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The Internet of Beefs (2020)

The Internet of Beefs (2020)

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·March 11, 2025
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cjs_ac

> Beefing is everywhere on the internet. Bernie and Warren beef with each other and with Trump, different schools of economists beef with each other over trade policy, climate hawks beef with climate doves. Here you see Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson taking their beef offline. There you see Ben Shapiro attempt to bait Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into a live beef for the hundredth time. And over on that side, we find Jesse Singal beefing with trans activists.

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> And this is just the North American, English-language theater of the IoB (the other major one I’m familiar with, the Indian theater, is much worse).

I have two observations on this. The first is that the interaction model of a platform influences this. Platforms with a creator-audience dynamic promote this sort of thing: YouTube, everything Meta owns, Twitter. Reddit and HN make this sort of thing less likely because posters can't establish a brand and there's no 'follow' mechanism.

My second observation is that there is a cultural component to this. Consider /r/politics: every comment page is just hundreds of people saying that Trump is awful. US politics is so polarised that supporters of different political parties need to be segregated into different subreddits. Compare and contrast /r/australianpolitics and /r/ukpolitics, where, despite a strong bias towards the Labo(u)r parties, the whole Overton window is welcome to participate, and they participate by engaging in earnest, interesting discussion. The 'no, they're the bad people over there' comments are downvoted as the worthless rot that they are.

I have a theory as to why this is, but I don't think HN is the right place to discuss it.