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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

Interesting review of a subreddit, wait, no, it's actually fairly good, from a philosophical point of view, over at The Ringer: How “Am I the Asshole?” Created a Medium Place on the Internet [theringer.com]. Perhaps all we Soylentils could ask together?

This is how it starts. You’re on Reddit late at night when you see an interesting post. It went up only four hours ago, but it already has almost 5,000 upvotes. Apparently a couple wants to name their daughter after the Star Wars character Captain Phasma, and they decided to ask the world whether it was OK. The internet seems to think that it isn’t, but you have a different read. Then there’s this kid with a stuffed tiger named Tig who asked his dad to suggest the tiger’s last name. “I couldn’t help myself and just instantly replied ‘Bitties,’” the dad wrote. Now the tiger is named Tig Bitties and the poster’s wife is mad at him. Should he have held his tongue?

One for the TMB.

At first, commenting on these posts feels like watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians, only if it were broadcast live and you could anonymously text any of the characters when you thought they were right or had done something appalling. It’s dramatic. It’s addictive. Soon, it’s like you’ve become fluent in a foreign language, abbreviating “Am I the Asshole” to AITA and wondering WIBTA (“Would I Be the Asshole”) if you told a friend that you hated his girlfriend or asked your roommate’s boyfriend to start paying rent because he’s been over so much lately. You start reading AITA posts before bed instead of doomscrolling the news because here, at least, it feels like your opinion matters.

Hmm, scrolling doom, a Sisiphyean task? But, what if your opinion mattered, on SN?

With everything else going on in the world (please see: a pandemic, massive unemployment, the upcoming U.S. election, Karens, police brutality, protests, riots, climate change, and balancing working from home with sending your kids to school), the Reddit forum known as Am I the Asshole? [reddit.com] has started to feel like a safe space. It’s a place where accountability actually exists, even if only in the form of branding someone right or wrong in one absurd situation. It’s also a place for growth: Sometimes posters return to talk about how their lives changed—almost always for the better—because of the advice they got from thousands of anonymous strangers.

Eventually you stop reading just for the drama, and instead comment because you honestly want to help. You feel like, if not a good person, then at least a better one for it. And maybe you are.

Karens! The Horror, the horror.

The format of the posts has largely remained the same since the beginning. Someone asks a question about an interpersonal conflict, and readers weigh in about whether the poster was in the right or in the wrong and why. But the moderation team has come up with ways to make the subreddit better (or sometimes just more fun).

One of those ways is by adding rules. A subreddit is allowed to have up to 15 rules; since the team added a “No COVID posts” edict earlier this year, AITA now has 14. The most important of those rules is “Be Civil”—without it, AITA might feel like the rest of the internet instead of being a respite from it. The moderators explain that being civil means to “attack ideas, not people” and to “treat others with respect while helping them grow through outside perspectives.” It’s not often that social media and personal growth go together in the same sentence.

Then, a year ago, the AITA team created a bot that would calculate a consensus 24 hours after posting and label the post in one of four ways: You’re the Asshole, Not the Asshole, Everyone Sucks Here, or No Assholes Here. Users in the mood for judging others can read posts only by people deemed “asshole”; those who want something nicer can read only “not the asshole” posts. It’s a nod to the fact that while thousands of people do come to the subreddit to weigh in and help, voyeurism is the appeal for many others.

Full Disclosure: Professional interest involved here.

Sometime after humans gained adequate food stores and physical security, we began to reflect on the right way to live. We established that there are “good” ways to be, and “bad” ways to be, and a whole lot of confusion in the middle. The first laws, which date back to Ur-Nammu around 2100 BCE, were essentially punishment for breaking the minimum moral values of society. Philosophers built on that scaffolding, spending one lifetime after another trying to answer questions like, “What does it mean to be good?” Even the things we think we know are bad—don’t kill other people—become thorny in situations like war or self-defense. Human life is too complex for a one-size-fits-all rule.

Everyone Sucks Here
It doesn’t seem to be an accident that AITA’s astronomical rise in popularity and the creation of a show like The Good Place would happen around the same time. Over the past few years, America has been pummeled with moral dilemmas at a blinding rate: What to do with monuments to the Confederacy; what we owe to immigrants and refugees who want to become citizens; whether it matters that you pay or cheat on your taxes. In Michelle Obama’s viral 2016 speech about that year’s upcoming election, she said that the question of who to vote for wasn’t about politics: “It’s about basic human decency. It’s about right and wrong.”

Rules of decency? More like guidelines, really.

That said, it’s not all moral improvement and helpful advice on AITA. Vicious comments have to be removed regularly, and users get suspended or banned every day for breaking rules. Posters often report that they get harassed in private messages, enduring everything from name-calling to death threats. (AITA “doesn’t own Reddit,” Beaulac says, so while it’s something he and the moderators worry about, they also don’t have control over anything that goes on outside the forum.) The moderators added an automated message everyone sees before posting, which includes a warning that AITA is a very public forum with millions of readers, that the story could get reported on by the media, and that—despite their efforts—some people don’t follow the “Be Civil” rule. Posters get doxxed regularly; the subreddit is just too big for people to be guaranteed that what happens in AITA stays in AITA. The best the moderators feel they can do is warn posters what to expect when telling their stories.

Trolls, don't be feeding them.

No Assholes Here
“Being a better person does involve thinking that your previous self wasn’t as good,” says the philosopher T.M. Scanlon, author of What We Owe to Each Other (a text referenced in The Good Place). In theory, anyone who posts on AITA is open to change. “As for what makes it possible for some people to change and more difficult or less likely for others is a question for your psychologist rather than your philosopher,” Scanlon says.

It’s always surprising when posting on the internet changes someone for the better, yet the most interesting thing about AITA isn’t that it makes (some) posters better people—it’s that perhaps the readers are becoming better, too. Beaulac isn’t surprised by this. “As much time as you want to spend considering the thoughts of others when they express them in a clear way is time well spent,” he says. “It’s a healthy thing to concentrate on.”

Scanlon says that the amount people change has to do with how much they engage with the material. “Philosophy of the kind that I practice starts from normally being puzzled about something,” Scanlon says. It’s not enough to say, “I believe this”; you have to go deeper into the why of your beliefs and where they come from. “As a person who has spent 50 years doing that as a profession,” Scanlon says, “I can tell you it’s not fun to discover your mistakes.”

Scanlon, good philosopher.

The takeaway, as they say today?

Ultimately, AITA is a deeply human place. It’s full of our worst and most embarrassing or challenging moments. It’s full of people shaming each other for bad behavior and people telling us it’s not too late to do better. It can be a place for change and accountability, a place that urges us to be more honest with each other. Some of us are lucky enough to have friends and family who can play that role. For the rest of us, though, there’s always the opportunity to ask millions of strangers a simple question online: Am I the asshole?

So, gotta ask, WIAITA??

Original Submission