Too many people have peed in the pool
stephenfry.com
stephenfry.com
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.
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.)
What is one to do then when someone does something truly outrageous? Ban the entire community?
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.
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.
People enjoy saying "Hello" just as they deliver the finishing blow.
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.
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.
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.
You also have the option to 'squelch' the opponent at any time, which mutes them completely.
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.
Looks like they still use the chat system in the latest iteration of the series. http://www.tribesascendwiki.com/Voice_Game_System
Of course, they didn't disable normal text chat, so the game's still full of jerks. I think it does help though.
Sarcasm is really hard to identify, and would be really hard to ban.
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.
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.
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.
One of the reasons I like HN is that outrage is discouraged.
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 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.
https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/online-conflict-in-the-light-...
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...
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.
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.
but perhaps they are here to stay.
second there was a massive gap in my friend group between MSN emoticons dieing out and emojis seeping in.
Perhaps my experiences are abnormal....
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.
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:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-te...
In the late 1980s terms like LOL were used on BBSes and on Usenet. Perhaps you just aren't old enough to remember that? :-)
Before LOL I'd use hahaha or hehehe all the time as well in IRC, Chat Rooms, BBSes, etc.
* Tiksi slaps bdreadz around a bit with a large trout.
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).
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"
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.
It's a Germanic language (not a child of German), with significant lexical input from French and Latin. The input from "Dutch, Arabic, etc." is minor.
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.
That's not what I said. I said "it's Germanic" and "it's not a child of German or Dutch".
The emoji thing was a bad analogy and I should have just left out that clause entirely and started that sentence some other way.
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.
Emoticons are even more universal.
think of it as visual intonation (o)
You can't find the meaning in other peoples' behavior if you just assume it's meaningless from the get-go.
It's not kids these days, it's always been like this for everyone.
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 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
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.
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...
> 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.
Anecdotally, I gravitate towards above average intelligence people for friendships and romantic relationships.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/07/06/has-being-si...
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.
Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.
Doesn't mean you should uncritically accept their ideas, but it does mean you should at least give them some weight.
But your opinion does not carry the same weight as a fact. Quite a few people I've encountered don't understand that.
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.
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.
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.
Masses usually act like morons. That's a well known phenomenon, old enough to become jokes in movies, and the entire audience (a mass) to get it.
When people are acting smartly, they each do different things, and don't form a mass at all.
See also: corporations, nations.
It's better to say that experts are better at some things and crowdsourcing is better at others. Though that's neither snarky nor pithy.
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.
- Terry Pratchett, Jingo
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"...
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?
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]
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.
I've seen that described as a good way of dealing with children. IMHO, that pre-qualifies it as appropriate for aggressive Internet commenters.
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).
But how clean is clean enough?
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.
You meant:
"this development is double-plus ungood"
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
100% agree. And note that HN is already running this experiment; we have downvotes as well as upvotes.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Ars Technica's comment system scores agrees and disagrees separately, and reports them separately. The extra axis of information seems useful.
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".
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
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!
No. Try posting anything here that opposes the groupthink. You'll get the downvote hammer used against you very quickly.
I agree that there's some "groupthink" going on here, but it's not nearly as bad as any other sites I've used.
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...
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.
FWIW, this is coming very soon to FB in the form of "reactions" rather than a simple "dislike" feature.
http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/27/facebook-reactions-launch...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
You mean they were so faded that the text merged with the background? Highlighting it with the mouse usually works for me in this case.
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.
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"
Up/Down [ Agreement; no real filtering mechanic ]
Tag -> Reason [ Other filtering / reactions ]
Flag -> spam filter signal
However, I think a real universal solution is unfortunately just non-obvious and likely not anything we've tried so far.
I'm pretty sure there is not an easy answer to this problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
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!
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.
Which is what I hear exclusively regarding Christian activists. They disregard any non-Christians whom have families, or of other value systems.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
| 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.
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.
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.
If you're a hunter or animal rights activist, it would be much better for you to be reminded that there are people out there that disagree with you.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 :/
[1] http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/12/07/socratic-fishing-in-lak... [2] http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/10/trying-to-fly-with-broken-w...
I don't want to count the votes of anyone my friend considers an idiot.
I don't want to count the vote of anyone whose tagged as a #foo by anyone tagged as a #bar by such and such a group.
Alternatively you want their vote to count double.
Instead of a single score you have as many scores as you have users and its impossible to interfere much in others affairs.
I think that this could be a very important improvement.
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.
I've been writing about this over six years ago, for example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095500
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Just playing devil's advocate here)
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.
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 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 it's the "which media to promote" bit which may have thrown me off.
Cheers!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Yes. Thereby making things worse than they used to be.
Which twitter has and encourages. It's called "bluelisting."
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.
[0] http://chester.id.au/2013/03/22/why-the-law-is-slow-imperson...
Actually we still have those, and twitter often plays an important role. C.f. Pax Dickinson, Justine Sacco or Brandon Eich.
Luckily we've moved beyond lynchings and other such political terrorism in the US. It still seems to happen in Europe, however: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/26/french-taxi-dri... http://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2015/nov/12/greek-g...
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.
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.
How could twitter determine things that are going to make you lose faith in the human race?
Do not show me controversial accounts, tweets or tags not 'generally liked by the people one degree of separation away from me'?
I'd experiment to see if that helped, but if it doesn't try more things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
i think your desire is reasonable. however, i think it would be unreasonable to demand it of something as public and global as Twitter.
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.)
as a filthy commie, i hope it's the reawakening of the global proletariat :3
My definition is a system of free, un-coerced trade among individuals, to mutual advantage.
It's very simple, and I see it as beneficial.
Interested in your thoughts, if you wish to share them.
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.
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.
This is more "socially scalable" to me.
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
https://web.archive.org/web/20061117074302/http://reddit.com...
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 like that term "general purpose networks", although "purposelessness" might be better suited.
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.
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.
This will not end well.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
"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. "
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'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.
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.
Didn't work at all with youtube comments.
I had to look that one up:
Peace, by Rupert Brooke, 1914:
"A paradoxical image, comparing going to war as an act that cleanses the participants, like a dip in a pool or river."
https://movehimintothesun.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/rupert-br...
I'm assuming that connection was intentional, because Stephen Fry is smarter than me.
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)
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.
(... now if only I could get rid of the ads...)
uBlock Origin
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'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?
And yes, I do realise it's all a bit Royston Vasey - "a local website for local people"...
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.
Of course he later closed his flourishing community suddenly. Very suddenly. Everyone was confused.
And the worlds he's built since, such as StackOverflow, are deliberately completely devoid of all community.
The smallest remnants of the community survive and evolve at http://www.crazyontap.com/
But still, that old post was so good I had to dig it out and read it again. I think it all still stands.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
* 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?
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.
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.
http://www.metafilter.com/98848/The-Post-That-Cannot-Possibl...
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.
Just a thought that your post had on me.
Edit: that was March 11, 2009. Someone should see if the Internet archive took a snapshot of the all-Erlang front page.
Edit 2: Nope, it fell between snapshots. I wonder if we could reconstruct it from the logs. But here's HN from the day before: https://web.archive.org/web/20090310152751/http://news.ycomb....
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.
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 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.
Not sure that's a prerequisite anymore.
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.
[0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/So-Youve-Been-Publicly-Shamed/dp/033...
[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.McLuhan said it: The Medium is the Message.
(I personally very much enjoy James Blunt's approach to Twitter.)
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.
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 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.
Humans are just irrational, flawed, and prone to freak out. And I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords...
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.
It's not our job to know, but as we should assume innocence until proven guilty we should assume friendliness before assuming ridicule.
If Beaven had a problem -- let her handle it. She's a big girl, we're not her collective parents.
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.
"Only one of the great cinematic costume designers would come to the awards dressed like a bag lady."
If people weren't so quick to jump on the "blame the white guy" wagon... you'd see that it was actually a pretty clever statement.
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.
This structure matches a classic setup/punchline structure of a joke: http://www.creatingacomic.com/2009/how-to-write-a-joke-joke-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
"Offensive Language Detection Using Multi-level Classification"
http://www.eiti.uottawa.ca/~diana/publications/Flame_Final.p...
"Automatic identification of personal insults on social news sites"
http://labfs.eecs.northwestern.edu/~sara/Site/Publications_f...
Never thought about it like this before. Sounds really strange when you put it this way.
There's a ton of gold in figuring out how some communities succumb to it, and others don't.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
But I still get arguments/pushback. Guh.
Can't you? I thought protected feeds were a thing (wherein subscribers would need the account holder's permission to follow / view their tweets)?
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
You're just afraid of the sea.
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.
The reason they're mad here, evidently, is that Stephen made a joke to his friend. It doesn't seem like it's Stephen who failed to assume good faith.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is an odd, and overly defensive, reaction to something that you've clearly misinterpreted. (That sounds familiar.)
Must be you were also telling a joke and I just don't get jokes.
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.)
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.
Thanks for doing such a thankless job. It made me smile on many levels.
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.
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. :(
How can the better traits prevail?
Feels like a sequel to Mike Judge's Idiocracy
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.
"Don't Yuck My Yum": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knro0i2JH44
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.