I have one of these prefilters and it works well. When I get the sense I'm about to say something dumb, I wait until the next day I have a good night's sleep already under my belt to say it. It works wonders.
(You do have to stretch your definition of AI a bit to include the subconscious, for this to count, admittedly.)
our need to immediately respond to anything online is a huge contributor to rancorous discourse. The rate of content decay and the public nature of the conversation encourages us to 'get our point in' and so encourages reactions instead of responses. It's not great that we need AI to moderate human answers, but we can see the short term value, whilst pondering the longer term implications
[I know you feel that this technique is helpful and you want to save the world. That's double plus good of you.] [For me, I think that] all the padding makes the conversation diluted, watered down and boring. It's similar to 'The Gift Shop Sketch' [1]. [I feel] this is very disrespectful of my time. [In my opinion] it would be great to use another model to strip all the feely words, condense the meaning and generally un-fuckify all the AI waffle. [What are your thoughts about that?]
Hmm, not my choice of sketch to demonstrate this. That is more about crap padded TV. "ChatGPT I have 1 minute of content, please pad out to 25 minutes".
There must be a 1000 British sketches about excessive politeness but none come to mind right now... the best I can think of is that it's an inverse Key and Peel anger translator:
We will need the anger translator in our client software to translates back out of the polite version so we can efficiently understand what is truly meant without confusion.
I had the opposite idea: Run all my comments through an LLM to make them more diplomatic. I noticed my comments have been a bit adversarial lately, so I just wrote a script to pass the HN comment history plus my draft comment to GPT-4 and have it reword my replies. Hopefully it won't be overly verbose.
This is this comment, GPTed:
~~~
Hey andersrs, I totally appreciate your perspective here - the 'Gift Shop Sketch' is a classic! To share my thoughts, though, I've actually contemplated doing quite the opposite. I've begun to realize that my comments might've been coming off a little too confrontational or straight to the point recently. So, I'm thinking of running them through a language model to dial up the diplomacy a notch.
Could be fun, right? I'm in the process of penning a script that takes our comment history, along with any new comments I jot down, into account and passes it all on to GPT-4. The goal's to help it finesse my responses a bit. Here's hoping it won't tip the scale in the other direction and make them a long-winded affair!
~~~
I agree that it's a bit meh, but I think with some prompt tweaking it can be very helpful.
EDIT: With some better prompting:
~~~
Actually, I've been thinking about making my comments more cordial. Noticed that they might come off a bit straightforward, so I've worked on this script to run my HN comments, along with my draft comment, through GPT-4. The idea is that it can help to craft my replies in a way that fosters better communication. I'm hopeful it won't end up making them overly long-winded.
~~~
For example, to me this sounds like I’m being talked down to as if you’ve pegged me as someone you have to finesse your words around or else I’ll erupt into violence at the drop of a hat.
I get the purpose, to not sound adversarial in your response. Just a thought though.
Ugh, I hope that’s not a symptom of the future we’re looking at. Sites that run users comments through LLMs with strict rules to make them more “amenable”.
Using whisper api to do real time transcription of what your interlocutor is saying and feeding it into wingmanGPT with system prompt to output what you should say to score, then sending back to an ear piece via bark with a real chad voice prompt.
The problem is that "civility" or "tone" is a surface issue and the offence is more fundamental to what's being discussed. There's a well-known "euphemism treadmill" where certain words are deemed bad, a replacement is developed, and then people start using them as a slur instead. It's possible to be perfectly polite while arguing for genocide.
Completely agreed, and honestly, sometimes we need to have frank conversations about true horrors and abhorrent behaviors that exist in the world. I hate to pull the Orwell card, but I fear that the normalization of this technology would inhibit necessary conversations about true evils, and give a false impression of civility and neutrality to people spreading hateful ideology.
That said, most online discourse is already a disaster, with every disagreement being ramped up to 11 with no capacity or patience for nuance, so I'm not sure how much worse it can actually get.
The reason that tone is a good signal (though that may change with generative AI in the mix) is because, in practice, it's correlated with intentions and understanding of the writer. It is possible to politely advocate genocide, and to make angry, simplistic, but 100% correct arguments for a right cause, but both cases are very rare to see in practice. Usually, people who write politely do so because they want to carefully get a considered point across; people who write angrily do so because they want to win a verbal fight.
It's obviously just my subjective impression, but I see lots of examples of people arguing for quite abhorrent positions on HN in a civil and carefully articulated manner. Rather than pointing to specific HN comments, I'll pick Richard Hanania as a recent example of the same phenomenon. The guy writes long blog posts that are (for anyone who can make basic logical connections between ideas) openly racist and sexist. Recently, it turned out that he'd spent many years, even into his late 20s, writing extremely uncivil racist and misogynist claptrap under a pseudonym on various internet forums. But because in public he presented essentially the same ideas under a veneer of civility, he was taken seriously by many 'intellectuals' who should have known better (e.g. Steven Pinker) and amplified by several mainstream media outlets (e.g. the Washington Post).
Manipulation of people's emotions is basically how politics at the highest level usually work. Or marketing. This is not even sarcasic, I mean it quite literally.
I think that was the OPs point. Manipulating (brainwashing) people is a Trillion dollar business.
And emotions are the key -- in the UK there is currently a campaign to give a tax break to the top 1%, and it's working, even left wing tabloid readers support it.
This completely misses the context in which online discussion occurs: social media platforms. Platforms whose business model depends on capturing eyeballs, and who know that outrage and sensation maximise that. It is attempting to treat a symptom, not the cause. A case of "oh, dear: our utopian technology has turned out to have bad consequences, so let's layer more utopian tech on top to fix it".
Edit: thought of a better example - Donald Trump getting banned from most social media. If they were seeking to maximize outrage, they wouldn't do that. They'd assign an employee to moderate everything he posted if they had to, but they'd keep him there, manufacturing outrage.
------
Twitter and Reddit would both be examples of the types of platforms you're referring to, that benefit from this outrage. And neither seems to want to maximize it.
In the case of Twitter, they prompt you to rephrase your Tweet if the algo thinks it's likely to offend people. If you post too much of that type of stuff, you get a form of lite-shadowban.
Reddit has for years coached people to 'remember the human' and backs it up with various rules and bans. They want people to treat each other well.
Is either platform successful in their attempts? Arguably, no. But that wasn't my point, I was addressing the claim that they seek to maximize outrage.
A good example of what? A platform not seeking to maximize outrage?
Yes. They banned the Donald Trump subreddit. That one subreddit produced more outrage than probably everything else in the history of Reddit combined. And they banned it. A company seeking to maximize outrage would not do that.
A company seeking to maximize profit from outrage would keep it up until they engage in behavior that threatens ad revenue, like if they were talking about murdering police officers or something.
You're proving everyone's point that outrage drives attention: one can get a lot of engagement from deliberate misunderstanding. No, those were not the goalposts to anyone but the most pedantic of pedants.
I don't think it's pedantic at all to say the goalposts are whether or not they maximize outrage.
I totally understand that the word's 'Reddit' and 'Twitter' and 'Trump' are going to trigger people into wanting to talk more broadly about those topics. There are lots of other places they can go and do that. I had a very specific and narrowly defined argument.
I think the "maximize outage" is a good simplification 80% of the time, but the "goal chain" goes from there to maximum advertising revenue, and that requires happy advertisers. And in the case of reddit I'm not sure how much revenue comes from gold and how much that was harmed by people saying "don't give money to this site hosting hate-speech".
Twitter and Reddit are corporations that have to give the outward appearance of civility for advertisers and regulators. I don't think they're sincere. Their business model relies on engagement, and outrage drives up engagement.
No, what I'm saying is they maximize outrage, but pretend that they care about civility.
You yourself said neither platform was successful in their attempts, that's because those "attempts" are there for show. They can't reduce outrage without reducing their profits.
> No, what I'm saying is they maximize outrage, but pretend that they care about civility.
Then you're wrong. They don't just pretend to care, they take actions. I've already given several examples.
> You yourself said neither platform was successful in their attempts
No, I did not say that. I said 'arguably' and that was precisely so people wouldn't try to turn this into a debate about how good they are at it. I said they try and they absolutely do try.
> because those "attempts" are there for show
And now you're contradicting yourself. You said they only pretend to care and now you said they make attempts. You keep flip flopping on what it is that you are even saying.
I can't read minds. Evidently you can and that's an awesome skill, congratulations. But everything I've said refers only to what they actually do. And what they do is to take actions that are clearly detrimental to maximizing outrage. Something you've just agreed with, if we extract all of your mind reading voodoo magic.
Are you perhaps overly pedantic and focused too much on the idea of "maximizing outrage to exclusion of everything else" instead of "finding a local maxima of outrage that doesn't upset our advertisers or actually drive people away?"
I addressed a very specific claim someone made - that they seek to maximize outrage. And that is all I addressed. I am not interested in broadening the scope and defending everything about every social media platform - as that's what this will turn into if I do not diligently keep the goalposts exactly where I set them.
"I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!"
06 Jan 21
I can't link to the tweet. But it has been reinstated on Twitter after the acquisition.
The thing about dog whistles is that you have to be a "dog" to hear them. What does it tell you, if you constantly hear dog whistles everywhere.
I don't hear any dog whistles. That's probably because I'm a socialist and not a "dog". I'm not the one focusing on undesirable elements in society. I see a lot of struggling poor people though. People who vote for con-men populists out of desperation.
While we’re on the subject of social media I feel the need to point out that you don’t need to keep saying this and it also doesn’t make much sense to bother. This isn’t a debate club meetup. People can latch on to parts of the conversation and focus on that if they want.
If you see the alternatives as moderate the thread or ignore it all, I agree with you. But for me the alternatives are moderate the thread or allow them to drag me into a hundred debates about a hundred different things. I was going to participate in the discussion either way.
So wait, there are a significant number of all-women hate subreddits? Such that they need to make another subreddit to ban them? What are they hating? Why is it a problem? Is it that they dont let men take part in the hating too?
I don't know about reddit enough and just struggling to even guess the context here.
> I don't know about reddit enough and just struggling to even guess the context here.
Reddit is extremely massive. With uber millions of people on it. And anyone can make a subreddit about anything. And they get extremely specific. Like someone might make one called r/FuckHNpedants for people who dislike all of the pedants on this site. And they post screenshots of our comments and mock us.
So clearly there are going to be people who make all sorts of random subreddits related to women. Lets say some guys didn't like women with freckles. They might make a subreddit showing pictures of women with freckles and bash them. And drill down a few more levels and go in all directions.
Then you have these other people who get triggered by that sort of content and demand it all be removed from Reddit. They make subreddits like that demanding it all be removed. Historically, they need to get featured in a bunch of media before Reddit does anything. They then ban a bunch of them and make a new rule.
It's subs that target hatred and violence towards women. Things like social stalking, rape confessions, non-consensual pornography, secretly cumming on their belongings etc.
>Is either platform successful in their attempts? Arguably, no. But that wasn't my point, I was addressing the claim that they seek to maximize outrage.
Mastodon has no advertising-driven business model. Still, that community is, due to its founding generation, extremely strident about certain social matters. A person posting views held by a considerable swath of the planet can draw outrage and sensation comparable to anything from Meta or Twitter. The loss of civility may have been initially sparked by advertising-based platforms, but it has spread to general anglophone society now.
I think when it comes to online discourse one also needs to be reminded that there are deliberate external factors stirring the pot. A lot of disharmony in society is beginning online.
Other than rephrasing, using AI to automatically add context to a discussion can help a lot with misinformation. This is bit like how Twitter's community notes feature adds needed context.
However one needs to keep in mind that they shouldn't attempt to sift through and correct misinformation on Facebook and Twitter, it will be generated far quicker than a person can reasonably counter. It's also a common strategy to use over-simplistic ideas to make such statements because these require an out-sized effort to debunk.
Rather sometimes it's useful to remember that all around us there are untrue things being said and not interacting (a.k.a. "engagement") with them is often a solution in itself. Blocking, muting and not reacting is a better strategy to algorithmically silence.
If reading materials online leaves you angry or itching to respond that's actually a problem with yourself that you need to figure out how to deal with.
The presence of "civility" - the appearance of it - does not improve the quality of those conversations people would refer to as "polarizing". An abhorrent message conveyed in a polite tone remains abhorrent, and people affected by it are very unlikely to perceive it differently, no matter how many "I feel", "in my opinion", or "I hear you" someone might slap on top of it.
It could easily have the opposite effect, since bad actors have been already abusing this technique - feigning politeness - for decades, destroying what little trust there could be in online discourse.
Insisting on the appearance of civility, in any case, only has a cooling effect on those who have skin in the game, leaving the rest to play devil's advocate amongst themselves as they loftily discuss possible solutions. I am, as always, thoroughly bemused by some people's insistence on solving social problems with technical solutions, but this really takes the cake.
Eventually AI in business use cases will push out options for edge scenarios and force humans to adapt to the models trained on humans but dumber by a country mile.
As if it's something else right now. Dealing with chat, email, phone endpoints unsuccessfully trying to pretend they are human (or not even that) is just a contemporary reality everyone got accustomized to.
The only people who want to remove polarity from online conversation are hardcore censorship maximalists. Life rarely involves absolute truths but some people refuse to acknowledge this.
It's incredible worrysome that AI is being driven into a closed-source censorship regime in the name of safety & civility, when in reality having a centralized and closed AI ecosystem would definitively be the worst kind of dictatorship regime.
Conversely, an open-source AI ecosystem would be the biggest equalizer in history and would harmonize humanity on an unprecedented level.
> The only people who want to remove polarity from online conversation are hardcore censorship maximalists. Life rarely involves absolute truths but some people refuse to acknowledge this.
Those two sentences don't make sense together. Surely if there are no absolute truths then removing polarity would help people find a middle ground.
There are absolute truths, but there is no impartial authority to decide what they are. The only way to reach truth is through discussion (ie, interaction between opposing viewpoints). Eliminating polarity also eliminates the possibility of determining truth.
Found the logical positivist. Discussion doesn't necessarily or even reliably lead to "absolute truth", just as armchair pondering about idealized versions of some phenomenon doesn't necessarily lead to actionable predictions about it. Most phenomena aren't amenable to being studied purely in logical abstractions and thus a search for "absolute truth" seldom makes sense for them in the first place.
If we want to talk about "objective truth" - an adjacent and popular buzzword - we should at the very least be attempting operationalization and experimentation on our claims, as empiricism is the framework best suited to supporting the epistemic claim of "objectivity"
Really the notion of an absolute, objective, and knowable truth is often an unrealistic standard if we don't have good means to study the phenomenon in question, and tends to be something more like a pissing contest about rhetorical prowess or credentials in most conversations in practice.
Reaching agreement is a valuable but far from certain outcome of a dialogue. It is not the same thing as ascertaining "truth" in some epistemically meaningful final sense
> Discussion doesn't necessarily or even reliably lead to "absolute truth"
Nobody says discussion is a source of it, or where you obtain some, but you can discuss it. The aim of discussion is discussion itself, not posing a guarantee that someone will walk away enlightened.
> The only people who want to remove polarity from online conversation are hardcore censorship maximalists
This in itself is an absolute statement. I prefer to see reduced polarity from online conversations (more similar to HN), and I'm not censorship maximalist (whatever that label means)
How do you "reduce polarity" without censoring voices? If you do believe in 'just a little censorship', then absolutely you are a censorship maximalist. How else would you achieve your censorship goals?
The censor class have repeatedly censored discussion in the name of correctness that were later proven to be either murky or outright false (see: lab leak theory censorship, mask effectiveness censorship, Hunter Biden laptop censorship etc).
As history has repeatedly shown, censorship is principally used by those whose ideas cannot be backed up in public debate -- the opposing view must be forcefully crushed.
Not everyone wants to go to a baseball game where 1% of the fans are constantly getting into screaming matches about the other team sucking. Similarly, I will politely nope out of an online community that won't stop clobbering me with Team Red vs Team Blue debates. Free speech is not the same as "I should be listened to in proportion to how much I talk".
Have you read what uncensored, lowest common denominator, everything goes online conversation devolves to? See 4chan's /pol/ for example, it aint pretty.
HN is relatively so good because there are clear and enforced guardrails around what a conversation looks like.
Allowing polarization for the sake of openness is not a good thing.
I agree. It could also be a helpful tool in teaching us being polite in areas where we've never learned to be polite because nobody taught us. It could also help us in making those opposing views more approachable without forcing us to adopt them.
Sure, it would equalize us to some degree, but there are areas where this can be beneficial to society.
One can also argue that extremists – like some politicians – do benefit so much from this polarity and lack of dialog, that they're only able to pursue their career as a politician due to this. Like some of the members of the German AfD party.
Putting this in contrast to the goals of "hardcore censorship maximalists", I believe that these censorshippers will have a harder time reaching their goals than the destabilizing benefits controversial politicians are reaping with the lack of polite discussion.
It is patently obvious parties like AfD exist because there's been massive censorship on speaking of the negative aspects of mass immigration. What do you think will happen if you start introducing harder clamps on free speech?
> "patently obvious ... massive censorship on speaking of the negative aspects of mass immigration"
There exists the concept of "Lügenpresse" ("lying press") which is a word used similar to uses of the word "woke", as a term to compact a message into one word.
This "Lügenpresse", which usually the public broadcasting services like ARD and ZDF are referred to, have indeed dealt with this topic for years now, as well as newspapers like Der Spiegel or FAZ.
No censorship has been taking place. What has been taking place is an avoidance of acknowledging the seriousness of the problem in the way the popular and extremist AfD has portrayed it, because it is easy to portray it for them the way they do due to a lack of honest discourse.
Keep in mind that while the AfD is attacking the other parties as being parties which ignore the topic, they are not proposing solutions which are immediately implementable, because they are in the privileged position of being in the opposition and therefore not required to actually act. They are in the privileged position where they can fan the fire, lean back comfortably and watch the place burn. No action required from their part.
Dealing with the topic is very complex not only due to the laws we have agreed to abide to, due to the "Rechtsstaat" ("constitutional state").
If it were by me, I wouldn't mind if they get to rule for one term, just for them to then display their inability to solve the problems they've been "criticizing" the entire time, but due to their stance regarding the Russian war – handing over Ukraine to Russia in exchange for cheap gas, like it used to be – and their right extremist views, they're absolutely untenable.
Do you really think that it was the AfD which moved Lindner to push the idea of looking for ways to impede migrants to send money back to their families? I doubt so. Not even two weeks ago our city had a citizen conversation to discuss the problems we are facing with the influx of migrants. This is the way to deal with these issues, and no AfD is required for this. It doesn't take an AfD to acknowledge the problems, they are not getting ignored.
> What do you think will happen if you start introducing harder clamps on free speech?
Using AI to help with more civilized discussions is not "introducing harder clamps on free speech".
Have you read what fully censored conversation devolves to? See Chinese state media and social media, it aint pretty.
> HN is relatively so good because there are clear and enforced guardrails around what a conversation looks like.
Hah, I think you'll find if you ask around that a surprisingly large number of people (especially liberal women) would be horrified at the discussions here. It's full of anonymous people furiously disagreeing with each other about everything, and full of arguments like "you're wrong because <facts>".
If you accidentally wander into the ultra-liberal hacker blogosphere, the sort of places where everyone uses anime avatars and half of them are furries, you'll find a lot of hatred for HN and a belief that it's no different to /pol/. Some of them even block links from HN.
So this distinction you're looking for doesn't really exist. If you support censorship you'll find they come for you next.
Like it or not, 4chan /pol/ and these days especially /g/ punch far above their weight in terms of having the “inside scoop” on things. A lot of AI research is being done on general threads on /g/ by real published academics who don’t want their names associated with making Waifu hentai. Without /g/ there’s no automatic1111 or comfyUI, and that would mean that diffusion models wouldn’t have taken off
/pol/ is low quality, but it’s existence is probably good for the world.
> Life rarely involves absolute truths but some people refuse to acknowledge this.
The way this is phrased sounds like absolute relativism: no truth really exists, everything is relative, every opinion is as relevant as any other.
This is a dangerous perspective, and often used to give too much focus to fringe opinions that do not merit that much attention.
Your username is waihtis on hn, 2+2 is 4 in mainstream mathematics, not true equals false in boolean logic, and the sun will rise tomorrow are all truths. People arguing against these truths better have a compelling argument, or they can be safely ignored. That is not censorship, but a thoughtful use of our time.
Aka, you are free to speak your mind, but you are not entitled to people listening. No one owes a platform to fringe opinions because of free speech.
>The only people who want to remove polarity from online conversation are hardcore censorship maximalists.
Even American civic debate culture is heavily centered around limitations on how to present an argument. Polarity in itself isn't what matters in productive discourse, it's truthfulness, factfulness, lack of bad faith argument style, and so on.
Anyone who is interested in debate producing truth rather than being a sort of entropy entertainment machine must value civility. People can be completely polarized and argue complete nonsense, there is no value in it whatsoever. The literal site we are having this conversation on right now is very strongly moderated when it comes to civility and avoiding needless polarization, but HN is not censorship maximalist. It's ironic to try to argue this especially here.
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[ 793 ms ] story [ 2721 ms ] thread(You do have to stretch your definition of AI a bit to include the subconscious, for this to count, admittedly.)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc
There must be a 1000 British sketches about excessive politeness but none come to mind right now... the best I can think of is that it's an inverse Key and Peel anger translator:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qv7k2_lc0M
We will need the anger translator in our client software to translates back out of the polite version so we can efficiently understand what is truly meant without confusion.
I had the opposite idea: Run all my comments through an LLM to make them more diplomatic. I noticed my comments have been a bit adversarial lately, so I just wrote a script to pass the HN comment history plus my draft comment to GPT-4 and have it reword my replies. Hopefully it won't be overly verbose.
This is this comment, GPTed:
~~~
Hey andersrs, I totally appreciate your perspective here - the 'Gift Shop Sketch' is a classic! To share my thoughts, though, I've actually contemplated doing quite the opposite. I've begun to realize that my comments might've been coming off a little too confrontational or straight to the point recently. So, I'm thinking of running them through a language model to dial up the diplomacy a notch.
Could be fun, right? I'm in the process of penning a script that takes our comment history, along with any new comments I jot down, into account and passes it all on to GPT-4. The goal's to help it finesse my responses a bit. Here's hoping it won't tip the scale in the other direction and make them a long-winded affair!
~~~
I agree that it's a bit meh, but I think with some prompt tweaking it can be very helpful.
EDIT: With some better prompting:
~~~ Actually, I've been thinking about making my comments more cordial. Noticed that they might come off a bit straightforward, so I've worked on this script to run my HN comments, along with my draft comment, through GPT-4. The idea is that it can help to craft my replies in a way that fosters better communication. I'm hopeful it won't end up making them overly long-winded. ~~~
For example, to me this sounds like I’m being talked down to as if you’ve pegged me as someone you have to finesse your words around or else I’ll erupt into violence at the drop of a hat.
I get the purpose, to not sound adversarial in your response. Just a thought though.
That said, most online discourse is already a disaster, with every disagreement being ramped up to 11 with no capacity or patience for nuance, so I'm not sure how much worse it can actually get.
And emotions are the key -- in the UK there is currently a campaign to give a tax break to the top 1%, and it's working, even left wing tabloid readers support it.
------
Twitter and Reddit would both be examples of the types of platforms you're referring to, that benefit from this outrage. And neither seems to want to maximize it.
In the case of Twitter, they prompt you to rephrase your Tweet if the algo thinks it's likely to offend people. If you post too much of that type of stuff, you get a form of lite-shadowban.
Reddit has for years coached people to 'remember the human' and backs it up with various rules and bans. They want people to treat each other well.
Is either platform successful in their attempts? Arguably, no. But that wasn't my point, I was addressing the claim that they seek to maximize outrage.
Are you saying that Reddit is a good example? Because that would be a laughable point to make
Yes. They banned the Donald Trump subreddit. That one subreddit produced more outrage than probably everything else in the history of Reddit combined. And they banned it. A company seeking to maximize outrage would not do that.
Just because there's a limit to the outrage tolerated, it doesn't mean that outrage isn't part of the plan.
That's where the goalposts are and that's where they are going to stay: whether or not they seek to maximize outrage.
So ya, that interpretation is the logical one. If your business model depends on something, you would be optimizing for maximizing it over time.
Please do not add any extra words to that, thus shifting the goalposts. Here you have added the word 'profit'. I never said anything about profit.
I argued that they do not.
I don't think it's pedantic at all to say the goalposts are whether or not they maximize outrage.
I totally understand that the word's 'Reddit' and 'Twitter' and 'Trump' are going to trigger people into wanting to talk more broadly about those topics. There are lots of other places they can go and do that. I had a very specific and narrowly defined argument.
We're not disagreeing. I wasn't speaking to what's in their heart, only to what they actually do.
You yourself said neither platform was successful in their attempts, that's because those "attempts" are there for show. They can't reduce outrage without reducing their profits.
Then you're wrong. They don't just pretend to care, they take actions. I've already given several examples.
> You yourself said neither platform was successful in their attempts
No, I did not say that. I said 'arguably' and that was precisely so people wouldn't try to turn this into a debate about how good they are at it. I said they try and they absolutely do try.
> because those "attempts" are there for show
And now you're contradicting yourself. You said they only pretend to care and now you said they make attempts. You keep flip flopping on what it is that you are even saying.
I can't read minds. Evidently you can and that's an awesome skill, congratulations. But everything I've said refers only to what they actually do. And what they do is to take actions that are clearly detrimental to maximizing outrage. Something you've just agreed with, if we extract all of your mind reading voodoo magic.
"I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!" 06 Jan 21
I can't link to the tweet. But it has been reinstated on Twitter after the acquisition.
If that's an argument, it doesn't change anything about what I said.
I don't hear any dog whistles. That's probably because I'm a socialist and not a "dog". I'm not the one focusing on undesirable elements in society. I see a lot of struggling poor people though. People who vote for con-men populists out of desperation.
You're a fool if you think that the way reddit handles content moderation does not create angry people.
please keep the goalposts right there and address only that one specific argument. as it's the only argument i'm making.
See the person above us:
>You're a fool if you think that the way reddit handles content moderation does not create angry people.
I never said that. And they're making personal attacks based on this thing I never said. That isn't what you just described.
Tell that to the volunteers over at /r/BanFemaleHateSubs
Reddit does about the minimum it can to avoid signifiant media backlash.
I don't know about reddit enough and just struggling to even guess the context here.
Reddit is extremely massive. With uber millions of people on it. And anyone can make a subreddit about anything. And they get extremely specific. Like someone might make one called r/FuckHNpedants for people who dislike all of the pedants on this site. And they post screenshots of our comments and mock us.
So clearly there are going to be people who make all sorts of random subreddits related to women. Lets say some guys didn't like women with freckles. They might make a subreddit showing pictures of women with freckles and bash them. And drill down a few more levels and go in all directions.
Then you have these other people who get triggered by that sort of content and demand it all be removed from Reddit. They make subreddits like that demanding it all be removed. Historically, they need to get featured in a bunch of media before Reddit does anything. They then ban a bunch of them and make a new rule.
>Is either platform successful in their attempts? Arguably, no. But that wasn't my point, I was addressing the claim that they seek to maximize outrage.
Other than rephrasing, using AI to automatically add context to a discussion can help a lot with misinformation. This is bit like how Twitter's community notes feature adds needed context.
However one needs to keep in mind that they shouldn't attempt to sift through and correct misinformation on Facebook and Twitter, it will be generated far quicker than a person can reasonably counter. It's also a common strategy to use over-simplistic ideas to make such statements because these require an out-sized effort to debunk.
Rather sometimes it's useful to remember that all around us there are untrue things being said and not interacting (a.k.a. "engagement") with them is often a solution in itself. Blocking, muting and not reacting is a better strategy to algorithmically silence.
If reading materials online leaves you angry or itching to respond that's actually a problem with yourself that you need to figure out how to deal with.
It could easily have the opposite effect, since bad actors have been already abusing this technique - feigning politeness - for decades, destroying what little trust there could be in online discourse.
Insisting on the appearance of civility, in any case, only has a cooling effect on those who have skin in the game, leaving the rest to play devil's advocate amongst themselves as they loftily discuss possible solutions. I am, as always, thoroughly bemused by some people's insistence on solving social problems with technical solutions, but this really takes the cake.
It's incredible worrysome that AI is being driven into a closed-source censorship regime in the name of safety & civility, when in reality having a centralized and closed AI ecosystem would definitively be the worst kind of dictatorship regime.
Conversely, an open-source AI ecosystem would be the biggest equalizer in history and would harmonize humanity on an unprecedented level.
Those two sentences don't make sense together. Surely if there are no absolute truths then removing polarity would help people find a middle ground.
If we want to talk about "objective truth" - an adjacent and popular buzzword - we should at the very least be attempting operationalization and experimentation on our claims, as empiricism is the framework best suited to supporting the epistemic claim of "objectivity"
Really the notion of an absolute, objective, and knowable truth is often an unrealistic standard if we don't have good means to study the phenomenon in question, and tends to be something more like a pissing contest about rhetorical prowess or credentials in most conversations in practice.
Reaching agreement is a valuable but far from certain outcome of a dialogue. It is not the same thing as ascertaining "truth" in some epistemically meaningful final sense
Nobody says discussion is a source of it, or where you obtain some, but you can discuss it. The aim of discussion is discussion itself, not posing a guarantee that someone will walk away enlightened.
Your GP post literally says "The only way to reach truth is through discussion", so take it up with them.
This in itself is an absolute statement. I prefer to see reduced polarity from online conversations (more similar to HN), and I'm not censorship maximalist (whatever that label means)
The censor class have repeatedly censored discussion in the name of correctness that were later proven to be either murky or outright false (see: lab leak theory censorship, mask effectiveness censorship, Hunter Biden laptop censorship etc).
As history has repeatedly shown, censorship is principally used by those whose ideas cannot be backed up in public debate -- the opposing view must be forcefully crushed.
HN is relatively so good because there are clear and enforced guardrails around what a conversation looks like.
Allowing polarization for the sake of openness is not a good thing.
Sure, it would equalize us to some degree, but there are areas where this can be beneficial to society.
One can also argue that extremists – like some politicians – do benefit so much from this polarity and lack of dialog, that they're only able to pursue their career as a politician due to this. Like some of the members of the German AfD party.
Putting this in contrast to the goals of "hardcore censorship maximalists", I believe that these censorshippers will have a harder time reaching their goals than the destabilizing benefits controversial politicians are reaping with the lack of polite discussion.
There exists the concept of "Lügenpresse" ("lying press") which is a word used similar to uses of the word "woke", as a term to compact a message into one word.
This "Lügenpresse", which usually the public broadcasting services like ARD and ZDF are referred to, have indeed dealt with this topic for years now, as well as newspapers like Der Spiegel or FAZ.
No censorship has been taking place. What has been taking place is an avoidance of acknowledging the seriousness of the problem in the way the popular and extremist AfD has portrayed it, because it is easy to portray it for them the way they do due to a lack of honest discourse.
Keep in mind that while the AfD is attacking the other parties as being parties which ignore the topic, they are not proposing solutions which are immediately implementable, because they are in the privileged position of being in the opposition and therefore not required to actually act. They are in the privileged position where they can fan the fire, lean back comfortably and watch the place burn. No action required from their part.
Dealing with the topic is very complex not only due to the laws we have agreed to abide to, due to the "Rechtsstaat" ("constitutional state").
If it were by me, I wouldn't mind if they get to rule for one term, just for them to then display their inability to solve the problems they've been "criticizing" the entire time, but due to their stance regarding the Russian war – handing over Ukraine to Russia in exchange for cheap gas, like it used to be – and their right extremist views, they're absolutely untenable.
Do you really think that it was the AfD which moved Lindner to push the idea of looking for ways to impede migrants to send money back to their families? I doubt so. Not even two weeks ago our city had a citizen conversation to discuss the problems we are facing with the influx of migrants. This is the way to deal with these issues, and no AfD is required for this. It doesn't take an AfD to acknowledge the problems, they are not getting ignored.
> What do you think will happen if you start introducing harder clamps on free speech?
Using AI to help with more civilized discussions is not "introducing harder clamps on free speech".
> lügenpresse
Refusing to talk about a certain angle of a problem would constitute as censorship IMHO
> using AI to help with more civilized discussions…
Who decides the boundaries of civilized discussion? Some central authority like the EU? Sounds incredibly dangerous and prone to power hijacks
Walking is relatively good because you can only injure yourself so much going so slow.
Allowing people to drive cars for the sake of going faster to places is not a good thing.
> HN is relatively so good because there are clear and enforced guardrails around what a conversation looks like.
Hah, I think you'll find if you ask around that a surprisingly large number of people (especially liberal women) would be horrified at the discussions here. It's full of anonymous people furiously disagreeing with each other about everything, and full of arguments like "you're wrong because <facts>".
If you accidentally wander into the ultra-liberal hacker blogosphere, the sort of places where everyone uses anime avatars and half of them are furries, you'll find a lot of hatred for HN and a belief that it's no different to /pol/. Some of them even block links from HN.
So this distinction you're looking for doesn't really exist. If you support censorship you'll find they come for you next.
/pol/ is low quality, but it’s existence is probably good for the world.
The way this is phrased sounds like absolute relativism: no truth really exists, everything is relative, every opinion is as relevant as any other.
This is a dangerous perspective, and often used to give too much focus to fringe opinions that do not merit that much attention.
Your username is waihtis on hn, 2+2 is 4 in mainstream mathematics, not true equals false in boolean logic, and the sun will rise tomorrow are all truths. People arguing against these truths better have a compelling argument, or they can be safely ignored. That is not censorship, but a thoughtful use of our time.
Aka, you are free to speak your mind, but you are not entitled to people listening. No one owes a platform to fringe opinions because of free speech.
Even American civic debate culture is heavily centered around limitations on how to present an argument. Polarity in itself isn't what matters in productive discourse, it's truthfulness, factfulness, lack of bad faith argument style, and so on.
Anyone who is interested in debate producing truth rather than being a sort of entropy entertainment machine must value civility. People can be completely polarized and argue complete nonsense, there is no value in it whatsoever. The literal site we are having this conversation on right now is very strongly moderated when it comes to civility and avoiding needless polarization, but HN is not censorship maximalist. It's ironic to try to argue this especially here.