Life after an internet mob attack
I don't have any insight into this specific situation, but there's one element of the post I wanted to comment on: that Scott Adams "canned apology."Is there any sequence of events in which that tweet is useful? I see two basic paths here. One: you want to apologize in order to get people to stop yelling at you. Two: you want to sincerely apologize because you think you've done something wrong.In either case, you can't use the Adams apology, because... it's obviously pre-canned. It's not sincere.But worse, what if you didn't know about the Adams apology and you come up with something similar? Same problems apply and you didn't even know you were setting yourself up for it!This feels like an instance of the insincerity/shitposting problem. It's fun to be snarky. You can get a lot of laughs being snarky. In some cases, it's even useful to be snarky, because it tends to muddy the waters. But I think it's also usually corrosive to be snarky.I wish Adams hadn't done that.