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Anon is a nice guy
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
463 points (97.3% liked)
Greentext
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This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
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What you're describing is the concept of positive and negative agents, and consequently of positive, negative, and intelligent relations. Let me explain:
Any fucking sane person would appreciate being treated nice and treat the other person likewise. It's basic "rewarding" behavior. To make others treat you well, you reward them when they do so by treating them well likewise. This is called a "positive" agent because there's a positive correlation between how they get treated and how they treat others.
However, as your post points out accurately, that's not at all how most people react. Most people, when you're being a douchebag to them, start respecting you more (paradoxically) and treat you better. That's called a "negative" agent because there's a negative correlation between how you treat them and how they treat you. In other words, if you treat them worse, they treat you better; and the other way around.
Now comes the concept of the intelligent agent, which is a mixture of the first two. Basically, assuming you want to be treated well, you'd treat others differently depending on whether they're positive agents or negative agents. If they're positive agents, you treat them well so they treat you nicely too. If they're negative agents, you treat them like the piece of shit they are so they respect you and treat you well. So, you gotta switch flexibly depending on the other person.
Hope that clears things up :D
Nope. I think you made it worse to me
I think @gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de has it a bit off, because he sees the individuals as positive or negative agents. I'd say it's positive or negative social situations.
If you're playing dodgeball, the point of the game is to hit other people with a ball. That's the situation you're in and your social reward is in playing the game.
By contrast, if you start flinging food at a wedding, you do not get the same social rewards. The point of a wedding is not to physically dominate your peers.
In OP's Greentext, you've got a kid who is in aggressive, jockular friend circles where verbal sparing is expected and rewarded. Greentext would not be rewarded if he behaved the same way with his mom.
But it's certainly possible that if the mom was younger and in a social circle with more jockular members, or she was sparing with other old biddies on Facebook, that she'd drop the nice demeanor and come out swinging.
Different people will approach those social situations differently. Work, play, drinking, hanging out, flirting ... everyone has their own ideas of what they enjoy or find inappropriate or don't know how to engage with in various settings. The same individual is often wildly inconsistent across different settings.
Personal adaptability and the willingness to apologise or double-down according to what the other party expects are the only ways to avoid getting one's feelings hurt and/or hurting others across a broad-range of experiences and individuals.
Of course, social isolation and intentionally keeping a small circle and/or routines are also valid options.