I’m already seeing a small but distressing increase in behaviors that are frankly embarrassing.
There’s no need to make what seems like an extra effort to treat each other poorly. Being “casually” antagonistic, dismissive, and instigatory for its own sake is miserably sad.
We don’t have to migrate the crummy reddit culture, too. Let’s leave it back on the dumpster fire?
My two rules to live by:
- Assume positive intent. Emotions, body language, etc. get lost when you reduce everything to just text. If it sounds mean or sarcastic but might be curious or genuine, assume it is the latter until proven otherwise.
- never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by
stupiditybeing uniformed. Yeah people are malicious sometimes. I still give people the benefit of the doubt.
That, plus when someone is obviously trolling or stirring something up for fun, don’t feed the animals.
Great advice and equally applicable to real life. By assuming positive intent you’re counteracting the Fundamental Attribution Error.
tendency to attribute another’s actions to their character or personality, while attributing their behavior to external situational factors outside of their control.
Otherwise you’re likely to spend a lot of time being angry at people who don’t really deserve it. Or even if they do, it’s just not worth your mental energy being upset.
