Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonstokes | Hacker News Reader

I have a theory about FB and Twitter -- or maybe more of an observation. Anyway, back in the stone age, people had bumper stickers with little slogans on them. And in the break rooms of various places of work, there was always a bulletin board an on a corner of it there was always some faded-from-to-many-xeroxes bit of humor/racism/sports fandom/sexism/dirty joke or other us-vs.-them thing on it that people would look at and amuse themselves with.

Now thanks to Twitter and FB, these little types of tribal territorial markings are just about all that's left of public discourse.

I see things get passed around and think, 20 years ago this would have been mimeographed and hung on a break room bulletin board, where it might have acted as a crude conversation starter about some aspect of "who are we?". But now people consider sharing and liking these things as their /contribution/ to a conversation.

It's like the way that millennials communicate with emoji, except it's image macros and memes and slogans and "gotchas" and hot takes that we consume, copy, and share. The copying and sharing of all that stuff is what passes for discourse now.

Me, I think that this development is double-plus bad.

View on HN

My theory is that it's because social media systems encourage and publicise agreement, while discouraging and hiding disagreement. This leads to a huge positive feedback effect on any meme that catches even a tiny number of people's attention, no matter how crazy.

On twitter, you signify agreement by retweeting; this takes seconds and permanently adds to the tweet's score. But to disagree, I have to write a message of my own. It'll show up in the conversation feed but doesn't affect the original message. And each disagreement stands alone, so they'll never accumulate a high score, so even the people who see them won't consider them as important as the original message.

Let's say somebody posts a Twitter message about, oh, how they've just tried cleaning their ear using trained caterpillars. It gets passed around a bit among the ear-canal-caterpillar-cleaning community, all five of them. But then a friend-of-a-friend-of-an-acquaintance retweets it, and suddenly thousands of people see it, and it's off-the-wall enough that a small percentage of them pass it on.

Suddenly it's got thousands of retweets. It's become a movement. Bloggers write about it, a few mainstream journalists comment on it, and abruptly Caterpillar-Facilitated Ear-canal Maintainance is a thing.

Meanwhile have written a tweet about how this is a really crazy idea and don't do it, seriously, it's just dumb. It'll get passed on a bit among my friends and will peter out.

It's not just Twitter; most social media networks do this.

Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment.

> 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.

And I personally think it is even more insidious. When I'm on facebook and see some extreme rightwing nutjob upvote ring I see what's going on On HN on a lot of downvoted commets it makes sense, they are poorly written and full of bs. But every time there is a little more political and/or contentious issue on all I see is Political Correctness police mercilessly downvoting and flagkillig anything that dares to even doubt. It is insidious and ironically has exactly the oposite effect (look:most of europe extreme right rise in popularity)

Each community specializes in something (which may be a bit tautological), but they do not do so well in the other things, too. So when I see some sort of political post on HN, I go in knowing it's going to be a little bit pants. Probably not terrible, probably a bit noisy as an echochamber, but certainly not what this community is good at. By contrast, if there's a bug writeup for how a screen redraw glitch was fixed by bitfiddling, well, that's the cake I came here for.

> But every time there is a little more political and/or contentious issue on all I see is Political Correctness police mercilessly downvoting and flagkillig anything that dares to even doubt.

Yes.

> It is insidious and ironically has exactly the oposite effect (look:most of europe extreme right rise in popularity)

Let me add a little detail here for non-Europeans. "Far right" in some western European countries has come to mean about Obama-ish politics (health insurance for all instead of government-pays-everything-for-everybody like those contries have today.)

As emp_zealoth points out this constant framing of anything that isn't way left and politically correct as "brown" and "extreme right" is now starting to backlash.

People starts to question mainstream media and conservative/right wing media/pro Israel groups/conservative political parties seems to see a surge in readers/participation.

It so happens that Western Europe has settled on a political system or set of systems which aren't perfect, but basically work well for everybody. Europeans have much less "stuff" than Americans, but when it comes to the basics -- health, education, public infrastructure, in some cases even housing -- everybody, rich and poor, has more or less equal access.

America, by contrast, has got its shit so not in one sock that despite vast increases in productivity, the vast bulk of the excess wealth has gone to the 1%, with the remaining classes not much better off than they were 30 or 40 years ago. And how healthy you can expect to be is positively correlated with how rich you are.

So when people say that America is a two party system: a right-wing corporatist party and a far-right-wing corporatist party, they're not blowing smoke. They're reckoning from a different origin than you. Apparently, relative to your political origin, sane policies are considered "way left and politically correct".

Don't get me wrong: I enjoy the European system and I think you are mostly right.

What I don't like is the constant framing going on from the currently politically correct ones on the left. I do not think it would be better the other way around, just state my wish for a bit of sane discussion.

"democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the rest" I guess.

> What I don't like is the constant framing going on from the currently politically correct ones on the left

Speaking of framing, that's a nice job you've done right there.

Everyone in politics reframes things, and constantly, too. It's a fundamental part of politics. People even get hired to reframe things as a profession ("PR Consultants" or "Spin Doctors"), and all varieties of politics hire them.

> "Far right" in some western European countries has come to mean about Obama-ish politics (health insurance for all instead of government-pays-everything-for-everybody like those contries have today.)

Not as far as I see. Far right in Europe today means hostility to immigrants, religious and ethnic minorities, with varying degree of disguise. Far right stands for isolationism and nationwide NIMBY policies.

Far right universally has secessionist sentiment from EU, no exceptions, as this is required to implement their policy. EU legislation founded in humanitarian values stands in the way.

If anything, Trump would be much more at home with Euro far right than Obama.

You don't have to score the two using the same metric.

Ars Technica's comment system scores agrees and disagrees separately, and reports them separately. The extra axis of information seems useful.

> Political Correctness police mercilessly downvoting and flagkillig anything that dares to even doubt.

We really need to move beyond the idea that just because an idea is contentious, it must be downvoted due to the "PC police", and not just due to "unpopular".

And seriously, blaming the rise of the right in Europe as being due to downvote/mark-unpopular mechanisms? That has to be the most banal political statement I've heard all year.

In any case, "the right to be heard" is not the same as "the right to be uncriticised".

Flagkilling/hiding something that is not blatantly offensive or false just because you don't agree is not criticism. It's censorship.

Banal political statement? What about western media trying to cover up the whole Kologne debacle (at least for few days) It's just an obvious recent example And it's just a tiny symptom

> 100% agree. And note that HN is already running this experiment; we have downvotes as well as upvotes.

I'd say that even though upvotes and downvotes are somewhat helpful it is the mentality that differentiates HN from other communities most significantly. We can't outsmart human stupidity with technology.

Sure, we have loads of people who want to game HN to push their own agendas but at its core HN users actually welcome new points of view.

There is nothing wrong wrong with, say, fighting for animal rights. But the moment you consider yourself an animal rights activist you're very likely to give up common sense and the ability to value any input that doesn't conform with your peers' opinion. Basically you become a one-dimensional character.

Pleas note I used the word "likely." I am not ruling out that there are open-minded animal rights activists!

> but at its core HN users actually welcome new points of view.

No. Try posting anything here that opposes the groupthink. You'll get the downvote hammer used against you very quickly.

This is one of the few tech sites where you can post something positive about Microsoft and not get moderated into oblivion.

I agree that there's some "groupthink" going on here, but it's not nearly as bad as any other sites I've used.

I don't use Twitter, but I agree with your point that crowd-sourced opinion, without constraints--the "dislike" option you offer, for instance--often produces a questionable consensus...

Consider 1} Cunningham's Law: "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer."

Only somewhat whimsical with more than a bit of truth to it...implying that if you post something without much merit someone will be along shortly to set you straight...

Unchecked commentary allows a "conversation" to run headlong...speculation...rumors...gossip...

We all have different preferences for entertainment I guess...I prefer thoughtful sources...

1} https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

Awesome. I've never heard it referred to as Cunninham's Law but I've used this a lot.

People are overly concerned with being 'correct' all the time. Sometimes I'll talk out of my ass and pick a side on a topic I know little about because usually thr person who knows more will either confirm or correct my assumptions.

It's a surprisingly useful tool to learn in-depth knowledge from others on just about any topic. You just have to be careful not to over use it as blind skepticism has a tendency to piss people off.

> Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment.

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...

Does that feature allow negative feedback? A frown for bad news is positive feedback.

I'm concerned that all reactions might be treated as good reactions. That is, that there is no way to politely disapprove. Does anyone have any more details on this?

The genius of it all is there is no 'hate' or 'dislike' button. It only allows 'positive' or no results.

I suspect facebook and company will come up with a solution to the problem of how do you indicate that you saw something without commenting when it's not socially acceptable to 'like' it. For example a funeral announcement, you don't want to 'like' it but you want to say 'thank you' or something yet you might not want to comment.

A real dislike or hate button would simply result in a lower signal/noise ratio. Maybe new types of bullying where lot's of people 'hate' on somebody.

It's already been shipping for a while. 3-4 weeks?

> My theory is that it's because social media systems encourage and publicise agreement, while discouraging and hiding disagreement. This leads to a huge positive feedback effect on any meme that catches even a tiny number of people's attention, no matter how crazy.

Well, honestly, I think that effect is largely an outgrowth of how we've designed anti-spam processes to date.

Scalable agreement systems where large numbers of users agree X is good, then X is not spam.

> Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment.

Reddit clearly functions in such a manner [as does HN]. Twitter / Facebook hide this but fundamentally its the same concept and it is largely ineffective for what your goal is [publicizing useful discussion, including disagreements].

We'd really need to figure out a better way of mitigating problematic content without using up/down votes before we can solve this problem unfortunately.

> We'd really need to figure out a better way of mitigating problematic content without using up/down votes before we can solve this problem unfortunately.

Agreed. All sharing platforms, HN included, conflate agreement with importance. I can't disagree with someone without silencing them on HN and Reddit. And I can't congenially disagree on Facebook or Twitter, at least not in a way that transparently affects the various algorithms.

> I can't disagree with someone without silencing them on HN

This bothers me too. I've encountered quite a few posts that were unreadable. Why? Was it because they violated some rule, or was it because they were unpopular opinion? I have no way to know. This is the largest problem with HN I can see.

> I've encountered quite a few posts that were unreadable.

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.

Or just click on the timestamp to go to the comment's own page, and then the fading should be turned off.

What I don't understand is why it apparently doesn't occur to the HN admins that "fading" peoples' posts into oblivion makes people pay more attention to them. If HN's intent is to make undesirable opinions less visible, it's a colossal failure.

Often it's a waste of time to highlight those posts with my mouse, because they're usually downmodded for good reasons. But I still feel compelled to look, and I doubt I'm alone in that respect.

To fix this, I'd limit the text contrast to two levels -- normal and obviously-but-not-illegibly faded. In other words, don't make it look like you're trying to hide something from me. If a post is so bad that it deserves to be rendered at near-zero contrast, then it's bad enough to delete altogether... and only blatant spam falls into that category IMO.

For me, I think it actually works well as a user interface.

If I'm in a mood to be charitable and particularly open-minded, I can choose to squint closely or highlight with mouse, and read a greyed-out comment.

However, once that reading is done, the fact that it's greyed out means I don't feel the need to respond to it, correct it, etc. I know that it's being hidden, that people will give it less credence and attention. Plus, I just don't have to look at it once it's no longer highlighted.

In effect, greying out text is a gentle reminder to "don't feed the trolls"

Maybe retweets should be associated with and grouped by SlashDot-style reasons/reactions? So you can see x approving retweets, y disapproving, etc.

I think it'd be an improvement:

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.

Dislike/down votes have there own for of abuses such as vote brigades.

I'm pretty sure there is not an easy answer to this problem.

So, this - the pile-on voting - is something folks get really frustrated about. Every system I've ever used that allows down-ranking has these regular screeds from one side or another about how the system is being ruined by gangs of like-minded voters blindly censoring dissent.

And for sure, it happens. And sometimes discourse suffers for it: good arguments get buried instead of being heard.

Then again, there are much worse things than getting your argument buried on the Internet. And Twitter has some of best examples of this... People being harassed, doxed, threatened, driven out of their jobs, their homes, their communities... All over <= 140 characters that some brigade didn't like and couldn't just downvote.

In a system mostly optimized for pithy one-liners, I'd argue it's a pretty serious defect that a bad joke can so easily escape the bounds of its intended audience and any semblance of context and cost you your reputation. But it appears that's what we've ended up with...

Twitter's userbase has a fine tradition of building social conventions to paper over the deficiencies of the system. In this case, they've reinvented the pillory to replace the hated censor.

Well, maybe. I would instead say that the rapid churn of social networks is a "reincarnation"-type solution to the problem. Fry's leaving of Twitter is precisely the answer to the problem.

To see why, let's focus on what the problem actually is: we're social animals who crave authentic connection with others, not just to hear but to be heard. We can't just be passive consumers of news but wish to comment on it and be heard and replied to and have meaningful discussion. The problem is that a voting bloc systematically muffles some peoples' speech, ostracising them from the community due to their disagreement -- but then the community becomes an echochamber and fails to satisfy our needs for diversity.

One solution to this has been randomization -- think Omegle etc. -- which works but encourages a different sort of inauthenticity due to anonymity. Another has been the Reddit/LiveJournal model: make it easy to spawn new communities when old ones die out. It's a lot less clear why, say, LiveJournal has mostly died, but probably it was a little too egotistical and people therefore as they grew up got bored with just sharing their own viewpoints without some sort of cohesive blogging narrative, and it just died.

Somewhere there's some room for a solution which batches together communities of 50 people more-or-less randomly with some form of self-selection, and encourages them to talk about some sort of topic-of-the-day that would be relevant to all of their interests. In the meantime our solution is to join a social network and have fun until our community gets too large and we cannot get the attention we crave, at which point we'll swap to another and repeat the process again.

What if, instead of trying to determine an objective ranking for content based on [up/down]votes, we used a correlational voting thing?

Things upvoted by people who vote similar things to oneself are ranked higher for oneself, and things downvoted by people who vote more similarly to oneself are ranked lower for oneself.

This might be computationally expensive, but approximations to it would be cheaper I think, and still give some good results.

I have thought before about the need for a "reputation" driven system, where the user can indicate who he or she "trusts" (and how much) based on their contributions. The system would then highlight information from trusted users and from users in the broader networks of trusted users. Other content would be available, but it would be displayed with less emphasis.

For this to work, the UX would need to indicate that a single "vote" means "this is a well-formed or interesting comment" as opposed to the "I agree" upvote or the ambiguous "like."

Overall I think this more closely resembles real-world networks. We are more likely to listen to those we trust, and we are often connected with new friends through trusted parties. We may occasionally interact with those outside our networks, but usually only in passing.

The problem with downvoting (at least simple versions) is that it allows separate communities to interfere which each others' communications. So, say you have hunters and animal-rights activists. They should be able to talk among themselves on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook without interference from the other side. You don't want one side to start downvoting the other side's posts into oblivion so they can't even talk among themselves.

Downvoting works okay in places like Hacker News that are basically a single community with good moderation and some common values. It doesn't work in large-scale systems where many distinct communities have little in common beyond using the same social network. The average for a controversial post isn't going to tell you much.

Perhaps some form of negative feedback would be helpful; an intelligent system could use it to avoid sharing posts into communities where they're not wanted. But the system could probably figure this out from people not upvoting or resharing things.

I've often thought the same thing, that the score you see should be based on your own voting history. Either based on you voting specifically, or agreeing / disagreeing with existing votes. Extend it even further by having posts from people that you normally agree with get highlighted even if they haven't had upvotes for the specific post.

Just out of curiosity, how much of that data is available via HN's public API (or other large enough forum)? I'd like to see someone run some analysis on it to see if up/down votes do tend to cluster like this.

I know specifically of one community that tracks these metrics internally (Stack Overflow) and from which there is also a specific term for someone that mostly only downvotes things ("Vampire").

A lot of people believe it's their right to disrupt the communities of others. They call it "activism" or "advocacy" or "defending family values" or whatever the justification du jour is. It's all basically trying to stake a claim to the whole service as the territory of your tribe.

I like the idea of reinforcing some separation, but I also fear it may be too late. A lot of people seem to derive joy from attacking the community of others, to the point where that's the focal point of some whole communities. Trying to stop this internecine fighting really is an attack on such communities...

IMHO, the problem is not disruption by outsiders. The worst cesspools I see are entirely in-group.

It seems to me that the in-group echo chamber becomes not a discussion, but a means for all to signal their right-thinking loyal membership of the group. Just over the last couple of days I've seen some awful stuff along these lines on Facebook, regarding the new opening on the Supreme Court. Someone will share a meme that was posted by one of their in-group pages. This turns into a bunch of "me too" replies, but each of them needs to share a comment that includes a non-clever pun based on misspelling an opponent's name, and many of which declare how evil the other side is and deserves whatever they get. (notice I'm not taking sides: I think this applies equally across the board)

The problem here is that from a few cheers that get the ball rolling, any semblance of discussion evaporates. It's like when the neighbor's dog barks in the middle of the night, so your own dog replies, and then another gets into the act, and pretty soon the cacophony has everyone awake - but nobody's any better off from knowing that there are a bunch of dogs in the neighborhood.

I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think that the problem is outsiders being disruptive - it's insiders clambering to signal their tribal membership.

EDIT: missed the "not" in first sentence. BIG difference!

I'd go so far as to say that attacking someone else's tribe and poison their territory is one of the stronger ways to signal tribal membership.

Sure - but the signal can only be heard from within your in-group's discussion. So they'll generally flock together taking potshots at the outgroup from afar. There are of course cases of drive-bys, but that's harder to organize and rarer.

Well, yes, there's no system that's truly value-neutral. (What would that even mean?) But generally speaking, I expect that the large social networks will try not to encourage open conflict between groups that would otherwise keep to themselves, to avoid driving members away. So this is a bias towards peacefulness rather than conflict.

One example of this is how resharing a post on Google+ starts a new comment thread underneath it. This allows posts to cross communities while somewhat discouraging them from mixing it up in the comments. (You can click on the original if you want to.)

The web does this too: a web page can be discussed in any number of forums, independently of each other, without conflict, by sharing the URL. Comments directly on the web page don't work that way, which is why they're so often worse.

If people are deliberately trying to fight, things get even more difficult. Banning people from your feed can sometimes work, but is vulnerable to sock-puppetry and doesn't scale to large groups.

It is almost like humans are tribal and will defend their own tribe and attack other tribes.

And will readily defend the most horrible offenses by members of their own tribe, but be horribly offended over the littlest misstep from members of others.

> "defending family values"

Which is what I hear exclusively regarding Christian activists. They disregard any non-Christians whom have families, or of other value systems.

Yes, that's one funny name for a thing. Another is "social justice" as in SJW.

Which means "twitter/Fb hate". Or more succinct, "social" justice is literally mob justice.

We had mobs before. They hung black people and wore funny hats. Now they don't care what color you are, wear guy fawkes masks, and make you lose your job and residence. Economic murder, rather than real murder.

This is an interesting side topic, social signalling and out of control holiness spirals.

What do you get if you mix the tolerance of a religious inquisition with any side of contemporary politics? You get out of control holiness spirals as each author tries to outdo the previous at being just a little more holy, a little better of a true believer in the real story. Its a perverse game of "telephone".

I propose VLM's law, that any large enough communications system that's not anonymous will devolve into holier than thou signalling warfare. Or rephrased you get three people together, one will slander another to show off to the third how much holier he is. It doesn't matter if we're talking about Jesus, physics, or emacs vs vi, same behavior.

Some of it is a culture of assuming the worst. Because if you've seen what passes for journalism, usually what we see IS the worst.

If you'd like the actual truth on a non-holiness spiral format, the reason why "family values" are described by Christian activists as coincidentally being Christian (well, as they see it, anyway) values is the same propaganda meme as the only opposition to traditional scientific evolution is the binary choice of Evangelical Christian biblical creationism. The same intentional thought process leads to it as a propaganda movement. The point is NOT to debate the issue with 3rd parties, but to assert primate dominance as the leaders of the Christians because they are the ones setting policy. The point isn't that Islam family values are not Christian or only families have values or whatever nonsense when internal doctrine is applied to outsiders who aren't supposed to be part of the conversation anyway, but to very publicly beat chest and tell competitors inside the in-group of Christians to "bring it on" because we are the leaders of the Christians so we decide whats a Christian family value... unless you'd like to argue and try to become top dog of the Christians yourself? Its sort of a misunderstood out of context quote used by outsiders almost as a slur when its really none of their (direct) business who is in charge of the Christian leadership. In a different age the Christians would be slandering each other over translations or various twisted out of context biblical readings, and back then it ALSO had nothing to do with outsiders and they can quite safely butt out and ignore the internal grindings inside the group. Unless you're personally involved in the dominance fight for Christian leadership I can assure you the whole topic is nothing personal, at least not intentionally, and was never meant for your ears.

As a person that lives in a country that is being sabotaged by catholic church i have to disagree. They might be mostly fighting internally, but it spills over into actual law.

I'm going to disagree. Any debate about definitions is fundamentally about power. There's no real reason why a word means one thing and not another. It's inconsistent to be frustrated with one group for insisting on a definition ("family values" means heterosexual couples and their progeny) and not be equally frustrated with other groups for doing exactly the same thing ("marriage" includes same-sex couples).

I'm willing to be wrong on this point if someone cares to enlighten me. I find it sad to conclude that power struggles are inevitable. It's better than violence, but still distasteful.

This is a shibboleth, is it not? A code phrase used by a particular in-group to signal membership of that in-group. (Although frequently they're terms of art to mean certain specific things by that in-group.)

It's not a shibboleth, it's a dog whistle. Shibboleths are for identifying people in one-on-one or small group situations. Aluminium vs. aluminum could be a shibboleth.

Dog whistles generally sound like platitudes to one group (family values, social justice, "let's have an honest conversation about race") and mean something entirely different to a particular demographic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics

I agree with your sentiment but it's far too simplistic.

Take for example, a forum on ISIS. Yes, I've just triggered Godwin's law. I'm sorry about that.

Now, the idea is that there should be no challenge to ISIS on some parts of the Internet because they have the same right as anyone else.

However, this fails Karl Popper's criteria, don't tolerate the intolerant.

I support the criticism of any prejudiced and intolerant group in any forum (even the ones that Political Correctness blindly defends). If the goal of a group is truly noble, I will often support it.

  > However, this fails Karl Popper's criteria, don't tolerate the intolerant.

It's worth pointing out what he meant by ‘intolerant’:

  | they are not prepared to meet us on the level
  | of rational argument, but begin by denouncing
  | all argument; they may forbid their followers
  | to listen to rational argument, because it is
  | deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments
  | by the use of their fists or pistols.

‘Intolerance’ here does not mean holding disagreeable opinions; it means intending to suppress rational argument. This is not a call to shout down opponents by calling them ‘intolerant’; it's a call to stop people shouting down opponents.

Thank you, I had no idea that the statement was tempered that way. The quip and the explanation together are a much more powerful and useful idea than the quip alone.

This article (http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/29/the-spirit-of-the-first...) expresses much the same thing, but takes a couple of pages to do it. Having a word ("intolerant" has been diluted, but maybe we can forge a new one) for people who silence arguments instead of answering them seems seems like it would greatly simplify almost all discourse.

You could use 'censors' but that might simply lead into debates over whether shutting down communication between willing parties due to the subject of their speech, in fact, censorship when the government isn't the one doing it.

In computer science, when we have too much data to process at once, we shard it. We separate it into manageable chunks and we stop looking at every single data point and just at summaries.

I was using this very analogy to explain the advent of CCG "formats" (MTG, Hearthstone) a few days ago and it seems like the same analogy could be used here. There is a point where a discussion/dicussion room contains too much data to be manageable and the only way to fix that is to break it up into chunks.

We see it on Reddit, too, with subreddits becoming "too big" and naturally breaking up into smaller subreddits.

I suspect there's a universal truth hidden in there somewhere.

It's the upper limit on our ability to process information. Whether it's data, or whether it's a social circle. I believe we will (until AI is a thing) be constrained and will fail, simply because of our poor ability to store and process information as humans.

But your defending the problem we have now. People are encouraged to get into feedback loops and not ever see anything that disagrees with them.

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.

This is a very interesting question: when does a community become an echo chamber? To use the hunting example: I imagine sometimes the hunters talk about stuff to do with hunting itself; the merits of different rifles, or where to find game, or whatever. And this is a reasonable community discussion for them to have, and it wouldn't help to have activists shouting "hunting is evil" over conversations such as that.

But sometimes the hunters will talk about the politics of hunting: one will say, "those activists are wrong to complain about animals suffering, because <reasons here>", and then another will say "yes, it's so obvious they're wrong, because <reasons> are so obviously right", and the echo chamber is ringing - this is the situation where people ideally would be brought into contact with the opposing view.

Can an online community promote the first type of conversation while challenging the other? How would we set about that?

That's the job of good moderation I think.

Perhaps. But I think it would take a particularly far-sighted and philosophical moderator to down-vote/remove a perfectly civil post whose message he agreed with, _just_ because it was contributing to an echo-chamber effect.

I would think this could be accomplished with just a policy to never, ever discuss the politics of the community's niche, and to remove posts that do.

The problem isn't the occasional disagreement, it's when communities raid each other, since people are much more brazen online than in person. In person, thousands of atheists would never march into a church during mass and start berating members for their beliefs, but that's very common in unmoderated communities. Moderation solves this issue when you can shard your communities (see reddit), but Twitter is just a global blob. Whose going to moderate it?

"communities raid each other"

I love that image and it makes a clear picture for me. Playing on a PvP server of WoW before any expansions there was no formal PvP game. What spontaneously happened though was the raiding and taking over of the other factions town. Making a mess and disrupting otherwise normal play until everyone got tired and went to sleep.

It feels so much more intense (real?) in the social media world though.

I think because it takes so little effort. Even in an MMO, you have to man your character to do anything. On twitter all it takes it for at least one person to be tweeting at a given moment to ruin the other community.

Plus, people on WoW would be paying a subscription, people are much more risk averse when they pay. Social media is free, and there's little to lose for most people.

Back in the times of the meow wars ( http://xahlee.info/Netiquette_dir/_/meow_wars.html ) people were at least aware of exactly what they were doing...

Better for whom? I think that's condescending. People already know that some forums only contain like-minded people - that's the point! Connecting with like-minded people about some specialized interest is one of the great advantages of the Internet. You can get valuable things out of it, without being under any illusion that you're talking with a diverse crowd.

Maybe the issue is that we don't have enough forums for people who want to have that debate? A "hunting versus animal rights" forum, for example. You'd need really good moderators, though. Lots of people wouldn't be interested in participating, but sometimes there might be interesting posts to reshare.

If the average person is completely shielded from any kind of discourse surrounding their beliefs, society will suffer. Echo chambers are the main reason politics in the US have become a complete disaster. When you hear the other side's point of view presented by your side, it's going to be biased and will just reinforce your own beliefs.

As evidence of this, think of how many people think that $other_party wants to "destroy America" in some form. Cue (and possibly queue) commenters saying "but $x really does want that!"

I've found that people who claim to know the other side's motivations are projecting for the most part. I catch myself doing it too. Being more aware of bias does not make one less susceptible to it, unfortunately. If anything, it tends to bring overconfidence regarding it :/

I've realized that Americans are uniquely patriotic, but to wildly different countries whose only common trait are their borders.

If you're thinking along these lines, you'll enjoy reading this post[1] by Venkatesh Rao. Stephen Fry leaving is the exact scenario of "evaporative cooling" expressed there, and you are exactly describing the process of "warrenization" that is required for large-scale online communities to survive and thrive. Obviously Twitter has failed in including these insights into their social architecture, to their detriment[2].

[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...

This is off topic (sorry), but I'm an animal rights activist and I have no problem with hunting or hunters. As long as the animal is consumed as food, no problem. Trophy hunters are a different story.

What about letting people decide whose votes they want to count for them. You can be as meta as you want to be with this.

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.

It's been obvious for a very long time that up-/downvoting is just a horribly broken mechanism. Much more so, if it's upvoting only. Twitter tries to ameliorate that with the ability to block people, but that's just a crutch.

The solution is laughably simple in theory, but it seems to keep getting ignored: Don't use a simple sum of votes. Instead use some method - any method really - to weight the votes of users depending how much their past voting behaviour correlates with your own.

I've been writing about this over six years ago, for example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095500

There is no friendly way to say it, the mass market are morons. It might be derogatory jokes, but this can also include things like spreading urban legends which were debunked four decades ago.

Just like Usenet and countless other online communities, what starts a a small group of fairly privileged and elite eventually degrades in to garbage as the reach increases. This is not so much an overall size issue but a relative one. I saw it happen to very small online communities in the 90s. In some respects, I watched it occur on a community I ran nearly 10 years ago.

Facebook's aggressive censorship along with non-public networks give each user a white washed micro-community. Public forums, such as Twitter and Instagram, do not.

> There is no friendly way to say it, the mass market are morons...

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...

> Even if you do happen to be smarter than the average bear

> it's still asshole-ish to assume that everyone else just be completely dismissed...

Devil's advocate: If you're above average intelligence, you're smarter than a majority of the populace by definition. Why would you not then dismiss the thoughts and ideas of those less educated?

One person's condescension is another person's logic.

because people don't exist on a continuum of smart and dumb.

I'm surprised to hear that, considering the story on HN the other day about how educated woman don't marry down. It seems a non-insignificant number of people want to partner with and befriend those of the same or higher intelligence.

Anecdotally, I gravitate towards above average intelligence people for friendships and romantic relationships.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/07/06/has-being-si...

Percieved same or higher intelligence.

Whether its perceived or not, thats how its playing out on a macro scale.

Really? Care to back that up with actual evidence?

Goddammit. Seriously. It's well-known that all kinds of intelligence are correlated, at least at the lower end. There is such a thing as a benchmark of the brain that gives a one-dimensional result that tells us a something significant about that person. You're just being touchy-feely superstitious (which is way better than the scared-of-different kind of superstitious, but still).

Then I'm sure you'll find it very easy to provide the study that confirms your claims.

You are the first person I've ever heard that called asking for evidence "superstitious". You might want to look up the definition of that word. Goddammit indeed.

Try not to get too touchy-feely in your reply, just give me the studies you are referring to.

http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1999-15054-002

Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.

One of the best things a person can do with their intelligence is try and understand the perspective of other people.

Because you live a different life than they do, they have experiences you don't and they know things you wont.

Doesn't mean you should uncritically accept their ideas, but it does mean you should at least give them some weight.

The obvious answer: because if you're wise, you realize that raw intelligence is a fairly small part of what makes someone worth listening to on a given question. On most questions of morals or politics, I'd rather listen to someone of average intelligence, but with a humble, good and patient character, than an MIT grad who's convinced they know everything.

Interesting. I'm not sure I can relate, though. I'd rather listen to Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins talk about evolution and atheism than someone of average intelligence.

Because you really just want reinforcement for ideas you already believe?

Dangerous slope. I want constructive arguments, to be sure, especially with people who hold a different view than my own on different topics.

But your opinion does not carry the same weight as a fact. Quite a few people I've encountered don't understand that.

I didn't say anything about whether I agree with those ideas or not. Stated simply, I'd rather hear any given argument from someone who is intelligent than someone who isn't. Extraneous factors, such as the arguer's humility or tone of delivery, don't enter the picture for me when evaluating the merit of the idea being argued.

Intelligence allows you to search through ideas faster. This is worth nothing if you are evaluating them badly.

It doesn't matter if you are the greatest geinus to ever live - if you are looking for a reason to believe what you already want to, being smart just means you find it.

"You can always design a cryptosystem that you yourself cannot break."

Humility and an open mind are probably worth more than intelligence in this way.

On certain topics, certainly. Listening to me talk about particle physics would do neither of us any good. That's why I constrained my answer to politics and morality (i.e., building the sort of society and becoming the sort of person that tends towards justice). Valuable opinions in those areas have much more to do with what has sometimes been called "practical intelligence", i.e., the ability to sift good ideas from bad using a wide range of personal experiences and a character intentionally shaped in response to those experiences. I suspect raw intelligence generally helps in that process, but it may also hurt, and it's by no means the most important factor.

Counterpoint: it was pretty common knowledge for the majority of the 19th and 20th centuries that women were categorically inferior and unreliable, that blacks were shiftless and dangerous, and that homosexuals were mentally ill.

Because your brain is going to lead you into thinking that your ingroup are the smart minority and your outgroups and people that you don't understand are the simple minded majority.

That person's logic is narcissism, not insight. I get that they think they're being logical, but really they're just lacking self-awareness. They're not revealing themselves to be smart people making rational choices, they're revealing themselves to be conceited people who aren't as smart as they think they are.

Put another way: someone who believes the stated Devil's Advocate position is by definition someone who doesn't understand the nature of intelligence, doesn't understand themselves, and doesn't understand other people. They might be making logical choices based on those misunderstandings, but correct logic based on false axioms is just as wrong as incorrect logic based on true axioms.

There's a certain scale where a group of people turn into a mob. And mobs are ruled by the id, a perfectly normal, conscientious person's behavior transforms when part of an anonymous mob or when interacting with a faceless entity in an impersonal way.

When I worked as a retail salesman, you'd see it all of the time. From people pushing expired coupons to return fraud to outright theft, people degrade in that sort of environment.

A casual perusal of the comments on any popular youtube video will disabuse you of this.

What?!?

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.

Or is it the other way around, that people act smartly and rationally individually but when taken as a whole become a singular moronic entity?

See also: corporations, nations.

If that's true, why is it so hard to beat the market in the long run.

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.

People act dumb both in groups and individually. You don't see very many intelligent people joining big groups and becoming moronic - they're smart enough to recognize groups cater to the lowest common denominator and avoid them.

The exception being young people who have the potential to be intelligent but lack life experience.

As much as you'd like to believe that people are smart somehow - the average IQ is 100. 100 is really, really dumb.

> The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.

- Terry Pratchett, Jingo

I believe this was the article's point - that Fry no longer wanted to partake in discussion where people were getting offended on other people's behalf. Its not the best way to engage his comment.

> it's still asshole-ish to assume that everyone else just be completely dismissed...

I think you're being overly harsh, nobody mentioned "dismiss[ing]" "everyone else"; yet I agree with the parent that conversations with such broad participation seem to be less interesting/'more dumb'/however-you-prefer-to-phrase-it.

You even hinted at some of the reasons this might be the case; i.e. that different people have knowledge of different things (i.e. 'there may be things these "morons" know way more about than you do'). The more people are included in a conversation, the less common ground there is to work from. People certainly can make accurate, fact-checked, carefully-worded contributions; yet they may be less likely to spread for a few reasons, e.g.

- Being more difficult to understand for members who aren't as well-versed in the subject, compared to slogans, soundbites and memes.

- Being more difficult to produce, compared to off-the-cuff remarks and guestimates.

- Being realistic can be less attention-catching and thought-provoking for those who don't already know a subject, compared to baseless hyperbole

- Those who don't already know about a subject, and try to contribute with e.g. anecdotes or quotes from others, may be unable to tell accurate information from inaccurate.

It's unlikely that such contibutions will spread very far, so the content which does reach any particular individual will tend to be less useful bu good at spreading (e.g. "viral" videos of cats).

These sorts of factors can lower the usefulness of a discussion. At a certain point, the quality or depth becomes low enough that those with a vested interest will often split off to a more focused/dedicated area for discussion. This leaves the original "mass market" conversation even more impoverished.

As an analogy, let's say you're considering which of two datastructures to use in some project; imagine trying to debate their relative merits and solicit opinions on their complexity tradeoffs by posting to a generic "Computer Users" group on Facebook, amid the background noise of questions about what's the best MP3 player, how to change the colour of the Windows taskbar, and where to get a keygen for Photoshop.

It's condescending, but, well, it's correct.

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.

I despise it as well. It's the very stupidest way to celebrate smartness.

Everybody's got strengths. From the perspective of that strength, everybody else can be seen as hopelessly weak. The politically strong may think everybody else is naive. The socially strong could everybody else is maladroit. The physically strong think everybody else is puny and inconsequential. The artistically strong think everybody else are embarrassingly lowbrow. And so on.

It's irritating regardless, but I find this easier to forgive in people who are not crowing about how smart they are. It somebody is actually smart, they can recognize the limitations of pure IQ, and how embarrassingly self-limiting it is to think you have nothing to learn from anybody else.

It's not like smart people don't also believe wrong things, make mistakes, and generally fuck up. Isaac Newton thought all sorts of things we now recognize as idiocies. America's founders were somehow unable to see the glaring contradiction between practicing chattel slavery and congratulating themselves on how devoted they were to liberty and the equality of man. On a cosmic scale, we are all morons. It's just that, limited by time and our meat-based brains, we are terrible at noticing how little we notice.

Strength, be it physical, intellectual, or any other kind, doesn't justify being arrogant. Smart people should know that.

I couldn't agree more about the mass market being morons. It's hard to say and not often said so bluntly in public though. Not because it's untrue but because the person saying it could be afraid they might be a part of that group of morons. I can't tell you how many times I've heard a moron call everyone else morons. So is there ever any way to know when "the mass market are morons" means what it says literally or when it's a stand-in for "most people aren't agreeing with my strongly held beliefs".

"The majority is always sane."

>>So is there ever any way to know when "the mass market are morons" means what it says literally or when it's a stand-in for "most people aren't agreeing with my strongly held beliefs".

Absolutely there is. We have a measuring stick with which we can measure the validity of one's beliefs: empirical evidence.

If you believe X, and scientists say we have sufficient empirical evidence that confirms that belief, and the mass market doesn't believe X, that makes the mass market a bunch of morons. This is inarguable.

There are many kinds of evidence and many ways to interpret it - and many kinds of science (physicists disagree with each other less than economists for a reason.)

Incidentally, most "morons" disagree with you on matters where they can find a scientist on their side, or on issues of morality, or on inconsequential matters (like the origin of life, which is interesting to most but doesn't affect any practical decision.) Few "morons" jump out of windows in defiance of gravity, and those who do no longer bother you on Twitter.

Also, scientists err, falsify results, cherry-pick them, etc. Of course, so do "morons"...

Well said. Even when science means well, it can suck to be on the non-moron side.

For ~120 years, science "knew" that an element existed inside all ignitable substances that was released during burning. When the air was fully saturated with phlogiston, the burning stopped. Just put a candle in a jar and watch what happens. The theory's sound, right?

120 years is a few lifetimes, who knows what revelations will drop before the 21st century winds down?

I think the friendly way to say it is that most people(yourself included) only achieve a medium/expert level of competence in one or two areas of their life. In the other areas, most of us are just bumbling through. Unfortunately though, manners require us to speak about various topics, leading to the bumbling side of humanity to be exposed in droves.

The mass market isn’t so much “morons” as just the lowest common denominator. Everyone is “smart” about the niche areas that interest them. These niches seldom overlap. So the mass market is more about things that cross the boundaries: sports, weather, politics, jokes, etc. So what starts as a niche (not so much privileged or elite) either stays as a niche or appeals to a mass audience by finding the common denominators.

Personally, sports bore me and I find the hero worship disgusting, but I recognize that I lose the ability to relate with a lot of people because of this disinterest. I wish more people were interested in computer science, political-economics, and defense policy, but most aren’t. While at times I want to scream, “stop worrying about bread and circuses,” I understand peoples desire to find common ground with others. [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

"There is no friendly way to say it, the mass market are morons."

Yes there is, to some extent. The trick is to start with observations, not interpretations. If you ask a really angry guy "Why are you angry?" chances are the reply is "I AM NOT ANGRY", possibly combined with a punch to your nose. Instead, ask "Why are you slamming with doors?". That starts the discussion with something that is harder to deny, and doesn't directly relate to the person, but only to his behavior, which he can change. Because of that, you are less likely to be punched, and it is more likely that you will get the answer "Because I am angry", which can be followed up with a discussion about the why, about whether he likes to be angry, and about the fact that you don't like it, either. If you want to be really inoffensive, start with "I don't like the noise of those slamming doors", but that feels a bit too indirect to me.

Similarly, don't say the mass market are morons, say they behave like morons or, even better, that they come over as morons on the Internet (my theory is that that is because people do not see facial expressions there) That not only is more polite, but likely also closer to the truth. At least, I haven't met someone who is like a real life Internet troll.

> "I don't like the noise of those slamming doors"

I've seen that described as a good way of dealing with children. IMHO, that pre-qualifies it as appropriate for aggressive Internet commenters.

I always say "if you have any doubt about the average person's intelligence, spend a day at the DMV."

My theory, since you all asked, and with my dozens of years of behavioral studies experience (just kidding, I do marketing stuff and things), is that we - human beings, that is - aren't really designed to communicate with the world. It's just not something we're ready for right now. We went from small tribes to friggin Twitter way too fast. We're in the "figure out wtf is going on right now" phase, which could end up being a totally reasonable transition.

But we all seem to be addressing these topics as if they are as natural as plants growing. IDK, I often ask myself "why?" when considering the innovations I experience on the daily. This isn't to say there doesn't exist wonderful benefits of "connector" services like FB/Tw, I'm just not sure we're ready for it all. Then again, maybe this is how progress happens?

The problem is that the abstractions for working out what gets attention/promotion on social media favour the lowest common denominator. Both Twitter and Reddit are genuinely useful for connecting together like-minded communities with well established standards of behaviour, but they both struggle enormously when they attempt to find some objective criteria which can create a ranking for comparing these communities to one another, and use that ranking to synthesize everything together to create a shared public space.

On Twitter, trending is principally about volume. On Reddit, you can view and upvote 100 image macros in the time it takes to read one long-form article. So almost by definition the shared space will be filled with information that is quickly digestible, or that people have not read or watched. In attempting to synthesize and rank every piece of information on these sites, we are effectively trying to automate an editorial process for deciding what is currently the most important thing in the world, in the meantime separating what is poor content from what is merely controversial, and ranking an image macro against a 10,000 word essay. This is a herculean task, and the methods we are using are manifestly not up to the job.

> The problem is that the abstractions for working out what gets attention/promotion on social media favour the lowest common denominator.

IMHO you've identified the root problem. it's simply very easy to optimize a feed around quick interaction signals as a way of surfacing what's important, and still get the quality wrong.

> we are effectively trying to automate an editorial process for deciding what is currently the most important thing in the world, in the meantime separating what is poor content from what is merely controversial, and ranking an image macro against a 10,000 word essay. This is a herculean task, and the methods we are using are manifestly not up to the job.

what's needed IMO are user satisfaction signals. I wonder if social networks could invite users to report content that makes them mad or they find useless. not for abuse, simply to identify what different users like and start understanding what groups of people prefer

It's like the way that millennials communicate with emoji

I'm GenX and not a millennial. I don't see anything wrong with using some emoji as part of my language. I already speak a language (English) which is some bastard child of French, German, Dutch, Arabic, etc. I'm happy to add a (poo emoji) when it's appropriate.

emoticons were annoying on MSN messenger. I'd hope that people will grow out of it, like they did back then.

but perhaps they are here to stay.

I don't think MSN users grew out of emoticons, they just stopped using MSN. Facebook chat, Skype and SMS picked up where MSN left off, and all three of those have a strong emoticon game.

interesting, first it appears people really love emojis here, my original post lost me some karma...

second there was a massive gap in my friend group between MSN emoticons dieing out and emojis seeping in.

Perhaps my experiences are abnormal....

I don't think they'll ever go away, and that's because of the nature of short-form text communications. You need to express emotion, something language is bad at doing in short-form. Longer expressions can have great flowery emotion, but "im gonna kill you" can mean a lot of different things depending on the emoticon or emoji that follows it. And that's really important.

Some people write long messages to convey emotion. Others use ambiguous phrases and follow it up with a quick expression of emotion to set the context.

Emojis are fine. But I remember the first times I started seeing "LOL" and "ROTFLMAO". And I realized that the person wasn't really laughing, but they were quietly typing that on the keyboard. If you think about it, before AIM and online chat (way before texting), people hardly ever faked their emotions so much. I mean, you could fake a small laugh, but you didn't outright say that you're rolling on the floor laughing, while you weren't even cracking a smile physically. That would be impossible over the phone, and AFAIK people didn't do it over email, either. It's a product of the instant-message culture.

And it also symbolizes the disconnect between the online persona on facebook, posting all those cool photos, and the real-world person sitting by the computer all those lonely nights. The emotions and the fulfillment of the emotions have become stilted, computers now provide a superstimulus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus) that replaces deep, real-life conversations with a steady stream shallow online interactions. Notifications pull us back in for more like an addictive slot machine. And our kids are ill-equipped to fight it, which is why they spend a great deal of their lives addicted to effectively meaningless communication with people who are not next to them:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-te...

If you think about it, before AIM and online chat (way before texting), people hardly ever faked their emotions so much

In the late 1980s terms like LOL were used on BBSes and on Usenet. Perhaps you just aren't old enough to remember that? :-)

Thank you. On BBSes and even IRC /me laughs, /me <action|emotion>

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.

I remember reading a study that people laugh more around other people. Anecdotally, I can definitely see this in myself. If I find something funny that isn't shared with other people, I might not outwardly laugh, and it would look like my lol, rofl, hahaha, etc isn't genuine, but with a group of people I'd probably be laughing out loud at the same thing. It might just be expressing the same emotion differently.

You can now try the Japanese lol: www.

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).

also irc (EFNet) made use of emoticons, and 'lol's. The longest I remember wa ROTFLMAOASTC.

I often say "lol" in real life to denote "I appreciate your attempt at being funny and agree that it was indeed humorous, but it wasn't funny enough to laugh laugh"

Because, like, what do you do when someone puts effort into a joke and you want to give them positive reinforcement, but you're just not in a laughing mood? Or it was funny in the abstract, but you're the wrong audience?

Another approach I've seen was "Heh, that's funny." ... but I'm not sure if that's better or worse than "lol"

"lol" is an amazingly useful addition to written, casual language. It's the textual equivalent of a smile/head nod in normal conversation. Remember that in physical conversation, body language conveys 80-90% of the message - phrases like "lol" and emojis take the place of body language.

Possibly interesting side note, I have noticed over the last few years the vocalization of 'lol' being used more and more genuinely as an affirmation of a mildly humorous situation or statement that didn't actually happen to produce a laugh. I think it started being used sarcastically or ironically, but has lost that attribute for the most part.

I've seen this mainly with non-native English speakers. It may have migrated from there too.

About a decade ago one of my friends took to saying the word "sigh" (deadpan, with no intonation in his voice) instead of actually sighing. It annoyed me to no end.

Yes, I noticed that too. I always thought it was a Dutch thing, since "lol" is a proper Dutch word meaning "fun".

In online and SMS Russian, a single ), reduced from standard :), is used so often that omitting it carries a kind of serious/angry meaning much like talking in a stern voice irl

It's exceptionally rare to read the transcript of a conversation or story and to physically burst out laughing. A huge part of humour is in the context ("you had to be there") and the delivery.

The current use of "lol" and "lmao" just makes a whole lot more sense than their hijacked and literal definition... it's about replacing what would normally be subtle visual cues and gestures, which signal acknowledgement and/or encouragement, with something that is universally understood.

Sometimes using shorthand can be disasterous for those getting to grips with it. I remember reading some time ago that someone's daughter had to explain to her mother that her friend was upset because when she wrote "I'm so sorry for your loss, lol" that lol does not stand for "lots of love".

Our prime minister had the same problem, often signing off his text messages "LOL, DC". As a country, we collectively lol'd

It seems like there is a general trend that very strong expressions get watered down over time, and we invent new expressions to replace them.

> I already speak a language (English) which is some bastard child of French, German, Dutch, Arabic, etc.

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.

But the Germanic language family is quite large; it basically describes every language spoken on the Northern Atlantic coast. You can't say "it's Germanic" and then say "it's hardly related to Dutch or German".

As for the development of the English language, I believe it derives mostly from Saxon - Frisian - Norse - French, in chronological order. I'm pretty sure Celtic should also be on that list, but I don't know in what order or to what extent.

English and Dutch are similar because they share a common ancestor. But the direct influence of Dutch upon English is minimal. Relatedness and Influence are distinct concepts, the language that influenced English was an ancestor of both Dutch and English, and so the influence of Dutch itself on English has been small compared to other languages like French.

> You can't say "it's Germanic" and then say "it's hardly related to Dutch or German".

That's not what I said. I said "it's Germanic" and "it's not a child of German or Dutch".

Gahh.. I actually don't have anything against emojis, and I use them, too. I probably agree with 90% of the pro-emojii sentiment in this sub-thread.

The emoji thing was a bad analogy and I should have just left out that clause entirely and started that sentence some other way.

Indeed. I actually find the fact that we've come full circle and are going back to ideograms rather fascinating.

If anything, see Japanese - Kanji are essentially ancient Chinese emoticons, which succinctly express common notions which would be far more expansive in katakana or hiragana.

I can't read the latter, but I can read Kanji - which gets me by in both China and Japan.

Emoticons are even more universal.

Using emojis (and acronyms, abbreviations and even to some extent memes) to augment conversation isn't the problem. Using them in such a random or repetitive way that they substitute for conversation - to the extent that some human interactions would struggle to pass a Turing test - is the problem. Twitter, where the bot feeds are often indistinguishable from the human ones, is pretty much the poster child for this sort of communication malaise.

There never was a serious public discourse. Why would giving everyone access to easy ways to contribute simply make that happen?

I don't know the reason why, it could be simple as most people aren't that smart, but the truth is the vast vast vast majority don't have anything interesting to add and most probably don't care what you're talking about anyways.

Just think about this for a bit: it was a socially acceptable social meme that people would stand around the "water cooler" and talk about TV shows. TV Shows!? That's what we've got when the masses are left to their own devices.

What I do think could potentially become a net positive is that in the bad old days, you had to catch someone putting that racist cartoon on the bulletin board or follow them to see the bumper sticker on their car. Now you can search them out, that's kind of interesting. I don't know that it will cure racism, sexism or other discrimination but it will further push them back in to a smaller place.

"this development is double-plus bad"

You meant:

"this development is double-plus ungood"

That has been my opinion for a while as well. It's really a huge amount of social signalling where people can group themselves into specific tribes by broadcasting how offended they are by something someone well known has said or done.

And because of that it's effectively become news, papers like The Guardian in the UK have endless opinion pieces which basically amount to people commenting on other people being angry on someones behalf about something someone said or did.

i consider emojis as the tonal element missing from text

think of it as visual intonation (o)

(o) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_(linguistics)

I like your interpretation which ascribes intelligence and meaning to other peoples' behavior instead of the grandparent which seems to imply that the kids these days are just stupid and don't have any interesting thoughts to convey.

You can't find the meaning in other peoples' behavior if you just assume it's meaningless from the get-go.

Oh, well played sir!

> kids these days are just stupid and don't have any interesting thoughts to convey.

It's not kids these days, it's always been like this for everyone.

the history of emoji coming from japanese culture is pertinent..

i am unable to speak for middle eastern or cyrillic languages due to a shameful unfamiliarity, but as for western and a majority eastern languages, the core of the japanese language is substantially, yet casually, more capable

japanese is comprised of three alphabets:

    kanji : an enormous, complex, and ancient chinese character set
    katakana and hiragana: syllabic runes that bridge japanese phonemes to its own complex characters or even other languages

the japanese even created a phoneme set using latin characters called romaji

the japanese have a japanese numeral system but also use arabic numerals

what's more is these elements of the language can all appear on the same poster one walks by while walking down the street

and yet still more, those elements can all be meant to be read in different directions

japanese texts are written horizontally and vertically

japansese books can be printed and read either page flipped right to left, or similarly to the west, left to right

one may argue a dislike for or refuse the use of emojis but it could be said that one of the most literate cultures in the world looked at their tools of communication and felt them wanting

If you doubt the immense amount of creativity in the language and slang used by teenagers, you need to take a Linguistics 101 and you'll find plenty of evidence.

There is something to be said about the oversharing effects of social media on human psyche, but this old school yearning for a better intellectual past is bullshit.

Imagine you have 10 people standing in a circle having a conversation. At any given time only a max of say 2 people can be talking at once, and its usually one. How do people communicate, when they can't speak?

Image macros and memes are just stand-ins for facial expressions and body language, something humans are hard wired to process, but is severely lacking when communicating through text. Its a way that people form real relationships over the internet. There's nothing awful about it. Go look at any group of 20 year olds and see how they communicate in real life - you'll be just as off-put as when you see their online communications.

Voluntary newspeak

"there was always a bulletin board an on a corner of it there was always some faded-from-to-many-xeroxes bit of humor/racism/sports fandom/sexism/dirty joke or other us-vs.-them thing "

This sort of dreck was as despicable then as it is now, off- or online. If people posting such things now leave Twitter, I'm all for it. They can go back to the stone age where they belong - oh wait, even then most people were likely better than that: http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/geschlechterrollen-fors... (in German).

It seems you'll get your wish soon enough, at least with respects to Twitter.

But how clean is clean enough?

Simple: no racism, sexism or any other de-humanizing speech based on identity is "clean enough".

How would you define the line between race discussion and racism? Or between meaningful discourse about gender/sex and sexism?

It's not my job to pick a definition but Twitter's (and other social sites'). In fact, they already did (defining "hateful conduct"): "You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease." Pretty basic stuff.

If it was my choice, I'd pick a wider definition, accepting that there will be an area of uncertainty and errors. However, I think that it is still far better to exclude some people (for a while?) than to e.g. subject many more people to constantly being called pejorative terms (including implications to being a slave, an animal or an exhibit)/belittled because of identity/violently threatened etc.

You could also see it this way: up to now the officially used definition was in effect that nothing is racist/sexist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com