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Oh man, have you ever tried to have a political discussion on Facebook? Even citing sources, trying to be diligent... And then, the only response you get is... "that's not right!". And that response is somehow given equal weighting?

I actually wish Facebook, the place where a majority of Internet discussion probably occurs, WOULD institute a dislike button and suppress those comments that get down voted too much (like Hackers News or Reddit).

Right now, it's either a "thumbs up" or a neutral stance, and that's just not enough to accurately describe the level of discourse occurring.

I mean, I can hop on the gripe-train about Facebook, but the only way I've found to have meaningful political conversations is over a very narrow topic with the expectation that parties come well-researched and willing to continue researching. Politics is excruciatingly complicated, trying to have a cogent conversation about it on Facebook is like trying to have a deep talk about religion while riding bumper cars.

The problem with downvotes is they are susceptible to brigading and in political discussions, there are essentially 2 hivemind brigades. In the end, any point that doesn't agree with the majority hivemind on the platform gets buried. /r/politics is a case study in this.

Political discussions in any forum have rarely been productive, and no number of tools designed to build echo chambers will change that.

The problem with services like Facebook is they give everyone equal footing on any topic no matter the person's expertise on the subject, their relationship to the matter at hand, or their overall attitude towards discussions in general.

This means a black person who's been repeatedly victimized by police has no more credibility than some white dude who thinks everyone's making it up and it's a bunch of cry-babies going on about nothing.

It means a cryptography expert can get shouted down by some idiot that's just parroting something they read on CNN that's dangerously misinformed.

There's a lot of factors in play here but the "like" button skews the conversations towards things that earn votes which are not necessarily things that are true, accurate, or meaningful.

Sometimes the truth is ugly and painful and that's hard to like.

"And then, the only response you get is... "that's not right!". And that response is somehow given equal weighting?"

I noticed this long before the internet became this popular. Its more about the anti intellectualism than it is technology.

Political discussions with general public have always been like that, in every country and every age. It's not Facebook's problem, that's just how people are.

Any topic that indiscriminately concerns almost any person (e.g. politics, religion, weight loss and bodybuilding, how to parent and educate children, cooking, healing common pains/sicknesses), when discussed with random people, is automatically doomed to turn into a mess of uninformed opinions, misinformation, trivial logical slips and ordinary quarrel.

Tech/science discussions are usually constructive because they imply harsh entrance filter on education and intelligence, because most of those who upvote "that is not right!" can not join a public discussion of pharmacokinetics of a certain organic molecule no matter how welcome they are. When filters are absent, you get what you have described.

The real problem is that over 95% of people do not even value being constructive, checking facts, citing sources, etc. That is not a technical problem, you can't solve it by tweaking voting buttons.

The author is a prominent woman journalist, so her experience of the internet probably involves more harassment than most people's.

So should model the internet after a victorian society where proeminent women jorunalists could drink tea, play the piano and have a meaningful conversations about marriage?

Yes. Those are the only two possible options.

Harassment or corsets. Pick your poison!

sure, but here her voice is at the top of a widely read internet forum, and there's a polite conversation going on about it. This seems like a win for the internet. I can't stress enough that I respect the pain of public personalities in the age of the internet, to the extent that they suffer harassing emails, fake police calls, stalking, and lord only knows what else. That's not what the conversation is about though (those aren't examples of 'trolling on the internet' those are examples of illegal harassment).

The internet is and continues to grow as a powerful tool for people who want to learn, converse, share ideas, entertain themselves, build things, etc. The idea that 'the trolls have won' seems misplaced and strange.

It's also a heavily moderated forum. Let's see what the response to the article is on Reddit or one of the Chans.

> I participate in two large professional forums (one for poker, one for development)

"Large" is subjective, and I'm inclined to argue that anywhere "non-trolls are winning" simply doesn't have the size that forums which fight against 'actual' trolling at its scale do.

A simple BBS system or IRC channel can "let the professionals win" simply by being so niche that the professional : troll ratio is well within the manageable bounds for a handful of mods to be able to casually moderate every so often. Hell, this pattern is visibly demonstrable with smaller 'niche' subreddits and subcommunities. It's the whole "there goes the neighborhood" pattern in its digital form.

"By obscurity" doesn't isn't really an anti-troll 'win', it's just escaping trolls' attention. It only works so long as trolls don't hear about or aren't interested in the forum.

You're in the top 1% or 0.1% of filtering for quality, IMO. Go spend some "quality time" on /r/the_donald for a more typical experience.

Vote with your feet/filter/time. Don't go to to /r/the_donald.

I just use HN and twitter mainly. I keep Facebook because many friends can only be kept in touch with (out of the blue) via facebook. Otherwise, just block a lot of it.

Nobody is forced to go to "the_donald". What would "the_donald" without trolling supposedly be? I dont know "the_donald", but doesn't the name itself already say "this is for trolling"?

Yeah, but you don't have to go there. That's the point.

Trolls aren't winning the Internet, for the most part they're loitering in those corners of the web you'd expect to find them.

if the internet is supposed to be a truly public platform, that is to say a space where different opinions can collide productively then the internet at the moment is clearly losing.

It's not that the trolls occupy the corners, it's that they occupy the big, visible public spaces of the internet, while everybody else is driven into digital sanctuaries. That clearly is a failure if the stated goal is to genuinely democratise knowledge and discourse.

I'd even go further than the author and say that we're way past a 'potemkin internet with a nice facade'. The facade is pretty darn ugly as well. The kind of stuff people are willing to post under their actual name is pretty scary.

big, visible spaces of the internet - you mean the media?

sure, those are affected to. The comment sections originally intended for discussion on most big media sites are toxic even with moderation or have become so bad that some news sites have ended the experiment altogether.

That's a pretty sad result given that the whole idea was to break down the barrier between journalists and readers.

Not only the comments, the actual articles are full of trolling, too.

What if the so-called trolls are actually just the majority of people?

For something like /r/the_donald, you're right. But for something more general, like general Twitter, you're not.

I'd rather go bathing in a volcano.

>Go spend some "quality time" on /r/the_donald for a more typical experience.

/the_donald has almost 400k subscribers. It is what it is. Do you assume these people are stupid, or do their beliefs and interests (and sense of humour) differ from yours?

Just checked it out. I see a meme with the text: "[..] There is no bigotry here. We do not look down on snowflakes, cucks, neckbeards or landwhales. Here, you are all equally worthless".

> Do you assume these people are stupid

probably, although it's their morality that's more of a problem than their IQ.

> do their beliefs and interests (and sense of humour) differ from yours?

yes.

>>Do you assume these people are stupid

I dunno... every time Trump fucks up in a big way, the_donald folks genuinely think he is playing "five-dimensional chess" and that he fucked up on purpose as a way to outmaneuver his opponents without them realizing it.

So yes, they are absolutely, definitively stupid. I mean how else do you explain the attribution of superhuman intelligence to someone who is an incredible cretin?

The exact same thing could be said about the people celebrating the DNC and Hillary's race to the White house on reddit. An obviously flawed actor with few redeeming qualities, yet still held in high regard in the minds of people on r/politics. The only difference I see on the left side of the divide is lack of humour (which tends to invite trolling).

I don't want to get into a political argument, especially with someone who thinks Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are even remotely comparable. And I say that as someone with a deep dislike of Hillary.

Interesting that you think the left side lacks humor. Last time I checked, all parody shows on TV were liberal. What is the right-wing equivalent of SNL?

>implying late night shows are funny

> What is the right-wing equivalent of SNL?

Bullied off the air long ago. Remember people tried to get people like Thiel fired from FB for daring to donate campaign funds to a mainstream candidate.

Name a single good TV parody show.

I agree that /r/the_donald is a poor quality experience, but it's analogous and in response to the poor quality experience of the /r/politics. They're both "circlejerks" that don't allow competing views to be posted. So while you may need to take the_donald with a huge grain of salt, if you're only get your news from left wing site like /r/politics, npr, huff po, new york times, and even hacker news for the most part, you could do worse than checking it out. (Though I would recommended Daily Wire, Daily Caller, and Reason as a counter points.)

politics might downvote something they don't like to oblivion, but TD will ban you for violating the narrative.

And if by take it with a grain of salt you mean that nothing in there is actually relevant or related to reality.

TD isn't meant to be a bastion of free speech. It's candidate support website. They say it in the sidebar: "This is a forum for supporters of Trump ONLY". They obviously won't allow anything which does NOT support Trump. /r/politics is supposed to be a neural subreddit, is not even close to it.

It's a forum dedicated to a certain political candidate and their views. By definition, such a place will be an echo chamber with a (usually) low regard for neutrality.

It's no different from a hobby forum simply not tolerating people who don't like that hobby. You don't go to say, a Microsoft specific forum and expect to hear why Apple or Linux operating systems are better. And if you did keep saying that, you'd probably be chucked out or flamed to a crisp.

I don't feel any need to do that on any kind of regular basis, any more than I feel the need to browse pro-anorexia or pro-suicide forums. I certainly take the view that one should keep one's eyes open, but the presence of human garbage (which is a cultural constant) has never bogged down the internet for me. (The worst of the internet - snuff porn, child porn, violent hate groups, people selling people, or murder, or weapons, or whatever - is as old as the internet. /r/the_donald is just like, I don't know... whatever).

Like, why wouldn't I think that the contents of the internet would be a reflection of the contents of our society?

Check a Usenet archive and see what the alt.* groups looked like in 1997. Lunatics and assholes have always been present on the internet; the difference is that in 1997, we saw the necessity of creating private spaces that excluded undesirable people.

Facebook and Twitter are virtually unmoderated. As long as your comment is legal and non-pornographic, it's probably staying up. The "communities" used by the majority of people the majority of the time are less well moderated than a lot of 4chan boards.

Of course the debate on Facebook is uncivil. Expecting otherwise is a peculiar kind of madness.

And if you have civil debates on Facebook, your social circle is extraordinarily strange.

Also, Facebook is moderated by the person whose wall you are posting on. I've seen effective moderation in this way. If you have friends that value good discourse norms, and you shitpost in the discussion around their posts, they can and will delete your shit and tell you to knock it off.

> My biggest gripe is the obvious advertorial/astroturfing that I think is probably something hn offers as a service, but I'm not stupid, so I ignore it.

I've been warned that I would be banned for implying that astroturfing was happening on this site without proof.

This was exactly the point of the article. You seem to have built your perfect Elysium, and you surrounded yourself with likeminded enlightened users. This is not representative of the state of the Web, tho. Plus: forums are still great because they're one of those places where you can still have a full anonymity while discussing something you care about.

Just because you don't have cancer doesn't mean cancer isn't a problem.

No one would have cancer in the internet if they didn't visit cancerous sites. You're hitting yourself.

I'm merely pointing out that "just say no" isn't a real solution to the fact that a large swath of the population falls for propaganda cancer (which is hell of a lot bigger than which sites you go to on the internet).

"I don't feel overwhelmed by trolls, except when I read yet another fucking headline about gluten."

You may not feel overwhelmed by trolls, but if you live in the United States, you have been overwhelmed by trolls.