Hacker News Reader

Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon does not make social media any less toxic, apparently...

I don't think I can name a single non-toxic social media platform.

That's because it's not the platform that's toxic, but the communities.

It's not the communities, a certain percentage of humans is unfortunately toxic and they are hijacking any undermoderated community.

It's so great we have the Internet as a source of clear, instantly-understandable-by-anyone examples of what McLuhan's most famous adage meant.

"The medium is the message? Dafuq does that mean?"

"You know how every social network is horrible?"

"Ah, now I get it."

Given that cable, talk radio and a fair fraction of books are horrible, I am afraid to say that the medium we're talking about may be language.

Ah, but it's precisely their different flavors of horribleness—and the kinds of non-horrible things they're able to convey regardless—that are the message. These differ even for things as similar as broadcast TV and modern streaming services—the way the message is conveyed, the medium, shapes the kinds of messages that tend to get through, or which are amplified and which are suppressed. An early example of this would be the role of the rising popularity of the codex, versus trunks full of scrolls, in driving the creation of a fixed "canon" in Christianity. The message of a pile of scrolls is flexibility—the message of codices is fixedness. Something's in, or it's out, and everything that's in is physically connected and difficult to separate. There's a decision to make, where there wasn't before.

It’s the effect of letting people behave however they want without social consequences. People don’t talk this way in the physical world, they don’t even have the courage to.

Social media is an unnatural environment, there’s more time to cultivate replies.

Correction: it's not the communities, it's the behaviors of those that when taken together make up the community.

User agents don't toxify social media communities. User's do.

And in the mastodon fediverse, it's very easy to de-federate from a community. So, toxicity might spread less easily in mastodon.

We made a mistake thinking that everyone's opinion matters.

It doesn't.

We should go back to ignoring some people. That doesn't mean banning them, just ignoring.

Technology tends to magnify one dimension or another of the human condition and it's rarely just your favorite dimensions.

More, actually. The largest Mastodon node is essentially Nazi controlled.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com