How to Put Out Democracy’s Dumpster Fire
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Second Life, the virtual world, does not have this problem in-world. Second Life averages about 40,000 to 50,000 connected users, comparable to GTA V Online. Second Life does not have an army of "moderators". What it does have is private property.
Anyone can enter Second Life for free, but after a while, you probably want some land and items, which costs money. (Land comes from the owners of Second Life; items are entirely user-created.) You can also rent out land, and so, there are landlords, small ones with a few lots and big ones with square kilometers of land. There's public land - streets, water, parks, railroad track - but you can't build there.
Once you own land, you have the power to exclude others from it. Both users and their objects can be ejected. Clubs, stores, amusement parks, etc. are all privately owned. So there's a form of moderation, one that's entirely local.
Linden Lab has a small "Governance" team. They don't have to do much. They have a public meeting once a month. It used to be every two weeks, but there wasn't enough business to discuss. Most of the issues that come up involve someone obstructing a road, or excessive advertising signage. It's like a city council meeting.
You can file "abuse requests" with Governance. They're mostly about land issues. There's occasional "griefing", but it's a minor nuisance, like littering. Anything being done on someone else's property, the property owner can deal with. Most property is set by its owner with a timeout for foreign objects left there, so stuff left around is returned to its owner after half an hour or so. All public places have such a timeout, usually a rather short one.
Unlike most virtual worlds, Second Life allows sex. There are "adult" areas, and in addition, what you do on your own property behind closed doors is your own business. This keeps sex-based griefing down. In the non-adult areas, annoying users get ejected from private property, and in the adult areas, nobody cares.
Somehow, they got this right.
Roblox is on a whole different level. Roblox has around 200,000,000 monthly users. That is 4000-5000x what Second Life has. The more users you have, and the more mainstream something is, the more likely you are to have some chunk of the population that are either sociopaths or otherwise think trolling or bullying or getting a reaction from people is fun.
In addition, the target demo of Roblox is kids especially young teenagers. At that age, a lot of social skills and introspection and impulse control have not developed for a lot of people. In addition, by targeting kids, they are open to a whole lot more scrutiny. For example, having virtual sex or doing virtual drugs in Second Life would not cause anyone to blink. If that happened in Roblox, it would be front page news on The NY Times and headline news on every news station, and likely a Congressional committee.
Instead it sounds like they have about 200x as much.
Maybe the moral of the story here is don’t try to solve social problems for early teens until you’ve solved it everywhere else.
There was some research done a while back that concluded that a system where members could 'punish' people for misbehavior can be statically stable if (and I believe they concluded, only if) the punishment came at a cost to those meting out justice.
Unless I'm mistaken, Stack Overflow read the same paper. Which is why getting upvoted gets you 10 points, but downvoting something you don't like costs you 1 point. You have to want it a little bit more than just the knee-jerk reaction. It means more to you, and therefore it means more to everyone else, too.
Still, their ability to "round up" is trounced by the automation of the social media platform. It would be like one of those early "American associations" that Tocqueville observed being dependent on an venue whose owner insisted that they spend more time on obnoxious issues because "it brought in a crowd". The article discusses a "more enlightened algorithm", but it isn't in Facebook's interest to give up its power to community moderators.
I am still convinced that humanity is "building a collective immunity" to this kind of toxicity, but this will be a slow, possibly painful process. Right now, it seems the only immediate way people can resist is to acknowledge the importance of connection "off screens" and do their best to keep those other associations - family, friendships, local groups, etc. - active and engaged.
I think many online communities, moderation serves only to reinforce the groupthink. (I'm not saying that's true of this community, but this site may very much be the exception rather than the rule.)
/r/TheDonald was moderated – if you posted something critical of Donald Trump, they'd remove it and ban you.
I agree somewhat, but the connection doesn't have to literally be "off screen", only "off of major, centrally controlled social platforms". Smaller sites are generally managed on a voluntary base and thus less scalable than a centralized network would be, but they do allow for meaningful connections that are not constrained by the need for physical proximity.
- Use approval voting for all federal and state elections
- Limit terms to a maximum of 12 total years in the legislative branch
- Federally adopt a simple geometric algorithm for drawing voting districts
Possibly more controversially:
- Cut all non-architectural patent durations by 50%, and cut software patent durations by 67%
- Re-organize the EPA's mandate to become an accurate measurer of externalities, that taxes the externality based on the cost to undo it (and outlaws or heavily regulates things we can't currently fix)
And if we weren't already so far in debt, I'd suggest the Fed not buy anything except US treasuries, and not at such a low interest rate.
Unfortunately, I don't see it. The grievance culture that I believe is at the root of it goes back long before the Internet, by decades if not centuries. The Internet could not have redirected it. It would have been swamped by it, regardless of its architecture.
The kinds of shifts they're talking about are easily coopted to feed the grievance culture. People booted out from the monolith complain bitterly, and use it as proof that their grievance is justified. Eliminate the monolith and you'd create silos for people to nurse their grievance in -- and then go seek out the other silos to poison. Until they were removed, at which point they'd head back to have their grievance reassured and topped up.
The Internet didn't create that. It may date right back to de Tocqueville, who politely only applauded us for our positive attributes.
I'd love to believe that the Internet can fix it, but I am doubtful. I don't think any algorithms can overcome divides when there is so much content produced to exacerbate them. And when people are already so invested in the latter as to deliberately ignore the former.
It's a gradual enfeebling of a culture known for its "Frontier spirit", that was fueled by a mixture of individualism and a collective good. Now these bored, helpless people are trying to form coalitions against overblown (or outright fictional) adversaries as if pushing such a fabricated purpose will personally help against the crises in their lives.
Highly doubtful it was a transistor set, inasmuch as the first working transistor wasn't invented until 1947, at Bell Labs. [0]
(The underlying point is valid, though. [1])
1) lack of accountability due to section 230 for companies like FB. We need proper cyber ethics governance model other than "hands off".
2) corporate takeover of government results in government "for the corporations". Other than voting for non-corporate owned politicians not sure what can be done at this point.