There have been numerous studies showing that outrage is one of the most viral emotions. For whatever reason, seeing something that makes you upset has a very high correlation with people sharing/liking/retweeting. I think this unfortunate fact is what is being born out in social media.
Research shows that amazing good news, like a huge leap forward in cancer research, is even more viral. But unfortunately those happen much more rarely up than someone saying something stupid and getting lambasted.
Ryan Holiday's book "Trust me I'm lying" also really opened my eyes to how a lot of this stuff works.
I've always wondered whether you could just have a community that banned outrage. Literally: express outrage, get banned. "Signal boost" someone else's outrage, get banned. It's not welcome within the community.
Would this even make sense? Or would this shove so hard against human nature that people would never be able to abide it?
(Of course, sometimes you'd be outraged at the community—or its management—and that'd be sort of an insidious policy in that case. I think it could still work if there was a "side" area—like MetaFilter's MetaTalk—that allowed outrage, but with the strong rule of not linking to the side area from the regular area, so people wouldn't just be having the same viral arguments by link-proxy.)
I've been playing Clash Royale on iPad (it's a multiplayer battle game set in the Clash of Clans universe that essentially drops the base building element and concentrates on the strategic combat).
Generally, competitive multiplayer games can be pretty harsh (devolving into toxic) communities. Clash Royale addresses this problem in an interesting way. You're allowed to communicate with your opponent, but only from a fixed vocabulary. There's just no way to be really hostile - the closest it gets is an angry face, which says more "I'm frustrated!" than anything else. There are a few faces and some simple speech -- "Good luck!", "Well played!", etc.
This has a really nice effect - it's actually a pleasant game to play and it's pretty common to get a 'Good game' or 'Well played' at the end, or even during the game when you make a good move. It works well in this situation because it's a 1-vs-1 game -- you aren't coordinating complex actions with teammates, which is where I think something like this would fall down.
Without hostility being in the vocabulary to begin with, you don't really feel like anything is missing and it gets around the whole hurt-feelings problem of 'banning' nicely in this case.
>... You're allowed to communicate with your opponent, but only from a fixed vocabulary.
This is what Nintendo did, at least in online Mario Kart for WiiU, and it's great. I allow my 6 year old get acquainted with this very safe version of online play and she loves saying all the positive things to the other players.
Interesting: In World Series of Poker, "Thanks!" is one of the permitted auto-texts. I find it annoying when people say "Thanks!" immediately after winning a hand / before anyone compliments them on their play or win. Sounds like Hearthstone's "Hello" deathblows.
That says something about language, how the rules affect what's considered "offensive," and how some will work within the rules to create new offenses.
I think "offence" is required to build human relationships. I find myself say something in a joking manner to my best friend that would be offensive to anyone else. In a way I think it's a test - you test if the relationship is strong enough to withstand the offence, and if the friend gives the appropriate response to show you he in fact did not get offended, the relationship is affirmed and becomes stronger. Here's an example on a phone call to my friend, who is engaged, on Valentine's night.
Me: "whatcha doing?"
Him: "eating dinner"
Me: "With two girls? You fox"
Him: "haha, parents"
Me: "Wish them a sexy valentine's day in bed for me"
Him: "Haha you fuck."
Then we both laugh.
And then there are times, when I probe potential new friends with the less intense, but same kind of speech, and they take it seriously, and that's a "test failure" meaning a confirmation it'll be difficult to build a relationship with them. Of course, sometimes it works, and I make a new friend.
Ah, now this is interesting. I can see that I often fail friendship tests such as yours. I don't actually tend to take things seriously, but I'm particularly bad at showing that I'm not taking something seriously.
Or so I've been told, though I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing wrong. Fortunately I have an amazing wife and a few good friends, so making new ones isn't particularly important to me. Which I guess is likely part of the problem. Anyway - I hope your parents Valentine's day was unique and experimental.
You're doing fine. I think there's need to be potential for friendship in the first place. If one person don't get the other's humour or the other person don't get the response, I think it could be because there's not enough shared experience or shared perspectives for the two people involved, and that's that. There's nothing you need to do - the kind of person you are, will likely be friends with, the kind of people, your kind of person tends to be friends with, so enjoy. :)
understood. though, there are different rules of engagement for potential friends and a bunch of mostly random people with whom you're playing a game. Still, agreed, there may be place for offense. And offense can enter even without an invitation.
hearthstone also allows "Thanks", and it is also used when you make a mistake (although there is also a "mistake" text).
The interesting thing is that you could actually say "thanks" (or "well played" or "hello") in a neutral way, but if you are on the losing side you are very likely to interpret them as mocking any way, which personally increases my annoyance at losing wildly. I desperately crave for a "f* you" emote at times.
But blizzard has been smart: you can preventively mute your opponent, and just get rid of the thing altogether.
Mute sounds great. It also aligns interests: if you want to be heard, you won't want to act like too big a jerk. Be interesting to see how the mutes are manifested: is it quiet -- you know you've muted me but I don't -- or more-widely communicated? Be great if the mute action was broadcast to appropriate players. "riffraff has muted smcnally." Then others would have less tolerance for my nonsense if they had affinity for you, or they might view you as overly-sensitive if otherwise. The latter would govern abusive or reasonless muting.
AFAIK there is no indication that you have been muted, which I think is in fact not ideal, as I agree with what you say: you should know when people find you annoying (thought that might encourage the behaviour for trolls, not sure)
This just gave me a flash back to back when I used to play Starseige Tribes.
The chat system included quick key commands for a ton of useful voice callouts.
The quick keys and audio sampling made them a lot more fun to use and harder to miss than manually typed messages. As a result, it was much less common to see typed messages popup during regular gameplay.
I've mulled this over in watching the community. Unfortunately (for other sites), I've come to the conclusion that it's a cultural thing and therefore subject to the whims of the dominant culture at any time.
HN certainly does things (thanks, team!) that make this more likely, such as playing around with the ability to downvote replies to yourself, etc.
But I think a larger part of it is "monkey see, monkey do to fit in." If I see an angry, fact-lite comment getting grey-bombed into oblivion, I'm going to probably be less likely to make such comments myself.
Sociology has a lot of language for this, but there are few things more powerful than the disapproval of one's peers, virtual or real.
(Of course, 4chan/SA as cohesive social entities are simply fascinating too...)
it's a cultural thing and therefore subject to the whims of the dominant culture at any time
It's also subject to the whims of dang the moderator, he's "the dominant culture". He's deservedly called me out a couple of times. Consequently I've tried to change my occasionally boorish behavior. Sometimes it only takes one person to create a culture.
One person only scales so far / for so long though. If BusinessWeek wrote an article claiming that "Hacker News was the place to hang out if you want venture capital!" then I wouldn't have optimistic illusions of cultural persistence.
There's plenty of topics here that are worthy of outrage and posted and discussed exactly for that reason. Fortunately people are civilized enough not to stoop to insults and threats. Those are the real problems. Twitter has no method to address insults and threats, and that's its ruin.
Yes, absolutely. Sarcasm poisons the well of conversation like nothing else. When people disagree and provide an argument you can have a conversation about substance. When people disagree and provide no argument or a personal attack, it's easy to dismiss and move on from there. Sarcasm leaves you hanging precisely because it's hard to identify - is the person serious so you should continue to put effort, or is he not serious and you should quit this discussion?
As to practical concerns - it's not the goal to catch every single instance of sarcasm, but rather to identify people who like to use it. People of this kind will be doing it regularly, and with various degree of subtlety, as such they will be caught in the act sooner or later.
It would be a strange use of sarcasm, in my opinion, to use it to keep people arguing to no avail. I'd rather call that disingenuous goading, not honest sarcasm.
Personally, I'm rather fond of sarcasm and irony. But if I find myself in a dialogue, and another party seems to not get the point of a sarcastic or ironic comment, then I will point out the miscommunication.
There's a heavily moderated and busy Facebook group focused on urbanism in Helsinki, "Lisää kaupunkia Helsinkiin". Irony and sarcasm are prohibited; they don't get you banned, at least not right away, but you do get called out for them. It really helps keep the discourse focused.
I would as well. Sarcasm is a problem though. I don't like sarcasm over text. People tend to type their messages and perform gestures as they do so as if they were speaking to the recipient in person. Of course this causes all sorts of problems.
Personally I had a minor cultural clash over someone saying "whatever" to me in professional conversation over text. It turned out that as it was very offensive to me meant nothing of the sort them.
Text is read in the voice of the reader, its meaning is relative to the reader, and should aim to be as clear as possible whenever possible.
You could do real time sentiment analysis on what someone is saying and it it is negative open a new input area for an explanation of their anger, greater than 500 chars (and validated as well as possible for realistic word structure), so the person would have to think through their anger, and possibly change their opinion or push it through with its attendant explanation as a expandable area on the message.
In traditional societies public outrage has always been taboo. In our society, when you take into account traditional communication modes, it is not that different. The problem is with electronic communication - which feels like a private channel and we feel dis-inhibited - but it is in fact public. Frustration is an emotion that we easily copy from one another - so when it is expressed publicly it spreads like a chain reaction.
I am part of a couple of groups where outrage/offendedness is really not socially tolerated, and will lead to tempbans and then permanent exclusion if continued. But they're closed groups built by invite; the concept could in theory be scaled up but I don't know how you'd make the moderation work out in terms of effort to available volunteer time.
Sounds like a safe place :) Being outraged is still within the range of self expression. You are close to your limits of harming others, but not automatically.
We're human...everything we attempt involves other humans...
Most "intelligent" humans think, at some point, that the way we go about our lives, on this planet, could be improved upon...
How to build consensus...? How to design a series of universal (planetary, in our case) truths that all will immediately recognize as valuable, and be willing to live by...?
Tons of obstacles, because we're human...tribalistic, nationalistic...we're short-sighted, likely by nature...
I have a theory about FB and Twitter -- or maybe more of an observation. Anyway, back in the stone age, people had bumper stickers with little slogans on them. And in the break rooms of various places of work, there was always a bulletin board an on a corner of it there was always some faded-from-to-many-xeroxes bit of humor/racism/sports fandom/sexism/dirty joke or other us-vs.-them thing on it that people would look at and amuse themselves with.
Now thanks to Twitter and FB, these little types of tribal territorial markings are just about all that's left of public discourse.
I see things get passed around and think, 20 years ago this would have been mimeographed and hung on a break room bulletin board, where it might have acted as a crude conversation starter about some aspect of "who are we?". But now people consider sharing and liking these things as their /contribution/ to a conversation.
It's like the way that millennials communicate with emoji, except it's image macros and memes and slogans and "gotchas" and hot takes that we consume, copy, and share. The copying and sharing of all that stuff is what passes for discourse now.
Me, I think that this development is double-plus bad.
My theory is that it's because social media systems encourage and publicise agreement, while discouraging and hiding disagreement. This leads to a huge positive feedback effect on any meme that catches even a tiny number of people's attention, no matter how crazy.
On twitter, you signify agreement by retweeting; this takes seconds and permanently adds to the tweet's score. But to disagree, I have to write a message of my own. It'll show up in the conversation feed but doesn't affect the original message. And each disagreement stands alone, so they'll never accumulate a high score, so even the people who see them won't consider them as important as the original message.
Let's say somebody posts a Twitter message about, oh, how they've just tried cleaning their ear using trained caterpillars. It gets passed around a bit among the ear-canal-caterpillar-cleaning community, all five of them. But then a friend-of-a-friend-of-an-acquaintance retweets it, and suddenly thousands of people see it, and it's off-the-wall enough that a small percentage of them pass it on.
Suddenly it's got thousands of retweets. It's become a movement. Bloggers write about it, a few mainstream journalists comment on it, and abruptly Caterpillar-Facilitated Ear-canal Maintainance is a thing.
Meanwhile have written a tweet about how this is a really crazy idea and don't do it, seriously, it's just dumb. It'll get passed on a bit among my friends and will peter out.
It's not just Twitter; most social media networks do this.
Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment.
The problem with downvoting (at least simple versions) is that it allows separate communities to interfere which each others' communications. So, say you have hunters and animal-rights activists. They should be able to talk among themselves on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook without interference from the other side. You don't want one side to start downvoting the other side's posts into oblivion so they can't even talk among themselves.
Downvoting works okay in places like Hacker News that are basically a single community with good moderation and some common values. It doesn't work in large-scale systems where many distinct communities have little in common beyond using the same social network. The average for a controversial post isn't going to tell you much.
Perhaps some form of negative feedback would be helpful; an intelligent system could use it to avoid sharing posts into communities where they're not wanted. But the system could probably figure this out from people not upvoting or resharing things.
A lot of people believe it's their right to disrupt the communities of others. They call it "activism" or "advocacy" or "defending family values" or whatever the justification du jour is. It's all basically trying to stake a claim to the whole service as the territory of your tribe.
I like the idea of reinforcing some separation, but I also fear it may be too late. A lot of people seem to derive joy from attacking the community of others, to the point where that's the focal point of some whole communities. Trying to stop this internecine fighting really is an attack on such communities...
IMHO, the problem is not disruption by outsiders. The worst cesspools I see are entirely in-group.
It seems to me that the in-group echo chamber becomes not a discussion, but a means for all to signal their right-thinking loyal membership of the group. Just over the last couple of days I've seen some awful stuff along these lines on Facebook, regarding the new opening on the Supreme Court. Someone will share a meme that was posted by one of their in-group pages. This turns into a bunch of "me too" replies, but each of them needs to share a comment that includes a non-clever pun based on misspelling an opponent's name, and many of which declare how evil the other side is and deserves whatever they get. (notice I'm not taking sides: I think this applies equally across the board)
The problem here is that from a few cheers that get the ball rolling, any semblance of discussion evaporates. It's like when the neighbor's dog barks in the middle of the night, so your own dog replies, and then another gets into the act, and pretty soon the cacophony has everyone awake - but nobody's any better off from knowing that there are a bunch of dogs in the neighborhood.
I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think that the problem is outsiders being disruptive - it's insiders clambering to signal their tribal membership.
EDIT: missed the "not" in first sentence. BIG difference!
Sure - but the signal can only be heard from within your in-group's discussion. So they'll generally flock together taking potshots at the outgroup from afar. There are of course cases of drive-bys, but that's harder to organize and rarer.
Well, yes, there's no system that's truly value-neutral. (What would that even mean?) But generally speaking, I expect that the large social networks will try not to encourage open conflict between groups that would otherwise keep to themselves, to avoid driving members away. So this is a bias towards peacefulness rather than conflict.
One example of this is how resharing a post on Google+ starts a new comment thread underneath it. This allows posts to cross communities while somewhat discouraging them from mixing it up in the comments. (You can click on the original if you want to.)
The web does this too: a web page can be discussed in any number of forums, independently of each other, without conflict, by sharing the URL. Comments directly on the web page don't work that way, which is why they're so often worse.
If people are deliberately trying to fight, things get even more difficult. Banning people from your feed can sometimes work, but is vulnerable to sock-puppetry and doesn't scale to large groups.
And will readily defend the most horrible offenses by members of their own tribe, but be horribly offended over the littlest misstep from members of others.
I agree with your sentiment but it's far too simplistic.
Take for example, a forum on ISIS. Yes, I've just triggered Godwin's law. I'm sorry about that.
Now, the idea is that there should be no challenge to ISIS on some parts of the Internet because they have the same right as anyone else.
However, this fails Karl Popper's criteria, don't tolerate the intolerant.
I support the criticism of any prejudiced and intolerant group in any forum (even the ones that Political Correctness blindly defends). If the goal of a group is truly noble, I will often support it.
> However, this fails Karl Popper's criteria, don't tolerate the intolerant.
It's worth pointing out what he meant by ‘intolerant’:
| they are not prepared to meet us on the level
| of rational argument, but begin by denouncing
| all argument; they may forbid their followers
| to listen to rational argument, because it is
| deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments
| by the use of their fists or pistols.
‘Intolerance’ here does not mean holding disagreeable opinions; it means intending to suppress rational argument. This is not a call to shout down opponents by calling them ‘intolerant’; it's a call to stop people shouting down opponents.
Thank you, I had no idea that the statement was tempered that way. The quip and the explanation together are a much more powerful and useful idea than the quip alone.
This article (http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/29/the-spirit-of-the-first...) expresses much the same thing, but takes a couple of pages to do it. Having a word ("intolerant" has been diluted, but maybe we can forge a new one) for people who silence arguments instead of answering them seems seems like it would greatly simplify almost all discourse.
You could use 'censors' but that might simply lead into debates over whether shutting down communication between willing parties due to the subject of their speech, in fact, censorship when the government isn't the one doing it.
Which means "twitter/Fb hate". Or more succinct, "social" justice is literally mob justice.
We had mobs before. They hung black people and wore funny hats. Now they don't care what color you are, wear guy fawkes masks, and make you lose your job and residence. Economic murder, rather than real murder.
This is an interesting side topic, social signalling and out of control holiness spirals.
What do you get if you mix the tolerance of a religious inquisition with any side of contemporary politics? You get out of control holiness spirals as each author tries to outdo the previous at being just a little more holy, a little better of a true believer in the real story. Its a perverse game of "telephone".
I propose VLM's law, that any large enough communications system that's not anonymous will devolve into holier than thou signalling warfare. Or rephrased you get three people together, one will slander another to show off to the third how much holier he is. It doesn't matter if we're talking about Jesus, physics, or emacs vs vi, same behavior.
Some of it is a culture of assuming the worst. Because if you've seen what passes for journalism, usually what we see IS the worst.
If you'd like the actual truth on a non-holiness spiral format, the reason why "family values" are described by Christian activists as coincidentally being Christian (well, as they see it, anyway) values is the same propaganda meme as the only opposition to traditional scientific evolution is the binary choice of Evangelical Christian biblical creationism. The same intentional thought process leads to it as a propaganda movement. The point is NOT to debate the issue with 3rd parties, but to assert primate dominance as the leaders of the Christians because they are the ones setting policy. The point isn't that Islam family values are not Christian or only families have values or whatever nonsense when internal doctrine is applied to outsiders who aren't supposed to be part of the conversation anyway, but to very publicly beat chest and tell competitors inside the in-group of Christians to "bring it on" because we are the leaders of the Christians so we decide whats a Christian family value... unless you'd like to argue and try to become top dog of the Christians yourself? Its sort of a misunderstood out of context quote used by outsiders almost as a slur when its really none of their (direct) business who is in charge of the Christian leadership. In a different age the Christians would be slandering each other over translations or various twisted out of context biblical readings, and back then it ALSO had nothing to do with outsiders and they can quite safely butt out and ignore the internal grindings inside the group. Unless you're personally involved in the dominance fight for Christian leadership I can assure you the whole topic is nothing personal, at least not intentionally, and was never meant for your ears.
I'm going to disagree. Any debate about definitions is fundamentally about power. There's no real reason why a word means one thing and not another. It's inconsistent to be frustrated with one group for insisting on a definition ("family values" means heterosexual couples and their progeny) and not be equally frustrated with other groups for doing exactly the same thing ("marriage" includes same-sex couples).
I'm willing to be wrong on this point if someone cares to enlighten me. I find it sad to conclude that power struggles are inevitable. It's better than violence, but still distasteful.
As a person that lives in a country that is being sabotaged by catholic church i have to disagree.
They might be mostly fighting internally, but it spills over into actual law.
This is a shibboleth, is it not? A code phrase used by a particular in-group to signal membership of that in-group. (Although frequently they're terms of art to mean certain specific things by that in-group.)
It's not a shibboleth, it's a dog whistle. Shibboleths are for identifying people in one-on-one or small group situations. Aluminium vs. aluminum could be a shibboleth.
Dog whistles generally sound like platitudes to one group (family values, social justice, "let's have an honest conversation about race") and mean something entirely different to a particular demographic.
In computer science, when we have too much data to process at once, we shard it. We separate it into manageable chunks and we stop looking at every single data point and just at summaries.
I was using this very analogy to explain the advent of CCG "formats" (MTG, Hearthstone) a few days ago and it seems like the same analogy could be used here. There is a point where a discussion/dicussion room contains too much data to be manageable and the only way to fix that is to break it up into chunks.
We see it on Reddit, too, with subreddits becoming "too big" and naturally breaking up into smaller subreddits.
I suspect there's a universal truth hidden in there somewhere.
It's the upper limit on our ability to process information. Whether it's data, or whether it's a social circle. I believe we will (until AI is a thing) be constrained and will fail, simply because of our poor ability to store and process information as humans.
I've often thought the same thing, that the score you see should be based on your own voting history. Either based on you voting specifically, or agreeing / disagreeing with existing votes. Extend it even further by having posts from people that you normally agree with get highlighted even if they haven't had upvotes for the specific post.
Just out of curiosity, how much of that data is available via HN's public API (or other large enough forum)? I'd like to see someone run some analysis on it to see if up/down votes do tend to cluster like this.
I know specifically of one community that tracks these metrics internally (Stack Overflow) and from which there is also a specific term for someone that mostly only downvotes things ("Vampire").
This is a very interesting question: when does a community become an echo chamber? To use the hunting example: I imagine sometimes the hunters talk about stuff to do with hunting itself; the merits of different rifles, or where to find game, or whatever. And this is a reasonable community discussion for them to have, and it wouldn't help to have activists shouting "hunting is evil" over conversations such as that.
But sometimes the hunters will talk about the politics of hunting: one will say, "those activists are wrong to complain about animals suffering, because <reasons here>", and then another will say "yes, it's so obvious they're wrong, because <reasons> are so obviously right", and the echo chamber is ringing - this is the situation where people ideally would be brought into contact with the opposing view.
Can an online community promote the first type of conversation while challenging the other? How would we set about that?
Perhaps. But I think it would take a particularly far-sighted and philosophical moderator to down-vote/remove a perfectly civil post whose message he agreed with, _just_ because it was contributing to an echo-chamber effect.
The problem isn't the occasional disagreement, it's when communities raid each other, since people are much more brazen online than in person. In person, thousands of atheists would never march into a church during mass and start berating members for their beliefs, but that's very common in unmoderated communities. Moderation solves this issue when you can shard your communities (see reddit), but Twitter is just a global blob. Whose going to moderate it?
I love that image and it makes a clear picture for me. Playing on a PvP server of WoW before any expansions there was no formal PvP game. What spontaneously happened though was the raiding and taking over of the other factions town. Making a mess and disrupting otherwise normal play until everyone got tired and went to sleep.
It feels so much more intense (real?) in the social media world though.
I think because it takes so little effort. Even in an MMO, you have to man your character to do anything. On twitter all it takes it for at least one person to be tweeting at a given moment to ruin the other community.
Plus, people on WoW would be paying a subscription, people are much more risk averse when they pay. Social media is free, and there's little to lose for most people.
Better for whom? I think that's condescending. People already know that some forums only contain like-minded people - that's the point! Connecting with like-minded people about some specialized interest is one of the great advantages of the Internet. You can get valuable things out of it, without being under any illusion that you're talking with a diverse crowd.
Maybe the issue is that we don't have enough forums for people who want to have that debate? A "hunting versus animal rights" forum, for example. You'd need really good moderators, though. Lots of people wouldn't be interested in participating, but sometimes there might be interesting posts to reshare.
If the average person is completely shielded from any kind of discourse surrounding their beliefs, society will suffer. Echo chambers are the main reason politics in the US have become a complete disaster. When you hear the other side's point of view presented by your side, it's going to be biased and will just reinforce your own beliefs.
As evidence of this, think of how many people think that $other_party wants to "destroy America" in some form. Cue (and possibly queue) commenters saying "but $x really does want that!"
I've found that people who claim to know the other side's motivations are projecting for the most part. I catch myself doing it too. Being more aware of bias does not make one less susceptible to it, unfortunately. If anything, it tends to bring overconfidence regarding it :/
It's been obvious for a very long time that up-/downvoting is just a horribly broken mechanism. Much more so, if it's upvoting only. Twitter tries to ameliorate that with the ability to block people, but that's just a crutch.
The solution is laughably simple in theory, but it seems to keep getting ignored: Don't use a simple sum of votes.
Instead use some method - any method really - to weight the votes of users depending how much their past voting behaviour correlates with your own.
If you're thinking along these lines, you'll enjoy reading this post[1] by Venkatesh Rao. Stephen Fry leaving is the exact scenario of "evaporative cooling" expressed there, and you are exactly describing the process of "warrenization" that is required for large-scale online communities to survive and thrive. Obviously Twitter has failed in including these insights into their social architecture, to their detriment[2].
This is off topic (sorry), but I'm an animal rights activist and I have no problem with hunting or hunters. As long as the animal is consumed as food, no problem. Trophy hunters are a different story.
I don't use Twitter, but I agree with your point that crowd-sourced opinion, without constraints--the "dislike" option you offer, for instance--often produces a questionable consensus...
Consider 1} Cunningham's Law: "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer."
Only somewhat whimsical with more than a bit of truth to it...implying that if you post something without much merit someone will be along shortly to set you straight...
Unchecked commentary allows a "conversation" to run headlong...speculation...rumors...gossip...
We all have different preferences for entertainment I guess...I prefer thoughtful sources...
Awesome. I've never heard it referred to as Cunninham's Law but I've used this a lot.
People are overly concerned with being 'correct' all the time. Sometimes I'll talk out of my ass and pick a side on a topic I know little about because usually thr person who knows more will either confirm or correct my assumptions.
It's a surprisingly useful tool to learn in-depth knowledge from others on just about any topic. You just have to be careful not to over use it as blind skepticism has a tendency to piss people off.
So, this - the pile-on voting - is something folks get really frustrated about. Every system I've ever used that allows down-ranking has these regular screeds from one side or another about how the system is being ruined by gangs of like-minded voters blindly censoring dissent.
And for sure, it happens. And sometimes discourse suffers for it: good arguments get buried instead of being heard.
Then again, there are much worse things than getting your argument buried on the Internet. And Twitter has some of best examples of this... People being harassed, doxed, threatened, driven out of their jobs, their homes, their communities... All over <= 140 characters that some brigade didn't like and couldn't just downvote.
In a system mostly optimized for pithy one-liners, I'd argue it's a pretty serious defect that a bad joke can so easily escape the bounds of its intended audience and any semblance of context and cost you your reputation. But it appears that's what we've ended up with...
Twitter's userbase has a fine tradition of building social conventions to paper over the deficiencies of the system. In this case, they've reinvented the pillory to replace the hated censor.
What if, instead of trying to determine an objective ranking for content based on [up/down]votes, we used a correlational voting thing?
Things upvoted by people who vote similar things to oneself are ranked higher for oneself, and things downvoted by people who vote more similarly to oneself are ranked lower for oneself.
This might be computationally expensive, but approximations to it would be cheaper I think, and still give some good results.
I have thought before about the need for a "reputation" driven system, where the user can indicate who he or she "trusts" (and how much) based on their contributions. The system would then highlight information from trusted users and from users in the broader networks of trusted users. Other content would be available, but it would be displayed with less emphasis.
For this to work, the UX would need to indicate that a single "vote" means "this is a well-formed or interesting comment" as opposed to the "I agree" upvote or the ambiguous "like."
Overall I think this more closely resembles real-world networks. We are more likely to listen to those we trust, and we are often connected with new friends through trusted parties. We may occasionally interact with those outside our networks, but usually only in passing.
Well, maybe. I would instead say that the rapid churn of social networks is a "reincarnation"-type solution to the problem. Fry's leaving of Twitter is precisely the answer to the problem.
To see why, let's focus on what the problem actually is: we're social animals who crave authentic connection with others, not just to hear but to be heard. We can't just be passive consumers of news but wish to comment on it and be heard and replied to and have meaningful discussion. The problem is that a voting bloc systematically muffles some peoples' speech, ostracising them from the community due to their disagreement -- but then the community becomes an echochamber and fails to satisfy our needs for diversity.
One solution to this has been randomization -- think Omegle etc. -- which works but encourages a different sort of inauthenticity due to anonymity. Another has been the Reddit/LiveJournal model: make it easy to spawn new communities when old ones die out. It's a lot less clear why, say, LiveJournal has mostly died, but probably it was a little too egotistical and people therefore as they grew up got bored with just sharing their own viewpoints without some sort of cohesive blogging narrative, and it just died.
Somewhere there's some room for a solution which batches together communities of 50 people more-or-less randomly with some form of self-selection, and encourages them to talk about some sort of topic-of-the-day that would be relevant to all of their interests. In the meantime our solution is to join a social network and have fun until our community gets too large and we cannot get the attention we crave, at which point we'll swap to another and repeat the process again.
Does that feature allow negative feedback? A frown for bad news is positive feedback.
I'm concerned that all reactions might be treated as good reactions. That is, that there is no way to politely disapprove. Does anyone have any more details on this?
The genius of it all is there is no 'hate' or 'dislike' button. It only allows 'positive' or no results.
I suspect facebook and company will come up with a solution to the problem of how do you indicate that you saw something without commenting when it's not socially acceptable to 'like' it. For example a funeral announcement, you don't want to 'like' it but you want to say 'thank you' or something yet you might not want to comment.
A real dislike or hate button would simply result in a lower signal/noise ratio. Maybe new types of bullying where lot's of people 'hate' on somebody.
> My theory is that it's because social media systems encourage and publicise agreement, while discouraging and hiding disagreement. This leads to a huge positive feedback effect on any meme that catches even a tiny number of people's attention, no matter how crazy.
Well, honestly, I think that effect is largely an outgrowth of how we've designed anti-spam processes to date.
Scalable agreement systems where large numbers of users agree X is good, then X is not spam.
> Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment.
Reddit clearly functions in such a manner [as does HN]. Twitter / Facebook hide this but fundamentally its the same concept and it is largely ineffective for what your goal is [publicizing useful discussion, including disagreements].
We'd really need to figure out a better way of mitigating problematic content without using up/down votes before we can solve this problem unfortunately.
> We'd really need to figure out a better way of mitigating problematic content without using up/down votes before we can solve this problem unfortunately.
Agreed. All sharing platforms, HN included, conflate agreement with importance. I can't disagree with someone without silencing them on HN and Reddit. And I can't congenially disagree on Facebook or Twitter, at least not in a way that transparently affects the various algorithms.
> I can't disagree with someone without silencing them on HN
This bothers me too. I've encountered quite a few posts that were unreadable. Why? Was it because they violated some rule, or was it because they were unpopular opinion? I have no way to know. This is the largest problem with HN I can see.
What I don't understand is why it apparently doesn't occur to the HN admins that "fading" peoples' posts into oblivion makes people pay more attention to them. If HN's intent is to make undesirable opinions less visible, it's a colossal failure.
Often it's a waste of time to highlight those posts with my mouse, because they're usually downmodded for good reasons. But I still feel compelled to look, and I doubt I'm alone in that respect.
To fix this, I'd limit the text contrast to two levels -- normal and obviously-but-not-illegibly faded. In other words, don't make it look like you're trying to hide something from me. If a post is so bad that it deserves to be rendered at near-zero contrast, then it's bad enough to delete altogether... and only blatant spam falls into that category IMO.
For me, I think it actually works well as a user interface.
If I'm in a mood to be charitable and particularly open-minded, I can choose to squint closely or highlight with mouse, and read a greyed-out comment.
However, once that reading is done, the fact that it's greyed out means I don't feel the need to respond to it, correct it, etc. I know that it's being hidden, that people will give it less credence and attention. Plus, I just don't have to look at it once it's no longer highlighted.
In effect, greying out text is a gentle reminder to "don't feed the trolls"
And I personally think it is even more insidious. When I'm on facebook and see some extreme rightwing nutjob upvote ring I see what's going on
On HN on a lot of downvoted commets it makes sense, they are poorly written and full of bs. But every time there is a little more political and/or contentious issue on all I see is Political Correctness police mercilessly downvoting and flagkillig anything that dares to even doubt.
It is insidious and ironically has exactly the oposite effect (look:most of europe extreme right rise in popularity)
> But every time there is a little more political and/or contentious issue on all I see is Political Correctness police mercilessly downvoting and flagkillig anything that dares to even doubt.
Yes.
> It is insidious and ironically has exactly the oposite effect (look:most of europe extreme right rise in popularity)
Let me add a little detail here for non-Europeans. "Far right" in some western European countries has come to mean about Obama-ish politics (health insurance for all instead of government-pays-everything-for-everybody like those contries have today.)
As emp_zealoth points out this constant framing of anything that isn't way left and politically correct as "brown" and "extreme right" is now starting to backlash.
People starts to question mainstream media and conservative/right wing media/pro Israel groups/conservative political parties seems to see a surge in readers/participation.
> "Far right" in some western European countries has come to mean about Obama-ish politics (health insurance for all instead of government-pays-everything-for-everybody like those contries have today.)
Not as far as I see. Far right in Europe today means hostility to immigrants, religious and ethnic minorities, with varying degree of disguise. Far right stands for isolationism and nationwide NIMBY policies.
Far right universally has secessionist sentiment from EU, no exceptions, as this is required to implement their policy. EU legislation founded in humanitarian values stands in the way.
If anything, Trump would be much more at home with Euro far right than Obama.
It so happens that Western Europe has settled on a political system or set of systems which aren't perfect, but basically work well for everybody. Europeans have much less "stuff" than Americans, but when it comes to the basics -- health, education, public infrastructure, in some cases even housing -- everybody, rich and poor, has more or less equal access.
America, by contrast, has got its shit so not in one sock that despite vast increases in productivity, the vast bulk of the excess wealth has gone to the 1%, with the remaining classes not much better off than they were 30 or 40 years ago. And how healthy you can expect to be is positively correlated with how rich you are.
So when people say that America is a two party system: a right-wing corporatist party and a far-right-wing corporatist party, they're not blowing smoke. They're reckoning from a different origin than you. Apparently, relative to your political origin, sane policies are considered "way left and politically correct".
Don't get me wrong: I enjoy the European system and I think you are mostly right.
What I don't like is the constant framing going on from the currently politically correct ones on the left. I do not think it would be better the other way around, just state my wish for a bit of sane discussion.
"democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the rest" I guess.
> What I don't like is the constant framing going on from the currently politically correct ones on the left
Speaking of framing, that's a nice job you've done right there.
Everyone in politics reframes things, and constantly, too. It's a fundamental part of politics. People even get hired to reframe things as a profession ("PR Consultants" or "Spin Doctors"), and all varieties of politics hire them.
Each community specializes in something (which may be a bit tautological), but they do not do so well in the other things, too. So when I see some sort of political post on HN, I go in knowing it's going to be a little bit pants. Probably not terrible, probably a bit noisy as an echochamber, but certainly not what this community is good at. By contrast, if there's a bug writeup for how a screen redraw glitch was fixed by bitfiddling, well, that's the cake I came here for.
> Political Correctness police mercilessly downvoting and flagkillig anything that dares to even doubt.
We really need to move beyond the idea that just because an idea is contentious, it must be downvoted due to the "PC police", and not just due to "unpopular".
And seriously, blaming the rise of the right in Europe as being due to downvote/mark-unpopular mechanisms? That has to be the most banal political statement I've heard all year.
In any case, "the right to be heard" is not the same as "the right to be uncriticised".
Flagkilling/hiding something that is not blatantly offensive or false just because you don't agree is not criticism. It's censorship.
Banal political statement? What about western media trying to cover up the whole Kologne debacle (at least for few days)
It's just an obvious recent example
And it's just a tiny symptom
> 100% agree. And note that HN is already running this experiment; we have downvotes as well as upvotes.
I'd say that even though upvotes and downvotes are somewhat helpful it is the mentality that differentiates HN from other communities most significantly. We can't outsmart human stupidity with technology.
Sure, we have loads of people who want to game HN to push their own agendas but at its core HN users actually welcome new points of view.
There is nothing wrong wrong with, say, fighting for animal rights. But the moment you consider yourself an animal rights activist you're very likely to give up common sense and the ability to value any input that doesn't conform with your peers' opinion. Basically you become a one-dimensional character.
Pleas note I used the word "likely." I am not ruling out that there are open-minded animal rights activists!
There is no friendly way to say it, the mass market are morons. It might be derogatory jokes, but this can also include things like spreading urban legends which were debunked four decades ago.
Just like Usenet and countless other online communities, what starts a a small group of fairly privileged and elite eventually degrades in to garbage as the reach increases. This is not so much an overall size issue but a relative one. I saw it happen to very small online communities in the 90s. In some respects, I watched it occur on a community I ran nearly 10 years ago.
Facebook's aggressive censorship along with non-public networks give each user a white washed micro-community. Public forums, such as Twitter and Instagram, do not.
"There is no friendly way to say it, the mass market are morons."
Yes there is, to some extent. The trick is to start with observations, not interpretations. If you ask a really angry guy "Why are you angry?" chances are the reply is "I AM NOT ANGRY", possibly combined with a punch to your nose. Instead, ask "Why are you slamming with doors?". That starts the discussion with something that is harder to deny, and doesn't directly relate to the person, but only to his behavior, which he can change. Because of that, you are less likely to be punched, and it is more likely that you will get the answer "Because I am angry", which can be followed up with a discussion about the why, about whether he likes to be angry, and about the fact that you don't like it, either. If you want to be really inoffensive, start with "I don't like the noise of those slamming doors", but that feels a bit too indirect to me.
Similarly, don't say the mass market are morons, say they behave like morons or, even better, that they come over as morons on the Internet (my theory is that that is because people do not see facial expressions there) That not only is more polite, but likely also closer to the truth. At least, I haven't met someone who is like a real life Internet troll.
The mass market isn’t so much “morons” as just the lowest common denominator. Everyone is “smart” about the niche areas that interest them. These niches seldom overlap. So the mass market is more about things that cross the boundaries: sports, weather, politics, jokes, etc. So what starts as a niche (not so much privileged or elite) either stays as a niche or appeals to a mass audience by finding the common denominators.
Personally, sports bore me and I find the hero worship disgusting, but I recognize that I lose the ability to relate with a lot of people because of this disinterest. I wish more people were interested in computer science, political-economics, and defense policy, but most aren’t. While at times I want to scream, “stop worrying about bread and circuses,” I understand peoples desire to find common ground with others. [1]
I think the friendly way to say it is that most people(yourself included) only achieve a medium/expert level of competence in one or two areas of their life. In the other areas, most of us are just bumbling through. Unfortunately though, manners require us to speak about various topics, leading to the bumbling side of humanity to be exposed in droves.
> There is no friendly way to say it, the mass market are morons...
I hate this super-condescending attitude.
Even if you do happen to be smarter than the average bear (which, don't pat yourself on the back yet: there may be things these "morons" know way more about than you do), it's still asshole-ish to assume that everyone else just be completely dismissed...
I believe this was the article's point - that Fry no longer wanted to partake in discussion where people were getting offended on other people's behalf. Its not the best way to engage his comment.
I despise it as well. It's the very stupidest way to celebrate smartness.
Everybody's got strengths. From the perspective of that strength, everybody else can be seen as hopelessly weak. The politically strong may think everybody else is naive. The socially strong could everybody else is maladroit. The physically strong think everybody else is puny and inconsequential. The artistically strong think everybody else are embarrassingly lowbrow. And so on.
It's irritating regardless, but I find this easier to forgive in people who are not crowing about how smart they are. It somebody is actually smart, they can recognize the limitations of pure IQ, and how embarrassingly self-limiting it is to think you have nothing to learn from anybody else.
It's not like smart people don't also believe wrong things, make mistakes, and generally fuck up. Isaac Newton thought all sorts of things we now recognize as idiocies. America's founders were somehow unable to see the glaring contradiction between practicing chattel slavery and congratulating themselves on how devoted they were to liberty and the equality of man. On a cosmic scale, we are all morons. It's just that, limited by time and our meat-based brains, we are terrible at noticing how little we notice.
Strength, be it physical, intellectual, or any other kind, doesn't justify being arrogant. Smart people should know that.
> it's still asshole-ish to assume that everyone else just be completely dismissed...
I think you're being overly harsh, nobody mentioned "dismiss[ing]" "everyone else"; yet I agree with the parent that conversations with such broad participation seem to be less interesting/'more dumb'/however-you-prefer-to-phrase-it.
You even hinted at some of the reasons this might be the case; i.e. that different people have knowledge of different things (i.e. 'there may be things these "morons" know way more about than you do'). The more people are included in a conversation, the less common ground there is to work from. People certainly can make accurate, fact-checked, carefully-worded contributions; yet they may be less likely to spread for a few reasons, e.g.
- Being more difficult to understand for members who aren't as well-versed in the subject, compared to slogans, soundbites and memes.
- Being more difficult to produce, compared to off-the-cuff remarks and guestimates.
- Being realistic can be less attention-catching and thought-provoking for those who don't already know a subject, compared to baseless hyperbole
- Those who don't already know about a subject, and try to contribute with e.g. anecdotes or quotes from others, may be unable to tell accurate information from inaccurate.
It's unlikely that such contibutions will spread very far, so the content which does reach any particular individual will tend to be less useful bu good at spreading (e.g. "viral" videos of cats).
These sorts of factors can lower the usefulness of a discussion. At a certain point, the quality or depth becomes low enough that those with a vested interest will often split off to a more focused/dedicated area for discussion. This leaves the original "mass market" conversation even more impoverished.
As an analogy, let's say you're considering which of two datastructures to use in some project; imagine trying to debate their relative merits and solicit opinions on their complexity tradeoffs by posting to a generic "Computer Users" group on Facebook, amid the background noise of questions about what's the best MP3 player, how to change the colour of the Windows taskbar, and where to get a keygen for Photoshop.
There's a certain scale where a group of people turn into a mob. And mobs are ruled by the id, a perfectly normal, conscientious person's behavior transforms when part of an anonymous mob or when interacting with a faceless entity in an impersonal way.
When I worked as a retail salesman, you'd see it all of the time. From people pushing expired coupons to return fraud to outright theft, people degrade in that sort of environment.
At this point in human history with the analytics we all have available it's pretty easy to see that the vast majority of people favor bite-size disposable content over longwinded discourse.
Look at the success of businesses that pander to the ever-more-frivolous. The Cheezburger network probably has more money spent on/in it than the New Yorker.
We don't have to hate the proles, but let's never delude ourselves in to thinking they don't exist.
People act dumb both in groups and individually. You don't see very many intelligent people joining big groups and becoming moronic - they're smart enough to recognize groups cater to the lowest common denominator and avoid them.
The exception being young people who have the potential to be intelligent but lack life experience.
As much as you'd like to believe that people are smart somehow - the average IQ is 100. 100 is really, really dumb.
> Even if you do happen to be smarter than the average bear
> it's still asshole-ish to assume that everyone else just be completely dismissed...
Devil's advocate: If you're above average intelligence, you're smarter than a majority of the populace by definition. Why would you not then dismiss the thoughts and ideas of those less educated?
One person's condescension is another person's logic.
The obvious answer: because if you're wise, you realize that raw intelligence is a fairly small part of what makes someone worth listening to on a given question. On most questions of morals or politics, I'd rather listen to someone of average intelligence, but with a humble, good and patient character, than an MIT grad who's convinced they know everything.
Interesting. I'm not sure I can relate, though. I'd rather listen to Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins talk about evolution and atheism than someone of average intelligence.
Intelligence allows you to search through ideas faster. This is worth nothing if you are evaluating them badly.
It doesn't matter if you are the greatest geinus to ever live - if you are looking for a reason to believe what you already want to, being smart just means you find it.
"You can always design a cryptosystem that you yourself cannot break."
Humility and an open mind are probably worth more than intelligence in this way.
On certain topics, certainly. Listening to me talk about particle physics would do neither of us any good. That's why I constrained my answer to politics and morality (i.e., building the sort of society and becoming the sort of person that tends towards justice). Valuable opinions in those areas have much more to do with what has sometimes been called "practical intelligence", i.e., the ability to sift good ideas from bad using a wide range of personal experiences and a character intentionally shaped in response to those experiences. I suspect raw intelligence generally helps in that process, but it may also hurt, and it's by no means the most important factor.
I didn't say anything about whether I agree with those ideas or not. Stated simply, I'd rather hear any given argument from someone who is intelligent than someone who isn't. Extraneous factors, such as the arguer's humility or tone of delivery, don't enter the picture for me when evaluating the merit of the idea being argued.
Counterpoint: it was pretty common knowledge for the majority of the 19th and 20th centuries that women were categorically inferior and unreliable, that blacks were shiftless and dangerous, and that homosexuals were mentally ill.
That person's logic is narcissism, not insight. I get that they think they're being logical, but really they're just lacking self-awareness. They're not revealing themselves to be smart people making rational choices, they're revealing themselves to be conceited people who aren't as smart as they think they are.
Put another way: someone who believes the stated Devil's Advocate position is by definition someone who doesn't understand the nature of intelligence, doesn't understand themselves, and doesn't understand other people. They might be making logical choices based on those misunderstandings, but correct logic based on false axioms is just as wrong as incorrect logic based on true axioms.
Because your brain is going to lead you into thinking that your ingroup are the smart minority and your outgroups and people that you don't understand are the simple minded majority.
I'm surprised to hear that, considering the story on HN the other day about how educated woman don't marry down. It seems a non-insignificant number of people want to partner with and befriend those of the same or higher intelligence.
Anecdotally, I gravitate towards above average intelligence people for friendships and romantic relationships.
Goddammit. Seriously. It's well-known that all kinds of intelligence are correlated, at least at the lower end. There is such a thing as a benchmark of the brain that gives a one-dimensional result that tells us a something significant about that person. You're just being touchy-feely superstitious (which is way better than the scared-of-different kind of superstitious, but still).
Then I'm sure you'll find it very easy to provide the study that confirms your claims.
You are the first person I've ever heard that called asking for evidence "superstitious". You might want to look up the definition of that word. Goddammit indeed.
Try not to get too touchy-feely in your reply, just give me the studies you are referring to.
I couldn't agree more about the mass market being morons. It's hard to say and not often said so bluntly in public though. Not because it's untrue but because the person saying it could be afraid they might be a part of that group of morons. I can't tell you how many times I've heard a moron call everyone else morons. So is there ever any way to know when "the mass market are morons" means what it says literally or when it's a stand-in for "most people aren't agreeing with my strongly held beliefs".
>>So is there ever any way to know when "the mass market are morons" means what it says literally or when it's a stand-in for "most people aren't agreeing with my strongly held beliefs".
Absolutely there is. We have a measuring stick with which we can measure the validity of one's beliefs: empirical evidence.
If you believe X, and scientists say we have sufficient empirical evidence that confirms that belief, and the mass market doesn't believe X, that makes the mass market a bunch of morons. This is inarguable.
There are many kinds of evidence and many ways to interpret it - and many kinds of science (physicists disagree with each other less than economists for a reason.)
Incidentally, most "morons" disagree with you on matters where they can find a scientist on their side, or on issues of morality, or on inconsequential matters (like the origin of life, which is interesting to most but doesn't affect any practical decision.) Few "morons" jump out of windows in defiance of gravity, and those who do no longer bother you on Twitter.
Also, scientists err, falsify results, cherry-pick them, etc. Of course, so do "morons"...
Well said. Even when science means well, it can suck to be on the non-moron side.
For ~120 years, science "knew" that an element existed inside all ignitable substances that was released during burning. When the air was fully saturated with phlogiston, the burning stopped. Just put a candle in a jar and watch what happens. The theory's sound, right?
120 years is a few lifetimes, who knows what revelations will drop before the 21st century winds down?
My theory, since you all asked, and with my dozens of years of behavioral studies experience (just kidding, I do marketing stuff and things), is that we - human beings, that is - aren't really designed to communicate with the world. It's just not something we're ready for right now. We went from small tribes to friggin Twitter way too fast. We're in the "figure out wtf is going on right now" phase, which could end up being a totally reasonable transition.
But we all seem to be addressing these topics as if they are as natural as plants growing. IDK, I often ask myself "why?" when considering the innovations I experience on the daily. This isn't to say there doesn't exist wonderful benefits of
"connector" services like FB/Tw, I'm just not sure we're ready for it all. Then again, maybe this is how progress happens?
The problem is that the abstractions for working out what gets attention/promotion on social media favour the lowest common denominator. Both Twitter and Reddit are genuinely useful for connecting together like-minded communities with well established standards of behaviour, but they both struggle enormously when they attempt to find some objective criteria which can create a ranking for comparing these communities to one another, and use that ranking to synthesize everything together to create a shared public space.
On Twitter, trending is principally about volume. On Reddit, you can view and upvote 100 image macros in the time it takes to read one long-form article. So almost by definition the shared space will be filled with information that is quickly digestible, or that people have not read or watched. In attempting to synthesize and rank every piece of information on these sites, we are effectively trying to automate an editorial process for deciding what is currently the most important thing in the world, in the meantime separating what is poor content from what is merely controversial, and ranking an image macro against a 10,000 word essay. This is a herculean task, and the methods we are using are manifestly not up to the job.
> The problem is that the abstractions for working out what gets attention/promotion on social media favour the lowest common denominator.
IMHO you've identified the root problem. it's simply very easy to optimize a feed around quick interaction signals as a way of surfacing what's important, and still get the quality wrong.
> we are effectively trying to automate an editorial process for deciding what is currently the most important thing in the world, in the meantime separating what is poor content from what is merely controversial, and ranking an image macro against a 10,000 word essay. This is a herculean task, and the methods we are using are manifestly not up to the job.
what's needed IMO are user satisfaction signals. I wonder if social networks could invite users to report content that makes them mad or they find useless. not for abuse, simply to identify what different users like and start understanding what groups of people prefer
It's like the way that millennials communicate with emoji
I'm GenX and not a millennial. I don't see anything wrong with using some emoji as part of my language. I already speak a language (English) which is some bastard child of French, German, Dutch, Arabic, etc. I'm happy to add a (poo emoji) when it's appropriate.
Emojis are fine. But I remember the first times I started seeing "LOL" and "ROTFLMAO". And I realized that the person wasn't really laughing, but they were quietly typing that on the keyboard. If you think about it, before AIM and online chat (way before texting), people hardly ever faked their emotions so much. I mean, you could fake a small laugh, but you didn't outright say that you're rolling on the floor laughing, while you weren't even cracking a smile physically. That would be impossible over the phone, and AFAIK people didn't do it over email, either. It's a product of the instant-message culture.
And it also symbolizes the disconnect between the online persona on facebook, posting all those cool photos, and the real-world person sitting by the computer all those lonely nights. The emotions and the fulfillment of the emotions have become stilted, computers now provide a superstimulus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus) that replaces deep, real-life conversations with a steady stream shallow online interactions. Notifications pull us back in for more like an addictive slot machine. And our kids are ill-equipped to fight it, which is why they spend a great deal of their lives addicted to effectively meaningless communication with people who are not next to them:
"lol" is an amazingly useful addition to written, casual language. It's the textual equivalent of a smile/head nod in normal conversation. Remember that in physical conversation, body language conveys 80-90% of the message - phrases like "lol" and emojis take the place of body language.
Possibly interesting side note, I have noticed over the last few years the vocalization of 'lol' being used more and more genuinely as an affirmation of a mildly humorous situation or statement that didn't actually happen to produce a laugh. I think it started being used sarcastically or ironically, but has lost that attribute for the most part.
About a decade ago one of my friends took to saying the word "sigh" (deadpan, with no intonation in his voice) instead of actually sighing. It annoyed me to no end.
In online and SMS Russian, a single ), reduced from standard :), is used so often that omitting it carries a kind of serious/angry meaning much like talking in a stern voice irl
* Tiksi slaps bdreadz around a bit with a large trout.
I remember reading a study that people laugh more around other people. Anecdotally, I can definitely see this in myself. If I find something funny that isn't shared with other people, I might not outwardly laugh, and it would look like my lol, rofl, hahaha, etc isn't genuine, but with a group of people I'd probably be laughing out loud at the same thing. It might just be expressing the same emotion differently.
It's the literal sound of a chuckle/giggle/light laughter. So when you say it aloud, you need only laugh naturally.
To see it in action go to http://nicovideo.jp and pick pretty much any video. Start watching with comments on, they scroll over the video, and marvel at the trails of www(wwwwwwwwwww).
I often say "lol" in real life to denote "I appreciate your attempt at being funny and agree that it was indeed humorous, but it wasn't funny enough to laugh laugh"
Because, like, what do you do when someone puts effort into a joke and you want to give them positive reinforcement, but you're just not in a laughing mood? Or it was funny in the abstract, but you're the wrong audience?
Another approach I've seen was "Heh, that's funny." ... but I'm not sure if that's better or worse than "lol"
It's exceptionally rare to read the transcript of a conversation or story and to physically burst out laughing. A huge part of humour is in the context ("you had to be there") and the delivery.
The current use of "lol" and "lmao" just makes a whole lot more sense than their hijacked and literal definition... it's about replacing what would normally be subtle visual cues and gestures, which signal acknowledgement and/or encouragement, with something that is universally understood.
Sometimes using shorthand can be disasterous for those getting to grips with it. I remember reading some time ago that someone's daughter had to explain to her mother that her friend was upset because when she wrote "I'm so sorry for your loss, lol" that lol does not stand for "lots of love".
Using emojis (and acronyms, abbreviations and even to some extent memes) to augment conversation isn't the problem. Using them in such a random or repetitive way that they substitute for conversation - to the extent that some human interactions would struggle to pass a Turing test - is the problem.
Twitter, where the bot feeds are often indistinguishable from the human ones, is pretty much the poster child for this sort of communication malaise.
Indeed. I actually find the fact that we've come full circle and are going back to ideograms rather fascinating.
If anything, see Japanese - Kanji are essentially ancient Chinese emoticons, which succinctly express common notions which would be far more expansive in katakana or hiragana.
I can't read the latter, but I can read Kanji - which gets me by in both China and Japan.
But the Germanic language family is quite large; it basically describes every language spoken on the Northern Atlantic coast. You can't say "it's Germanic" and then say "it's hardly related to Dutch or German".
As for the development of the English language, I believe it derives mostly from Saxon - Frisian - Norse - French, in chronological order. I'm pretty sure Celtic should also be on that list, but I don't know in what order or to what extent.
English and Dutch are similar because they share a common ancestor. But the direct influence of Dutch upon English is minimal. Relatedness and Influence are distinct concepts, the language that influenced English was an ancestor of both Dutch and English, and so the influence of Dutch itself on English has been small compared to other languages like French.
I don't think MSN users grew out of emoticons, they just stopped using MSN. Facebook chat, Skype and SMS picked up where MSN left off, and all three of those have a strong emoticon game.
I don't think they'll ever go away, and that's because of the nature of short-form text communications. You need to express emotion, something language is bad at doing in short-form. Longer expressions can have great flowery emotion, but "im gonna kill you" can mean a lot of different things depending on the emoticon or emoji that follows it. And that's really important.
Some people write long messages to convey emotion. Others use ambiguous phrases and follow it up with a quick expression of emotion to set the context.
There never was a serious public discourse. Why would giving everyone access to easy ways to contribute simply make that happen?
I don't know the reason why, it could be simple as most people aren't that smart, but the truth is the vast vast vast majority don't have anything interesting to add and most probably don't care what you're talking about anyways.
Just think about this for a bit: it was a socially acceptable social meme that people would stand around the "water cooler" and talk about TV shows. TV Shows!? That's what we've got when the masses are left to their own devices.
What I do think could potentially become a net positive is that in the bad old days, you had to catch someone putting that racist cartoon on the bulletin board or follow them to see the bumper sticker on their car. Now you can search them out, that's kind of interesting. I don't know that it will cure racism, sexism or other discrimination but it will further push them back in to a smaller place.
That has been my opinion for a while as well. It's really a huge amount of social signalling where people can group themselves into specific tribes by broadcasting how offended they are by something someone well known has said or done.
And because of that it's effectively become news, papers like The Guardian in the UK have endless opinion pieces which basically amount to people commenting on other people being angry on someones behalf about something someone said or did.
I like your interpretation which ascribes intelligence and meaning to other peoples' behavior instead of the grandparent which seems to imply that the kids these days are just stupid and don't have any interesting thoughts to convey.
You can't find the meaning in other peoples' behavior if you just assume it's meaningless from the get-go.
the history of emoji coming from japanese culture is pertinent..
i am unable to speak for middle eastern or cyrillic languages due to a shameful unfamiliarity, but as for western and a majority eastern languages, the core of the japanese language is substantially, yet casually, more capable
japanese is comprised of three alphabets:
kanji : an enormous, complex, and ancient chinese character set
katakana and hiragana: syllabic runes that bridge japanese phonemes to its own complex characters or even other languages
the japanese even created a phoneme set using latin characters called romaji
the japanese have a japanese numeral system but also use arabic numerals
what's more is these elements of the language can all appear on the same poster one walks by while walking down the street
and yet still more, those elements can all be meant to be read in different directions
japanese texts are written horizontally and vertically
japansese books can be printed and read either page flipped right to left, or similarly to the west, left to right
one may argue a dislike for or refuse the use of emojis but it could be said that one of the most literate cultures in the world looked at their tools of communication and felt them wanting
If you doubt the immense amount of creativity in the language and slang used by teenagers, you need to take a Linguistics 101 and you'll find plenty of evidence.
There is something to be said about the oversharing effects of social media on human psyche, but this old school yearning for a better intellectual past is bullshit.
Imagine you have 10 people standing in a circle having a conversation. At any given time only a max of say 2 people can be talking at once, and its usually one. How do people communicate, when they can't speak?
Image macros and memes are just stand-ins for facial expressions and body language, something humans are hard wired to process, but is severely lacking when communicating through text. Its a way that people form real relationships over the internet. There's nothing awful about it. Go look at any group of 20 year olds and see how they communicate in real life - you'll be just as off-put as when you see their online communications.
"there was always a bulletin board an on a corner of it there was always some faded-from-to-many-xeroxes bit of humor/racism/sports fandom/sexism/dirty joke or other us-vs.-them thing "
This sort of dreck was as despicable then as it is now, off- or online. If people posting such things now leave Twitter, I'm all for it. They can go back to the stone age where they belong - oh wait, even then most people were likely better than that: http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/geschlechterrollen-fors... (in German).
It's not my job to pick a definition but Twitter's (and other social sites'). In fact, they already did (defining "hateful conduct"): "You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease." Pretty basic stuff.
If it was my choice, I'd pick a wider definition, accepting that there will be an area of uncertainty and errors. However, I think that it is still far better to exclude some people (for a while?) than to e.g. subject many more people to constantly being called pejorative terms (including implications to being a slave, an animal or an exhibit)/belittled because of identity/violently threatened etc.
You could also see it this way: up to now the officially used definition was in effect that nothing is racist/sexist.
I left Twitter last year when it looked like the 'professionally offended' were becoming too influential. They didn't affect me as I keep a low profile, but it was like seeing an omen and noticing friends were buying into their hype.
The way Twitter is now pandering to this lot with the recently announced Orwellian-style group, and other odd behaviour suggests that they approve of the current momentum.
I'm just glad to no longer have its weight on my shoulders. Life is great without social media, but it must be difficult for public figures who stick with it for the free promotion.
If you take a moment to look around, you’ll realize that a lot of socially progressive people are saying the exact same thing about Twitter, that the “professionally offended” are becoming too influential.
Mind you, they’re talking about what happens when a woman criticizes video game culture and winds up with death threats and snuff porn choking her mentions.
I am not saying this to suggest that one “side” or “the other” is right or wrong or has it worse than the other, but just making the general observation that Twitter does have a problem, and it seems to provide a terrible experience for all sorts of people with all sorts of social views.
We blame it on the people dogpiling, or brigading, or whatever, but that shouldn’t prevent us from recognizing that Twitter is doing a terrible job of providing an environment for anything except “Interacting with Brands” and sharing low-emotional-content memes.
I don't think Twitter is making things worse than they used to be.
Society has the problem. Twitter just makes it public.
Remember, the US used to have anti-communist witch hunts in which people were forced to give up their careers, it had actual physical lynchings, and it still has a culture where the police can do more or less whatever they want with limited accountability.
People being disrespectful or even stalkerish on a social network isn't good news, but it's a long way short of the very bad things that happen regularly offline.
If anything Twitter's problem is more that it works well for promoting celebrity vapidity, but less well for providing a mass audience for the stories of ordinary people.
You could argue there's not much interest in the latter, but then we're back to society having the problem, and Twitter being a medium for a certain expression of it.
I think Quora does a much better job of dealing with real stories and relatively civil debate - but I'd guess it's much less popular than Twitter.
Your prison system has been described as a slow-motion Holocaust and the new Jim Crow. Does that not count as political terrorism?
Or is this the same linguistic problem where 3000 dead in an intentionally collapsed building in NYC is terrorism, but two million killed by intentionally collapsing a middle-eastern state doesn't really have a word that we can use, so it seems harder to grasp somehow.
> Society has the problem. Twitter just makes it public.
Every tool, every medium, has some effect on its content. It makes something things easy, others difficult. It amplifies some channels, squelches others. It speeds some things up, slows others down.
Society has all sorts of wonderful things and terrible things. But we humans choose which tools to build and which media to promote. We can observe this and criticize choices accordingly.
So you would prefer to build tools to mask society's problems instead of uncovering them so that we can stare them in the face and have some type of discussion about them?
That's not playing devil's advocate, it's constructing a false dichotomy.
As a counter-example, are you saying that the best way to have a discussion about Young Earthers is to give them equal space in every geology textbook?
I don't think you're saying that, and I don't think I'm saying that we as a society should mask our problems.
Twitter isn't a textbook though. It's goals as a communications platform are completely different.
It's like saying, would you rather design SMS around masking Young Earther's ideas?
In the 20s, you would have had these services designed around not conversating about alcohol. Is that right? Is it wrong? I don't know if it's for the communications platform to decide.
However the communications platform can provide the user tools to control what/who they hear from so that they can make those decisions themselves.
> Twitter isn't a textbook though. It's goals as a communications platform are completely different
Twitter is a company. Its goals and the way it tries to achieve the are as subject to discussion and criticism as any other company.
As for the rest of your comment, you keep talking about “masking” when I never used that word. I conclude that you have a preconceived idea of what I am saying, and are arguing with that. Since it isn’t what I’m saying, I have no obligation to defend it, or even explain why when you put words in my mouth, the difference between your words and my words are.
When you begin an argument with “So what you’re saying, is...” I need go no further than to say “No."
> However the communications platform can provide the user tools to...
And now you are talking about how Twitter could change its offering to improve the lives of its users. Which is what I was talking about. Seems like a good place to break off.
I think Twitter by its very nature promotes that kind of thing. The 140-character limit inherently pushes towards zingers and outrage. Nuance is stripped away by the medium.
Exactly - it's too easy to say that Twitter is simply a reflection of society itself, technology is not a completely neutral pass-through filter.
The 140-character limit strips all nuance out of conversation, so it's no surprise that when it comes to controversial topics everyone is an asshole. It turns out we need more than 140 chars when talking about complicated, important topics.
More than that, Twitter's choice of how users relate to each other also contributes to the nastiness - it's a medium specifically designed so that a single message can traverse a huge portion of the user graph, and this causes a lot of problems.
On Facebook, if you post something stupid, insensitive, or generally moronic, at worst you'd have your friends (or friends-of-friends) telling you off, it almost never goes beyond that simply by nature of how friending works. FB's privacy settings (by default at least) literally prevents anything from being shared past N distance from you.
Ditto on old-school web forums - if you post something stupid, insensitive, or generally moronic, you'll at worst be dogpiled by the forum's own users, but that's it. The link may be spread around, but few people will sign up to some new phpBB webforum just to yell at your stupidity.
On Twitter though your tweet goes viral and traverses many, many different communities, each of which get to layer their own outrage on. More than that, they are all free to respond to you, without filters. The pile-on effect is the scariest we've seen from any social network in existence.
Reddit also suffers from a similar problem - communities cross into each other almost too easily, so brigades are common. At the very least though most subreddits are moderated, whereas Twitter is really a free for all. We've seen how well Twitter's abuse team handles overt death threats and other far-beyond-the-pale abuse (read: lol).
This might not be particularly insightful coming from someone who never really got into Twitter, but their whole model of user interaction is fundamentally defective.
Honest question here - if you believe the issue is that information is too readily available, what is the solution to avoid brigading and the like? Segregating spaces? Safe speech spaces?
Pandora's box has been opened in social media and the internet, and it's not going to close again.
I believe what we're seeing is the happy crossroads of cavemen tribal thought that we got so used to before instant communication, and the, in my opinion inevitable, world-culture many years in the future.
I just don't buy that the issue is that too-much information is available. The issue is that taking offence to information is just so much en vogue right now for exactly the reasons you state. We used to only be able to pile on our family and friends. And to do that we had to really watch what we said, or else they'd be pissed at us for no good reason.
Now that communication is across the world, it just doesn't matter anymore to the individual (especially those who were raised to be self-centered, as I would argue we are currently being raised). So, I can threaten you with a bombing, because I'll never actually meet you. So it doesn't really matter to me.
Combine that with the NEED FOR FAME that we are fed by media. Everyone wants to go viral. Everyone wants to be part of something famous. Everyone wants to be on the cutting edge of the next big movement. So, we yell and we kick and we scream and we insult and we don't think about consequences. Because something new will be along in the next ten minutes; so there are no consequences.
I love watching humans figure out new technology. It seems like we never really do it that well. I'm mostly just pissed that I was born too early for what we know should be possible, but can't figure out how to make happen.
I think casting my view as "information is too readily available" is a vast oversimplification.
Information being readily available isn't the issue, the issue is the ease in responding too it - more specifically the ease in responding thoughtlessly and flippantly, and the empathy gap that entails.
IMO the empathy gap is the problem we face socially as we move into the Internet age, and solving must in some part involve system design - this seems to be something Facebook has been aware of, but that Twitter hasn't.
> "Pandora's box has been opened in social media and the internet, and it's not going to close again."
Ehh, this isn't a complaint about social media in general, it's a complaint about Twitter's model in specific. Many social media services are working just fine without creating the epic shitstorms that seem to surround Twitter on a weekly basis - and I think the demographics of these services are leading indicators of who's succeeding and failing.
Facebook for example has largely solved this by defaulting things in such a way that limit post virality. They've also avoided a lot of abuse problems by clearly delineating ownership of spaces (if you post something abusive on my Wall, I can delete it). As opposed to Twitter where they've steadfastly maximized user ability to invade others' spaces but minimized ability to defend one's own (i.e., you can insert yourself into any conversation anywhere without any say on the part of the participants, and they can do it to you).
The adoption of Snapchat is also indicative - those who don't use Snapchat like to attribute its rise to teenagers sexting each other, but in reality a huge driver of their success is that people got tired of posting things for the judgment of the peanut gallery. The ability to share things with exactly the people you want (outside of the realm of direct messaging) is useful, and those who grew up under the pervasive pall of Facebook and Twitter are saying no to the old model. There is an overt rejection/separation of the "broadcast" mode of social media that those of us in the slightly-older set have gotten used to.
The most promising risers in social media aren't broadcast-style affairs, and they resemble a much more complex form of IRC/group messaging than anything else.
> "We used to only be able to pile on our family and friends."
This is really key - and drives at the heart of the problem. The issue right now isn't that people are being offended - a lot of that shit really is offensive. It's disingenuous to pretend that Twitter outrage is entirely synthetic by people who enjoy being offended (the whole concept of a "professional victim" is IMO reductionist and woefully inaccurate).
The issue is that responses to people saying offensive, ignorant shit is no longer proportional to the ignorant shit itself. There is a virtue to proportional response, and we're witnessing what happens when proportional response goes away - every thing, big or small, is automatically a nuclear war.
The structure of the system has a great influence on this. On Facebook because of the adherence to a voluntary opt-in social graph, responses are in general pretty proportional. If I say something racist in a post, I'll get called out by my friends and family, and none of them are going to SWAT me. On the other hand, if I say something vile on Twitter, I'll likely be receiving death threats.
It's even true in this specific case - IMO Stephen Fry's comments were shitty, and I think he ought to be called out on it - but a million-user pileup?
> "Combine that with the NEED FOR FAME that we are fed by media. Everyone wants to go viral. Everyone wants to be part of something famous."
I actually think this is becoming less true over time. One thing I've noticed is that there's a pretty big generational gap between my "generation" that grew up without social media (basically late 20s and beyond), and those who grew up in it (mid 20s and earlier). The "everyone wants to go viral" thing is IMO stronger in our generation than it is for younger people, and part of it is that they've internalized the downsides more so than the rest of us.
I mean sure, I don't think we'll ever fully rid the human race of the need for validation and fame, but it honestly seems like the younger generation is exercising a lot more care in who and how they associate with others.
Thank you for your lengthy reply. I'm a CS student and usually attend meetups and workshops, mostly related to startups and entrepreneurship. Nearly everyone there introduces themselves with their names and twitter handles. I have heard this "advice" again and again that if you want to make connections, get active on twitter. How true is it? Is twitter really the place to get in touch with people more so than Facebook?
Yeah, this is really Twitter's saving grace, and also why as much as it is a raging dumpster fire, it is still valuable.
Facebook curbs abuse by basically making sure no one can bug you unless you opt-in to it (friending them), and limiting how viral your posts can go. The flip side of this is that this is a really poor way to talk to people you don't already know.
Twitter is the complete opposite - complete strangers can contact you, read your writings, and do whatever. This is wonderful for networking, but obviously has pretty tremendously large downsides. Because of this there are actual "communities" on Twitter in a way that basically doesn't exist on Facebook, because associating with new people is just so easy.
The existential-scale problem facing Twitter now is that abuse has gotten so out of hand, and that the power-users are far more susceptible to abuse than everyone else due to their visibility. More than that, shutting off abuse in the ways we know how basically means converting to Facebook's social model, which is pretty much the anti-Twitter.
Maybe there are ways to curb abuse while helping Twitter stay Twitter? This is the big outstanding question, clearly I'm pessimistic about it - the two big reasons why Twitter succeeds (vast reach and free interjection) is precisely why it's also a shithole.
> the two big reasons why Twitter succeeds (vast reach and free interjection) is precisely why it's also a shithole
The same could be said for 4chan and it's still here after 15 years and shows no signs of going away. Can't we assume that twitter will continue to exist as it is right now? But then again, twitter and 4chan are different platforms. People get hurt on twitter and by 4chan. I guess twitter is going to become the next MySpace.
Also I'd say the stream is part of the problem. Your tweet disappears from the stream quickly. The more noticeable it is, the more likely it is to have a life > 5 min.
> Remember, the US used to have anti-communist witch hunts in which people were forced to give up their careers, it had actual physical lynchings, and it still has a culture where the police can do more or less whatever they want with limited accountability.
Which twitter has and encourages. It's called "bluelisting."
Yes, it's a human dynamic. In other spheres of interaction we've evolved mechanisms to cope.
I wrote about this a few years ago[0]. But for the day to day situation, Stephen Fry has made the sensible choice. There's no point drinking from a well people keep re-poisoning.
A problem I've noticed is that offensive content seems to float to the top. Outside of Twitter I rarely see the kind of hatred I'm about to refer to.
For example, the other day Trump RT'd a tweet by an account with a name like 'White Genocide'. I kid you not. Anybody that clicks this is going to find very unpleasant material about 'the end of the white race' including photos of blood-covered Swedish women, etc. Not very nice. Another day, people were tweeting a Business Insider article on GitHub which directed me towards a series of tweets by some employee ranting about how white people 'cannot be taught empathy' and therefore should not be allowed into positions of power.
These are both very extreme political positions which ultimately revolve around hatred and dehumanisation.
It's just not a good user experience for this kind of thing to constantly be spotlighted by either Twitter, the 'professionally offended', or the 'professionally offensive'. I'd love to be able to tick a box which just says something like "just don't show me things that are going to cause me to lose hope in the human race". Seriously.
This level of hatred doesn't seem to appear on Facebook or on the front page of papers. I don't see why it should be such a big part of my Twitter experience.
I believe in freedom of speech and I'm anti-censorship but in advance I'd like a setting which would help me to avoid having to consciously decide not to see this material.
Interesting. I have a complete opposite experience. I see a lot of disturbing stuff on Facebook but virtually none on Twitter. I guess it just depends on who you follow on these social medias.
Luckily, Twitter is a private company and does not have to offer a platform for anyone to say anything. They are free to limit speech as they see fit. That includes people from the so-called SJW community. Its not even PC vs non-PC, because that itself assumes there is an obvious 'correctness' in the language one must use. The whole "that's offensive/that's X-ist" crowd is annoying as hell.
The notion of "professionally offended" implies making money off the whole thing. If you don't, than you're merely an amateur offended.
Also, saying that Twitter has a problem is like saying that fires can cause property damage. Twitter is a problem. It's designed for propaganda, whether corporate or political. There is very little else to it that an RSS feed can't do. You cannot use it to run a community or have a real discussion. 140 character limit dumbs things down. Retweets encourage mob mentality and echo chambers. Embedded pictures server to spread stupid memes (think 21st century propaganda posters) and also as an ugly workaround for the character limit. You can't even link to stuff properly, because... uh, reasons. (URLs really shouldn't have counted towards message length.)
If people thought things through, it wouldn't have taken off in the first place.
Something that I've seen is that Twitter claims to be interested in cracking down on people who harass.. But when people come and bully in the name of "social progress" .. they tend to look the other way. I've reported a tweet or two that attacked the reputation of an individual and was told "it's been reviewed but we deem it ok."
I think literally no one is happy with the level of involvement twitter has in preventing bullying. I don't think it has anything to do with what side of a debate you're on.
> I left Twitter last year when it looked like the 'professionally offended' were becoming too influential.
Unfortunately, it's not only Twitter where radfems and other (insert favorite swear word here) grab a stranglehold on public conversations. It's mass media too.
By "professionally offended", I assume you mean mostly marginalized people who are the recipients of torrents of abuse/death threats/rape threats/sexual harrassment/etc nearly every day they are active on twitter.
The "professionally offended" are actually a much smaller subset of the group of marginalised people - probably 0.1% at most, and many of them holding a lot of privilege.
The "professionally offended" are by definition those that make money from others' marginalisation. They benefit from prolonging inequality and maximising the emotional pain of others by spreading grievances as far and wide as possible. They do this as leverage for personal financial gain.
The average "marginalised" person doesn't deserve to be tarnished with the same brush. It's extremely bad of you to attempt to use them as a shield.
Communities of marginalized people also contain toxic people, unless you want to believe that by "virtue" of being marginalized we can assume a lack of toxicity.
I'm a bit monomaniacal about this, but the current online culture wars (and the previous offline culture wars) make me wish that secession didn't have such a bad name. It is obvious that large groups of people have irreconcilable differences of opinion on matters of free speech, sexuality, gun ownership and so on.
It is a shame that rather than a firm handshake and friendly wave goodbye, we will end up with a totalitarianism of one ideology or another, violence, or both.
I don't know if it will prevail in the end, but I think that Reddit approach by splitting the community in small subgroups/communities has a better chance to last in the long run.
Of course, you'll create feuds between communities but at least it is somewhat confined and not always spilling in the common public space.
Unfortunately it also greatly increases the echo chamber / filter bubble but it seems you can not have a peaceful community without an heavy dose of groupthink.
A long time ago, at the dusk of the XXth century, I used to believe that Internet would usher a new age of Enlightenment since every one would have access to many different opinions and unbiased sources. Arguably that was a pretty naive view, and instead we got new tribes disagreeing on almost everything conceivable.
For those of you old enough to have seen the net hey started, but young enough to have been impressionable by its start:
Remember when we wanted EVERYONE to get online? Remember when we thought how great the world would be if everyone was connected and could read all this great information and research?
HA! One thing we did not understand: the tragedy of the commons.
It is now nothing but a tragedy. Best thing to do is stay deep within your select niches and away from general purpose networks like Facebook or Twitter.
I have been waiting a long time for someone to use lessons learned from recommender systems to build a social media site like reddit, but rather than having users group themselves up, they would be shown posts algorithmically, based on how they have voted in the past. For example, if I vote for a lot of pro EFF posts, maybe I will see more posts about free software or something like that.
This also allows the site to treat votes as merely an expression of preference, not a judgment of quality (which is hard to define). Many sites try to enforce a rule that says "Don't downvote things disagree with." This is an impossible battle to win, there will always be people who downvote things they don't agree with. This behavior needs to be accounted for in the platform.
That sounds horrible. I don't want the internet to become a giant echo chamber. I want to hear differing views from time to time, because I might be wrong.
I would imagine you could also similarly find the things you either stay away from or actively dislike. Sort of a topical noise cancellation. Train it to know your preferences, but to occasionally give material outside the comfort zone. I think you'd really need a substantial map of topics to have a good understanding of where contrasts lie, but we're likely on track with the datasets currently being built in public sites like Reddit.
Really, I'm surprised this feature isn't implemented anywhere, since one of the joys of the Internet is being delighted by a new idea you haven't seen before. I certainly would appreciate filtering of the obvious rubbish like Fry is exasperated with, but having quality dissenting opinions available is precious.
> reddit is a source for what's new and popular on the web -- personalized for you. Your votes train a filter, so let reddit know what you liked and disliked, because you'll begin to be recommended links filtered to your tastes. All of the content on reddit is submitted and voted on by users like you
I think there's probably an upper limit for how big any community can become before it becomes fractured. This size is probably variable, and dependent on the medium and structure of the community to an extent, but I'd posit it exists for any community. See: reddit, Stack Overflow, Facebook, any church, any religion, any politcal party, any country.
Often secession is what happens: new subreddits, new churches, new countries. But as they grow, the same problems return.
One thing I've often thought about is some kind of community-space with a fixed upper-bound on the size of communities, essentially forcing a community to split to add new members, like an old cell.
(Not directly applicable to Twitter, but to online communities in general)
It'd be interesting if you could have two votes: whether you liked what the person posted (which would only be visible to them) and whether you'd personally share it with your friends (which would affect it's ranking only among your friends)
Or put differently, I wonder if it's not possible to create a system that dynamically sorts content, instead of having static groups. Seems like static groups with a label on them inevitably end up arguing about exactly what the label means (grin).
I don't want an echo chamber, and I want to be challenged -- but I don't want a daily rage fest against whomever the internet currently hates either.
> I don't want an echo chamber, and I want to be challenged -- but I don't want a daily rage fest against whomever the internet currently hates either
There is some scaling effect at play.
Let's say in community of 1,000 - 10,000 it is easy to keep a civil discourse by small moderation and self-policing. In the 100,000 - 1,000,000 range it is much much harder.
I have no idea of the size of HN but I believe it is closer to 50,000 and thus still "nice".
The follower system on twitter already sorts content like that, it's just the retweet system amplifies certain types of content so strongly that it drowns out other types. Amongst other glaring problems, like driving an evil feedback loop that makes twitter money by making everyone angry.
Many times online I see a friend who is justifiably upset. Let's say they like to put their dog in a sweater and somebody said it was animal abuse.
Now I could care less about dogs in sweaters, but I like my friend. I hear them and I want them to know that they have been heard. So I "like" the content.
When you've only got 1,000 or so followers, no big deal. But if you're around 50 or 100K? statistically you're going to end up with dozens, maybe hundreds of likes. Some likes are "I agree!" Some likes are "I like you". How could any system distinguish the two? I have difficulties doing this in small groups where people are physically nodding their head.
I know designers don't want to move away from the one-button like/vote/heart/plus/whatever, but hell if I can figure out how you'd make a system work like that without massive feedback noise (which is what's happening).
SRS is the boogeyman of Reddit. It doesn't have nearly the power so many people seem to think. There are plenty of reactionary subreddits on multiple sides of various spectrums.
> Internet would usher a new age of Enlightenment since every one would have access to many different opinions and unbiased sources
Agreed. Seems like what happened is people could find their own opinion bubble to live it and feel empowered without having to deal with other opinions.
The US does this by allowing states to have their own local governments and laws.
Forcing everybody into a single, homogeneous culture dictated by a central authority is a recipe for disaster.
People often point to the chaos that takes place in the US government as a 'failure of Democracy'. I'd argue the opposite, it's a side effect of a successful Democracy that supports a wide variety of subcultures with different beliefs/norms.
It should be extremely difficult to establish a universal consensus.
The danger comes when the central authority makes declarative judgements that affect everybody without working out foing due diligence. Some topics can't be addressed globally and therefore should be defined locally or not at all.
Universal laws work best when they're used to guarantee basic human rights and freedoms. Unfortunately, some groups try to manipulate public opinion and garner support by attaching 'human right' to whatever particular pet cause they're trying to force.
Re. your last paragraph, the "different opinions" is exactly what we get, so it's not "instead" but "consequently". As for unbiased sources, that is a pipe dream as it ever was.
There's two reasons for strong moderation (sometimes called 'censorship' by people who don't like it) on the internet:
Jackasses creating an unsafe space for other parts of the community, and making a space safe for advertisers.
The first reason comes down to having a choice between taking action against jackasses to allow groups like "women" and to have a place on your site. This is pretty damn important, and something that places like twitter and reddit have been horrible at. To the extent that there's less harassment on sites like Instagram, I wonder if it's just that the jackasses have confined themselves to Reddit.
Advertising is a different issue altogether, and pretty much comes down to the Q-Tip corporation not wanting their ads to run on r/penetration. Which, meh, as far as I'm concerned, but companies based on ad revenue need to be able to sell ads.
Both of these become bigger issues, however, as the sites get bigger and have a larger need for advertising dime to keep the lights on, and just have a bigger pool of jackasses to deal with. Reddit seems to have scaled... poorly... in both of these regards, and needs to think hard about both issues.
Another reason for "censorship", particularly on Reddit (where the aim goes against the broader cultural default of the site) is to prevent discussions from being overrun by memes and other "low-effort" posts. Most /r/science posts that make the front page end up with a lot of deleted comments, for example.
We disagree (and I get the impression this is the root of much strife) on the definition of the word "safe" in "safe space".
Safe from what? From having your views challenged? From someone calling you an asshat? From people making non-credible threats (Think navy seal copypasta)? From people making legitimate threats?
Talk to 10 different people and all will have different definitions as to what the meaning is there.
IMHO, the objectionable part of "safe space" is the idea that everywhere needs to be a "safe space", and especially so when only certain favored groups of people gets to be "safe" in that universal "safe space" in accordance with the demands of a very vocal minority.
The right to carve out a space (on the Internet or otherwise) for certain like minded individuals to be "safe" from any of the things you mentioned, as well as any other things they may deem fit, is one that we should generally honor, though.
Agreed, but only if said "carving out" isn't done platform-wide at everyone's expense.
Changing the rules after people have invested their time and effort into being part of a community with certain norms is generally a crappy thing to do. This is the internet, where anyone can start their own community with their own rules in any number of ways. The rights of the people that were there first should be recognized.
Sure. It's incumbent on a platform for a wide variety of communities to provide the tools for those communities to define and enforce their own norms. A big part of the problem at Reddit last year was failing to provide good tools for mods of subreddits.
Why not give mods a knob that auto kills ninety percent of the stuff they end up deleting, to keep them from just getting worn down dealing with this shit?
For my own part, the 'non credible' threats are a huge part of the problem. They stop being non credible if there's enough of them, or if you're getting private messages from people with your home address and a rapid or murder threat. That's the level of unsafe that I'm talking about here. And communities need the tools to stop bullshit before it gets out of hand. I actually think that the sort of over reactionary pc-ness that Steven Fry is concerned about could be a reaction to a lack of such tools.
"A long time ago, I used to believe that Internet would usher a new age of Enlightenment since every one would have access to many different opinions and unbiased sources."
Heh, same here. I think that so many of us simply underestimated the immense power of capitalism to co-opt and commodify everything it touches.
Agreed that Twitter shouldn't be activism-free, but they could try to make it less threatening, e.g. by hiding or slowing down replies that are likely to be part of mobbing.
Twitter could do a million things to improve the platform (when it comes to reducing abuse), sadly they've chosen to introduce only orthogonal features nobody really wants, like "Moments".
Property rights are involuntary for the have-nots. The basis of capitalism isn't 'voluntary exchange', but property rights and the accumulation of capital.
Is there a name for the thing where every discussion online eventually becomes about stridently defending or bashing capitalism?
SOME PUBLIC FIGURE: I'm leaving twitter, too many trolls.
[ 50 pages of discussion ]
AGGRIEVED COMMIE: ACTUALLY, capitalism sucks!
(As it happens, totally agree with the commie stuff though. All the cheery talk about liberty and voluntarism is idiotic since it acts like primitive accumulation and enclosure don't exist, as if everybody starts out with equal capital to manage, like in a board game.)
It wasn't capitalism that co-opted communities, it was the end product of modern politics which strives to play people against each other to maintain the power of those who govern. By subtle and some not so subtle phrasing they can turn people into irrational actors which makes them all the more easy to manipulate. There have been some really good areas for the technically inclined to congregate that were destroyed with politically driven conversations took over.
The problem is twofold: low bar to grabbing torches and pitchforks, and a high bar for recognizing someone else's humanity.
In the old days you might not agree with your neighbor, but you had to live next to them. Now with the flick of a thumb you can denounce someone's entire existence before breakfast.
It seems to me that in the old days, not that long ago, people literally formed a mob, and often the catalyst was about who got to live next door to who.
Even the bad boys of twitter, which goes right up to mobs of people trying to ruin peoples lives with death threats etc doesn't seem quite as bad as bombing someone's church for example.
Sure, I'm not trying to say it was all perfume and roses before, but they had to put some effort into it at least. The problem now is it becomes reflexive and casual—you don't even really need the strength of your convictions to attack someone online.
It seems like it's probably "lower" impact (i.e. no physical bombs) by higher participation (people are more likely to shout on Twitter than actually bomb some place).
Of course, the risks are minimal on twitter. At worst they can write a death threat, but nobody's going to come to your house. They'll spend more time arguing with your defenders. And the attention span is short, by next week your controversy will be gone.
Contrast to getting into an extreme argument with your neighbor could result in a physical fight, destruction of property, or death.
Ultimately, this is why I really don't want to see articles on Internet discourse dominated by "culture wars" topics; So little is at stake. I highly doubt mass tweeting and public shaming will ever have much power over anyone, or change national policy or thought. However, someone once told me though that the most vicious fights are often the pettiest, so I only expect culture wars stuff to be more common in the future.
> I highly doubt mass tweeting and public shaming will ever have much power over anyone, or change national policy or thought.
It only has the power that we give it. Which is to say, right now it has enormous power, because employers fall over themselves to defuse any hint of controversy by firing anyone who becomes the target of a mob. And conferences un-invite people, and et cetera, et cetera.
If, going way back to 2009 or so, employers had stood firm and said "no, we're not going to waste our time policing what our employees say in their off hours, now go away" to the perpetually offended of whatever stripe, none of this would be happening. But they didn't, and it is. We need to reverse this state of affairs before we can afford to sit back and dismiss it as irrelevant bickering.
Federalism was supposed to enable pluralism within a single political entity. Each state could live the way they wanted to and have different rules/laws than their neighbors. The urge to use the federal level of government to impose uniform social rules on all the sub-units undermines the possibility of stable political pluralism. Once rules at the state level are no longer safe, the stakes for controlling the single central point of failure at the federal level rise to the point where political differences become intolerable.
I was about to make the same comment, so I'm glad you did.
I'll add that until we can discuss what a fair process is (as opposed to anecdotes of unfairness), the problem won't get better. Everything, including cash transfers, will be human rights and therefore national issues with no room for diversity of solutions between regions.
I came up with a joke a few years ago, which is becoming less and less funny as time passes:
Everyone's an asshole. It's just that you're usually surrounded by people who are the same kind of asshole as you are. The internet makes it trivially easy for assholes of opposing kinds to get into contact with each other, thus guaranteeing maximum offense.
Personally I don't think there's any such thing as 'irreconcilable differences'. The idea of secession in that instance kinda scares me because it leaves you with a new foriegn nation on your doorstep with the exact same set of 'irreconcilable' differences and nobody to moderate them.
Seemingly irreconcilable differences (e.g. US rep/dem, Israel/Palestine) are created by the narratives we're fed & let fester. Sure, narratives are elusive and sticky, but they're just narratives.
In the past that's sometimes taken a global-scale event; like how the horrors of the Nazis swept away any remaining support for eugenics. Other times it's been smaller; like how Stetson Kennedy undermined support for the KKK by exposing its schoolboy ritualism to ridicule in a radio show.
Change the narrative, maybe starting with your own. Whoever the "other side" are; humanise them, don't demonise them. Be the bigger person. Admit that your own perspective on things isn't 100% bulletproof (because nobody's is).
Of course, if you disagree and want to win the argument you could always bring up Trump... I don't have an answer to that.
Personally I don't think there's any such thing as 'irreconcilable differences'.
How would you reconcile the differences between the Western world and fundamentalist Islam regarding the rights of women? Should we "admit" that our perspective that women should be allowed to go outside with their faces uncovered is possibly wrong?
> How would you reconcile the differences between the Western world and fundamentalist Islam regarding the rights of women?
Your comment reads like you disagree and are raising a counter-example, but the existence of a difference doesn't make that difference irreconcilable.
> Should we "admit" that our perspective... is possibly wrong?
Fundamentalist Islam in the 20th & 21st century seems (as far as I've read) to be largely a reaction against Western powers interference, or to use a tired term 'imperialism', with the natural evolution of Middle East nations... toppling democracies, installing dictators, etc.
To get away from the influences of perceivedly 'evil' Western interference fundamentalists took Islam all the way back to the 7th century. In that context it's hard to see how a Westerner arguing that their views on women are "wrong" is going to bother them much; the opposite perhaps. You're arguing against the narrative.
Should we admit that we're wrong about feminism? No, I think that'd be both dishonest and counter-productive. Should we admit that we have been wrong in the past about other important things? Maybe, perhaps that'd help undermine the imperialism narrative.
I believe the comment that was replied to contains an appropriate response:
"Seemingly irreconcilable differences are created by the narratives we're fed & let fester. Sure, narratives are elusive and sticky, but they're just narratives."
and
"Change the narrative, maybe starting with your own. Whoever the "other side" are; humanise them, don't demonise them. Be the bigger person. "
As an anarchs-capitalist I'd be happy to have a society where anarchs-communists had their communes and lived under their own rules.
This may seem off topic but its directly relevant- we regularly have these debates in the anarchist community.
But at the end of the day, it seems the anarchs-communists don't want to live under their own rules for themselves, they want us to live under their rules too. (Yes, the irony is lost on them.)
For people who are conditioned to believe it-- the others must be forced to live the way they think is appropriate--otherwise things are not "Fair".
Jealousy, fear, all these emotions are easily manipulated by propaganda.
To the detriment of tolerance.
So, while I want to see gay married couples defending their marijuana crops with fully auto machine guns, and saying whatever they want online, because I believe in human rights, I must admit I am surrounded by two groups of people who do not believe in human rights and are increasingly seeing the other group as less than human.
> But at the end of the day, it seems the anarchs-communists don't want to live under their own rules for themselves, they want us to live under their rules too.
The main difference between the libertarian left and right tends to be whether they see property rights as some sort of special exception from the principle of maximising liberty, or a some form of theft because it limits liberty. I don't know many far left libertarians (anarchists or otherwise) who'd give a shit how you choose to live as long as you are not proposing systems that would limit the liberty of others.
The right libertarian ideas that tends to be seen by the left as drastically limiting the liberty of others tends to be right libertarian ideas about strict enforcement of property rights and shared responsibility for externalities.
E.g. if you see property as theft, then someone wanting to wall off land is not a simple matter of you wanting to live differently, but a matter of you wanting to deprive others of liberty.
So from the left libertarian point of view, there is no irony, but the consequence of following the principle of maximizing personal liberty to the end, rather than making large carve-outs for property.
> if you see property as theft, then someone wanting to wall off land is not a simple matter of you wanting to live differently, but a matter of you wanting to deprive others of liberty.
Yes, and the problem with this definition of "liberty" is that it makes it impossible for "liberty" to coexist with peaceful cooperation and trade, since peaceful cooperation and trade require property rights. And without peaceful cooperation and trade, you can't create wealth. So "liberty" as defined by the left libertarian is a recipe for poverty and war. As indeed we see wherever such systems have been tried.
> from the left libertarian point of view, there is no irony, but the consequence of following the principle of maximizing personal liberty to the end
Yes, which also means that "maximizing personal liberty" requires, as I said above, poverty and war. You stated the example in terms of land, but it applies just as well to any kind of property. If you have a house, or a car, or a wallet full of money, and I want it, "maximizing personal liberty" means I can just take it, because, hey, I'm just exercising my liberty. Of course you can also exercise your liberty by shooting me when I try. Good luck trying to have a stable society on that basis.
"But at the end of the day, it seems the anarchs-communists don't want to live under their own rules for themselves, they want us to live under their rules too."
Because generally, you guys insist on living in the community and getting all the benefits of doing so, without following that community's rules. Basically, you're saying that those people do not have the right to govern themselves, because when you live in that community, you have become one of those people.
"So, while I want to see gay married couples defending their marijuana crops with fully auto machine guns, and saying whatever they want online, because I believe in human rights"
I fail to see how fully auto machine guns involved in any way leads to human rights. Those devices only exist to deprive other humans of their right to live.
Firearms actually allow humans to defend their right to life. The reason is that they are the ultimate equalizer. A gun allows the 4'11", 89-pound, 79-year-old female to protect herself when attacked by the 6'4", 240-pound, 27-year-old male (or the 5'11", 160-pound female, etc). Then, after said defense takes place, the law sorts out the consequences: right-makes-right, rather than might-makes-right.
Or, in the absence of law enforcement, (e.g. the American frontier), it at least allows potential victims the potential to defend themselves, and gives potential attackers pause: even if they don't have to worry about being arrested and put on trial, they have to consider that their next victim might be armed.
Conversely, in the absence of firearms, the biggest and strongest wins. And in the presence of law enforcement, by the time the police arrive, it's too late.
For this reason, one of the first steps an oppressive government takes is to disarm the population. Examples of this go all the way back to even feudal Japan. It's kind of amazing that we still haven't learned our lesson. Idealism is great, but human lifetimes are relatively short, and human societies are clearly not a succession of "standing upon the shoulders of giants."
Too simplistic, regional arrangements don't necessarily mean everyone in said community follows the ideology of that group. Moving outside of the realm of abstracted ideological thought experiments is kind of a difficult thing. So how do you handle folks breaking your version of human rights in separate groups? Just ignore it? How's that much different from nation states?
The thing is, the groups of people that have irreconcilable diferences on gun ownership are not the same as the groups of people that have irreconcilable differences on free speech. So now you're talking at least 4 separate countries, right? But worse yet, the people involved don't necessarily admit to themselves what their opinions on free speech are, so they wouldn't necessarily self-segregate properly...
Add to that that there is significant geographical intermixing, and the multistate solution to these problems starts to look like the ethnic situation in the Balkans has at some points: several states with totalitarianisms of some ideology (ethnicity in the case of the Balkans) but also a significant minority of dissenters who are supported by neighboring states. It's not really that happy a situation.
Unilateral secession has to have a bad name or civilization would be impossible. But a peacefully negotiated and mutually agreed upon secession would definitely be a good thing.
I've been accused of being sexist exactly once in my life, by an anonymous male friend of a woman on Twitter because I dared to answer a question she asked. I didn't realize she was asking in jest. Her friend said I should have known that she was a very knowledgeable person (I didn't) and her question was a joke, and because I answered it I was implying that she didn't know the answer and therefore was manspainling and generally being a sexist dick. This person wasn't satisfied and pursued me for several tweets until I apologized. I did apologize, but I've noticed that it kind of soured me on Twitter. I'm proud of my record of working women in tech and raising an independent daughter. I use my real name on Twitter and I don't need some anonymous busybody attacking me in public for dubious reasons. Perhaps if Twitter had a real name policy it would level the playing field. I'm sure a famous person like Stephen Fry is under constant attack from anonymous trolls.
We need the opposite. The collision of economic incentives to self-promote online under one's real name with the way the Web works has been a disaster, in many ways. We need a no real names policy.
Just remember that this vision of war was the prevailing attitude in pre-WW1 Europe (maybe also in America, but what do I know?).
It helped that the (thought) leaders espousing such nonsense rarely fought at the front lines. For them the only things that could be bruised by war were their ego and their wallet.
WW1's reach changed that (and WW2 shook it up some more)
My Facebook newsfeed feels like a cocktail party where the host has surreptitiously arranged for the silent majority to observe a performance wherein the most "unsophisticated" guests squabble with each other over politics. The opinions on the feed, regularly produced by the same small group of people, are rife with dramatization and lacking any substantive argument. Yet hardly any of them come from friends who I know closely on an individual basis.
Facebook seems like a platform that amplifies the voice of a minority on the outskirts of the social graph, distributing its opinions to the silent majority. This seems good in theory, and would hopefully result in some meaningful improvements to civil discourse. However, it remains unclear whether expectation meets reality in that regard.
I totally agree. I have un-followed a few people and now I only friend people that actually want to be friends with. I try to avoid posting political or technical things (mostly). So now, my FB is mostly just sharing pics and events with friends. (Actual friends, that I see IRL.)
Sanctimonious indignation is toxic. But to be fair, people post really offensive stuff too, and often it's well-meaning people who don't even seem to realize what they are doing.
The best example I've seen lately is Richard Dawkins, who posted a video I won't link to where an Islamist and a Feminist are singing a song together. The video makes a real point that isn't intrinsically offensive. But the highly caricatured portrayal of these two people is, to me at least, a pretty inflammatory gesture. Also it came out that the feminist caricature is based on a real person who has received death threats for her work.
Humans aren't programmed to live together with people who are really different from them. We evolved to preserve our in groups and unify against out groups. We have huge blind spots about how other people will perceive things. We can absolutely learn, but it takes effort and we'll make mistakes as we go. Twitter is all of this happening in real time.
I think you've recognized something important here, which is that offense is generally a subjective matter. In such cases an clear-headed statement of objection may be warranted, but dogpiling and outright bullying is never excusable.
I've joined a number of online forums through the years, and I've always ended up leaving them due to a spiral of "tone gets rough / the good people leave".
I'm still in this one, but I guess we'll see how long it lasts here. Seems different somehow, but they all do in the beginning.
What are some innovations in solving the asshole/quality spiral? There's lots of takes on moderation, but what are some interesting ones?
I've been on this one for a pretty long time. A little over 7 years according to my user page.
The quality has not noticeably gone down. There are a lot less technical articles now than I feel like there used to be, but that might very well just be because I've gotten more technical, and now everything seems like an opinion.
I think it's because HN is actually willing to defend itself. We used to have days where everybody would ONLY submit articles about some obscure programming language (although I have forgotten which one it was...not arc, I don't think...scala maybe? I think it started with an S).
We don't seem to do that anymore, but I think the culture is still there. People are willing to tell you to leave if you're not a good member. That's really important.
Indeed, I joined 9 days after you (and have within 1% of your karma (!)), and my experience is the same. HN was founded with a keen awareness of how online forums tend to go downhill over time, and there are specific rules to avoid it.
But IMHO, the saving grace is the fact that HN is not built to grow. Growth is what ruins every online community. There are still plenty of small communities have have been going fine for years or even decades because they didn't experience explosive growth. As soon as you have something like Twitter with massive investment and market expectations, you know the community is done for. To Twitter's credit though, the mechanic of following individuals does scale much better than a forum though. Subreddits were also a good idea that allows some community while scaling. But in both those cases it works because they create sub-divided communities rather than one massive one which inevitably breaks down.
I'm wondering how many similarities your comment also has to do with capitalism...
Some areas of business make a good local idea, regional idea, but VC firms want you to expand and swallow the world. Maybe that's also the wrong way to think about it: maybe coexisting in the local economy is a better, more stable, and amicable way to go.
If I recall correctly, there was a noticeable difference in the HN front page on Christmas day. More unusual articles were upvoted than what usually gets posted. It could be due to the difference in visitors, but it might also be just that fewer people were voting, and there was less people to upvote what might normally be a popular post and that caused less generic posts to stay visible.
HN still works if you belong to the right school of thought. Quality has gone down in the sense that variety of viewpoints has been diminished. Within the filter bubble, there are still enough interesting articles to make it worthwhile.
Totally agree that SO has little community (or quite a hostile one, if any) but that may be because it is a victim of its own success.
I see the same thing happening in other stack-exchange sites, sadly. The underlying problem may be the gradual fatigue at questions of the form:
"HOW DO I DO DIS???!! SOLVE THIS FOR ME NOW PLZ!!"
or even the more subtle "I was wondering about this homework-like question...?" which are - inevitably - just lazy students posting their homework. These get closed as "homework question".
On the flip side, there are interesting questions which don't fit into the SE model. These are the speculative or more open-ended discursive ones. These get closed as "too broad".
On SO itself, it kind of feels like most questions are homework - or even just people unable/unwilling to use search engines. Then innocent questioners who word their question wrong get caught in the crossfire, and have their question closed.
My own personal experience with SO as a Q&A site is I've had a literally 0% success rate. None of the questions I've posted have ever been successfully answered. (Now I don't even bother.)
I think that's because the site encourages people to get all the internetpointzzz reputation currency, and not to, you know, actually answer questions. And the questions I asked were somewhat difficult, because I'm not a dummy and I did a lot of research before posting them. So, as a software developer, I do not find SO "successful" as a Q&A site.
As a community, it seems their biggest flaw is they try to solve literally every problem with the reputation system, and they've turned it into a weird mess. For example, the SO FAQ says "if you know or find the answer, go ahead and answer your own question". But the reputation system says, "Nope, no permissions. We were just yanking your chain." Very off-putting for literally everybody who doesn't spent 4 hours a day there farming reputation.
Have you found... anything... anywhere that will answer your questions?
Because like you, I'm relatively bright and I do a lot of research before asking my questions. Hence they tend to get zero answers from:
IRC, mailing lists, personal emails of luminaries, Stack Overflow, Slashdot, or anywhere.
Generally I just keep hammering away and digging deeper until I figure out which CPU register is flipping wrongly that, to the top of the stack, caused the database query to return the wrong result (to give a synthetic example of the sort of thing I tend to run into and solve).
I usually just assume if the question isn't answered by 2-3 different mediums, it's unanswerable. Then I work-around it, usually with some horrible hack that I hate.
Most recently, I was trying to twist and mold WebAPI2 into accepting a multipart/form-data request while also using the auto-serializer. I asked everywhere and every one, and nothing. The work-around is just awful, goddamned awful, but oh well.
I blame the developers who apparently think this REST API is "done" despite it being impossible to, for example, upload a user's profile image using it. Guh.
Catching all the pointzz (it also has badges!!) can be a problem. Especially on SO itself, there can be a race to answer a question, which means the quality of the answers suffers sometimes.
Difficult questions really don't work well, sadly. Unless there is the rare situation that some expert out there happens to know the answer and has the spare time to post a long detailed reply.
Didn't realise you couldn't answer your own questions without sufficient rep - that sounds a bit rubbish. Don't think you get any points from it either (obviously, otherwise you could just rapidly post a bunch of empty 'questions' and accept all your own answers).
Ultimately, stack-exchange sites seem to work well for a certain volume of questions, with a certain minimum number of enthusiastic varied experts in some field, for a certain level of question (not homework, not blue-sky research). This is kind of Goldilocks-obvious I suppose...
Right; but the thing is, the only questions I ever have are the difficult questions. Easy questions are either:
* Something I can figure out myself if I think about it for a few minutes, or
* Already on StackOverflow or another Q&A site so I can look them up.
IMO if the site doesn't tackle difficult questions, what's the point? I don't need yet another site for easy questions, I need a Q&A site to get my questions answered.
RE: the answering my own question thing -
Yeah, the people in control of the site all have like 573453247,3048294723847 rep so they think nothing of saying "well doing action X should require rep" followed by the old canard, "it's really easy to get that much rep!"
I seriously wonder if any of those people have actually created a new account and tried to use their own website. Because there's SO MANY LIMITATIONS on SO MANY THINGS tied to rep, if you come in from the outside there's actually very little you can actually do. And there's no way to ease-in to using the site, because you can't (for example) post comments on other people's answers until after you gain rep.
So if you're like me, and you have no patience/desire to play the internetpointzzz game, nor did you start using the site "early enough" to benefit from its population growth, and the fact that early users could do a LOT more without rep limits-- then you're kind of just stuck in this weird no-man's land.
(I didn't use the site when it was founded because of it's bizarre and foolish insistence on using OpenID. Thankfully they've finally moved away from that.)
Theoretically, I could gain rep (by playing the game), then add a "bounty" to my difficult questions to get them answered, but I ain't got time for that! Who does?
Agreed, there's a problem in both directions on the stack* sites, but Overflow is the single worst offender.
An observation; reading the meta sites (where they discuss the community) turns up a lot of downright vitriolic ire directed at the stinkin' no-reps who pollute the site with their ill-thought-out questions, like someone traipsing through the house with muddy shoes on.
In fact, I'd wager that if someone who had a mind to ask a question on SO read the meta site first, they'd be completely turned off from the attitude on display.
And I say this as someone that's been on both sides of the equation. I've had questions closed for "too broad" even when they're asking a pretty direct question with an equally direct answer, I've seen the flags pile up in the review queues.
Anonymity helps a lot, I think. This site isn't completely anonymous but it de-emphasizes usernames such that it's easy to miss them. Explicit policies are the other thing, and strong personal leadership. It's when the moderators become an unaccountable committee that a site starts to go downhill.
Conversely, the best online community I know is our village website, where real names are required - on the basis that you're less likely to be rude to someone who you might meet in the street tomorrow. It's notable that the biggest aggro we have is generally from people who live outside the village and therefore aren't invested in making relationships work.
And yes, I do realise it's all a bit Royston Vasey - "a local website for local people"...
I grew up on anonymous message boards in small communities, largely the ones surrounding video game music and chiptunes/"micromusic." There was some nasty behavior exhibited and I always figured it was the anonymous pseudonyms. Then I joined Facebook and saw the same thing playing out with real names and, usually, real faces as avatars.
In America, we have a social network called NextDoor that uses aggressive methods to keep outsiders from being able to post in your hyper-local community/neighborhood. Your village's site is the same concept, only maybe without the postcard-mailed address verification step.
It's a great concept. Just neighbors helping each other out, right? I thought that, besides the required real names, most members having profile pictures of their real faces, and many of them having their exact addresses listed on their profile page (oh, Bob lives 8 houses down from me!), would put a halt to the vitriol I saw on Facebook. It hasn't.
It must be something about looking at a picture on a screen instead of a human who's reacting, visibly, in real-time to our hateful words, that lets us do what we do online.
I'm working with the editor of our local newspaper to put together something for our community, and would be interested in hearing more about your village website. Could I get a link?
League of Legends have attempted to solve the problem by tying a reward structure to user interaction. Positive interactions get rewarded, negative interactions punished.
The upvote/downvote system works well for how simple it is for the end user. Although, this reward structure seems to favour opinion over fact- The stronger the opinion the more interest in generates. Also, the system only works well if the community is aligned. HN, for example, has enough people to flag flagrantly bad comments that it's managed to [mostly] maintain quality with growth. Reddit "blows up" when the company takes action to realign the community away from what it considers to be bad actors.
Twitter has no control over quality nor content. They've invested so much into developing a monetization platform (which some may argue has diminished quality of content) and they've ignored the core product- a community interacting with itself. Fake accounts, ads, and an organized faction of bad actors; one wonders how far-reaching the Twitter Exodus [of users and investors] will be.
Reddit employs an automoderator bot that supports a lot of different types of customization. Each subreddit may have a completely different bot configuration.
In the same context, you would think that the asshole/quality spiral (love this description, by the way) could be managed by a combination of moderation bots/humans and (especially) the voting system, but when a sub gets big (say 70k users), it's quite often the assholes who are most vocal and cause the most trouble. With that amount of users, there will be a certain amount of "brigading" and a certain group of users who will play along with the griefers for fun.
It's been mentioned above, but a user base can reach a "tipping point" where it becomes impossible to manage with a a small amount of moderators, a bot and a voting system.
Something will eventually give. I've seen all this play out numerous times and experienced it first-hand.
I'm not surprised - I wouldn't be famous for all the money available (not an option anyway, particularly given my lack of talent!) - so many people now think they have a right to you, if they're a fan, or they've bought your work, or they don't like your work, or whatever. Twitter seems to bring those sorts of things much closer (as, of course, does much social media), and I'd think anyone with any opinions on just about anything will end up getting drawn into arguments over just about everything with people they've never met, whose opinions they probably wouldn't care about in any other sphere.
I seriously think there will be a huge backlash against all of this sort of thing in the next few years - people have binged on it ad nauseam, and given the way my two teenage step-kids have reacted (removing themselves almost entirely from most social media, and only using it to talk to people they actually know and like IRL), I'd think there's more to come, in terms of people just leaving such an arena behind.
I've been thinking a lot about online communities since I listened to "So you've been publicly shamed" by Jon Ronson [0].
I quite like twitter just now but I don't follow many people and nobody follows me. I often see tweets from indie game devs discussing yet another Twitter storm in a teacup and I'm frustrated by how much stupid stuff escalates.
Twitter is powered by an evil feedback loop where making people upset makes twitter more money. Their UX is designed to generate easily-amplified content, and amplify it, and this is the unanticipated consequence. I doubt they can fix the feedback loop without torpedoing engagement.
Isn't that like any news site ever? There's a reason why articles in tabloids and on clickbait websites tend to be as inflammatory as possible, because the inevitable flame war in the comments will likely bring the page views (and the links from people attacking it elsewhere will bring the backlinks for SEO purposes).
Twitter needs to be very careful. I use Facebook to follow my friends. I use Twitter to follow influencers/celebrities. If they start leaving and Twitter is just left with the musings of the average joe they're going to lose and lot of users.
I think this is a natural consequence of the twitter format. The short message motivates (some) users to win cheap points, offend or simply scream loudly in order to get attention. In my Luddite mind the political conversation is becoming Twitter-fied and now focuses more on short sound bites rather than a sound discourse.
[Neil Postman] also repeatedly states that the eighteenth
century, being the Age of Reason, was the pinnacle for rational
argument. Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated
truths be rationally conveyed. Postman gives a striking example:
Many of the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have
walked down the street without being recognized by the average
citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their
written words. However, the reverse is true today. The names of
presidents or even famous preachers, lawyers, and scientists call
up visual images, typically television images, but few, if any,
of their words come to mind. The few that do almost exclusively
consist of carefully chosen soundbites.
Not just the short format but also the stream makes tweets disappear quickly. Most tweets are never seen by anyone else. If you say something provocative it stands out and lives a little longer than the typical tweet. This gains you followers so your tweets will live a little longer. You say something else provocative and you wind up with a positive feedback loop.
Probably worth noting as a bit of context to this that Fry was presenting the BAFTA awards last night, said something offensive about someone who was a friend of his (but the public wouldn't necessarily have known that), and people on social media reacted badly.
People on social media reacted stupidly, but then he tried to engage the horde and prove that they were wrong to be offended by retweeting dozens (hundreds?) of people who backed him up. That was a strategy that could not result in anything but defeat and misery. He worked himself up into a rage trying to change the internet's mind, and when he failed, he took his ball and went home. I was and still am a fan of his, but for his own mental health, I'm glad he's not on Twitter any more.
I agree with this. I like Stephen Fry too, but I think his public persona of being this loveable gentleman of the people - entertaining, eccentric, erudite - quite often clashes with his tendency to make either silly or spiteful remarks in public; and the difference between Fry and the people who make their living from saying horrible things (eg. comedians in Britain like Jimmy Carr or Frankie Boyle) is that 1) there's an expectation that these people will say horrible things periodically; and 2) they can take the abuse when it's dished back to them.
(I personally very much enjoy James Blunt's approach to Twitter.)
Is there anything social media people don't react badly too? Facebook/Twitter just move from one social snafu to the next, facts be damned, we're offended over here!
My new years resolution was to stop using Twitter actively, and I've basically done that (spare a few offenses). I was intending to pin up a link to a page explaining my reasons, but haven't gotten to it yet.
Public venues like Twitter have devolved into pitchfork-wielding mob battles over extremely stupid, petty nonsense (on all sides of the political spectrum), and I expect this to just continue to happen over and over again as the influentials of the "Twitterati" get better at pushing manipulable people into whatever half-baked agenda they want to use them for.
The "influentials" are the people most rewarded by this system of relentless psuedo-controversy: petty, shrill narcissists that contribute little (or negatively) to anything of genuine value, merit or productivity.
Through a few personal experiences, I've been made a lot more cognizant of the fact that I won't be able to avoid the mobs by staying out of them. I've decided it's best to just not participate at all, and to work to break the systems that enable the mobs in the first place by coming up with better systems.
We need to go back to having sane, civil, intelligent discourses about real issues online, and figuring out the best way to facilitate them. Twitter is never going to work for that, no matter how many lunatics-running-the-asylum tribunals they come up with.
I think this is a tricky problem to properly solve. Or rather: An opportunity for Twitter to really mess up attempting to fix this.
A big part of what makes Twitter interesting/worthwhile is the ability to interact with lots of different people you wouldn't have stumbled upon.
But also, especially when you're just starting out on Twitter, people you otherwise wouldn't have been able to get through to.
On Twitter I get to have a conversation with someone famous (in the industry but even bona fide celebrities like the author). People who I could never send an email, letter, call and actually get a response. On Twitter, I have a really good chance someone like Stephen Fry will actually read my tweet and even responding. I'm guessing the odds I'd be able to get him on the phone or have him accept my Facebook friend request are rather low.
If Twitter builds a filter bubble around all famous/verified users, it loses a big chunk of it's a appeal to the nobodies. Which includes both trolls and decent people. And I think Twitter can't do without the civilized nobodies.
> I think this is a tricky problem to properly solve
I don't think it is. I think a few simple settings could easily fix this problem; like (enabling/disabling) direct messages from people you don't follow, and customizable opt-in-able blacklists (of either users or words/phrases) that could be shared throughout the community. That way, some would be able to keep saying whatever they want, while others would be able to not feel offended by them.
Sad to say, but humans have been bred over millennia to be clannish, violent, and prone to witch hunts. Quite literally, all of European history is about taking the peasants off to murder other people, and bringing back only the strongest ones who survived the battle to spread their seed to the next generation. The ones in the aristocracy interbred to the point of serious genetic flaws p https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_intermarriage ]. So, choose your side: the ones born from the strongest, heartiest fighters, or the ones produced by many generations of selective in-breeding... At least, this is the story for us white folks....
Humans are just irrational, flawed, and prone to freak out. And I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords...
I watched the BAFTAs with my girlfriend last night and I have to say, when Stephen made that comment we both said 'woah that's a bit mean' out loud. Of course, being the general public we're not aware of Mr Fry's relationship with the lady who won the award but from an outside perspective it came across as a bit bullying.
I only found out today about the twitter backlash and I don't think it should be lumped in with so called SJW movements, or the anti-anti-offensive movement, it really sounded like a hurtful unnecessary comment that he shouldn't have made without context or clarifying their relationship. It really seemed un-characteristically mean for Mr Fry.
Without clarifying it it looks like he stood on stage in front of a bunch of rich celebrities and slagged off the winner of an award for not wearing conventional dress to an award show.
I'm all for offensive comedy, but this wasn't a joke, he was basically slagging her off in public, live on television to a room full of people. Without context of their relationship it really looks like bullying. That's completely different to an offensive stand up comedy joke, especially when its so personally targeted. Some context to clarify that it wasn't mean and they're friends would have taken the edge off the 'joke' and nobody would have cared, but it was so off the cuff and mean it just looks like he is bullying her, which is probably what touched a chord with so many people. I'm sure Mr Fry is the last person who would want to be seen as bullying anyone.
The thing is, it wasn't their business to care. They had no part in it or knowledge of the people involved but they leapt into avenger mode anyway. And a lot of their responses were way outside of civil interactions.
This is one of the very least appealing changes in Anglophone culture over the past 10 years. The world would be far better off if Twitter made personal attacks, doxxing, etc (except possibly against politicians) a TOS violation that lead to account closure.
The problem is, Twitter would be much worse off. They literally profit from hatred and anger.
I'd like to be clear that I'm not advocating anyone on twitter or anything that was said, I have not read any of the twitter response to this.
I just wanted to say that I could understand why people saw it the way they did, because to me it came across as really mean. It really stood out and made Mr Fry seem rather mean even compared to some of his other jokes. I'm not personally offended and I'm not going to twitter about it but I can see why people felt it was harsh because it felt harsh to me.
I mean, I watched the show, I heard what he said, it's whole tone was off compared to the rest of the night. It really stood out and sounded awfully harsh.
Now I'm not going to go to twitter about it, it didn't offend me but it did come across rather mean and crass.
Fry's post says that one of the problems is due to people being offended on behalf of other people they have never met.
So they are not offended personally (e.g like most people), but they imagine that it would be offensive to someone else (e.g. a minority) and decide to co-opt this imagined offence.
It's a curious difference in being offended personally, and defending others via imagining the offence of that other. One can see another point of view, but its harder to imagine another changing their point of view.
Well I'm actually curious now what the twitter response was, because as I've expressed here, I think his 'joke' missed the mark and came off harsh, which I found hurtful by proxy I suppose. I wouldn't like to be called that live on television. So I'm assuming most of the response was 'that wasn't very nice I think you should apologise for that remark' and Mr Fry's response is to get annoyed that anyone would get offended by his comment and eventually close his twitter account. I'm sure there were much more extreme remarks but this is twitter, you're going to get chaff with the wheat.
I personally think he was out of line and even with the context of they were friends I think it was a mis-judged joke. I'm not going to go on social media to tell him about it but my opinion of him has certainly changed based on this behaviour.
Do you really not understand how telling a woman that she looks like a bag lady is offensive, even setting aside the fact that a.) this was on a television program and b.) the woman was not in a position to say anything in response?
"Only one of the great cinematic costume designers would come to the awards dressed like a bag lady.
So lets break that down.
The subject is a "cinematic costume designer" According to Sir Fry, she is a great one at that.
Then we have the other part of the statement: "She came to the awards dressed as a bag lady." This part of the statement is a bit odd/stands out when compared to a group of rather posh individuals.
When you put both parts of this together you have a really positive reference by Mr. Fry then combined with an odd/"less flattering" situation. It's ironic.
What make this even funnier and more congratulating is: She's a costume designer. Maybe this was intended. At the end of the day Stephen Fry was pictured with the individual and there have been claims that there is no bad blood between the two.
To call it an offensive joke seems like you're perverting what was actually said and would require striping out the context.
Mr. Fry did not say: "Shes a bag lady, too poor to receive this award. Just take a look at her clothes"
That could be considered a joke at the expectation of being posh, at a highly honor awards ceremony, and would be considered offensive to the subject and maybe the audience.
Combine this with stories that rise to prominence based on a limited set of facts, distorted truths, or outright lies, and it's particularly pernicious. That people are instantly willing to offer the absolute worst wishes (and actions) they can muster, on a few words posted over a picture, and personally involve themselves in something they know NOTHING about is disheartening.
Not everyone deserves a microphone. Yet as an industry, we have built billions of them. (Comment sections, including this one, are the place to start when thinking about that.)
The problem is that Stephen Fry loves to dish it out, then has a petulant hissy fit because he can't take it. He loves to claim there's "no right not to be offended" - except when it comes to his precious sensibilities, apparently.
But if she has just been (yet again) nominated as one of the World's or Britain's best costume designers, how is poking fun at her current outfit, by a comedian of all people, "being mean"? Is it not that contrast that makes the joke?
Well just watch the whole thing, from nomination to winning, to award acceptance to Mr Fry taking the stage again and tell me that his comment sounds like a joke. I'm sure he intended it to be a joke and to not be taken seriously, and I'm sure he was sincere when he was calling her the best costume designer in Britain, but the joke didn't work. The comment came across as crass and harsh and mocking of a woman who's just won an award just because she's dressed unconventionally for an awards ceremony.
I think he missed the mark with his 'joke', and as I've said before I'm not personally offended and I'm not going to tell him off publicly on social media but I can't help how his comment felt mean spirited to me and still does despite context of their familiarity.
I wonder is it so hard to build an automatic "insult" detector with all recent progress with deep learning. Quick googling gave quite a couple of older papers:
"Offensive Language Detection Using Multi-level
Classification"
When this was a topic in University a few years ago, it was still very hard to properly detect humor, especially sarcasm. If I understood this correctly, this whole episode was kicked of by Stephen making a joke about some lady's attire. I don't know what would be worse; the sanctimonious fallout or his tweet being censored by an automatic insult detector in the first place. (actually I do: the second).
I was thinking about a tool, not a universal censor :) Something like a special place for notifications: "Hate mail" - some people with loads of noise replies would definitely appreciate that. Also offensive replies could be shown last when displaying tweet with replies, for example.
I'm not saying the detector should filter all tweets everywhere, was just thinking about an option for some sensitive people to turn on which would affect only tweets mentioning them, for example.
I suspect it's at least partly to do with the subject matter. If the community is united around a common interest, they can (sometimes) put aside their differences elsewhere to talk about that one thing in a moderately civil way.
If it's a free for all about anything and everything, then well, it's like herding cats and a vicious flame war is likely to ensue at some point.
I believe it is to do with group psychology, the network effect and the drive of VC funded companies for "growth". I'm not sure about the growth thing yet though, but it kind of implies the more people the better.
What's the big deal? If you don't like how a platform works just leave it, I haven't used either Facebook or Twitter ever (I do have accounts, but I think you can count my posts and tweets combined with fingers of one hand) and it hasn't affected my life at all
Thats exactly what Stephen is doing. He doesn't like it anymore so he's leaving. What makes it it a big deal is that twitters success is based on prolific twitterers like Stephen Fry using the service and using it well. At the moment people are discussing how twitter is "doomed" for many different reasons this new piece of information just seems to add to the pile of evidence that twitter isn't providing value to the right people and this threatens its future.
So then twitter dies and something better takes it's place. I really don't see a way out of this. I mean if random people being mean is the issue what can they do? Other than start monitoring and censoring everything tweeted
Prediction: A neo-luddite renaissance is on the horizon. The anti-social media sentiment that has only been seen among techhies is going to spread into otherwise-mainstream youth conservatives.
The only thing in the way is that current services have not censored, but they're beginning to, and decentralized alternatives haven't existed.
A maturation of bitcoin over the next year, especially with the fork, will result in bringing novel usages of the blockchain to the average consumer.
Best part of not having Twitter and the book of faces is the mysteriousness that you project when attempting to court the opposite sex, either that or just a doushy superiority complex. Either way I want nothing to do with Facebook (twitter is useful for finding out the status of services like Firebase etc). As far as I am concerned in life, distraction is the enemy, and if distraction is the enemy well then that makes Facebook a windmill to my Don Quixote.
It was through the angry backlash to a tweet that I discovered Stephen Fry. About eight years ago, Stephen couldn't get a Windows laptop to connect to wifi. His Twitter outburst and the reaction of Windows fans became grist for the tech blogs, which is how I noticed it. I wonder if Stephen is romanticising the early years of Twitter or if those angry reactions have just become more common. (Either way, I don't blame him for leaving.)
This is true of almost any internet forum today. Every comment you make is meticulously deconstructed in an effort to find some kind of "gotcha". Well, either that or it's completely ignored.
And god forbid you have an opinion on any subject in which you don't hold a doctorate degree. You can't even tell people "it's alright to eat eggs" without the conversation devolving into a back-and-forth war of citations.
My wife does have a doctorate degree and you still get the back-and-forth of citations.
Because she has a PhD in nutrition (really!) I can confirm that, yes, it is okay to eat eggs. (Though I'd shoot for organic and cage-free, personally.)
Or maybe you just have to go to a pool in a better neighborhood? After all on Twitter you can choose from whom you're getting status updates, can't you?
This was actually a useful post, moreso than I expected. But in it, you can see shades of Randi's personality:
"That is dumb and you are dumb for suggesting it"
gives me memories of her latest encounter with FreeBSD, in which she tells people they "fucking suck" (this is someone who claims to run an online harassment organization), changed her Twitter name to "Kill All Men", posted pictures of her drinking from a mug with the words "Male Tears" on it, etc.
But yes, many of these suggestions would go a long way to helping people manage their Twitter experience the way they want, which is a good thing.
You're (willfully?) ignoring the implication of a private feed: lack of discoverability (finding new followers), for those of us who use Twitter as a source of promotion for our side projects/businesses/careers.
> You're (willfully?) ignoring the implication of a private feed
Egads! You saw through my duplicitous scheme!
Alternatively, I was simply pointing out that this is - in fact - a feature.
To your point, I'm not sure how you could both have audience selection and discoverability. How do you plan to both self-promote and cherry pick your viewers?
Not since Twitter has chosen to start "shadowbanning" users. When this happens, you can explicitly follow someone, but you will not see their messages in your timeline.
Unfollowing/refollowing the user seems to clear it at least for a time, but you have to be really paying attention to even notice that it happens. I'm going to guess that it takes the form of a "silent" unfollow on their backend.
And on a more opinionated note: No prizes for guessing the political leanings of those this happens to.
Twitter is far more open than that. It's probably the only thing I liked about Google+ vs Twitter or Tumblr. You can choose to block certain people and limit your posts to certain circles or to just one person, thus it never shows up in the public feed. It's sad no one else replicated that aspect of Google+ or that it took off. It really designed better in terms of how content was dispersed from your account POV.
it says right here in the HN approach to comments that "HN is an experiment. As a rule, a community site that becomes popular will decline in quality. Our hypothesis is that this is not inevitable—that by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening." the question therein is where do we go now, and to which degree can we avoid twitter and other sites beyond their ostensible utility
While I agree that much of social media is as he describes, I don't have this problem on Twitter. I follow just over 100 people whose thoughts interest or entertain me. I shut off the screamers, the haters, the high-emotion types. With the result that my experience of Twitter is pleasant. Is there some reason OP couldn't do the same?
The way I see it:
1: Really low barriers to entry for each snowflake to express their views.
2: Social networks work as echo chambers, which allow anyone to find dozens that share their views ("If they think like me, it must mean that I am right!!").
3: Misunderstanding of the way the cyberspace works, with people not understanding really that it is encroaching on the "physical" world, and professing extreme opinions they would never have dreamed of voicing if not in front of a screen in the safety and "privacy"(hum) of their home.
4: The powers that be, that is to say the social networks operators have so much at stake that they are walking on eggs, wary of taking any action that could jeopardise their cash cow(actual or potential).
The situation is a mix of all those factors, and the result is I think a bit depressing.
Can you imagine our societies without a police force?
Today's social networks are not far from that imho.
I bounced back and forth on and off FB until, I bit the bullet and deleted each one of my "friends" one by one. If I didn't do that, then I would be plunged in an infinite loop of deactivation/reactivation hell.
It was interesting to see the reaction of people when I said I had deleted them in order to make it less enticing for me to use my account. They were actually offended for being deleted.
Could it be that the mere perpetual overuse (and/or misuse) of social media breeds hypersensitivity? Hmm...I say yes. Nothing wrong with the occassional indulgence, but there's just more to life. But that's just my worthless 2 cents.
I think one of the problems about social media is that the experience for the common person is often very different than that of (even moderately) famous people. I hear tech journalists talking about their experiences on twitter and they are so different than mine and I have to think it is because they have thousands of followers and I have around 100. If they do something they get tons of feedback but if I tweet the same thing I would hardly get any. Certainly there are times when things erupt and someone becomes "famous" and is bombarded but for most of us that doesn't happen.
I'm not active on twitter, but from what I've seen, particularly in the aftermath of GamerGate, is that it's a putrid mess of hatred, threats, and bigotry. The problem doesn't so much seem to be that people are defending others, but that they are attacking them.
I never really saw the point, but it in the past few years it has seemed even more pointless. You just can't have a good, nuanced conversation in 140 characters. You can only shout one-liners and threats. It's what the medium seems designed for.
In a medium such as Twitter, there is not enough incentive to make users post quality. Morons can post about whatever irrelevant nonsense they want and gain approval from other morons. From inside a filter bubble, PC policing a celebrity can seem incredibly courageous and clever, when in fact it is the opposite. The potential harms of this are real. Richard Dawkins suffered a stroke last week following such an incident, where a random interloper peppered him with a barrage of criticism, taking her gang of followers with her.
Everything is evolving all the time, and future iterations are based on, a reaction to, or rejection of what came before.
There are going to be cycles of products, some you love, some you hate, but what won't change is that there are still like-minded people out there, no matter what your tastes or opinions. We will learn from this generation of social media , and future products will solve some of these problems to a large degree, only to evolve into something we detest again - but each time it should get a little better.
How about an "untweet". Basically a thumbs down for tweets that smell. Then use collaborative UN-filtering.
Or how about using Word2Vec to usher turds to a remote part of the tweet space. Use sliders to adjust your results. For example "I need a twitter hug. What would happen if I turn down the 'Outrage' and turn up the 'Kittens' -- awwww, how cute! Ok, now what would happen if I turn up the 'Death Metal' -- kittens and death metal -- whoooah!
The irony here is that the person acting most offended is Stephen Fry himself, who decides to quit in high fashion because, alleges he, some people pissed in the pool.
Twitter is not his pool; it's not even a pool: more like the sea.
Many people -- and all kinds of living things -- piss in the sea and do many other things in it; if you're unhappy with that, well yes it's better if you stay on the shore, but don't go around pretending you're so pure.
Assholes, the self righteous,plain evil, or simply stupid kind, are a minority but they have a tremendous impact in any community which does punish or prevent bad behavior. This is why we have to have door locks, police, jails, passwords, etc. Any sufficiently large online community will end up including a bunch of douche bags which, unconstrained by the these old school deterrents, will eventually destroy it.
The presence of justice and the absence of tension are not the same thing. I think a lot of people have lived a large part of their lives completely insulated from the tension that has existed in society over social justice issues for centuries. Now that you can go on Twitter and find out exactly how and why everyone is mad, it looks like comity and mutual respect has evaporated. But really what has happened is that the absence of tension engendered by the undemocratic dissemination of information in the pre-Internet age has been revealed to be a lie: people have been angry for a while and they're angry for reasons. Shocking.
Asking someone to shut up is much easier than assuming they're acting in good faith and have reasonable motivations that you can't perceive, because, you know, it's the Internet and nothing is more ridiculous than a person looking at the Internet and nodding condescendingly while explaining the exact nature of all these human beings they disagree with.
If from the get-go you assume people are acting in bad faith and you demand that they admit that this is the case before you even consider them as reasonable people, you are asking for full surrender instead of treating them as equals.
he made a joke to his friend in public. i have friends to whom i could shout "i hope you fucking die, you bloated moist abscess" at, but if i did that on twitter as a famous person without the context of our friendship readily visible, what people ought to think?
once it came to light that he was ribbing his good friend, then people ought to have apologized and moved on. it doesn't make them terrible people for being a little on edge about powerful famous men ribbing less powerful, less famous women. the world isn't in the shitter just because he was misunderstood on twitter.
But didn't you just say, "If from the get-go you assume people are acting in bad faith and you demand that they admit that this is the case before you even consider them as reasonable people, you are asking for full surrender instead of treating them as equals"? Isn't failing to do this precisely the source of the outrage? And yet now you seem to be suggesting it was perfectly reasonable for people to assume bad faith and try to tear him down, up until good faith was proven.
I think we're using different notions of good and bad faith. My notion of good faith is sincerity and reasonableness in intention, likewise bad faith is insincerity and unreasonableness in intention. All these people got outraged by interpreting Fry's tweet offensively. Are they doing it for kicks? (insincerity) or are they just stupid? (unreasonableness)
I don't think good and bad faith is a quality of their behavior, but of their intent and mental competence as human beings. Someone can get incredibly outraged but be sincere and capable of explaining their feelings reasonably. It doesn't mean that one assumes the best in others, because that is just as spurious as assuming the worst in others. One should just call it like they see it and think it, nothing more, nothing less.
> But really what has happened is that the absence of tension engendered by the undemocratic dissemination of information in the pre-Internet age has been revealed to be a lie: people have been angry for a while and they're angry for reasons. Shocking.
How would we tell the difference between "people have always been angry, this just exposes it" and "the pathological design of social networks like Twitter makes people angry when they wouldn't have otherwise been"?
I love Stephen Fry, but I'm conflicted. On one hand, he's upset that people are offended and without a hint of irony is obviously very offended by their sensibilities. That said, celebrities (intentional or otherwise) have a very different experience on social media than the lay person.
This is not a twitter problem. If you're a famous celebrity with a gigantic megaphone you have to accept the fact that the masses are going to react to what you put out there. I think it's funny when celebrities get all wrinkled over internet outrage but take for granted the fact that they are leveraging the masses (via twitter and other platforms) to boost their own careers. Woops, you said something that some people on the internet disagree with, suddenly you have a deluge of hate mail instead of doting adoration. Well, what did you expect? The masses are not autonomous eye-balls, they are people with disparate ideas and opinions and if you say things that piss some people off, this is the reaction you get.
So, in the face of internet controversy, what does a celebrity do? Retreat to a convenient forum where they explicitly control the discourse so they can publicly broadcast their disdain for the fickle judgment of masses without having to actually listen to them. I suppose the so-called SJWs aren't the only ones that need a "safe space" to speak their minds without fear of criticism.
For me, what's important is not avoiding disagreement, conflict, or rage -- what I want to somehow exclude from my social media existence is just good old craziness. The Internet has been enormously empowering to the stark barking mad.
I agree with Stephen. A while ago I came to the conclusion that widespread use of social media such as FB, tumblr and Twitter (especially twitter), has caused a severe degradation in public discourse and conversation.
In certain forums these types of posts are called Goodbye, Cruel World posts and they are summarily ridiculed. HN takes itself too seriously to give this post the proper treatment.
People are blowing this way out of proportion. Stephen Fry made a shitty joke about his friend, people objected, and he got angry at them for not finding it as funny as he did.
He has the right to his opinion as do others. This outrage culture is only slightly more annoying than the people who constantly bemoan it.
Now that Twitter has created a committee by which those people are given actual power on the platform, I'd say the pool is now mostly urine with just a bit of chlorine.
The problem isn't that this is a Twitter problem. It's that this is a cultural problem. People kinda suck. People kinda suck a lot.
I was having a conversation with a friend at lunch, when I started putting ketchup on my hotdog. He looked at me and incredulously questioned, "really? What are you, like, 8 years old?" I had never even heard of the idea that "only children put ketchup on a hotdog." Yet here was someone I had originally thought of as a rational human being elevating it to a serious issue.
A lot of this stuff gets defended as "just a joke", but I don't see anyone laughing. If you're so bad at making jokes, maybe you should just give up the practice and stick to being generally pleasant to be around.
I guess I'm lucky that I'm not famous enough to get any randos following me on Twitter. The people who follow me are interested in my work, they aren't hero-worshipping me. I get to have excellent conversations with people on Twitter. But that is only because--even though it's not 100% in my control--my lack of celebrity allows me to guide and design my Twitter sphere. For a celebrity, they just get inundated with folks they don't want to hear from.
Just read the replies to Notch's tweets sometime. I'm surprised he hasn't become a complete recluse. Almost every single one has some 13 year old complaining about "Minecraft sucks now that you're gone", even though he's been gone longer than they've been playing it.
I don't think that your friend considered his remark to be a joke worthy of a laugh, but it sounds like "good natured ribbing" over something entirely benign.
It's a social technique employed by many people on a day to day basis as a bonding method where no offense is usually intended and no offense is usually taken. Where your friend failed, in my opinion, is that he should recognize that not everyone is receptive to or appreciates this kind of teasing. It's up to him to identify the "line" that should not be crossed with some people and then not cross it.
Instead of making condescending comments towards people that are just trying to engage you in conversation you could take a leaf out of your own book and "just give up the practice and stick to being generally pleasant to be around" :)
It's a capital crime in Chicago, if you do it in public.
That's where the joking about it comes from; ketchup on hot dogs is one of those things that people take jestingly serious with tongue firmly planted in cheek at all times. Nobody actually cares, nobody's actually going to kill you in Chicago despite my joke, but people interpret the joshing as caring and demeaning because nobody can actually take a joke any more, as evidenced by GP (and which is far more often the problem). And yet here we are, lamenting the downfall of society.
I can't even fathom a world where someone giving a friend crap over lunch for their choice of condiment is enough to start a Serious Conversation about Culture. That's funny in itself, honestly, but I don't want to live in that world. That's why I eschew social media altogether.
I remember when I was a boy, laughing was something to be celebrated, because sharing something funny with your friends was one of the high points of life. Actually cutting loose and laughing with your friends about the stupidest things is easily one of the best feelings you can experience, but now every time I genuinely laugh at something that I find funny, I often have to look around and be worried about who saw me do it. It's genuinely depressing, the older I get. I don't even have humor any more. Now I just have liquor.
See, you're part of the problem. You think you understand my friend's tone better now that I'm relating it to you better than I did at the time that I experienced it. You don't believe my version of the story, even though the only evidence you have is my telling of it. You've treated me as if I'm lying to you, yet you don't just come out and say it. This is the very definition of passive aggressive behavior.
Just because something is post hoc declared as a joke doesn't mean it was a joke. And just because something is styled as a joke, doesn't mean it is funny. I don't have a problem with taking jokes. Most people just suck at humor. It's not an easy thing to tell a joke. And besides, most people are just using "it was a joke" as an excuse to cover up for some serious comment they made that went over like a lead balloon.
See, you think it's personal and that I've made some kind of determination on your character based on my conclusion. You've totally come off the rails and started attacking me personally at the mere suspicion (not even to you!) that you might have misinterpreted things. I've merely read and worked with the information that was made available; you call this person a friend, for example. You were having lunch with this person. This person felt comfortable enough with you to remark upon your condiment choice. I've observed many, many people remark upon the same choice in a jesting fashion.
Now, which is more likely from my perspective: that a misinterpretation by you is at work (and which is spilling over here, since you clearly don't have closure on this egregious scenario), or that your friend is the one person out of millions who actually cares about ketchup on a hot dog and was ready to fight with you about it? Someone you identify as a friend chose ketchup on a hot dog as his Maginot Line in your relationship and demeaned you over it. Okay, maybe that did happen (in which case you should think long and hard about who you identify as friends), but my point was it's extraordinarily unlikely, and you cannot fault me for concluding that in my own time and with the facts given.
You can't relay a story and then expect everyone to blindly accept your interpretation without reading objectively. That's unfair. I think you very likely misinterpreted things, yes, and I base that on the entire story including believing your perspective entirely. I don't think you're lying at all. That's the entire point, that I think you're telling the truth from your perspective, and your perspective might be a little bit off. It's nothing negative. I don't think less of you. I see misunderstanding like this all the time.
Yet you felt passionately enough about it to go after me personally and call me part of the problem, simply because I didn't subscribe immediately to a half story. I feel I'm exercising the better option: I'm reading objectively and drawing my own conclusions rather than immediately buying into a single-sided narrative. That's what we should do when confronted with unfamiliar situations relayed by people we don't know, because it's the fundamental brick in the foundation of avoiding mobs, rash conclusions, beheading people over blogs, and so on.
And see? Now we're arguing about this. About ketchup on a god damned hot dog. Remember how I didn't want to live in this world?
(Edit: Also, please, please, please tell me you didn't compare your choice of condiment to the plight of minorities in an upthread comment. I will conclude something about your character after reading something like that, if you mean it.)
Holy shit you put a lot of thought and care into deconstructing that situation logically and rationally. You would probably make a great super-forecaster. Head over to Slate Star Codex!
Thanks for doing such a thankless job. It made me smile on many levels.
But that's just it: it wasn't logical or rational. It was irrational and biased, because he wasn't even present at the event in question. He dismissed the only actual evidence available (the first-hand witness account) and fabricated his own story out of thin air based upon his own life experiences. Then he accused him of misinterpreting and overreacting. Mind-reading is bad enough second-hand, but third-hand?
And this passes for objectivity, logic, and reason? And this makes you smile?
Of course, the joke's really on all of us, because this kind of human interaction/communication/judgment/reasoning failure has been going on since the begnning of time. It's not as if I'm not guilty of it, too. And by the time we overcome it (if anyone ever does), we die, and people who haven't overcome it take our place.
Perhaps the ultimate lesson is to lower our expectations. Haha.
I understand what you're saying, but I think moron4hire has a very good point here.
There is no objective reading to be done here. You have available a single account from a single source. Despite having nothing but his account to go on, you think your interpretation is more correct. Despite him knowing this other person personally, in real life, and having been there in-person to witness body language and tone-of-voice, you think you are a better judge of that person's intent.
At the same time, of course, to you, moron4hire is just as random of a person as moron4hire's lunch companion, and equally likely to be the socially inept one of the two. So it's fine that you are skeptical of his interpretation; it's fine that you think he probably misinterpreted his friend's jesting.
But out of about three choices of how to respond, you chose the worst one.
a) You could have said nothing. Mildly amusing anecdote, skepticism registered, moving on.
b) You could have said something like, "I wonder if he was just kidding." Skepticism expressed without implying fault or incompetence, while leaving the door open for further, neutral discussion and elaboration by moron4hire.
But instead, you chose c) Explicitly accuse him of overreaction and misinterpretation, implying that you know better than him, despite his being there and your only reading his account, while also engaging in armchair psychoanalysis ("odd, and overly defensive, reaction...").
And that's just plain rude, as well as arrogant. It's basically the same as the "you put ketchup on your hot dog?!" reaction.
> I'm reading objectively and drawing my own conclusions rather than immediately buying into a single-sided narrative. That's what we should do when confronted with unfamiliar situations relayed by people we don't know, because it's the fundamental brick in the foundation of avoiding mobs, rash conclusions, beheading people over blogs, and so on.
Actually you're jumping to your own conclusions based upon a dearth of evidence. That's one of the causes of mob mentality. You think you're being objective, but you're actually just discounting his experience and drawing exclusively upon your own. And by accusing him of being wrong, you assert your own correctness and superiority, thus reinforcing your bias.
And this is the whole problem! People think they're being objective when they're merely replacing one subjective bias with another. No wonder there's so much arguing and misunderstanding in this world. :(
> Someone you identify as a friend chose ketchup on a hot dog as his Maginot Line in your relationship and demeaned you over it. Okay, maybe that did happen (in which case you should think long and hard about who you identify as friends), but my point was it's extraordinarily unlikely, and you cannot fault me for concluding that in my own time and with the facts given.
I'm just going to assume you don't have many friends or don't see them on a regular basis. It seems extraordinarily unlikely you would have many friends you see frequently and not have a weird argument with at least one of them.
See how that works? It's this very sort of "extrapolate on my own, dismiss things that don't fit my worldview" that is where this comes from.
No one thinks you're lying, however your perspective on your friend's statements is a bit absurd. It at the very least can be described as culturally ignorant -- the hyperbole built on top of that ignorance is what makes it absurd.
I usually like them with chilli, but whatever. The point wasn't the hotdog. The point was that "I can't believe you like a thing I don't like" is pervasive in our culture. Things could be political candidates or sports teams or sex positions or music genres or entire races of people. We have figured out that it's not good to do that to gay people or black people, but somehow we haven't figured out it's not good to do it in general.
People do suck, but platforms can do a lot to mitigate that. All they have to do is make it a lot more difficult for harassers to create extra accounts. That's all. Then their existing reporting/flagging systems will have some actual bite to them, since shutting down an account will actually be consequential.
We banned this account for trolling. One bad thing about HN's open policy about accounts is that people can, and do, create account after account that they get banned with. Surprisingly much of the worst behavior on Hacker News is the work of a small set of these.
But the other side is that users who are inspired to create new accounts to comment often make some of the best contributions to a thread. That's true of this thread too. The benefit of being open exceeds the cost.
I don't know what you're talking about as I've never engaged in violent or horrific behaviour or sent death threats.
Bigotry and hatred are disgusting. Not once did I say they were acceptable.
I think deep down you know you're making vicious, unfounded accusations and that's why you feel the need to do so from a new account disconnected from your real name.
That's not true. It is never acceptable to threaten someone or be violent.
To be explicit again: the reason I say monetisation of suffering is bad is because monetisation of suffering causes more suffering.
You think you're being a Good person but you've not thought things through. Every time Gawker decides to provoke a group of people with an offensive comment it's going to cause some people to relive past emotional suffering that they don't want to be reminded of. Likewise, Nero deciding to take shots at radfem twitter isn't a victimless activity - every time he does so he riles up both feminists and gamergaters causing more of the same behaviour. Monetising suffering is bad for almost everybody but journalists and extremely powerful activists.
Other than that, please take your accusations and ridiculous conspiracy theories elsewhere. I'm done trying to talk sense into you.
"To leave that metaphor, let us grieve at what twitter has become. A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended – worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know. It’s as nasty and unwholesome a characteristic as can be imagined. It doesn’t matter whether they think they’re defending women, men, transgender people, Muslims, humanists … the ghastliness is absolutely the same. It makes sensible people want to take an absolutely opposite point of view. I’ve heard people shriek their secularism in such a way as to make me want instantly to become an evangelical Christian."
This is a fair description of how Stephen Fry (as much as I love him) acted towards me on Twitter several years ago. (about the time I left twitter for good)
I don't think he's a bad guy, I think there is just an authoritarian streak running thru out culture right now that is so strong that a guy who, at the time, had just played a persecuted gay man in V for Vendetta was advocating for the persecution of people he didn't like! (though I'm sure he didn't realize it/recognize it/intend it.)
I think Stephen is a well intentioned guy who doesn't intend to piss in the pool, but I think propaganda has scared and manipulated him, as it has done so many others over history.
Smithsonian had a good short article on it: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-emotion-go...
Research shows that amazing good news, like a huge leap forward in cancer research, is even more viral. But unfortunately those happen much more rarely up than someone saying something stupid and getting lambasted.
Ryan Holiday's book "Trust me I'm lying" also really opened my eyes to how a lot of this stuff works.