Hacker News Reader

Comment by unsignedint | Hacker News Reader

Social media as a vessel for diverse discussion is a tall order. It’s too public, too tied to context, and ultimately a no-win game. No matter how carefully you present yourself, you’ll end up being the “bad guy” to someone. The moment a discussion touches even lightly on controversy, healthy dialogue becomes nearly impossible.

Think of it this way: you’re hosting a party, and an uninvited stranger kicks the door open, then starts criticizing how you make your bed. That’s about what it feels like to try to “fix” social media.

View on HN

I really liked the Circles feature in Google+: you defined groups of friends, and you could make your posts visible to particular groups.

They were not like group chats or subreddits, the circles were just for you, it was just an easy way to determine which of your followers would see one of your posts.

This kind of interaction was common in early Facebook and Twitter too, where only your friends or followers saw what you posted, often just whitelisted ones. It was not all public all the time. Google+ just made that a bit more granular.

I suppose that these dynamics have been overtaken by messaging apps, but it's not really the same thing. It's too direct, too real-time and all messages mixed-in, I like the more async and distributed nature of posts with comments.

Granted, if you really want a diverse discussion and to talk with everyone in the world at once, indeed that's a different problem and probably fundamentally impossible to make non-toxic, people are people.

Whitelisting solves the problem for me. I curate every tweet I see with a browser extension. Strangers can't kick down the door. I only see content from my direct follows. It dramatically reduces the stress. Maybe a little like horse blinkers.

Do you mind sharing this extension? I would prefer if it also shows the retweets of people you follow as that is an endorsement no matter what people say.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/control-panel-for-t...

How do you find new things to follow? If everyone did this it would be extremely rare to encounter new content.

We'd just go back to human curation, you'd whitelist a few curators you liked, people wanting to promote their content would email a link to a curator, if they thought their audience would like it they'd share it, you'd see it via your whitelist and if you liked the look of it you'd whitelist them.

Is this really an issue? I only message on WhatsApp with people I’ve met in real life and I prefer it that way.

I only want to engage with people on Twitter if I specifically add that person to a whitelist. I don’t want to be subject to an algorithm that is trying to increase “engagement”. I don’t want more engagement with Twitter, I want to see random posts which an AI thinks are going to enrage me so I stay on the site longer.

> Whitelisting solves the problem for me. I curate every tweet I see with a browser extension. Strangers can't kick down the door. I only see content from my direct follows. It dramatically reduces the stress. Maybe a little like horse blinkers.

This extension? https://github.com/rxliuli/mass-block-twitter

So you are fighting against the platform that you're using. It reminds me about people constantly fighting with their own computer (Windows) to remove ads and crap. In both cases viable alternatives exist which don't require this huge effort.

I see how this works for you and many others but I hate this practice. You are not turning strangers away, you just preemptively shadow-ban everyone.

> Social media as a vessel for diverse discussion is a tall order. It’s too public, too tied to context, and ultimately a no-win game. No matter how carefully you present yourself, you’ll end up being the “bad guy” to someone. The moment a discussion touches even lightly on controversy, healthy dialogue becomes nearly impossible.

Worth reading Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now book:

https://www.amazon.com/Arguments-Deleting-Social-Media-Accou...

I still think old school linear forums are the best format for online discussion. They’re not perfect by any means, but I think they still beat all the alternatives I’ve tried.

The old school forums also centered around a single topic or interest, which I think helped keep things focused and more civil. Part of the problem with social media is that it wants to be everything for everyone.

I like old school forums with like an optional chat room for people to sync in real time if they want

The era of sites with a phpbb forum and an irc channel was really fun for me and I miss it a lot

I made lots of friends that way in the past, close friends, and it's unlike anything I've encountered since then with social media

The internet has become a primary battlefield for making money, and we can't go back to the days when it was just a non-commercial hobby that people enjoyed. To make money online, it's crucial to spread content as widely as possible, and the most effective methods for this are clickbait and ragebait. That's why the enshittification of the internet was inevitable.

Linear is awful. Discussions are always so bad with them. The only advantage is that following the newest message is easier, which still doesn't prevent people from ignoring them if the thread becomes too long.

The main reason why you might think that way, is less the format, and probably more the moderation, and lower amount of people in those forums. I mean take this forum here, is far better than twitter or any other social media-sloop. Smaller Subreddits, especially with good moderation, are also far better than big Subreddits.

There's a couple really big things I like about linear. As you said you can follow the thread of conversation in chronological order. Another big thing for me is that it doesn't have comment karma. Upvotes and downvotes result in echo chambers that suppress alternative viewpoints. PG got it almost right here by making you have to meet a threshold to downvote, but I think it would be better if downvotes didn't exist here at all. It becomes an "I disagree with your opinion" button. Also, threaded discussions encourage people to just highjack one of the top voted threads instead of replying to a more relevant person later down the line.

Also on the topic of moderation, I feel like less is more. Unless it's spam, child pornography, or threats of violence, it should probably just be left alone. Reddit in particular is extremely over moderated these days. Outside of a handful of subreddits, it is impossible to post conservative views because moderators will ban you for them. Just basic stuff like "I support <Republican candidate> and here's why..." results in a ban. Even just being subscribed to /r/conservative is enough to be automatically banned from several other subreddits. While there are exceptions, most of the moderators are in actuality just a bunch of petty, censorious tyrants.

> As you said you can follow the thread of conversation in chronological order.

But it's not chronological, it's posting order. It's pretty common to have sub-threads with different focus and timeflow emerging in the middle of linear threads

> Another big thing for me is that it doesn't have comment karma.

Implementation-detail. And Linear boards can also have karma-systems.

But on the other side, it supports a community-driven moderation.

> It becomes an "I disagree with your opinion" button.

Yes, that is a problem. There should be more options available, maybe a limited set of emojis to communicate the impression of something, instead of bland down/upvotes. It kinda works well on Github and Discord, but has less usage by the systems there.

> Also, threaded discussions encourage people to just highjack one of the top voted threads instead of replying to a more relevant person later down the line.

Which is not bad? At least you can ignore them. Linear has no option for this, all is the same mess.

> Also on the topic of moderation, I feel like less is more.

Depends on the topic, community and size, also the country. Illegal content has always to be moderated by law. And in general, offtopic has to be moderated.

> "I support <Republican candidate> and here's why..." results in a ban

Again, on or offtopic? Each subreddit has a focus, and if it's out of this focus, it's justified to remove it. For example, I would not like to see discussions about PHP in a C-Subreddit, this is simply a waste of my time and attention.

It's not solved in real life. It's a huge ask that it should be solved on the internet.

Where are good discussions between really different viewpoints anywhere?

none of that is the fault of a website. thats been the case for millenia.

"Diverse discussion" is just something I don't want. Of course I've made up my mind about all kinds of things and I don't really need to see opposing points of view as though they are novel thoughts that I've never considered before. Sure, tell me again why your religion or your conspiracy theory proves that the scientific consensus is a hoax. Maybe you'll convince me this time?

I don't mind Mastodon, but I'm pretty selective in who I follow, and diversity of opinions isn't one of my criteria.

> I don't really need to see opposing points of view as though they are novel thoughts that I've never considered before

I mean, that's fine, if you think that you can consider all conceivable angles thoroughly, by yourself. I for one welcome opposing views, but I suppose if my idea of that meant "religion or conspiracy theories" I'd probably be avoiding it too.

I follow people I can learn from, not people who try to convince me that everything I already know is wrong. I don't follow people who post misinformation, reject science, or who think that ad hominem attacks are a valid form of debate. There are a lot of them out there!

Fair enough. I guess I'm very lucky in that regard, as I don't run into that type of person very often

> I don't follow people who post misinformation

A little off topic, but where do you get your news? I am having the hardest time finding credible news sources that aren't full of misinformation or bias to the point of being Soviet Union Pravda levels of propaganda.

The best I've been able to do is pick a few sources that are left leaning and a few that are right leaning and try to glean the truth myself using critical thinking and for particularly important topics, more in depth research independently. The problem is that this is very time consuming and exhausting.

Various, but including The Guardian and ABC News (Australia). I don't think they knowingly post misinformation in news reports, but there's still selection bias (I usually just read headlines, there's little I really need to know in depth). Their opinion and fluff pieces may or may not be interesting on the day.

I lost interest in "right-leaning" when they basically went mad some time before the first Trump term. Neoliberalism was already on its last legs as a credible doctrine. I'm more or less an anarchist at this point.

Edit: the ABC is somewhat right-leaning, and the Guardian doesn't really lean very far left.

no need to consider all angles about an issue. not possible anyway. think about how much time you've wasted on HN reading opposing views that add no value.

I will do that, right after I spend some time thinking about how much time I've spent on HN reading opposing views that add immense value and wisdom to my life. :)

Also bearing in mind that most of us can't really do much about issues in the news, apart from posting a few pithy comments of our own which will disappear into the noise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com