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Comment by brandur | Hacker News Reader

There's something about the text-based medium in particular that encourages the total dissolution of empathy. If you took any two users flaming each other on Twitter and put them on a phone call, you'd see a quick return to civility (i.e. just voice without even going to video is probably enough in most cases).

These platforms should be modern mediums for sophisticated public discourse. Instead, the inclination to daemonize, defame, and bully is so strong that you get the opposite effect -- there's a total shutdown of public discourse as most people won't go on record to say anything that might not be consistent with the party line.

This doesn't change anyone's mind -- it just has the effect of normalizing discourse to the lowest common denominator and driving anyone with a deviant opinion behind closed doors. Soon enough, everyone is screaming into an echo chamber.

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"There's something about the text-based medium in particular that encourages the total dissolution of empathy."

You're right. Two related things at play here, I think:

- Text-only is very low bandwidth. You don't get any of the body language, facial expressions, tone of voice that you get in person. emoticons and emoji are attempts to counter this

- Distance: You're protected from any negative reaction due to the effect of your messages.

There are actually social frameworks in place to compensate for both of these, but what passes for modern internet culture has largely rejected them.

Um. By which I mean to say:

Dear grzm,

Thank you for your recent post on HackerNews with regard to the limitations of empathy in a text based medium. I largely agree with your points.

However, I would like to draw your attention to an existing practice, specifically intended to compensate for the drawbacks you mention; this is the traditional letter-writing style. A fixed communication structure provides social cues which compensate for the lack of emotional side channels, as well as providing continual reassurance to the reader the communication is, in fact, desired.

Of course, this is not a panacea (indeed, it can be abused to great effect: I highly recommend reading some of the correspondence of Mark Twain!), but I am of the opinion that it can be effective in facilitating communication between people of differing opinions.

Thanking you for your attention and in anticipation of your reply, I remain,

Your sincerely,

david.given

PS. It's a been long time since I had an excuse to use the word 'facilitating'. Also, I had to look up the closing salutation. I also suspect that one of the main reasons this worked is because it's substantially more work. Tossing off a dismissive note in a couple of minutes is one thing; sitting down with a pen and composing a proper letter means you have to think about what you're saying.

Dear david-given,

I really enjoyed reading your follow-up post on HackerNews. Truly it provided a good example of an antiquated mode of communication which is nonetheless an excellent solution to the problem of conveying social cues over the internet.

I wanted to mention to you another aspect of this solution. Namely, the impersonal nature of the communication also provides some emotional distance between the writer and the reader. This can be valuable in the event that what is written is controversial in some way, as it communicates a desire to form some neutral ground where the conversation can be had. This helps facilitate an atmosphere of collaboration rather than the usual Internet attitude of spit-roasting of the reader.

I hope you find this message of some use or insight. I appreciate the time you've taken to read it.

Thank you, jschwartzi

That's a good point, but sadly, on Twitter, due to the realtime part, you'll get buried in accusations if you don't respond within seconds, so this isn't a realistic option.

Indeed, and I often find myself going out of my way to qualify forum posts in an attempt to prevent misinterpretations. It takes effort, though, and as you note, it's compensation. It can help, but I don't think it can full make up for it. I'm glad others are thinking about this, too.

>there's a total shutdown of public discourse as most people won't go on record to say anything that might not be consistent with the party line.

>...driving anyone with a deviant opinion behind closed doors. Soon enough, everyone is screaming into an echo chamber.

Funny, I've always thought downvotes on HN encouraged the same, albeit to a lesser degree. It's one thing to use downvotes as a moderation tool, submerging comments from others with whom you don't agree. It's another thing to "penalize" (FWIW) a person because you disagree with him/her. That it seems acceptable is a smaller symptom of the bigger problem.

Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode #1 this season.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5497778/

Maybe you mistyped, or maybe it's just too late and I'm not parsing things right, but I'm having a hard time distinguishing between the two options here:

"It's one thing to use downvotes as a moderation tool, submerging comments from others with whom you don't agree. It's another thing to "penalize" (FWIW) a person because you disagree with him/her."

Regarding how down votes are used on HN, there are those who use them to express disagreement (PG weighed in a while ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171), though there are others who think this isn't the best use of down votes.

Maybe we need "non-substantive", "don't agree", and "flag/uncivil". I can see how that could overcomplicate things, though.

Yeah, it was too late...for me. Sorry, I wasn't very clear.

By "punishing people", I meant the whole "karma" thing. So, using downvotes to score comments is considered a form of thread moderation. Ok, that's one thing. However, also assigning a score to people based, in part, on whether others frequently agree with them really encourages group-think. There is at least some perceivable utility in downvoting comments, but what's the value of scoring whether people frequently agree with someone?

BTW, I'm not going meta here, as I think it's very relevant to this thread.

>there are others who think this isn't the best use of down votes.

Yeah, I am also one who believes that, even with comments, downvotes for disagreement have a similar--though perhaps lesser--effect of discouraging diversity of ideas. I guess the heart of it is that disagreement is considered a legitimate reason for downvoting, whether it's comments or karma that is impacted.

Upvotes plus the current flags for incivility/inappropriateness should be enough for moderation, and would remove the disincentive for the expression of diverse ideas.

There's not really any point in having rules you can't enforce. So unless you're going (and able) to penalize someone for down-voting inappropriately, just leave it to "democracy" and let each person cast their down-votes for whatever reason pleases them personally.

At least HN and twitter let me post under ever-changing pseudonyms.

For all the vitriolic atmosphere that might create it also enables me to present deviant opinions without fear of that vitriol.

Friction arises where real-name and pseudonymous posting collides without sufficient self-moderation tools available to the users.

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