I’ve been travelling this week, so time for posting has been tight.
Having spent a fair amount of time on the internet, I’ve also become more familiar with drama and how to avoid it. Here are some good ways to avoid drama:
- Don’t make it personal — you’re here to accomplish some impersonal set of goals on the internet. You’re not really here to make friends, although that might happen now and again.
- Don’t play power games when there are unclear lines of authority.
- Girls on the internet are usually bad news.
- Be mostly indifferent to how people are feeling about you at any given moment.
- Don’t be needy.
- Setting up exchanges with uneven, shifting, or unpredictable value is a recipe for difficulties later on, no matter how much that people like you.
- Hitching your sense of self-worth to your e-fame is a recipe for difficulties later, because people will sense that, and then condition you to behave in a way that damages you.
- Ex: Lindsay Lohan makes great money by drawing attention to herself through bad behavior… until she’s no longer insurable, can no longer get regular work, and her scandals no longer scandalize because she’s already so scandalous.
- Hew towards generosity over asking for favors from people. If you actually want favors from people, giving more than you expect to get is a great way to trigger peoples’ sense of reciprocity.
- The internet leads to skewed behaviors and reward structures compared to the richer world of social relations that it’s just a model of — the internet is a computer model of society, but not the thing itself.
- Further, when you communicate with someone through a medium, it creates a worse mental model of that person than you might have otherwise.
- The internet is great at reaching semi-differentiated masses of people at scale, but not so great at generating trust or encouraging compliance.
Well-timed and useful. Thanks very much, Mr. Dampier.
I suppose another thing is to size up whoever is criticizing you and respond accordingly. If someone is completely anonymous and gives the middle finger to what you’re producing, there isn’t much point wasting time on a lengthy response. If it is a thoughtful person who does produce content then go for a deeper engagement.
I add, stay away from Twitter. I am a mere observer in these parts, and the twitter battles that I’ve seen from the sidelines look very, very bad. Twitter is not conducive to intelligent discussion. It’s more inclined to bring out snark, and amplify mental or emotional problems people may have.
Normal, well adjusted people are not going to be attracted by twitter drama.
Kind of like “Moscow Rules” of the clandestine cold war era for the internet.