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Comment by patagonia | Hacker News Reader

Politics maybe off topic, but this is partially our fault. It’s always frustrated me that politics are largely unaddressed on HN. Not talking about it doesn’t make it not so.

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Politics aren't unaddressed. There have been plenty of political threads this year, and every year. At the same time, political flames will take over the site completely if allowed to, so we can't allow them to. This is a hard problem.

If you or anyone want to know how we think about that problem, there are a lot of past explanations at these links:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

At this point, I don't believe this story can be categorized as simply "politics." This is momentous historical event that's absolutely unprecedented in modern U.S. history.

Agreed. This story has moved beyond “politics” narrowly speaking. I’m suggesting that, by not discussing actual politics the people building the technologies enabling the the causes of today, it’s irresponsible.

This. Facebook and the other social networks have spent a decade and a half curating echo chambers for insanity and this is the predictable result. It's been a long, slow buildup to this, not quite another McVeigh moment but not too far from it.

What will it take for tech people to acknowledge that, combined with the fake-drama-soaked media, they've built something socially corrosive?

Is it avoidable though? Social media might be accelerating the development of echo chambers, but the underlying reason why it works is because people seem to enjoy tribalism. I'm not sure that connecting people globally could end up in any other way. Most people are not capable of being part of a large community of like minded people and still keep objectiveness and perspective. This is something I've been thinking about a lot, and it seems rather hopeless. I'd love to have my mind changed.

I wont change your mind, but maybe we can share more nuanced reasons for the modern issue -

I'll argue, strongly everything regarding Social Media/ misinformation / content security is an epiphenomena of : the shape, rate and self forming nature of modern human communication networks.

The pace of interaction and information has simply overwhelmed the ability of human one on one interaction.

Most of our actions are with a mobile phone near us, meaning that the social sphere is directly with us and only a twitter/FB/Reddit/HN glance away.

Doesn't help that the sites need to be competitively addictive to be financially viable.

So no matter how much you interact on a 1 on 1 basis, a few seconds after they return to their phone they are part of the new outrage cycle.

Do note that the whole thing above is doable with cable television news as well.

So you can, for a little bit, look at the network structure and pace, while looking at humans as connected processing hubs that are getting compromised.

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Heres an actual paper showing that Misinformation based communication travels differently than "Fact" based information https://www.pnas.org/content/113/3/554.full.

I completely agree with everything you've said. My main point is that I suspect this is a natural development even with all economic incentives and Algorithms set aside. Facebook et. al. are capitalizing on social psychology that would be there even if they weren't. You can see the same sort of echo chambers taking shape in other fora such as 4chan, Reddit and Mastodon. These do not incorporate the Algorithms that are often solely blamed for the outrage cycle.

If people both A) Enjoy to be part of communities of like minded people B) Cannot stay objective and keep perspective once immersed in one

then the current situation (and worse) seem to be inevitable. Regardless of actions taken against (or complete elimination of) the big commercial players.

I agree!

You can even go back to the cable news era and see the same issues. It seems quaint but the Fox News effect and the Fox News bubbles were things that were already driving those forces.

The evidence suggests to me that our ideals on free speech do not take into account human wetware bandwidth when it’s being influenced by modern telecommunications and Internet enabled conversations.

Plenty of political discussion happens on HN, but dang does a good job of removing the toxic comments and letting the civil comments remain.

> but this is partially our fault

Yes, I've called dang out on his inaction numerous times. HN is utterly filled with alt-right scum.

You might be living in a bubble if you think HN is alt-right. Trump got 46.9 % of the vote. He has nowhere near that level of support here.

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