‘Likes’ and ‘shares’ teach people to express more outrage online: study
news.yale.edu
news.yale.edu
In the end I quit writing reviews for Yelp and exited the community even though much of my social life at that point had become subsumed by it. Luckily I was still at an age where it was easy to rebuild my social life. For many, social media has become their primary social outlet and without it, they don't have anything else to turn to. Even without the pandemic, I suspect that it's more difficult to build an offline social life than it used to be, especially for the young.
Anger is addictive.
> The difference, according to the people who study this sort of thing, is recognizing whether your reaction is designed to actually help you fix the thing you're mad about, or just satisfying the adrenaline and dopamine rush you get from lashing out (the latter, after all, is what makes anger so addictive).
Apparently it's from 2099, retro-loaded to present day.
From the outset I wanted to build a discussion site that was entirely focused on live conversation, without the gimmicks that have become so ubiquitous across the social media landscape and beyond.
In the real world we signal our approval of a conversation by either engaging or walking away. Other people sense our liking of it by seeing our engagement, not a cheap binary sticker we throw up.
What does 'engaging' mean, exactly? You also signal your disapproval by engaging. If I tell someone to go fuck themselves after they tried to get me alone in a dark alley... I engaged with them, I didn't walk away with a tacit approval of their attempted assault and say I remained disengaged.
If someone creeps on me online and I tell them to fuck off, the creepy cunt they are... then I engaged with them too. If I didn't engage and instead walked away, I might have a stalker to deal with because I never said no.
`engage` is doing too much work and, in my mind, it's an inhuman term. You're applying the logic of a toilet cubicle to a human.
Of course as you point out, not all conversations are positive ones, but I like the idea of optimizing for more conversation in general.
Also I don't claim that it's going to work out or that all voting is bad (in general on HN it seems useful), but I like the idea of trying something different.
So, is that what your ranking is based on for Sqwok? Clicks and comments? Is it having the effect you'd hoped?
Def aware that scaling it past a small user base may be challenging, but I also see opportunities to experiment in that regard.
Then again, I could find out that the majority of people prefer to simply "like" something.
That said, it's always hard to know until you have a large user base.
(In this regard, as far as I’m concerned, for a novel type of social networking platform it’s much more important to be paid, rather than play around with likes and algorithms. Long-term business model will prevail—if your paying users are the advertisers, you’ll align with them sooner or later.)
Agree, trolls will always try to game the system. I like the idea of optimizing for quality users vs quality content. You can always add optional controls for conversations as well e.g. account age restriction.
I also suspect that highly trolled topics might have a higher number of replies per view overall.
The crux of the issue is that society rewards attention whoring behavior. I would love to see our leaders promote more "do, not tell" behavior.
What I remember is how I didn't like the actual news after the local news because of how boring it was. It was actually a news program.
I also grew up watching ESPN sports center. There was never any outrage at that time. It was just showing highlights of games with minimal added commentary. The internet then destroyed all these business models and turned everything into a tabloid.
Growing up I can remember at the grocery store when checking out there was always a tabloid newspaper that every other week would have on the cover how Elvis faked his own death or something just ridiculous.
Now basically everything is like that tabloid.
However there is a certain element in society that gets truly over-stimulated by this stuff - the over-amplified likes and shares are making it seem like the outraged community you are aligned with is much larger than it actually is. Or more precisely, the number of people actively engaged and willing to undertake actions to back up their likes looks much bigger than it actually is. This pushes our over stimulated friends into over-reactions.
This has now fomented a lot of extreme acts - hitting the streets, burning stuff, occupying buildings, safe in the completely misleading knowledge that your in-group is much larger than you think.
The outrage machine has been an interesting social experiment but now people are getting killed because of it and it's probably time to nuke Facebook and Twitter from orbit unless they start taking moderation seriously.
That does not mean that schools teach kids what to think. Rather, we teach kids how to think, and what the common pitfalls are.
The problem is that this means that a bad education leaves you vulnerable to manipulation. That, and the fact that it takes 10-20 years for the effect to reach society.
However, deplatforming seems to work. Nuking the platforms doesn't seem too extreme to me given the harm they are causing.
This isn't a new situation. People spread hoaxes, but also true and unwanted info, in the wars when governments tried to suppress unfavorable news from the fronts. Mistrust / distrust cannot really be remedied by massive shows of force.
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-doze...
Taking sledgehammer on human communication does not seem efficient and side-effect-less to me.
I grew up in late Communist Czechoslovakia. The party cracked down on unwanted information really hard. They had a 13,000 strong secret police with extensive powers to do that, and forty years of experience how to strangle dissent. Kids were schooled in the One and Only Correct Way of Thinking, up to and including university, where you had to clear several classes of Marxism-Leninism before being allowed to, say, build bridges. Things like Xerox machines were tightly controlled and subject to registration, to curtail spread of illegal leaflets.
And yet rumors spreaded within days of anything happening and distrust against the government and whatever the government said to the public was absolutely rampant.
If anything, at the end of the day they sledgehammered themselves.
But what if we designed the “Like” button to be directed not at the others, but at yourself. I mean, when you press the “Like” button it has consequences for you. If you “Like” useless content, then you will get more useless content in the future. Would that change the dynamics of “liking”? Would it make people think more carefully about what they like if their future content recommendations depended on it?
I’m building just such a system at https://linklonk.com
When you upvote an item - you don’t simply increment the counter and make that item rank higher for everyone else. Instead, you connect stronger to other users who upvoted that item before you. The stronger you connect to someone - the more weight their upvote has for you - the higher their other upvoted content ranks in your recommendations. This creates a feedback loop where you use the upvote button no to influence others, but to direct your future recommendations. This is a “filter bubble” - one that you very consciously form.
I think I am missing your message -isn't this exactly how most platform's algorithms work now? You get more of what you like?
However I was shocked to find that pages I had liked, I would not see their posted content and would instead see other stuff that was often outrageous.
I can't remember when twitter rolled out the 'curated' instead of chronological change for higher engagement / more advertising value - but at this point it was long ago too.
This was shocking to many people who created 'pages' for businesses and such as well. Even Kim Komando (on the air/via her broadcast / podcasts) railed against the algorithm hiding her stuff from people that had liked her fbook.. (meanwhile offering to 'boost' her presence in people's feed for high fees.
So I'm not sure if the systems originally were setup to run that way, but they certainly have not been in the past many years akaik.
Other people I have spoken with have been shocked that the system has not been working as they expected and wondered why they 'liked' a page when they don't get all the info the page posts, many not believing that pages they were really interested in posting new stuff were instead being censored from appearing in their feed.
These systems have far fewer "Likes" than other implicit signals such as which posts the user read (ie, didn't scroll past). So they use all of those signals and likes are unlikely to have a strong impact on the output of the algorithm.
The algorithms are opaque by nature. Even the developers of these deep models won't be able to explain to you why a user's recommendation list is ranked the way it is. Now imagine a user contemplating the consequences of liking a certain item on their future recommendations. It's hopeless.
As a result, the developers learn not to rely on these "like" signals and the users learn to provide likes only to affect the directly observable changes - the like counter.
If you know that the content you like will get more visibility then it incentivizes people to upvote what they want other people to see, as opposed to what they themselves want to see.
"Fuck you" has a lot more meaning and impact than a "thank you" without additional context; anger encourages short and impulsive actions, kindness necessitates understanding and sophisticated social interactions. "Thank you for helping me out when my wife threw me out of the apartment" has more punch than just "fuck you" but also requires more involvement to even produce the initial situation that began the chain of event. Researched arguments are nearly impossible to find compared to the sea of impulsive reactions.
As an example of this is the difference between 4chan's /b/ and /r9k/ boards. /b/ is pure random, with nothing off limit except what is illegal under the law while /r9k/ is similar but no duplicates of text or picture are permitted across all the history of the board. While the post on /r9k/ remain vulgar, insults are far less prominent.
Specialized groups/boards/subreddits are also similar where content and researched opinions are the main point of those groups by their nature.
Perhaps the saddest testament to this was a troll who was banned from Twitter and told a journalist "I feel like I don't exist anymore." That is a really awful place to end up. It is also an unhealthy place to be.
Blog article from him here: https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/addiction.html
It's not that everybody is at the exact center, but most of the people I've encountered will have a side but be pretty far away from the loud extreme narrative you see online and in the news.
> “Our studies find that people with politically moderate friends and followers are more sensitive to social feedback that reinforces their outrage expressions,” Crockett said. “This suggests a mechanism for how moderate groups can become politically radicalized over time — the rewards of social media create positive feedback loops that exacerbate outrage.”
The problems in this country and perhaps the world at large is a lot of people seem to want the extremists to get along and get into arguments with the fringes and take away that these situations represent most of reality. The truth of it is, hopefully, that there are actually an enormous number of people who are relatively quiet who just need to learn how to identify other moderate people of differing views and how to, when to, and really TO have conversations about their differences and understand and empathize with why somebody else has a different position.
What annoyed the hell out of her is that her top tweet is one that she typed while drunk after reading something that made her blood boil.
I don't think that likes and shares teach people to express more outrage. I think that the root cause here is that we reward outrage. We love to hear somebody bitch lyrical, more than we like a good joke. We live to read about some "Karen" getting her comeuppance.
The reinforcement strategy behind AI recommendations (on Facebook, YouTube, Spotify) is to continue showing more similar content. This leads to extremism.
To encourage diversity, we the programmers need to intentionally change the algorithm to present opposing views. Mix some 80s disco in with that punk rock. Remind people that there is another perspective.
We can also encourage "thank you"s - actively creating backlinks so that people know where the thought came from originally, and can learn more.
Hacker News has a great system of self-moderation where downvotes are allowed but only after the user has received 1000 upvotes to establish their credibility. First contribute well, then earn the right to criticise. I hope we can find ways to translate this model into other domains, even real life.
I’m sure somewhere this has been analyzed in depth, but a few years ago it seems the YouTube algorithm underwent a fundamental change in which it shifted from recommending videos based on what other people viewing a video liked to recommending videos based only on your own personal history.
IMHO “cancel culture” is just “consequence culture.”
Instead, you have some people's lives ruined for a dumb joke on Twitter, and others getting away scot free with actual sexual assault because the substantive and evidence-supported accusations were covered up before they could go viral.
As it stands, I think cancel culture more closely resembles the 2 minutes' hate from 1984 than actual justice.
So, yeah, thanks but no thanks. There is no due process and no consequences for false accusers.
What I can't get behind, is people sifting through the entire (online and offline) history of people, in the hopes of finding some evidence of wrongdoing, no mater how small or trivial, and then starting a cancel campaign. That kind of behavior is just plain creepy and stalkerish, bordering the psychotic.
One thing I’ve never seen Facebook seem to have any recognition of is that the basic concept their news feed is a self reinforcement loop. They choose to show a user a particular type of photo, and then the photos that user interacts with are primarily composed of that particular type of photo, which coincidentally is the only thing Facebook displays to them.
Everyone would then have to put that small effort in balance with the actual amount of interest/outrage they feel. I bet most re-shares and likes would not happen if they required any sort of effort.
If the outrage is not enough to deserve actual effort to make it heard, then the outrage is probably not worth being heard.
In person, if you are to express outrage you run the risk of being directly challenged. If you are in a system when the simplest forms of feed back are positive in nature ( Like, Share ) you most likely find you can express outrage without negative consequences.
I wish there was a way to turn off the other channels.
In all seriousness though, this is one of the most important recent studies. Social media is an experiment that has been having profound effects in our society and people are just starting to realize it.
Please downvote or upvote to express your outrage.