"blame culture" means

(reposting on killcorp for better normie federation)

@apophis I think those are the same thing because they just are. They read like descriptions of the same phenomenon.

@ephemeromorph for me they differ because in they're from the POV of the blamee and blamer respectively and in my experience a community culture can emphasize one or the other (i'd say "independently" but it seems if anything to be one at the direct expense of the other)

like at work i'm always dealing with bullshit situations where we need to get some very simple thing from a lawyer or govt bureaucrat or banker and something that could have taken 5 minutes to deal with (3 if you type fast, 20 if someone's using POP) ends up taking weeks because no one wants to potentially be on the hook if they said the wrong thing to someone, said the right thing to the wrong person, violated some obscure privacy regulation, violated some obscure corporate handbook regulation or pissed off the wrong people (with no effort taken to analyze if that person would have a leg to stand on about their being pissed off or if they had any say about the matter or any consequences at all)

if anything does go wrong, these folks will also mobilize to blame someone else, but only to the extent needed to deflect away from themselves, and are very consciously aware that they are doing this

but the way "blame culture" is used in the current potential fedi meta this post is a subpost of, if you ask the same sort of question most people would think nothing of helping you and wouldn't even make a huge deal out of the same consequences that the former group would let a child starve to death on the street to avoid

but when things do go wrong and these latter folks mobilize to blame someone, deflecting the blame away from themselves is generally a secondary concern while their primary concern is a genuine conviction that the people they're directing their blame at need to be punished or at least shut down pending some major reforms

@ephemeromorph there may also be an autistic/allistic or socioeconomic class distinction in all this

@apophis I voted "they're the same" even though that's not quite right. They are two similar phenomena with the same cause, which is treating blame as a meaningful response to bad things happening. *Usually*, blame is irrelevant noise at best and actively counterproductive at worst, most people in most situations are good actors and failures are accidental/systemic rather than intentional.

In specific situations there is a high concentration of bad actors and things then flip around a bit and you end up with "punishment" like banning people from platforms as a viable option, but that's still not the same as a "culture of blame" where people treat either avoiding or assigning blame as a primary goal.

@itsmaya
> *Usually*, blame is irrelevant noise at best and actively counterproductive at worst

boosting

as a bit of context to where i'm coming from with this, my primary exposure to this phrase prior to 2026 has been the secret third thing after "shame culture" and "guilt culture" https://en.wikipedia.o...

1 workplace defensiveness
5 habitual self-righteous communal punisher-reinforcement
2 they are the same thing
3 (no vote, see results)
11 votes

RE: https://kill-corporations.enterprises/objects/7e1c7ef9-674d-4b33-a2b9-ebb1eb4b9ab1