Social Media: An Apology
datatracker.ietf.org
datatracker.ietf.org
100% true.
Another good data point is John Gabriel's Great Internet Fuckwad Theory: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
That was written 14 years ago, effectively before modern social media. This problem has been a long time coming. The problem isn't that we couldn't know. It's that people kept thinking it would magically be different this time.
I don't think that's the problem, rather it's that the overwhelming majority of people currently on the internet are completely unaware there was a 'last time'.
Generally just this.
But at best, they had an incredibly rosy view of what was going on. E.g., looking back, a Twitter founder claims that in 2006 everyone "was cool": https://twitter.com/rasmus_kleis/status/974552443789836288
Given Gabriel's theory, that's obvious bunk. And having talked to some online community pioneers, abuse started pretty much from the get go. Look at all the replies I got when I brought it up on Twitter, for example. Story after story of early experiences of trolling, abuse, etc: https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/974847531317211136
There was (and is) a strong strain of technoutopianism, where we take the shiny new possibility and project a perfect future onto it. This goes back at least as far as the introduction of the telegraph, which many thought would bring about world peace: https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Ninetee...
As Neiwart documents, though, many of the terrible people online today are intellectual descendants of the terrible people who were doing their social networking in person and via the mail: https://www.amazon.com/Alt-America-Rise-Radical-Right-Trump/...
You and Rasmus twist Ev's words to somehow be about oppression instead of what he clearly meant: the early internet was inhabited by geeks and he (a geek) liked that. It's also clear that he's talking more about spammers than abusers. Of course with scale both will ramp up.
Secondly we see the presentation of a hard left view as the only valid way of thinking. Pro-gun people showing up to a forum about gun control is in no way abuse, it's the internet fulfilling its promise of giving everyone a voice (even if you don't agree with them).
Yes, there have always been trolls, spammers, jerks, loudmouths... What social media seems to have created is a unique culture of grievance hunting, virtue signalling and a worship of victimhood.
Again, please don't take this as a personal attack, it's just an observation from someone who's been on the internet for a really long time.
I also think I'm reading Ev just fine. He says "We laid down fundamental architectures that had assumptions that didn’t account for bad behavior." As one of Twitter's first users and a former Twitter employee, I think he's right. But when Twitter started in 2006, people had been behaving badly on the Internet for a long time, and it was far from being a "just nerds" place. The September that Never Ended started 13 years before Twitter, for example.
I also don't believe that my view is "hard left". I'm a gun owner, and am fine with people talking about guns. You're distorting what I said, which is that "rabid pro-gun types turned up to aggressively dominate and/or ruin the [gun control] forum". We were talking about abuse, and this was given as an example of clear forum abuse. Yes, gun owners can participate usefully in gun control forums, but being pro-gun does mean you can't be abusive.
I think facebook has easily proven that the anonymity part of that equation is _very_ optional.
The post is worth the quick read; I like the suggestion that the solution is more clearly implicit this way.
[1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/18/the-coroll...
"Careful what you say online" is a big part of what we teach our kids nowadays. It's a variant of "careful what you say in public", with everything now being public.
On a personal note, I once was denied a job based on the fact that I made a one-off comment 5 years previous that I was starting to dislike Object Oriented Programming. That's all it took to convince this company I wasn't fit to work for them.
If a comment that innocuous can be used as a reason not to hire, then you have two choices: never say anything online ever or stop worrying about it. I opt for the latter. So has most of Gen Z. Worrying if expressing utter mundanity online is going to be used against you is no way to live.
> We will do better.
Yeah, I don't think so.
2.4. Whisky
For those unable to leave social media or otherwise curtail their use.
People got to this ridiculous level of childlike annoyance at the mere existence of dissent through group effects alone, but compounding it by literally removing any form of conflict seems like the worst solution possible.
The solution to people acting terribly on the public square shouldn't be to remove it.
I think he's saying that that the ease of which we can cut out any information that challenges our beliefs does more harm than good.
I'm sure you're a fine, upstanding, rational person who will always consider every viewpoint and come to a reasoned conclusion based on the facts every time and won't let emotions dictate any part of your decision.
However, not everyone is so disciplined. Don't consider the rational actor. Consider the irrational. Consider the flat-earther who can personally silence any sources that provide evidence to the contrary. Just stuck in their little bubble of misinformation. Then when something does sneak through their filter, they'll regard it as the anomaly because everything else they see confirms what they already know.
Now, there is some benefit to being able to silence certain opinions. I for one don't need flat-earthers constantly pushing their narrative that flies in the face of facts. But, then again, they feel the same way. I believe I've considered their evidence and their viewpoint fairly and have come to a conclusion rationally. But so do they. I believe I'm right, I'm fairly certain of it. But so are they.
It comes down to believing that personal abuse should be silenced. If I'm just blatantly attacking you or you're attacking me with no other goal but to be insulting, then being able to block each other seems fine. But to be able to silence information just because you disagree with it seems a bit more dodgy.
Reddit fitness mods seem to be sponsoring workouts. Instead of doing the methods that work, they are peddling a few select workouts that have questionable effectiveness.
So they ban people for suggesting other plans, which only compounds in resentment. It seems almost daily topics talking about Starting Strength workouts are deleted, but there are too many people that already know about it.
Talk about a weird community to be part of..
But I'm relentless in cutting consistently negative people from my social media feeds, and its made my personal experience so much better.
While appreciate the principles you're discussing, I just don't need the constant negativity.
Of course the great thing about the web is also that it's so big. We don't need to literally silence the assholes. They should feel free to congregate in various Youtube comment threads and on boards like 4chan and voat.
It's the inclusion.
Before, if you had a really socially unacceptable opinion, you couldn't really voice it without attracting a lot of heat. Now, you can throw your voice into the aether and get back thousands of people across the world who feel the same way you do. Whether if you're into collecting stamps, ancient alien conspiracies, or Nazi furry cosplay.
Everything becomes normalized to a degree. The motto "strength in numbers" becomes the issue.
However, there are some good things that have come from this. Gay people, transgender people, people with various mental illnesses all have a place to come together without having to face the judgment of the people in their communities. It's the largest alcoholics anonymous meeting you could want.
American society no longer has those mechanisms either. They were dismantled in the 50s and 60s under the opinion that they were too restrictive and stifling.
Are you really arguing that you have a right to pick a person at random and coerce them into at least seeing what you have to say before making a decision to ignore you?
I'm arguing that such an action has terrible ramifications on a large enough scale.
These are not mutually exclusive. There's no reason that we can't construct places where public discourse of controversial ideas is possible yet people are not forced to engage in such.
It's certainly something we haven't succeeded at yet, and a hard problem altogether, but we do need it otherwise we're doomed to that one dystopia where "nobody is questioned yet nobody is right".
On the contrary, I think there should be far more blocklists.
Opponents of blocklists get themselves wound up over the potential productive conversations that might occur were it not for the overzealous filtering of the lists. But I don't see any positive value in that potential. The overwhelming majority of potential 1:1 political debates never occur, and nobody cares. Why should I then be concerned over potential Twitter debates, which are adversely selected for toxicity?
People who are passionate about the evils of blocklists also have a hard time not coming across like the sea lion from the cartoon.
Umberto Eco
Apparently the Elders of the Internet are too old to know about spell-check :-D
I currently try to employ mitigation methods 2.3 and 2.4. If you slip on 2.3 you can generally compensate by leaning more heavily on 2.4.
"Okay"