Teaching thicker skin a good idea. Even a blog post on the psychology of receiving and responding to anonymous Internet criticisms and engaging in debates without taking it personally would be interesting to me.
As a woman, I suspect the people on the internet forums on which I feel most at home make an effort to be nicer to me (and other women). Whenever I comment on those forums anonymously, there are many more negative comments and they are more aggressive than any I receive when I’m not anonymous- comments both from men and women. Maybe just associating a comment with a name or a face makes people more friendly in general- I don’t know.
As a person who is more motivated by criticism than praise, I tend to be careful about researching and crafting my comments to avoid unhelpful or obvious attacks, because criticisms tend to attract an inordinate amount of my attention and I’ll fixate on the one criticism and forget about all the upvotes and praise. I try to keep things in perspective but it’s my personality to focus more on errors.
In my experience women like to share their thoughts with everyone but can be less inclined to argue with random strangers. Depending on the topic, some of the lesswrong comment threads seem to be a forum for debate, and less of a place to share thoughts. Maybe if they were reframed as “share your take” instead of “dive into the debate,” they’d have more more appeal, but I don’t know if that’s the goal.
Teaching thicker skin a good idea. Even a blog post on the psychology of receiving and responding to anonymous Internet criticisms and engaging in debates without taking it personally would be interesting to me.
As a woman, I suspect the people on the internet forums on which I feel most at home make an effort to be nicer to me (and other women). Whenever I comment on those forums anonymously, there are many more negative comments and they are more aggressive than any I receive when I’m not anonymous- comments both from men and women. Maybe just associating a comment with a name or a face makes people more friendly in general- I don’t know.
As a person who is more motivated by criticism than praise, I tend to be careful about researching and crafting my comments to avoid unhelpful or obvious attacks, because criticisms tend to attract an inordinate amount of my attention and I’ll fixate on the one criticism and forget about all the upvotes and praise. I try to keep things in perspective but it’s my personality to focus more on errors.
In my experience women like to share their thoughts with everyone but can be less inclined to argue with random strangers. Depending on the topic, some of the lesswrong comment threads seem to be a forum for debate, and less of a place to share thoughts. Maybe if they were reframed as “share your take” instead of “dive into the debate,” they’d have more more appeal, but I don’t know if that’s the goal.