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Comment by op03 | Hacker News Reader

Remove the Publicly visible Like Count and those kind of conversations and connections are easy.

The Like count makes people defensive or aggressive especially when they are called out in public leading to never ending reaction and counter reaction cycles.

Without that dumb random signal interfering in conversations all kinds of strange connections are possible.

I see it at work meetings between highly competitive people who dont have anything in common with each other. I see it on whatsapp chat groups.

But I don't see it happening on FB, Twitter and on the News. These mediums favor reaction-counter reaction over solutions.

Connection takes time and the right environment. Anyone who wants connection and solutions to trump reactions, please have those conversation in an environment without random signals interfering with the process.

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People were horrible to each other online long before modern social media, and indeed in print and in person long before that. While some people do indeed pursue likes for their own sake, it's not the root cause of social aggression.

It's not the catalyst, it's the accelerant - when you have 1000 points for your troll post you're sure as heck gonna do more of them.

That's the basic problem. All the motivation and encourgement is towards extreme, attention grabbing content.

To me it seems like an extremely solvable problem. Facebook could do an A/B test right now of removing all likes and see what happens. You'll get an answer as to some of the effects in a week. The question is what metrics you decide on determines "moderate" as opposed to "extreme".

To anyone at facebook - please dissuade me if I'm being naive here - I'm always looking to update my mental model of this.

I suspect the only naivety is with respect to what that would do to facebook's revenue.

Sure, if you have a network of troll buddies to upvote you. But you're assuming that everyone is motivated by the same incentives, in this case popularity. This is necessarily true, and one reason we know this is because some people keep trolling even when their accounts are banned or they're recognizable enough to be rejected by the community.

A lot of trolls are 'salt collectors' - saying obnoxious things to garner offended reactions and then screenshotting the comments of upset people to share with frens on a different platform. They don't care about popularity, only engagement. In organized influence operations, the goals of troll groups are to steal time or resources, or disrupt the cohesion of target groups.

All these negative behaviors existed before social media; they're well known to operators of fora, usenet discussion groups and so on, as well in the multiplayer game space. This taxonomy of motivators for 'griefer' gamers might also broaden you understanding of what drives trolling behavior: https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2017.1306109

I like how Slashdot handles it. Posts and comments do have counts, but the range is reasonably narrow, from -2 to +5. This allows for modding down noise, and modding up the signal, but this excludes the comparative phallometry typical for FB and twitter threads with hundreds and thousands on upvote counters.

“comparative phallometry” XD

The other cool thing about slashdot moderation is why it's +5, like insightful, funny, and the coveted "+5 Troll"

And not everyone can vote. As a casual but everyday user, I was issued mod points one time in over 20 years. (Though lately I rarely read or comment there anymore.)

What. People were acrimonious in the medieval ages. They didn't have like counts. This is such total bullshit.

I have seen it with friends busy bashing each other on Twitter/FB but being able to reconcile on a Whatsapp group or a private meeting.

Its not that on Whatsapp groups some members of the group aren't entertained by a good fight and goad/encourage both sides. Its that when its private and social status and social signaling is less of a priority and people you trust/respect can step in and cool things down and refocus the conversation on solutions.

In the public square there are thousands of retards who will show up to encourage both sides to keep fighting. It benefits the platforms. Conflict is much more engaging than a boring conversation on lets work out the details.

Maybe people are now, more often than not, talking to Human nodes in a network, and the network outperforms you in presenting data that will match a confirmation bias.

So it would imply that you can reason with an individual who isn’t acting as node.

Just because there was a bad thing in the medieval ages doesn't mean it can't be much worse now that it's turned into a point-scoring spectacle sport.

The like button is my performative social stupidity amplified. My stupid is loud enough already.

In all those generations of horrendous behaviour there are predictable patterns. At our best we are wonderful curious intelligent and kind, but in the heat of the moment, most of us don't have a lot of emotional self control, so we need to plan ahead to make better behaviour effortless and stupid behaviour effortful.

The like button is a mini version of the gun control debate, of course guns don't kill people on their own (actually... says boston robotics in the corner). I have close friend, a well respected law graduate now working in another field who said this week he'd love to have a weapon to wave at people who cut him off in traffic. This is a man who has worked for years to build a life and career, and he lacks the judgement to not escalate a trivial tiff with a stranger to a life or career ending act of stupidity.

Yeah, but now acrimony’s at webscale.

This doesn't make sense to me. There absolutely was a "like count". There were votes for decisions and there were citations for opinions. Academia is bitter for that reason. Yet, with the same incentives and much higher stakes they remained friends.

I don't know if Likes are the root of the issue, but they certainly don't help. Newsgroups had no such signaling and they could get really toxic.

The other problem with most online communities is that there's almost no limit on output. All else being equal, someone with an active offline life is going to have a smaller presence than someone who's terminally online, someone who spends more time listening to others is going to have a smaller presence than someone who spends more time talking, someone who puts more effort into their posts (proofreading, look up evidence) is going to have a smaller presence than someone who haphazardly shoots off comments, and someone who reserves comments for when they have something important to contribute is going to have less of a presence than someone who comments on things they don't know anything about.

Things like mods (most people don't have the time commitment), voting (terminally online people will be able to vote earlier and more often, driving the conversation), front page thresholds (a small group of people acting as filters for new submissions), and time limited submissions (the longer you wait to comment the more likely the conversation will have died) just skews things even more.

For all the discussion about the low quality of online conversations, there seems to be very little discussion about the environments we've created and what kind of discussion these environments encourage.

Even if the counts are private, counters create an ulterior motive beyond substantive discourse in the desire to collect likes. Their signals constrain speech as posts are authored. Just like the profit motive, the like motive greatly skews reality from beneath the surface of what is being said.

And to disagree with someone, you should have to at least open your mouth. That's a conversation. To just be able to dislike or downvote let alone anonymously is harmful for everyone, even the person downvoting. Instead of exercising speech, it's a slap on the wrist response.

Removing context removes nuance, and removing nuance removes intellect.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24523014.

Good luck Mr. Dan. I don't envy you right now.

I'm sorry, but this is wildly naive. It isn't "likes" that are causing the problem. It is things like the fact that one side appears to be in the early stages[1] of a UN defined genocide[2]. I'm not going to be friendly to you if you think lower taxes or some other excuse is more important than the human and civil rights abuses that party supports.

[1] - https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/09/17/hyster...

[2] - https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml

Both sides abuse civil rights when it suits them.

Uninformed sterilization has happened in the past in this country too. Look at doctors at some Native American reservations. It's quite abhorrent to stereotype an entire of party based on the sensationalism of an extremely small subset of actors.

Also the 'band wagon' effect is a widely documented cognitive bias - so there is merit to the idea that "likes" can create bias.

>It's quite abhorrent to stereotype an entire of party based on the sensationalism of an extremely small subset of actors.

Meanwhile the president was just on a stage in Minnesota talking about "racehorse theory"[1]. His biographer has previously described it as follows: "The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development. They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring."[2]

I don't know where I would get the idea that he is in support of eugenics.

[1] - https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1307124621389463553

[2] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-tru...

Again, you are using the statements/actions of an extremely small subset to stereotype an entire party (tens or hundreds of millions of people).

I am using the words of the president and leader of the party. The party that abandoned precedent a refused to draft a platform in 2020, instead choosing to just support the president.

So did he say it while in office? Did he create a policy or direct agencies to engage in eugenics? Please tell me where there is any evidence of a state-sanctioned offense of this nature.

Using your logic, we should label the Democrat party the same because under Carter's watch Native Americans were sterilized and the party supports an organization started by a eugenics advocate (Planned Parenthood). Don't forget Biden's comments on race while in office...

Hold the perpetrating individuals accountable and stop stereotyping entire classes of people.

Click on that Twitter link. Trump said these things yesterday. You are comparing something that happened literally yesterday to things that happened 4 decades or even over a century ago.

There's a bunch of stuff in that link, yet I didn't see a part advocating for eugenics.

The whole reason most people join that side is that it’s no longer safe to publicly express any opinion that isn’t either anodyne or extreme. This generates constant, subtle pressure which - over years - drives increasingly extreme behaviour.

Yes, I think the far right have gone much further than the far left in that regard; however, IMO its a question of when, rather than if, social progressives take up arms (given the path I see social media taking).

We need to get off public-by-default platforms that feel semiprivate. Everyone gets bad/wrong ideas; talking about them with our friends is how we stop them before they become part of our identity, but it’s no longer safe to do that.

If you think being asked to be more PC is such an affront that you turn your back on literal genocide, then I'm not going to be your friend.

If a government moves forward with literal genocide, I won't blame any person who takes up arms against it.

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Are the author's writing for your site, are you aggregating, or both? Either way, I bookmarked it. Seems like a very interesting product!

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