Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?
Hey HN, I've noticed a huge uptick in the toxicity online in the last 5-7 years. Before, around 2010-2012, people who disagreed would usually leave it at that and walk away respectfully. Now, it seems like everyone treats everything as an argument or debate to be won at all costs. Even niche sites like HN are not immune.
So how do we fix this? I've heard some talk that upvote systems and algorithms might be at fault. Do we ditch them and go back to a literal timeline? Or is this more of a social problem that code can't solve? Let's hear some input on this, because I can't shake the feeling that tech isn't totally innocent in this mayhem.
858 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 446 ms ] threadWith growing awareness + press coverage, those platforms who deliberately implemented bad algorithms to harvest maximum attention (FB, YT, TW) increasingly find it damages their brand image. There is an incentive to (at least marginally) improve their features / biz models.
Then there is digital literacy. We used to have netiquete and that can be taught. If you read the (very entertaining) article The Internet of Beefs [0] you'll see there is a solution by not getting involved in a beef, or extracting yourself if you got baited. Similarly it helps to know how to avoid trolls [1].
It will not be easy to change cultures large-scale. Many people just like to beef (there is a similarity with road rage too; people forget themselves online). Others enjoy starting beef wars for the lolz, or - more sinister - with strategic objectives.
At least we should be able to create more safe harbours, where people thrive from uplifting experiences online. Changing culture bit by bit.
[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/
[1] https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...
Maybe not directly, but every YC company advertises themselves and their projects here, and HN is known as the hub for the SV tech and startup scene, which gives YC an automatic amount of "street cred" and visibility in all of the discussions had here. I'm sure Hacker News has made YCombinator more than a few dimes indirectly from all of that.
The point is, HN has different incentives from FB. That matters in the culture of the resulting community.
Thats all we can do. But the most important step.
Eh, people were being jerks to each other on usenets and bbs's way before this.
Godwin's law is 30 years old at this point.
0. Behavior online doesn't arrive out of a vacuum. If people are miserable because they're working harder, making less and their society is in retreat, they're probably going to take out their frustrations out on the easiest targets.
1. Unplug from social and mainstream media because it doesn't have much value.
2. Stop demonizing, hating on groups of people and falling for the unthinking of mob tribalism, even rhetorically. Hate bad ideas, not people.
3. Realize that we're divided-and-conquered if we're going to let a few rich people and their corporate media keep us set against to each other. Solidarity is the only way.
4. Anonymity is good in small doses, but it's too easy for people to act unreasonably hiding behind it (cyberdisinhibitionism). DHH's company wrote a blog article about improving the quality of discussions with profile pictures and real names.
5. Stop and use every instance of it as a teachable moment, where feasible. It only works though if people have shame and can be brought around to the Golden Rule/empathy... it seems to me most parents these days aren't as involved in active parenting, so their kids run ferrel and so more people grow up to act more brutally and sociopathic. Furthermore, the current prevalence of parasitic vulture capitalism valuing myopic greed and selfishness above all else reinforces a disinterest in the concerns and well-being of others... which is antithetical to community and civilization.
6. There's nothing yet so far to replace the community function filled by religion, and so many people aren't interested in behaving themselves or doing right by their neighbors or strangers if they can get away with it.
7. More people have lost most of their hope about the future. For example, no healthy society has mass shootings/suicides nearly every day that no longer make the news.
> improving the quality of discussions with profile pictures and real names
As a counter-point, imagine a discussion forum in an authoritarian country where your picture and real name is placed next to everything you say online. The discussions may end up being very polite, and full of agreement, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the community is well served by that forum.
To some, that concern may seem irrelevant, since most governments wouldn't attempt to control people that way, but I don't think we have to look very far to find examples where people expressing unpopular opinions face social and professional punishments. Perhaps you would agree that anonymity can be helpful in such situations, (checks notes) "anonsivalley652".
There was a theory in 2004, known as GIFT: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad
Guess what? People without anonymity are total fuckwads too - this happens on Facebook, Instagram and Twitch, in an era where you could probably find someone's personal details if you look hard enough.
I think the key is audience. Bullying feels good for a lot of people. Bullies will go for low hanging fruit where they won't be struck back.
You see people acting this way even in once helpful sites like Stack Overflow; downvotes will pull bullies in like a magnet. You see people picking on anti-vax, flat earthers, Justin Bieber, not so much because they do harm, but because they're easy targets to hold down.
Viral algorithms amplify this effect. It highlights bad news that everyone can join in and rage on. It's not a new thing; news channels have done this for decades.
We can't really fix it. I'm more a community nomad these days. It's easy to move on to other new and old communities, away from this effect. I've been happy with HN, Discord, and IRC lately.. IRC has picked up back to 500 people per channel, and it's probably no coincidence.
Your other examples were solid, but anti-vax absolutely does cause harm, and it seems inappropriate to dismiss the possibility that in the case of anti-vax people are motivated by genuine fear for our collective safety and that of our children.
Of course, by "activists", there's a difference between the genuine voices, versus the Reddit or HN meme-slingers. The latter group seems louder due to style. While they happen to be on the right side (from my POV), they're still quite awful as people.
People who are genuine in that NEVER bash. For the simple reason that bashing doesn't work. What they do do is respectfully argue with any false data.
But you'll never see someone like that insult people or call them stupid, ignorant, or doubt the love of an anti-vaxxer for their own children.
This doesn't mean anti-vaxxers should be tolerated as a viable alternative lifestyle, but throwing curses at them online and spamming memes that make them out to be mentally challenged really doesn't do anything but satisfy a bully.
On HN this is greatly reduced by the point system and the opacity of bad posts. A bad post fades away so it doesn't look as important as other posts.
In real life you can get a punch in the face if you say nasty things to someone.
But on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube most trolls wont ever learn because they just can say whatever they want.
It is worth remembering that the visible part of an internet community is a small part of the total possible community. Following the classic 90-9-1 rule there are a lot more people who could participate than people who do participate. This means that the visible face of an online community has a lot of room to change.
The problem is, this functionality is popularity based. Yes, posts that get downvoted are usually bad posts. However, some are simply disliked by the majority of people who wanted to vote on them and are not actually "bad" by the standards of this discussion. Similarly, I have seen toxic posts (that I have downvoted and flagged) upvoted (at least once) when the target of the toxicity was "acceptable".
In truth consequences can be an incentive for bad actors. To them saying offensive things and getting a burner account banned is boring compared to tricking people into getting banned.
I really dislike that. But, I have put in CSS so that bad posts don't fade away, and enabled show dead so that all messages can be seen. But at least we have the choice!
One of the things that surprised me was how people who are horrible online are even worse offline.
I think there are plenty of online consequences. Post a controversial post and someone will verbally slap, share, shame you. Shaming might be far worse than a physical punch to some people.
I think a lot of people who become trolls don't become trolls for the sake of of trolling. They do it because they're trying to enforce consequences upon someone.
Hell, go read any "opinion" article from any newspaper since the dawn of the printing press. They were well-written fuckwads, but they were pretty much all fuckwads.
I've found it easy to ignore content I don't like, but it is getting harder to find open discussion forums.
I feel like what you describe here ... is the noise.
There seems to be some folks who talk about really valuing novel ideas and how they can't show up on moderated discussions but I just see a lot of noise that might not be "overton window" but are mostly pithy garbage.
I find that anything mildly thought out usually fits inside even the heaviest of moderated type discussions.
Depends on the moderation. Here, if it's well thought out (and expressed in a non-antagonistic way), it usually fits. Not every moderated place will that be true, though. And even here, certain topics may not run afoul of the moderators, but users may still downvote them to oblivion. (For example: There is some suggestion that autism may be caused, in at least some cases, by gut bacteria. But if I were to link that idea to the suggestion that the measles vaccine might, in some cases, cause gut issues, I would expect to be destroyed by downvotes, no matter how good of an argument - or even evidence - I had.)
I think we're looking back at history with rose-tinted glasses here. Toxicity has always been around. Maybe in recent years it has grown, but I think that's just the nature of the technological beast.
It doesn't mean that on a broad scale technology always actively contributes to making things more toxic- but just that it amplifies and contributes to all sorts of things, and that includes the negative. We're more connected than we've ever been, and the unfortunate side-effect is that the degrees of separation between us and those that are toxic have been significantly reduced. Anonymity is maybe a small part, but there are plenty of openly toxic people, both online and off.
Toxic people are just toxic people and I think it's a social issue that is just always going to exist at some level. Maybe there are ways to use technology to assist in fighting against it and maybe not. I think it's just a potentially-unsolvable complex problem that will always arise in society.
I don't know the most effective ways to fight it. However, I'm trying my best not to contribute to it, and maybe personally fighting it within myself will have an outward effect on others. While I wouldn't say I'm mean/toxic/etc online, I do try to stay self-aware of my actions/reactions/emotions and what I post online (and have failed to do this sometimes) because it's very easy to get caught up in negative news/misery and then it's easy to branch off from there into an unhelpful level of anger/negativity.
I try to do my best not to assume the worst of others, to realize there are beings with entire lives unknown to me behind every screen name (if it's not a bot) and to realize it's sometimes difficult to properly infer the tone of what someone is saying online. It's still an internal work-in-progress, but I think I'm far more mindful of my behavior now than in years past.
Look into the lives of politicians in the 1950's and 1960's. They frequently socialized together and worked together. They were able to find common ground. Every victory for one party wasn't necessarily a loss for the other. How often do you think Mitch McConnell goes out for a drink with Bernie Sanders?
Tribalism, especially in relation to things like sports, is super-old. But it's spread to all parts of our lives. Often it's semi-friendly (are you a vi or emacs person?), but it can get out of control.
So how do you fix it? That's tough, especially when every news story seems to have two equal but opposite sides.
That's the problem with transparency and constant scrutiny. In the 50s and 60s you could hide affairs like Kennedy did. Or you could have a drink with people from the other party, discuss things openly and find a deal without anybody knowing. If McConnell met with Sanders today there would be a huge uproar. There is something to be said for the ability to make backroom deals.
But here are some of my observations:
- Everyone's online. Everyone. That includes people a) who had a less than stellar upbringing (whatever that means to which one of us); b) with mental illness (some of them untreated and/or self-diagnosed); c) from other cultural background (which don't necessarily align with western point-of-views); d) who are underaged; e) who are (very) bored (and some find entertainment in provoking chaos); f) who lack proper education; g) who simply do not care about educating themselves and others; and h) who are naturally antagonistic for whatever reason.
- Bots. There are also a good number of botnets out there (the "like" economy comes to mind) or subverted systems (smartphones, routers, PCs, etc) which act without the owner's knowledge;
I'm convinced there's also botnets out there that purposefully amplify certain controversies online (websites' comment sections come to mind). Now, understand, this doesn't apply to every controversy. But I've seen some weird stuff on YouTube, for example. And, quite frankly, it's not that hard to extrapolate that since there are "like" bots there are equally "hate" bots as well. The end game is, in most cases, visibility. In others, it's probably social engineering for whatever reason. Mostly political.
Unfortunately, media outlets have fallen into this scheme as well. I mean, it's not like the concept of clickbait is new. Attractive headlines are as old as newspapers/journalism.
- Highly progressive opinions will always clash with the status quo;
- There's a fundamental and unavoidable loss (or lack) of signal whenever people communicate in short sentences, or when they do not have enough time to fully understand what's being said, or when they communicate with people who they don't know;
If I have a friend who's a prankster/jester I might be used to their shenanigans and tolerate them--a stranger might not find them funny. Maybe the stranger will find it funny after they know my friend, but that would depend on a lot of other variables as well.
- There's also the problem of the person who transmits information not expressing themselves properly (for whatever reason) which will unavoidably lead to miscommunication;
- Social networks are fundamentally designed for engagement--now that everyone is online there will be a clash of ideas. Tribes will organically form (just like offline). And - with few exceptions - what was meant as a benign message ends up in a declaration of war from the other tribe.
So, in sum, I just scratched the surface of the problem. It's very hard to make sense of all the noise and coming up with a proper solution to this problem.
Is it an education problem? Is democracy the root cause? Would a totalitarian (regardless it being Right-Wing or Left-Wing) system work? Is it something fundamentally ingrained into our human condition that makes it impossible to solve this problem? (Look at bees, for instance, they're ruthless and yet highly efficient at what they do.) Is it a fundamental purpose (or lack thereof) that each and everyone of us has defined - through whatever heuristic and for whatever reason - that's to blame for all this chaos? Is it its visibility?
Yeah. It's a hard problem to solve. Maybe lots of compromise would help.
I honestly don't know.
The quote
comes to mind.An algorithmic solution would be to rigorously hide everything that looks like mere unproductive outrage from public discourse. However, not only would that amount the severe censorship but it'd probably also not be exactly easy to implement.
Besides, platforms such as Twitter or good old-fashioned news thrive on outrage. If you take that from them there's probably not much left, which is why it's not in these platforms' interest to do something against the issue.
So, it's back to square one: Yourself. Keep your identity small and try not to perpetuate outrage on the Internet.
Smaller internet forums, subreddits, Discord/Slack groups, etc tend to be a lot more civil than the likes of Twitter or YouTube are.
So a revival of those types of sites and communities will help a lot.
As will returning to the days of multi pseudonyms for different websites. Because people are not one sided. They don't always act the same way in every setting.
No, their behaviour depends on the company they're with. They might act one way with family, another way with friends, another way at work, etc.
That's how society stays together to some degree. People don't know how others act in other settings, and they don't care. Your coworkers likely have a whole mix of political opinions, but since it likely doesn't come up during work, it doesn't really matter.
Social networks seem to be trying to demolish this sense of separation between sides of people's personalities, and that's making society more and more fragile, as one wrong move means someone's entire life gets destroyed by the internet mob.
Oh, and decent moderation too. Unfortunately for Facebook and co, you can't automate moderation and expect it to work well, and you can't outsource it to a bunch of full time employees in a distant office somewhere. It has to be done by people with a real investment in the community, which is again where a well run small community shines.
I never stopped doing this. The problem is, a lot of younger people were never taught to or never learned they should do this and a lot of older people same thing sort of.
I was kind of lucky I suppose, years ago I had a friend say something on a work Facebook page that caused some trouble, I realized Facebook wasn't a place I could have people like that, so since I've kept Facebook or any other social media website with personal information and concersations on it strictly professional or Christmas dinner at grandma's house level. Which pretty much means, no politics, no getting involved in other people's arguments, no posting things I wouldn't want an employer or my grandma seeing, no friends that post ridiculous things on my feed etc.
Then i've got my forum and other online site accounts that lack, for the most part, studd that could easily identify me, though I'm sure someone with lots of time and dedication(dunno why though), could figure it out, that use a different email than my 'real' email, where I can talk about things without worrying that I might randomly piss off someone I know.
If I want to have potentially divisive conversations with people I know in person, I'd rather do it in person or at least not on what might as well be the community billboard.
Even federated approaches like mastodon also have big issues with toxicity.
I agree with you that size is one of the main contributing factors to the problem, I just don't think smaller sites is a practical solution for the public at large. That being said, if you don't care about "fixing" the public problem, then you're right on the money. If you personally don't want to experience toxicity, get off the big sites, it's that easy. I just don't see that being a fix for the average teenager/college student/boomer
I do agree with the parent comment, that we may well see a resurgence of small and medium-sized online communities, for the simple reason that more fragmentation could be a good thing. When a community has its eternal september, people can move elsewhere.
No seriously, just stop. This isn't a "complex problem that needs nuanced technical and legislative solutions".
Back in the old day, there was this saying. "Do not feed the trolls". Sadly, we've forgotten that.
Our current approach is, "create rigorous 30 minute point by point take down videos to defeat their point of view". Our urge to debate and correct people who are wrong just fuels them making more content. A troll needs reactions to survive. Just downvote and move along.
We now have people who 100% believe objectively wrong things and have an obsession to spread their belief as fact.
Edit: If there is a solution to this issue, it will depend on the ratio of these people who are willing to change their mind. A real solution might involve a procedure to move people from the more stubborn camp to a more open minded camp.
When someone tells me that xyz plant oil cures cancer or the earth is flat... I ignore them. If I want to be a troll I may play along or challenge them if its fun.
That's the internet. There have always been nutters- they just found other nutters to talk with and you get a loud feedback loop. You can happily mute them still.
What was once contained on the internet is leaking out onto the streets and is already affecting you and I in many ways.
During the Golden Age of broadcast TV and Radio (pre-internet), the big networks broadcasted plenty of unchallenged lies. The difference now is that laymen can fact check the content put out by the big players. But the price for this is that every troll or nutter has access to the some of the same tools to spread their own lunacy.
I far prefer the current situation over the previous. While it may have felt more comfortable when people believed that news readers were telling the truth or reporting truth, it never was that way.
It gives them the ability to hide between other people and manipulate the conversation.
What happens when you see that same person talking to a cancer patient trying to sell them plant oil?
The truth can't advocate for itself.
Added as we know it because it's actually quite easy to persuade people that what they like about the world is under dire threat, as opposed to the objective existence of the planet or life thereon. People's individual worlds tend to be quite small and it's easy and socially/politically profitable to market to them with threats rather than inducements to expansion with all the unpredictability that entails.
Now, imagine that you've been identified to or by an angry group as the cause of their dissatisfaction. This is a very different dynamic from 'someone on a street corner' that you can usually safely ignore, and against whom you probably feel you could defend yourself if necessary. I don't think you'd be so dismissive of nutters in groups if you were negatively impacted.
That's not remotely a new thing. Ever since bits could be sent over the wire we've had Dale Gribbles trying to spread their weirdass conspiracies using the web. Only difference is that back then it existed in the form of homemade webpages with remarkably bad color theory rather than the poorly punctuated social media posts of today.
There's usually enough truth behind every lie - enough to make it compelling enough to believe in. I'm sorry but I don't think it's as obvious as you're making it out to be. We all probably believe something that's objectively wrong. The truth is really in the middle, but all I see is people going further towards fringe opinions.
trolls: people who say absurd or mean things for lulz fools: people who truly believe absurd or mean things because they are naive or gullible scammers: people who say absurd or mean things for profit, and may present as fools or absurdist trolls when challenged
There was even a "emoji" of beating a troll back in the days o ubb and vbb
People then believe those lies, they repeat them, and even if they don't those lies sink into their subconcious and change their behavior, not necessarily today or tomorrow, but for the next 30 years
Ignoring them doesn't fix the problem.
Not necessarily. In the US one of our presidents taught us a long time ago that "both may be" wrong, and "one must be" wrong.
- both sides are wrong
- the participants are unwittingly talking past each each other
Etc.
"If you accept X then we need to do Y."
"I don't think we should do Y"
"Then you reject facts."
Something everyone seems to have forgotten is that intelligent, well-informed, people of good will can look at the same facts and come up with different policy prescriptions.
(Edit) This doesn't mean I don't believe in truth, right/wrong etc... it means that I'm constantly balancing what's most likely to be trueish - subject to higher quality information at a later time.
A policy choice is the linkage of a fact to a particular goal; while few policy choices are so simple as to admit of a binary choice, you can certainly rank them on a gradient.
Of course, it helps if your goal is clearly definable and you maintain awareness of consistency. Otherwise, a goal of, say, improving life expectancy might be satisfied by a eugenics policy which made unpersons of those with medical conditions that would lower life expectancy.
To go even further, people may agree on the 'what' of a goal, but disagree on the 'why' of a goal, which very much inform what policy choices they are amenable.
Some have called this increased polarization.
I see it as a slide towards violent authoritarianism.
I wish this were true. I used to post snopes links and primary sources to Baby Boomer posts on Facebook, but it's hopeless. They either don't trust the fact-check, can rationalize it away, or just don't care. One of the most shocking realizations of my adult life has been learning that a very large portion of my otherwise high-functioning friends will believe anything, no matter how crazy or self-contradictory, if it reinforces their sense of self-righteousness.
We do have the ability to determine truth from fiction, it just takes more work than cynically throwing up your hands and smugly concluding all sides are lying.
The desire to compel others to conform to one’s ideal of correctness is the fundamental impulse of authoritarianism.
...but also libertarianism, for a particular aspect of correctness.
My understanding is that the core value / principle of libertarianism is individual liberty.
How do you derive compelling others from that?
Yes, and libertarians tend to hold that it is right and proper (and even often define “violence” to exclude this use of force) to use any degree of force necessary to get others to observe the individual liberties libertarians see as essential.
Maybe, but it's also the impulse of people who rightly care about the future of our shared world.
Literally no authoritarian says "i want to suppress people because I'm evil mwahaha." Every single authoritarian says "i need to suppress this evil disinformation because i care about the future of our shared world---unlike you unworthy people who presumably don't care."
That's not rationalism, that's just saying "I'm right, they are wrong, end of discussion".
Good luck with judging who's right and who's wrong.
Yes, in a world with literally billions of people, you have a few millions who believe outlandish things. If that was the extent of the problem with polarization/toxicity on the internet (or public debate in general), I doubt we'd talk about it, and I'd be very happy with the state of the world.
Those people have no large base, no stable membership, no money, no power. Focusing on them is like decrying the fall of science because 6yo Timmy still believes in Santa Clause.
* the Flat Earth Society has a very stable membership and patreon. Mark Sagent's youtube channel alone has 58k subscribers. Social media influence is the source of money, and a power all on its own. * Gweneth Paltrow's pseudoscience has a facebook group with 500k members. She has a netflix series and a reliable income from her online storefront. The facebook group came first, then the netflix series. * QAnon is a persistent conspiracy theory with no basis in fact. Regardless, tripcodes (a public hash of the password used for identity verification on 4chan) denote a persistent online identity, so he's got a following... and the following is what causes power.
Power in its purest form is asking someone for something and getting it. This looks different in the modern age than it did previously, but saying that celebrities don't have power belies the entire concept. These are celebrities, either advocating obviously false things, or due to their advocation of obviously false things, and millions of people are taken in.
In contrast, the expected Iowa caucus turnout numbers are going to be around 60,000. Or, in other words: There are more people believing in flat earth than there are democrats caucasing in Iowa. How in the world is this not a problem.
I mean, isn't the answer already in these sentences? The world vs Iowa.
It's not that I don't believe pseudoscience and cults are a problem, it's just that they are a small problem on the grand scheme of things. Increasing polarization of society at large is a problem on a different scale. It's something that has very tangible effects for most people, some guy believing that the earth is flat and having 60k people watch his videos really doesn't.
So sure, paying attention to the edge cases is fine, but focus most of your attention on the big issues.
There's a tendency to wishfully think that people are rational and should be expected to sort out their own information environment with no governmental influence whatsoever, but I don't buy it at all. We're predictably manipulable, emotional creatures, and we can decide rationally to improve our information environment without falling into your implicit slippery slope.
Yes. I never said authoritarianism is bad. In fact, I probably consider myself an authoritarian.
It has begun to happen, with phenomena such as people being fired for Facebook or Twitter posts. It doesn't seem impossible to tie a sufficiently-advanced pattern-recognition network to the firehoses of data on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, et. al to automatically tie together the scraps of personal info people accidentally leave behind and severely compromise online anonymity.
Be interesting if it happens.
On the social side I can't even imagine how destructive it could be. People (especially on HN) love to lament how restrictive and oppressing the "everyone knows everyone" small town life can be. So now that we have the anonymity online we can escape to, we've all turned around and started building the biggest "small town" imaginable! One with no escape.
This is naive. Facebook has just as many extremist bigots as any other anonymous platform.
Apologies, I didn't mean to insinuate that you were. My point was that this is the usual (and often intended) consequence of your argument, as I understood it and have seen it in the world.
Calling someone a liar doesn't help by itself, but if we can bring clear and irrefutable evidence to a discussion, I think we can reasonably reject outright incorrect views.
It also takes more work than "But I'm right!"
If you've done the research, if you know that you're correct, it's one thing. (Even then, not everyone who is incorrect is lying.) But it's a real temptation to say "I'm right, they're wrong, they're lying" when you haven't actually done the work to be sure you're right.
I am prone to that temptation. You almost certainly are, too. So be careful. You can be the one in the wrong.
And I really do mean a complete lie. This wasn't a dispute over creative redefinitions of terms like Boris' NHS funding claims, or some nitpick about a minor detail. Corbyn and a worryingly large chunk of the press took an example of US food safety regulations being unambiguously stricter than EU ones - of them placing all the same restrictions on food manufacturers that the EU does, plus more - and falsely claimed their regulations were weaker instead, using graphic, emotive, memorable language, and everyone believed and repeated this total inversion of the truth.
The thing that gets me is that on some level, people must've known that US food isn't really unsafe. There's not some big movement of people who refuse to eat US food - by and large, everyone trusts food there as much as they would food here. The other thing is that despite this pretty much the entire press dropped the ball on this lie. (It is not even close to the only prominent anti-Brexit or anti-Tory lie they left unchallenged or outright made themselves.) Even Full Fact did initially - they actually helped spread the false claim themselves, and only came back to it a month or so later after it had spread across the internet multiple times and been used by Corbyn repeatedly in his campaigning.
This is both a cause and a consequence of the defunding of journalism and the change of the profession from news to views.
Private funding is making the situation worse.
Public funding is the instrument of authoritarian regimes- state sponsored media.
I think the root cause is lack of objective, critical thinking skills, and the glorification of "how it makes you feel" being more important than "is this reasonable".
I.e. emotion driving reason, rather than reason driving emotion.
See also: Donald Hoffman's experiments in truth-maximizing vs. fitness-maximizing: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25450
Journalism is dying because it's become not only useless as a means of information dissemination --- new media is better at that --- but also because journalists have become contemptuous of the public. They have only themselves to blame.
The problem comes when you have 5 civil engineers saying a bridge is not safe, and 50 random members of the public saying it's safe. If we treat those opinions as equal, we end up with a bridge collapsing.
The hell, average maanger lies.
The only improvement I see is decentralization, which is a very slow, but powerful process. The Gutemberg printing press showed that it is possible, and Bitcoin is doing the same thing right now, but I think superior technology for organizing people and resources is the only solution.
That said, yes, we absolutely cannot ignore the toxicity in its entirety. Ignoring it entirely is how little old ladies at church bible studies wind up dead. There are certainly classes of toxicity that it's just military sense not to ignore. Religious and ethnic extremism, etc. Basically anything that is going to cause issues with physical violence. To my mind, violence is the line.
"The problem". What problem are we talking about again here? Is the problem that people are believing wrong things, or the spread of polarization and toxicity?
I don't care if people believe "wrong things". How's that old song go? "All lies and jests, still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest"? People will always believe whatever they want to, regardless of "evidence", regardless of history, regardless of persuasion. "Post-truth" society is such a ludicrous term. There was never a "truth society" to begin with. Never. If someone doesn't want to change their mind, you're tilting at windmills. Doubly so if this person is an anonymous account.
What I care about is stopping the spread of toxic and divisive stereotypes.
Look at the front page of Reddit. Every other post is a screenshot of an outrageous anonymous tweet, or a picture of a receipt with a nasty note on it, or a text message conversation. Look at how the public receives this: "Who cares if it's real or fake? The point is that it reinforces my stereotype of 'them'. We know 'they' exist, and we must do something about 'them'."
That's what's driving polarization and toxicity. The urge to respond with outrage to anonymous trolls. This is a problem we can fix by down voting and moving on.
But those beliefs lead to actions, which have negative consequences, which can affect us all.
No it isn't. Responding to toxicity or an external insult is precisely what the immune system does. An autoimmune disorder would be an activation of the immune system against some other bodily system that is healthy and functioning.
For instance: some people consider anti-vax sentiment to be child abuse, but dont consider cross-sex hormone injections for young children to be child abuse (and vice versa).
Another example is how many consider the swastika to be a symbol of genocide, but give a free pass to the hammer and sickle -- even though both of these symbols' ideologies have been similarily genocidal.
Humans are incredibly social beings, they hide in each other, as well as grow in each other. People absolutely can and do change their minds on all sorts of things every single day, and it's a "throw my hands up in the air and quit" to say otherwise.
Yes, people change their minds. But the more passionately they care about something, the less likely they are to change their minds about it. On the big questions that people care deeply about (politics, religion, vi vs. emacs), evidence doesn't seem to change peoples' ideas nearly as much as it should.
If you are an ethnic minority in a society where xenophobic nationalists believe you should be killed, do you think you'd care if people believed those "wrong things"?
Most people just glance at headlines, image, or whatever, and don't read articles or examine comments. Those comments about it being wrong only help inform the subset of people who bother to look at comments.
suppose nobody paid attention to such content in the first place, would it really be a problem in that case?
I think the tricky part is that if I ignore it, but no one else does, the problem is still there.
Until this system dies, we won't solve this problem. It's not good enough to instruct people to stop feeding the trolls: there are huge troll-feeding dopamine farms feeding and nurturing trolls by the millions. Until we shut them down the situation will continue to get worse.
Stop feeding partisan BS. You are not Left nor Right!
In fact I would say that "don't feed the troll" is the root cause of the huge spike in trolling that we have now.
Do not feed the troll meant, from what I understood back then, kill it, not let it grow somewhere else where it's protected.
For example, I don't use Facebook. But my parents do. I've had to talk with them on more than one occasion because they would get caught reading objectively wrong things spread on Facebook by bots. Thankfully my parents trust me enough that I can be an authority on those sorts of things, but it's not something I can simply ignore. If I were to let it fester, eventually it could turn into things like 'vaccines contain brainwashing bleach' or 'the government wants to take away your spleen' levels of nonsense.
At a certain point it's a good idea to stop platforming people like anti-vaxxers but it's also irresponsible to say it's possible to just ignore it.
So the algos are boosting controversy, to boost engagement, to boost financials.
Responding makes it worse for you. It gives them a second chance aggravate you, this time with more precision. Downvote and move along is excellent advice -- especially if you're on a platform that helps you filter them out in the future. But don't fool yourself into believing that they'll go away, or that people aren't listening to their misinformation and incorporating it into their belief system -- even if they know it's false.
Then they win elections.
In terms of things like 'fake news' and media outlets peddling absolute lies, ignoring it altogether may not be the wisest move. Might in those cases be better to calmly deconstruct the lies and prove the stories are wrong.
In terms of things like personal attacks, political toxicity on Twitter, etc? Ignoring the trolls is 100% the best thing to do. The folks that send threats and mock others online want a reaction, and the more reactions they'll get, the more the person reacting will get targeted by even more of them.
It has never worked. Put yourself in the position of someone who is being maliciously harassed by trolls and getting no help from anyone else. It's like telling a weak kid that is being bullied to just ignore it; the reality is that bullies are determined and tend to escalate rather than abandon their aggressive behavior. At best they will move on to picking on some other weaker person.
Ultimately, it rewards trolling behavior.
Doing things on the internet used to be harder. It used to be a network of loosely interconnected websites. You wanted to have a voice you made a website. You wanted to talk to others you joined a chat room or newsgroup or message board.
Then we invented comments. Now we have apps with SSO. You don’t even need to make a username anymore. The entirety of the internet congealed into 50 or so web properties.
Slashdot is still around. It’s relatively hard to use. Their moderation system brutally punishes trolls and rewards good behavior. It also allows for jokes and sarcasm.
The arrogance behind thinking "how do we fix the way everyone behaves"... jesus holy eff.
Vigorous debate is good, even if you get manic israel vs palestine or weirdly spergy tabs vs spaces spats as a side effect.
Writing is the tip of the iceberg. I used to run a forum, and the write versus read rates are enormous. 1 to 20+ ratios.
Argument brings out the best ideas. That energetic passion, that desire to win, makes people give it all they've got. And people read. And people can detect between wisdom and dumbassery. And they learn and benefit from it.
It's a key factor in educating the next generation. It's good. Go clutch your pearls elsewhere.
Nope
On the other hand, you've also posted some substantive and interesting comments, so I don't want to ban you. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit? The idea is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do. When you know more than someone else, share some of what you know in a respectful way, so we all can learn something. Don't just put others down.
My personal feeling is that reverse chronological order with maybe throttling your chronic over-sharing friends would probably go a long way to helping blunt some of the negative effects we see today. But it would also lower engagement and lead to revenue losses so they probably haven't earnestly considered it. Kinda like how the cigarette companies don't want you to know that smoking is bad for you, because you might smoke less.
Everybody remember the collective insanity of the Covington Catholic school fiasco where journalists and celebrities were publicly wishing for the death of a bunch of kids wearing MAGA hats or at the very least getting them doxxed or hurt all because of a one minute video taken out of context. And those who approached the story in a cautious manner were called out by the rest for being to soft or accused of being part of "the bigots", Ironically, the account that initially twitted the video snippet was banned after a few days.
I don't think the population is more deranged than before though, I mean the 70's were pretty violent politically, more than today.
The solution is to quit social media or join smaller communities free of wedge issues and identity politics. Twitter, Facebook or Reddit aren't going to fix themselves, they make money off outrage and petty divisions.
And finally you don't owe activism on a specific cause or an opinion to anyone. It's OK not to have an opinion or not wanting to get involved in a political debate. Anybody that attacks you for refusing to take a stance on any issue should probably be muted/blocked or removed from your life, that person isn't your friend and will try to make you look bad at the first opportunity just get brownie internet points for themselves.
You will realize that Social Media is designed in such a way intentionally to draw toxicity from society.
No technology is neutral. Technology gives and technology takes away. Medium is the message. Communication evolved because of the medium. For every evolution, it gives something and it takes away something. From oral communication to the printing press to telegraph to TV to the internet to social media. Every evolution gives birth to something and destroys something.
For example, TV makes everyone reachable (what it gives), but makes everything into entertainment (what it takes), even important topic such as politics, religion, war, poverty, pestilence, etc science becomes pure entertainment, juxtaposed between endless drama, reality show, and ads, coupled with background music and personas that manipulate the minds. The more "entertainer" you are, the better, regardless whether you are a dumb scientist or a dumb lawmaker that will affect many people's lives using your policy.
Social media such as twitter, for example, everyone now has a voice (what it gives), but with its char limit (what it takes) doesn't give critical thinking and rational debate a highlight, therefore it spirals down into madness. The more outrageous you are, the better, because it will go viral and people will react in such a predictable way.
A good example of a person who knows exactly how TV audience and social media audience will behave in a predictable way, and took advantage of that, is President Trump.
You want to design a medium/platform in such a way so that the pros outweigh the cons. But I think the hard part is knowing how will people use the platform. Those social media giants started out with good intentions, and only later and later down the road, and here we are right now, that we discover its true effects.
Trump wasn't the first though, and contrast the coverage: Obama's digital strategy was lauded for its tech-savvy genius by the media, whereas Trump's campaign was linked by the same to white supremacists wrt Pepe the Frog etc.
Twitter has a hard, small limit. Most other platforms either have no limit, or the limit is fairly large.
The problem is, people don't use it.
Worse, those that do use it are ridiculed, or their words are ignored (TL;DR anyone?)...
Thinking about this, I wonder if any of it has to do with people's "inner monologue" that was discussed yesterday here on HN? If you didn't see it, the gist was that there are some people who don't have such a monologue, and it came as a surprise to one person. Similarly, those without such a monologue are often surprised that others have it; one person commented that they often wished that the voiceover of characters in a movie, expressing their inner thoughts, was a real thing - and were shocked to find out that for most people - it is!
Anyhow - does this play into how people write online? Do they tend to write less or smaller messages, because their inner monologue is too loud or constant? Do those without such monologue write more thoughtful and longer posts? Then I think of myself; I have an inner monologue, but I tend to write long things (case in point - this post?) - but I don't find my inner monologue a burden.
But some do - I know I have read of people who either must always have some noise around them to drown out their "inner monologue", or if left in silence, even for small moments, will declare themselves "bored", perhaps because their inner monologue isn't perceived as interesting (whereas I and others have no problems thinking and pondering things, in silence, with no boredom)...?
Does this effect how people compose and type their messages? Does it help or hinder understanding? Does it facilitate or does it block meaningful conversations?
Twitter may have tapped into something that was always there to begin with, and in essence has helped foster that communication style - making it acceptable widely - conversation as "sound bites" - which has perhaps led to our present situation.
I saw the post about inner monologue but didn't read it. But I believe it could be related.
I highly suggest reading the book because I'm doing a disservice trying to explain about it. It basically explained how oratory, printing press, telegraph/telephone and television really changed society a lot, but in subconscious ways that most of us don't think.
But what I see constantly is that people have gone from a "what about you" mindset to "what about me" mindset. My conversations end as soon as the person is done answering my questions about them. Like, zero reciprocation, which is god awful.
If these people participate online, where they can mainly get away with being a shitty personality, then this toxicity is not that surprising to see.
I have no solution, only a small piece of advice: seek out others with empathy and active interest in others. Avoid narcissists like the plague. Be humble.
We need to start emphasizing what we have in common, help people see that ultimately we're really not all that different from each other. The internet lets people hide behind this isolating veneer that makes it too easy to just shout at each other and behave in extreme ways that would never be socially acceptable in the real world. Interacting in real life significantly moderates people's behaviour and when social media and the internet facilitate segregation and amplification of extremes, spending more time in person might really do us a lot of good.
We need to put people in a context where politics is irrelevant and a shared interest has the opportunity to bond people who would otherwise not meet. It's the only way I see of countering Identity Politics that try to be all consuming.
It would also be helpful to encourage people to focus on more positive events. Outrage culture is a thing, only exacerbated by social media, where rage = clicks/views = money. We need to change the economics of this equation. We would really benefit from a culture that gave more attention to people doing good rather than just focusing on the villains in society.
I think there is a lot more to this than many people think.
If more people participated in hobbies, then they would spend less time on the internet. The time they do spend would be more targeted and focused instead of mindlessly scrolling and scrolling and getting baited and agitated.
They would also form communities, as you suggest, with common interests and get to know people better. It's basic socialization.
Part of the problem is that for some reason there is a notion that everything has to be a business today. There's a Fidelity Investments TV commercial running right now where a daughter says to her retired mother, "Did you paint this [painting]? You know you can sell these!" And a business is born. Why? Why can't she just enjoy painting for painting's sake. For her own enjoyment? Why is money what decides if something is valid or not?
I encourage people to start hobbies. And be bad at them. Be terrible at reading, stamp collecting, woodworking, gardening, model railroading, brewing, or whatever. Do it because you like it. If you happen to be good at it, great! If all of your carrots die, that's OK, too. You got to spend quality time with yourself, which is more important than all the carrot sales you could possibly make.
[warning, cynic paragraph ahead] We don't have time to socialize, we obviously live to work. We might be stressed as we don't get to disconnect much, but you know, that would be so wasteful! Streets are not for people to socialize, they are for cars and for going somewhere else to do business. Spaces can only be there for money, otherwise they are an inefficiency which we'll have to fix. If you are good at something, you should be earning money from it. We live in a global world. We have so many hobbies! But only so many people fits in an area, so matches are unlikely. Anyway, if you are willing to go out for socialization any hobby is ok. If you are interested in finding interesting people... sorry, they are busy at the moment. That's what interesting people do. Be stressed and busy trying to fix the world from crashing by hitting harder the accelerator. Ah, the beauty of an efficient market. Perfecting time and spaces.
I optimistically think people are appreciating face-to-face time more, and I hope we think of a lot of new excuses to meet up over the next decade.
If something is political is only about the level of agreement and not about sanity, decency, or morality. It may be easier to (not) think about divergence of views but that doesn't solve the particular underlying issue isn't real.
A few years ago I was at a local community meeting about expanding a school (USA). Let me tell you something, online trolls have nothing on the people who were for or against the expansion.
I left totally shocked with the toxicity, outright lies and innuendo. At one point someone on the board said the school was a front for prostitution. The audience audibly gasped.
We had that thing. It was called organized religion. Then liberals systematically destroyed it. In typical fashion, they never thought about what would replace what they were tearing down.
Also "chosing not to participate" is not the same as "systematically destroying."
A key function of most religions is providing people with a specific moral framework. Fundamental to that is almost always the process of socializing children in that moral framework. (Indeed, the UN recognizes that as a fundamental human right.) At the same time, a key function of schools also is socializing children in the values and morals of their community. For most of American history, there was no conflict between these two institutions--America's overwhelmingly Christian communities socialized their children in their religion through public schools.
The Warren Court's decisions in the 1960s broke that process. Parents had to socialize children in their religion "on their own time." Meanwhile, because teaching morality is an indispensable aspect of socializing children, public schools created an alternative, secular moral framework to impart onto children. Under those precedents, even in communities that were overwhelmingly Christian, and where Christian parents wanted their children raised with a Christian moral framework, public schools were required to teach them something else, in competition with whatever religious instruction they might receive on their own time. It's a unique scenario where attempts to vindicate the individual right of being free from unwanted exposure to religion in schools, has the side effect of dramatically curtailing the ability of the majority in the larger community to impose their religious values into their children.
Taxing people, then using that money to create public schools, and then requiring people to send their kids to those schools, and then prohibiting those schools from teaching kids the religion of their parents, very much has the effect of undermining the propagation of religion. It gives the secular teachings of teachers primacy over whatever religious teachings parents may be able to impart during the waking hours when children aren't in school.
Whether this that approach is nonetheless necessary in a multi-cultural society is a different question. I would point out that countries like Sweden seem to be doing fine allowing religious parents to choose to send their kids to publicly funded religious schools. But I think the effect of promoting secularism and undermining religion is hard to deny.
Not to mention the irony of addressing the toxicity and polarization of the internet by adding yet more toxicity and polarization.
We should really be putting far more effort into building similar non-religious communities. Things like book clubs, hiking clubs, or anything that involves shared interests.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Today, the lower classes know what's going on politically and economically better than many of the elites. That's why distrust of institutions is at an all time high. That's why books which label the social order as a fiction like 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' are top sellers. For the first time in history, the correlation between wealth and knowledge has disappeared and is even starting to reverse.
It's difficult for the elite to control a class which knows what's going on better than they do. And BTW, fake news has a purpose. It's a political and economic weapon invented by the lower and middle classes to serve their needs.
Brexit effectively ruined a few experiences for me, like pycon UK, and I’m really not looking forward to picking them back up or risk being in that position again, sorry. I respect everyone’s opinion until it starts making me an unperson, there I draw a line.