Hacker News Reader

More critique to add on to the article (attaching to the thread since I like to similar topics grouped together for discourse reasons):

One of the author's key points is that the economics of networks is the reason for poor discourse. Money & influence are identified as the drivers of bad behavior.

But this has only inspired the author to write the very hand-wavy outrage media piece that is in the exact same nature as the media that they are condemning. No real solutions, no real framing of the problem in a way that can be solved. In short, the article is created by the exact system the article complains about.

If you think that the economic incentives of discourse is broken, there's real "journalistic" work to do. Propose an economic model of "value creation". Show, through modeling, how easy it is for bad behavior to dominate with the given market conditions. Isolate and propose policies that would change behavior. Model out what should happen if those changes were to take place. And then call for a real world test to see if that really happens.

> The, mostly, free discourse we have on the internet today is more democratic than it was prior to the Gutenberg revolution or the rise of radio.

Is this true I wonder? Sure anybody can post, but we aren't all heard equally, at least not along standard social media channels where upvotes and algorithms determine who hears your voice - and these tools can be gamed (to what degree? I don't know)

A world where anybody can speak but only the powerful can be heard isn't much different from the world where only the powerful can speak.

To that end, I wonder if a systematic study could be done to see just how equal social media really is.

Are we seeing a redistribution of the power of speech/press back to the people, or simply a shift of power to those who know how (and have the funding) to control it?

This is an equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome issue.

Part of competing in the current marketplace of ideas isn't just the quality of your idea it's your ability to market it. Whether you particularly like that aspect of our public discourse is irrelevant to the current state. The difference here is that the toolkit of getting your message amplified has a much lower bar to entry now than it did before (a nobody with a good tweet can get their video or soundcloud profile in front of millions of eyes). It's probably the case that we're just seeing a shift in the mix of actors who hold power, but the trend has been towards it being easier for people to enter the fight.

My assumption is that the easier it is for people to participate the more we'll trend towards a steady state where the quality of your ideas and your ability to sell them will be the deciding factor in your reach. As opposed to having a dominant advantage because your [race | social caste | profession | political party] has captured the medium of communication and intellectual production. Unfortunately I think we're seeing those groups (2,3, and 4 primarily) lashing out and trying to maintain their advantage to the general detriment of society.

> My assumption is that the easier it is for people to participate the more we'll trend towards a steady state where the quality of your ideas and your ability to sell them will be the deciding factor in your reach. As opposed to having a dominant advantage because your [race | social caste | profession | political party] has captured the medium of communication and intellectual production. Unfortunately I think we're seeing those groups (2,3, and 4 primarily) lashing out and trying to maintain their advantage to the general detriment of society.

I agree with the last part of this but maybe not the first. I think it's pretty presumptive that just because anybody can put content out there that there will be anything close to an even playing field. Only time will tell.

For an early internet example: the distributed nature of the internet meant that in theory anybody could create and publish their own platform. Anyone with good ideas should easily be able to buy a domain and enter the web marketplace.

In the modern world, only a few websites dominate the vast majority of eyeballs. This isn't how it has to be, but this is how reality has played out. If you want a platform with users you need at minimum to treat it like a part time job, and possibly a few million in venture capital to boot.

Or, to put it another way, centralization was a more powerful force than quality in choice of platform. I argue this may happen to some degree with content itself (or likely already does. Look at top YouTube channels and decide for yourself.)

There's no doubting that modern internet and modern discourse is in theory open, but I find a lot of doubt that it's open in practice. I can't help but read an upvoted link on Reddit and wonder if there's an upvote farm behind it or social marketing firm carefully crafting it, as opposed to an individuals voice.

Some platforms have even higher barriers to entry, like YouTube or twitch.tv, good luck getting more than 10 views as an individual there unless you make it atleast a part time job. But I'm sure a well funded source can make a video that looks like a small time content creator but pushes their view or their product.

Well said..

Unfortunately, i think few espouse such beliefs or ideas.

Further, it's far easier and more seductive to ensure that opinions one doesn't like can be censored or shamed into silence rather than win with better ideas.

I'm reminded of Feynman's experience in the arts discussing "The ethics of inequality in the fragmentation of knowledge."

He eventually extracted from the Jesuit priest that "fragmentation" merely meant that the Catholic Church didn't control knowledge like they had in the 13th century.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/search?page=26&q=Richard+Fe...

> Anyone who doesn't agree with my conclusion obviously shouldn't be listened to because they're part of the problem.

It's actually kind of ironic that the OP indulges in such blatant well-poisoning, when that's exactly the kind of fallacious argument that ruins public discourse.

On the broader issue, while I don't agree with gatekeeping, I do think it's important to educate people about when social media is at its best and when it's at its worst. Among relatively small groups of people who already have a fairly strong connection - e.g. families, clubs, hobbies - but can't readily get together in person, social media can do a lot of good. Corporate accounts, or accounts with a million effectively anonymous followers? Generally garbage. Note that these distinctions are easily made based on structure, not content. Without getting into the issue of who should do what about these less beneficial structures, I think we'd be better off without them.

But what about the public forum run by profit driven private entities!

At risk of losing some people by stating some loose observations and findings with faux-confidence:

Dense networks of human relations tend to lead to those humans creating specific network topologies in which liberal values tend to emerge. In places where the network is sparsed (relative to elsewhere), it is here we find reduced empathy for distant others, mistrust, populism, higher social distance between any two random nodes overall, and also bastions of socially conservative thought.

My growing belief is that most social conservativism is network damage to the social fabric. But if that sounds slippery, don't worry: there is no need to purge it, as reducing the average path length in the network will see that happen on its own. Pluralistic values and greater ability to form consensus arises in spaces where we re-weave the social fabric into the sorts of topologies that cities tend to permute through on their own.

Be very skeptical due to my lack of citing sources, but I share the above in earnest with this comment left in haste <3

EDIT: to be clear, I believe there is also some "illness" in the progressive left as well, due to their social distance from certain groups as well. The network is sick. A healed network will be some place in between, at a place we can all live with :)

This seems mostly like handwaved logic though, why don't you consider liberalism a form of populism for example? After all, the political values you're describing arise by your own admission in areas of high density. How can something be populist and yet also targeted towards a population that you've defined as being the more minor or otherwise less dense? Not that it'd be correct either, but I could take the same elements you've used and describe Liberalism as xenophobic towards anything that doesn't share its values. I really am trying to see how you arrived at the point you did but it mostly just seems like you decided one side was wrong first and developed your explanation afterwards.

This is a a circular argument and somewhat disingenuous. You presuppose that liberal values emerge from a "denser network", which at surface level seems fine. Except definitionally I argue that pluralism itself doesn't work without defined in groups and out groups (denoting the plurality of the group). This is inherently "anti-liberal" in the sense that it requires continued in group and out group hostility to maintain the segmentation.

Looking into history at say, early Iberia, the plurality was maintained by intense violence between muslim and christian populations living in proximity to each other. In order to maintain this plurality the in group had to drastically enforce conformity while in combat with the out group to maintain topological cohesion.

To diagnose the social problems rising in the country as "network damage" is almost calling people who disagree with what I imagine is your stance as mentally ill. That is a dangerous road to move down and I would advise you to reconsider or at least allow for the nuance that potentially this isn't just about identifying characteristics of a population feeling threatened by another group.

But rather this could a manifestation of a very real feeling of insecurity that is not caused by lets just say it, racial tensions, and perhaps more of an economic anxiety bent. If Maslow isn't getting his due, then the real conversation is how can people move to middle ground feel more unified by shared prosperity.

Othering people based on a diagnosis of "not enough different people they talked to" adds to the problem instead of addresses it.

Be very skeptical due to my lack of citing sources, but I share the above in earnest with this comment left in haste <3

EDIT: Clarity

Sorry, didn't mean to imply one side as mentally ill. I'll walk it back a bit: If there's an illness, both poles have responsibility. And maybe only ill in the sense that they will break the whole together. Due to historic districting and balance of power in the USA at least, the illness on the right seems to be "winning" in the political arena there. But it'd be a comparable powderkeg if the far left got their people in without laying a foundation for consensus-building. The conservative right doesn't have as much culture of consensus-building in its DNA imho, so it's hard to look to them for any hope of resolution to the crisis of social distance.

Bah, sorry, this is like a "drinks in bar" level of uff-the-cuff conversation on my part. Your reply was wonderful though :)

> Othering people based on a diagnosis of "not enough different people they talked to" adds to the problem instead of addresses it.

Fwiw, there's a really rad Santa Fe Institute podcast that addresses that very thing, which I'm listening to right now. tl;dr - we're all terribly biased but mostly just about people we DON'T have connection to, while we're FANTASTICALLY great integrators and estimators of even small nuances in the social fabrics that we're directly in conversation with. https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/9-U7UI7GsP

Sometimes "drinks in a bar" level conversation can be the most rewarding. Let me know if you want to get a drink and talk about it.

I'll cede that both poles have responsibility and that the conservative right have unified themselves mostly on a shared set of identities with little room for consensus, this is a problem.

But I think we need to remove ourselves from totally binary thinking (he says as a he programs all the time) and separate some concepts like neo liberal financial models from liberal social principles as I bet we would agree on the social and disagree on the financial. I'm assuming a lot so please correct me where I'm wrong. Reactionary populism is very often correlated to what are perceived to be unfair economic policy (see "reparation" payments of post world war 1 germany to france...ended tragically in 1945).

Dismissing the "conservatives" as on unified entity despite their strong coalition of identity misrepresents the problem as I see it.

Don't suppose you're in Toronto? :)

>My growing belief is that most social conservativism is network damage to the social fabric.

I could make the exact same argument (also without sources, since I'm lazy tonight) but in the inverse, that most social liberalism is caused by network damage to the social fabric - and I bet I could make a much more compelling argument, given that the contemporary brand of social liberalism (i.e. social Progressivism) sees breaking down traditional social fabrics as an axiomatic good.

>Pluralistic values and greater ability to form consensus arises in spaces where we re-weave the social fabric into the sorts of topologies that cities tend to permute through on their own.

This only happens when the topologies are not organic, but artificial. And to top it all off these new topologies still require elite support to supplant the organic ones. The only reason a place like San Francisco still draws people (to the extent that it actually does; I keep seeing stories here and elsewhere about people quitting that place in droves) is because of an Elite network that is seriously incentivized to squeeze out every last benefit they can from their existing network effects before it crashes and burns.

I'd tend to agree. Ironically "othering" is one of the strongest social binders there is, see: religion, nationalism, etc.

This isn't really "othering", though. It's similar to a two-sided-market, where the Elites sit as the middle-platform and transmit value between the existing state or corporate institutions and the, well, not-elite. And then this latter group transmits value back via an extraction mechanism employed by this Elite.

>Dense networks of human relations tend to lead to those humans creating specific network topologies in which liberal values tend to emerge. In places where the network is sparsed (relative to elsewhere), it is here we find reduced empathy, mistrust, populism, increased social distance between any two random nodes, and also bastions of socially conservative thought.

Indeed. People in large cities hardly talk to one another outside of ordering coffee. People in Appalachia talk to each other constantly. Is it any wonder that the sparse social networks of densely populated areas result in reduced empathy, mistrust, populism, increased social distance between any two random nodes and also bastions of socially conservative thought.

SF still sounds like it did in the 70s. You'd think a place could have gotten some new ideas since Computer Lib/Dream Machines was published there.

EDIT2: acknowledging my shitty tone and that I deserve downvotes. I'll try harder next time not to fall into the trap of shallowly divisive statements