The only way to detoxify the internet, is to get rid of the "social" aspect. Starting with gasp comments. My online experience has been that much better, since adding comment blockers to my browser.
While I agree with you, and I also run a comment blocker, I find it difficult to believe that sites are going to willingly give up the engagement that comments brings.
Any thread about Facebook, and most threads about Apple are cesspools of negativity. I think you've got some rose tinted glasses when it comes to the kind of discourse that HN offers.
It really depends on the subreddit, doesn't it? I only visit subreddits like r/boardgames and while there is the occasional rude person, overall thos subreddits are welcoming uplifting places. Some parts of Reddit are horrid and some parts are beautiful, just like real life. I just don't go to the horrid parts - just like I would avoid the horrid parts of a city.
I would encourage you to read any thread on harassment or the treatment of women and marginalized people in the tech industry and then revisit that thought.
Personally I'm guilty of often seeking out comments before or soon after viewing an article or video online. As social creatures I think its reasonable to want, even need, others opinions. The effects of receiving these opinions may not always be positive, but I think they are necessary.
Pragmatically, comment sections can have bots, ads, instigators. I think there is a better solution than outright getting rid of online discussion. There's room here for innovation (Not even technical innovation, I think there's low hanging fruit here in terms of comment section design)
Similarly, I use comments as a quick screen to filter through the PR/targeted journalism of stories. Not perfect and will eventually stop working as media companies wise up.
Similarly, I will frequently check Wikipedia before the company/film/whatever. Flaws, but frequently better than official channels.
It doesn't even have to be targeted journalism, sometimes people write junk because they make mistakes or aren't aware of counter-arguments...not even scientific papers are safe from this. Cunningham's Law[1] to the rescue :)
I can feel that hostile internet comments take a toll on my overall happiness, but I don't want to be ignorant of valid counter-arguments to the content I read.
I've been kicking a design around in my head for the past few weeks which retains most of the outward form of something like Reddit, on the grounds that it has proved to be a model that can attract users, but redefines the upvote and downvote process such that an upvote now means "I want to see more of this poster's comments, and transitively (and weaker as the links go out) what that user sees" and a downvote now means "I'd like to see less of this poster's comments and transitively what they upvoted". The difference here being that upvote no longer means "I think everyone should see more of this comment", but now "I think I should see more of this commenter".
I think it ought to be unidirectional to prevent obvious attacks. I'm not too worried about the "filter bubble" because I think you are inevitably in a filter bubble, and it's on you to manage it, not expect random sites on the internet to somehow pop you out of it (they basically can't, by definition).
I think I'd still want categorizations for subject, just to give things some sort of focus. The result is that instead of /r/politics or /r/$ANYTHING being captured by some sort of single monolithic gestalt, multiple simultaneous gestalts could be running side-by-side. You'd want some deliberate mixing, both to keep things interesting and because I think you'd want to ensure some "heat" in the simulated annealing sense to ensure that things don't get too isolated and things keep moving. (Communities themselves keep moving, after all.)
The net effect of this is that while trolls would still exist, anyone not interested in trolling should naturally filter them out of their view relatively quickly, while the trolls get each other to troll at. Since they can not be eliminated, all you can really do is fence them off. One of the other interesting side effects is that you ought to get some other interesting communities in there, too; the community of people who thoughtfully comment, the community of "doers", etc. One interesting possibility is that this may even allow "celebrities" to have a "social network" that nominally anyone can join, but requires sufficient social proof that it isn't just "anybody with a Twitter account and an itchy trigger finger can get the first reply below $CELEBRITY's tweet.", wrecking the utility of social media for the celebrity. I haven't quite solved the question of how to initialize the communities once the system gets going, but it's probably feasible.
What stops me from coding this up is that whenever I start really fleshing this out into an implementable system, I realize it violates one of my life rules: "Never engage in an endeavor in which the worst case scenario is complete success." I don't want to run a community site like that. So for me personally, the outcome matrix boils down to "Failure -> waste of time, Success -> oh shit". Because even if this did miraculously fix all social issues, which I am hardly naive enough to suppose, there's still legal compliance, DMCA compliance, etc., all sorts of things I personally have no desire or drive to do.
However, by all means, feel free to "steal" my idea. While I am by no means an expert in this field (the aforementioned paragraphs are pretty much the sum total of my thinking at this time), I'll even spot you some free "consulting" in the form of playing intelligent-rubber-duck to bounce ideas off of if you'd like. And let me know if you get to deployment.
Well, it wouldn't be the first time someone had the right idea decades before the world was ready. (No sarcasm; fully serious.)
Though you'd want to open it up to people beyond open source developers. And it's possible the idea of using the "up/down arrows" that everyone is familiar with may still be worthwhile; it's been too long since I've seen the advogato interface to remember if they had that. And finally, a "likeability" metric that was less mathematical and a bit more rough & ready might be a good thing; mathematical constructs are really good at maintaining the properties you design in, but are often extremely fragile. I'd want an algorithm with some knobs I can twist, not a single algorithm. But by all means read the papers in question; why rediscover those things the hard way?
I've been thinking about a similar system for a while.
I think you can avoid a lot of the success-as-worst-case issues by designing this as a decentralized protocol.
Each 'user' is a cryptographic identity: all votes or posts are authenticated by the users signature. When you follow/upvote a user, your clientside software increases that user's weight in your feed. All content on the system is content addressable by hash. All 'likes' are signatures on a content hash.
When you connect to another node, you request all recent signatures for people you follow/have upvoted. Clientside software can use various schemes for weighting - totally up to each individual user (ex. how many upvotes is equivalent to following someone? how much time decay in scoring do you want? how deep do you want to traverse followed users' social graph? etc.). Weights for each followed user are multiplied by that user's score for that piece of content, and is then summed across all followed users to create an ordinal list of content - a 'feed'. In this way, if multiple users you follow all like the same piece of content, it would probably be scored higher than a piece of content liked by only one user you follow - so long as your weighting for all those users is equal.
Ideally:
- Nodes should be able to support multiple users, and host a webserver that provides access to the network to those who are not technically sophisticated enough to host it themselves.
- User data should be portable and transferrable to different nodes.
- Nodes could implement their own email+forgotpassword userflow to abstract the crypto complexity away from laypeople, though this complicates account transfers and risks account theft by unscrupulous nodes.
Reddit has a large user base and a myriad of subreddits where different solutions have been tried. So far, the best I've seen is strong moderation: clear rules and swift enforcement.
AskScience is a shining example of a high quality subreddit, although the comment section usually looks like a graveyard with 90% of the comments removed.
I'd like to see moderation decoupled from the forum namespace.
So you'd subscribe to a forum namespace in order to see posts about a topic (say, AskScience), but you would then also subscribe to whichever moderators you want. The moderation wouldn't be inextricably tied to the namespace.
Anybody can post anything in any namespace (and anybody can declare themselves a moderator of any namespace), but people will only see posts if their chosen moderators allow it. You could have all of the same moderation powers that exist at the moment, except any given moderator's actions are optional to any given user's view of the forum.
We wouldn't need a situation like with r/bitcoin and r/btc where disagreements about moderation resulted in a splinter group creating a separate namespace: those who disagreed with moderator X would simply unsubscribe from X's moderation.
I don't know if this would result in a better forum, but I'd be interested to see how it's different, and I don't know of anywhere it's been tried.
(And in case someone out there is granting wishes... can I also have it decentralised e.g. using IPFS's pub sub?)
Spam was and still is a nassive headache. However Bayesian filters were really starting up. But Spam was annoying at best.
What caused Usenet servers to be quit was that ISP's were seeing them as a pirate haven and a lawsuit magnet. There was all the impetus to stop supporting piracy, and lose the costs incurred with that bandwidth to a Usenet server.
Sure, it was a great draw to use it to pirate... but it is also why it fell. Now these days, time to move to IPFS. That place is ripe for piracy, and super simple to share.
But then somehow a few "bad guys" get to become moderators and everything goes back to s*it. As someone has said above, it's all about the incentives. No-one has enough reasons or available resources to want to take over an obscure sub-reddit with almost no real-world influence, but when there are State actors involved you can be sure that things will turn sour. My most recent such experience is with /r/syriancivilwar, which used to be decent enough two or three years ago (even if some of the posters had actual ISIS flares), but since the troups-on-the-ground involvement of both Russia and Turkey the sub-reddit has become an echo chamber for those interests.
I agree, on areas of general topics (news, current events, et cetera), the comments are cancer. As more comments are posted, racism/sexism/ageism/horribleness approaches 1.
The comment section changes a lot if you stick with tech sites and peoples' blogs, or project sites like github/gitlab/hackaday.io . In those cases, people are 99% of the time pretty decent. They may demand a feature on a FLOSS git* page, but aside of entitlement attitudes, it's relatively non-poisonous.
EDIT: I misunderstood OP, I thought the comment was saying there was zero proof of Huffman's ability to tamper in the first place. Agreed there's no way to prove he can't do this anymore.
Mind quoting the passage that describes the measures in place? I just read the entire article and absolutely zero proof is provided that Huffman can no longer edit things.
It mentions Spezgiving, followed by Huffman's apology, and then moves onto banning subreddits, to the meeting about banning subreddits, and ends at /r/Place and the worry it'd be nothing but swastikas. Absolutely nowhere is anything described about the measures in place to prevent Huffman - or anyone else at Reddit for that matter - from editing posts.
I would argue we don't need to detoxify the internet, stopping trolling is missing the point however we should stop the spread of misinformation, in fact sites like reddit and facebook rarely create information, they just consume it blindly without questioning the source
I'm less sure regarding Facebook (as I'm rarely on it) but there is a large amount of information created (or at least initially disseminated) on reddit. Places like /r/DIY, /r/woodworking, and countless others are chock full of original content and helpful users willing to answer questions and get into a dialogue down in the weeds.
It's not that the "trolls are winning", it's that people are allowing the trolls to bother them. Trolls have always existed; it's our heightened sensitivity and inability to just shrug them off or laugh in the face of their obscenity that's letting them "win".
I just don’t think saying “people shouldn’t let themselves be bothered” is at all a viable solution. Automated troll detection is clearly a hard problem, but I’m not convinced it’s unsolveable. Whereas getting people to not be bothered is, unless people start living forever and have no offspring, by its very nature a commitment without end.
Yet much more modest than the policing of content that Facebook and the like seems to be interested in.
That goes double when it’s two clicks to permanently dismiss someone from your attention. The best troll repellant is and always has been to ignore them.
Its also impossible. You're not going to have a close conversation with a group of people when a little kid is jumping up and down and screaming for attention in public. Ignoring them doesn't work for either trolls or bullys. Either they run the show, or you do something about them, end of story.
> Ignoring them doesn't work for either trolls or bullys.
This goes against decades of received wisdom: DNFTT, anyone?
For what it's worth, I agree with you, and I always thought simply not feeding trolls was pointless: There's something similar to a broken window effect in terms of overall tone. If someone comes to a site, sees a lot of negative comments and general asshattery, they'll file that place away as "where the asshats are" even if those comments are being studiously ignored by the regulars. That means the only ones who want to comment there will be the ones who want to act like what they see around them: asshat trolls.
I also think that ignoring them until they go away is a bad strategy: Even if you ignore one or two of them successfully, there's dozens if not hundreds of them waiting to join. You can't outwait them all without the community degenerating due to the broken window effect I mentioned above.
I kind of took your first sentence and started replying to it by saying about what you said afterwards - I thought that was your main point! My typed reply:
> Do not feed the trolls only solves the problem in smaller communities, or at least only just holds off the effects of the troll (topics spinning out of control, pointless arguing, accusations and recriminations) until they can be moderated. Its not a solution for a community, and never has been.
It doesnt work now, and with the diversification and use of the net by vulnerable groups.
Having a users on a generalist forum suddenly exposed to flashing lights to induce a seizure, or ambushed by images of dead people, or being attacked for being a woman or a minority group?
Yeah you cannot expect people to shrug that off, without also expecting a large mass of humanity to be essentially living without a normal emotional response.
No one needs to change anything. The internet existed for years without this being an issue.
If you encounter someone on the internet who is annoying you, most platforms give you the option to block them. You do that, then move on with your life. It's not hard.
The internet did not exist in its present form, extent of influence, flexibility, etc., without this being an issue for any length of time. Don't lie to yourself.
No, trolls have not existed in the form they exist since the emergence of the internet. Self-censorship is a wonderful thing. And the way it works is: you say dumb things (especially as a kid), you get slapped by your parents/friends/people around you. By age 18 or 21, you know instinctively that what you can and cannot say around other folks. At least the vast majority of folks do.
On the internet however, there's no real sense of human interaction and the repercussions are usually minimal.
Real life trolling is probably 1/10k of internet trolling.
People don't need the self control to avoid trolls, they need the self control to change their reaction to them from simply getting butthurt and offended.
> So your answer to people you don't like is corporal punishment.
A) Who said it's my answer?
B) Just because I listed corporal punishment, it doesn't mean it's the only one form of punishment used.
That how society works, especially for kids. Kids are jerks to each other. After a childhood of interacting with jerks, we learn what we can and cannot say. We react to stimuli. A huge chunk of these stimuli is negative, i.e. a form of punishment.
Does it improve discourse? I believe it does, not all of it is negative. It forces us to learn and to better ourselves.
Obviously it shouldn't be the only form of interaction. You also need the carrot, not only the stick.
But the internet proved that the "stick" is there for a reason. You either have a "carrot" for everything (impossible, and also doesn't work, since people get used to rewards and become desensitized to them after a while) or you need at least the threat of a "stick".
Yeah this is bullshit. Trolls have always existed, but shrugging them off was never a solution.
In message boards I used to frequent trolls were suspended without question and banned for repeat offenses. Now when trolls get banned there is an out cry from the troll and those in line with them about censorship and violation of their free speech.
The problem is trolls are given too much room to play and speak.
The conflict is that reddit originally touted itself as a meta-community, where such moderation was applied per-subreddit. If you didn't like the topics/policies of one community, then start another right alongside.
But the desire of investors for widespread palatability and the media's latest push for censorship have perverted the site into creating unified "community standards", across what should be considered independent communities.
Reddit itself gained much of its popularity due to the mass exodus from Digg over their censorship of one simple number! Users inherently do not want to be censored in what they can communicate about, and so the cycle will be with us until we finally scrap this hack of using centralized websites in lieu of end-user software - centralized structures can never remain free of top-down control.
The other problem is that several subreddits were known to "leak," where the subscribers to some subreddits would go out and spread that kind of thing across the rest of the site. If the racist content stays in their subreddits, it's still terrible that it's there, but at least it can be firewalled off. But when the users of those subreddits start spreading that content through the rest of the site, it's much more difficult to avoid it.
> Yeah this is bullshit. Trolls have always existed, but shrugging them off was never a solution.
> In message boards I used to frequent trolls were suspended without question and banned for repeat offenses.
That must be selective memory, or at least not generalizable: on some pretty major message boards (e.g. Slashdot), trolling became a prominent subculture.
In fact, one of the my major memories of numerous early message boards was that trolling was an integral component of the forum culture. Trollish things would frequently be said and you spotted the newbies and outsiders based on how they responded. As you learned the culture, you'd learn not to get trolled and maybe occasionally troll yourself.
For me the issue is the broad application of troll and liberal banning. I was all on board the detoxify train until I was banned from a subreddit where I had posted for 5 years.
I didn’t know what comment or behavior. Messaging mods said that it was obvious what comment and that I was a troll.
This was confusing to me. I never went back. Now I am skeptical of labeled trolls unless I can assess behavior directly.
> The problem is trolls are given too much room to play and speak.
That's the problem with your mindset right there.
We are talking about people. To decide that other people cannot say things you do not like to hear is to deny them their liberty. That clearly worse than "trolling".
Getting offended by a person's words or actions is not them doing something to you, it's you doing something to them - or rather, to yourself.
So if you can't - or shouldn't - compel other people to think and act in a certain manner, what do you do?
Exactly, but only as long as you take precautions that no one can escalate online harassment to something that's a real-life problem.
I'm pretty comfortable online, but mainly because I only post under frequently-changed pseudonyms and never leak much personal info. If someone gets obsessively mad at me, I can just abandon the account and be done with it.
This has nothing to do with "getting your feelings hurt".
If someone is a dick to you IRL, you just go about life without them and its of zero consequence to you. Imagine if they stayed in your life outside of your own accord and just yelled dumb shit at you from the sidelines.
Not everyone is built as strong as you, it bothers some people.
Thats untrue - in that what you describe is the kind of trolling we would wish for because its benign.
Trolls actively target forums for support groups. Today they can attack groups and classes of people.
At this point, expecting people to "grow a thick skin" is not an option, because a major aspect of their life is fighting for their rights against people who are attacking them, or people who have hurt them.
At this juncture the troll loses all rights over the definition and interpretation of how their action should be perceived.
Instead most normal people just see it as vandalism and stop caring about whether it was for the lulz or not.
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And as stated in the article - NOT responding to a troll who is attacking someone makes you complicit.
Ignoring bots/ads/spam commentators, I think the emergent toxicity in online discussion is a result of a fast-paced feedback loop and (ultimately) low empathy.
All people commenting online; liberal, conservative, depressed, mentally ill, whatever-- they all have ebbs and flows to their behavior. Online discussion exposes the sum negative aspects in the behaviors of all actors. Instant feedback loops (esp. 1-to-many interactions) speed up the rate of negativity.
I agree. There are strong psychological and sociological inhibitions that the internet strips away. Turns out those inhibitions are a good thing, and likely evolved for a reason.
I think there are definitely layers here. One of the things happening is that people who ultimately support all sorts of awful things like genocide and racial cleansing get upset when people are rude to them on the internet, as if that were the real problem. There are a lot of priorities out of whack.
The only consequence you should get for being a dick should be people realizing it and not taking you seriously. IMO, that's one of the things you shouldn't really outsource, unless you want someone else to pretty much decide everything for you.
Social media sites are learning the hard way that they're media properties like any other media property, and that they have to have strong editorial control over their media property to be a proper media business.
Reddit is a hive of working-class populism, which is incompatible with any advertising-oriented business. Advertisers don't want their ads next to shitty toxic content. They want their ads next to elite, well produced content. You think Calvin Klein wants their beautiful fashion ads next to a photo of a dead body?
Sure they can get 10 cent ads of your neighbor's garage sale to place next to the photo of a dead body, but to get the $5 million ad buy from Proctor & Gamble, they'll need editors to raise the quality of their content.
Detoxification is central to any ad-based business.
How quickly they learn this is the question for Reddit.
Reddit initially rose to prominence because of bad decisions on Digg's part. Reddit is nothing without its users. Any decision that potentially drives users off its platform can't be made lightly.
It's worth noting that instead of community management, Reddit has been soft-pivoting to become a new Facebook with features like group chat, new profile designs, and a News Feed-esque view on the official mobile apps.
Incidentally, Facebook itself hasn't solved the problem of its community/fake news, hence the recent algorithmic changes to the News Feed to surface more content from friends, and a public push toward Facebook Groups. To be like Reddit.
They couldn't make enough money with their current monetization model so they're copying the arguably most successful player in their market (FB). It'll be interesting to see how it plays out because of reddit's "anonymity", its lack of real social connections (friends, family, that cute person who sits next you you in econ), or any kind networked apps (whatsapp, instagram, messenger, ...).
Reddit used to be a place where you could post links to anything on the internet (kind of like this place) and comment on it (without signing up with your email). Now it's place more like Facebook with algorithms based on your personal taste, geolocation, forced email, shadow banning, banning of politically incorrect subreddits, endless political posts and "Futurology" and "Uplifting" news articles. Free speech on reddit died a long time ago.
I’ve also noticed recently that Reddit has gotten extremely aggressive towards people using it without an account or using it on mobile without installing the app. I’m addicted to it enough, thank you, without having a dedicated app for it.
Reddit only used free speech as a draw until it got enough user to make money by pushing agendas. It's been agenda-pushing high censorship for years now, but some people just started noticing around the 2016 US election where they didn't even try to hide their obvious bias anymore.
In an age where any opposing opinions are consider "toxic" by some, I don't think trying to "detoxify" should be a goal. If you don't like the opinions of a subreddit, don't go to that one.
Its been relatively rare that unpopular opinions offered in good faith are punished with anything other than downvotes on reddit. People don't post opinions with the intent to convince, they post with the intent to deceive or create a reaction, IE trolling. That has been the big wave that has taken over, its just taken the conservative political sphere over far quicker.
The other wave is the circle-jerk - a relentless and all-encompassing embrace of confirmation bias, institutionalized to keep a fundamentalist purity of thought. This is beyond a normal echo chamber, these are high powered ideology amplifiers.
We've never had the concept of unlimited freedom of speech, and most of the time that its been curtailed, it has been to protect against those who use it in bad faith (fire in a crowded theater, etc). That is the toxicity - IMO Reddit is going to learn this lesson far too late, and allow a group that doesn't want to be there anyway take down the whole site when they leave.
It's not at all rare, and it's endorsed by the admins. They LITERALLY changed their algorithm to keep the Donald Trump fan subreddit from appearing in the /all filter and their posts from ever reaching the front page.
When you change your searching and indexing algorithms to suppress fans of a specific politician but not fans of other politicians, that's not really good faith.
People attribute to malice what is best attributed to entropy
The old reddit, allowed actual pedophiles to describe their issues in ask reddit threads.
Theres even a dark ama where a relation which would make people ill, was discussed.
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Unfortunately what social media is exposing, is weaknesses in how human beings agglomerate.
If someone makes a forum for dead baby jokes - distasteful to many, but not harmful in private - it eventually attracts people who think that dead baby jokes are the norm.
Or in worse terms - a sub for making offcolor jokes soon gets overrun by people who think off color jokes are not a risque deviation from normal behavior, but is actually normal behavior.
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On top of this, the internet and social communities are extremely low on contextual information - which is critical for most people to understand a conversation in real life.
This means that the only way someone can know what you mean when you are being vague, is if you make an constant effort for tonal and idea accuracy in your comments.
Obviously this is challenging, leading to a cascade of misunderstandings, which only serve to polarize groups more.
----
Theres a lot of research being done on how people behave online, and its just a grim picture.
> Reddit used to be a place where you could post links to anything on the internet (kind of like this place) and comment on it (without signing up with your email).
There's no money to be made with that.
HackerNews is different cause it's just a funnel and an online play ground for folks at YC. The day they decide that the signal to noise ratio has decreased past their threshold, this place will be gone faster than the Arc server can shut down.
Reddit generates enough to continue being Reddit through the gold program.
What happened was Reddit got sold, and that large amount of money raised expectations about "making money", in particular, equating massive traffic to massive potential dollars.
Reddit would have been just fine, and would have seen few real financial issues had it not been burdened with providing a return for a rather large sale price.
Just because it can be sold, may not mean it should be.
There is an inherent conflict between users goals and how they derive value from a site like Reddit, and the builders who may or may not align with what attracted users in the first place.
It's a difficult problem, and one that Aaron spoke to a few times. The idea of sustainable community discussion was solid, and clearly resonant with a lot of people and probably the broadest demographics around.
Reddit appeals to everyone from teens on up. Kind of amazing.
It's current owners paid a price high enough to remove the sustainable discussion idea from the table, favoring a more monetized model.
That has had ripple effects. Not all good, though some are.
Today, Reddit has factions. The vast majority use Reddit casually, often on mobile. The basic app works, but not well.
There is a much harder core set, a good third or more, and I'm one of those, who just uses the old school browser interface, which works just fine on modern mobile.
This third contains many of the community minded people. There is growing angst over changes and a steady divergence in directions, leaving many who understand Reddit, and it's users well, in an increasingly rough place.
I don't see it ending well.
Frankly, someone is going to do the sustainable discussion thing again, and maybe get it right. Making gazillions won't be in the cards, but a very nice living will be.
Should that happen, whoever does it will own discussion big time.
The strength in users funding user discussion comes from the absence of that inherent conflict that always manifests when money gets too big and expectations fail to align with what users see as the real value.
Maybe people being the customers, in the sense of one another, not so much to deliver ADS, is worth exploring more. It won't be as sexy as something that sells, or that will IPO in a way that sets up founders for life, but it may well be the perfect place to deliver answers to some of the harder questions related to large group discussion dynamics.
I have been experimenting with the idea of not making a bunch of rules that define how shitty people can be to one another.
What is stated is being a good human is no risk. The more shitty someone is, the greater their costs and risks get.
Risks include bans, time outs and such.
Costs include various forms of enforced compliance being required to post.
Remedies for being a good human are basically a return to normal peer status.
In particular, a gradual escalation of cost to contribute long before a time out or ban happens, seems to signal to people. A lot more is recoverable.
I see others modeling these things, demonstrating deescalation, and in general trying to recover things before any admin type action is taken. I also see them mentoring newbies toward the safe positive. Her important as that kind of distributed person to person action does not require tools, and cannot be bought.
This very strongly suggests community norms can be used instead of explicit rules to manage things toward value and away from noise.
Ever notice how alphas looking to start shit have a keen interest in the rules? Of course! They want to know what they can get away with.
Take that away and their behavior does change.
A secondary part of all this involves evaluating risk reward for trolls and others making noise.
I'll not put it here, as my thoughts are incomplete and some work is in process, but I will say indirect means, including tools, automation, filters, r...
> Ever notice how alphas looking to start shit have a keen interest in the rules? Of course! They want to know what they can get away with.
The problem is, rules are also a way for someone who was wronged to appeal. While it's a line that troublemakers want to thread to push boundaries, when rules are unwritten, communities often become a reflection of the will of the moderator rather than a community of diverse opinion. Codified rules are one of the steps we have to encourage diversity of thought, but of course there needs to be rule enforcement...
It's entirely possible to appeal sans a set of rules.
The appeals are rooted in norms, and the process is a dialog, kept recoverable, not a trial.
Explain to me how a set of rules isn't a formalized expression if the will of those who created them?
There is more to all of that, in particular, security and agency.
But, those details aside, norms operate much like rules, and are far more resonant, and community owned than rules alone are.
Finally, the organic and well distributed nature of norms tends to check varied and manipulative enforcement of rules. A primary example might be a flare up, vs nefarious intent to make noise and or cause grief.
Unwritten rules have upsides too, though I rarely see them being a reflection of the moderation unless the moderation is being very heavy handed.
I've been in communities that were very pleasant and open about a lot of things where the only rule was, quote, "don't be a dick". I've also been in communities, that despite extensive rules that would make make fellows from my law course cry in joy and fully oriented towards left/liberal, were cesspools of hatred.
I think in both cases it's more a matter of what the moderation will do with what they have. "You reap what you sow" probably applies in some way.
When there are only unwritten rules, then people trying to circumvent them will, usually and to my experience, get caught and stopped by the moderation. The lack of written rules usually means they have leeway in what they do so they can easily plug holes.
On the other hand, with written rules it's also harder for moderation to abuse their rights.
Either way, there will always be this commitment, the community usually figures out what they need by themselves when the decision becomes necessary.
A classic example of how barriers to entry make an impact - take a look at the dwarf fortress forums around 2008-2010.
The game is arcane, and to grok the game you need to be willing to put in an unusual effort at the time.
The resulting main boards are pretty good, signal vs noise ratios are healthy.
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The next major rule is that - general topics are bad. It allows people to farm tangential credibility, and anyone with an opinion can speak.
The worst offender are topics on religion(/identity) and politics.
If you allow pol on your forum, you are fighting a losing battle. Pol has the lowest barrier to entry, but actual Policy and Politics are managed by complicated facts and hidden information.
Politics affects everyone, and is designed to be associated with hot button topics.
This single handedly will poison and polarize your community.
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Between these 2 rules, you can get enough positive starting runway to create a healthy community for a while. Eventually the community will grow old and degrade, but you will avoid a whole host of other problems.
I disagree with your first line of defense, but I do that on more general discussion.
You are on solid ground otherwise. :D
Norms, established members, and the concepts of owning our end of a discussion, as well as weighing what others say can do wonders for general fuckery.
First, and again, you are on solid ground with specific discussion topic focused communities.
Assuming a more general discussion, and or one where growth and or participation is desired, having strong norms in place immunizes the community against nefarious players.
When someone new shows up, the idea is to give them some rope. Let them self identify, and self select too.
When most of the community gets this, then the idea of raising both their cost and reducing their reward both pack a big punch.
You aren't wrong. What you put here does work, but it has a lot of friction, which may be undesirable.
See, a nefarious actor has a low risk and generally low cost to entry.
Why enter?
They also have a high reward potential, and it's that favorable ratio that consistently attracts them. Above someone mentions $10 as a barrier to entry.
$10 is cheap ass compared to the fun one can have! No joke. In my study of this, I've met many who would pay that easily.
If that friction, however high it needs to be, is desirable, fine. Raise the cost enough and the outcome will be a low noise, but also low churn, low growth community, generally speaking. A very compelling, but specific topic can alter that too.
Otherwise, the community, it's founders, moderators, others of status, influence, however that all is structured, only has control over the reward part, and they can have some control over the cost too.
See, the topic of discussion here is more general chatter. We have more focused things well on the way to being acceptable signal to noise. What we do t have is general community, say politics, or other broad topics in that same state.
It's that which I have focused on for a very long time. Personal interest.
Norms, and various discussion devices can deny nefarious actors joy, and can frankly make them regret their intent. At the same time, consistent calls to join the community, based on their own arguments framed in positive ways can work wonders.
One discussion norm is weighting of what one gets. When a clown calls you an ass, it's as laughable as it could be a basis for righteous indignation.
The vast majority of the time, righteous indignation is the response. "How dare you!" From there, the reward gets pretty good for the clown.
What happens when the response is laughable? One actually laughs, or does something basic like rate the shit?
I can tell you the reward on all that is much lower. When they realize that is a norm? Low joy, high pain potential, particularly when they figure out they really are seen as a clown, or ass.
All these things, and I'm leaving a lot out, as it would be a short book to model, get at reward.
Ask yourself, what does a reward look like?
Say it's attention, as another example.
Return that with endearment, and most often they will leave, or join and become a member with some genuine basis. They leave because the moment they are familiar, their behavior normalized, understood, it's boring. No fun. No joy.
They join, because they find out there really is a common basis and they didn't realize it. Often, an ask to join will actually work.
A few will just spew forth, and so raise their cost makes great sense.
Simple things, like say not allowing them 4 letter words, carry a very high, often funny cost that can always be removed on good behavior, expression of and demonstration of better intent.
The best is the community can see that, act accordingly and it's all public and largely transparent. Often, some members will step in to help. Often that works, amazingly, and when the basic norms behind it all are in place and solid.
Many other simple, subtle, always recoverable things can be used in tandem with strong community norms to inhibit noise, while promoting signal.
The best part about this kind of approach is it's well distributed. Model it to a few, they apply, model for a few more, and soon most active participants are largely immune.
I made a new account about a week or so ago. Their new user form looks very much like you need an email to create an account, but you can just press continue without adding one, despite there being no indication of that. If I hadn't already known I didn't need an email, I would have either given them one or left the site and not returned, depending on how I felt giving them my email address.
As they request it they can probably claim that those not giving it are not authorised under the CMA/CFAA or appropriate act in whatever jurisdiction. Would be interesting to see that tested.
Just because I have an honesty box for payments doesn't mean you're not obligated to pay for whatever goods/services.
How do you know the latter are rare, as they're not publicly disclosed. You only find out the former potentially if you're the a moderator, or perhaps the person banned. The banning of subs you find out if you're in the sub, or watch every sub to check for bans. Or is there a banlist from reddit I don't know about?
from your list, it's the only thing it's not correct:
there's a site wide shadow-ban that is only done by admins. that means if you post something, nobody will see but for you everything will show up as normal. subreddit moderators can approve your comment and it will show up. this started as a measure against spammers but it seems like normal users get shadow banned too.
now there's normal ban, where you can be banned from a subreddit (you can't post but you can browse) and there's a reddit-wide ban (your account gets basically deleted).
and there's also AutoModerator "shadow-ban" which makes use of reddit's auto moderator to delete a user's comment as soon as it get posted.
Given that reddit is a Y Combinator alumnus, did anyone at YC contemplate the current mess of the internet back when they applied? I'm curious about the questions asked back then and how they would be answered now
I half-agree with this. The internet doesn't make a genuinely kind and empathetic person into a troll. But I think it does amplify certain bad little impulses that are latent in pretty much everybody -- the temptation of quick and cutting putdowns, mob and tribal mentality, lobbing rhetorical bombs then ignoring the consequences...
There is a qualitative difference between a back-and-forth on Twitter (or even HN) and a back-and-forth in real life. There's way more trust in good faith in the latter.
> These people are just as noxious in real life even if some of them hide it when their identities are known.
I don't think so. A lot of people, and this is especially true with Twitter, get noxious because they found an audience there to "amuse" and entertain, which might amplify the temptation for "troll behavior", especially when that audience is of the same political/cultural leaning as the speaker. Social media inflate egos. Some people who might feel insecure in real life find a community there where they can feel like someone, not by doing something positive but by being mean and condescending to whom they deem their ennemy.
However social media didn't create these divisions, they just amplify them.
IMHO Twitter is a proof that even with real identities, people will engage in toxic behavior provided they feel supported by a large audience. Of all the social media I found Twitter to be the nastiest of all.
By contrast, aside from a few brigading, Reddit communities are often isolated, self contained and don't "leak". It takes a user to actively go on a sub to see its content, while Twitter is constantly pushing stuffs to its users, even the nastiest ones.
It's not Little Boy that created a runaway supercritical explosive nuclear reaction, it was uranium that created a runaway supercritical explosive nuclear reaction.
Except that that uranium had to be mined, refined, separated, shaped, and placed into a gun-type fission physics package.
The toxic people you mention existed before Reddit (and Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or other various online media). However they weren't manifesting the same effects as we're seeing now, for the most part, until Reddit (and Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or other various online media) came along.
It's not the components that have changed, but the relationships, vectors, and mediation between them.
We could, of course, note that there were earlier periods in which we saw similar types of situations evolve. And I could respond in turn that many of those instances were themselves the result of changes in the media landscape: AOL and Usenet, 24 hour cable television news, talk radio, FM radio, CB radio, handheld megaphones, Xerox machines, mimeographs, television (both terrestrial, cable, and satellite), radio, large-scale public address systems, high-speed printing presses, widespread literacy, population concentrations in cities, railroads, and more.
And from these: the 2003 Iraq War, the Gigritch "Contract on America", the Rwanda massacre, the Yugoslav civil war, the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, the 19760/70s Vietnam War protests, the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights movements, McCarthyism, Father McCoughlan, Fascims and Nazism, the Russian Revolution, the Revolutions of 1840, the Chartist Movement, the French Revolution, the American Revolution.
Changing how a system receives, transmits, and processes information will fundamentally change that system itself.
I definitely have to disagree with you here. Human behaviour isn't really built in. There are obviously some natural behaviours in humans, but most human behaviour is a result of our surroundings.
When humans are in material need, they act in a way differently from when they aren't in material need. Nobody is surprised by that.
When humans are on reddit, they act differently from how they act on an old-style phpBB forum. No surprises there either.
All this centralization has created all these problems. We need to federate our systems, perhaps at the app level even. I worked at OpenTable for a short and their arch was interesting. Each PoP in the old version is its own system that pushes data central. Tho they’re replacing it with a new generation of centralization presumably due to eng maintenence concerns. Similar with their regional frontends, seems they’re being consolidated.
I am coming to think nested intranets and special purpose vpns might be a good approach to global commerce and expression. I love building massive scale no touch systems, but they’re never that perfect once they start being used. Eg. Usually you end up with more severe and harder to solve issues with one massive db vs. smaller systems with derived data and links. And on the FE a lot of hard problems go away, beyond i18n etc also cyber bullying etc become tractable.
They all result in toxic comments, trolling, an echo chamber,or worse, a complete lack of participation. There's no real solution to this problem. However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation and an echo chamber (though, you could argue that not all participation is equal and you're mainly removing poor participants).
There's no perfect way to do this because even if you made a subscription necessary, for instance, you may just create an echo chamber. As part of the solution you'd need to prevent the creation of new accounts to circumvent any punishment received.
I'd say the most straightforward solution is that you have a forum and you get an account. Physical mail is sent to your house in order to get a single account. Then, regular moderation practices would be taken seriously as there's no way to create another. The community would be left with those who care enough to not be banned. The problem is that the moderators themselves may be corrupt or wrong.
That can't be determined to be a lie unless someone solves the problem. It's only a conjecture or assertion until then.
>And then, do you want a trial for every comment? That will not work even for a fraction of comments.
Only really has to apply to political statements made by the most powerful office holders, and only when contested, and only when there is a imminent intent to deceive and impact policy.
It's not really an all-or-nothing situation. It's just a matter of how much can be achieved within a reasonable cost.
Some subreddits do have strong moderation; some subreddits think they have strong moderation but they have fucking idiot mods who call down trolls; and there are some subreddits that have permissive moderation and those subreddits leak.
> However if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling.
You genuinely don't. There are forums where you have to pay real money to be able to read and post, and where acting like a jerk will get you banned. They haven't eliminated the jerks. About the only advantage is paid mods which ensures some consistency.
It closes subreddits at the owners whim, that seems strong. It doesn't need to be always exercising that power to have demonstrated that it has and uses that power.
I think your suggestion would lead to an echo chamber. Take a look at metafilter and how samey they've gotten. One thing to remember is that even small barriers implicity give mods much more power.
I complete agree. My premise is that you can only remove two out of the four -- echo chamber, trolling, toxicity, community. If you accept this premise the only logical conclusion is to remove trolling and toxicity. Without community the point is moot, after all. So really you're removing two out of echo chamber, trolling, toxicity.
Hmm, I think I would choose to remove toxicity and echo chamber. I don't mind a certain degree of bad faith behavior if removing it comes at the cost of having discussions with people different from me
I think maybe a good solution would be to (1) pay mods and (2) make everything they do transparent. This will give you better mods to start out with but also gives users the power to notice mod overreach before it spirals out of control.
Within a narrow community, a little bit of "echo chamber" is worth the quality of commenting online. I'd rather get downvoted a little and have to debate my minority opinion than it be drowned out with spam and bots here.
Well your comment presupposes you can trade between a little echo chamber for a lot of spam. Sure, but my comment is more about moving beyond pure spam to stuff like trolling - call it low-level bad-faith behavior. I'm okay with some of that in exchange for a community which is a bit more diverse.
It just occurred to me that that forum moderation is essentially politics, and the failure modes of web-forums follow the failure modes of the political systems their moderation emulates.
The most common form anarchic moderation (i.e. no moderation). When a forum's small, unwritten social rules keep things under control. However, as forum grows, that breaks down, and things become more chaotic.
Metafilter essentially has an authoritarian moderation culture, the rules of discussion are both made and enforced (selectively or not) by the same group on another subject group. There's a wall to keep outsiders out (the paywall). It avoids chaos, but its failure mode is ossification, devolution into an echo chamber, and eventually desertion; as public forum behavior comes to more-or-less rigidly reflect the opinions and preferences of the moderators.
Reddit's somewhere in the middle of the above two forms. There are anarchic hordes in the less moderated reaches, and little authoritarian kingdoms without the walls to keep the hordes out.
I don't think anyone's tried real democracy in a forum (with elections, politics, checks and balances, and the time investment that all entails). It'd be interesting to see how such a forum would fare, and if it could avoid chaos without become an echo chamber. Democracy isn't the public-opinion-style voting we see in forum's today, but instead actual accountability of the moderators to the users.
Not claiming this is a novel insight, but it's new to me.
LambdaMOO tried switching to democracy around 1993, with "LambdaMOO Takes A New Direction". Basically, the mods ("wizards") instituted a petition system for technical changes and ceded all social decisions to a separate arbitration board. The resulting three and a half years of chaos is summarized in the last post on http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/LambdaMOO
In the end, the wizards published "LambdaMOO Takes Another Direction" and took back control, concluding:
> Over the course of the past three and a half years, it has become obvious that this [refraining from making social decisions] was an impossible ideal: The line between 'technical' and 'social' is not a clear one, and never can be.
A great deal has been written about this experiment (and a Web search will find much analysis, along with full text of LTAND and LTAND2), and there are a wide variety of perspectives on why LTAND failed, but one conclusion that nearly everybody seems to reach is that attempting to give a community democracy with no higher guidance is almost guaranteed to be a recipe for disaster.
Reflecting on all of this, I have no idea how the US founders managed to get something that worked at all, much less as well as it does. (And notice that it took them several tries to get it right.)
Freedom fighters rebelling against authoritarian regimes also start out with the goals of empowering the populace ("power to the people!"). They cast off their shackles, stage a coup and seize control...only to realize after some amount of chaos that people are incapable of governing themselves, and the former champion of freedom becomes the new dictator.
An echo chamber is the only real option. Computers are unaware of concepts of good or evil, so at best a moderation algorithm can do is enforce a certain viewpoint. The question is what viewpoint? The viewpoint of the consensus of users, or the viewpoint of the community leadership?
I don't think moderation should be done by algorithm, as soon as you give the task back to humans you're much more capable of shades of gray and thoughtful, real moderation. Humans have been moderating public spaces for thousands of years, we're more than up to the task if a little bit of care is put into the implementation.
But humans are VERY very slow at this. Even our world-class moderation systems (the legal system in many countries) is excruciatingly slow, often taking months or years for a single decision.
Have you ever... looked at the comments on MeFi? Some posts get lengthy, complex discussions, on subjects related to the link at hand; some do not. There is also Ask MeFi, where you can ask questions and get answers from other users (ads shown against this section to visitors without an account used to be a major portion of MeFi’s revenue until Google did some stuff that lowered MeFi’s search ranking). And there’s MetaTalk, which is for talking about the site and has its fair share of “hey let’s hang out and talk” posts.
I mean, yeah, it’s structured mostly around links, and you can certainly use it as a source of Interesting Links. But there’s conversation and community there if you look around a little.
I was a member there for years. There's a community, which is highly normative, but they also resist implementing threading or commenting by reference precisely to keep the focus on submissions.
I'm still a member! For the record, we resist implementing threading or commenting by reference because it's makes for an unreadable discursive shitshow when trying to follow busy, active discussions.
Staying relatively on topic is an unrelated aspiration and one that we mostly let flex a lot depending on the specific thread and context.
We really just need better public education, as well as clearer separation between information and entertainment.
Facebook/Reddit/Twitter/etc promote a regression towards the mean understanding... viral content reflects and amplifies the "average user's" sentiment and values. Acceptable for entertainment, but inherently prone to misinformation, propaganda, and demagoguery. Education requires valuing subject matter experts. Opinions which may not be widely held, or even popular, but supported by people who are vetted as being knowledgeable on the subject.
Traditional media could be regulated because they were largely centralized, but centralization also creates an establishment that regulated counter-culture ideas. In contrast, the internet is anarchic. Online anonymity impairs delegation of trust... any idea can be published so every individual must rationally evaluate what they consume. Attempting to regulate away undesirable behavior on the anarchic internet is just cat-herding. At best, you create a walled garden for a select few.
As I see it, the paths forward are either:
* public education, emphasizing civics/rationality, to support distributed self-regulation
* centralizing with state regulations
I want the former but the latter seems most likely, considering how the underlying networks are consolidating, and increasing awareness of how amplified public ignorance creates political/economic instability that hurts those with power.
I wish this were true, but the amount of fake news spread by trusted news networks, such as newspapers spreading Russian propaganda bots, implies that education isn't sufficient. If a professional cannot discriminate between truth and lies on twitter how can an average person?
The economic incentives are misaligned. Fake news helps with page views and other KPI. If there was an actual enforcable cost associated with misrepresenting the truth, we'd see a slowdown in fake news.
The restoration of the Fairness Doctrine would also help stymie some of the biggest promulgators like Fox News *
The analogy of food nicely shows that some sort of race-to-the-bottom does not necessarily occur: there’s still organic or other high quality fresh food even though McDonald’s has been around for a while.
Similarily, there are still excellent news sources. The Economist is often cited in these discussions, and the New York Times is also vigilant in their reporting and the correction of errors when they occur[0].
What we’ve seen is a breakdown in trust of institutions, largely disconnected from actual mistakes on their part. People will quickly demand proof and invoke conspiracy theories when, for example, the there-letter agencies accuse Eussia of interfering in elections. They have learned to invoke “appeal to authority fallacy”too well, without offering an alternative. Because you cannot evaluate a new story without in some way deferring to the reputation of the publisher.
I disagree with the fast food analogy because that has obvious and direct personal costs, while infotainment negatives are subtle and externalized.
Re: trust and appeal to authority; your example made me realize people are drawn to grand conspiracies because unverifiable theories are infallible... Luring in people unfamiliar with probabilistic reasoning and consilience.
At the same time, I feel like we are seeing a breakdown of trust in institutions because of actual mistakes that, in years past, would have gone unnoticed.
Although this distrust does have negative impacts to our society, I view this distrust as an overall good thing.
That depends. Sometimes European organic veg is preferable to Chinese industrially farmed veg when your local supermarket offers only those two choices. This is definitely true of garlic: Chinese garlic tends to be notoriously bitter and lack juice, but Spanish organic garlic is very sweet, pungent, and juicy. Now, the fact that the European organic choice was made according to the limitations of organic farming may well be irrelevant to its goodness, but there is a strong enough correlation with quality to guide consumers, and it was likely chosen by your supermarket as an alternative to the Chinese imported product precisely because they wanted to cover the organic segment.
That is not a property of organic though. Non-organic farmers are able to produce at least as high a quality as organic (nothing an organic farmer does is prohibited for the non-organic farmer, while there are a number of things the conventional farmer can do to increase quality that is prohibited to organic farmers). Of course just because they can doens't mean they do.
The breakdown in trust of news institutions has many sources, so correcting factual faults is just addressing one part. Omission and selective use of facts, misleading context, and misleading language seem to carry a higher penalty for trust in todays environment where it is very easy to provide the original source when ever a slightly biased news article is published. A factually error is very binary, true or false, while omission and selective use of facts gives room for much more outrage and distrust of otherwise well establish news institutions.
The Economist and the New York Times may have good practices in regard to errors, but there is a clear difference in their reporting to independent fact checking sites. To make matters worse, even those examples of "excellent" news papers tend to have a clear and open political alignment. With increased political polarization this then result in a rather natural distrust of news institutions, even those that are vigilant in correcting errors after they have occurred.
That's great but it's a slow cultural change. Well-educated countries can still fall into extremism, which is driven by emotional and atavistic factors as well as economic and political ones, and can't simply be dispelled with doses of Rationality (tm). Arguably, the failure of rational utilitarianism to engage with this aspect of humanity and to simply dismiss everything that can't be quantified as irrationality exacerbates the growth of toxicity.
On a more practical level, the US is a country where part of the population rejects the theory of evolution on religious grounds, historical narratives are intensely contested, and political life is objectively and increasingly polarized. Educational change happens over generational timescales, and if it were as simple as making it available all our social ills would have been dispelled long ago.
Of course education and critical thinking skills are essential for a healthy social body, but when I see people saying 'we just need better education' I feel like I'm on a bus that's headed towards a cliff edge and well-meaning people are suggesting that the solution to this is better driving lessons.
My intent was to describe the system (social media is a hyper-efficient anarchic consensus-based information exchange), and a root-cause for undesirable output...
There may not be a solution that preserves the open internet, if this system is fundamentally incompatible with social realities.
> .../Reddit/... promote a regression towards the mean understanding... viral content reflects and amplifies the "average user's" sentiment and values
Comparing the experience in a niche subreddit, vs. a default subreddit, it's clear that the real problem is allowing causals in. If people have to go out of their way to participate, you wind up with only the ones who care to do so. And they have, in their reputation, something they don't want to lose.
But if people are allowed to participate by default, you get the enormous masses of people who, collectively, by virtue of their shifting roster, are immune to moderation. And you get people who set out that morning to share as many opinions as possible, instead of the people who set out to participate in that community exclusively.
I’ve witnessed this in well-meaning subredddits. Lots of arcane rules for posting. No warn band and removals mean I don’t try again.
On the subreddits I manage, I allow broad participation with no barriers. But they aren’t popular enough to have enough trolling to break me down and add hoops.
Yes. In today's age of near-universal literacy, "uneducated" is just a euphemism for views disliked by the the side in control of the education apparatus.
While thought-policing media, schools, churches, and any other possible venue of "indoctrination" may "work" to a superficial extent, it mostly just completely destroys the credibility of your authority and leads to stunning implosion and destabilization. See: the Soviet Union.
Like it or not, you can't just beat "undesirable" views out of people, either with schools or social media moderation.
I understand and agree with some points of your criticism, but I disagree with the part that we can't beat undesirable views out of people. Well, we can't do it completely, but it's not a binary thing, and I believe we really can do a lot to educate people. And not a political education, but teaching them about their own biases. Teaching them to be critical, to not just ignore evidence when it goes against their views, to be fair to others, etc.
I don't know, I don't think we have actively tried yet.
I don't mean it to be inspirational, only to indicate that persistent propaganda and organized information warfare can indeed drive ideas fully out of the population.
Being able to distinguish fact from fiction is not a skill that is near universal, and it should be. Seems like a straw man to attack "thought policing" and "indoctrination." We're talking about critical thinking and logical reasoning.
This argument is completely disingenuous. Your average person is capable of critical thinking and logical reasoning -- those who aren't are either wards under the care of another person. Normal people just think logically and critically in reference to local optima, and that's not something that we can or should try to program out of them.
That quality is also known as adaptability and it's crucial to successful survival and prosperity, for exactly the same reason that it's useful in mathematics: global optima are generally difficult to deduce, if they can be conclusively and authoritatively determined at all.
Saying Side X is "not being logical" or "can't think critically" is virtually always just a cop-out. It says you either a) don't understand or b) don't want to admit the validity of some of their concerns.
Most of the time when the other side's argument is understood, the disagreements are a matter of priority and/or credibility, not nonsensical thinking. And those priorities are usually determined intrinsically; values as such can't really be programmed or taught. They're the result of the years of experience each individual has endured in the real world.
A good example of this is that many engineers are known for a just-the-facts, no-frills approach. This is because engineers tend to prioritize facts and correctness over aesthetic and emotional value. Other people who don't do this aren't objectively wrong -- they just put different weights on the considerations, leading them to different conclusions.
Another example is outlet credibility. Your average Fox News viewer may believe that MSNBC is propaganda secretly dictated by the shadowy figures in the background, and vice versa. If you believe this, the logical conclusion is to dismiss or at least discount the perspective of the propagandist.
You cannot "prove" that one side is propaganda and the other side isn't, because it is impossible to definitely deduce the intentions and motives of other people. Reports that say reports from MSNBC were more frequently errant are of no value because you can just say "Oh yeah, says who? The same shadowy figures?" to that.
It is important to understand that humans hold a variety of totally non-falsifiable beliefs -- things that cannot be definitively proven one way or the other, even if you try, like the state of mind of the speakers we're around. These have to be approached from the subterranean to be understood, let alone addressed.
All we can do is understand that our own perspective is not the default or de-facto correct one, and that other people are entitled to their own assumptions and unfalsifiable opinions just as we are. They're entitled to their own credibility heuristics and decisions about who is worth trusting. People are free to make their own decisions and conclusions, whether we agree with them or not.
Understanding that is critical to learning that it's OK to disagree with people, without having to pretend that they're insane just to preserve your own ego and self-worth.
> All we can do is understand that our own perspective is not the default or de-facto correct one, and that other people are entitled to their own assumptions and unfalsifiable opinions just as we are. They're entitled to their own credibility heuristics and decisions about who is worth trusting. People are free to make their own decisions and conclusions, whether we agree with them or not.
For opinions, perhaps. There are also people who reject facts. I don’t consider rejection of evolution or young-earth views as legitimate. Thus, those who cling to these views are empirically wrong.
Most people don't reject facts, they reject certain interpretations of facts.
For example, some people believed epilepsy came from evil spirits. They didn't deny that the person was shaking on the ground. They just had a different explanation for it than we do now.
When you build a small house, you don't account for the curvature for earth. Same for when you walk down the street.
When you build a runway for a plane or a long bridge, you do.
A model is not necessarily useful in all contexts. People still use the flat earth model in useful ways because it's simpler to assume the earth is flat in some situations. Of course, once you go beyond the capabilities of the flat earth model your numbers will wildly diverge into the realm of useless while the round or spherical models provide useful numbers for longer.
If parent had been talking about chemistry or physiology or any subject that can be explored via controlled experimentation, I wouldn't have complained. Instead the topics were geological and evolutionary history, which seem very much not "empirical". Not that I suspect that those sciences are wrong in any sense, but words have meanings.
I misread gp as saying "flat Earth", and not "young Earth". My apologies. I would agree that even if we can point to things like nylonase or the speed of light coupled with known distances to stars, those are deduced facts. Whereas astronauts have empirically observed the spherical nature of earth.
No, it's not disingenuous at all. It is not a cop-out to say that people who believe in conspiracy theories, people who don't understand facts, people who are highly opinionated about things they don't understand, etc. are not behaving logically. They can have valid concerns and still be behaving irrationally. You clearly think these are mutually exclusive but they aren't.
Is there not such a thing as conspiracy fact? Aren't some conspiracies, in fact, real? It seems both sides of the political aisle have pet conspiracy theories these days, so it's really hard for this to hold water anymore.
> people who don't understand facts
As another commenter said, people will usually agree on the clear and present facts, e.g., Donald Trump won the presidency. Where you'll find more disagreement is on rationale: either he won because he gave a voice to the discontented American working class, or he won because he worked in cahoots with Vladimir Putin to subvert American democracy.
People don't refuse to acknowledge the obvious state of affairs. They have different interpretations, based on different values and credibility heuristics, of the likely impetus for that state of affairs.
>people who are highly opinionated about things they don't understand, etc.
aka virtually everyone. How many of us know enough to hold our own with the experts in something that we're "highly opinionated" on? If we can in anything, it's very narrow. Are all of our other opinions invalid now? Humans use credibility heuristics to try to determine who is right about something, and then they follow based on that.
> are not behaving logically
I dunno, it sounds logical to me, at least in the practical sense. If we pretend we live in a world of infinite resources and time, you might be right, but considering the constraints of reality, the logical approach seems to be to have and express opinions in the moment according to one's best judgment, since everyone else is going to be doing that too. Just gotta try not to be too haughty about it.
> They can have valid concerns and still be behaving irrationally. You clearly think these are mutually exclusive but they aren't.
I agree someone can have a valid concern and also behave irrationally. I don't agree this is what you started out saying, though.
>Appreciate the multiple snide attacks, though.
No offense intended. Edit deadline is passed, but I wasn't thinking I put any such things in. My apologies if you felt I was being condescending or passive-aggressive.
> This argument is completely disingenuous. Your average person is capable of critical thinking and logical reasoning -- those who aren't are either wards under the care of another person.
Oh please, you think the average person has sufficient critical thinking skills to read the newspaper and pick out the parts that are "stretching the truth", use specious reasoning or various other logical fallacies, etc? You must roll with a different crew than I.
> Your average Fox News viewer may believe that MSNBC is propaganda secretly dictated by the shadowy figures in the background, and vice versa.
If they had critical thinking skills, wouldn't they be able to get a pretty decent handle on the degree to which they are propagandists?
It sounds to me like what you're saying is, most things within this realm are not knowable, except for the parts that are. The world is complex and confusing, but I don't think it's that confusing.
These 20,000 odd people unequivocally lack the type of critical thinking skills GP is referring to. I find it hard to believe that they are all under professional care. These people are straight out of The DaVinci Code, or National Treasure. They truly believe that they have uncovered a massive conspiracy to over throw the current American government, and they are organizing to stop it. Many subreddits choose a sort of mascot that defines their subredditors. For instance, people who subscribe to the tongue in cheek /r/evilbuildings are "6509 villains plotting", where they post pictures of buildings that have a nefarious apperance, no conspiracy in the comments. /r/CBTS_Stream has "21,333 Operators". As in mercenaries/militiamen. These people are rabid Trump supporters, seem to have a strong fundamentalist Christian bent, and appear to be extremely gullible and susceptible to any sort of theory that involves revenge upon the previous administration. They even have their own prophet, "Q". Everything from occult references, to nazis, to big pharma killing off holistic doctors, to arranging Trumps tweets into an 11x11 grid, and then playing word search to reveal a secret message. These people swear that Donald Trump's televised rallies are chock full of encoded messages and symbolism, both in what Trump is saying, and the clothes/posters of supporters in the background. These people buy toothpaste from Alex Jones, because it doesn't contain flouride. These people believe that all mainstream American history since the American Civil War is a lie created by the perpetrators of this current hoax these people have uncovered. They also believe that Trump has already secretly met with Kim Jong Un, and will soon unveil a world saving peace treaty, and that will "make the libs heads explode".
The truly sad part of this is that a lot of these people are also members of other subreddits dedicated to people who have escaped Mormonism, or Jehovah's Witnesses, or similar groups. So these people have already thrown off the shackles of psychological warfare once. But they believe now that they are "woke", and seem completely beyond talking down.
Good luck explaining to these people that they are being radicalized by Russians, or whoever. Good luck getting any of these people to not believe that any censorship is obvious proof that the sleuths are hot on the case, and that the global elite are silencing them.
> A good example of this is that many engineers are known for a just-the-facts, no-frills approach. This is because engineers tend to prioritize facts and correctness over aesthetic and emotional value.
And yet engineers are over-represented (compared to people with other degrees) amongst Creationists and conspiracy theorists and, I would guess, terrorists. I think engineers value simplicity and direct causation more than facts or correctness.
Education teaches critical thinking, science, history, numerical literacy, and the general skill and toolset to differentiate fact from falsehood, rhetoric, and manipulation-- regardless of where it is coming from.
Education is an immune system for the mind. Generally it is the manipulators who don't like an educated populace, because it decreases their power. They tend to be the ones labeling education as "indoctrination".
Right, in principle, it's agreed that "education" is "good knowledge" and "indoctrination" is "bad knowledge" and/or "fake news".
As long as you think that the inoculations being administered in the school system are valid, you'll call it education. Once you stop thinking that, you'll call it indoctrination.
So you're not really arguing anything. Every side calls training that biases you toward their preferred narrative "education" and training that biases in the opposite way "indoctrination". Is your point that "sometimes people disagree"?
This tends to last until someone realizes that an educational system is a wonderful indoctrination tool to advance their goals. Often enough this is followed by enacting that.
This isn't new. "Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man."
We've already got people with the correct worldview in charge of curriculum and personnel. The problem is that there are still dumb-dumbs that sometimes think there are valid alternatives to our worldview. That's why we need better education.
Sorry--it is satire, but the comment represents literally how it comes across to me when I see claims that "better education" will effectively bring about less toxic discussions. The implication is clear: If only people were rational and educated, like me, they wouldn't think the way they do, and then we would all agree.
How about this: first teach advanced critical thinking skills, so people have the skills (if not the will, that's another problem) necessary to see through propaganda from both sides.
I have a feeling a lot of people would have issues with this approach though.
Well, my understanding is that "critical thinking" is already very commonly considered to be part of various course curricula. If it's not being taught, then we'd need to do something differently.
I've been hearing claims of the need to teach "critical thinking" since I was in high school. To me it always came across as one of those things that can't easily be taught, particularly in a traditional academic setting. Everyone agrees it should be taught, but if there were a clear way of doing it, we would.
> If it's not being taught, then we'd need to do something differently.
When reading the news, forums, or overhearing conversations, do you not regularly encounter people who obviously have no significant skills in critical thinking?
> There's plenty of material out there that isn't remotely touched upon in a traditional education.
Right. I took a logic class for my undergraduate degree. It's actually the source of the "modus" in my username. I guess to me that's a far cry from what people refer to as "critical thinking." Being able to identify textbook logical fallacies isn't the same thing as rationally and objectively forming a judgment about something.
It's certainly a helpful part, but I doubt most would remember it any better than geometry or 1800s history.
> When reading the news, forums, or overhearing conversations, do you not regularly encounter people who obviously have no significant skills in critical thinking?
I do, but it's rarely a clear-cut example of misunderstanding a logical fallacy. More often than not, it's the blind acceptance of supporting evidence while rejecting opposing evidence. Or assigning way too much value to a poorly-sourced news story. Or approaching the issue with a different worldview / values. Or any number of other biases that affect decision-making.
To be clear, though: I agree it's clearly not being taught. I'm just not convinced you can take a bunch of high schoolers, put them in a room, and after X weeks of doing something, they'll be critical thinkers. I agree you could probably teach them logical fallacies well enough to pass a test on them, but that's not the same thing.
Judging solely on the number of HN commentators who are absolutely incapable of detecting irony or satire, and indeed who may feel those are entirely out of place on HN, the average citizen isn't capable of considering two mutually contradictory propositions at the same time, let alone becoming "well-informed". The various exhortations in this thread to "just teach them!" bespeak a similar innocence. We have a rather large number of trained professionals engaged in the teaching already, so such pleas should at the very least be accompanied by considerations of why those efforts have not yet sufficed.
Most of our high schools despair of teaching mathematics to the level of algebra, to most of their students. Many haven't yet despaired of conveying literacy to those same students, but the outcome is by no means certain. I would consider both of those prerequisites to "critical thinking", no matter what particular idiosyncratic definition of that phrase you might prefer. Therefore I suggest that we aim lower, for a sort of animal suspicion that comes naturally to all humans. The result, from the perspective of political harmony, will be the same: hundreds of millions of critical thinkers would not magically all arrive at the same conclusions on any set of topics. In a perfect world of critical education, not only would you still disagree with most people's conclusions, but you would also still disagree with how they arrived at those conclusions.
But to be fair, the longer we get into the current era of politics, the harder it is to distinguish between earnestness and satire. Young people who watch the movie Network today don't see Howard Beale as satirical, because there are too many people like him today who are deadly serious.
> Do you think we've reached the absolute apex of having a well-informed citizenry?
Of course not.
> If not, if critical thinking doesn't work, what could we do to improve this situation?
I'm not sure "well-informed" and "critical thinking" are even relevant to each other, but putting that aside, I genuinely don't know. That's why I asked how you teach critical thinking.
It's possible people are bound to retreat to their biases and it's a futile effort. I'm just not convinced attempting to teach people "critical thinking" will work, because it hasn't.
I've seen it in numerous course syllabi and mandates. I'm not sure how to cite that, though. Here are a few examples where it is assumed the existing education system / teachers claim to be teaching critical thinking.
> Public school teachers and administrators will tell you that one of the mandates of public education is to develop critical thinking skills in students. They believe that curricula are designed, at least in part, with this goal in mind. [1]
> Common Core, the federal curriculum guidelines adopted by the vast majority of states, describes itself as “developing the critical-thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills students will need to be successful.” [2]
> Many teachers say they strive to teach their students to be critical thinkers. They even pride themselves on it; after all, who wants children to just take in knowledge passively? [3]
Are you willing to acknowledge educators / curricula commonly claim to teach critical thinking? To me it's always come across as something claimed to be taught pretty much everywhere. Yet we both seem to agree it's not working.
We could try teaching critical thinking differently and potentially meet some success, but that doesn't change how it's been claimed to have been taught for some time with poor results.
> Here are a few examples where it is assumed the existing education system / teachers claim to be teaching critical thinking.
> Are you willing to acknowledge educators / curricula commonly claim to teach critical thinking?
I'm not in denial of some sort ffs, I'm frustrated at watching our society coming apart at the seams because the vast majority of the population seems to be incapable of intelligently reading a newspaper article, and will fall for seemingly any trick in the book.
Of the examples of "critical thinking education" listed above, do any remotely approach the critical thinking specific education I'm talking about here?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16572861
People are absolutely inundated with propaganda nowadays, like no other time in history, with social media being the most powerful weapon by far. We are graduating our children and sending them intellectually defenseless into this new world, I don't know if the average human mind can be brought to a level sufficient to cope with the propaganda created by the world class experts in persuasion who are working for a variety of deep pocketed entities, but at least we could try.
> Of the examples of "critical thinking education" listed above, do any remotely approach the critical thinking specific education I'm talking about here?
Well no, but my claim wasn't that your suggestion has been tried. It's that other people have been claiming they've been teaching critical thinking for some time, and it's not working.
I agree it's a problem--I just don't think a class in logic will do it. I'm not sure it's teachable at all, and even if it is, I'm not sure those same skills won't be ignored the moment the argument questions one's identity or becomes emotional.
Is it worth trying? It's easy for me to say "sure," but it's not on me to implement, and I'm certainly not sure how to assess whether it'd be successful.
I think emotional maturity is more important than critical thinking. People in our culture have this life or death anxiety over being right, especially in social groups. You see it all the time on social media. Person 1 makes a throwaway facebook post which contains some kind of factual error. Person 2 points this out. Person 1 feels personally attacked and becomes emotionally invested in "winning." The more pushback person 1 gets the more stand their ground and will scorch the earth to save face. Where is all this intellectual insecurity coming from?
It comes from the fact that when you say anything incorrect online, there's an infinite number of people who will call you out on it. Your intellect is always on trial. You have to convince a jury of the entire planet that your opinion is valid.
Take the same comment or opinion and air it among three friends in person (or a very tight social network). You only need to convince two or three people who likely trust and respect you already, and who are not inclined to want to spend an infinite number of hours debating such trivia across all time zones.
But... an infinite number of people aren't reading every page on the web, all the time. Even on Reddit, you're only really interacting with the limited subset of users who choose to comment, out of the limited subset who read a thread - which is still possibly bigger than a circle of friends, but smaller than any significant fraction of the human population.
There is the perception that "the entire world" is watching you on the web, criticizing your every move, but that's not a fact.
Why not just engage in conversations on the principle of charity and good faith. There's also the concept of steel manning other peoples arguments to help extend good faith.
Not every conversation has to become a burned bridges and salt the earth affair. If the other person is just trying to "win" then disengage from the argument. If the other person is arguing with you in good faith then maybe you're wrong or have something to learn from a new perspective.
Even if you hadn't misinterpreted the GP, this crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed here. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to those rules when commenting on HN.
We should incentivize them to have the correct worldview. E.g. if you’re a CEO you should make sure that your workforce holds the correct opinions by reminding them that they can be fired on the grounds of being a bad “cultural fit”.
The clear separation between information and entertainment is BRILLIANTLY said. Seems straightforward but it's really important. Why is Twitter, a cesspool of memes, rap, sports, and kardashians mostly used by kids under 25 the primary means of breaking stories? Why is so much news on there? Anytime profitability, entertainment, short attention spans and news all get entwined, the resulting outcome is clear.
Facebook, Reddit, twitter, Snapchat have all started for entertainment and switched to catchbyte reaction/outrage culture news and normal news has turned into a mess as well.
I say regulations wiping trending news feed off Facebook, twitter and Snapchat is a start. Perhaps funding to any group that meets set in stone criteria regardless of political affiliation gets some federal funding to make up for the cost of making real journalism. That journalism must be fact checked and we hold them accountable.
People are desensitized to everything now and when shocking news is made every 15 minutes and the world is so connected we become numb to so much and that is incredibly dangerous
More karma, more posting; less karma, less posting. Everyone starts every month/week/day with only so much, no roll-over per timeframe. Modify it so that 'popular' threads cost more to post in. You can give karma to others too via the upvote and take it away with a downvote, but still no roll-over. Troll/shill accounts would still get upped around en masse, but less so and it would be 'easier' for mods to tell. (I'm sure you can model this without too much effort vis a vi prisoner's dilemma). You'd have to pick and choose which to comment in. Posting content would work similarly, but a slight mod to the cost to posting.
I'd think so. More popular threads would 'cost' more to post in and there would then be less posters in it as a result. 'Brigading' would be difficult.
on the contrary, popular opinions would gather more karma, thus allowing them to share their ideas more often, unpopular opinions will quickly have their posting ability removed via downvotes. Soon enough only the prevailing popular opinion will be found
I had the same idea at first but I don't think it would work in practice
The NRA has its own social network where users must perform certain tasks before the user can post or comment. You have to tweet at your legislator or share things to your personal Facebook in order to show fealty to the community, in order to get enough karma to talk to others in it.
All within the context of rampant financialisation, land policies returning us to feudalism and continuous lying about the banking bailout including removing the one candidate who was going to take on the banks (Bernie).
Maybe it's not "the internet" that's the problem. Maybe the dissemination of information as we slide into this rentier hellpit is causing people to be pretty pissed off?
I don't like "the economist" however a while back they did do a piece on land value tax, maybe HN will find it more palatable coming from this journal:
- European feudalism was an unusual system in that the government had no taxing power. The lord who owned land held the taxing power ("feudal dues") over that land, and the king funded himself by collecting feudal dues from land he owned personally, rather than e.g. by taxing the dukes. This might contrast with a more advanced state of civilization in which the caliph / emperor / whatever collected taxes directly from everywhere by virtue of being the supreme ruler, and paid a salary to his lower administrative functionaries. Or it might contrast with a system where the use of land wasn't much of a source of taxes. Or both of those latter things might be true simultaneously.
The US system of property taxes has a lot in common with the system I've described above, and some obvious differences. Similarities:
- The federal government ("king") can't assess property taxes. Only the states ("local lords") can do that.
- People other than the government cannot own land outright, but must pay the property tax ("feudal dues") for its use every year.
Of course, rather than the federal government receiving tax income based on federally owned land, it instead double-taxes the citizens of the states. (But on mercantile revenue rather than on land.) This is arguably worse than the feudal system.
How are devolved local states equivalent to private landlords? States capture land value via land tax and socialise this. Private landlords capture it and keep it.
Are you referring to a feudal lord as a "private landlord" or a "devolved local state"? Both would be more or less fully appropriate.
"Devolved local state" is slightly more accurate than "private landlord", because unlike a landlord in a more commercialized society, a feudal lord was not legally able to sell the land he owned. He was legally able to govern it.
I believe the somethingawful forums involve a cost to participate, something like a one time $10 fee that was designed to remove low content or negative content participators. Might be an interesting case study of your hypothesis.
Unfortunately, while this works, it does not align with the goals of the companies running these forums-- to get as big as possible, to get the biggest valuation and/or slice of advertising dollars as they can. Even small monetary barriers to entry decrease participation substantially, and that's just not acceptable.
This is why I'm quite pessimistic about the current situation: the current in-vogue business model of surveillance/advertising capitalism demands massive size beyond what can be moderated, and thus makes this problem inevitable. And it only gets worse when the most toxic users are the most profitable, viz. Twitter's refusal to ban Donald, even though by any reasonable interpretation of their TOS, he breaks it every other day.
Worked, but not 100%. Many people were still willing to pay 10$ over and over and over again, for whatever reason, to reregister and keep posting (badly) just to get banned again.
I’m amazed at how much trolling there is on Nextdoor. It’s not hate speech level, and most posts seem pretty cordial but considering the community venue aspect I’m just floored at how reflexively shitty people can be the minute there’s a divergence of opinions.
Yeah, Nextdoor is astonishingly vile given the non-zero chance of actually running into one of your fellow members at the grocery store.
My hypothesis is that Nextdoor primarily appeals to those who already have that kind of territorial "they're all out to get us" mindset since territoriality is literally what the app is about. It's the angry "get off my lawn" old man of social networks and it attracts exactly those kinds of people. Mix in some Internet depersonalization effects and you get something pretty nasty.
My Nextdoor community gets a lot of hate speech. They have filters that catch the words you know, but they don't have a way to stop the ideas.
My neighborhood is 50%+ non English Speaking Chinese. There are posts almost everyday that say things like..
"Some people in this neighborhood need to OPEN THEIR EYES and stop hitting the gate with their cars. I'll post this in the appropriate languages so everyone and the community can appreciate the significance of my message. Ching-Chang Chow... Bang Bong, Bing bong bing."
I'd say hierarchical credibility. More authority. Give the leaders power to bless others with disproportionate power, who in turn have the ability to bless others with disproportionate power.
Remember that Reddit ultimately only imparts one vote per person regardless of whether you're an admin or moderator or whatever. End that system. We've already established that these systems are not libertarian - the leadership has an opinion (in /r/Science the opinion is that you must post good science) and we want to empower them to enforce it.
Not only that, but provide negative feedback. If you endorse a terrible person, make it impact your credibility.
We haven't really tried "real identities". We've come close.
Real identities would require verification, which sites like FB only do after the fact.
I fear that a huge repercussion of the election issues is that we will get there. A real ID may be required for you to post comments in all websites. And i'm not sure how I feel about that. Reality is that it would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identify was viewable and searchable by all you know. But at what cost?
I really do wonder what is the root of trolling. What makes a "normal" person take an alter-ego/view/counter view, solely based on lack of face to face interaction...
> A real ID may be required for you to post comments in all websites. [I]t would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identify was viewable and searchable by all you know. But at what cost?
The cost is that it would prevent people from anonymously reporting abuses, which means that fear of retaliation will have a chilling effect. We've already seen this where people get death threats, houses burned down, etc, when they do things like report sexual assault.
People should be allowed to be anonymous but only explicitly so. The problem now is we have people lying about who they are and using multiple accounts and other forum moderation abuse to push viewpoints, often paid to do so.
> Reality is that it would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identify was viewable and searchable by all you know
Is this true? I've seen various studies saying that the opposite is actually true, but I can't currently find any of those studies. Does anyone have any sources?
EDIT: some sources, though I don't know the strength of their validity:
Most of the problems of the Internet are mimicked in real life. That's why I don't think "real identities" would solve much, to be honest. Before trolling, for instance, there was the art of the prank (some harmless, and some downright mean -- just like trolls!), and the term "rabble rouser" seems to date back at least a couple hundred years. Some people in real life interact with others in rather toxic manners, in one form or another.
I mean, you get toxic behavior even on something like Nextdoor, where you pretty much know it's the neighbors across the street. Technology has just made things more convenient -- social media removes any curation, and technology also has made some means of harassment much easier to execute.
Myself, personally, I avoid social media that encourages toxic behavior (which usually means, smaller, special interest type sites; social circles that you know; etc.). This involves some degree of moderation or self-selection.
I don't see a good way around limited moderation for Reddit either, which is unfortunate in that it is hard to moderate something that size well (it's usually inconsistent and often arbitrary-ish).
Reality is that it would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identify was viewable and searchable by all you know.
I don't think it would. Lots of people post horribly objectionable material under their own names on a regular basis, depending on their level of financial security, peer group, and social milieu.
What makes a "normal" person take an alter-ego/view/counter view, solely based on lack of face to face interaction...
Some people are horrible, and are just as unpleasant in real life as they are online.
> A real ID may be required for you to post comments in all websites.
I honestly don't think this will ever be the case. Because there is a lot of profit from an unmoderated comment store. Also because it'd be monumentally hard to actually make all sites compliant.
Reality is that it would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identify was viewable and searchable by all you know.
That is not at all clear, especially as a percentage of comments. There are plenty of sociopaths who are perfectly willing to troll under their real name. Meanwhile, more reasonable people may quite rationally be worried that expressing any opinion on a controversial issue will lead to online mobs trying to get them fired from their jobs, kicked out of school, or otherwise ostracized. Not to mention scenarios like being a gay teenager in a very socially conservative environment.
There are two kinds of people who use real names on FB: those who never post offensive content anyway (the vast majority), and those who simply don’t care if offensive content is associated with their real identity (a small minority).
Those who post offensive content and do care, find it completely trivial to get a fake name. FB’s enforcement of their policy is basically nonexistent. This is the second-biggest group of users.
I can see at the cost of making stolen identities worth even more.
As it is websites completely suck at keeping our 'anonymous' identity secure. Our email and passwords are hacked so commonly there are websites dedicated to tracking it. Now you're just adding 'real identities' to the brokered data. Any real trolls will be able to use this data from the dark net pretending to be you. Even worse, since real names are required, any employers will look for you on the internet, they will see your "I'm an anti-gay right wing pro-russian" profiles online and say "you are not a cultural fit for our company". You will have to take the time and effort to clean up what is said about you. Since it's a real identity, it's not going to change, and they already have all the information they need on you.
Real identities doesn't work when FB threads aren't indexed by Google.
If googling myself found comments I'd make on "platform X," you can be sure I'd carefully consider my comments on that platform.
Having anonymous commenting is important, but if you want a less toxic platform for mainstream comments, real identities + indexing is a good start.
The real WTF moment for online discussion is yet to come. When ML chatbots are able to comment indistinguishably from human comments, purely as a measure of capacity of time/scale, comment threads are eventually going to just become chatbots arguing with chatbots, drowning out actual discussion by humans.
This nightmare scenario has natural stable states, I think. At some point, it will cease to be profitable to propagandize at machines, no? We should work to construct a society that negatively incentivizes bot proliferation, but it can't be a purely financial incentive. Free speech must not have a price tag, or else "stop, thief" may become impossible to shout.
There is a fundamental approach that has not been tried as yet
- Incentives
The real-world has that figured out long ago. If you find something that is truly useful & timely, you would be willing to pay real money for it.
Google Answers (answers.google.com) had tried an approach wherein a price can be put on a question and any legit reply which answers that q can claim it. 'Reputation' definitely still plays a role in this, but the system is flexible enough to allow a new comer to attempt answering a question & stake a claim to the funds.
The real-world has many of these aspects sorted out, like calling a plumber or a carpenter from your neighborhood to get your work done. The problem is we have embarked on creating a 'global' network (aka FB) without first having adequately understood how to create strong family & community network, before we go global with our social networking..
skeptics stackexchange is a good example. Lots of people complain that too many comments are deleted, but it's an absolute lions den of controversial issues. The mods do a very tough job and handle hate speech better than anywhere I've seen.
HN generally works very well. The echo chamber problem is due to allowing downvotes IMO. In my experience that simply leads to minority viewpoints being downvoted. Instead, downvotes should be removed, and people should be allowed to flag abusive comments.
On top of downvotes, you can say very toxic / abusive / condescending things and get away with it if you share the "correct" viewpoint, but unpopular views have to be exceptionally polite to avoid biased moderation. You can't bluntly refute or critique a questionable (but popular) argument without being accused of lacking civility...
> if you share the "correct" viewpoint, but unpopular views have to be exceptionally polite to avoid biased moderation
Where HN has been falling short (lately, in my observation) is where discussions about the ethics of certain business models get lost via the "buried" option or killed off completely.
You cannot come to HN to discuss the potentially-negative ecological or economical impact of a YC company. The voting rings will literally send your comment or post to the void: buried or killed off completely. HN does still post lots of interesting links, but for truly interesting discussion that isn't (for lack of a better word), tainted by bias, I prefer Reddit these days.
- pointing out flaws in overhyped press releases about the next wonder drug/treatment
I guess you're right that you can avoid getting downvoted by being exceptionally polite and spending about 15 minutes crafting a response saying "crap science, uncontrolled trial, possible placebo effect", but sometimes I just don't have the time and energy for that. I'd prefer it if people here didn't automatically assume I'm full of shit when I point out a flaw in an argument without writing my response absolutely perfectly the first time.
> "You cannot come to HN to discuss the potentially-negative ecological or economical impact of a YC company."
People say negative things on HN about YC companies all the time. We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC-funded startup is at issue. That doesn't mean we don't moderate it at all—that would leave too much of a loophole—but we do moderate it less. This is literally the first principle that we tell everyone who moderates Hacker News. You can find many posts I've written about this over the years via https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
What I meant, is that one cannot start a discussion of such things without being willing to lose lots of points and karma. Observations that AirBnB might be doing more harm than good to cities having "housing crisis" issues, and the fact that Uber and Lyft are actually harming public transportation rider numbers and putting more automobiles on the roads (creating congestion).
Two issues I've seen brought up here that get downvoted into oblivion. Why risk that? It's far easier for people to jump on the "attack the poster" bandwagon... as they have done to me in this thread.
Granted, I've been reading HN for over 11 years now, and the site is not the same as it used to be. A lot of interesting posters have left. Probably I need to lower my expectations for what to see when I come here.
It's hard to say why specific comments have been downvoted. Often it's because they break the site guidelines in ways the author didn't notice. Sometimes it's simply not fair, and other users need to (and often do) fix that by giving a corrective upvote.
Plenty of comments arguing that Airbnb/Uber might be doing more harm than good routinely get heavily upvoted, so I'd question your overall generalization.
I think the Hackernews' "echo-chamber-ness" is extremely exaggerated. It only feels like that if you're in the minority viewpoint in a thread (which happens to me, too). However, it's not echo-chambery if dissident viewpoints live side-by-side dominant viewpoints, even if the latter are 80% of the thread replies and upvotes.
An echo chamber is arguably more when we actively suppress dissident viewpoints. Reddit is infamous for moderators doing that simply by deleting comments under some pretext of 'spirit of the subreddit' or such. With Facebook there's a first-and-last-name-and-picture-visible shaming that can be scary and damaging, repulsing the opposite viewpoints. At a more extreme, you can help foster an echo chamber by organizing a large group of people to scream and picket and threaten a speaker that has the wrong views, reminding all the others of what happens.
HN to me is an oasis. Even if I get downvoted when I have a minority view. I still feel as if intelligent arguments are considered.
With Reddit, how many intelligent comments are there? The English grammar alone is awful, full of shortcuts, cliches and new millennial-speak. But worse: the responses are short. One-liners. And even worse: argumentation is ad-hominem and emotive.
In summary, I think Reddit is about emotional expression, and HN is about (an attempt of) rigor and rationality.
I've seen a lot of very interesting, usually quite short comments on politics-related threads in the past few weeks, that were posted less than ten minutes prior and already grayed out and marked "[dead]". In each instance, the user was not using inflammatory language at all, yet HN was implicitly saying "yeah we're not going to allow discussion on this topic." I'm sure there's Very Good Reasons(TM) for this but it always feels like wasted opportunity for interesting, out-of-the-box discussion.
> In each instance, the user was not using inflammatory language at all,
Downvotes are not only for inflammatory language; a comment can be a negative contribution to the signal-to-noise ratio, and even violate the commenting guidelines, without using inflammatory language.
Ah. HN is special: they punish political discussions. It's unfortunate, even tragic in my opinion. They allow it sometimes if there's specifically a tech or science-related topic very very closely attached.
I avoid poking the moderator lions (I used to post political articles maybe a year or more ago), but I do wish HN would have another view of that particular topic. It's rather unavoidable that adults (and we are adults), highly-educated ones at that, would sometimes slip into politics when science or tech news (or legal news about tech or science) is discussed.
But yes, you're generally right about that.
I think emotive political discussion is useless, but rational policy discussions aren't useless.
The real issue is binary choice. I might disagree with a comment, but acknowledge it's a valid well thought out argument. On the flip side I might agree but acknowledge it's a poorly formed argument.
Something might be totally off topic or funny, but if I made me laugh do I down vote it?
Slashdot's model of tagging posts was a pretty good idea I think and allowed one to filter out the 'funny' or 'offtopic' comments.
I disagree. Upvoting is like a High 5, downvoting, especially on Reddit, is used to bury something people don't agree with. Downvotes, IMO, should require some sort of intellectual effort as to why you are actively burying a comment or post and thus require a reply.
Dragon, you commented and downvoted on something that you are doing right now which is commenting on a comment system. No? At least you had the decency to reply, which most Redditors don't. Which makes Reddit Toxic.
I never downvote a comment, reddit or here, simply because I disgree. I find such behaviour (subjectively) wrong since it does not encourage discussion in an open, civilized manner (on reddit, all that happens is that you get 30 comments deep and you just downvote eachother's comments to 0 while being increasingly aggressive).
I reserve downvotes for when a comment is being needlessly toxic, doesn't contribute to the discussion or otherwise not helpful for an open discussion.
I think the best cure for "downvote to disagree" is to firmly hold to the principle that the opposing side of the argument has the best intentions to the extend of their knowledge and that at the end of the discussion, all participants should have learned something. You should also always be willing to change your mind on what you argue about.
HN works very poorly, and worse by the year. I've been using HN since 2009, I've been on a wide variety of discussion platforms going back to usenet, HN has had its moment in the sun and that has largely passed.
Voting on HN barely has an effect, and I suspect that the average votes per comment on HN has gone way down year over year. People just don't vote on posts as often as you'd think, not anymore. A related problem is that commentary doesn't go on for very long. In the usenet days you could have a good thread that would last for months and months that would continue to spawn good and interesting commentary, a flash in the pan thread might only last a few days. On HN the window of commentary for a post is rarely more than a day and typically only a matter of hours. It's just people strafing comments into the void and then disengaging. Long comments typically don't get read, and don't get upvoted, don't get commented on, etc, for example.
> ...I suspect that the average votes per comment on HN has gone way down year over year
OK, I'll bite! A cursory look at the data shows a clear increase in average votes on comments from 2007 until 2012, which is the only year with a dip, followed by steady growth until the present all-time high.
I wonder if (or how) one should take population into account, too. We might figure that a majority of the people read only threads that are on the frontpage, so, if the number of people on HN has doubled, then each thread will get viewed by 2x as many people, and, if the new crowd has the same likelihood of voting on each comment as the old crowd, then you'd expect 2x as many votes, assuming no change in comment quality. Instead you might want "votes per comment, divided by number of users".
Of course, there are lots of "all else being equal" implicit assumptions there. First, if the population doubles but stories move off the frontpage in 0.7x the time, then you'd only get 1.4x as many votes—and this is one of InclinedPlane's points. Second, the newer crowd could be significantly more, or significantly less, active. To control for these two things, the measure you might use instead is "votes per comment per pageview", or "votes per comment per second a user spends on the page". Third, there might be more comments posted—well, duh, it would be weird if the new users never posted any comments.
Fourth—and I think this another thing InclinedPlane wants to focus on—comment quality could have changed. Comment sorting is relevant too, because I'm sure lots of users don't read everything. If we suppose that, due to an increase in population, we get 2x as many comments but they have the same quality distribution, and if we suppose the best comments always go to the top, then the average quality of the top n comments should increase; you can see something like this in extremely popular Reddit threads, where the top several highly upvoted comments are clearly optimized for something (often clever jokes). If we suppose a decent population of users only read the top n comments, and always use the same function that maps "quality of a comment" to "probability of upvoting", then, when the set of comments doubles and (by assumption) the best rise to the top, we'd expect these users to generate more upvotes overall, and hence "average votes per comment viewed" should go up. (It's also possible that people's standards would rise. But I think people's changing standards would lag behind the changes in what they're viewing.) That said, for the comments that aren't in the top n, the fraction of people that view them (and consequently might comment on them) would go down.
The question of how long threads sit on the frontpage is relevant, both for comment exposure and for InclinedPlane's point about conversation longevity. (There are also pages like "new" and the no-longer-linked-at-the-top "best".) I wonder how best to quantify that... perhaps "the frontpage tenure of the thread with the longest tenure of all threads on that day".
After reading a few discussions over the last few days, I was thinking to my self that HN was better than ever, and very good (with one serious shortcoming). Even the echo chamber is much better than I remember.
EDIT: The shortcoming, IMHO, is the abandonment of politics. HN is the ideal place to solve that problem, with s sophisticated audience open to and interested in experimentation and in problem solving. The goal of propagandists is not to persuade you, but to paralyze you; to shut down real discussion and debate. HN is, unwittingly, capitulating and cooperating with them. HN is another success for them.
> That's an illusion, for reasons I attempted to describe here
That implies that it's an unsolvable problem, if I understand correctly. There's no reason to think this problem is any more difficult than all the other 'unsolvable' ones and this one is particularly, I would even say 'extremely' valuable to work on.
I don't believe we simply could introduce political topics and it would work due to some HN magic. It would take serious work and experimentation to find a solution, but I think HN is better suited than other places to do that work. And a solution could change discourse in the country and the world, at a time when discourse on the Internet problems SV has invented has become a very dangerous weapon for some, and is tearing society apart.
I realize that "we" means you and sctb more than anyone, and so it's a request and encouragement. I still think it's the most valuable thing HN could do, potentially world-changing. Previous generations had books and leaders that changed the course of history; this time it might be software or a software-based technique that turns the tide. I hope that at least you will keep it in mind.
I don't know that it's impossible. But if I'm certain about anything re HN, it's that it would be unwise to try to make it be that, for the same reason we don't do radical medical research on living humans.
Our first responsibility is to take care of what we have. The way to take care of a complex system is to be sensitive to feedback and adapt. We can apply that principle here. Look at what happens when the political taps get opened beyond a notch or two. Discussion becomes nasty, brutish, long, and predictable. That's what we want less of, so opening the taps all the way is not an option. For similar reasons, closing them all the way isn't an option either.
I don't disagree completely. I think there's a chance HN can slowly develop greater capacity in this area. But it would need to be very slow and not something we try directly to control. Anything as complex and fragile as HN needs a light touch.
Well... downvotes are definitely abused. They're not supposed to be used to express disagreement, and they are. All. The. Time. And it stinks to be on the receiving end of that.
But I'm not sure that they should be eliminated. The alternative is to leave moderation as the only way to deal with bad (abusive, off-topic, trolling, unintelligible) posts. I'm not sure that having people flag every bad post they think they see, and letting the moderators sort it out, is really the optimal way to do things.
I think people have the wrong idea about HN downvotes because they think Reddit rules apply to HN. It's a bit like how in Canada we think we have Miranda rights because we've seen it on American TV.
I would argue that while it's totally okay to do it, I'd find it better if people used it less for simply disagreeing. In my experience, the resulting discussion ends up being of poorer quality because of it (and less exposure due to being pushed down and hidden once it hits a certain threshold)
Such evidence as I'm aware of points in the opposite direction: HN without downvotes would be like a body without white blood cells. Disease would quickly kill it.
The problem with your argument is that it doesn't reckon with just how lousy bad internet comments are, or how many of them there are, or how completely they take over if allowed to. To a first approximation, bad internet comments are the entire problem of this site.
It's easy to imagine an HN that would be just like the current HN, only with some negative X (e.g. bad downvotes) removed. Most of these ideas are fantasies, because the thing you'd have to do to remove X would have massive side effects. You can't hold the rest of the site constant and do that.
Bad != disagree. I think we all agree that it should be ok to downvote and hide "bad" comments. However the problem is that many good comments are downvoted simply because people disagree with them.
I think it might be better to remove the downvote and replace it with "flag", so people can flag bad comments (spam, abusive, pointless, etc). At least that way people would need to think a little before the comment gets flagged, which would hopefully result in fewer minority viewpoint comments getting hidden.
I'm not arguing that we should never downvote, if someone is writing garbage, I will happily downvote them. But maybe people are a bit too quick to downvote when they disagree...
Your list consists entirely of push media. Some example of pull media that "play well with others" or at least are not actively anti-social are podcasts and email listservs. Of course its easier for advertisers to monetize push media.
In the long run push media is always going to be troll-ier and offend more people than pull media.
I think you're underestimating the cost to society of your parenthetical. To the degree that "the personal is political", sharing the details of one's circumstances — especially as a marginalized or disenfranchised individual — can reveal ostensibly unique struggles to be widespread societal problems. Twitter does this, and has been good for highlighting shared experiences. We'll lose a platform for that very important, seemingly trivial disclosure if we improperly disincentivize contributions. We need to keep "poor participants" in the common conversation.
Secondly, I notice no mention of deliberate, paid propagandizing, i.e. professionally divisive sock-puppets employed by sock-puppet firms.
Any serious discussion of threats to a healthy public discourse must address deliberate attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the common voice.
> However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation and an echo chamber (though, you could argue that not all participation is equal and you're mainly removing poor participants).
Twitter actually does this but only for some types of accounts. Every see the "see more" button under replies? That's where people of low quality go. Twitter has a sort of rating for figuring out if someone is of low quality or not and they usually get hidden. Even their likes and retweets get hidden.
Hasn't to help overall on Twitter though I have noticed I get less assholes replying to me.
The only real consistency i've seen between toxic communities and healthy ones is size. When you try to call 100k people a "community", it's a bad community where the toxic people have a louder voice than the good ones. If the community is a core group of <1000 participants and maybe 10000 spectators (following the 90-9-1 rule of online communities) it can be good. When it grows larger than that, it needs to be split up or shut down.
The only way i see to save reddit is to set a maximum size for a subreddit, and shut down or otherwise isolate every subreddit that grows bigger than the maximum threshold.
Real real identities (i.e. government issued digital id) have never been done. I am sure they will come eventually. The political process is just very slow compared to the pace of technology.
The purpose of using real identities (government ID) is not to facilitate debate and sharing of opinions, but to punish and neuter debate and limit sharing of opinions.
Compare the outcomes of totally anonymous reputation-based forums such as HN, reddit or 4chan with near-real identity forums such as Facebook or Linkedin.
There is a very open flow of ideas and debate on 4chan and other reputation-based forums.
There is at least as much hate speech and trolling going on at Facebook as on HN, yet Facebook has near-real identities.
Linkedin have at least as much spam and criminal phishing posts going on as HN, yet Linked in has near-real identities.
HN would not be a better forum if everyone had to register with their government ID. The main benefit would be to make it easier to ban one person from accessing the forum, and silence that individual.
It is wildly inaccurate to call HN or Reddit “strong moderation” — the tooling alone is abysmally bad, plus Reddit can’t put the “post anything you want as long as it is not literally illegal” genie back in the bottle so easily after a decade.
I don't see the connection between the quality of the tooling and whether or not there's strong moderation. HN is pretty strongly moderated and reddit inherently allows for very strong moderation. Do you think HN is not strictly moderated or that reddit does not allow for strict moderation?
I'll agree that reddit doesn't seem to expose easy to use moderating tools, though.
Forum communities with actual strong moderation, eg. Something Awful, ResetEra have near zero issues with hate speech, Nazis and other things that reddit has let fester.
Well, that's because reddit is simply a platform, right? reddit undeniably has tools to allow for strong moderation. see /r/AskHistorians for a perfect example of this.
"Tools to allow for" is a hell of a phrase. Yes, moderation is possible on reddit but the idea that the tooling for such is in any way "good" is in error. It's enough to make moderation possible with sufficient application of effort. The fact that it's so rare is a strong indication of how useful those tools are.
Reddit tries to be just a platform, but it fails in two ways:
1) Namespace of subreddits. The subreddit which snags the most obvious name for a topic has a much better chance of becoming canonical for that topic that competitors with worse names.
2) Cross-subreddit identity and supporting tooling. For example, i can easily search for all recent posts made by a particular user, but i can't easily search for all posts made by a particular user within one specific subreddit. This sort of thing promotes "cultural leakage" across reddits and makes people think of all of Reddit as one community with one culture.
One of the major factors that keeps it relatively clean is that user registration costs $10. That's a strong financial disincentive against trolling, bots, etc.
I really believe that successful online communities of the future will have paid signups.
Haha if you pay for SA it only suggests that you are a sucker who paid 10 bucks to post on SA for a couple of days before getting banned. They are very ban happy there.
I have had an SA account for years and never been banned. I don't appreciate being called a sucker and I think the price is fair for what I get.
When I use Facebook I am the product, not the customer. This means the platform is optimized to put my eyeballs on advertisements or provide data about me to marketers. It is not optimized to provide high quality conversation.
What, am I supposed to list my reasons with citations (of course) to justify my opinion about some historical relic of a site? And I didn't get banned from SA; I just know a lot of people who did.
Also, SA's userbase consists largely of older, tech-savvy people. It's been around for nearly 20 years now and I bet their registration peak was ~2004 (:files:). So it's pretty likely that the median age of a poster there is ~35-40.
I'd totally pay $10 for a less shitty reddit clone.
The Something Awful forums provided my first real exposure to 'internet culture'. I find myself reading their forums more and more often lately because discussions there seem less likely to devolve into an echo chamber. An account there is well worth the registration cost imo.
I think part of it is the lack of voting and the presence of easily-identifiable avatars: participants have an incentive to post things that generate maximum engagement and discussion with other specific users as opposed to maximum instantaneous agreement. In this regard it mirrors real-world social interaction much more closely than reddit/fb/twitter.
In particular, there is no guarantee that moderators are any good. Whoever registered a subreddit first "owns" it and moderates it themselves/chooses additional moderators. That's it.
This means there was a "gold rush" in the early days and if some shitter is sitting on prime real estate (like brand names of products) there's nothing you can do about it. If they decide to close the subreddit by making it private, nothing you can do about it. If they go inactive and are still squatting on prime digital real-estate, nothing you can do about it... if they later get hacked but are still inactive, doubly nothing you can do about it.
I think one way to help prevent echo chambers is to have term limits on moderators. So many moderators become sour towards their own communities but feel an obligation to stay involved. Term limits might help with that and encourage new users to become moderators themselves.
Imagine a blank graph. Randomly place 1 million circles on it. No two with identical boundaries. This is our hypothetical Venn diagram of people's preferences for how communication happens online. Drop another million circles to represent how those people will actually act online.
It doesn't matter what points on the graph are labeled "toxicity," "echo chamber," "uncomfortably friendly," or "sparse comments, experts only." It only matter's that the circles are not all identical.
While I can't come to a conclusion on it (whether or not it's a good/bad idea) - I wonder what others in the HN community think about it. I apologize in advance if this is a bad place to comment, I've been mostly a lurker thus far!
We’ve tried real identities plus serving as many ads against user conversations as possible (Facebook), and “algorithms” designed to keep users on as long as possible regardless of the cost to their mood, or the world around them. Perhaps “social media” should stop trying to be a way to make lots of money.
Naaah. Gotta monetize every inch of everyone’s life. It’s the American way.
I'd like to see what impact posting limits would have. For instance, let every user make 2 submissions and 10 comments in a month. One of the issues on every forum is that it takes a lot less time to make a ton of low effort comments than it does to make one thoughtful post. Another is that a small minority end up making the vast majority of the posts (even when that minority is well intentioned).
Another key factor is the community reaction to low-effort posts; Many users of social media are not looking for or willing to put in the time and effort to digest more in-depth discussion, and will happily skip over more thoughtful posts in favour of the next meme or bite-sized thought. In a platform such as Reddit, where votes per unit time are paramount, this results in the burying of most longer discussion.
Metafilter set the gold standard: accounts require a one-time payment to discourage sock puppets and they have full-time moderators who’ll jump in before behavior gets out of control and tell people to tone it down.
I disagree, There IS a solution, but no one likes it.
Segway: Football aka Soccer had a problem back in the day. Games became (more?) boring because teams would go up a goal, and just play "kick the ball to the goalie". Goalie'd pick up the ball, bounce it, pass to a player who kicked it back to the goalie, rinse and repeat. Then they instituted the back pass rule - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-pass_rule - where basically, pass back to the keeper and he can't use his hands, only his feet. A generation of goalies had to learn to play with the ball at their feet, and the bit people enjoyed happened more often.
Rugby Union has had a similar evolution, although more intense. Rugby's goal is to have a game that can be played by people of all shapes and sizes, and they mostly succeed. George Gregan was a great player at 5'9", and most second rowers are over 200cm/6'7". But rugby always gets boring, because the coaches start to playing boring rugby (lot of kicks, lots of positional play, less running). So rugby, every few years, overhauls the rules. For a year or two, the game is exciting again, IMHO the best sport in the world, then it is boring all over again as coaches play safe. We then get another overhaul.
I think the Soccer back-pass rule and rugby's ever-changing-rules are models of how changes in rules can dramatically affect the quality of an activity, I don't think they are doable for online sites at scale. Instead, the only solution I can see working is to constantly change to new platforms.
I started in SEO in circa 2001, and there were heaps of forums run on phpBB et al. They had all recently started, so they were figuring themselves out. The forums all interacted, but they all had their own feel and their own rules. Over a few years, they developed "personalities", and everyone could find a place that suited them. This "personality" then morphed into a kind of group think, and the forums grew into echo chambers where the rules where strictly enforced to keep out the others, and each forum became hostile to all the evil others, and they devolved from fun places to hang out to the same old same old.
SM then came along, with sites like FB, Digg and reddit being born, and this process started again. A new place, no real rules yet, and it was the same exciting process of discovery. Over time, the bad parts set in, and these places became stale echo chambers filled with all the bad bits everyone talks about.
That's why I think the only real solution is to tear it all down and start afresh, because this process has repeated several times now. I think that partly explains why SnapChat and the other platforms exist, and why, IMHO, SnapChat et al will grow to a point then fail to grow anymore, as the "freshness" fades, and all the nastiness intrudes. Unless sites can figure out a way to change this process, which after almost 2 decades of this process is either unlikely (pessimistic), or it is too soon to tell (optimistic).
TL;DR when a platform gets entrenched, it starts to exhibit more nasty traits, and a new platform started afresh is the only solution.
> Physical mail is sent to your house in order to get a single account.
That's how NextDoor works and it seems to work reasonably well.
There are some big communities that seen relatively healthy to me. For example, Instagram is easily my favorite social network. I see photos that my friends take and that's about it. I pull it up and am done with it in a minute or two.
It seems like if moderators of subreddits were given the ability to A) limit posting rights to paid users and b) given the ability to ban at will, that most subreddits would see a much improved commenting culture.
4chan also exists and it works and is marvelously non-toxic once you realize that any insults hurled at you are impersonal because they can only attack what you have immediately posted previously. Your attack surface is tiny, assuming basic information hygiene.
One of my biggest issues with reddit is post history. Oops this person posted something we don't like 3 weeks ago, dismiss his post and attack him. Oops, this person posted somewhere we don't like, ban them from the 46 subreddits I moderate. Oops this person posted for the first time in a default sub they have been subscribed to for 3 years today, ban him for brigading.
I imagine there are a few trade-offs when flicking the "post-history" switch either way.
Post history On:
You get to follow a users comment history. If you read an insightful comment by them, and want to read more, then having a history is nice.
Users are people
Post history partially On:
e.g. comments could decay to anon after some period. (Cue the sites that collect all post data and match to users)
Slightly increases the cost of doing a deep dive on a users history.
Users are people, fading to ideas
Post history Off:
Lowered attack surface for people who are actively trying to find an argument with you.
Less pressure to have a persona consistent with the typical one of any particular community.
Users are ideas
For example you can make multiple identities easier. I make use of that here via firefox containers, it is quite nice.
You can make anonymous the default and track the user under the hood, allowing them to claim a post at a later point if they feel confident enough to attach their name to it.
You could limit who can see the user identity. Or only display something more vague than a specific identity, a profile-lite behind a one-time ID.
This is why 4chan always had it right. Anonymous + minimal moderation. Instead of echo chambers you get extreme contrarianism. The upside of this is that non-conformal viewpoints aren't buried and low effort trolling just gets ignored.
IMO the problem is size/scale. If you're too small, then you just have people going through the motions of talking to each other in an attempt to make the platform seem real so more people will join it. If you're too big, you won't be able to curate effectively. There's a sweet spot in the middle, you start heading up around only maybe 20 or 30 users (the point at which it becomes impractical for everyone to know everyone), and when it starts heading back down depends on the culture, but go down it will.
There was a podcast (I think freakonomics?) saying that sports forums had the least toxic political discussions on the internet. This was probably due to their common interest in a sports team over their political views.
Reddit has zero problem leaving post that threaten the lives of an entire religious group on their frontpage. If they were serious certain subs would be nuked.
People might think the subs that you frequent are vile and disgusting. Which is fine, they don't have to go there, just like you don't have visit the subs that you don't like. Just because you consider them vile and disgusting doesn't mean you get to decide that for other people.
You realize that is a perfectly reasonable objective for a site to be a mostly impartial, user-moderated forum, right? I don't consider any view I encounter on reddit to be endorsed by the platform. If people want content moderated with a specific slant, just subscribe to the subreddits that suit your tolerance, there are plenty that are heavily moderated.
Personally, I love seeing things that I disagree with on reddit...it's honestly one of the last places left that gives me the feeling of exposure to different bubbles.
The parent commenter specifically said "post[s] that threaten the lives of an entire religious group". Hardly comparable to something someone can simply disagree with.
Those are also specific posts, but most of the posters who share the sentiment of the commenter typically advocate for the removal of entire subreddits.
Also, to be frank, I think that posts of that nature are exactly the kind of thing that someone can and should disagree with. Suppression of those beliefs by silencing them just means they are moved away from platforms through which their views can be better contextualized for them. The prevailing attitude that some people are just not worth debating says more about the person who holds that belief than it does about those they're accusing of never budging. I have had my mind changed many times, as well as changed the minds of others.
I suppose I'm saying that disagreement is just a start when it comes to content like what was brought up. Of course you and I disagree with a suggestion we eliminate a people group. But it's not simply another unit of thought in an objective marketplace of ideas. The Overton window came up a lot in 2016, and I think it's useful both descriptively and prescriptively--certain things should be outside the bounds of civilized discourse. Implicit in the notion that these ideas should be confronted rationally is that its adherent is simply misguided, miseducated, and that sure and steady appeals to reason and empathy will persuade them, as if all white supremacists rooting for genocide are waiting for their American History X moment, but I don't think you have to look hard to find intelligent and otherwise rational people advocating vile things. The obstacle isn't reason, it's something beyond that.
I think it's extremely patronizing and disingenuous to lump posts calling for the extermination of members of a religious group, or calling for the execution of refuges in with "things I disagree with".
I go on reddit every single day, and I have never seen a post on the front page advocating for the genocide of an entire religious group. I've seen a handful of posts linked from /r/againsthatesubreddits, but the irony is that the only reason those posts made the front page is because they were linked from the meta subreddit.
That being said, for posts of that nature that do reach the front page, I stand by what I said. If it is the policy of reddit to be entirely noninterventionist and simply allow the communities to self moderate, that is completely reasonable, and I don't think any of those views should be interpreted as being encouraged by reddit.
The obvious question given an open platform should be why exactly would a community like that be able to exist successfully within a system that votes content up or down?
The problem with Reddit is that, while it's not endorsing the content, it is facilitating it. You can let the white supremacists in your neighbourhood use your garage for their weekly meetings and plausibly claim that you're just being neighborly while disagreeing with their purpose. But I'm still going to judge you for helping them out, for making their organizing easier and cheaper, and for smoothing the road for them.
When Reddit banned r/fatpeoplehate and r/coontown in 2015, among others, it actually succeeded in reducing the amount of hate speech on Reddit:
Working from over 100M Reddit posts and comments, we generate hate speech lexicons to examine variations in hate speech usage via causal inference methods. We find that the ban worked for Reddit. More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreased their hate speech usage—by at least 80%. Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown “migrants,” those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage [0]
By making it easy for participants of r/coontown to participate, Reddit actually contributed to the output of r/coontown.
Letting white supremacists use my garage for weekly meetings is not the same as me building an establishment for the explicit purpose of facilitating conversations of all kinds, and then not kicking out a white supremacist minority for using the facility.
My concern with censorship is always 2 fold:
1.) You have to always assume the person who is in control of censorship is the person who doesn't agree with you. Donald Trump has on multiple occasions indicated that he would like to restrict the press's capability to criticize the president, since he has been in power. Kim Jong Un shares a similar sentiment. Would we like that, because there are many Trump supporters who would see absolutely nothing wrong with that. There was a moral majority in the US for a long time that would have preferred to restrict the capability for others to talk about what they considered to be sinful things, such as homosexuality or communism.
2.) You have to realize how quickly things become conflated. Ben Shapiro, a conservative pundit, went to Berkeley to speak, where student groups attempting to ban him from speaking had strung up a huge sign reading "We say no to your white-supremacist bullshit." It's important to note that Ben Shapiro is an Orthodox Jew who is harassed daily by white supremacists online...and has never said a single thing advocating for racial supremacy. In fact, he is hugely opposed to racial, gendered, or national identity politics of any kind. Students wanted to ban him for hate speech simply because they associated him with what they perceived to be hate speech.
Building an establishment to facilitate conversations of all kinds generally does not obligate you to allow every specific conversation. Were it my establishment, I wouldn't permit members of NAMBLA to organize their sex-trafficking trips to Southeast Asia, or white supremacists to organize the next Unite The Right rally. I wouldn't feel at all like I'd betrayed my purpose in facilitating more, and more different, conversations by specifically banning some that are obviously problematic in and of themselves.
I also wouldn't feel like I was censoring anyone. My not facilitating their conversation is not the same as my preventing them from having it. I would also be mindful that the presence of nazis and pedophiles in my establishment was itself a barrier to other communities taking advantage of my facilities; if members of those other communities started showing up after I banned them, I'd probably consider it a net win for freedom of expression and conversational facilitation.
Also, you're soft-pedaling Ben Shapiro by calling him a "conservative pundit", as if he's in the same inoffensive league as Ross Douthat or David Brooks. He was an editor of Breitbart News, which is now quite openly the voice of the "alt-right"; he departed and got on their enemies list because he was smart enough to realize that Trump was going to damage the cause for a generation--which is why they're going after him, because they were quite happy to have an orthodox jew on staff while he was agreeing with them. He's said a variety of things about Arabs and black people that are flat out racist. He's not quite the bomb-thrower that Milo is, but he still drops nuggets such as "Arabs like to bomb crap and live in sewage". Calling him a white supremacist might be hyperbole, but it's not simply conflating conservative views with nazis. He's a racist asshole who advocates for ethnic cleansing. Maybe white supremacy isn't his conscious goal, but when he facilitates that end, it becomes a bit irrelevant if he's actually written that down on his "A better 2018" list.
I think that study is good but I add personal nuance when interpreting its obvious curative suggestion.
Its not the ban that worked - as much as the full identification of those groups, the banning of those subs and the negation of the immediate survival attempts of those subs.
The whole process is what worked, not just a simple ban.
Could you give examples, I've been there a lot and have never seen this (though I've been told "people like you should be killed" a few times because of my religious associations, so don't doubt it, just curious about specifics).
I don’t know if you can do this. The problem with social news sites is not that the trolls are winning but it is that the moderators aren’t properly compensated because no website has the capability of moderating large websites. Also to get advertisers on your platform you need a moderated forum that aligns with your advertisers. The internet always had free speech and with that comes trolls by definition . The difference now is that there are competiting ideologies associated with websites that want to control vast parts of the internet . We have websites that want your pictures , attention and comments for free in exchange to promote other people’s products. On the site operators side they need to do deals with advertisers who don’t want that controversial topics. So the advertisers force discussions on the platform to only align with them. Or the site operators do this. Solving the troll problem is not going to be solved just by reddit.
A few minutes reading /r/The_Donald shows that there is a vast difference between saying "that guy on the internet hurt my feelings" and "this is a threat to civil society."
It depends on the discussion and I’d need to see the link. While obviously calls for violence are illegal (FBI steps in), there are many possibilities where the discussion could be useful (eg, convincing people to better understand refugees).
Largely I’ve been desensitized to complaints about TD as typically it results in hyperbole (eg, election was a direct threat to people’s lives).
Not whether it is a terrible thing to say. But whether saying it should be banned.
Here’s a super simple example.
Jerk: “I think we should shoot immigrants”
Non-jerk: “that’s a bad idea because immigrants have souls”
Former-jerk: “good point. I changed my mind and no longer think shooting immigrants is a good idea. In fact, I will now dedicate my life to helping the needy and everyone who reads this thread should as well.”
It would be bad to ban a thread such as the one above.
Moderators of T_D prevent that. Unless you subscribe to the subreddit, you're unable to vote, and despite constantly rallying against "safe spaces", they instaban anyone who goes contrary to the group.
That, and I find it impossible to believe that someone who is able to post that online would know that it is an unacceptable position.
Would it be sufficient for every user to just have client side configurable filters? Or is this movement more about denying
"toxic" people a platform to begin with?
If it's the latter case, I can't get behind it. Free speech means everyone should have a platform to speak. As society transitions away from using our mouths to using our keyboards, the first amendment implies that speech should be protected on the common medium - whether verbal or text.
Filters can work after the fact, but they don't prevent a lot of it to start.
As for "toxic", the article is referring to things like /r/CoonTown, or brigades like the one that went after Leslie Jones on Twitter a number of years ago. The people behind those already have a platform to speak: The Internet. They're not entitled to space on another platform like Reddit or Twitter, and they're not entitled to force their speech in front of someone else's face.
Coon town is obviously offensive, but easily avoided (ie, not a problem).
I casually followed the Leslie Jones incident and don’t see the problem. The brigading seemed easily avoided by Jones and was actually amplified by media covering how bad it was.
My twitter feed doesn’t show mentions by randos, so Jones should have been able to easily filter out at the client. She may have for all I know.
So both your examples seem easily solved by client filters to not force speech in faces.
"Coon town is obviously offensive, but easily avoided (ie, not a problem)."
It is until it starts to leak.
"I casually followed the Leslie Jones incident and don’t see the problem."
I honestly cannot see how one can see the incident, and cannot see a problem with thousands of posters telling an African American woman that she's an ape.
"The brigading seemed easily avoided by Jones"
That is blaming the victim.
"So both your examples seem easily solved by client filters to not force speech in faces."
Someone made a quantitative study about the /r/fatpeoplehate ban recently and their conclusion was that the honeypot theory isn't valid and that banning hateful subs causes a reduction in overall hateful behavior instead of just shuffling it around.
The mob tends to be ok with hate if it's directed towards someone they dislike - e.g. you can find on /r/canada 's frontpage people calling Doug Ford's kids fat and ugly.
“I honestly cannot see how one can see the incident, and cannot see a problem with thousands of posters telling an African American woman that she's an ape.”
Let me clarify. Obviously, thousands of people calling someone an ape is a problem. But one that is easily avoided by disabling twitter replies to your account. So it’s not a problem for anyone that it happens to.
So when I say “I don’t think this is a problem” I mean that it’s not a problem that can’t currently be solved and not worthy of trying to stop the thousand assholes.
It’s not blaming the victim to point out that if you change a setting you save them from pain. It’s not Leslie Jones fault at all that people are jerks. But maybe she didn’t know how to configure twitter. If so, wouldn’t it be a shame that if no one wanted to help her learn for fear of victim blaming?
I equate this as worrying if people are sitting in their living room gossiping about you and saying mean things. Somehow you have the magic ability to listen in. You do and are upset. Certainly you can try to make those people stop being jerks. Or you can stop listening. Or maybe do both.
The problems seem solvable if your goal is to not encounter jerks harassing you online. Since you can filter them out. If your goal is to not have jerks, then definitely not solvable. But that’s a stupid problem to solve through authority. The way you solve jerks is through love and education.
Single-dimensional "karma" numbers are part of the problem.
If you allow multi-dimensional karma then you have the problem that aggregation mechanisms are going to be site-specific (in karma systems, 1 + 1 is not necessarily equal to 2 even before considering multidimensionality) and you end up drawn back to the individual sites hosting the concept anyhow.
When I watched that, I thought of "Facebook Hell Universe". Because I think that's what Zuck would want - having a reputation system under his control and control of everyone under it.
I realize my first comments is not as detailed as it should have been, I've expanded in the comments.
Black mirror is same vein, but different concept:
Getting loans, buying cars, via a single reputation score is different than giving people a tool to curate the content they wish to consume.
By having access to a "user's reputational history" across multiple sites, you can see where their reputation is coming from. Then you as a consumer of internet media, can choose what site reputation to put value on. Letting you curate and avoid toxicity, or live in your echo chamber if thats what you want.
Its like asking a couple friends if they'd loan their weed wacker to the new guy down the street, they say he acts kind of shady but has always brought back their garden tools. Same thing. You ask users of a couple sites how this other user has acted. They say he made some jokes, but also had some valid points here and there.
We don't then say, oh they made crude jokes, charge them an extra $1000 for rent.
While that would be a huge problem, also think about communities where RL anonymity is a necessity. The recent Twitter idea to verify every user only works when people are willing to put their full name out there, but as we've seen on facebook that doesn't really stop anything - these are not really CEOs of respected companies, they're nobodies playing with the little bit of power they have in their lives.
Even if you can make that work, that will only lead to the tyranny of the majority. You're filtering for the most common denominator opinions. I wouldn't want to be a part of this kind of sterilized community.
And how will you solve brigading? All it takes is two large groups disagreeing on something, and your reputation goes down the drain if you're in the slightly smaller group.
Your reputation will go down, with THOSE people. If they refuse to agree they refuse to agree. There is nothing toxic about that.
An accounts "history" and "reputation" will be tied to each site. A liberal who posts regularly on echo chambers on both sides of the aisle will have a middle of the road reputation. On Fox news for example you'd see next to their comments:
FoxNews.com Rep: -123
Global Rep: 38
A high global rep is due to the high score posting comments on WashingtonPost articles. Where you would see:
WashPost.com Rep: 161
Global Rep: 38
I'd expect someone with a reputation of 0 to be an honest individual gaining views on both sides of an argument. Someone with a global rep of -1833 is probably a troll or someone who doesn't interact with "like-minded" people, which could of course be seen by looking at the history of where the reputation came from.
You as a consumer, would most likely flag site reps to show on all pages, so maybe you on every site you visit would see a users reputation like so regardless of the site you are on:
Current Site Rep: 3
FoxNews.com Rep: 283
WashPost.com Rep: -87
Global Rep: 221
And you could, of course, dig into their history of reputation, and even Hide/star particular users who you notice are trolls/note-worthy to you personally.
- You've just created opportunities for sites who don't participate to attract customers. "No reputation requirements, we don't judge you". Great for curated niches, bad for mass market.
- People with diverging but still main stream political views getting their reputation docked by those in the other camp who control the site. It can flow both ways. Reputation starts to get linked to the echo chamber, in that those who don't echo the same get docked.
- Someone hacks you and starts messing up your rep across multiple sites.
A lot of other posters in this thread seem to agree that anonymous groups work better. I tend to agree. But getting everyone on the planet to switch to anonymous environments will be incredibly difficult and take a very long time due to intrenched financial interests. I could hardly get my wife to switch to Mastodon (even being able to keep her identity there), let alone my mother in law, or my rarely seen co-worker.
So for point 1: I'd say let "no reputation" sites attract customers. If people want to participate in completely anonymous groups they are responsible for the groups they choose and the opinions in them. Good on them.
But for the rest of the people who lack the awareness, knowledge, or motivation to seek out these communities, we have a responsibility to find a way to make non-anonymous communication less toxic.
For point 2: Knowing the reputation of a user for the site you are visiting as well as their global reputation helps the reader make a more informed decision about the worth of this person's comments to them than without. Lets use politics. Assume a user with liberal tendencies argues intelligently with conservatives in Fox News comments where his comments are downvoted because they are diverging. They also comment thoughtfully on r/SandersForPresident where his views are appreciated and upvoted. When I see this persons comments on Fox, I will see his fox new's score is -128 and his overall score is 3. A troll on the other hand may have a -348 on Fox news and -828 overall. From this I can conclude conservatives don't like the first user, but some other people do like the first user. I can also conclude the second user is a troll, or doesn't ever participate in groups that share somewhat similar viewpoint. All of which you can see in their history, where their scores for various sites are listed, perhaps you could even bookmark scores for specific sites you want to see. Of course, this is binary, and can be improved with dimensionality, but is still better than nothing at all.
For point 3: Hell, what is someone hacks your bank account? I think a bigger concern would be someone automating downvoting of your account or upvoting of their own. Which would require more thought.
That will only work if you insist on tying the reputation to identities.
Even then it probably won't stop people being awful (there's plenty of awful stuff posted by identifiable people). But if people can be pseudonymous, it won't work at all.
Absolutely! You dont have any contact information here but feel free to contact me offline if you wish to collaborate on a piece about this topic or just to share some ideas. you can reach me at petermcneeley@hotmail.com
Aside from the degenerate cases like “kill all white men” or “liberalism is a mental disorder”, one man’s “toxic comment” is another man’s “common sense”. And as frustrating as it may be to SV digital overlords they don’t get to decide which is which, at least not without unpleasant repercussions down the line.
So there’s really no way to solve this. There is a way to contain it somewhat: create homogeneous bubbles. Which is what we’ve been observing over the past few years.
Or, rather than giving up or "creating homogeneous bubbles" instead you could look at things on a case-by-case basis as Reddit is doing. At the end of the day the privately run company does get to decide whether content warrants removal or not since they are running a business and advertisers don't like advertising in a space associated with extreme or harmful content. They also have an incentive not to take the moderation too far since to do so would put the company's most valuable asset — its user base — at risk.
Trouble begins when you try to define “harmful” content outside the most egregious cases. Politics inevitably creep in. Worse, these days some people think that “words are violence”, that being offended gives them any rights (and thus creates the vicious cycle of being offended by more and more inane things), and that everyone who voted for Trump is a Nazi. How far are you willing to go, as a private company, to please your advertisers? And how far will your user base allow you to go before deserting en masse?
Toxic statements = statements from a different political orientation
Why are people so willing to embrace Orwellian doublethink? My prediction is that such a sword will do decapitate undeserving people of all political aisles.
The article is largely about removing flagrantly racist content (the subreddits they listed as examples were like r/KKK and r/CoonTown) and various illegal content like bestiality videos. It seems disingenuous to classify these as simply "different political orientation".
As much I disagree with racists, I believe that a healthy society must allow them to speak.
I tried to find a quote from Dershowitz’s book on defending Nazis but gave up due to paywall.
Toxic is not an objective measure for speech. But like in real life, toxicity depends on the dose. Life doesn’t eliminate toxins, it reduces them to manageable levels (or dies).
There’s also the practical effect that banning is irreversible. Toxicity is not terminal, but banning doesn’t allow for redemption.
What's wrong with racism? I spent two years homeless on Skid Row. I will never, ever, move to a black majority neighborhood. That's not "toxic", that's me making an intelligent rule.
It doesn't mean I denigrate my black friends. The ones I know are "salt of the Earth". As in I'd die for them. It doesn't mean I won't hire a black applicant. It might seem impossible but one can adopt general rules and still hold exceptions for corner cases.
Or even (gasp) withhold judgement of individuals until you get a better idea what type of person they are.
Have you been following what’s going on in the UK with their anti-“hate” speech laws?
Tweet something that someone decides is offensive to them, get a visit from the police? I’d say it’s a very rational concern that these regulations would be weaponized against “wrongthink”.
I'm not saying the UK's way is the way to go. But trying to handwave away the problem of toxicity with, "It's just people who can't handle' differing opinions" not right either.
The number of actual prosecutions or even visits from the police is tiny, and when you look at the actual cases they tend to be racist death or rape threats.
"Arrests for offensive Facebook and Twitter posts soar in London" [1]
"Arrests for 'offensive' Twitter and Facebook messages up by a third" [2]
"British Police Arrest At Least 3,395 People for ‘Offensive’ Online Comments in One Year" [3]
"Police arresting nine people a day in fight against web trolls" [4]
"More than 3,300 people were detained and questioned last year over so-called trolling on social media and other online forums, a rise of nearly 50 per cent in two years, according to figures obtained by The Times.
About half of the investigations were dropped before prosecutions were brought, however, leading to criticism from civil liberties campaigners that the authorities are over-policing the internet and threatening free speech...."
There are a few examples in there. Here’s a few more [1]. Mostly it’s ill advised mouthing off, or blowing off steam as was the case of the guy delayed hours at an airport. These are not “true threats” or incitement, which are charged differently.
Dangerously minimizing? What's dangerous is a culture addicted to simulating political action by managing online comments. Instead if putting resources to making your local garden great, to mangle Nietzsche of Ecco Homo, people get worked up by actions they have no control over instead of working locally to change conditions where they could have an impact.
And you lack imagination and historical hindsight if you think the concept of "toxicity" can only be wielded by whatever you consider to be the forces of light. So to speak.
Yes. Pretending that the problem of toxicity is just people who can't handle differing opinions is to be willfully ignorant of the problem. As such, a reasonable conversation can not be had.
"And you lack imagination and historical hindsight if you think the concept of "toxicity" can only be wielded by whatever you consider to be the forces of light. So to speak."
You're spoiled beyond belief if you view "toxic" comments online as a serious problem. If it is truly "a problem", then the larger problem is tying your emotions to what anonymous people say. You live vicariously through an image of how offended someone else might be. Instead of tending to the garden you can actually protect and uphold.
Do you think the poor bastards in Skid Row feel better because some (literal) white typed in defense against toxicity?
Do you think someone...Let's say Tim Wise! Do you think Mr.Wise has actually interacted with black communities while he lives in a 98% white neighborhood? Do you think Mr.Wise would help some homeless junkie who's trying to figure out how to work his phone so he can message an estranged daughter on Facebook? That's part of what I did in Skid Row. There are issues of knowledge, skills, and plain diet that would offer much better benefits than speaking out against some notion of "toxicity", created by people who have no skin in bleating their stupid moralism.
You could argue that toxic comments on the internet are the only reason the current president got elected in the US. Should said president lead us to a nuclear holocaust, or any number of other real possibilities due to his proven negligence, toxic internet comments would have a very real impact on the material conditions of citizens in this country.
Huh? What if Clinton had won and started a nuclear holocaust? Who's to blame then? You must be opposed to all political advertising for the party you don't like because somehow you're able to see that it's bad and the other half of the population isn't. That's being hopelessly blinded by partisanship.
I'm opposed to all political advertising period, and would have also considered a Clinton presidency non-optimal, though likely more stable than what we have now.
I'm fine with the down votes, but it should be pretty obvious that it would have been Marco Rubio, or some other sanitary GOP member who got elected if it wasn't for the Russian troll brigade on the internet whipping up a frenzy for Trump.
it should be pretty obvious that it would have been Marco Rubio, or some other sanitary GOP member who got elected if it wasn't for the Russian troll brigade on the internet whipping up a frenzy for Trump
You raise a wonderful point. Personally, I don't think a "Russian troll brigade" was singularly more effective than all the other attempts to affect the election, but if there was an influence, it certainly may have been greater in the GOP primary than in the general election.
But despite having read an awful lot of election analysis, I don't think I've ever heard anyone else make this point. I've only ever seen the issue framed as Trump vs Clinton, with almost all the proponents of the "Russian hacking" narrative being on the pro-Clinton side.
Besides yourself, does there exist a group of pro-Rubio (or perhaps more interestingly pro-Cruz) supporters who believe that Russia successfully influenced the election in support of Trump? Is there somewhere online I could read more about this worldview?
You know, that's a good question. I read a lot, and I pay attention a lot, so for me dots get connected rather naturally. There isn't much out there talking about russian spamming taking place during the primary. I found this though: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/congress...
That being said, my family is loaded with died-in-the-wool republicans, and I remember them all blown away by the fact that trump was winning the primary. None of them could believe it, and they all hated him during the primary!
After trump won, and it was him vs clinton, then the narrative switched. They loved trump at that point.
It was very chilling. It became clear to me that these folks were heavily influenced by some sort of propaganda because their minds changed like the wind!
You also realize that democrats secretly promoted Trump because they figured he would muck up the Republican primaries and become an unelectable candidate.
Not to mention how incredibly ignorant you have to be to not notice how out-of-stock (out of touch but maybe they lack a stock of common sense) coastal liberals are to the real problems and realities of the "silent majority". Blaming Russia is like blaming a soldier for giving a enemy a bayonet stab. Of course after this enemy has suffered grievous wounds from his own side.
Sorry, but this idea of "Sticks and Stones" hasn't been true for a long, long time. You may be able to shug off terrible, racist, bigoted slurs hurled at you, but people who have that slung at them day after day after day might not be, and I'm not going to blame them for not wanting to take it anymore.
Then why are they on the racist slur subreddit? Same with Twitter, you don't have to follow people who insult you, or the people who retweet the insults to you.
Why are you assuming that stuff stays in it's little corner? It doesn't. Especially with Twitter, it's very easy for anyone to message that kind of thing to you.
Rather than censorship, just give readers better filtering tools. This was largely solved on USENET years ago, has been largely solved in email (to a great degree) -- it's just Twitter, FB, etc. which seem to have a hard time solving it.
If you made certain sets of filters the default, or available in groups, and did filtering based on your best beliefs about the desires of readers (based on keywords, senders, and maybe other characteristics of the conversation), it would go a long way.
How would you do that in such a way as to prevent a Twitter army from piling on someone? Or at least make it so they don't feel they're being bombarded?
At some point go whitelist or raise thresholds very high (like, on twitter, only people you follow, or blue checks, show up in your timeline if abuse is detected, as a very rough pass. Could easily do something far better.)
I think this is the real solution. Instead of giving people useable, client-side filters, we've let companies push us to using shitty, broken website filters so that they can control the flow of information. Client-side filters work great, and they are how we generally solve these types of problems with other communication methods, and do so relatively successfully.
A lot of commenters here are mentioning that better education could help solve this problem. I agree.
What if there were a new type of "teacher" who replaced or augmented regular mods on sites like Reddit?
Universities strive to hire professors who will teach students to be open-minded, consider the sources of information, and just think better in general. The prestige of each university is largely based on this factor. We tend to measure this by looking at the research accomplishments of the professors, or by looking at how many great thinkers/leaders come out of those universities.
What if sites like Reddit did the same thing, and tried to build their prestige based on excellent moderation? Could they be measured by how many great ideas/movements come out of the platform?
How do universities prevent the "echo chamber" effect where a few mods or a few users can take the whole conversation in one direction?
"How do universities prevent the "echo chamber" effect where a few mods or a few users can take the whole conversation in one direction?"
They turbocharge group think. Probably not the best example of an open minded community.
A distant cousin of my wife went to a Seminary; within a relatively narrow range of beliefs, he claimed there was a lot more intellectual freedom than universities along the lines of teaching how to talk to devil's advocates and heresies and converting non-believers. More of a carrot and stick than university which is solely stick-style, who can most emphatically say "I can't even" and so on.
Most people are idiots. Consider that half of the population (hypothetically) has less than a 100 IQ score. Idiots did different things together 100 years ago and, 1000 years before that, groups of idiots would get together to raid and rape and pillage. They still do that in other places in the world. Now they come onto the internet to send hateful things and porn to one another. Most of the biggest idiots do not go on reddit. When the idiots on reddit act up, management cleans it up a little bit. Is there an issue that needs to be fixed here? I think anyone even claiming to have a solution may belong to the former group
The human brain is a fantastic computer. Most people are geniuses, constantly crunching stochastic phenomenal trajectories, and navigating ever-changing real and virtual terrains. The problem isn't how smart we are, but on what we focus.
Great point. Then perhaps we should aspire to be like gorillas, instead. Instantaneous, implicit martingales and brownian motion calculation in their minds subconsciously, exactly like us, except, they don't shitpost on the reddit.
"Since the early 20th century, raw scores on IQ tests have increased in most parts of the world. When a new version of an IQ test is normed, the standard scoring is set so performance at the population median results in a score of IQ 100. The phenomenon of rising raw score performance means if test-takers are scored by a constant standard scoring rule, IQ test scores have been rising at an average rate of around three IQ points per decade."
I suspected that I shouldn't have put that into my post or should have qualified it with a statement regarding how completely useless of a metric it is. My general point was that probably around half of the planet is humping a tree as we type at our computer and pontificate about the human potential and dignity, regardless of a useless score that slightly correlates with things.
IQ isn't useless. It does correlate with violence (rape and pillage?) and of course it's a powerful predictor of academic performance, future income, and even life expectancy.
As soon as it gets mentioned to make a point, it incites a completely orthogonal discussion about what it means, its validity, socioeconomic bias, racial bias, etc
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 353 ms ] threadYou do read this site, right?
My opinion is that getting rid of voting is step one to making both sites infinitely better.
Extremely draconian human moderation is step two.
are you talking about the "social" comments, or commenting in general (including this site)?
Pragmatically, comment sections can have bots, ads, instigators. I think there is a better solution than outright getting rid of online discussion. There's room here for innovation (Not even technical innovation, I think there's low hanging fruit here in terms of comment section design)
Similarly, I will frequently check Wikipedia before the company/film/whatever. Flaws, but frequently better than official channels.
I can feel that hostile internet comments take a toll on my overall happiness, but I don't want to be ignorant of valid counter-arguments to the content I read.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
I think it ought to be unidirectional to prevent obvious attacks. I'm not too worried about the "filter bubble" because I think you are inevitably in a filter bubble, and it's on you to manage it, not expect random sites on the internet to somehow pop you out of it (they basically can't, by definition).
I think I'd still want categorizations for subject, just to give things some sort of focus. The result is that instead of /r/politics or /r/$ANYTHING being captured by some sort of single monolithic gestalt, multiple simultaneous gestalts could be running side-by-side. You'd want some deliberate mixing, both to keep things interesting and because I think you'd want to ensure some "heat" in the simulated annealing sense to ensure that things don't get too isolated and things keep moving. (Communities themselves keep moving, after all.)
The net effect of this is that while trolls would still exist, anyone not interested in trolling should naturally filter them out of their view relatively quickly, while the trolls get each other to troll at. Since they can not be eliminated, all you can really do is fence them off. One of the other interesting side effects is that you ought to get some other interesting communities in there, too; the community of people who thoughtfully comment, the community of "doers", etc. One interesting possibility is that this may even allow "celebrities" to have a "social network" that nominally anyone can join, but requires sufficient social proof that it isn't just "anybody with a Twitter account and an itchy trigger finger can get the first reply below $CELEBRITY's tweet.", wrecking the utility of social media for the celebrity. I haven't quite solved the question of how to initialize the communities once the system gets going, but it's probably feasible.
What stops me from coding this up is that whenever I start really fleshing this out into an implementable system, I realize it violates one of my life rules: "Never engage in an endeavor in which the worst case scenario is complete success." I don't want to run a community site like that. So for me personally, the outcome matrix boils down to "Failure -> waste of time, Success -> oh shit". Because even if this did miraculously fix all social issues, which I am hardly naive enough to suppose, there's still legal compliance, DMCA compliance, etc., all sorts of things I personally have no desire or drive to do.
However, by all means, feel free to "steal" my idea. While I am by no means an expert in this field (the aforementioned paragraphs are pretty much the sum total of my thinking at this time), I'll even spot you some free "consulting" in the form of playing intelligent-rubber-duck to bounce ideas off of if you'd like. And let me know if you get to deployment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato
Though you'd want to open it up to people beyond open source developers. And it's possible the idea of using the "up/down arrows" that everyone is familiar with may still be worthwhile; it's been too long since I've seen the advogato interface to remember if they had that. And finally, a "likeability" metric that was less mathematical and a bit more rough & ready might be a good thing; mathematical constructs are really good at maintaining the properties you design in, but are often extremely fragile. I'd want an algorithm with some knobs I can twist, not a single algorithm. But by all means read the papers in question; why rediscover those things the hard way?
I think you can avoid a lot of the success-as-worst-case issues by designing this as a decentralized protocol.
Each 'user' is a cryptographic identity: all votes or posts are authenticated by the users signature. When you follow/upvote a user, your clientside software increases that user's weight in your feed. All content on the system is content addressable by hash. All 'likes' are signatures on a content hash.
When you connect to another node, you request all recent signatures for people you follow/have upvoted. Clientside software can use various schemes for weighting - totally up to each individual user (ex. how many upvotes is equivalent to following someone? how much time decay in scoring do you want? how deep do you want to traverse followed users' social graph? etc.). Weights for each followed user are multiplied by that user's score for that piece of content, and is then summed across all followed users to create an ordinal list of content - a 'feed'. In this way, if multiple users you follow all like the same piece of content, it would probably be scored higher than a piece of content liked by only one user you follow - so long as your weighting for all those users is equal.
Ideally:
- Nodes should be able to support multiple users, and host a webserver that provides access to the network to those who are not technically sophisticated enough to host it themselves.
- User data should be portable and transferrable to different nodes.
- Nodes could implement their own email+forgotpassword userflow to abstract the crypto complexity away from laypeople, though this complicates account transfers and risks account theft by unscrupulous nodes.
AskScience is a shining example of a high quality subreddit, although the comment section usually looks like a graveyard with 90% of the comments removed.
So you'd subscribe to a forum namespace in order to see posts about a topic (say, AskScience), but you would then also subscribe to whichever moderators you want. The moderation wouldn't be inextricably tied to the namespace.
Anybody can post anything in any namespace (and anybody can declare themselves a moderator of any namespace), but people will only see posts if their chosen moderators allow it. You could have all of the same moderation powers that exist at the moment, except any given moderator's actions are optional to any given user's view of the forum.
We wouldn't need a situation like with r/bitcoin and r/btc where disagreements about moderation resulted in a splinter group creating a separate namespace: those who disagreed with moderator X would simply unsubscribe from X's moderation.
I don't know if this would result in a better forum, but I'd be interested to see how it's different, and I don't know of anywhere it's been tried.
(And in case someone out there is granting wishes... can I also have it decentralised e.g. using IPFS's pub sub?)
Maybe it's time to remake Usenet, minus binaries. Binaries, piracy, and their data load per server are what killed Usenet.
(Yes, I know it's still living on in paid-service world. But gone are the days your ISP runs a machine.)
Binaries and piracy were two of the biggest reasons to use Usenet.
Spam is what killed it.
Spam was and still is a nassive headache. However Bayesian filters were really starting up. But Spam was annoying at best.
What caused Usenet servers to be quit was that ISP's were seeing them as a pirate haven and a lawsuit magnet. There was all the impetus to stop supporting piracy, and lose the costs incurred with that bandwidth to a Usenet server.
Sure, it was a great draw to use it to pirate... but it is also why it fell. Now these days, time to move to IPFS. That place is ripe for piracy, and super simple to share.
But then somehow a few "bad guys" get to become moderators and everything goes back to s*it. As someone has said above, it's all about the incentives. No-one has enough reasons or available resources to want to take over an obscure sub-reddit with almost no real-world influence, but when there are State actors involved you can be sure that things will turn sour. My most recent such experience is with /r/syriancivilwar, which used to be decent enough two or three years ago (even if some of the posters had actual ISIS flares), but since the troups-on-the-ground involvement of both Russia and Turkey the sub-reddit has become an echo chamber for those interests.
That kind of moderation works under those environmental conditions - similar how some drugs work on certain types of body types and fail in others.
Other topics which are broad and have little general boundaries tend to get a lot harder to define.
Classic example would be where does porn stop and art begin?
In forum terms - politics, general opinion topics have more subjective moderation.
---
Overall though, I agree - manual moderation is pretty much the best way to go forward.
The comment section changes a lot if you stick with tech sites and peoples' blogs, or project sites like github/gitlab/hackaday.io . In those cases, people are 99% of the time pretty decent. They may demand a feature on a FLOSS git* page, but aside of entitlement attitudes, it's relatively non-poisonous.
There's precisely zero proof of this.
EDIT: I misunderstood OP, I thought the comment was saying there was zero proof of Huffman's ability to tamper in the first place. Agreed there's no way to prove he can't do this anymore.
It mentions Spezgiving, followed by Huffman's apology, and then moves onto banning subreddits, to the meeting about banning subreddits, and ends at /r/Place and the worry it'd be nothing but swastikas. Absolutely nowhere is anything described about the measures in place to prevent Huffman - or anyone else at Reddit for that matter - from editing posts.
re: edits; check whether the post sentiment changes, I'm not worried about admins fixing typos/grammar.
Also, investors understand trust is a prerequisite to profit... editing shenanigans are intolerable.
That goes double when it’s two clicks to permanently dismiss someone from your attention. The best troll repellant is and always has been to ignore them.
This goes against decades of received wisdom: DNFTT, anyone?
For what it's worth, I agree with you, and I always thought simply not feeding trolls was pointless: There's something similar to a broken window effect in terms of overall tone. If someone comes to a site, sees a lot of negative comments and general asshattery, they'll file that place away as "where the asshats are" even if those comments are being studiously ignored by the regulars. That means the only ones who want to comment there will be the ones who want to act like what they see around them: asshat trolls.
I also think that ignoring them until they go away is a bad strategy: Even if you ignore one or two of them successfully, there's dozens if not hundreds of them waiting to join. You can't outwait them all without the community degenerating due to the broken window effect I mentioned above.
> Do not feed the trolls only solves the problem in smaller communities, or at least only just holds off the effects of the troll (topics spinning out of control, pointless arguing, accusations and recriminations) until they can be moderated. Its not a solution for a community, and never has been.
It doesnt work now, and with the diversification and use of the net by vulnerable groups.
Having a users on a generalist forum suddenly exposed to flashing lights to induce a seizure, or ambushed by images of dead people, or being attacked for being a woman or a minority group?
Yeah you cannot expect people to shrug that off, without also expecting a large mass of humanity to be essentially living without a normal emotional response.
If you encounter someone on the internet who is annoying you, most platforms give you the option to block them. You do that, then move on with your life. It's not hard.
And do so in a way that doesn't boil down to a blame the victim solution of simply leaving the platform?
On the internet however, there's no real sense of human interaction and the repercussions are usually minimal.
Real life trolling is probably 1/10k of internet trolling.
It's a decentralized solution to a decentralized problem.
Not everyone has the self control to avoid the comments in the first place.
Not everything you've seen can be erased and forgotten (there's a reason NSFL exists).
People don't need the self control to avoid trolls, they need the self control to change their reaction to them from simply getting butthurt and offended.
Do you honestly believe that is the best method to improve discourse?
A) Who said it's my answer?
B) Just because I listed corporal punishment, it doesn't mean it's the only one form of punishment used.
That how society works, especially for kids. Kids are jerks to each other. After a childhood of interacting with jerks, we learn what we can and cannot say. We react to stimuli. A huge chunk of these stimuli is negative, i.e. a form of punishment.
Does it improve discourse? I believe it does, not all of it is negative. It forces us to learn and to better ourselves.
Obviously it shouldn't be the only form of interaction. You also need the carrot, not only the stick.
But the internet proved that the "stick" is there for a reason. You either have a "carrot" for everything (impossible, and also doesn't work, since people get used to rewards and become desensitized to them after a while) or you need at least the threat of a "stick".
In message boards I used to frequent trolls were suspended without question and banned for repeat offenses. Now when trolls get banned there is an out cry from the troll and those in line with them about censorship and violation of their free speech.
The problem is trolls are given too much room to play and speak.
But the desire of investors for widespread palatability and the media's latest push for censorship have perverted the site into creating unified "community standards", across what should be considered independent communities.
Reddit itself gained much of its popularity due to the mass exodus from Digg over their censorship of one simple number! Users inherently do not want to be censored in what they can communicate about, and so the cycle will be with us until we finally scrap this hack of using centralized websites in lieu of end-user software - centralized structures can never remain free of top-down control.
> In message boards I used to frequent trolls were suspended without question and banned for repeat offenses.
That must be selective memory, or at least not generalizable: on some pretty major message boards (e.g. Slashdot), trolling became a prominent subculture.
In fact, one of the my major memories of numerous early message boards was that trolling was an integral component of the forum culture. Trollish things would frequently be said and you spotted the newbies and outsiders based on how they responded. As you learned the culture, you'd learn not to get trolled and maybe occasionally troll yourself.
I didn’t know what comment or behavior. Messaging mods said that it was obvious what comment and that I was a troll.
This was confusing to me. I never went back. Now I am skeptical of labeled trolls unless I can assess behavior directly.
That's the problem with your mindset right there.
We are talking about people. To decide that other people cannot say things you do not like to hear is to deny them their liberty. That clearly worse than "trolling".
Getting offended by a person's words or actions is not them doing something to you, it's you doing something to them - or rather, to yourself.
So if you can't - or shouldn't - compel other people to think and act in a certain manner, what do you do?
The answer is simple: show them the door.
More concerning is the large scale propaganda and marketing.
I'm pretty comfortable online, but mainly because I only post under frequently-changed pseudonyms and never leak much personal info. If someone gets obsessively mad at me, I can just abandon the account and be done with it.
If someone is a dick to you IRL, you just go about life without them and its of zero consequence to you. Imagine if they stayed in your life outside of your own accord and just yelled dumb shit at you from the sidelines.
Not everyone is built as strong as you, it bothers some people.
However, we're talking about how filters and algorithms won't stop people from being dicks to each other.
Trolls actively target forums for support groups. Today they can attack groups and classes of people.
At this point, expecting people to "grow a thick skin" is not an option, because a major aspect of their life is fighting for their rights against people who are attacking them, or people who have hurt them.
At this juncture the troll loses all rights over the definition and interpretation of how their action should be perceived.
Instead most normal people just see it as vandalism and stop caring about whether it was for the lulz or not.
---
And as stated in the article - NOT responding to a troll who is attacking someone makes you complicit.
Choosing not to be involved is clearly not the same as actually starting the behavior to begin with.
To say otherwise is "free speech, only if I like it"
All people commenting online; liberal, conservative, depressed, mentally ill, whatever-- they all have ebbs and flows to their behavior. Online discussion exposes the sum negative aspects in the behaviors of all actors. Instant feedback loops (esp. 1-to-many interactions) speed up the rate of negativity.
This appears to be the parallel catharsis argument to that used for why ultra-violent FPS don't encourage, provoke, increase violent behaviour.
[I don't really buy it in either case, but I'd argue it online to see what other think.]
Reddit is a hive of working-class populism, which is incompatible with any advertising-oriented business. Advertisers don't want their ads next to shitty toxic content. They want their ads next to elite, well produced content. You think Calvin Klein wants their beautiful fashion ads next to a photo of a dead body?
Sure they can get 10 cent ads of your neighbor's garage sale to place next to the photo of a dead body, but to get the $5 million ad buy from Proctor & Gamble, they'll need editors to raise the quality of their content.
Detoxification is central to any ad-based business.
How quickly they learn this is the question for Reddit.
A fashion magazine only has 1 million subscribers, but can make $400 million/year in revenue, basically printing money.
I see no evidence of that.
> A fashion magazine only has 1 million subscribers, but can make $400 million/year in revenue, basically printing money.
A fashion magazine doesn't outsource its content production to its subscribers.
I would encourage you to look at the evidence.
> A fashion magazine doesn't outsource its content production to its subscribers.
And?
>> I see no evidence of that.
> I would encourage you to look at the evidence.
I would encourage you to provide it.
It helps to know that it's a $3 trillion dollar industry.
Outside of fashion, you can look at the financial industry that can also charge $100+ CPM.
Is this . . . I don't even know how to respond to this. Have you ever spent more than three seconds with a working-class person?
I can assure you that cat memes and intersectional feminism are not mainstays of the working class.
> which is incompatible with any advertising-oriented business
Tell this to the ad agencies selling Busch and Coors Light.
Do you not have any working class friends on Facebook? Compare their meme posts to your elitist friends.
> intersectional feminism
This is the discussion about Reddit, not Tumblr
> Busch and Coors Light.
Have you ever see them advertise in anything other than pristine media property?
I would encourage you to look at people in the real world, instead of basing your beliefs on your own online behavior.
Incidentally, Facebook itself hasn't solved the problem of its community/fake news, hence the recent algorithmic changes to the News Feed to surface more content from friends, and a public push toward Facebook Groups. To be like Reddit.
It's a never-ending cycle.
In an age where any opposing opinions are consider "toxic" by some, I don't think trying to "detoxify" should be a goal. If you don't like the opinions of a subreddit, don't go to that one.
The other wave is the circle-jerk - a relentless and all-encompassing embrace of confirmation bias, institutionalized to keep a fundamentalist purity of thought. This is beyond a normal echo chamber, these are high powered ideology amplifiers.
We've never had the concept of unlimited freedom of speech, and most of the time that its been curtailed, it has been to protect against those who use it in bad faith (fire in a crowded theater, etc). That is the toxicity - IMO Reddit is going to learn this lesson far too late, and allow a group that doesn't want to be there anyway take down the whole site when they leave.
When you change your searching and indexing algorithms to suppress fans of a specific politician but not fans of other politicians, that's not really good faith.
The old reddit, allowed actual pedophiles to describe their issues in ask reddit threads.
Theres even a dark ama where a relation which would make people ill, was discussed.
----
Unfortunately what social media is exposing, is weaknesses in how human beings agglomerate.
If someone makes a forum for dead baby jokes - distasteful to many, but not harmful in private - it eventually attracts people who think that dead baby jokes are the norm.
Or in worse terms - a sub for making offcolor jokes soon gets overrun by people who think off color jokes are not a risque deviation from normal behavior, but is actually normal behavior.
----
On top of this, the internet and social communities are extremely low on contextual information - which is critical for most people to understand a conversation in real life.
This means that the only way someone can know what you mean when you are being vague, is if you make an constant effort for tonal and idea accuracy in your comments.
Obviously this is challenging, leading to a cascade of misunderstandings, which only serve to polarize groups more.
----
Theres a lot of research being done on how people behave online, and its just a grim picture.
How Community Feedback Shapes User Behavior (https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1429)
The spreading of misinformation online( http://www.pnas.org/content/113/3/554.full)
The effect of the ban on hate subs on reddit (http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf)
There's no money to be made with that.
HackerNews is different cause it's just a funnel and an online play ground for folks at YC. The day they decide that the signal to noise ratio has decreased past their threshold, this place will be gone faster than the Arc server can shut down.
Reddit generates enough to continue being Reddit through the gold program.
What happened was Reddit got sold, and that large amount of money raised expectations about "making money", in particular, equating massive traffic to massive potential dollars.
Reddit would have been just fine, and would have seen few real financial issues had it not been burdened with providing a return for a rather large sale price.
Just because it can be sold, may not mean it should be.
There is an inherent conflict between users goals and how they derive value from a site like Reddit, and the builders who may or may not align with what attracted users in the first place.
It's a difficult problem, and one that Aaron spoke to a few times. The idea of sustainable community discussion was solid, and clearly resonant with a lot of people and probably the broadest demographics around.
Reddit appeals to everyone from teens on up. Kind of amazing.
It's current owners paid a price high enough to remove the sustainable discussion idea from the table, favoring a more monetized model.
That has had ripple effects. Not all good, though some are.
Today, Reddit has factions. The vast majority use Reddit casually, often on mobile. The basic app works, but not well.
There is a much harder core set, a good third or more, and I'm one of those, who just uses the old school browser interface, which works just fine on modern mobile.
This third contains many of the community minded people. There is growing angst over changes and a steady divergence in directions, leaving many who understand Reddit, and it's users well, in an increasingly rough place.
I don't see it ending well.
Frankly, someone is going to do the sustainable discussion thing again, and maybe get it right. Making gazillions won't be in the cards, but a very nice living will be.
Should that happen, whoever does it will own discussion big time.
The strength in users funding user discussion comes from the absence of that inherent conflict that always manifests when money gets too big and expectations fail to align with what users see as the real value.
Maybe people being the customers, in the sense of one another, not so much to deliver ADS, is worth exploring more. It won't be as sexy as something that sells, or that will IPO in a way that sets up founders for life, but it may well be the perfect place to deliver answers to some of the harder questions related to large group discussion dynamics.
I have been experimenting with the idea of not making a bunch of rules that define how shitty people can be to one another.
What is stated is being a good human is no risk. The more shitty someone is, the greater their costs and risks get.
Risks include bans, time outs and such.
Costs include various forms of enforced compliance being required to post.
Remedies for being a good human are basically a return to normal peer status.
In particular, a gradual escalation of cost to contribute long before a time out or ban happens, seems to signal to people. A lot more is recoverable.
I see others modeling these things, demonstrating deescalation, and in general trying to recover things before any admin type action is taken. I also see them mentoring newbies toward the safe positive. Her important as that kind of distributed person to person action does not require tools, and cannot be bought.
This very strongly suggests community norms can be used instead of explicit rules to manage things toward value and away from noise.
Ever notice how alphas looking to start shit have a keen interest in the rules? Of course! They want to know what they can get away with.
Take that away and their behavior does change.
A secondary part of all this involves evaluating risk reward for trolls and others making noise.
I'll not put it here, as my thoughts are incomplete and some work is in process, but I will say indirect means, including tools, automation, filters, r...
The problem is, rules are also a way for someone who was wronged to appeal. While it's a line that troublemakers want to thread to push boundaries, when rules are unwritten, communities often become a reflection of the will of the moderator rather than a community of diverse opinion. Codified rules are one of the steps we have to encourage diversity of thought, but of course there needs to be rule enforcement...
The appeals are rooted in norms, and the process is a dialog, kept recoverable, not a trial.
Explain to me how a set of rules isn't a formalized expression if the will of those who created them?
There is more to all of that, in particular, security and agency.
But, those details aside, norms operate much like rules, and are far more resonant, and community owned than rules alone are.
Finally, the organic and well distributed nature of norms tends to check varied and manipulative enforcement of rules. A primary example might be a flare up, vs nefarious intent to make noise and or cause grief.
Think family vs Roberts rules of order.
I'm not entirely convinced rules are indicated for all discussion forms and communities.
It's a human problem, and using humans and human ways has advantages.
I've been in communities that were very pleasant and open about a lot of things where the only rule was, quote, "don't be a dick". I've also been in communities, that despite extensive rules that would make make fellows from my law course cry in joy and fully oriented towards left/liberal, were cesspools of hatred.
I think in both cases it's more a matter of what the moderation will do with what they have. "You reap what you sow" probably applies in some way.
There must simply be a commitment to health and purpose of community.
On the other hand, with written rules it's also harder for moderation to abuse their rights.
Either way, there will always be this commitment, the community usually figures out what they need by themselves when the decision becomes necessary.
The best example for reddit is a national park, imo.
As for rules -
Rules are not the first line of your defense.
The first line of defense is the price of admission into your community.
I have seen a large number of forums now, and frankly most of the heavy lifting is done by the type of people and the topic.
For example - Boring, technical/professional forums / Intellectual or otherwise taxing topics / Result in a self selection process that reduces noise.
This is also supported by research on how different types of information are spread through networks - http://www.pnas.org/content/113/3/554.full
A classic example of how barriers to entry make an impact - take a look at the dwarf fortress forums around 2008-2010.
The game is arcane, and to grok the game you need to be willing to put in an unusual effort at the time.
The resulting main boards are pretty good, signal vs noise ratios are healthy.
----
The next major rule is that - general topics are bad. It allows people to farm tangential credibility, and anyone with an opinion can speak.
The worst offender are topics on religion(/identity) and politics.
If you allow pol on your forum, you are fighting a losing battle. Pol has the lowest barrier to entry, but actual Policy and Politics are managed by complicated facts and hidden information.
Politics affects everyone, and is designed to be associated with hot button topics.
This single handedly will poison and polarize your community.
----
Between these 2 rules, you can get enough positive starting runway to create a healthy community for a while. Eventually the community will grow old and degrade, but you will avoid a whole host of other problems.
You are on solid ground otherwise. :D
Norms, established members, and the concepts of owning our end of a discussion, as well as weighing what others say can do wonders for general fuckery.
Assuming a more general discussion, and or one where growth and or participation is desired, having strong norms in place immunizes the community against nefarious players.
When someone new shows up, the idea is to give them some rope. Let them self identify, and self select too.
When most of the community gets this, then the idea of raising both their cost and reducing their reward both pack a big punch.
You aren't wrong. What you put here does work, but it has a lot of friction, which may be undesirable.
See, a nefarious actor has a low risk and generally low cost to entry.
Why enter?
They also have a high reward potential, and it's that favorable ratio that consistently attracts them. Above someone mentions $10 as a barrier to entry.
$10 is cheap ass compared to the fun one can have! No joke. In my study of this, I've met many who would pay that easily.
If that friction, however high it needs to be, is desirable, fine. Raise the cost enough and the outcome will be a low noise, but also low churn, low growth community, generally speaking. A very compelling, but specific topic can alter that too.
Otherwise, the community, it's founders, moderators, others of status, influence, however that all is structured, only has control over the reward part, and they can have some control over the cost too.
See, the topic of discussion here is more general chatter. We have more focused things well on the way to being acceptable signal to noise. What we do t have is general community, say politics, or other broad topics in that same state.
It's that which I have focused on for a very long time. Personal interest.
Norms, and various discussion devices can deny nefarious actors joy, and can frankly make them regret their intent. At the same time, consistent calls to join the community, based on their own arguments framed in positive ways can work wonders.
One discussion norm is weighting of what one gets. When a clown calls you an ass, it's as laughable as it could be a basis for righteous indignation.
The vast majority of the time, righteous indignation is the response. "How dare you!" From there, the reward gets pretty good for the clown.
What happens when the response is laughable? One actually laughs, or does something basic like rate the shit?
I can tell you the reward on all that is much lower. When they realize that is a norm? Low joy, high pain potential, particularly when they figure out they really are seen as a clown, or ass.
All these things, and I'm leaving a lot out, as it would be a short book to model, get at reward.
Ask yourself, what does a reward look like?
Say it's attention, as another example.
Return that with endearment, and most often they will leave, or join and become a member with some genuine basis. They leave because the moment they are familiar, their behavior normalized, understood, it's boring. No fun. No joy.
They join, because they find out there really is a common basis and they didn't realize it. Often, an ask to join will actually work.
A few will just spew forth, and so raise their cost makes great sense.
Simple things, like say not allowing them 4 letter words, carry a very high, often funny cost that can always be removed on good behavior, expression of and demonstration of better intent.
The best is the community can see that, act accordingly and it's all public and largely transparent. Often, some members will step in to help. Often that works, amazingly, and when the basic norms behind it all are in place and solid.
Many other simple, subtle, always recoverable things can be used in tandem with strong community norms to inhibit noise, while promoting signal.
The best part about this kind of approach is it's well distributed. Model it to a few, they apply, model for a few more, and soon most active participants are largely immune.
An "infection&...
Avoiding those doesn't get us answers to hard questions. It does simply push the problems out of scope.
In some contexts, better understanding one another does a whole lot of good.
That is also a focus of mine personally.
My comments on should be taken with that idea as context.
Just because I have an honesty box for payments doesn't mean you're not obligated to pay for whatever goods/services.
> algorithms based on your personal taste,
only for recommending subs to try
> geolocation
only for recommending subs to try
> forced email
no it does not
> shadow banning
extremely rare, and per-sub, not reddit-wide
> banning of politically incorrect subreddits
extremely rare; most of why Reddit is publicly despised is because it allows politically incorrect subreddits.
from your list, it's the only thing it's not correct:
there's a site wide shadow-ban that is only done by admins. that means if you post something, nobody will see but for you everything will show up as normal. subreddit moderators can approve your comment and it will show up. this started as a measure against spammers but it seems like normal users get shadow banned too.
now there's normal ban, where you can be banned from a subreddit (you can't post but you can browse) and there's a reddit-wide ban (your account gets basically deleted).
and there's also AutoModerator "shadow-ban" which makes use of reddit's auto moderator to delete a user's comment as soon as it get posted.
The internet isn't toxic.
It's the people who are toxic.
These people are just as noxious in real life even if some of them hide it when their identities are known.
Can anything be done to detoxify the people, or do we just treat them like spam and filter them out?
And what happens next when millions of rabid voices are suppressed?
The toxic people don't cease to exist, we just won't be able to see them as well.
Perhaps we'll find the social and political environment of 2022 to be much darker and more dangerous than 2018.
I suspect most of them are rather pathetic in real life.
I half-agree with this. The internet doesn't make a genuinely kind and empathetic person into a troll. But I think it does amplify certain bad little impulses that are latent in pretty much everybody -- the temptation of quick and cutting putdowns, mob and tribal mentality, lobbing rhetorical bombs then ignoring the consequences...
There is a qualitative difference between a back-and-forth on Twitter (or even HN) and a back-and-forth in real life. There's way more trust in good faith in the latter.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z4444w/how-reddit...
They were Fake news before fake news was a thing.
I don't think so. A lot of people, and this is especially true with Twitter, get noxious because they found an audience there to "amuse" and entertain, which might amplify the temptation for "troll behavior", especially when that audience is of the same political/cultural leaning as the speaker. Social media inflate egos. Some people who might feel insecure in real life find a community there where they can feel like someone, not by doing something positive but by being mean and condescending to whom they deem their ennemy.
However social media didn't create these divisions, they just amplify them.
IMHO Twitter is a proof that even with real identities, people will engage in toxic behavior provided they feel supported by a large audience. Of all the social media I found Twitter to be the nastiest of all.
By contrast, aside from a few brigading, Reddit communities are often isolated, self contained and don't "leak". It takes a user to actively go on a sub to see its content, while Twitter is constantly pushing stuffs to its users, even the nastiest ones.
Except that that uranium had to be mined, refined, separated, shaped, and placed into a gun-type fission physics package.
The toxic people you mention existed before Reddit (and Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or other various online media). However they weren't manifesting the same effects as we're seeing now, for the most part, until Reddit (and Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or other various online media) came along.
It's not the components that have changed, but the relationships, vectors, and mediation between them.
We could, of course, note that there were earlier periods in which we saw similar types of situations evolve. And I could respond in turn that many of those instances were themselves the result of changes in the media landscape: AOL and Usenet, 24 hour cable television news, talk radio, FM radio, CB radio, handheld megaphones, Xerox machines, mimeographs, television (both terrestrial, cable, and satellite), radio, large-scale public address systems, high-speed printing presses, widespread literacy, population concentrations in cities, railroads, and more.
And from these: the 2003 Iraq War, the Gigritch "Contract on America", the Rwanda massacre, the Yugoslav civil war, the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, the 19760/70s Vietnam War protests, the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights movements, McCarthyism, Father McCoughlan, Fascims and Nazism, the Russian Revolution, the Revolutions of 1840, the Chartist Movement, the French Revolution, the American Revolution.
Changing how a system receives, transmits, and processes information will fundamentally change that system itself.
The Internet is, in significant part, toxic.
When humans are in material need, they act in a way differently from when they aren't in material need. Nobody is surprised by that.
When humans are on reddit, they act differently from how they act on an old-style phpBB forum. No surprises there either.
I am coming to think nested intranets and special purpose vpns might be a good approach to global commerce and expression. I love building massive scale no touch systems, but they’re never that perfect once they start being used. Eg. Usually you end up with more severe and harder to solve issues with one massive db vs. smaller systems with derived data and links. And on the FE a lot of hard problems go away, beyond i18n etc also cyber bullying etc become tractable.
- Real identities (Facebook comments)
- Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.)
- Strong moderation (Reddit, HN)
They all result in toxic comments, trolling, an echo chamber,or worse, a complete lack of participation. There's no real solution to this problem. However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation and an echo chamber (though, you could argue that not all participation is equal and you're mainly removing poor participants).
There's no perfect way to do this because even if you made a subscription necessary, for instance, you may just create an echo chamber. As part of the solution you'd need to prevent the creation of new accounts to circumvent any punishment received.
I'd say the most straightforward solution is that you have a forum and you get an account. Physical mail is sent to your house in order to get a single account. Then, regular moderation practices would be taken seriously as there's no way to create another. The community would be left with those who care enough to not be banned. The problem is that the moderators themselves may be corrupt or wrong.
Thoughts?
Judicial system engages in determining whether someone is guilty based on the evidence that it itself filters.
What about more complex things? Like what if I say "P = NP"? Is that a lie?
And then, do you want a trial for every comment? That will not work even for a fraction of comments.
That can't be determined to be a lie unless someone solves the problem. It's only a conjecture or assertion until then.
>And then, do you want a trial for every comment? That will not work even for a fraction of comments.
Only really has to apply to political statements made by the most powerful office holders, and only when contested, and only when there is a imminent intent to deceive and impact policy.
It's not really an all-or-nothing situation. It's just a matter of how much can be achieved within a reasonable cost.
Some subreddits do have strong moderation; some subreddits think they have strong moderation but they have fucking idiot mods who call down trolls; and there are some subreddits that have permissive moderation and those subreddits leak.
> However if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling.
You genuinely don't. There are forums where you have to pay real money to be able to read and post, and where acting like a jerk will get you banned. They haven't eliminated the jerks. About the only advantage is paid mods which ensures some consistency.
I think maybe a good solution would be to (1) pay mods and (2) make everything they do transparent. This will give you better mods to start out with but also gives users the power to notice mod overreach before it spirals out of control.
The most common form anarchic moderation (i.e. no moderation). When a forum's small, unwritten social rules keep things under control. However, as forum grows, that breaks down, and things become more chaotic.
Metafilter essentially has an authoritarian moderation culture, the rules of discussion are both made and enforced (selectively or not) by the same group on another subject group. There's a wall to keep outsiders out (the paywall). It avoids chaos, but its failure mode is ossification, devolution into an echo chamber, and eventually desertion; as public forum behavior comes to more-or-less rigidly reflect the opinions and preferences of the moderators.
Reddit's somewhere in the middle of the above two forms. There are anarchic hordes in the less moderated reaches, and little authoritarian kingdoms without the walls to keep the hordes out.
I don't think anyone's tried real democracy in a forum (with elections, politics, checks and balances, and the time investment that all entails). It'd be interesting to see how such a forum would fare, and if it could avoid chaos without become an echo chamber. Democracy isn't the public-opinion-style voting we see in forum's today, but instead actual accountability of the moderators to the users.
Not claiming this is a novel insight, but it's new to me.
In the end, the wizards published "LambdaMOO Takes Another Direction" and took back control, concluding:
> Over the course of the past three and a half years, it has become obvious that this [refraining from making social decisions] was an impossible ideal: The line between 'technical' and 'social' is not a clear one, and never can be.
A great deal has been written about this experiment (and a Web search will find much analysis, along with full text of LTAND and LTAND2), and there are a wide variety of perspectives on why LTAND failed, but one conclusion that nearly everybody seems to reach is that attempting to give a community democracy with no higher guidance is almost guaranteed to be a recipe for disaster.
Reflecting on all of this, I have no idea how the US founders managed to get something that worked at all, much less as well as it does. (And notice that it took them several tries to get it right.)
I mean, yeah, it’s structured mostly around links, and you can certainly use it as a source of Interesting Links. But there’s conversation and community there if you look around a little.
Staying relatively on topic is an unrelated aspiration and one that we mostly let flex a lot depending on the specific thread and context.
Facebook/Reddit/Twitter/etc promote a regression towards the mean understanding... viral content reflects and amplifies the "average user's" sentiment and values. Acceptable for entertainment, but inherently prone to misinformation, propaganda, and demagoguery. Education requires valuing subject matter experts. Opinions which may not be widely held, or even popular, but supported by people who are vetted as being knowledgeable on the subject.
Traditional media could be regulated because they were largely centralized, but centralization also creates an establishment that regulated counter-culture ideas. In contrast, the internet is anarchic. Online anonymity impairs delegation of trust... any idea can be published so every individual must rationally evaluate what they consume. Attempting to regulate away undesirable behavior on the anarchic internet is just cat-herding. At best, you create a walled garden for a select few.
As I see it, the paths forward are either:
* public education, emphasizing civics/rationality, to support distributed self-regulation
* centralizing with state regulations
I want the former but the latter seems most likely, considering how the underlying networks are consolidating, and increasing awareness of how amplified public ignorance creates political/economic instability that hurts those with power.
The restoration of the Fairness Doctrine would also help stymie some of the biggest promulgators like Fox News *
* you can search for "fox news viewers misinformed" and encounter studies and results like http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/
Similarily, there are still excellent news sources. The Economist is often cited in these discussions, and the New York Times is also vigilant in their reporting and the correction of errors when they occur[0].
What we’ve seen is a breakdown in trust of institutions, largely disconnected from actual mistakes on their part. People will quickly demand proof and invoke conspiracy theories when, for example, the there-letter agencies accuse Eussia of interfering in elections. They have learned to invoke “appeal to authority fallacy”too well, without offering an alternative. Because you cannot evaluate a new story without in some way deferring to the reputation of the publisher.
Re: trust and appeal to authority; your example made me realize people are drawn to grand conspiracies because unverifiable theories are infallible... Luring in people unfamiliar with probabilistic reasoning and consilience.
Although this distrust does have negative impacts to our society, I view this distrust as an overall good thing.
Sure McDonalds is not good, but there is also plenty of organic that equally bad (or worse).
That depends. Sometimes European organic veg is preferable to Chinese industrially farmed veg when your local supermarket offers only those two choices. This is definitely true of garlic: Chinese garlic tends to be notoriously bitter and lack juice, but Spanish organic garlic is very sweet, pungent, and juicy. Now, the fact that the European organic choice was made according to the limitations of organic farming may well be irrelevant to its goodness, but there is a strong enough correlation with quality to guide consumers, and it was likely chosen by your supermarket as an alternative to the Chinese imported product precisely because they wanted to cover the organic segment.
The Economist and the New York Times may have good practices in regard to errors, but there is a clear difference in their reporting to independent fact checking sites. To make matters worse, even those examples of "excellent" news papers tend to have a clear and open political alignment. With increased political polarization this then result in a rather natural distrust of news institutions, even those that are vigilant in correcting errors after they have occurred.
That's great but it's a slow cultural change. Well-educated countries can still fall into extremism, which is driven by emotional and atavistic factors as well as economic and political ones, and can't simply be dispelled with doses of Rationality (tm). Arguably, the failure of rational utilitarianism to engage with this aspect of humanity and to simply dismiss everything that can't be quantified as irrationality exacerbates the growth of toxicity.
On a more practical level, the US is a country where part of the population rejects the theory of evolution on religious grounds, historical narratives are intensely contested, and political life is objectively and increasingly polarized. Educational change happens over generational timescales, and if it were as simple as making it available all our social ills would have been dispelled long ago.
Of course education and critical thinking skills are essential for a healthy social body, but when I see people saying 'we just need better education' I feel like I'm on a bus that's headed towards a cliff edge and well-meaning people are suggesting that the solution to this is better driving lessons.
There may not be a solution that preserves the open internet, if this system is fundamentally incompatible with social realities.
Comparing the experience in a niche subreddit, vs. a default subreddit, it's clear that the real problem is allowing causals in. If people have to go out of their way to participate, you wind up with only the ones who care to do so. And they have, in their reputation, something they don't want to lose.
But if people are allowed to participate by default, you get the enormous masses of people who, collectively, by virtue of their shifting roster, are immune to moderation. And you get people who set out that morning to share as many opinions as possible, instead of the people who set out to participate in that community exclusively.
On the subreddits I manage, I allow broad participation with no barriers. But they aren’t popular enough to have enough trolling to break me down and add hoops.
I agree 100% as long as you put me, or people of my worldview, in charge of the curriculum and personnel.
While thought-policing media, schools, churches, and any other possible venue of "indoctrination" may "work" to a superficial extent, it mostly just completely destroys the credibility of your authority and leads to stunning implosion and destabilization. See: the Soviet Union.
Like it or not, you can't just beat "undesirable" views out of people, either with schools or social media moderation.
I don't know, I don't think we have actively tried yet.
You absolutely can. An example: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2012/sep/22...
Religion sucks, but Soviet Communism's anti-religious nature doesn't excuse its foibles.
That quality is also known as adaptability and it's crucial to successful survival and prosperity, for exactly the same reason that it's useful in mathematics: global optima are generally difficult to deduce, if they can be conclusively and authoritatively determined at all.
Saying Side X is "not being logical" or "can't think critically" is virtually always just a cop-out. It says you either a) don't understand or b) don't want to admit the validity of some of their concerns.
Most of the time when the other side's argument is understood, the disagreements are a matter of priority and/or credibility, not nonsensical thinking. And those priorities are usually determined intrinsically; values as such can't really be programmed or taught. They're the result of the years of experience each individual has endured in the real world.
A good example of this is that many engineers are known for a just-the-facts, no-frills approach. This is because engineers tend to prioritize facts and correctness over aesthetic and emotional value. Other people who don't do this aren't objectively wrong -- they just put different weights on the considerations, leading them to different conclusions.
Another example is outlet credibility. Your average Fox News viewer may believe that MSNBC is propaganda secretly dictated by the shadowy figures in the background, and vice versa. If you believe this, the logical conclusion is to dismiss or at least discount the perspective of the propagandist.
You cannot "prove" that one side is propaganda and the other side isn't, because it is impossible to definitely deduce the intentions and motives of other people. Reports that say reports from MSNBC were more frequently errant are of no value because you can just say "Oh yeah, says who? The same shadowy figures?" to that.
It is important to understand that humans hold a variety of totally non-falsifiable beliefs -- things that cannot be definitively proven one way or the other, even if you try, like the state of mind of the speakers we're around. These have to be approached from the subterranean to be understood, let alone addressed.
All we can do is understand that our own perspective is not the default or de-facto correct one, and that other people are entitled to their own assumptions and unfalsifiable opinions just as we are. They're entitled to their own credibility heuristics and decisions about who is worth trusting. People are free to make their own decisions and conclusions, whether we agree with them or not.
Understanding that is critical to learning that it's OK to disagree with people, without having to pretend that they're insane just to preserve your own ego and self-worth.
For opinions, perhaps. There are also people who reject facts. I don’t consider rejection of evolution or young-earth views as legitimate. Thus, those who cling to these views are empirically wrong.
Most people don't reject facts, they reject certain interpretations of facts.
For example, some people believed epilepsy came from evil spirits. They didn't deny that the person was shaking on the ground. They just had a different explanation for it than we do now.
When you build a runway for a plane or a long bridge, you do.
A model is not necessarily useful in all contexts. People still use the flat earth model in useful ways because it's simpler to assume the earth is flat in some situations. Of course, once you go beyond the capabilities of the flat earth model your numbers will wildly diverge into the realm of useless while the round or spherical models provide useful numbers for longer.
Appreciate the multiple snide attacks, though.
Is there not such a thing as conspiracy fact? Aren't some conspiracies, in fact, real? It seems both sides of the political aisle have pet conspiracy theories these days, so it's really hard for this to hold water anymore.
> people who don't understand facts
As another commenter said, people will usually agree on the clear and present facts, e.g., Donald Trump won the presidency. Where you'll find more disagreement is on rationale: either he won because he gave a voice to the discontented American working class, or he won because he worked in cahoots with Vladimir Putin to subvert American democracy.
People don't refuse to acknowledge the obvious state of affairs. They have different interpretations, based on different values and credibility heuristics, of the likely impetus for that state of affairs.
>people who are highly opinionated about things they don't understand, etc.
aka virtually everyone. How many of us know enough to hold our own with the experts in something that we're "highly opinionated" on? If we can in anything, it's very narrow. Are all of our other opinions invalid now? Humans use credibility heuristics to try to determine who is right about something, and then they follow based on that.
> are not behaving logically
I dunno, it sounds logical to me, at least in the practical sense. If we pretend we live in a world of infinite resources and time, you might be right, but considering the constraints of reality, the logical approach seems to be to have and express opinions in the moment according to one's best judgment, since everyone else is going to be doing that too. Just gotta try not to be too haughty about it.
> They can have valid concerns and still be behaving irrationally. You clearly think these are mutually exclusive but they aren't.
I agree someone can have a valid concern and also behave irrationally. I don't agree this is what you started out saying, though.
>Appreciate the multiple snide attacks, though.
No offense intended. Edit deadline is passed, but I wasn't thinking I put any such things in. My apologies if you felt I was being condescending or passive-aggressive.
Oh please, you think the average person has sufficient critical thinking skills to read the newspaper and pick out the parts that are "stretching the truth", use specious reasoning or various other logical fallacies, etc? You must roll with a different crew than I.
> Your average Fox News viewer may believe that MSNBC is propaganda secretly dictated by the shadowy figures in the background, and vice versa.
If they had critical thinking skills, wouldn't they be able to get a pretty decent handle on the degree to which they are propagandists?
It sounds to me like what you're saying is, most things within this realm are not knowable, except for the parts that are. The world is complex and confusing, but I don't think it's that confusing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CBTS_Stream/
These 20,000 odd people unequivocally lack the type of critical thinking skills GP is referring to. I find it hard to believe that they are all under professional care. These people are straight out of The DaVinci Code, or National Treasure. They truly believe that they have uncovered a massive conspiracy to over throw the current American government, and they are organizing to stop it. Many subreddits choose a sort of mascot that defines their subredditors. For instance, people who subscribe to the tongue in cheek /r/evilbuildings are "6509 villains plotting", where they post pictures of buildings that have a nefarious apperance, no conspiracy in the comments. /r/CBTS_Stream has "21,333 Operators". As in mercenaries/militiamen. These people are rabid Trump supporters, seem to have a strong fundamentalist Christian bent, and appear to be extremely gullible and susceptible to any sort of theory that involves revenge upon the previous administration. They even have their own prophet, "Q". Everything from occult references, to nazis, to big pharma killing off holistic doctors, to arranging Trumps tweets into an 11x11 grid, and then playing word search to reveal a secret message. These people swear that Donald Trump's televised rallies are chock full of encoded messages and symbolism, both in what Trump is saying, and the clothes/posters of supporters in the background. These people buy toothpaste from Alex Jones, because it doesn't contain flouride. These people believe that all mainstream American history since the American Civil War is a lie created by the perpetrators of this current hoax these people have uncovered. They also believe that Trump has already secretly met with Kim Jong Un, and will soon unveil a world saving peace treaty, and that will "make the libs heads explode".
The truly sad part of this is that a lot of these people are also members of other subreddits dedicated to people who have escaped Mormonism, or Jehovah's Witnesses, or similar groups. So these people have already thrown off the shackles of psychological warfare once. But they believe now that they are "woke", and seem completely beyond talking down.
Good luck explaining to these people that they are being radicalized by Russians, or whoever. Good luck getting any of these people to not believe that any censorship is obvious proof that the sleuths are hot on the case, and that the global elite are silencing them.
And yet engineers are over-represented (compared to people with other degrees) amongst Creationists and conspiracy theorists and, I would guess, terrorists. I think engineers value simplicity and direct causation more than facts or correctness.
Education teaches critical thinking, science, history, numerical literacy, and the general skill and toolset to differentiate fact from falsehood, rhetoric, and manipulation-- regardless of where it is coming from.
Education is an immune system for the mind. Generally it is the manipulators who don't like an educated populace, because it decreases their power. They tend to be the ones labeling education as "indoctrination".
Right, in principle, it's agreed that "education" is "good knowledge" and "indoctrination" is "bad knowledge" and/or "fake news".
As long as you think that the inoculations being administered in the school system are valid, you'll call it education. Once you stop thinking that, you'll call it indoctrination.
So you're not really arguing anything. Every side calls training that biases you toward their preferred narrative "education" and training that biases in the opposite way "indoctrination". Is your point that "sometimes people disagree"?
This tends to last until someone realizes that an educational system is a wonderful indoctrination tool to advance their goals. Often enough this is followed by enacting that.
This isn't new. "Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man."
People like you scare me.
I have a feeling a lot of people would have issues with this approach though.
Logical fallacies would be one place to start, you can see examples of this all day long on reddit for example.
I've been hearing claims of the need to teach "critical thinking" since I was in high school. To me it always came across as one of those things that can't easily be taught, particularly in a traditional academic setting. Everyone agrees it should be taught, but if there were a clear way of doing it, we would.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_logic
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-classical/
https://distancelearning.ubc.ca/courses-and-programs/distanc...
> If it's not being taught, then we'd need to do something differently.
When reading the news, forums, or overhearing conversations, do you not regularly encounter people who obviously have no significant skills in critical thinking?
Right. I took a logic class for my undergraduate degree. It's actually the source of the "modus" in my username. I guess to me that's a far cry from what people refer to as "critical thinking." Being able to identify textbook logical fallacies isn't the same thing as rationally and objectively forming a judgment about something.
It's certainly a helpful part, but I doubt most would remember it any better than geometry or 1800s history.
> When reading the news, forums, or overhearing conversations, do you not regularly encounter people who obviously have no significant skills in critical thinking?
I do, but it's rarely a clear-cut example of misunderstanding a logical fallacy. More often than not, it's the blind acceptance of supporting evidence while rejecting opposing evidence. Or assigning way too much value to a poorly-sourced news story. Or approaching the issue with a different worldview / values. Or any number of other biases that affect decision-making.
To be clear, though: I agree it's clearly not being taught. I'm just not convinced you can take a bunch of high schoolers, put them in a room, and after X weeks of doing something, they'll be critical thinkers. I agree you could probably teach them logical fallacies well enough to pass a test on them, but that's not the same thing.
If not, if critical thinking doesn't work, what could we do to improve this situation?
What country are you writing from, and could you give some specific examples?
But to be fair, the longer we get into the current era of politics, the harder it is to distinguish between earnestness and satire. Young people who watch the movie Network today don't see Howard Beale as satirical, because there are too many people like him today who are deadly serious.
Of course not.
> If not, if critical thinking doesn't work, what could we do to improve this situation?
I'm not sure "well-informed" and "critical thinking" are even relevant to each other, but putting that aside, I genuinely don't know. That's why I asked how you teach critical thinking.
It's possible people are bound to retreat to their biases and it's a futile effort. I'm just not convinced attempting to teach people "critical thinking" will work, because it hasn't.
Implying it's been tried, and failed.
Where has widespread teaching of critical thinking been tried?
> Public school teachers and administrators will tell you that one of the mandates of public education is to develop critical thinking skills in students. They believe that curricula are designed, at least in part, with this goal in mind. [1]
> Common Core, the federal curriculum guidelines adopted by the vast majority of states, describes itself as “developing the critical-thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills students will need to be successful.” [2]
> Many teachers say they strive to teach their students to be critical thinkers. They even pride themselves on it; after all, who wants children to just take in knowledge passively? [3]
Are you willing to acknowledge educators / curricula commonly claim to teach critical thinking? To me it's always come across as something claimed to be taught pretty much everywhere. Yet we both seem to agree it's not working.
We could try teaching critical thinking differently and potentially meet some success, but that doesn't change how it's been claimed to have been taught for some time with poor results.
[1] http://argumentninja.com/public-schools-were-never-designed-...
[2] http://www.newsweek.com/youre-100-percent-wrong-about-critic...
[3] http://theconversation.com/lets-stop-trying-to-teach-student...
> Are you willing to acknowledge educators / curricula commonly claim to teach critical thinking?
I'm not in denial of some sort ffs, I'm frustrated at watching our society coming apart at the seams because the vast majority of the population seems to be incapable of intelligently reading a newspaper article, and will fall for seemingly any trick in the book.
Of the examples of "critical thinking education" listed above, do any remotely approach the critical thinking specific education I'm talking about here?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16572861
People are absolutely inundated with propaganda nowadays, like no other time in history, with social media being the most powerful weapon by far. We are graduating our children and sending them intellectually defenseless into this new world, I don't know if the average human mind can be brought to a level sufficient to cope with the propaganda created by the world class experts in persuasion who are working for a variety of deep pocketed entities, but at least we could try.
Well no, but my claim wasn't that your suggestion has been tried. It's that other people have been claiming they've been teaching critical thinking for some time, and it's not working.
I agree it's a problem--I just don't think a class in logic will do it. I'm not sure it's teachable at all, and even if it is, I'm not sure those same skills won't be ignored the moment the argument questions one's identity or becomes emotional.
Is it worth trying? It's easy for me to say "sure," but it's not on me to implement, and I'm certainly not sure how to assess whether it'd be successful.
Of course this doesn't work when politics is taboo.
Take the same comment or opinion and air it among three friends in person (or a very tight social network). You only need to convince two or three people who likely trust and respect you already, and who are not inclined to want to spend an infinite number of hours debating such trivia across all time zones.
There is the perception that "the entire world" is watching you on the web, criticizing your every move, but that's not a fact.
Not every conversation has to become a burned bridges and salt the earth affair. If the other person is just trying to "win" then disengage from the argument. If the other person is arguing with you in good faith then maybe you're wrong or have something to learn from a new perspective.
Facebook, Reddit, twitter, Snapchat have all started for entertainment and switched to catchbyte reaction/outrage culture news and normal news has turned into a mess as well.
I say regulations wiping trending news feed off Facebook, twitter and Snapchat is a start. Perhaps funding to any group that meets set in stone criteria regardless of political affiliation gets some federal funding to make up for the cost of making real journalism. That journalism must be fact checked and we hold them accountable.
People are desensitized to everything now and when shocking news is made every 15 minutes and the world is so connected we become numb to so much and that is incredibly dangerous
nope, this won't work.
People will always need a place to voice their vile comments in a cowardly manner
More karma, more posting; less karma, less posting. Everyone starts every month/week/day with only so much, no roll-over per timeframe. Modify it so that 'popular' threads cost more to post in. You can give karma to others too via the upvote and take it away with a downvote, but still no roll-over. Troll/shill accounts would still get upped around en masse, but less so and it would be 'easier' for mods to tell. (I'm sure you can model this without too much effort vis a vi prisoner's dilemma). You'd have to pick and choose which to comment in. Posting content would work similarly, but a slight mod to the cost to posting.
I had the same idea at first but I don't think it would work in practice
If you're curious: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-01/the-nra-h...
We've tried:
- Real identities (Facebook comments)
- Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.)
- Strong moderation (Reddit, HN)
All within the context of rampant financialisation, land policies returning us to feudalism and continuous lying about the banking bailout including removing the one candidate who was going to take on the banks (Bernie).
Maybe it's not "the internet" that's the problem. Maybe the dissemination of information as we slide into this rentier hellpit is causing people to be pretty pissed off?
https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-va...
- European feudalism was an unusual system in that the government had no taxing power. The lord who owned land held the taxing power ("feudal dues") over that land, and the king funded himself by collecting feudal dues from land he owned personally, rather than e.g. by taxing the dukes. This might contrast with a more advanced state of civilization in which the caliph / emperor / whatever collected taxes directly from everywhere by virtue of being the supreme ruler, and paid a salary to his lower administrative functionaries. Or it might contrast with a system where the use of land wasn't much of a source of taxes. Or both of those latter things might be true simultaneously.
The US system of property taxes has a lot in common with the system I've described above, and some obvious differences. Similarities:
- The federal government ("king") can't assess property taxes. Only the states ("local lords") can do that.
- People other than the government cannot own land outright, but must pay the property tax ("feudal dues") for its use every year.
Of course, rather than the federal government receiving tax income based on federally owned land, it instead double-taxes the citizens of the states. (But on mercantile revenue rather than on land.) This is arguably worse than the feudal system.
Night and day.
"Devolved local state" is slightly more accurate than "private landlord", because unlike a landlord in a more commercialized society, a feudal lord was not legally able to sell the land he owned. He was legally able to govern it.
This is why I'm quite pessimistic about the current situation: the current in-vogue business model of surveillance/advertising capitalism demands massive size beyond what can be moderated, and thus makes this problem inevitable. And it only gets worse when the most toxic users are the most profitable, viz. Twitter's refusal to ban Donald, even though by any reasonable interpretation of their TOS, he breaks it every other day.
Cheap, if you ask me.
My hypothesis is that Nextdoor primarily appeals to those who already have that kind of territorial "they're all out to get us" mindset since territoriality is literally what the app is about. It's the angry "get off my lawn" old man of social networks and it attracts exactly those kinds of people. Mix in some Internet depersonalization effects and you get something pretty nasty.
My neighborhood is 50%+ non English Speaking Chinese. There are posts almost everyday that say things like..
"Some people in this neighborhood need to OPEN THEIR EYES and stop hitting the gate with their cars. I'll post this in the appropriate languages so everyone and the community can appreciate the significance of my message. Ching-Chang Chow... Bang Bong, Bing bong bing."
Remember that Reddit ultimately only imparts one vote per person regardless of whether you're an admin or moderator or whatever. End that system. We've already established that these systems are not libertarian - the leadership has an opinion (in /r/Science the opinion is that you must post good science) and we want to empower them to enforce it.
Not only that, but provide negative feedback. If you endorse a terrible person, make it impact your credibility.
Real identities would require verification, which sites like FB only do after the fact.
I fear that a huge repercussion of the election issues is that we will get there. A real ID may be required for you to post comments in all websites. And i'm not sure how I feel about that. Reality is that it would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identify was viewable and searchable by all you know. But at what cost?
I really do wonder what is the root of trolling. What makes a "normal" person take an alter-ego/view/counter view, solely based on lack of face to face interaction...
The cost is that it would prevent people from anonymously reporting abuses, which means that fear of retaliation will have a chilling effect. We've already seen this where people get death threats, houses burned down, etc, when they do things like report sexual assault.
Is this true? I've seen various studies saying that the opposite is actually true, but I can't currently find any of those studies. Does anyone have any sources?
EDIT: some sources, though I don't know the strength of their validity:
I mean, you get toxic behavior even on something like Nextdoor, where you pretty much know it's the neighbors across the street. Technology has just made things more convenient -- social media removes any curation, and technology also has made some means of harassment much easier to execute.
Myself, personally, I avoid social media that encourages toxic behavior (which usually means, smaller, special interest type sites; social circles that you know; etc.). This involves some degree of moderation or self-selection.
I don't see a good way around limited moderation for Reddit either, which is unfortunate in that it is hard to moderate something that size well (it's usually inconsistent and often arbitrary-ish).
I don't think it would. Lots of people post horribly objectionable material under their own names on a regular basis, depending on their level of financial security, peer group, and social milieu.
What makes a "normal" person take an alter-ego/view/counter view, solely based on lack of face to face interaction...
Some people are horrible, and are just as unpleasant in real life as they are online.
I honestly don't think this will ever be the case. Because there is a lot of profit from an unmoderated comment store. Also because it'd be monumentally hard to actually make all sites compliant.
That is not at all clear, especially as a percentage of comments. There are plenty of sociopaths who are perfectly willing to troll under their real name. Meanwhile, more reasonable people may quite rationally be worried that expressing any opinion on a controversial issue will lead to online mobs trying to get them fired from their jobs, kicked out of school, or otherwise ostracized. Not to mention scenarios like being a gay teenager in a very socially conservative environment.
Those who post offensive content and do care, find it completely trivial to get a fake name. FB’s enforcement of their policy is basically nonexistent. This is the second-biggest group of users.
I can see at the cost of making stolen identities worth even more.
As it is websites completely suck at keeping our 'anonymous' identity secure. Our email and passwords are hacked so commonly there are websites dedicated to tracking it. Now you're just adding 'real identities' to the brokered data. Any real trolls will be able to use this data from the dark net pretending to be you. Even worse, since real names are required, any employers will look for you on the internet, they will see your "I'm an anti-gay right wing pro-russian" profiles online and say "you are not a cultural fit for our company". You will have to take the time and effort to clean up what is said about you. Since it's a real identity, it's not going to change, and they already have all the information they need on you.
Good luck in that terrible future.
If googling myself found comments I'd make on "platform X," you can be sure I'd carefully consider my comments on that platform.
Having anonymous commenting is important, but if you want a less toxic platform for mainstream comments, real identities + indexing is a good start.
The real WTF moment for online discussion is yet to come. When ML chatbots are able to comment indistinguishably from human comments, purely as a measure of capacity of time/scale, comment threads are eventually going to just become chatbots arguing with chatbots, drowning out actual discussion by humans.
- Incentives
The real-world has that figured out long ago. If you find something that is truly useful & timely, you would be willing to pay real money for it.
Google Answers (answers.google.com) had tried an approach wherein a price can be put on a question and any legit reply which answers that q can claim it. 'Reputation' definitely still plays a role in this, but the system is flexible enough to allow a new comer to attempt answering a question & stake a claim to the funds.
The real-world has many of these aspects sorted out, like calling a plumber or a carpenter from your neighborhood to get your work done. The problem is we have embarked on creating a 'global' network (aka FB) without first having adequately understood how to create strong family & community network, before we go global with our social networking..
Where HN has been falling short (lately, in my observation) is where discussions about the ethics of certain business models get lost via the "buried" option or killed off completely.
You cannot come to HN to discuss the potentially-negative ecological or economical impact of a YC company. The voting rings will literally send your comment or post to the void: buried or killed off completely. HN does still post lots of interesting links, but for truly interesting discussion that isn't (for lack of a better word), tainted by bias, I prefer Reddit these days.
- discussing the risks of psychoactive drugs.
- pointing out flaws in overhyped press releases about the next wonder drug/treatment
I guess you're right that you can avoid getting downvoted by being exceptionally polite and spending about 15 minutes crafting a response saying "crap science, uncontrolled trial, possible placebo effect", but sometimes I just don't have the time and energy for that. I'd prefer it if people here didn't automatically assume I'm full of shit when I point out a flaw in an argument without writing my response absolutely perfectly the first time.
People say negative things on HN about YC companies all the time. We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC-funded startup is at issue. That doesn't mean we don't moderate it at all—that would leave too much of a loophole—but we do moderate it less. This is literally the first principle that we tell everyone who moderates Hacker News. You can find many posts I've written about this over the years via https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
What I meant, is that one cannot start a discussion of such things without being willing to lose lots of points and karma. Observations that AirBnB might be doing more harm than good to cities having "housing crisis" issues, and the fact that Uber and Lyft are actually harming public transportation rider numbers and putting more automobiles on the roads (creating congestion).
Two issues I've seen brought up here that get downvoted into oblivion. Why risk that? It's far easier for people to jump on the "attack the poster" bandwagon... as they have done to me in this thread.
Granted, I've been reading HN for over 11 years now, and the site is not the same as it used to be. A lot of interesting posters have left. Probably I need to lower my expectations for what to see when I come here.
Plenty of comments arguing that Airbnb/Uber might be doing more harm than good routinely get heavily upvoted, so I'd question your overall generalization.
An echo chamber is arguably more when we actively suppress dissident viewpoints. Reddit is infamous for moderators doing that simply by deleting comments under some pretext of 'spirit of the subreddit' or such. With Facebook there's a first-and-last-name-and-picture-visible shaming that can be scary and damaging, repulsing the opposite viewpoints. At a more extreme, you can help foster an echo chamber by organizing a large group of people to scream and picket and threaten a speaker that has the wrong views, reminding all the others of what happens.
HN to me is an oasis. Even if I get downvoted when I have a minority view. I still feel as if intelligent arguments are considered.
With Reddit, how many intelligent comments are there? The English grammar alone is awful, full of shortcuts, cliches and new millennial-speak. But worse: the responses are short. One-liners. And even worse: argumentation is ad-hominem and emotive.
In summary, I think Reddit is about emotional expression, and HN is about (an attempt of) rigor and rationality.
Downvotes are not only for inflammatory language; a comment can be a negative contribution to the signal-to-noise ratio, and even violate the commenting guidelines, without using inflammatory language.
I avoid poking the moderator lions (I used to post political articles maybe a year or more ago), but I do wish HN would have another view of that particular topic. It's rather unavoidable that adults (and we are adults), highly-educated ones at that, would sometimes slip into politics when science or tech news (or legal news about tech or science) is discussed.
But yes, you're generally right about that.
I think emotive political discussion is useless, but rational policy discussions aren't useless.
Something might be totally off topic or funny, but if I made me laugh do I down vote it?
Slashdot's model of tagging posts was a pretty good idea I think and allowed one to filter out the 'funny' or 'offtopic' comments.
So, upvotes and respond.
If it's a net positive contribution, you shouldn't be downvoting.
> Slashdot's model of tagging posts was a pretty good idea
Its a good model for a customizable user experience, and a bad model for a community. Those two goals are often opposed.
Dragon, you commented and downvoted on something that you are doing right now which is commenting on a comment system. No? At least you had the decency to reply, which most Redditors don't. Which makes Reddit Toxic.
I reserve downvotes for when a comment is being needlessly toxic, doesn't contribute to the discussion or otherwise not helpful for an open discussion.
I think the best cure for "downvote to disagree" is to firmly hold to the principle that the opposing side of the argument has the best intentions to the extend of their knowledge and that at the end of the discussion, all participants should have learned something. You should also always be willing to change your mind on what you argue about.
Always.
Voting on HN barely has an effect, and I suspect that the average votes per comment on HN has gone way down year over year. People just don't vote on posts as often as you'd think, not anymore. A related problem is that commentary doesn't go on for very long. In the usenet days you could have a good thread that would last for months and months that would continue to spawn good and interesting commentary, a flash in the pan thread might only last a few days. On HN the window of commentary for a post is rarely more than a day and typically only a matter of hours. It's just people strafing comments into the void and then disengaging. Long comments typically don't get read, and don't get upvoted, don't get commented on, etc, for example.
OK, I'll bite! A cursory look at the data shows a clear increase in average votes on comments from 2007 until 2012, which is the only year with a dip, followed by steady growth until the present all-time high.
Of course, there are lots of "all else being equal" implicit assumptions there. First, if the population doubles but stories move off the frontpage in 0.7x the time, then you'd only get 1.4x as many votes—and this is one of InclinedPlane's points. Second, the newer crowd could be significantly more, or significantly less, active. To control for these two things, the measure you might use instead is "votes per comment per pageview", or "votes per comment per second a user spends on the page". Third, there might be more comments posted—well, duh, it would be weird if the new users never posted any comments.
Fourth—and I think this another thing InclinedPlane wants to focus on—comment quality could have changed. Comment sorting is relevant too, because I'm sure lots of users don't read everything. If we suppose that, due to an increase in population, we get 2x as many comments but they have the same quality distribution, and if we suppose the best comments always go to the top, then the average quality of the top n comments should increase; you can see something like this in extremely popular Reddit threads, where the top several highly upvoted comments are clearly optimized for something (often clever jokes). If we suppose a decent population of users only read the top n comments, and always use the same function that maps "quality of a comment" to "probability of upvoting", then, when the set of comments doubles and (by assumption) the best rise to the top, we'd expect these users to generate more upvotes overall, and hence "average votes per comment viewed" should go up. (It's also possible that people's standards would rise. But I think people's changing standards would lag behind the changes in what they're viewing.) That said, for the comments that aren't in the top n, the fraction of people that view them (and consequently might comment on them) would go down.
The question of how long threads sit on the frontpage is relevant, both for comment exposure and for InclinedPlane's point about conversation longevity. (There are also pages like "new" and the no-longer-linked-at-the-top "best".) I wonder how best to quantify that... perhaps "the frontpage tenure of the thread with the longest tenure of all threads on that day".
After reading a few discussions over the last few days, I was thinking to my self that HN was better than ever, and very good (with one serious shortcoming). Even the echo chamber is much better than I remember.
EDIT: The shortcoming, IMHO, is the abandonment of politics. HN is the ideal place to solve that problem, with s sophisticated audience open to and interested in experimentation and in problem solving. The goal of propagandists is not to persuade you, but to paralyze you; to shut down real discussion and debate. HN is, unwittingly, capitulating and cooperating with them. HN is another success for them.
No, it's really not, as HN demonstrates most of the time it interacts with politics.
That's an illusion, for reasons I attempted to describe here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16443431
> That's an illusion, for reasons I attempted to describe here
That implies that it's an unsolvable problem, if I understand correctly. There's no reason to think this problem is any more difficult than all the other 'unsolvable' ones and this one is particularly, I would even say 'extremely' valuable to work on.
I don't believe we simply could introduce political topics and it would work due to some HN magic. It would take serious work and experimentation to find a solution, but I think HN is better suited than other places to do that work. And a solution could change discourse in the country and the world, at a time when discourse on the Internet problems SV has invented has become a very dangerous weapon for some, and is tearing society apart.
I realize that "we" means you and sctb more than anyone, and so it's a request and encouragement. I still think it's the most valuable thing HN could do, potentially world-changing. Previous generations had books and leaders that changed the course of history; this time it might be software or a software-based technique that turns the tide. I hope that at least you will keep it in mind.
Our first responsibility is to take care of what we have. The way to take care of a complex system is to be sensitive to feedback and adapt. We can apply that principle here. Look at what happens when the political taps get opened beyond a notch or two. Discussion becomes nasty, brutish, long, and predictable. That's what we want less of, so opening the taps all the way is not an option. For similar reasons, closing them all the way isn't an option either.
I don't disagree completely. I think there's a chance HN can slowly develop greater capacity in this area. But it would need to be very slow and not something we try directly to control. Anything as complex and fragile as HN needs a light touch.
But I'm not sure that they should be eliminated. The alternative is to leave moderation as the only way to deal with bad (abusive, off-topic, trolling, unintelligible) posts. I'm not sure that having people flag every bad post they think they see, and letting the moderators sort it out, is really the optimal way to do things.
That's a common misconception. Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
I think people have the wrong idea about HN downvotes because they think Reddit rules apply to HN. It's a bit like how in Canada we think we have Miranda rights because we've seen it on American TV.
I think you have more success if you ask everyone else to upvote unfairly downvoted comments.
The problem with your argument is that it doesn't reckon with just how lousy bad internet comments are, or how many of them there are, or how completely they take over if allowed to. To a first approximation, bad internet comments are the entire problem of this site.
It's easy to imagine an HN that would be just like the current HN, only with some negative X (e.g. bad downvotes) removed. Most of these ideas are fantasies, because the thing you'd have to do to remove X would have massive side effects. You can't hold the rest of the site constant and do that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
Bad != disagree. I think we all agree that it should be ok to downvote and hide "bad" comments. However the problem is that many good comments are downvoted simply because people disagree with them.
I think it might be better to remove the downvote and replace it with "flag", so people can flag bad comments (spam, abusive, pointless, etc). At least that way people would need to think a little before the comment gets flagged, which would hopefully result in fewer minority viewpoint comments getting hidden.
In the long run push media is always going to be troll-ier and offend more people than pull media.
Secondly, I notice no mention of deliberate, paid propagandizing, i.e. professionally divisive sock-puppets employed by sock-puppet firms.
Any serious discussion of threats to a healthy public discourse must address deliberate attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the common voice.
Twitter actually does this but only for some types of accounts. Every see the "see more" button under replies? That's where people of low quality go. Twitter has a sort of rating for figuring out if someone is of low quality or not and they usually get hidden. Even their likes and retweets get hidden.
Hasn't to help overall on Twitter though I have noticed I get less assholes replying to me.
The only way i see to save reddit is to set a maximum size for a subreddit, and shut down or otherwise isolate every subreddit that grows bigger than the maximum threshold.
Real real identities (i.e. government issued digital id) have never been done. I am sure they will come eventually. The political process is just very slow compared to the pace of technology.
Compare the outcomes of totally anonymous reputation-based forums such as HN, reddit or 4chan with near-real identity forums such as Facebook or Linkedin.
There is a very open flow of ideas and debate on 4chan and other reputation-based forums. There is at least as much hate speech and trolling going on at Facebook as on HN, yet Facebook has near-real identities. Linkedin have at least as much spam and criminal phishing posts going on as HN, yet Linked in has near-real identities.
HN would not be a better forum if everyone had to register with their government ID. The main benefit would be to make it easier to ban one person from accessing the forum, and silence that individual.
My vote is for reputation-based forums.
I'll agree that reddit doesn't seem to expose easy to use moderating tools, though.
Forum communities with actual strong moderation, eg. Something Awful, ResetEra have near zero issues with hate speech, Nazis and other things that reddit has let fester.
Having a toxic community that internally declines to moderate is not strong moderation.
1) Namespace of subreddits. The subreddit which snags the most obvious name for a topic has a much better chance of becoming canonical for that topic that competitors with worse names.
2) Cross-subreddit identity and supporting tooling. For example, i can easily search for all recent posts made by a particular user, but i can't easily search for all posts made by a particular user within one specific subreddit. This sort of thing promotes "cultural leakage" across reddits and makes people think of all of Reddit as one community with one culture.
Related: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16573842 which summarizes a study that finds cultural leakage across subreddits.
One of the major factors that keeps it relatively clean is that user registration costs $10. That's a strong financial disincentive against trolling, bots, etc.
I really believe that successful online communities of the future will have paid signups.
When I use Facebook I am the product, not the customer. This means the platform is optimized to put my eyeballs on advertisements or provide data about me to marketers. It is not optimized to provide high quality conversation.
No wonder you got banned so quickly there...
I'd totally pay $10 for a less shitty reddit clone.
There's nobody watching the watchmen, essentially. That leads to a lot of frustration, anger, mistrust, and abuse.
This means there was a "gold rush" in the early days and if some shitter is sitting on prime real estate (like brand names of products) there's nothing you can do about it. If they decide to close the subreddit by making it private, nothing you can do about it. If they go inactive and are still squatting on prime digital real-estate, nothing you can do about it... if they later get hacked but are still inactive, doubly nothing you can do about it.
Imagine a blank graph. Randomly place 1 million circles on it. No two with identical boundaries. This is our hypothetical Venn diagram of people's preferences for how communication happens online. Drop another million circles to represent how those people will actually act online.
It doesn't matter what points on the graph are labeled "toxicity," "echo chamber," "uncomfortably friendly," or "sparse comments, experts only." It only matter's that the circles are not all identical.
https://doxa.network/
While I can't come to a conclusion on it (whether or not it's a good/bad idea) - I wonder what others in the HN community think about it. I apologize in advance if this is a bad place to comment, I've been mostly a lurker thus far!
In addition to all that, I still fail to see how a blockchain would solve any of these fundamental issues.
Naaah. Gotta monetize every inch of everyone’s life. It’s the American way.
HN seems to be doing a great job in that regard (in my opinion) and it is a model with which other websites can learn from.
I don’t know an easy way to scale that model.
I disagree, There IS a solution, but no one likes it.
Segway: Football aka Soccer had a problem back in the day. Games became (more?) boring because teams would go up a goal, and just play "kick the ball to the goalie". Goalie'd pick up the ball, bounce it, pass to a player who kicked it back to the goalie, rinse and repeat. Then they instituted the back pass rule - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-pass_rule - where basically, pass back to the keeper and he can't use his hands, only his feet. A generation of goalies had to learn to play with the ball at their feet, and the bit people enjoyed happened more often.
Rugby Union has had a similar evolution, although more intense. Rugby's goal is to have a game that can be played by people of all shapes and sizes, and they mostly succeed. George Gregan was a great player at 5'9", and most second rowers are over 200cm/6'7". But rugby always gets boring, because the coaches start to playing boring rugby (lot of kicks, lots of positional play, less running). So rugby, every few years, overhauls the rules. For a year or two, the game is exciting again, IMHO the best sport in the world, then it is boring all over again as coaches play safe. We then get another overhaul.
I think the Soccer back-pass rule and rugby's ever-changing-rules are models of how changes in rules can dramatically affect the quality of an activity, I don't think they are doable for online sites at scale. Instead, the only solution I can see working is to constantly change to new platforms.
I started in SEO in circa 2001, and there were heaps of forums run on phpBB et al. They had all recently started, so they were figuring themselves out. The forums all interacted, but they all had their own feel and their own rules. Over a few years, they developed "personalities", and everyone could find a place that suited them. This "personality" then morphed into a kind of group think, and the forums grew into echo chambers where the rules where strictly enforced to keep out the others, and each forum became hostile to all the evil others, and they devolved from fun places to hang out to the same old same old.
SM then came along, with sites like FB, Digg and reddit being born, and this process started again. A new place, no real rules yet, and it was the same exciting process of discovery. Over time, the bad parts set in, and these places became stale echo chambers filled with all the bad bits everyone talks about.
That's why I think the only real solution is to tear it all down and start afresh, because this process has repeated several times now. I think that partly explains why SnapChat and the other platforms exist, and why, IMHO, SnapChat et al will grow to a point then fail to grow anymore, as the "freshness" fades, and all the nastiness intrudes. Unless sites can figure out a way to change this process, which after almost 2 decades of this process is either unlikely (pessimistic), or it is too soon to tell (optimistic).
TL;DR when a platform gets entrenched, it starts to exhibit more nasty traits, and a new platform started afresh is the only solution.
That's how NextDoor works and it seems to work reasonably well.
There are some big communities that seen relatively healthy to me. For example, Instagram is easily my favorite social network. I see photos that my friends take and that's about it. I pull it up and am done with it in a minute or two.
It would also help reddit monetize.
4chan also exists and it works and is marvelously non-toxic once you realize that any insults hurled at you are impersonal because they can only attack what you have immediately posted previously. Your attack surface is tiny, assuming basic information hygiene.
Post history On: You get to follow a users comment history. If you read an insightful comment by them, and want to read more, then having a history is nice. Users are people
Post history partially On: e.g. comments could decay to anon after some period. (Cue the sites that collect all post data and match to users) Slightly increases the cost of doing a deep dive on a users history. Users are people, fading to ideas
Post history Off: Lowered attack surface for people who are actively trying to find an argument with you. Less pressure to have a persona consistent with the typical one of any particular community. Users are ideas
For example you can make multiple identities easier. I make use of that here via firefox containers, it is quite nice.
You can make anonymous the default and track the user under the hood, allowing them to claim a post at a later point if they feel confident enough to attach their name to it.
You could limit who can see the user identity. Or only display something more vague than a specific identity, a profile-lite behind a one-time ID.
Personally, I love seeing things that I disagree with on reddit...it's honestly one of the last places left that gives me the feeling of exposure to different bubbles.
Also, to be frank, I think that posts of that nature are exactly the kind of thing that someone can and should disagree with. Suppression of those beliefs by silencing them just means they are moved away from platforms through which their views can be better contextualized for them. The prevailing attitude that some people are just not worth debating says more about the person who holds that belief than it does about those they're accusing of never budging. I have had my mind changed many times, as well as changed the minds of others.
That being said, for posts of that nature that do reach the front page, I stand by what I said. If it is the policy of reddit to be entirely noninterventionist and simply allow the communities to self moderate, that is completely reasonable, and I don't think any of those views should be interpreted as being encouraged by reddit.
The obvious question given an open platform should be why exactly would a community like that be able to exist successfully within a system that votes content up or down?
When Reddit banned r/fatpeoplehate and r/coontown in 2015, among others, it actually succeeded in reducing the amount of hate speech on Reddit:
Working from over 100M Reddit posts and comments, we generate hate speech lexicons to examine variations in hate speech usage via causal inference methods. We find that the ban worked for Reddit. More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreased their hate speech usage—by at least 80%. Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown “migrants,” those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage [0]
By making it easy for participants of r/coontown to participate, Reddit actually contributed to the output of r/coontown.
[0] http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
My concern with censorship is always 2 fold:
1.) You have to always assume the person who is in control of censorship is the person who doesn't agree with you. Donald Trump has on multiple occasions indicated that he would like to restrict the press's capability to criticize the president, since he has been in power. Kim Jong Un shares a similar sentiment. Would we like that, because there are many Trump supporters who would see absolutely nothing wrong with that. There was a moral majority in the US for a long time that would have preferred to restrict the capability for others to talk about what they considered to be sinful things, such as homosexuality or communism.
2.) You have to realize how quickly things become conflated. Ben Shapiro, a conservative pundit, went to Berkeley to speak, where student groups attempting to ban him from speaking had strung up a huge sign reading "We say no to your white-supremacist bullshit." It's important to note that Ben Shapiro is an Orthodox Jew who is harassed daily by white supremacists online...and has never said a single thing advocating for racial supremacy. In fact, he is hugely opposed to racial, gendered, or national identity politics of any kind. Students wanted to ban him for hate speech simply because they associated him with what they perceived to be hate speech.
I also wouldn't feel like I was censoring anyone. My not facilitating their conversation is not the same as my preventing them from having it. I would also be mindful that the presence of nazis and pedophiles in my establishment was itself a barrier to other communities taking advantage of my facilities; if members of those other communities started showing up after I banned them, I'd probably consider it a net win for freedom of expression and conversational facilitation.
Also, you're soft-pedaling Ben Shapiro by calling him a "conservative pundit", as if he's in the same inoffensive league as Ross Douthat or David Brooks. He was an editor of Breitbart News, which is now quite openly the voice of the "alt-right"; he departed and got on their enemies list because he was smart enough to realize that Trump was going to damage the cause for a generation--which is why they're going after him, because they were quite happy to have an orthodox jew on staff while he was agreeing with them. He's said a variety of things about Arabs and black people that are flat out racist. He's not quite the bomb-thrower that Milo is, but he still drops nuggets such as "Arabs like to bomb crap and live in sewage". Calling him a white supremacist might be hyperbole, but it's not simply conflating conservative views with nazis. He's a racist asshole who advocates for ethnic cleansing. Maybe white supremacy isn't his conscious goal, but when he facilitates that end, it becomes a bit irrelevant if he's actually written that down on his "A better 2018" list.
Its not the ban that worked - as much as the full identification of those groups, the banning of those subs and the negation of the immediate survival attempts of those subs.
The whole process is what worked, not just a simple ban.
Largely I’ve been desensitized to complaints about TD as typically it results in hyperbole (eg, election was a direct threat to people’s lives).
You're gonna have to provide a context in which this wouldn't be a terrible and unacceptable thing to say, cause I can't think of one.
Here’s a super simple example.
Jerk: “I think we should shoot immigrants” Non-jerk: “that’s a bad idea because immigrants have souls” Former-jerk: “good point. I changed my mind and no longer think shooting immigrants is a good idea. In fact, I will now dedicate my life to helping the needy and everyone who reads this thread should as well.”
It would be bad to ban a thread such as the one above.
If that person were never able to share that opinion, they would never get feedback that it is an unacceptable opinion; and might therefore act on it.
That, and I find it impossible to believe that someone who is able to post that online would know that it is an unacceptable position.
If it's the latter case, I can't get behind it. Free speech means everyone should have a platform to speak. As society transitions away from using our mouths to using our keyboards, the first amendment implies that speech should be protected on the common medium - whether verbal or text.
As for "toxic", the article is referring to things like /r/CoonTown, or brigades like the one that went after Leslie Jones on Twitter a number of years ago. The people behind those already have a platform to speak: The Internet. They're not entitled to space on another platform like Reddit or Twitter, and they're not entitled to force their speech in front of someone else's face.
I casually followed the Leslie Jones incident and don’t see the problem. The brigading seemed easily avoided by Jones and was actually amplified by media covering how bad it was.
My twitter feed doesn’t show mentions by randos, so Jones should have been able to easily filter out at the client. She may have for all I know.
So both your examples seem easily solved by client filters to not force speech in faces.
It is until it starts to leak.
"I casually followed the Leslie Jones incident and don’t see the problem."
I honestly cannot see how one can see the incident, and cannot see a problem with thousands of posters telling an African American woman that she's an ape.
"The brigading seemed easily avoided by Jones"
That is blaming the victim.
"So both your examples seem easily solved by client filters to not force speech in faces."
Except they're not.
It doesn't really leak, not until the honeypot gets shut down and the denizens are forced to hangout elsewhere.
Let me clarify. Obviously, thousands of people calling someone an ape is a problem. But one that is easily avoided by disabling twitter replies to your account. So it’s not a problem for anyone that it happens to.
So when I say “I don’t think this is a problem” I mean that it’s not a problem that can’t currently be solved and not worthy of trying to stop the thousand assholes.
It’s not blaming the victim to point out that if you change a setting you save them from pain. It’s not Leslie Jones fault at all that people are jerks. But maybe she didn’t know how to configure twitter. If so, wouldn’t it be a shame that if no one wanted to help her learn for fear of victim blaming?
I equate this as worrying if people are sitting in their living room gossiping about you and saying mean things. Somehow you have the magic ability to listen in. You do and are upset. Certainly you can try to make those people stop being jerks. Or you can stop listening. Or maybe do both.
The problems seem solvable if your goal is to not encounter jerks harassing you online. Since you can filter them out. If your goal is to not have jerks, then definitely not solvable. But that’s a stupid problem to solve through authority. The way you solve jerks is through love and education.
1. The reputation system is affected by voting on all sites in which you participate.
2. The history of your participation across sites is viewable in your history (ala reddit, HN)
3. Your reputation is displayed with you participation wherever you participate.
Sites could then put reputation limits only allowing users above a certain reputation to participate. Making the cost of toxicity increase.
The biggest problem would be getting the walled gardens to adopt the system.
If you allow multi-dimensional karma then you have the problem that aggregation mechanisms are going to be site-specific (in karma systems, 1 + 1 is not necessarily equal to 2 even before considering multidimensionality) and you end up drawn back to the individual sites hosting the concept anyhow.
Black mirror is same vein, but different concept:
Getting loans, buying cars, via a single reputation score is different than giving people a tool to curate the content they wish to consume.
By having access to a "user's reputational history" across multiple sites, you can see where their reputation is coming from. Then you as a consumer of internet media, can choose what site reputation to put value on. Letting you curate and avoid toxicity, or live in your echo chamber if thats what you want.
Its like asking a couple friends if they'd loan their weed wacker to the new guy down the street, they say he acts kind of shady but has always brought back their garden tools. Same thing. You ask users of a couple sites how this other user has acted. They say he made some jokes, but also had some valid points here and there.
We don't then say, oh they made crude jokes, charge them an extra $1000 for rent.
And how will you solve brigading? All it takes is two large groups disagreeing on something, and your reputation goes down the drain if you're in the slightly smaller group.
An accounts "history" and "reputation" will be tied to each site. A liberal who posts regularly on echo chambers on both sides of the aisle will have a middle of the road reputation. On Fox news for example you'd see next to their comments:
FoxNews.com Rep: -123 Global Rep: 38
A high global rep is due to the high score posting comments on WashingtonPost articles. Where you would see:
WashPost.com Rep: 161 Global Rep: 38
I'd expect someone with a reputation of 0 to be an honest individual gaining views on both sides of an argument. Someone with a global rep of -1833 is probably a troll or someone who doesn't interact with "like-minded" people, which could of course be seen by looking at the history of where the reputation came from.
You as a consumer, would most likely flag site reps to show on all pages, so maybe you on every site you visit would see a users reputation like so regardless of the site you are on:
Current Site Rep: 3 FoxNews.com Rep: 283 WashPost.com Rep: -87 Global Rep: 221
And you could, of course, dig into their history of reputation, and even Hide/star particular users who you notice are trolls/note-worthy to you personally.
- You've just created opportunities for sites who don't participate to attract customers. "No reputation requirements, we don't judge you". Great for curated niches, bad for mass market.
- People with diverging but still main stream political views getting their reputation docked by those in the other camp who control the site. It can flow both ways. Reputation starts to get linked to the echo chamber, in that those who don't echo the same get docked.
- Someone hacks you and starts messing up your rep across multiple sites.
So for point 1: I'd say let "no reputation" sites attract customers. If people want to participate in completely anonymous groups they are responsible for the groups they choose and the opinions in them. Good on them.
But for the rest of the people who lack the awareness, knowledge, or motivation to seek out these communities, we have a responsibility to find a way to make non-anonymous communication less toxic.
For point 2: Knowing the reputation of a user for the site you are visiting as well as their global reputation helps the reader make a more informed decision about the worth of this person's comments to them than without. Lets use politics. Assume a user with liberal tendencies argues intelligently with conservatives in Fox News comments where his comments are downvoted because they are diverging. They also comment thoughtfully on r/SandersForPresident where his views are appreciated and upvoted. When I see this persons comments on Fox, I will see his fox new's score is -128 and his overall score is 3. A troll on the other hand may have a -348 on Fox news and -828 overall. From this I can conclude conservatives don't like the first user, but some other people do like the first user. I can also conclude the second user is a troll, or doesn't ever participate in groups that share somewhat similar viewpoint. All of which you can see in their history, where their scores for various sites are listed, perhaps you could even bookmark scores for specific sites you want to see. Of course, this is binary, and can be improved with dimensionality, but is still better than nothing at all.
For point 3: Hell, what is someone hacks your bank account? I think a bigger concern would be someone automating downvoting of your account or upvoting of their own. Which would require more thought.
Even then it probably won't stop people being awful (there's plenty of awful stuff posted by identifiable people). But if people can be pseudonymous, it won't work at all.
So there’s really no way to solve this. There is a way to contain it somewhat: create homogeneous bubbles. Which is what we’ve been observing over the past few years.
Why are people so willing to embrace Orwellian doublethink? My prediction is that such a sword will do decapitate undeserving people of all political aisles.
I tried to find a quote from Dershowitz’s book on defending Nazis but gave up due to paywall.
Toxic is not an objective measure for speech. But like in real life, toxicity depends on the dose. Life doesn’t eliminate toxins, it reduces them to manageable levels (or dies).
There’s also the practical effect that banning is irreversible. Toxicity is not terminal, but banning doesn’t allow for redemption.
i don't suggest we cater to them, just that we realize their way of thinking and reacting.
It doesn't mean I denigrate my black friends. The ones I know are "salt of the Earth". As in I'd die for them. It doesn't mean I won't hire a black applicant. It might seem impossible but one can adopt general rules and still hold exceptions for corner cases.
Or even (gasp) withhold judgement of individuals until you get a better idea what type of person they are.
Wrong. Saying so is dangerously minimizing the problem.
Tweet something that someone decides is offensive to them, get a visit from the police? I’d say it’s a very rational concern that these regulations would be weaponized against “wrongthink”.
"Arrests for 'offensive' Twitter and Facebook messages up by a third" [2]
"British Police Arrest At Least 3,395 People for ‘Offensive’ Online Comments in One Year" [3]
"Police arresting nine people a day in fight against web trolls" [4]
"More than 3,300 people were detained and questioned last year over so-called trolling on social media and other online forums, a rise of nearly 50 per cent in two years, according to figures obtained by The Times.
About half of the investigations were dropped before prosecutions were brought, however, leading to criticism from civil liberties campaigners that the authorities are over-policing the internet and threatening free speech...."
[1] - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for-offensive-f...
[2] - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/02/social_media_arrests...
[3] - http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/10/14/british-police-ar...
[4] - https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine-peo...
[1] - https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/killallwhitemen-twitter-trolli...
And you lack imagination and historical hindsight if you think the concept of "toxicity" can only be wielded by whatever you consider to be the forces of light. So to speak.
Yes. Pretending that the problem of toxicity is just people who can't handle differing opinions is to be willfully ignorant of the problem. As such, a reasonable conversation can not be had.
"And you lack imagination and historical hindsight if you think the concept of "toxicity" can only be wielded by whatever you consider to be the forces of light. So to speak."
Nowhere did I say that in the least.
Do you think the poor bastards in Skid Row feel better because some (literal) white typed in defense against toxicity?
Do you think someone...Let's say Tim Wise! Do you think Mr.Wise has actually interacted with black communities while he lives in a 98% white neighborhood? Do you think Mr.Wise would help some homeless junkie who's trying to figure out how to work his phone so he can message an estranged daughter on Facebook? That's part of what I did in Skid Row. There are issues of knowledge, skills, and plain diet that would offer much better benefits than speaking out against some notion of "toxicity", created by people who have no skin in bleating their stupid moralism.
I'm fine with the down votes, but it should be pretty obvious that it would have been Marco Rubio, or some other sanitary GOP member who got elected if it wasn't for the Russian troll brigade on the internet whipping up a frenzy for Trump.
That's my only point
You raise a wonderful point. Personally, I don't think a "Russian troll brigade" was singularly more effective than all the other attempts to affect the election, but if there was an influence, it certainly may have been greater in the GOP primary than in the general election.
But despite having read an awful lot of election analysis, I don't think I've ever heard anyone else make this point. I've only ever seen the issue framed as Trump vs Clinton, with almost all the proponents of the "Russian hacking" narrative being on the pro-Clinton side.
Besides yourself, does there exist a group of pro-Rubio (or perhaps more interestingly pro-Cruz) supporters who believe that Russia successfully influenced the election in support of Trump? Is there somewhere online I could read more about this worldview?
That being said, my family is loaded with died-in-the-wool republicans, and I remember them all blown away by the fact that trump was winning the primary. None of them could believe it, and they all hated him during the primary!
After trump won, and it was him vs clinton, then the narrative switched. They loved trump at that point.
It was very chilling. It became clear to me that these folks were heavily influenced by some sort of propaganda because their minds changed like the wind!
Not to mention how incredibly ignorant you have to be to not notice how out-of-stock (out of touch but maybe they lack a stock of common sense) coastal liberals are to the real problems and realities of the "silent majority". Blaming Russia is like blaming a soldier for giving a enemy a bayonet stab. Of course after this enemy has suffered grievous wounds from his own side.
If you made certain sets of filters the default, or available in groups, and did filtering based on your best beliefs about the desires of readers (based on keywords, senders, and maybe other characteristics of the conversation), it would go a long way.
What if there were a new type of "teacher" who replaced or augmented regular mods on sites like Reddit?
Universities strive to hire professors who will teach students to be open-minded, consider the sources of information, and just think better in general. The prestige of each university is largely based on this factor. We tend to measure this by looking at the research accomplishments of the professors, or by looking at how many great thinkers/leaders come out of those universities.
What if sites like Reddit did the same thing, and tried to build their prestige based on excellent moderation? Could they be measured by how many great ideas/movements come out of the platform?
How do universities prevent the "echo chamber" effect where a few mods or a few users can take the whole conversation in one direction?
They turbocharge group think. Probably not the best example of an open minded community.
A distant cousin of my wife went to a Seminary; within a relatively narrow range of beliefs, he claimed there was a lot more intellectual freedom than universities along the lines of teaching how to talk to devil's advocates and heresies and converting non-believers. More of a carrot and stick than university which is solely stick-style, who can most emphatically say "I can't even" and so on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
You assume too much about half of the human population.