I tried smaller internet for discussion like lemmy and mastodon, it’s either boring or equally as toxic. Makes me think we’ve been conditioned to expect a ton of content and get upset easily. Both can be true. Blogs has been more interesting as often seen here.
Assuming the key points are valid (they seem reasonable), I'd argue that we'd probably be in a better position with social media if it weren't for the platforms taking on managing our interactions with others. If people had their own software/agents that would filter according to your own needs, we'd likely see less toxicity - but this comes tumbling down as I suspect the platforms would see a dent in their monetisation, and so naturally they wouldn't be in favour.
Ads companies like google and facebook make their core business to put ads on your face. Same as, someone pays them loads of money for them to show you ads, so you can buy things you don't want or need.
So when you use any of their "products", you are the product. This is nothing new. I hope that is not new to you.
That said, their business spy also is good for spy agencies, so they take care of each other's business.
And please don't ever say "social media" or "social plataforms" because those are not social. Those are indeed anti-social platforms. You can call them that.
Take a look at twitter and what is has become. It was already bad.
we live in a society where we can't really voice, our opinions or grievances towards specific groups or cultures or issues as it is deemed politically incorrect, so a lot of that has moved online, behind anonymity. Anonymity also plays an amplifying role. Larping as the target group and in many instances it becomes even easier to manipulate this much is true, but this is the price of forcing all of the healthy debates away from the off-line world because we fear offending.
The contrast between the online off-line world that the author in the article alludes to is indicative of this. It's the unspoken role where we all know that speaking out has consequences often that impacts are economic well-being. There would be no way to get farm something for which there is no demand for...
I find it nearly impossible to avoid divisive content online. There are so many cool things in the world, but I can't find them because my timelines are all flooded with culture war. I wish I could find a platform that would listen to me when I say "show fewer posts like this."
Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 40 years ago when discussing online forums:
>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.
This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew.
That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people with actual mental illness; think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.
[1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here
The result of leveraging one-to-many persuasive marketing-type efforts until its footprint encroaches on an unleveraged many-to-many ecosystem bad enough to compromise former utility more & more as technology advances.
As opposed to mainstream users who should be gaining more from the same underlying infrastructure as improvements in technology occur. Which should theoretically have continued happening but it got reversed by overwhelming force.
Outrage is the most valuable emotion a piece of online content can inspire.
If you enjoy something, you’ll like/heart/upvote it and move on. But if it outrages you, chances are you’ll go straight to the comment section to argue. Maybe you’ll repost it with your own take to show everyone how much you disagree.
More „engagement” = more time to shove ads in your face = a nice juicy bonus for the ad execs who run all the websites now.
This article is rife with wishful thinking and honestly I don't know if society has ever been as harmonious as I feel like it alleges. As if there was a time where everyone just got along and things were great and you could get an egg cream for a quarter after the sock hop.
I seriously question whether there was ever a time where the masses weren't influenced by "a few people", for better or worse.
The numbers don't move me and can't be the sole arbitrator of truth when the direction of humanity is involved.
So while I'm not surprised that people report feeling less inclined toward inflammatory media after disengaging it, I just don't believe that there is a grand collective that we can return to that is free from the influential few.
The issue is that there are many masses and many fews at odds to find their pair and wont to view the others as the outrageous ones.
People can hardly curate outfits at their own discretion. They're going to defer to people who are deferring to what amounts to a cell of 3-4 guys linked to a larger apparatus of taste to find out what to wear, what to watch and what to think.
That's just the way it is.
The average person is well-meaning and reasonable up unto the this eerie point in their life where they feel existentially threatened and thrust on the stage of public opinion for the criticism of others.
So I think that suggesting that society isn't toxic in it's current form and all it is is that we're just viewing the world through this funhouse lens because of a few bad guys on social media is a conceited perspective because the world as it is indeed is a carnival of ideas surrounding the marketplace and the internet is its pavilion, not its public square.
And to dare to suggest that there is in fact one single true direction for people to choose demands contending against all the goofy ways people are turning and admitting that things are as bad as they appear, in spite of whatever ways we can come up with to assume the good faith of the common man.
The irony is that this same outlet will unapologetically make its bones off the incessant reporting on all the ways that society is under peril. Sometimes obscuring these reports with solicitations to fund this effort.
The answer is yes, and also yes towards that question for most other media. The fact propaganda is an industry is the issue. As soon as you have a population of people of sufficient mass, it becomes worthwhile to invest in attempting to influence the mindshare in some way towards a profitable end. This will be true for as long as we make use of propaganda for selling products, controlling votes, and how people think and behave. People might think it is only for the masses, but given their individual value you can probably be sure that all influential people in this world are also propagandized into making decisions that benefit other latent interests.
I'm not sure how you get out of the fact that game theory suggests there will always be people operating selfishly like this and reaping benefit from it as such. You see it in ecosystems too. It is a perfectly valid evolutionary strategy to learn to rob a nest vs making your own way. The question is how we balance these realities about our animal selves and even try and counter them for collectively beneficial reasons, that also won't just be subverted for someone else. Especially as technology grows to be more esoteric and powerful in the future.
The author is describing the socially (and physically) destructive percentage of the population who just want to grab power through manipulation and control and the way they express this through social media, I believe (dark triad personality disorders, loosely). The only danger I see is an embrace of passivism in the form of “anyone who objects to things that are happening in passionate terms is the real problem.” Which would be even worse, when that percentage has real power, and real ability to pull levers. Not to say everyone should go around screaming or protesting with every tweet, etc. It's the balance of these things I think is off-kilter, not a simple solution “just act aloof and block the right people, and all will be well in the world, just like it is in Starbucks when I leave my apartment each morning.” In any case, that's my two cents. There's a balance to be struck, that this article doesn't really get at.
> When I scroll through social media, I often leave demoralized, with the sense that the entire world is on fire and people are inflamed with hatred towards one another. Yet, when I step outside into the streets of New York City to grab a coffee or meet a friend for lunch, it feels downright tranquil.
Alternative explanation: The online world is "real" and the real-life interactions are "fake", at least as far as political opinions are concerned.
The social conventions for online and face-to-face interactions are still markedly different (with good reason). When face-to-face, we generally care a lot more about maintaining a pleasant conversational environment and usually avoid things that would insult or hurt the person we are talking with. The focus is also a lot more about everyday issues and a lot less about abstract political topics like it would be online.
All of this means that face-to-face, we will probably talk a lot less about divisive political topics than we would do online.
But it does not mean we have fewer opinions on those topics, only that we won't show them so easily.
So it could be that the online discourse really is a truthful mirror of the political division of society, only that in real life, those divisions are much more hidden behind layers of politeness.
It's totally not true that only a small number of people are spreading all the contrarian ideas online.
I remember where was some media coverage about 'The disinformation dozen' during COVID; what a load of rubbish. How can anyone believe this? In a world with billions of people connected to the internet, only 12 are spreading disinformation? This is impossible. There are surely at least 100 North Korean agents working full time being paid to spread non-stop disinformation... This is a really conservative guess. Now do that for every country who have a beef against the west you probably have tens of thousands of people being paid to spread disinformation. Then you probably have thousands of people spreading disinformation as a way to promote their books... Then you probably have millions of institutional insiders spreading various bits of contrarian information once in a while (which would be mislabeled as disinformation). It's not a small number of people either way. It's a LOT of people... Suggesting that it's only 12 people is comically wrong! I'm sorry but if you ever believed that, you need to adjust your worldview because you've been living in a bubble. It's not only physically impossible statistically, it's literally impossible to measure so you'd be wrong just for accepting any fixed number (let alone a tiny number)...
The mainstream view is a simplified view and so there will always be people who can see fundamental flaws in parts of the mainstream argument because they have deeper knowledge on certain aspects than a journalist has. Mainstream news is written by journalists, they never know quite as much as the insiders. So anytime a news article is published, there will be a small number of people out there who know the full story and they will be surprised at the discrepancies between the story and their first-hand experience of it. If you're an expert in anything, it's likely a matter of time before you come across some media story about your field which you know doesn't quite correspond to reality. Once you experience that, it makes you doubt all media coverage of other fields too. It's just a fact that the media isn't fully accurate. It doesn't matter how reputable the organization is; they have a near monopoly so this allows them to add a lot of spin and make a lot of 'mistakes'.
I would love it if there were a part of the internet where a) one person = one account and non-person accounts were somehow labeled. Kind of how south korea does it. But you know, better.
And b) i could block that one person on each platform with one click on all my accounts, including screenshots of their posts.
In real life i know the person talking to me is a unique individual and not one of several duplicate persons bc of physical limitations.
Wishful thinking: we are reaching that point where AI could solve this instead of AI just making the issue worse.
Technical question - they say people felt 23pc less animosity. Assuming their measurements are okay, what would the statistical power of this experiment ? I dont think they report a null hypothesis.
42 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 57.7 ms ] threadhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23522...
Assuming the key points are valid (they seem reasonable), I'd argue that we'd probably be in a better position with social media if it weren't for the platforms taking on managing our interactions with others. If people had their own software/agents that would filter according to your own needs, we'd likely see less toxicity - but this comes tumbling down as I suspect the platforms would see a dent in their monetisation, and so naturally they wouldn't be in favour.
And please don't ever say "social media" or "social plataforms" because those are not social. Those are indeed anti-social platforms. You can call them that.
Take a look at twitter and what is has become. It was already bad.
Many many people were vaccine hesitant. It was not a false perception that many were hesitant.
I spent a lot of time with friends and family convincing them how to think about the risks and to convince them to take the vaccine.
The contrast between the online off-line world that the author in the article alludes to is indicative of this. It's the unspoken role where we all know that speaking out has consequences often that impacts are economic well-being. There would be no way to get farm something for which there is no demand for...
>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.
This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew.
That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people with actual mental illness; think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.
[1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here
Illustration: (Emily's Quotes)
https://emilysquotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/capitali...
The Internet's Original Sin It's not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web. [0]
By Ethan Zuckerman
The Internet Apologizes [1]
Even those who designed our digital world are aghast at what they created. A breakdown of what went wrong — from the architects who built it.
By Noah Kulwin
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/adver...
[0] https://archive.is/NxfXW
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/an-apology-for-the-i...
Just think about how embarrassing some friends or family can be. Think about why you went online in the first place.
And rising.
The result of leveraging one-to-many persuasive marketing-type efforts until its footprint encroaches on an unleveraged many-to-many ecosystem bad enough to compromise former utility more & more as technology advances.
As opposed to mainstream users who should be gaining more from the same underlying infrastructure as improvements in technology occur. Which should theoretically have continued happening but it got reversed by overwhelming force.
If you enjoy something, you’ll like/heart/upvote it and move on. But if it outrages you, chances are you’ll go straight to the comment section to argue. Maybe you’ll repost it with your own take to show everyone how much you disagree. More „engagement” = more time to shove ads in your face = a nice juicy bonus for the ad execs who run all the websites now.
I seriously question whether there was ever a time where the masses weren't influenced by "a few people", for better or worse.
The numbers don't move me and can't be the sole arbitrator of truth when the direction of humanity is involved.
So while I'm not surprised that people report feeling less inclined toward inflammatory media after disengaging it, I just don't believe that there is a grand collective that we can return to that is free from the influential few.
The issue is that there are many masses and many fews at odds to find their pair and wont to view the others as the outrageous ones.
People can hardly curate outfits at their own discretion. They're going to defer to people who are deferring to what amounts to a cell of 3-4 guys linked to a larger apparatus of taste to find out what to wear, what to watch and what to think.
That's just the way it is.
The average person is well-meaning and reasonable up unto the this eerie point in their life where they feel existentially threatened and thrust on the stage of public opinion for the criticism of others.
So I think that suggesting that society isn't toxic in it's current form and all it is is that we're just viewing the world through this funhouse lens because of a few bad guys on social media is a conceited perspective because the world as it is indeed is a carnival of ideas surrounding the marketplace and the internet is its pavilion, not its public square.
And to dare to suggest that there is in fact one single true direction for people to choose demands contending against all the goofy ways people are turning and admitting that things are as bad as they appear, in spite of whatever ways we can come up with to assume the good faith of the common man.
The irony is that this same outlet will unapologetically make its bones off the incessant reporting on all the ways that society is under peril. Sometimes obscuring these reports with solicitations to fund this effort.
I'm not sure how you get out of the fact that game theory suggests there will always be people operating selfishly like this and reaping benefit from it as such. You see it in ecosystems too. It is a perfectly valid evolutionary strategy to learn to rob a nest vs making your own way. The question is how we balance these realities about our animal selves and even try and counter them for collectively beneficial reasons, that also won't just be subverted for someone else. Especially as technology grows to be more esoteric and powerful in the future.
Alternative explanation: The online world is "real" and the real-life interactions are "fake", at least as far as political opinions are concerned.
The social conventions for online and face-to-face interactions are still markedly different (with good reason). When face-to-face, we generally care a lot more about maintaining a pleasant conversational environment and usually avoid things that would insult or hurt the person we are talking with. The focus is also a lot more about everyday issues and a lot less about abstract political topics like it would be online.
All of this means that face-to-face, we will probably talk a lot less about divisive political topics than we would do online.
But it does not mean we have fewer opinions on those topics, only that we won't show them so easily.
So it could be that the online discourse really is a truthful mirror of the political division of society, only that in real life, those divisions are much more hidden behind layers of politeness.
I remember where was some media coverage about 'The disinformation dozen' during COVID; what a load of rubbish. How can anyone believe this? In a world with billions of people connected to the internet, only 12 are spreading disinformation? This is impossible. There are surely at least 100 North Korean agents working full time being paid to spread non-stop disinformation... This is a really conservative guess. Now do that for every country who have a beef against the west you probably have tens of thousands of people being paid to spread disinformation. Then you probably have thousands of people spreading disinformation as a way to promote their books... Then you probably have millions of institutional insiders spreading various bits of contrarian information once in a while (which would be mislabeled as disinformation). It's not a small number of people either way. It's a LOT of people... Suggesting that it's only 12 people is comically wrong! I'm sorry but if you ever believed that, you need to adjust your worldview because you've been living in a bubble. It's not only physically impossible statistically, it's literally impossible to measure so you'd be wrong just for accepting any fixed number (let alone a tiny number)...
The mainstream view is a simplified view and so there will always be people who can see fundamental flaws in parts of the mainstream argument because they have deeper knowledge on certain aspects than a journalist has. Mainstream news is written by journalists, they never know quite as much as the insiders. So anytime a news article is published, there will be a small number of people out there who know the full story and they will be surprised at the discrepancies between the story and their first-hand experience of it. If you're an expert in anything, it's likely a matter of time before you come across some media story about your field which you know doesn't quite correspond to reality. Once you experience that, it makes you doubt all media coverage of other fields too. It's just a fact that the media isn't fully accurate. It doesn't matter how reputable the organization is; they have a near monopoly so this allows them to add a lot of spin and make a lot of 'mistakes'.
And b) i could block that one person on each platform with one click on all my accounts, including screenshots of their posts.
In real life i know the person talking to me is a unique individual and not one of several duplicate persons bc of physical limitations.
Wishful thinking: we are reaching that point where AI could solve this instead of AI just making the issue worse.