Webnote spotlight. From love to hate


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After a short break (a little over a year - what does your calendar mean to us, immortals) Spotlight is back on the air

Webnote. From now on, the column will be permanent, but my participation in the life of Gagadget will not be limited to it: however, I will not reveal all my cards, you will soon see everything for yourself.

Today I want to talk about one amazingInternet conglomerate, which has long attracted me with its uniqueness: on the one hand, this resource is quite informative and useful, on the other - it is extremely pathetic, narcissistic and has all the beginnings of the psychology of the crowd. Why pathetic? Let me remind you that pathos is, firstly, a city on the island of Cyprus, where the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite, was born, and secondly, “a rhetorical category corresponding to the style, manner, or manner of expressing feelings, which are characterized by emotional sublimity and inspiration. In the interpretation of Aristotle, pathos is a device in which the aesthetics of the narrative is conveyed through the tragedy of the hero, his suffering and the response emotions of the audience. Using pathos, the speaker should cause the audience the right feelings, while not fully opening their own. In a later presentation, in the works of Hegel, the concept of pathos has expanded, including not only tragic, but also a solemn, sublime aesthetics. The pathos is heroic, tragic, romantic, sentimental and satirical. Authors of odes, epos, tragedies traditionally resort to pathos ”(quoted from Wikipedia).

That is, as you see, an ode or tragedy generouslydiluted by emotions, which leads the crowd behind itself, can have quite a lot of popularity, especially if this epic is about modern technologies. And what else is very important in these your internet at the present time? That's right - likes, pluses and minus ones (this is especially important, I still don’t understand why Mark Zuckerberg didn’t build a dislike or something like that in his brainchild, because nothing drives the crowd like a general negative assessment and censure). The composition of the participants of this party is also important - ordinary people have nothing to do there, we need only “our own”, advanced and romping, comrades who speak the same language, people of the same circle, if we talk about modern technologies.


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Well, have you guessed who I'm talking about yet?There is an audience that (with all its intellectual strength) behaves like an uneducated crowd, a lot of narcissistic authors, an emotional epic and pros and cons&#8230; Of course, this is HabraHabr! Let's take a little look at this resource and see why smart people, when they come across it, become obedient sheep to someone's will and run where everyone else is, sometimes even against their will. I will also explain why I don’t like this resource (yes, from my own example and experience, but this is even better than talking about ephemeral things).

Let's begin with how to get on Habr. To do this, you need to have an invite (here it is, “VIP exclusive exclusive place” where everyone wants, and here it should not be confused with Leprozorium, which, although it looks like a bit of Habr, but still is somewhat different in many ways, turn, in its spirit), or it is necessary to write some such a beautiful post, that the gods will descend from heaven and give you the cherished and desired regulation.

Next, before writing on Habr, you need to go throughStrict face control. Look at this form: the checkboxes in the first part of the test of loyalty and strength are not pressed immediately, but each 3 seconds after the previous one, so that there is time to read the rules. If you make the wrong choice in the second part of the answers, the desired button will not be pressed. Well, as a conclusion, if you have negative karma (another strange concept that depends on how many plus signs and minus ones you received), then you will not be able to write anywhere except in the sandbox from which you can be “pulled "On the real Habr, if you get enough pluses.


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Doesn’t it remind interrogation with predilection? I don’t know how to whom, but I don’t want to put the answers where necessary — do they think I'm completely foolish? I admire those who passed this test, who never shook a hand, and who then still found the strength and courage to write their own thoughts and notes on Habr. And oh, how difficult it is: you just need to do something that does not fit into the social norms and principles - all, write, it’s lost, you will be warned and you will not be able to write anywhere and even leave comments (I personally have a limit of one comment per hour - and all because of the truth, which I say, not submitting to the herd effect).

And again Wikipedia: “The characteristics of the crowd most often include: spiritual unity or“ mental homogeneity ”; emotionality; irrationality. Gustav Lebon explained the spiritual unity of the crowd by the mechanism of infection - the mechanical spread of affect from one member to another by the type of infectious disease. Thus, homogeneity precedes rather than follows from belonging to the crowd. Two mechanisms supposedly explain the emotional and irrational nature of the crowd: loss of responsibility due to anonymity; impression of universality. "

Now, you never know if you will getAdvantages of your publication or you will be suddenly zaminusyut - it all depends on the mood of the crowd. Yes, I know that they can write as meaningful posts, and not quite relevant, but in most cases, everything starts with the first ratings and comments. I will allow myself a little more distraction and recall the case (I may be mistaken in the details, but not in essence). Somewhere in Germany, they set up an interesting social experience: in an unfavorable area there was an empty office building that was glazed. And so it stood for some time completely whole, and no one touched it. Sociologists decided to go on provocation and broke several windows. After a couple of days there was not a single whole window on the building: people saw that the windows were broken and “connected”.

With Habr the same situation. Despite the fact that smart and intelligent people gathered there, the psychology of the crowd works very quickly, and the hand past the will stretches a minus (or plus, depends on the mass effect). Almost all comments with a minus, which I met (and wrote myself), are contrary to the generally accepted opinion in a single post, and often express the truth that many can not say out loud. For example, here is a fresh case: they found a case to turn off advertising on Kindlah, asking about this support service; and someone said that he liked the advertisement, and he immediately got the minuses. Below you can see my comments about renegades (because of the night of resurrection while there are no minuses), as well as the author’s comments on the post in the style “if you don’t have the case that I described, then what do you come up here, read and comment on with thoughts that are different from the crowd. "


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What is most interesting, on Habré is full of useful information and necessary posts that help in the work of many Internet-dependent people. But that's scary - they do not understand humor at all:


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What did I want to say to all of this? Just that you should never be like a crowd, and have your own point of view. Do not be afraid to tell the truth, no matter how bitter it may be, and don’t follow the majority if you are sure that they are wrong.