way around.
Welcome to the internet?
The best way to deal with negative reactions is to stop caring what people think. Be yourself and if they don't like it, it's their problem.
Isn't the end result of not caring what other's think being antisocial?
At least for those of us that are neurodivergent and don't naturally click with others.
Don’t. Just don’t expend the effort, because it’s a harmful net negative. Instead focus all that energy in the real world with real people who are capable of reciprocating with actual love and affection.
Online communities are artificial, frequently superficial, and commonly echo chambers that only exist to amplify something at cost and hostility to everything else. Online communities can be extremely beneficial in answering a question or providing supplemental guidance, but that’s all and it’s quite shallow.
Edit:
Also don’t fear the downvote. The internet is filled with stupid people, narcissists, trolls, and such. The hostility you face may very well not be you. I am frequently downvoted on HN for suggesting the developers measure things before making unfounded assumptions about performance or for commenting about Gaza that doesn’t amount to genocide. I own those downvotes proudly.
This should be the accepted answer.
The issue at hand is that there is often a lot of dishonesty and deception involved in online discussion. People usually never reply back on their maybe wrong initial standpoint, and tend to radicalize their answers once they realize that they will lose the argument.
"Win the argument at all costs" is what statistically most online people use as a strategy. In online communities, honest curiosity is often punished, especially when you start with programming or other tech-related sciences.
I think that indirectly contributed to echo chambers and locality sensitive circle jerks, wherein a sub community accepts only one answer as a solution, either out of fear for downvotes of other proposals, or because those downvotes led to a socially acceptable answer.
I really miss the old phpbb web forums internet, where people could have interesting discussions with way longer attention spans than the 24 hours most platforms have nowadays.
In my opinion, interesting topics need active debate and cultural and knowledge exchange to make progress, but we somehow totally fucked that up on the internet. Be it missing enforcement of netiquettes, corruption of mods or anarchistic behavior for retalation against an opposing view (may I remind you that we still have 4chan, 8chan, 4plebs, kiwifarms, /pol/ and all the other messed up echo chambers, where hate is used a lot to "silence the enemy")
I wanted to give OP a general advice: Hate is a mind infiltration technique. If somebody uses hate in discussions, it means they cannot win by other - rational - means to convince the opposing party. If somebody intentionally uses those techniques, they follow ulterior motives that are motivated by anger, nationalism, religion, etc. Because they usually fear that they have to defend their own world view - otherwise it would shatter to crumbling pieces when it would've been held against their own moral standards.
Don't give up hope, OP, there are good and trustworthy people out there. Keep the ones that you find closely, and learn how to emotionally support them in times of need.
> I really miss the old phpbb web forums internet, where people could have interesting discussions with way longer attention spans than the 24 hours most platforms have nowadays. > In my opinion, interesting topics need active debate and cultural and knowledge exchange to make progress, but we somehow totally fucked that up on the internet.
A professor once complaint about lab politics and I asked why [given his position] he didn't get more involved. He said: I must try to solve it inside my domain of knowledge - even if that wont result in the desired outcome. If I get involved it will distract me and I stop being a scientist.
You've nicely reduced the problem to a computer science problem if not a [be it raw] idea for a startup.
Among all those daily topics on social media are some worthy of years of debate (if the measure is a productive result) A thousand post forum thread is a workable but crappy solution. Newer thing seem exponentially worse. Wiki's barely keep track of who wrote what and turn into a hard to navigate forest of articles.
> A professor once complaint about lab politics and I asked why [given his position] he didn't get more involved. He said: I must try to solve it inside my domain of knowledge - even if that wont result in the desired outcome. If I get involved it will distract me and I stop being a scientist.
This is such a nice quote, and really straight to the point. I love it.
I think social media and how it is designed as a game bugs me a lot, because the more I try to understand the mechanics behind it, the more I feel like I don't understand anything at all. The human species is a very emotional one, and is ragebaited very easily (myself included), given the right parameters are known from an OSINT perspective.
The internet right now is a social system, which kind of implies that it always needs an emotional context, like where the people debating it are coming from, how they've been primed into their opinion with their own experience, and what the context means in a transferred perspective of another area of expertise. And that is somewhat orthogonal to how science works, where the more experience we gain, the more we understand how less we know, which actually means that more experienced people have less intention to do further research, because it's a net negative reward system.
And I think this is somewhat a huge problem, because the lack of transparency of these emotional contexts makes things on the internet attackable in the sense that they can be rage baited, frowned upon, derailed into non-mattering discussions etc. The most rational statement can be shat into oblivion over minor wordings mistakes, which doesn't make sense from the perspective of rationality - as if every human on the internet claims to be perfect by default unless proven otherwise.
And we all know that a lot of people are constantly in the news for something that they said or did in the past. It's like a witch hunt out there, and I don't understand how we as a society can even tolerate that, let alone embrace it by viewing, sharing or liking it.
Social media also does not reflect gains in experience over time, as everything "has to be in the moment", otherwise it would not work as a system. (I wanna point to Chamsky's ideas about propaganda and George Orwell's 1984 here). The optimum social media post is the one with the most ridiculous claims and the least amount of scientific evidence, while also being total hyperbole in an emotional context that's abused for marketing purposes.
So yeah, overall I think I am just frustated by the state of things, but I also have no clue how we can collectively solve it in a sustainable and communital (?) manner.
They put a arcade shaped device in an elderly home that showed life expectancy based on the food served and blood work. (I'm not really sure what the machine did, maybe it also took blood samples.) The elderly could enter what parts of the meal they skipped, additional things they ate or planned to eat then got a graph showing the life expectancy for someone their age on that diet. It was probably crappy science but the response was hilarious. One old man said that before the machine was installed he never ate salads in his life and didn't care much for vegetables. Another ate fast food several days per week and said the machine took all the joy out of it. It's just not enjoyable enough to lose years over.
It was hilarious what a feedback process does.
I think it entirely possible for human dialog to produce useful practical results. I know it is possible. It normally takes a bit of will power and/or vision to get the joy of accomplishment but the endorphins are so much more potent than those triggered by a tik tok video.
We use to have forums where people asked and answered questions. When people stopped bothering to say thanks, limited participation to 1 post, then stopped answering, then stopped asking and finally forgot how the process even worked I wrote out this idea in the comment section of the official yahoo 360 blog: It was to force users into that pattern by requiring the top post to be a question and the responses answers. A point system, ranks badges. Pretty much exactly what yahoo answers was. The more questions you ask or answers you give the more points you score. There are no dumb questions. They made it exactly the way I described except from the monetization. You can put ads on it but the idea was to sell the answers as a service to big companies. You will inevitably have a million Microsoft office questions and answers. At some point MS should be willing to put their name on it and shape the service to fit their brand, allow login with an MS account etc. They don't have to, it doesn't have to be expensive, there are plenty of companies with horrible documentation. I don't pretend to have invented q&a or the answers platform I just fooled around with the idea. Before came google answers, after came stack overflow.
I totally haven't figured out how to quantify but I'm sure people can be forced into a pattern where we have constructive dialog that leads to actions/projects/accomplishments/achievements. All that is needed is feedback, a sense of progress in the process, seeing a goal come closer. I don't want it to be a game but if that is what it takes.
That things online have turned to shit is actually wonderful. Before things can improve first they have to get worse. There is this huge vacuum now where our ambitions use to be. If figured out all it takes is a bit of code :)
(What I consider) a truly wild thought I've kept to myself. With LLMs you should be able to do many-to-one communication. The internet only has one-to-many. (With everyone screaming to be the one)
It should be possible to have a constructive exchange of thoughts between millions of people, merge similar statements, have stuff float to the top, etc. The LLM doesn't have to be intelligent, it only needs to help glue the collective human intelligence together and make it do useful things. If we can effectively organize that much feedback there might be no point in doing anything on your own or with a small team. If enough people enjoy the process money or ROI also stops being an issue.
I just read this again and all is fine.
https://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/rants/X0001_ACT_NO...
If you must change don't change into that what they want you to become. Wear the downvotes with pride. Become so arrogant as to not care what anyone else thinks of you. What you think of yourself is enough.