Comment by Karrot_Kream | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Karrot_Kream | Hacker News Reader

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> The algorithms seek to maximize engagement. And it turns out that rage is one really good way to maximize engagement.

I used to think this was only a property of algorithms but I'm not convinced anymore. Any number of link aggregator sites I'm on with no algorithmic surfacing of content, Reddit (at least on the old site), HN, Lobsters, Tildes, etc all have the same effect. Everyone comments on and engages with the rage inducing post. Nuanced, sanguine conversations get maybe an upvote or two but are just a few posters talking. This tracks with my experience on forums back in the '90s where huge hellthreads would spawn and have people arguing for weeks, and every archive of Usenet flamethreads that I've seen.

I don't think the algorithms are helping, but I think this is just a property of socializing in the large. Humans, when socializing in person, have a lot of context. When my friend rants "relationships are terrible they are just adults emotionally manipulating each other" to me, and I have the context of knowing my friend just had a bad breakup, I know the place this is coming from. When someone posts this on Twitter, everyone is up in arms because there's no context. There's other properties of socializing in the large that I suspect leads to the patterns we see in online discourse, but I'm beginning to think that the algorithms are the minor part.

Early twitter didn't have much algorithmic involvement. I recall early twitter being a much chiller place. But in the last couple of years (and especially in the last six months or so) algorithms seemed pretty blatant - getting tweets from people was not following, etc. So while I agree that part if this is " a property of socializing in the large", it seems from experience with early twitter vs late twitter that as the algorithms became a bigger part of the platform, things went downhill.

Twitter has developed norms which prioritize anger. Some fairly prominent folks on Twitter can go weeks without tweeting anything positive. This isn't going away. Much like Reddit has developed norms around downvoting to disagree.

I think you're laser focusing on Twitter because of your experiences on the platform. I only started using Twitter recently as I felt the non-technical content on HN became too one-sided or rage-filled, so I can't offer much observation there, but I've been on non-algorithmic social sites for decades. I've been on HN for over a decade. Heck, you can hop onto Usenet today and see hellthreads still spawning. A Raspberry Pi group I'm in had a (crossposted) hellthread about Apple products.

People respond to rage whether there's algorithms or not. People give others online much less benefit of the doubt than they do in person. I've seen this constant on every non-algorithmic social site I've been on. Mastodon, despite being a much smaller network, also has huge chains of posts spawned by angry toots/posts. At this point I'm convinced that this is just a modality of failure in human discourse. I'm cautiously optimistic that humans will develop norms around socializing in the large, but it took centuries of political instability for the printing press to be normalized, so it may take (turbulent) decades for socializing in the large to be normalized.

At least on Twitter you can still switch to chronological feed (though default settings do probably influence people's behavior in general).

Asking for a friend, where do you find those usenet flamethread archives?

Narkive has a whole bunch of these archived (especially since Google Groups is terrible these days.) If you know which group you're looking for they have old logs. Some folks associated with the newly revived Big 8 are also looking to submit Usenet archives to archive.org.

You could say "enragement is good for engagement"

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