I’m trying to think if we ever prank each other or socially engineer each other in my social circle, and the answer is yes but it’s always by doing something really cool — like, an ambiguous package shows up but there’s a thoughtful gift inside.
(Not necessarily expensive — a friend found a textbook on Soviet accounting for me, I got him a hardcover copy of Junichi Saga’s Memories of Silk and Straw. Getting each other nice tea, coffee, soap, sometimes putting it in a funny box so it doesn’t look like what it is. Stuff like that. Sometimes nicer stuff, but it’s not about the money.)
Then I’m trying to think how my circle in general would respond to no-permission-given out-of-scope pranking of someone’s real life community that they’re member of — and yeah, there’d be pretty severe consequences in my social circle if someone did that. If I heard someone did what your buddy did who was currently a friend or acquaintance, they’d be marked as someone incredibly discourteous and much less trustworthy. It would just get marked as… pointless rude destructive behavior.
And it’s pretty tech heavy btw, we do joke around a lot, it’s just when we do pranks it’s almost always at the end a gift or something uplifting.
I don’t mean this to be blunt btw, I just re-read it before posting and it reads more blunt than I meant it to — I was just running through whether this would happen in my social circle, I ran it out mentally, and this is what I came up with.
Obviously, everyone’s different. And that’s of course one of the reasons it’s hard for people to get along. Some sort of meta-lesson, I suppose.
I think this case is fairly different to what you describe. The community organised for this to potentially happen and Chris publicised this fact to his friends. The community decided that it was worth the risk so the damage could be assumed not to be large and having the frontpage going down for 24 hours really isn’t a huge deal.
The actual damage is realisitically the fact that the experiment (and associated metaphor) didn’t work but I feel like the lessons learnt should more than make up for that.
Different social norms, I suppose.
I’m trying to think if we ever prank each other or socially engineer each other in my social circle, and the answer is yes but it’s always by doing something really cool — like, an ambiguous package shows up but there’s a thoughtful gift inside.
(Not necessarily expensive — a friend found a textbook on Soviet accounting for me, I got him a hardcover copy of Junichi Saga’s Memories of Silk and Straw. Getting each other nice tea, coffee, soap, sometimes putting it in a funny box so it doesn’t look like what it is. Stuff like that. Sometimes nicer stuff, but it’s not about the money.)
Then I’m trying to think how my circle in general would respond to no-permission-given out-of-scope pranking of someone’s real life community that they’re member of — and yeah, there’d be pretty severe consequences in my social circle if someone did that. If I heard someone did what your buddy did who was currently a friend or acquaintance, they’d be marked as someone incredibly discourteous and much less trustworthy. It would just get marked as… pointless rude destructive behavior.
And it’s pretty tech heavy btw, we do joke around a lot, it’s just when we do pranks it’s almost always at the end a gift or something uplifting.
I don’t mean this to be blunt btw, I just re-read it before posting and it reads more blunt than I meant it to — I was just running through whether this would happen in my social circle, I ran it out mentally, and this is what I came up with.
Obviously, everyone’s different. And that’s of course one of the reasons it’s hard for people to get along. Some sort of meta-lesson, I suppose.
I think this case is fairly different to what you describe. The community organised for this to potentially happen and Chris publicised this fact to his friends. The community decided that it was worth the risk so the damage could be assumed not to be large and having the frontpage going down for 24 hours really isn’t a huge deal.
The actual damage is realisitically the fact that the experiment (and associated metaphor) didn’t work but I feel like the lessons learnt should more than make up for that.
You’re being very kind in far-mode consequentialism here, but come on now.
Making your friend look foolish in front of thousands of people is bad etiquette in most social circles.
I’d kinda assumed that one wouldn’t do this unless they were confident their friend would be ok with it, as indeed seems to be the case.