The Silence Is Deafening (2020)
devonzuegel.com
devonzuegel.com
Here's the giveaway:
> A huge part of the problem is that digital spaces generally have no equivalent of a disapproving glare.
Every. Single. Platform. has an equivalent to this - except Twitter. Reddit (and HN) have visible downvotes. YouTube's downvotes, invisible though they now are, can at least influence the recommender algorithm. Even Facebook has "frowny emoji" reactions. But on Twitter, the only way to express disapproval is to "join the conversation" - thereby amplifying it, and incurring all the negative consequences Devon explores.
It's engagement genius. (Accidental genius, naturally - like most of Twitter's "core game loop", it's an unforseen, emergent phenomenon about which its inventors seem faintly embarrassed). The "grifter" problem Devon mentions exists almost exclusively on Twitter, because it's incentivised by the platform!
Normally I wouldn't get so heated about this stuff, but Twitter has attracted a critical mass of the world's journalists, so its incentives flow directly into The National Conversation(TM). This has visibly malign results, prompting many people to look for ways to fix it. This is a noble aim, but won't get anywhere if we regard Twitter's design decisions as immutable and inevitable, rather than a deliberate choice.
I've never signed up for Twitter, so not an expert, but doesn't unfollowing someone express disapproval?
YouTube has this feature, but the information it signals is now hidden from the public. The hiding of dislikes have essentially nullified the disapproving glares of the surrounding audience. I'm wondering what the ultimate effects on viewership will be, and the effects on the algorithm might not be in the favor of viewers.
A theory I have is that the lack of dislikes could make potential viewers more anxious that they could be stepping into misinformation at any time and have no easy (even if unreliable) way of checking veracity, so they choose to engage with less content overall.
I have also heard that if someone dislikes a video after watching it all the way through, it still counts them as "engaged" and doesn't negatively impact the channel's exposure. That would mean that a viewer could be mislead into thinking that a dislike means "nobody should watch this", whereas the effect is actually the opposite for the platform's algorithm.
I would really like to see hard data on this from a YouTube channel with significant viewership, detailing how the view count and engagement have changed since dislikes were hidden. If YouTube claims that dislikes don't influence viewership, there should at least be evidence that it is so.
YouTube's algorithm is opaque, so obviously folks could be wrong about this -- but there's a pretty common belief that dislikes actually cause a video to be recommended more often, making it not really that much of a disapproving glare. Same with the Facebook frown, except that FB is pretty open about it.
People think a lot of obviously wrong things about various social media algorithms, and this might be one of them, but in a way that's beside the point. The belief is sufficient to negate the social pressure effect, regardless of how well founded that belief is.
I read a joke once that went something like "On Facebook, I spend half my time deciding if I want to debunk pseudoscientific bullshit, or if I want to have friends." Point being lots of times I'll have friends or acquaintances post shit where I think "Did this person just suffer a head wound?", but if it's someone I want to remain friends with, I just scroll by it. I often wonder if that person noticed they usually get tons of positive emojis with other posts but it tends to be crickets when they post their "I'm just doing my vaccine research" posts or whatever other bullshit.
As a result Twitter personalities are incentivise to be one dimensional. Normally talk about tech, but make a political statement? Expect complaints.
This problem even happens in places you might fail to notice if you aren't paying attention: as an example, with ratings for hotels, depending on the location--even for what is essentially a cookie-cutter franchise--hotels attract different audiences, and so the ratings people leave mean something different! I noticed this often as a I (used to... damn pandemic ;P) travel a lot, and in some cities (like San Jose) all the reviews of a Marriott would be talking about how useful the rooms are for parties, as a lot of the people booking hotels are doing so for tech companies, whereas in another city (I can't think of an example but imagine some place you would usually go on for a vacation instead of a conference) all the reviews would be focused on whether or not the pool was a fun and safe place for their children. I frankly care about neither of these qualities of a hotel :/.
What you probably want to do is enough "collaborative filtering" to only care about voters who are similar to you. This is the kind of thing people were talking about a lot back in the days of the Netflix prize competition (which had an amazing forum they deleted :/), with k-means clustering of users trying to figure out which subset of votes "matters" to you, and people thought this would be the future and how every site worked... but then Netflix seems to have just gone in a direction of extremely simplistic category affinity (and even removed five star ratings recently). In my case, this would eventually (hopefully) case me to ben heavily weighting people who tend to rate a hotel based on the quality of its bed and the smell of its air, to the exclusion of almost every other rating axis.
The reality is that--for better or for worse--platforms refuse to actually provide rich signaling for these mechanisms (and what they do do is sometimes misunderstood: like, it actually irks me that this grandparent post thinks a Facebook sad react is supposed to be bad somehow: if you say something and I react "Sad" I might very well be commiserating with you... and Facebook knows this so Sad is worth two Likes! fwiw, they did finally decide to make Angry worth 0 ;P) and even--such as the case of Netflix--tend to remove and "simplify" signaling mechanisms over time, and so none of these mechanisms they have "matter" really as they are so low signal and are used so naively.
The only content platform I can think of that "got big" (but isn't anymore) which really tried hard to work on this problem is Slashdot, which asked you why you were downvoting something, and then 1) required you to choose whether you got to comment anywhere at all on the post's thread OR vote on any of the comments and 2) would show your voting decisions to other people who would "meta-moderate" your decisions to decide how good you were at it and then change how often you were given the option of voting. This way you could actually separate out "tyranny of a majority that I think is dumb" from "this comment is actually off-topic or an attempt to incite chaos".
I'm not sure the reaction to IRL disapproval is much different, at least for the people who receive a lot of it.
And anything vaguely political or controversial is the kiss of death for downvote systems because it triggers upvote/downvote wars where downvote becomes "I disagree with this viewpoint (so it must be downvoted to oblivion.)"
Emojis and downvotes require actively choosing to reply. They're opt-in.
And we know damned well that opt-out yields much higher volume.
People are afraid to say their opinion because of the backlash. Not everyone has a well thought out opinion, that doesn't mean they deserve to be punished. The human experiment can only move forward with open displays of ignorance coupled with open-minded discussion and acceptance.
It's idealistic to think this could happen easily, but I see no other way for global civilisation to come to terms with our historical cultural differences.
We're either going to devolve into systems where nothing matters and everything goes, which frankly we already have with 4chan, or allow certain views to prevail over others, which literally every forum or approval-based channel has these days, or find a different way to share differences and come to terms with them, which I hope somebody invents soon.
> I see no other way for global civilisation to come to terms with our historical cultural differences
I agree.
But the path we are on is the opposite. 'We' (or whoever is running the show - as I don't think the state we find ourselves in is natural) is not about allowing for diversity of opinions, and building personal resilience and tolerance to diverse thinking via the application of reasoned argumentation.
No. Instead we herded into low engagement, preferably simplistic binary positions. We are even moving away from law, into a time of cancel culture driven by corporate policy. We are going into hardcore tyranny of the individual.
The reason is (imo) that it is far easier to govern when you treat people as a collective. If you have imprinted thoughts patterns into what might have been individual thinkers, and support that throughout their lives via top-up programming from the media, you can guide this communal thinking.
The answer from my perspective is for everyone to be trying achieve maximum individuality. (Everyone thinks they are individual, but they are actually expressing received opinions. I don't even say I am an exception - though I do think I am working on it.)
But who's got time for individuality?!? There are mortgages to pay, children to train into the system - er, I mean educate, work takes a lot out of you, and passive engagement with screens is so tempting.
Maybe in the next life!
Maybe there are systems that afford that.
Maybe there are systems that are more or less resistant to astroturf, spam, and trolling.
Maybe things like language, speech norms, even laws have evolved organically to allow more productive conversations.
Seems worth thinking about, experimenting, implementing.
Imagine a "ಠ_ಠ" button on each tweet. The poster finds out how many people THAT THEY FOLLOW* clicked that button, but can't find out specifically who. They just know that the crowd of people that they respect has a certain air of disapproval.*
I love this. This is so much more interesting than a downvote, which could easily come from someone you're disagreeing with or people who share their views. This is your friends giving you the hairy eyeball. I want this.
Now, if one’s friends have opinions that the rest of us find to be terrible, then maybe it’d be better for that person to be able to drift away easier. But I think the thesis here is that most of us aren’t at the extremes / aren’t in bubbles mostly comprised of extremists, and a private-hairy-eyeball would perhaps help many of us from radicalizing our dialogue.
Online forums have much smaller bandwidth and much larger pool of participants. Nuance in expression is terribly limited to the ASCII character set. What ever you've written, whether a thoughtful paragraph or two, or just adding a short bit of flavouring to the discussion is now cast in stone for all time.
My suspicion is that the size and durability of online forums is antithetical to nuanced discussion.
...And what comes when people are under the cloak of anonymity, or otherwise feel there will be no negative consequences to whatever they choose to do.
It's interesting to see that people are now arguing in favor of public shaming and peer pressure as ways to control behavior, and lamenting that these are now harder to implement at scale. A generation ago the internet was seen as a way to escape pressure for conformity.
> Bringing it into a private space like DMs is crucial, because it credibly shows that you're not trying to get brownie points from your in-group by bashing them in public.
The problem with DMs is that they are too much work for the passive onlooker.
Public forums like Twitter, Reddit, etc. should include the possibility of sending private signals: "uncool" badges that take no more than one click, but that are only seen by the original poster.
Perhaps a weighted surfacing of the "uncool" numbers. If a certain number of 'considered authentic' users mark it as such that starts to become visible on a post, and on the overall 'karma' of the author's profile.
The idea being if the author DOES care, and sees they're getting marked as 'uncool' then they have a chance to self-censor/edit/adapt. But if the authosr doesn't care then the audience still has a chance to see what some sort of 'curated' members have said about the content, and that the author's overall rating has potential to take a hit for it.
Any system can be gamed, of course, but the lack of clear options for contributing negatives about content is how we've gotten into this mess. Sole up/down votes are not enough.
The Silence Is Deafening - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23728212 - July 2020 (225 comments)
That's largely what down votes are, and why it's a problem that YouTube now hides them. We need both smiles and glares to communicate well.
Our tech overlords are the equivalent of Kings now, above the law. And their attitude to humanity stinks.
Has it ever been theorized that in even so pure a place as HN the down vote is abused?
At any rate the disapproving glare has been the go to tool of small minded and provincial people throughout history, and is often enshrined as such in media. So I guess I'm not that sure that having one will solve all problems.
It takes a lot fo time to do each person, especially considering time zones. Not to mention, all your time is spent reaching out to people who were rude.
Hm. Need to think about that for virtual worlds.
The real issue is being really able to separate work and life, or have a local social activity in person, in the physical world, while have a secondary and separated working life in a "virtual" world. This is hard IME, we tend to make friends where we are most active, then it's hard to separate remotes people from work to real physical and human world, for that I still have to find a real solution but meeting each others sometimes while keeping WFH for the rest again suffice in most cases. Having a local physical life separated from the work it's not that hard, at least if we do not live in a desert/very remote areas.
The main issue I see in practice are mostly due to the lack of "social interest" in many remote workers who actually prefer to be remote just to avoid working with their colleagues, so they do not interact as needed, they do not try to communicate what's needed etc, the lack of habit and organization where most people simply start from scratch just like child doing their first experience "in the wild" without real experience, but those issues can be solved just with trials and errors in few years: for the system part we need to rediscover really remote work vs working on the shoulders of giants on their platforms, for the human part simply learning to develop a kind of "remote sociability" for work and a healthy local sociability where we physically live.
"Remote sociability" is hard, but not that hard IF we learn it, of course we (society) have to really try to learn...