Hacker News Reader

> I think "Right problem, wrong solution". The reason people mock bad ideas on Twitter is probably because Twitter has a character limit. Refuting bad ideas often takes longer than 240 characters.

It's not even the right problem.

The problem is not mocking people, disagreeing with them or whatever (incidentally the twitter character limit doesn't preclude external links or tweet chains, which are extremely common at least in science twitter). It's that doing so through a retweet (or a boost) is a signal to followers, and that can send hordes harassing a single person, because it's very easy for followers to click on the RT/boost and reply, and they're not going to see that thousands of people already did exactly that.

And the person at the other end of the pipe has to deal with a flood of burning garbage.

And more generally that kind of crap is easily weaponisable, twitter provides few tools to deal with it, and they don't usually apply their own rules. I don't know that Mastodon is any better.

Fundamentally, social platforms are only good so long as they've not reached their eternal September yet, or are actively prevented from doing so through active and unforgiving moderation — which can have its own issues.

> And more generally that kind of crap is easily weaponisable, twitter provides few tools to deal with it, and they don't usually apply their own rules. I don't know that Mastodon is any better.

The key difference here is that, once we've noticed that this lack of context (ie..."has someone already made the point about $G_OUTGROUP_MEMBER_23049 or $G_OUTGROUP_234 that I'm going to make?")...we can actually change the code to Mastodon/whatever fediverse server/client to provide solutions to it(see, for example, pleroma's "did you type 'open source' when you mean 'free software'?). Technical measures could be considered and tested in small instances and then scaled up as they are found to work/not work.

With birdsite you just throw up your hands and say "well, the corporation doesn't think it's a priority. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ "

Is this really such a big problem, especially for the average user, to make it a key feature of the platform?

Sure, occasionally an otherwise obscure person might find themselves at the end of an unexpected shitstorm, but otherwise it generally affects more prominent users, who are well aware that anything mildly controversial can turn into lots of angry replies.

Is that even a real problem? Isn't it actually valuable information to know that people get really angry about this-and-that? Aren't researchers able to use this data to learn something about human behavior?

Seems to me like people want to blame technology for something that's really amplified human nature. A rehashing the old story of the "basically good" human corrupted by some foreign evil.

> Sure, occasionally an otherwise obscure person might find themselves at the end of an unexpected shitstorm, but otherwise it generally affects more prominent users, who are well aware that anything mildly controversial can turn into lots of angry replies.

And that's supposed to be a good or even neutral thing… how?

> Is that even a real problem?

Very much so.

> Isn't it actually valuable information to know that people get really angry about this-and-that?

Not really, and that isn't even relevant to the issue of it actively harming people.

> Seems to me like people want to blame technology for something that's really amplified human nature. A rehashing the old story of the "basically good" human corrupted by some foreign evil.

You're the only one talking about "basically good human". The amplification of human nature is the very issue at hand, "human nature" has not evolved in that context and while it may work at small scales it demonstrably does not at the scales we're involved in. As a result it is ethically and functionally necessary for the tool to mitigate human nature since they're the ones amplifying it to downright and outright harmful levels.

It might be human nature and interesting from some perspective, but that doesn't mean it's good or fun to be a part of. It may be human nature for everyone in Thunderdome where a sign says "only one man leaves alive" to choose to fight brutally to death, but that doesn't mean we should continue or promote hanging out in Thunderdome over alternatives that encourage other parts of human nature instead.

>Sure, occasionally an otherwise obscure person might find themselves at the end of an unexpected shitstorm, but otherwise it generally affects more prominent users, who are well aware that anything mildly controversial can turn into lots of angry replies.

People often join social networks to follow, interact with, or become prominent people, so it is a problem for them if all of those prominent people are continually sacrificed.

CGPGrey has a great description of this problem with his video "This video will make you angry":

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

The gist is that pithy, low-effort strawmans of an opposing tribe are highly attractive and contagious memes.

I don't think it has anything specific to do with Twitter. You see similar issues everywhere: Facebook, Reddit, and of course meatspace. It's a human problem.

Twitter and the short character-limit may magnify it a bit, I'll admit that. But the actual problem can't be solved on Twitter or Mastodon. Each individual needs to be aware of this human problem and to constantly make an effort to notice and counteract it in their own brain (which is very difficult and error prone). Perhaps if enough people start doing that more, then cultural change will take place. I don't know.

>But the actual problem can't be solved on Twitter or Mastodon. Each individual needs to be aware of this human problem and to constantly make an effort to notice and counteract it in their own brain (which is very difficult and error prone). Perhaps if enough people start doing that more, then cultural change will take place. I don't know.

Twitter has a profit incentive against people solving this problem. Places like Mastodon at least have the possibility of designing against the issue or somehow encouraging education about it.

> I think "Right problem, wrong solution". The reason people mock bad ideas on Twitter is probably because Twitter has a character limit.

Well, I didn't mention it in the post, but Mastodon also ups the character limit to 500 characters (really, even more, because links always count as 24 chars, regardless of actual length). So if you're right that that's part of the problem, then it's also partly addressed.

But I think the bigger issue is that retweets encourage you to try to refute/mock/engage with bad ideas in a tweet. With Mastodon/boots, users tend to just ignore bad ideas (or, if they're really bad, respond at length in a blog/medium post)

You're right that it could become too much of an echo chamber, but it will at least avoid becoming a rage-generator.

"Rage generator"

I've been calling certain social platforms and areas "hate lasers" for a while.

> Refuting bad ideas often takes longer than 240 characters.

Not necessarily true.

> Showing bad ideas to be bad is very important in civil discourse, not being able to point out bad ideas by "retweeting" them with commentary will likely make this social network an echo chamber devoid of intellectual curiosity

Theoretically yes, but the problem with Twitter is not "properly" refuting ideas, because there is no such thing as absolute truth when it comes to human interactions. People will tend to believe whatever they want, independent of facts. Furthermore, people may interpret the same fact in completely diverging ways, depending on their prior conceptions.

Not allowing awfulness to spread could be more efficient than helplessly trying to refute it.

> Not allowing awfulness to spread could be more efficient than helplessly trying to refute it.

Didn't you just basically say that what is "awful" is subjective? You're basically saying "maybe echo chambers are better".

I generally agree with "people will tend to believe whatever they want", but many people do change their minds, especially as they age. Pushing people into the underground just makes them more extreme.

Also, don't underestimate the power of public mockery. What makes Nazism most unattractive isn't the fact that it's abhorrent from some moral perspective (that not everybody shares), it's the fact that most actual Nazis are total losers by every measure.

> Didn't you just basically say that what is "awful" is subjective? You're basically saying "maybe echo chambers are better".

Yes, I did. Instead of retweeting, you let the awfulness die out instead of getting more attention, i.e., don't let opinions escalate. Awfulness here doesn't have to be what I consider to be awful. And I don't see what this has to do with "maybe echo chambers are better".

Now, I don't know whether that would be more efficient or not - it could, right?. Neither of us know, so perhaps the Mastodon experiment may teach us something.

Twitter didn't used to have retweets with comments but people did basically the same thing using manual retweets or . replies. I imagine if Mastodon develops a big partisan political community the same thing will happen there.

Yeah, that particular criticism dances right up to "The problem with Twitter is that people are using it".

The number of people that will take the time and effort to verify the things that they read or hear pales in comparison to those that cherry pick whatever fits their biases, and everyone is limited in time and attention span. It's a signal to noise problem, and while technical people have a mental model of this problem in the concept of DDoS attacks, I would guess that many people lack awareness of how bad information can simply clog their attentional pipeline and exhaust motivation to verify.

Mastodon defaults to a character limit of 500. Instance maintainers may change this - mine's got the highest limit of any I know at 7777, for instance. (And mechanisms I won't get into to make it so that you can't spam someone with really long toots.)

You can talk about bad ideas without retweeting them, too, you know.

It's not really a solution. Screen shot; toot with your mocking comments.