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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.