I Watched A Guy Get Fired On A Livestream In Austin And It Flipped My Whole View On Public Shaming
Last month I was in a Twitch chat in Austin watching a streamer play games when his own mod dug up a clip from 2019 and dropped it in the chat. Within 20 minutes the guy had 4,000 hate tweets and two sponsors pulled out, and I sat there feeling sick even though I barely knew him. The part that messed me up was nobody watched the full clip, including me at first, and when I finally did, it was way less bad than the chat made it seem. Now I mute every pile-on hashtag before I even read it because I do not trust the crowd to do the work. Where does the line sit for you, do people deserve a shot at explaining the context or is the clip the final word?
The 2019 clip thing is what gets me, because old posts get pulled up without any of the stuff around them. Like a guy tweeting "lol" at 2am in 2019 reads way different than the same words today, and the crowd never cares about that gap. I keep thinking about how fast 4,000 tweets happens, like the mob moves faster than any person could ever explain themselves. My take is that context should come first, not as some reward after you apologize, because by the time you apologize the internet already decided. The clip being the final word only works if clips show everything, and they never do, they show 30 seconds out of a whole life. So yeah people deserve a shot to explain, but the real fix is the crowd slowing down, and nobody wants to do that part.