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Comment by bhawks | Hacker News Reader

A significant part of the problem is social media technology and our relationship with it. The platforms encourage low effort hot takes and gamify narcissistic tendencies (likes, karma, rts, friends, followers). Nuanced discussion or having a deep engagement with a person is often impossible. It fosters divisiveness and tribalism at an amazing scale.

I'd wager in a world without Twitter, Facebook, et al we'd have a healthier & stronger society. Humans aren't meant to communicate this way and numerous studies show the physiological toll on the individual and we are all witnessing the societal toll play out in front of us.

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On top of that, like being in cars, it lobotomizes our empathy towards those we're interacting with, creating the perfect storm of toxic interaction.

My thoughts on this are that we are in a period of

Low friction to create content => cheap, easy, mass volumes of content

AND no curation based on accuracy, scientific rigor, and truthfulness.

In fact the curation is biased heavily towards content which makes the reader strongly feel something. Outrage, joy, sadness... They acknowledge those feelings by sharing, tweeting, liking, upvoting. All measured by the proxy metric "engagement".

"Engagement" is the enemy in these issues as while it symbolizes usage to a social media company trying to blitz scale, in actuality it symbolizes content that made someone feel a strong emotion and NOT content that is accurate, truthful, and scientific.

Everyone is optimizing for content to go viral in order to get eyeballs on it and that automatically means content skewed to generate outrage, sadness, or joy. And as the competitions heats up, the content has to become even further optimized for feelings generation in order to win out over other similarly skewed content.

This is why social media unintentionally became one of the biggest problems that truth and science has ever faced.

Social media, if anything, played a positive role and showed its strengths. Thanks to early warners, some people managed to keep their sanity, some others found flaws in studies, some others were warning people while the media was being partisan, some others taught people how to behave while government and the media were delirious about going/not going to protests/rallies etc. The "media of record" will never admit it, but the internet/social media proved that "access to multifaceted information" dominates over "parroting the elites". People are learning to distrust the mainstream elites, and that's a good thing.

> Nuanced discussion or having a deep engagement with a person is often impossible.

Of course this is impossible if the other party is not interested, but the format doesn't prevent engagement. The problem is that this engagement takes work and is rewarded less than the "hot takes" you describe.

The literature on trust metrics that Raph has made a contribution to does suggest that the gamification can be tuned to reward constructive interactions. Given the recent advertiser boycott of Facebook, it is possible that there is now an incentive for applying these ideas in the context of popular social metrics.

Prevent might be too strong a description, but discourage deeper engagement while radically facilitating the opposite?

> can be tuned

Sure, maybe. But thus far they haven't been. I'm a bit dubious that intentional interventions wouldn't also have their own substantial negative effects.

Our online communications platforms have a much greater effect on many people than a great many drugs that we only make available by prescription do... yet we've tapped in most of the country to them on a 16-hour a day central line drip feed before we ever really began studying their effects.

> But thus far they haven't been.

They haven't been because the social media platforms have been chasing engagement as their only target and that favours toxicity. But many advertisers are allergic to toxicity: there may be space for a social media platform that tries to avoid the toxic forms of engagement.

> I'm a bit dubious that intentional interventions wouldn't also have their own substantial negative effects.

The current system has been shaped by intentional interventions. The alternative regime should be judged relative to the status quo.

I recommend Richard Seymour's 'The Twittering Machine' on the nature of those intentional interventions; cf. review: https://www.rs21.org.uk/2019/11/16/review-the-twittering-mac...

I’d like to make a similar argument for traditional mass media.. Readers don’t get to have nuanced discussions with content producers (journalist,editors,etc). This leads to not necessarily prosocial tendencies exhibited in, eg, the NYT doxxing of SSC or Vice not doing Naomi Wu a solid. Perhaps this is what Taleb may ascribe to a lack of skin in game? In the social web there is however the possibility of getting burned by the mob, so hmmmm.

Continuing on that thought - gamification of social media is a mechanism of mass manipulation. I think the author’s intent is to create resiliency. Kudos!

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