Comment by mattbrewsbytes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattbrewsbytes | Hacker News Reader

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> You want to solve the problem of people saying racist things, so you decide to destroy the public square

"Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts. Those thoughts voiced are short lived and can only be broadcast as far as the sound wave will carry them. Social media like twitter allows millions of people to spread their thoughts, commentary and keep them semi-permanently online for a long time, decade or more.

I never stated I was solving the problem of people saying racist things. I'm challenging the assumption that designing a new social media platform should repeat existing designs that have public content with public comments driven by advertisements. In my opinion if someone designs with that premise it will end up the same as the existing social media platforms we have today (with a side effect of new JS frameworks being borne).

Is this the only product design Tech has: public content and sell advertisements?

> "Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts. Those thoughts voiced are short lived and can only be broadcast as far as the sound wave will carry them.

That's very true. Maybe a better Twitter could incorporate actual geographical distance. You would have to choose where you are and could only see messages from people that are actually near you. If you move, you see different messages.

Or the distance could be ideological -- or better, theoretical.

Any user would have to choose a place on a "map" / a set of coordinates. A user can move freely at any time, but

- messages can't move and stay where the user was when they were posted

- messages can only be seen when the user is near them.

Isnt your proposal basically Reddit? Subreddits are nodes that require you to be close to them to see whats going on (via joining the sub), with a public square, /r/popular, artificially built from the top posts on those nodes. For some definition of "top".

I would say it’s also a mix of nextdoor - both of which are still just as toxic.

Tempted to say the problem is just the internet breeding toxicity in general. Maybe we could all do better with less internet and more nature time

Nextdoor is very indicative of where you live. There are often time joyous earnest "here's a pretty picture of a bird" posts, and if you live somewhere nice, typically rural, there's not even the usual dreck.

> ... somewhere nice, "Typically rural"? It'd be interesting to discuss the evidence for this greater rural niceness, if known. We should be wary of rural mythology, in part because the rural lifestyle is non-representative (in the US and globally), declining, and unsustainable (does not scale, we can't all do it). To respond to my own challenge, and making no assertions of causality, there are countervailing bits of evidence, based on correlations. The correlation between Trump support and rurality is strong and statistically undeniable. Is this group inherently "nicer" in person or on the internet? A second random but disturbing example is the "significantly higher risk of femicide and non-domestic homicide victimization in rural counties compared to non-rural counties." https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5...

True, but the significant difference is that you can belong to any number of subreddits at the same time, and they're organized by topic.

In my idea the place itself would be neutral/non-significant, and you could only be in one place at a time, like IRL.

Interesting. My use of Twitter has waned over the years while my use of Reddit has increased...I guess I'm voting with my time that Reddit is the better model.

I'm 100% positive that reddit is the better model in general -- at least with the old UI that didn't have all the dark patters to force you to stay on. I still quit it over a year ago because I noticed I was very addicted to it.

It's the original design of Facebook. You had to join based on real-world membership in a pre-existing network, in this case a university. You only got to interact with people from your university.

There's something to be said for this. Schools have their problems. Plenty of drama, bullying, harassment, marginalization, extremism. But when it's limited to a school network, it doesn't swing national sentiment, aid and abet genocides, provide an outlet for foreign adversaries to subvert race relations in your country.

But it does mean ad campaigns can't have global reach.

One other benefit of tying online groups to offline groups is that they are able to moderate themselves. Schools aren’t perfect but they can deal with cyber bullying if all parties are students at that school.

I don't know if the limit needs to be geographical. I'd think it could be segmented by interest, ala discussion forums for particular hobbies. Those are private and heavily moderated, there are 'village elders' (mods/heavily active users), people are on good behavior because of this, they always seem to have a section for more controversial/political discussions for those who want it - and they tend to be civil, surprisingly enough, because users have a rep to protect in the more generalized sections and don't want to be a bad citizen. And nothing is indexed by search engines, you have to go to the site and search.

Reddit has this a bit with subreddits but it's far more loose and indexed by search engines, which I think is why it is problematic in certain ways.

Nextdoor is literally this. It’s twitter/Reddit but for geographically isolated groups.

Sounds like the Metaverse.

Shouting is only 1 form of communication though. Newspapers and pamphlets have been around for centuries and travel farther and last longer than human generated sound waves. So your proposal kind of simulates pre-printing press days and maybe even pre-written language days.

>"Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts.

and if you're a crazy person or verbally abusive or maybe just shouting things that while maybe true are insulting to the public morality then the police come and carry you away.

Or picketed so their speech is drowned out, or even punched in the nose by passers by.

You can argue if this is good or bad, but it’s a fundamental difference between the public square and digital recreations: in the real world, speech can have meaningful consequences. In the Twitter world, you create a new profile.

It feels like a problem of scale. One person shouting and getting carried away, whoever is right or wrong in that scenario, is still one person. Now extend that to everyone shouting at everyone in what has become the de facto public square and the stakes involved in deciding who to carry away feel existential in scale.

> "Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts.

I disagree that it's a fallacy, the issue is that platforms have an interest in claiming themselves to be a public square. But the platform is not the square THE INTERNET, which is to say the open World Wide Web, is the public square. Platforms are the individual bars and pubs and cafes that line the squares and boulevards.

Each cafe and pub has the right to set its own rules for entry and set its own vibe and culture, but when there is an oligopoly of bars who are all megalomaniacs wanting to own the whole thing and keep people locked in their establishments for as long as possible, that does not lend itself to having a healthy community or vibe in any one of them.

Let people self-segregate and affiliate with the communities they want to. The racist shitheads will find their spaces, but they only start to multiply when they're able to wheedle their fearmongering propaganda in front of people who wouldn't otherwise want anything to do with them.

> The racist shitheads will find their spaces, but they only start to multiply when they're able to wheedle their fearmongering propaganda in front of people who wouldn't otherwise want anything to do with them.

The problem with this approach is group polarization [0], the tendency for groups with similar opinions to become more extreme and entrenched over time. The danger posed by bigots is not just from their numbers, but also the degree of violence used to enforce their bigotry. In addition, having pre-established communication makes it easier to organize violence, even with a small proportion of the population.

I don't have a solution to these problems, as much as I wish I did, but wanted to bring them up as issues.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization

I actually think having large, centralized platforms actually makes the polarization problem worse because they encourage usage habits that keep people only within the milieu they've had curated for them within that platform. A more confederated system, like having multiple independent fora, means most people can dabble in and out of multiple different communities at once and not have their perspective on how the world is skewed in the same sort of systematic way.

Sure some people will go down the rabbit hole anyway, but then they will limit their reach by virtue of being too extreme to appeal to "normal" or moderate people who don't think about this stuff too deeply and are put off by extremism reflexively. When things are more centralized, there's sort of a one-way ratcheting effect where you get exposed to mild versions of the thing enough to start getting into it, and then slowly get pulled into more and more extreme versions. That doesn't happen with forums that each have their own culture and identity, there isn't as much transitional/interstitial space to acclimatize you. You just jump in, read the vibe without being preconditioned, and make your instinctual call on whether you'd like to stay.

Usual argument is that your solution also "works" if you replace racists with, say, abolitionists at the point in history when the general public consensus was that slavery is just fine (except with internet).

Enabling good ideas to spill out of their origin communities into general public discourse is the main point of "public square" and "free speech" concepts.

They can still spill out through activist work, they just can't be as easily astroturfed by troll-farms so people will have to come by their influence honestly, through moral suasion and persuasive powers.

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