The Trance of Dysfunction: Why Trolls Have Come to Dominate Discourse | Hacker News Reader

The Trance of Dysfunction: Why Trolls Have Come to Dominate Discourse

scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

35 pointsfern1220 comments

I have noticed posts on Facebook now, finally, asking people not to feed the trolls by responding to their messages.

I think that social media companies have been irresponsible in their passing the buck on moderating conversations in the name of avoiding censorship.

I am more concerned, however, that people my age and younger (gen x) never had civics in school. There used to be an assumption that the world is chaotic, and that all we have is each other, which meant that the best society has to offer is its culture. Being uncultured was seen as so uncouth that people wouldn't stand for it. Today it's everywhere.

I see people questioning other people's patriotism every day. I see conspiracy theories given the same benefit of the doubt as science. I see lies told on the news without retraction or accountability.

Without a mass movement to educate and inform people about how to think critically and treat one another with dignity, technology will be of little help.

That said, I'm still hopeful that the tech community can help leapfrog this ugliness. Or at least, quantify the problem and begin working towards solutions.

I agree, particularly with your point about thinking critically and treating others with dignity, but at the risk of sounding overly pessimistic, why are you hopeful that the broader tech community can help, or even wants to help, leapfrog all this ugliness? As a somewhat outsider looking in, most of what passes for the tech community from what I can observe seems primarily focused with tracking users so that these users can be targeted with advertising to "aid" them in future purchasing decisions. I'm not entirely sold on the idea that this is the community that's going to instill positive change.

You know, maybe this is one of those junctures where if it can't help, then I question what it is we're all working towards. I thought when the internet came out that free access to all the world's information would enlighten people. Unfortunately, it seems to have had the opposite effect for a great many of us. There is so much ignorance in the face of such vast knowledge.

It might be time for us to ask ourselves if we really want our best and brightest to be chasing ad dollars anymore. Is this really the future we were envisioning in the 80s and 90s? It feels like so much rat racing and scrambling for a piece of the pie and playing zero-sum games. That loss of meaning could be part of what's at the heart of the discontent at large. Why can't we be inventing things that free people from labor and give people back a basic standard of living, the loss of which is what's driving so much of these feelings of disenfranchisement in the first place?

Sorry I don't have much of an answer, I'm kind of at a loss too.

As far as I can tell, trolls thrive on a narrow Overton Window.

That's a pretty interesting though, never thought of it that way. Makes sense that the more things you can talk about, the less shock value they can extract from it.

From another perspective you could say they're lowering the bar overall, and you're saying the only way to deal with them is that you de-sensitize yourself to them. Nietzsche springs to mind, about gazing into abysses and battling monsters.

Is this a conjecture or a claim? In my experience the Overton Window is wider in the US than most other places, but there is also a greater tendency towards trolling in US society as well. These assertions would be challenging to measure, but might be amenable to proxy representations.

It's just my own observation. It's definitely wider in the US than other places but also enforced differently, depending on where you go. In the US, we have a "soft" enforcement, although with doxxing, etc., it's not so soft in many cases.

Trolls have always dominated discourse once the discourse gets into the public arena. The noticeable difference today is that is tends to be more real time for more people.

The first problem is that the biggest trolls we have are our politicians (of every stripe and level), including any position that requires a public vote to enter.

Critical thinking is not taught today in education system and hence, we see less and less people able to refute or deal with trolls in any significant way.

I notice that Techdirt.com has a very usable means of dealing with trolls by the general reading community.

The second problem is that the label "troll" often gets applied to anyone who has a viewpoint that is different to prevailing group's viewpoint. So, someone who has a relatively left POV will be labelled a troll on a site that is relatively right, whereas someone who is relatively right will be labelled a troll on a site that is relatively left. There are all sorts of opposing viewpoints that have some level of validity which will be labelled as trollish by the opposing camp.

This is where critical thinking comes in handy, to be able to see the level of validity of an opposing viewpoint without heading down the ad hominen path of rebuttal.

Thirdly, there are those who have the goal of simply stirring up the general group by making comments that exist for the sole purpose of causing contention.

This is where critical thinking come in so that one can recognised such and apply the required filters and not get caught up in responding to those comments. In other words, Don't Feed The Trolls.

Finally, the term NAZI applies to a specific viewpoint and when you look into this viewpoint, there is nothing positive about it. Many who have been labelled nazi are no more NAZI than those who have applied that label to them.

It is a particularly pernicious POV and thoroughly debilitating to the well-being of society. Mind you, there are any number of other viewpoints that are just as bad for society both from the left and the right.

I reject the premise. The internet seems to have proven that medium shapes dialogue.

Wikipedia = encyclopedia quality product using only input from internet people

Reddit = Consistently entertaining jokes on news using only input from internet people

HN = A readable online discussion with points worth considering using only input from internet people

That's an pretry glass-half-full perspective. I would counter with this:

Wikipedia = stable, but mostly because a cabal of senior editors is firmly in charge. For all practical purposes, "anyone" can't edit Wikipedia anymore; try it, your edits will be reverted by somebody citing WP:WTFBBQ. It keeps trolling down, but at the cost of enforcing the party line.

Reddit = when it isn't trolls and miscreants, it's the same unfunny jokes upvoted ad nauseum

HN = good, but mostly because we're a self-selecting subset of the general population and there are legitimate grounds for banning any "off-topic" speech. This approach doesn't scale to the wider world.

I would add Stack Exchange (and particularly SO), full of invaluable information but you need to kneel before asking a question.

I do not know how the Meta groups are today, this was one of the most toxic groups I have ever seen.

If this article said anything, I missed it. Some novel approaches are being tried, such as crowdsourcing editing.

>by exploiting our tendency to believe that others we disagree with are merely misguided and can be educated

There's such a tendency? From my experience, it's much more likely that people believe that the other side is full of idiots.

I mean this week seems to have seen a very public and significant pushback against alt reich/gamergate/neonazi/MAGA idiots. It's been one of the worst weeks to be a white supremacist or racist in the US for quite some time.

So there are limits. Even Ted Cruz will eventually stand up and say: you know what, this is too fucking far. STOP.

They key to moving the Overton window is to do it gradually. Charlottesville was a massive overreach, and it backfired.

You're seriously lumping gamergate into that?

The one thing I can't stand, and think is unfair, is when a few bad apples ruin a decentralized movement for everyone. BLM had the exact same problem, idiots delegitimizing a movement fighting a very legitimate problem, and then those scattered incidents being collected to allow organized detractors to mischaracterize them.

Now we're seeing that happen with the rightwing protests as well. Don't get me wrong, I hate nazis and also do not at all agree with Trump supporters / people that want to keep the confederate status, but they're not all nazis.

Don't want to tread old ground here, but since the gamergate clusterfuck, pretty much every single one of the gamergate "thought leaders" has turned out, to nobody's surprise, to be a nazi.

Anyway, the connections between Nazism and gamergate have been extensively detailed across the web.

But here's Stormfront endorsing the movement:

https://archive.is/YyKpX

Wow, I didn't know people were still talking about gamergate like it was a controversy worth caring about. And what does it have to do with legitimate conservative causes? You're as bad as the president. "Not all the white men carrying torches and chanting 'Jews will not replace us' are bad people"

Not really, just don't like backhanded character assassination.

Also, not all the people protesting were chanting "Jews will not replace us". Oddly, some of the white nationalists that helped organize the protest were Jewish. And I also personally know many conservative people in favor of the statues that aren't nazis either (and at least for some, it's because they personally are Jewish, so it would make no sense).

Calling all conservatives white nationalists is the equivalent of calling all BLM protesters black nationalists, or all counter protesters antifa. It's just easy namecalling and almost always ends up just being very heavily cherrypicked images and such used to construct a narrative.

I completely agree with the statement 'not all conservatives are Nazis.' Just the people who show up at white nationalist rallies and decide to go with the mob. Why can't conservationism be about cutting taxes again? The repubs have a serious image problem turning a blind eye to this insane fringe and if they want to fix it they need to stomp it out and focus on economics or something less divisive.

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