Americans overestimate how many social media users post harmful content
academic.oup.com
academic.oup.com
It is also why moderation is so effective. You only have to ban a small number of bad actors to create a rather nice online space.
And of course, this is why for-profit platforms are loathe to properly moderate. A social network that bans the trolls would be like a casino banning the whales or a bar banning the alcoholics.
While crime is definitely a major problem, especially in big cities; it only takes a few news stories to convince some people that almost everyone is out to get them.
It's almost 100% effective at highlighting scammers and bots. IMO all social media should show a little flag next to usernames showing where the comment is coming from.
There is a fundamental problem with large scale anonymous (non-verified) online interaction. Particularly in a system where engagement is valued. Even verified isn't much better if it's large scale and you push for engagement.
There are always outliers in the world. In their community they are well know as outliers and most communities don't have anyone that extreme.
Online every outlier is now your neighbor. And to others that "normalizes" outlier behaviors. It pushes everyone to the poles. Either encouraged by more extreme versions of people like them, or repelled by more extreme versions of people they oppose.
And that's before you get to the intentional propaganda.
Presumably with further tie ins to government services, one would be able to view all the phone numbers registered in their name to spot fraud and deactivate the numbers they don't own.
Posting history of any account is already visible. That's already a lot of transparency.
Having individual account vote histories visible won't add any benefit, but will increase ad hominem attacks within discussions, and will also increase hive-mind type voting.
Hacker News is just a discussion forum. This isn't real life. The focus should be on the discussion more than the people-there's not much in the way of profiles. It's weird to ask more of a discussion forum than a government election process which actually does matter.
> Also limit down votes per day
Posts can already only be downvoted for a limited duration. You also can't downvote until you have 500 points.
If you require spending points downvoting, it simply further incentivizes point harvesting or spending all day on HN so you can have more power, which only drives non-genuine activity.
I think personally once you reach 1000 points a star should be displayed instead of the score.
Context matters. Sources matters.
As for incentives… yeah *if you’re a troll-hole it does. But publishing you DV count also exposes you.
There should be more transparency.
Looking through post histories manually is time consuming and ultimately wouldn't work if new account creation is free. Once you start spending more time your haters than they spend on you, you've lost.
How so? It's not like Facebook charges you to post there.
We hold (or I do at least) certain stereotypes of what type of person they must be, but I'm sure I'm wrong and it'd be lovely to know how wrong I am.
They measure the wrong things. Instead of measuring intangibles like project outcomes or user sentiment they measure engagement by time spent on site. It's the Howard Stern show problem on a "hyper scale."
> A social network
Given your points we should probably just properly call them "anti-social networks."
Arbitrators are good! They can be unfair or get things wrong, but they are absolutely essential. It boggles my mind how we decided we needed to re-learn human governance from scratch when it comes to the internet. Obviously the rules will be different, but arbitrators are practically universal in human institutions.
You may be in a minority here. Most people when they see harmful content react to it. And that reaction is perceived as engagement which further perpetuates and strengthen the signal.
"Last week, the Yale Youth Poll released its fall survey, which found that “younger voters are more likely to hold antisemitic views than older voters.” When asked to choose whether Jews have had a positive, neutral, or negative impact on the United States, just 8 percent of respondents said “negative.” But among 18-to-22-year-olds, that number was 18 percent. Twenty-seven percent of 18-to-22-year-olds strongly or somewhat agreed that “Jews in the United States have too much power,” compared with 16 percent overall and just 11 percent of those over 65."
It's easy to get exposed to extreme content on instagram, X, YT and elsewhere. Incendiary content leads to more engagement. The algorithms ain't alright.
A few bad apples, spoil the whole bunch is illustrated to an extreme in any nodal graph or community.
So it's more about how much toxic content is pushed, not how much is produced. At an extreme a node can be connected to 100% of other nodes and be the only toxic node, yet also make the entire system toxic.
Here's the counterpoint to that though: people share stuff on social media not just because it's easy, but because of the egocentric idea that "if I like this, I matter to the world." The egocentricism (and your so-called moral decline) started way earlier than that, though-it goes back to the 1990s when talk shows became the dominant morning and afternoon program in the TV days. Modern social media is simply Jerry Springer on sterioids.
It only looks like "decline" because we didn't used to give random people looking to exploit those weaknesses a stage, spotlight, and megaphone.
Is the 43% cited at the top of the piece matching the same criteria they use for digging deeper in the study ?
Their specific definition of toxicity is in the supplementary material, and honestly I don't think it matches the spectrum of what people perceive as toxic in general:
> The study looked at how many of these Reddit accounts posted toxic comments. These were mostly comments containing insults, identity-based attacks, profanity, threats, or sexual harassment.
That's basically very direct, ad hominem comments. and example cited:
> DONT CUT AWAY FROM THE GAME YOU FUCKING FUCK FUCKS!
Also why judge Reddit on toxicity but not fake news or any other social trait peolple care about ? I'm not sure what's the valuable takeaway from this study, only 3% of reddit users will straight insult you ?
Baseline is in the end anti-democracy and anti-truth. And Google is heavily pushing for that. The same for Twitter. They are not stupid, if they know you and they think they should push you in a more subtle way then they aren't going to bombard you with Tucker Carlson. Don't ever think the tech oligarchy is "neutral". Just a platform, yeah right.
Google et al do not give a hoot about being “left” or “right” - they only care about profit. Zuck tattooed rainbow flag while Biden was President and is currently macho-man crusader. If Youtube can make money from videos about peace and prosperity that’s what you’d see behind the VPN. since no one watches that shit you get Tucker
Funny how you say this but insist you're not the one being fooled right now!
via their preferred business model: no competition, no market. Their best bet is the right. And since the right's agenda is objectively antithetical to the people's interest, they need to create smokescreens with bullshit. That is exactly what is being pushed here.
They are happy with "left" politicians as long as they buy into the false narratives, and as long as they are willing to play along with their monopolist playbooks.
I was always intrigued about Twitter. After the novelty wears off who the hell wants to spend hours ever day tweeting?
Most users don't post much of anything at all on most social media platforms.
Rage = engage
If more channels were subject to moderation, and moderators incurred penalty for their failure, channels would be significantly more circumspect in what they permitted to be said.
Free speech reductionists: Not interested.
Just because an American citizen sees something psoted on social media in English, it doesn't mean that it was a fellow American citizen who posted it. There are many other major and minor Anglophone countries, and English is probably the most widely spoken second language in the history of humanity. Not to mention that even if someone does live in America and speak English and post online, they are not necessarily a US citizen.