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Comment by travisgriggs | Hacker News Reader

There’s that old saying “God gave you two ears and one mouth, please use in that proportion.”

So much of the social aspect of the internet has been about “giving more people a voice”, and we’ve chased that desire at the blogging, milli-blogging, micro-blogging level.

I’m undecided, but I have a hunch that the increase in “speaking” via the internet has not increased at the same level as encouraging people to “listen.” I think there have been increases. Wikipedia is an asset I didn’t have as a kid. I can search for more stuff and read more stuff. But it doesn’t feel like they’ve increased at the same rate.

Or put as quasi math, if

M = desire/effort to use mouth and be heard online

L = desire/effort to listen/ingest ideas of others online

Then it feels like M/L is rising as a number over the last 2 socially netified decades.

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I want to agree with your ideals but there are 1,000x more people who read and rarely share. The viewed stat on a top rate hn submission is probably 50,000 views on average where comments are measured in the hundreds.

On the same topic: https://www.axios.com/2022/03/08/political-polarization-twit...

The problem is who are you listening to.

If you talk about anything in a public place, say in a pub, it won't take long to hear a differing opinion.

We've worked so hard to create closed communities on the Internet, that you're not exposed to opposite ideas unless you work hard at looking outside your bubble. Social media with its very smart recommendation algos will try to keep you firmly in your echo chamber.

Yeah, you can listen on the Internet too, but you often only hear the choir.

I wonder how much opinion was an important factor in societies before internet. To an extent you can go to a pub every night, full of people you disagree with yet you all live in the same area / space ..

I often feel human groups are not about high level ideas.. but emotional flow and basic needs. Most of the time we don't discuss to debate but to share feelings and share needs.

Social media algorithms might not be the only thing keeping people within a bubble. For example, Fediverse instances or Reddit communities (infamously known for the “hivemind”).

People might simply be tribal in nature, however this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t improve.

Bubbles are definitely an issue, but the original point is pretty far off from reality as they said.

You'd have to respond to every second comment if people held to the 2:1 ratio on the internet.

If the response counts as a comment, then that ratio is impossible to fulfill - although in that interpretation it'd be impossible to fulfill IRL as well, so I don't think we can use comments vs replies as a metric, unless you only count root-level comments as "talking" and sub-root comments as "listening", in which case I feel like the ratio does hold true

What's the ratio? 1:9:90? or something along those lines.

1:2 is amazing engagement.

My favorite takeaway from social media has been realizing that many people have an agenda to push, and will use charged language to push that agenda.

Riling people up and making them angry at other people is a good way to get attention, and from that attention you can make money by selling that attention to other people. The more angry and upset you can make people, the more money you can make selling ads.

It's a cycle and I want no part of it. When I catch myself doomscrolling I remember this, and start skipping the electric stories in favor of ones of beneficial interest to me. It's done a little good for my mental health.

You're suggesting that one of the old Rules of the Internet, LURK MOAR, should be more suggested. I agree with you, but I think this is one of those problems that the Eternal September brought on.

Two notes:

- we are social animals so we like to interact and depending on where we live and how we live finding similar cohorts of people in desired quantities it's not that easy without some form of telecommunication. Banal example: I like computers, classic desktop systems, Emacs, zsh etc even in a CS faculty I was able to find only a very small cohort of people with a similar "hobby", I like to climb, again finding other climbers is not such hard but also not that immediate, it's not that popular. I like offroad, shooting, downhill MTB, Ski-Alp. All such sports are not that common, finding people with similar interests it's easier with a bigger agorà (like internet, with usenet or the web);

- MODERN social networks have replaced older ones with a far different target: older ones have a simple target, matching people, making them communicate on common areas of interest. Modern ones have the target to profile, project and direct people discussions, isolating, matching some but not others etc. Witch means modern social targets are political and economical AGAINST their users, exploiting their characteristics.

The result is that in modern era people are hyper-connected to someone else computer system, but also hyper-isolated humanly. And that's not a side effect but a target. You can steer even an entire civilization without most noticing or even knowing who you are mastering social interactions.

Seems pretty simple. Like a noisy restaurant; if everybody is talking at once then nobody can hear anything.

That would be more like group chats. You hear the people close to you. Social media is different where a small group are screaming very loud and drown out the majority.

The best thing about the internet is it gives everyone a voice.

The worst thing about the internet is it gives everyone a voice.

Everyone has a voice outside the internet too, but your spoken word carries social and physical consequences, which tends to teach one pretty quickly not to run their mouth.

Social media won't improve until there is a button I can click to slap the person who wrote it, paraphrasing that famous bash.org quote.

Mind you, I'm not talking about government laws. In the real world, moderation is highly distributed: anyone that has to listen to you can "moderate" you.

>outside the internet… your spoken word carries social and physical consequences, which tends to teach one pretty quickly not to run their mouth.

I see this written a lot on the internet, but it diverges pretty strongly from what I see in real life, i.e. people run their mouths all the time.

The difference I see is that, on the internet, pretty much every interaction is with a stranger you’ll never talk to again, so there is no point in trying to build a rapport.

Plus, engagement numbers to keep your addiction.

Action.jpg speaks louder than words! Short video speaks itself like a big mouth.

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