It’s not really the same. You could be a regular Reddit user, active in any number of forums. Someone could post something bad about you in some other forum, and you’d never know about it. If you’re not a Reddit user at all, you’d never know and never care. With Twitter, messages like the one in this topic go to your personal feed.
It’s the difference between someone making an idle threat about you to someone else at some distant bar, and someone showing up at your door to make the threat in person. Even if you find out about the former, it’s still not as scary as the latter.
Reddit has a long history of being a free-for-all, where people can say anything without policing or consequences. Twitter tries to be more family-friendly. A place news services and businesses can use and safely link to. Far more policing. A service people can use without the BS common on Reddit.
The “account with a large and conservative following” was, predictably, Adam Baldwin’s. Baldwin a) played Jayne on Firefly and b) coined the term “Gamergate”.
But we don’t all move on. There are those of us who think rape threats need calling out even on Reddit, because they’re frankly not an acceptable part of discourse. It’s never going to change if we just shrug and barf out another “boys will be boys” excuse. Internet culture is not some untouchable monolith; it’s susceptible to all the influences real life culture is, for the simple reason that the internet is part of real life.
“If you don’t like the taste of fish, you wouldn’t go to a restaurant, order the trout, and then call the chef a stupid bitch for serving it to you. So why do people do it on the Internet?”
Astonishingly, I knew a chef who did exactly this on a somewhat regular basis. She was a nightmare person and developed the sort of professional reputation you would expect.
On the other hand, her food was on the amazing side of heaven, and it was really the stimulant abuse that brought out her… difficult side.
A few choice gentlemen suggested I, like their gun, have a “rough brush clean my holes.”
That’s what you use to clean a gun.
Eh…is it okay if I’m not outraged, but don’t think it’s all that funny?
Others said they wanted to lock me in their closet when they’re done with me.
Which is pretty much what happens to a lot of guns: people drag them out of the closet, use them, clean out their holes with a rough brush, and lock them up when they’re done. I think most people can agree that women have more rights than a gun.
So, right, just to head this off: if you had less rights than a gun, your parents would have to have a permit to allow you to be born, a permit to bring you home, you would be their property, and it would be illegal for you to be exceptional unless you were in the military, well-meaning folk would want you to be put to death if your parents killed someone, and the only people defending you would be wackadoodles carrying Confederate flags and Don’t Tread on Me flags.
some gun owners seem to think they should have more rights than anyone, though.
How is threatening someone with rape “acting like people”? Seriously, how is that the first thing some people think about when they read something they dislike? Why is that just something the target should shrug off? At what point does it become a problem we can talk about rather than just something dumb we should ignore?
Maybe, but @Mister44 will have to clarify then. I didn’t get that the net makes us less human, but that human beings are assholes by nature, which is not a view I agree with. Deploying such violent language usually indicates a problem with the individual deploying the language, not with people more generally.
This has to be a case of a pessimist vs optimist outlook affecting one’s interpretation.
In like 99.9+% of the average person’s day-to-day interactions, they manage to get through life with out blatantly insulting someone, and certainly not threatening someone with rape or death. Even the worst racists or sexists manage to not blurt out slurs with every person they don’t like on the street. Many of us have to interact with people we don’t like and/or disagree with and manage to keep it civil. I think on average, acting like “people” includes being polite and civil - vs a snarling, uncultured beast.
@LDoBe 's post above with the Penny Arcade cartoon pretty much sums it up that some people, even normal people, given anonymity + an audience will act in outrageous behaviors they would never (or at least rarely) engage in offline.
well some people are misanthropes, people such as me actually, so if I hear about a bunch of people threatening to rape someone because of a somewhat boring joke and I’m in one of my dark moods I might think “huh, people being people again, hope they all die”
