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Comment by jacooper | Hacker News Reader

The entire problem lies with the twisted motives of social media.

They don't want to make you happy or feel good, they want money, at all costs which results in you being angry and toxic.

I agree with this article in general, and think that its worth it to spend time arguing with people you care about rather some rando on twitter.

community run communities will probably have a resurge, the problem is the tech barrier, we have already seen how mastodon is seen as to complex or has "horrid UX" for normal users.

So I doubt anything will change for the mainstream, techies and other geeky communities might go to mastodon or create a forum, but normal users won't bother doing any of this.

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Adding to this, having run small communities I can see platforms like Mastodon growing into Twitter albeit with a different twist of behavior but eventually becoming equally toxic, just a different flavor of toxic.

I believe one of the root causes is that the internet basically connected billions of people from many different cultures into one big pool without any arbiter mechanisms which is bound to get ugly fast. In this regard I agree with the article that the internet wants to be segmented. Mastodon will probably start with silos of similar thinking people but as it grows they too will run into culture clashes leading to groups of people being silenced. Then some other platform will come along to make smaller silos or tribes and this pattern will repeat.

You can already see that. If you think Twitter moderation is arbitrary or weird, clearly you haven't seen some of the popular Mastodon servers. Meet the new boss same as the old boss.

The difference, as the article mentions, is that you can just leave. You can follow the same content from another instance with other rules and not be effected by any of the weird laws on the main mastodon instance.

Do other people have to refollow you if you move? Can your client form a single timeline when you’re “actually” following from two different places? It seems inconvenient…

Yes, you can move your account.

though I dont know if you can still move if your account gets banned.

You lose your followers if you get banned. I was following someone who got banned for disagreeing with moderation policies. I suggested asking the admin to help with the migration; he did, and the admin refused.

This was a rather large server too, featured on JoinMastodon.

Generally all official mastodon servers are very left leaning, so if you are conservative, you might get banned quickly, and certainly the admin won't help you migrate.

I think Mastodon has the tendency to grow into the opposite extreme of toxicity: fragility. People as well as instances are very generously blocked, leading to perfectly peaceful bubbles.

Which are not that great. There's almost perfect ideological agreement...but not really. A handful of people dominate conversation by posting frequently whilst the rest barely engages and/or is afraid to speak their mind.

As an example, on a fairly large Mastodon instance I saw a popular user claiming how we should still wear masks. There were a few dozen replies, all in perfect agreement.

That's truly bizarre, as this is a topic that people have strong opinions on across the entire political landscape. Even amidst just progressives, there's no uniform consensus, granted people are free to speak their minds without repercussions. The fact that there wasn't even a hint of disagreement or nuance I find telling.

So I agree with your point, this too is a type of toxicity, just a different flavor. Fragility, toxic positivity, I'm not sure what to call it, but it's not healthy.

Another fun opposite effect (in comparison to Twitter) to reason about is algorithms and amplification. Mastodon has very little of that which is considered good. It's a more "organic" social network.

Quite a few users will discover though that an organic social network makes the chance of getting engagement on your posts even harder than it already was. Just getting your post seen at all is a challenge, and building somewhat of a following can takes months if not years of purposeful effort. This means that for the typical user, the feeling that you're screaming into the void will be common, leaving the question: why post at all?

toxic positivity

Positively toxic echo chambers. I think you summed it up perfectly. I've seen what you described occur in the past on other chat platforms and forums. Mostly forums. People that think alike get some high rank and access to private sub-forums and people that have thoughts not aligned with the tribe start to think the forum is no longer being used. Not sure how that would translate into the Mastodon platform.

I think today it translates into every platform due to the highly polarized political landscape. This sorts people into just 2 buckets, after which each bucket is dominated by radicals or semi-radicals.

That's why I dislike the term "bubble", because it fails to describe the inner working of the bubble. It suggests that it is uniform and consensus-based, whilst instead they are ran by an autocratic elite that "softly" silence dissent. By making dissent costly.

The state of online conversation: 50% of the population is evil. Luckily I'm in the good 50%, which is full of terrible ideas but I can't afford to challenge them.

Meh. What's wrong with not wanting every online space I inhabit to be embroiled in ceaseless no-holds-barred political and social warfare? If I want that, it's easy to find, it doesn't have to be everywhere.

I think there is a spectrum of social behavior. The extreme bubble or silo is in my opinion just as toxic as the extreme toxicity of fringe ideas. There is probably a balance in there somewhere so that people can stay clear of social warfare and at the same time people can feel comfortable to be themselves and not have to wear a mask or have highly measured speech.

I honestly do not know how to achieve that balance. I think platforms that come close to having a balance still end up with people having to know their audience and have measured speech to some degree. Even HN is an example of that. It's probably the best balance I have seen but I have no idea how it could be made better other than having millions of small stand-alone self hosted platforms but then we move closer to those echo-chamber bubbles.

This is just my personal preference but I would not want to be in an echo chamber. If everyone just agreed with me all the time I would start to feel like I am in a room full of NS5 robots iRobot movie reference. "One of us..." That to me would be just as dystopian as being in a room full of fighting tribes. But that is just my own take on things. Perhaps it is a generational + personality tainted preference on my part.

That's exactly my point. The bubble I was referring to continues to be highly political. It's not non-political.

But is that limited to just Mastodon?

That happens on other social media to avoid getting banned.

One example is anything showing disagreement with LGBTQ movement from the east, no matter how much you think that is a done thing, it definitely not, especially there.

No, I think the effect of "toxic positivity" is found wherever you create a small community, whether that be Reddit, Mastodon, or anything else.

Toxic positivity isn't necessarily about banning, it's rather "soft silencing" within the bubble. Those most ideologically active dominate the network and discourage any type of dissent.

To stick with my mask example. There's absolutely no consensus within progressive circles that mandatory masking should make a comeback. So there should be significant debate even within the progressive bubble. But there is none. Zero. That likely means that a lot of people in the bubble disagree yet are afraid to express that.

> So there should be significant debate even within the progressive bubble.

Why? There are no new government mandates on the horizon, and it's not one of the biggest issues in the world for progressives.

> That likely means that a lot of people in the bubble disagree yet are afraid to express that.

Or maybe they're just a lot less interested in this debate than the vehement anti-maskers?

Earlier you said "claiming how we should still wear masks", and now you're discussing mandates. I don't think it's contradictory to be opposed to mandates of something you support.

As far as my opinion goes, we should still wear masks, but mandates just turn people into petulant children and aren't worth the trouble.

See, I was trying to find the most innocent progressive topic as to not derail from my main point. Which is not masks. It's unhinged ideological purity inside bubbles, which soft silences speech. Masks was just an example.

And yet still you manage to label anybody opposing your opinion as children, even before hearing any argument. You're part of the problem and the very reason people go into silent mode and simply stop bothering.

> A handful of people dominate conversation by posting frequently whilst the rest barely engages and/or is afraid to speak their mind.

This is true of Twitter too.

> Just getting your post seen at all is a challenge, and building somewhat of a following can takes months if not years of purposeful effort. This means that for the typical user, the feeling that you're screaming into the void will be common, leaving the question: why post at all?

I've also felt this is true of Twitter.

> As an example, on a fairly large Mastodon instance I saw a popular user claiming how we should still wear masks. There were a few dozen replies, all in perfect agreement.

Maybe people aren't there for debate club? I personally joined Twitter, and Mastodon, for tech. In fact I first joined Twitter for a tech conference. I have very little interest in debating political and social issues on social media. I muted/blocked all that stuff on Twitter and will do so if necessary on Mastodon.

There are too many people on Twitter who are just looking for a fight. A lot of us aren't interested at that at all, and would rather just participate congenially in a shared interest. If that's a "bubble", then I'm happy to be a bubble boy.

> They don't want to make you happy or feel good, they want money, at all costs which results in you being angry and toxic.

I agree that the incentives between users and social media don't align. However, there still would be none if there was an incentive for social media to "make users happy" or "make users feel good". As long as a single entity is in in a position to control the experience of all users (for example by deciding which timeline/suggestion algorithms are used) users have to keep track of how the incentive structure of that entity evolve. That means as a user, I want to own my interface to networks (so I get to choose e.g. suggestion algorithms). That's one of the cool things of the fediverse or email. By design, no single entity can make the user experience for all users strictly worse because there is no way to force adoption of something that goes against users incentives.

> The entire problem lies with the twisted motives of social media.

Just media. Social media might be latest iteration, but traditional media works the same way, outrage gets you views or sells your newspaper.

The difference is normal media isn't the main conversations space for many people, social media is.

> The entire problem lies with the twisted motives of social media

Exactly! I myself do not identify with "we take the internet wherever we go, and its little colored icons are always beckoning, telling us to abandon whoever we’re talking to or whatever we’re working on and check the latest posts."

This is due to a few things. First, having long established pattern of using desktop computers / laptops, revealing "smart" phones as frustratingly limited devices. I can tap out maybe 5wpm on a mobile device, perhaps 10-20wpm if it has swipe input. Yet on a familiar keyboard, I can do upwards of 120-140wpm. That's an order of magnitude difference, with the qualitative difference of being able to type at the speed I am thinking.

This means when I'm using a mobile device, I'm only using it begrudgingly because I'm away from a real computer and need to solve a problem. If I'm hanging out with friends and someone else texts me, basically the last thing I want to do is take my phone out of my pocket, focus on a tiny screen, and start plodding along tapping out characters. This behavior descends from having mobile computing devices much earlier than most people (laptop and palm pilot around Y2k), when it was not socially accepted to ignore the people you're with and play with your device.

The second is that for a long time I used a phone running Lineage/microG, with only software from F-droid. Free software is designed with its main goal of helping the user accomplish their own goals, rather than the perverse incentive of proprietary web/apps that treat the user as a subject to be sucked in for as long as possible ("engagement"). If I take my phone out of my pocket to use the calendar or calculator or whatever, it's not like I then want to continue scrolling through my calendar or dividing numbers. If I take my phone out to show someone some photos, that is a real-world social activity. Both are limited stimulation based on tasks that can be finished, rather than the endless drip-drip of social media.

Sadly I stopped using that phone due to the early 4G shutdown in the US, and I have yet to find a good device to replace it. I've been using a throwaway "full take" Android that the carrier sent me for free, but my usage patterns have basically stayed the same. When I'm home, I generally leave that phone near the door since I have no use for it until I go out again.

Of course it's easy for me to say this - the difficult part is how to kick one's own addiction to the always-on proprietary software hellhole. I'd propose a large part of this is segmenting your usage across different physical devices - despite the universality of computation, having one or two devices that encompass all of simple tasks like checking the weather, employment, personal productivity, creativity, active relaxation, and passive relaxation is an anti-pattern. It simply blurs the lines too much.

Get at least one new device, ideally running only Free software, but at the bare minimum you need to not install any of the corporate willpower-destroying apps. You can still keep your "trash" device with all those apps you can't imagine living without, but silence the notifications and leave it on a desk/coffee table/etc. Only check on it occasionally, like daily or when you're relaxing at night or when you need to accomplish a specific task on one of the corporate dopamine apps.

> Sadly I stopped using that phone due to the early 4G shutdown in the US, and I have yet to find a good device to replace it.

A pixel with GrapheneOS or Calyx.

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