Persistent interaction patterns across social media platforms and over time | Hacker News Reader

Persistent interaction patterns across social media platforms and over time

nature.com

41 pointsandsoitis24 comments

To me, the interesting parts of this are:

"We also show that some online conversation features have remained consistent over the past three decades despite the evolution of platforms and social norms." and "Our findings suggest that the polarization of user opinions—intended as the degree of opposed partisanship of users in a conversation—may have a more crucial role than toxicity in shaping the evolution of online discussions."

This is something I've noticed too, as a former participant of a tiny social media site originally forked from Hackernews. Different political opinions and a controversial subject can make for a really unpleasant place, and without any sort of real-life connection, everything is so abstracted that it's hard to be respectful. People on that site that I know are usually good commenters got toxic, I try very hard not to be toxic and had to leave when I couldn't.

Moral is, theres some anecdotal proof for the conclusion , and it does make me wonder that maybe the reason facebook / twiter / etc. is so toxic isn't due to being milked for engagement. Or at least, that that's not as big a factor as I thought. And this seems like it could have some implications on how to make for a pleasant fediverse.

Is it lobsters? I'm guessing it's lobsters

That would make sense, but it's not. It's pretty small, theres only like a dozen active users at any given time. I still like the place so pretty explicitly not calling it out, just not the right fit for me for this moment

> This API considers toxicity as “a rude, disrespectful or unreasonable comment likely to make someone leave a discussion”.

This seems to be incredibly subjective.

According to this, "toxic" content could include a serious discussion about contentious subject matter, a terse comment, or even a off-color joke.

That seems like a very reasonable definition to me.

To your expanded definition: there's plenty of 'contentious' discussions that could happen on Hackernews for example and I'm very glad that dang's excellent moderation and the community culture as a whole prevents them from overwhelming everything else as much as possible. Some subjects have the tendency to be very passionate and personal and to take over spaces when they appear, and letting every thread devolve into those topics makes for an unpleasant place.

But the original definition requires it be "rude, disrespectful or unreasonable". So I don't think a controversial topic is necessarily toxic by their definition, though some topics tend to turn toxic very fast.

These adjectives all pretty uncontroversially negative. The HN guidelines say "Be kind. Don't be snarky". Saying that a rude comment is toxic is just correct. If your terse comment or off-color joke is rude or unreasonable it Is toxic and you probably shouldn't say it.

and it also focuses on the impact, not the intent. Almost any comment can make someone upset and cause them to throw a hissy fit/leave yet most people wouldn't judge those specific comments to be toxic.

Similarly, the most toxic, awful and mean insults can be non-toxic by this definition if they happen between good friends or simply people with very thick skin who won't leave no matter what. (either due to the relationship or simply due to their desire to prove their point)

This study operated on a flawed definition, so the conclusions are biased in quite a strong way.

Also, as other users ITT mentioned, this study uses platforms where posting is heavily censored, either as a global action by the site or by the room's admins (in case of Reddit, FB groups and Telegram). This does not account for the chilling effect - the opposite side won't leave the conversation because they couldn't/didn't want to join in the first place!

So many utter echochambers with really toxic behaviours (e.g. the FDS subreddit) would be classed as non-toxic because all participants have the same viewpoint - the targets of the toxicity are outsiders to the community.

I think the article actually agrees with you, that their toxitiy is hostile to outsiders.

"This entails, for example, that even if toxicity does not seem to make people leave conversations, it could still be a factor that discourages them from joining them."

They also agree that the effects of the moderation impact the data set, and this is mentioned. That's part of why they tried to include many different sites which may have different policies and even so it's cited as a potential problem.

What, specifically, from the conclusions do you think is wrong?

I also think you are misunderstanding what the criteria is. It is not comments that cause someone to leave in that specific instance (something there's not data for anyways), but comments that are declared toxic according to a ML model where the idea is to find comments likely to repel others due to being rude or unreasoanable, regardless of the actual effect. This is kinda squishy and objectionable too, but not in the way that you're saying so I figured it was worth clarifying

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_entrepreneur

What if their definition of "toxic" makes me want to leave a discussion, are they moral enough to close down the entire thing?

Given that every commenter eventually leaves a discussion after reading/replying to some post, doesn't that mean that a that what they're actually measuring is how long discussions are?

I agree it should be broken down better or they are falling into the same simple thinking that most commenters online have.

> they are falling into the same simple thinking that most commenters online have.

Please be aware that your comment has been marked by the API as 'toxic' due to an overt generalized assumption.

I agree, and non-sarcastically. The GP comment is saying that not only are the researchers are dumb but that most internet commenters (not them) are too.

This doesn't make for a good discussion. There's no easy way to respond to this other than being defensive or adding more snark. It is a discussion ender and if all hackernews comments were like this I would leave the site.

> This doesn't make for a good discussion.

What if it is objectively true?

Is there some magic dust that renders humans necessarily good/smart, or might it be possible that you are grading on a curve, as you have been trained to do by humans?

If there are problems and people refuse to even acknowledge them let alone address them, they deserve what they get imho.

I imagine a lot of innocent people get caught up in the harm, but how would one determine who is objectively innocent?

>There's no easy way to respond to this other than being defensive or adding more snark

Your comment is itself an example of how to respond to this without being defensive or snarky.

Thanks, I really do try.

I mean, you could make an otherwise polite, respectful or reasonable comment, and the fact that it made someone leave the discussion would make it the opposite of what it actually is, as well as "toxic". Even more, the level of "toxicity" of certain expressions would depend solely on the average tolerance of the userbase to them at any given time. You could rather label these expressions as "discussion enders", I guess, to signify the general reaction to them, rather than the nature of their content, which can vary from user to user and across time.

A great deal of this study is entirely subjective and they focus heavily on social media that has ejected viewpoints. Therefore, why would there even be toxicity when it's only 1 viewpoint being allowed?

Climate change is never having any sort of healthy debate on reddit or gab for example. It's 1 sided discussion in echo chambers(in this case opposing sides) and therefore toxicity should be expected to be 0.

> For the vaccines topic, we collected about 70,000 comments from the r/VaccineDebate subreddit, focusing on the COVID-19 vaccine debate.

except for the part where you check this out. https://www.reddit.com/r/VaccineDebate/

They have 152 members and no activity for 4 years.So what's this about 70,000 comments of curation against antivaxxers. Reddit quite regularly banned anyone antivaxxer for 'medical misinformation'

They aren't measuring toxicity at all in this case for example.

My theory about why toxicity doesn't necessarily cause people to leave a discussion: the strong desire to have the last word in a discussion.

You don't want the "idiot" to win by default.

A frequent request on HN is for an easy way to find out when somebody has responded to a comment. I think not having any kind notification system is one of the reasons HN hasn't become another Reddit or X.

I hope HN never gets that "feature".

Siri to be the bearer of bad new but that's just a Google search away, if you don't want to write it yourself/can't.

https://hnrss.github.io

Mainstream corporate media is at least an order of magnitude more toxic than anything on the internet.

I think you mean legacy media. Internet is the mainstream now.

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