[HN Gopher] The internet wants to be fragmented
___________________________________________________________________
The internet wants to be fragmented
Author : miletus
Score : 224 points
Date : 2023-01-01 12:37 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (noahpinion.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (noahpinion.substack.com)
| superkuh wrote:
| Hah. Good joke website gets the point across. I cannot connect to
| or load https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-internet-wants-to-
| be-f... from my comcast home IP. I can only load it by tunneling
| through one of my VPSes. Definitely fragmentation.
| [deleted]
| jacooper wrote:
| The entire problem lies with the twisted motives of social media.
|
| They don't want to make you happy or feel good, they want money,
| at all costs which results in you being angry and toxic.
|
| I agree with this article in general, and think that its worth it
| to spend time arguing with people you care about rather some
| rando on twitter.
|
| community run _communities_ will probably have a resurge, the
| problem is the tech barrier, we have already seen how mastodon is
| seen as to complex or has "horrid UX" for normal users.
|
| So I doubt anything will change for the mainstream, techies and
| other geeky communities might go to mastodon or create a forum,
| but normal users won't bother doing any of this.
| mindslight wrote:
| > _The entire problem lies with the twisted motives of social
| media_
|
| Exactly! I myself do not identify with " _we take the internet
| wherever we go, and its little colored icons are always
| beckoning, telling us to abandon whoever we're talking to or
| whatever we're working on and check the latest posts._ "
|
| This is due to a few things. First, having long established
| pattern of using desktop computers / laptops, revealing "smart"
| phones as frustratingly limited devices. I can tap out maybe
| 5wpm on a mobile device, perhaps 10-20wpm if it has swipe
| input. Yet on a familiar keyboard, I can do upwards of
| 120-140wpm. That's an order of magnitude difference, with the
| qualitative difference of being able to type at the speed I am
| thinking.
|
| This means when I'm using a mobile device, I'm only using it
| begrudgingly because I'm away from a real computer and need to
| solve a problem. If I'm hanging out with friends and someone
| else texts me, basically the last thing I want to do is take my
| phone out of my pocket, focus on a tiny screen, and start
| plodding along tapping out characters. This behavior descends
| from having mobile computing devices much earlier than most
| people (laptop and palm pilot around Y2k), when it was not
| socially accepted to ignore the people you're with and play
| with your device.
|
| The second is that for a long time I used a phone running
| Lineage/microG, with only software from F-droid. Free software
| is designed with its main goal of helping the user accomplish
| their own goals, rather than the perverse incentive of
| proprietary web/apps that treat the user as a subject to be
| sucked in for as long as possible ("engagement"). If I take my
| phone out of my pocket to use the calendar or calculator or
| whatever, it's not like I then want to continue scrolling
| through my calendar or dividing numbers. If I take my phone out
| to show someone some photos, that is a real-world social
| activity. Both are limited stimulation based on tasks that can
| be finished, rather than the endless drip-drip of social media.
|
| Sadly I stopped using that phone due to the early 4G shutdown
| in the US, and I have yet to find a good device to replace it.
| I've been using a throwaway "full take" Android that the
| carrier sent me for free, but my usage patterns have basically
| stayed the same. When I'm home, I generally leave that phone
| near the door since I have no use for it until I go out again.
|
| Of course it's easy for me to say this - the difficult part is
| how to kick one's own addiction to the always-on proprietary
| software hellhole. I'd propose a large part of this is
| segmenting your usage across different physical devices -
| despite the universality of computation, having one or two
| devices that encompass all of simple tasks like checking the
| weather, employment, personal productivity, creativity, active
| relaxation, and passive relaxation is an anti-pattern. It
| simply blurs the lines too much.
|
| Get at least one new device, ideally running only Free
| software, but at the bare minimum you need to not install any
| of the corporate willpower-destroying apps. You can still keep
| your "trash" device with all those apps you can't imagine
| living without, but silence the notifications and leave it on a
| desk/coffee table/etc. Only check on it occasionally, like
| daily or when you're relaxing at night or when you need to
| accomplish a specific task on one of the corporate dopamine
| apps.
| jacooper wrote:
| > Sadly I stopped using that phone due to the early 4G
| shutdown in the US, and I have yet to find a good device to
| replace it.
|
| A pixel with GrapheneOS or Calyx.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Adding to this, having run small communities I can see
| platforms like Mastodon growing into Twitter albeit with a
| different twist of behavior but eventually becoming equally
| toxic, just a different flavor of toxic.
|
| I believe one of the root causes is that the internet basically
| connected billions of people from many different cultures into
| one big pool without any arbiter mechanisms which is bound to
| get ugly fast. In this regard I agree with the article that the
| internet wants to be segmented. Mastodon will probably start
| with silos of similar thinking people but as it grows they too
| will run into culture clashes leading to groups of people being
| silenced. Then some other platform will come along to make
| smaller silos or tribes and this pattern will repeat.
| fleddr wrote:
| I think Mastodon has the tendency to grow into the opposite
| extreme of toxicity: fragility. People as well as instances
| are very generously blocked, leading to perfectly peaceful
| bubbles.
|
| Which are not that great. There's almost perfect ideological
| agreement...but not really. A handful of people dominate
| conversation by posting frequently whilst the rest barely
| engages and/or is afraid to speak their mind.
|
| As an example, on a fairly large Mastodon instance I saw a
| popular user claiming how we should still wear masks. There
| were a few dozen replies, all in perfect agreement.
|
| That's truly bizarre, as this is a topic that people have
| strong opinions on across the entire political landscape.
| Even amidst just progressives, there's no uniform consensus,
| granted people are free to speak their minds without
| repercussions. The fact that there wasn't even a hint of
| disagreement or nuance I find telling.
|
| So I agree with your point, this too is a type of toxicity,
| just a different flavor. Fragility, toxic positivity, I'm not
| sure what to call it, but it's not healthy.
|
| Another fun opposite effect (in comparison to Twitter) to
| reason about is algorithms and amplification. Mastodon has
| very little of that which is considered good. It's a more
| "organic" social network.
|
| Quite a few users will discover though that an organic social
| network makes the chance of getting engagement on your posts
| even harder than it already was. Just getting your post seen
| at all is a challenge, and building somewhat of a following
| can takes months if not years of purposeful effort. This
| means that for the typical user, the feeling that you're
| screaming into the void will be common, leaving the question:
| why post at all?
| jacooper wrote:
| But is that limited to just Mastodon?
|
| That happens on other social media to avoid getting banned.
|
| One example is anything showing disagreement with LGBTQ
| movement from the east, no matter how much you think that
| is a done thing, it definitely not, especially there.
| fleddr wrote:
| No, I think the effect of "toxic positivity" is found
| wherever you create a small community, whether that be
| Reddit, Mastodon, or anything else.
|
| Toxic positivity isn't necessarily about banning, it's
| rather "soft silencing" within the bubble. Those most
| ideologically active dominate the network and discourage
| any type of dissent.
|
| To stick with my mask example. There's absolutely no
| consensus within progressive circles that mandatory
| masking should make a comeback. So there should be
| significant debate even within the progressive bubble.
| But there is none. Zero. That likely means that a lot of
| people in the bubble disagree yet are afraid to express
| that.
| lapcat wrote:
| > A handful of people dominate conversation by posting
| frequently whilst the rest barely engages and/or is afraid
| to speak their mind.
|
| This is true of Twitter too.
|
| > Just getting your post seen at all is a challenge, and
| building somewhat of a following can takes months if not
| years of purposeful effort. This means that for the typical
| user, the feeling that you're screaming into the void will
| be common, leaving the question: why post at all?
|
| I've also felt this is true of Twitter.
|
| > As an example, on a fairly large Mastodon instance I saw
| a popular user claiming how we should still wear masks.
| There were a few dozen replies, all in perfect agreement.
|
| Maybe people aren't there for debate club? I personally
| joined Twitter, and Mastodon, for tech. In fact I first
| joined Twitter for a tech conference. I have very little
| interest in debating political and social issues on social
| media. I muted/blocked all that stuff on Twitter and will
| do so if necessary on Mastodon.
|
| There are too many people on Twitter who are just looking
| for a fight. A lot of us aren't interested at that at all,
| and would rather just participate congenially in a shared
| interest. If that's a "bubble", then I'm happy to be a
| bubble boy.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| _toxic positivity_
|
| Positively toxic echo chambers. I think you summed it up
| perfectly. I've seen what you described occur in the past
| on other chat platforms and forums. Mostly forums. People
| that think alike get some high rank and access to private
| sub-forums and people that have thoughts not aligned with
| the tribe start to think the forum is no longer being used.
| Not sure how that would translate into the Mastodon
| platform.
| krapp wrote:
| Meh. What's wrong with not wanting every online space I
| inhabit to be embroiled in ceaseless no-holds-barred
| political and social warfare? If I want that, it's easy
| to find, it doesn't have to be everywhere.
| fleddr wrote:
| I think today it translates into every platform due to
| the highly polarized political landscape. This sorts
| people into just 2 buckets, after which each bucket is
| dominated by radicals or semi-radicals.
|
| That's why I dislike the term "bubble", because it fails
| to describe the inner working of the bubble. It suggests
| that it is uniform and consensus-based, whilst instead
| they are ran by an autocratic elite that "softly" silence
| dissent. By making dissent costly.
|
| The state of online conversation: 50% of the population
| is evil. Luckily I'm in the good 50%, which is full of
| terrible ideas but I can't afford to challenge them.
| poszlem wrote:
| You can already see that. If you think Twitter moderation is
| arbitrary or weird, clearly you haven't seen some of the
| popular Mastodon servers. Meet the new boss same as the old
| boss.
| jacooper wrote:
| The difference, as the article mentions, is that you can
| just leave. You can follow the same content from another
| instance with other rules and not be effected by any of the
| weird laws on the main mastodon instance.
| ilyt wrote:
| > The entire problem lies with the twisted motives of social
| media.
|
| Just media. Social media might be latest iteration, but
| traditional media works the same way, outrage gets you views or
| sells your newspaper.
| jacooper wrote:
| The difference is normal media isn't the main conversations
| space for many people, social media is.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| Written on substack no less...
| hypfer wrote:
| And yet you participate in society
| doublepg23 wrote:
| I think it's reasonable to say federated blogging platforms
| are a solved problem in 2022 (2023!) I don't think this is
| analogous to debates about economic systems.
| smitty1e wrote:
| "Fragmented" is not "eradicated".
|
| The Famous Article:
|
| > Why did this happen to the centralized internet when it
| hadn't happened to the decentralized internet of previous
| decades?
|
| The reason is that people scale poorly. Dunbar's Number[1] is a
| thing, and every human effort in physical- or cyber-space,
| sacred or profane, tends toward a Tower of Babel[2] over time.
|
| Those that conform to Gall's Law[3] may prove relatively
| durable.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
|
| [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel
|
| [3]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_la...
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| > The reason is that people scale poorly.
|
| I would propose that humans scale magnificently.
|
| Our need for belonging and our propensity for conflict has
| spread us to all the corners of the earth and it continues to
| keep us there.
|
| Great from the collective perspective if you want to see
| humanity as a whole survive.
|
| Not so great for those who suffer from the conflict though.
| smitty1e wrote:
| >> The reason is that people scale poorly.
|
| > I would propose that humans scale magnificently.
|
| Certainly, apex predator on the food chain. But that is a
| different point than the human organizational one I was
| going after.
| frereubu wrote:
| I'm not sure this was anything new, even when the original tweet
| was posted. I remember back in around 2000 when someone put up a
| page on a random domain that simply said "Well done, you have
| reached the end of the internet. You can now go outside." It was
| early enough that people could still remember when one person
| could have visited most sites on the internet, but that was long
| enough ago that it was clearly impossible to do again. I remember
| reading that page when someone sent it to me and feeling a deep
| sense of relief at the idea, even though I knew it was
| impossible.
| aWidebrant wrote:
| "Why did such a bland observation resonate with so many people?"
|
| Asked and answered.
| TobyTheDog123 wrote:
| This is a brilliantly potent and beautifully written article, and
| plan on sourcing it on an upcoming business plan of mine.
| borski wrote:
| We should chat, because I plan on doing the same. Email's in my
| profile. :)
| INeedMoreRam wrote:
| [dead]
| Puts wrote:
| Now the article was only talking about twitter and social media,
| but I can't help react on the title since there really is no
| evidence at all of internet wanting to be fragmented. In fact
| it's just the opposite.
|
| - Not even the most hardcore people are using IRC anymore
|
| - All web hosting is now in the cloud
|
| - There's basically only two rendering engines left, of which one
| is at the moment extremely marginalized
|
| - GIT that was supposed to be distributed is now used as a
| centralized versioning system in centralized services.
|
| If anything it seems that the internet wants to be consolidated.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I rarely use IRC any more and I used to run some small IRC
| servers. Most moved to Discord but I refuse to use such
| platforms for their abuse of retaining both text and voice
| transcription chat history forever. Discord voice transcription
| can run silently in any public or private channel and nobody
| can prove otherwise. This was not impossible on IRC but far
| less likely. Public channels were recorded with publicly
| visible bots that had permission to be in the channel. Some
| IRCD's had modules that would allow a NetAdmin to monitor
| private chats but that can be mitigated with clients that
| support OTR.
|
| Nowadays if I need to spin up a chat with people I know I just
| give them a shell function that utilizes a self-hosted instance
| of devzat. # uncensored chat using self
| hosted https://github.com/quackduck/devzat.git # add to
| .bashrc or /etc/profile.d/functions.sh on a VM somewhere
| function chat() { # make us a temporary
| nickname Name=$(base64 /dev/urandom | tr -d '/+' | dd
| bs=12 count=1 2>/dev/null) # make us a temporary throw
| away ssh key. key is our ID. ssh-keygen -q -t rsa -b
| 2048 -N "" -C "${Name}" -f ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}" # add
| +ssh-rsa in the event client restricts weaker ciphers
| ssh -i ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}" -p 22 -4 -o "HostkeyAlgorithms
| +ssh-rsa" -o "PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes +ssh-rsa"
| "${Name}"@23.239.0.70 rm -vf ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}"
| ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}".pub }
|
| If things go sideways I just nuke that instance and what little
| chat history the daemon had is gone.
| ilyt wrote:
| Uh, IRC didn't even had encryption and anyone in IRC chat can
| still record everything just fine. That's so weird thing to
| have issue with.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| IRC has had encryption for a very long time. IRCS is
| typically on port 6697 but some admins also have it listen
| on 443 for people behind fascist firewalls.
|
| _anyone in IRC chat can still record everything just fine_
|
| I addressed this. Yes, someone can invite a bot in a
| channel they control and the channel operators can kick/ban
| a bot. Also people can achieve E2EE encryption using OTR.
| So in fact there are two layers of encryption, one of which
| individuals control and the IRC admin has no visibility
| into. There is an unsupported OTR custom client for Discord
| but it is against the terms of service.
|
| Discord on the other hand has visibility into everything
| and no way for users to know this. Anything said on Discord
| in text or voice is a permanent transcription record.
| People are made to believe they can delete messages, but
| they are just flagged as deleted in Cassandra.
|
| If I want a private voice conversation with someone or a
| group, I invite them to my private uMurmur server. There
| are clients for workstations and cell phones. Some people
| won't use such things and those are not people I would
| likely ever talk to anyway.
| vasqw wrote:
| >IRC has had encryption for a very long time. IRCS is
| typically on port 6697 but some admins also have it
| listen on 443 for people behind fascist firewalls.
|
| Transit encryption maybe, but admins can still read
| everything.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Yup like I mentioned there are modules that allow
| snooping. This is why if people truly want privacy they
| need to use a client that supports OTR add-ons providing
| end-to-end encryption. Pidgin is one of them.
|
| Another option would be for each small circle of friends
| to run their own uMurmur or ngircd servers, then at worst
| the admin would spy on their friends. ngircd can be spun
| up in a few minutes, even faster if one already has some
| LetsEncrypt keys for a domain. uMurmur can also be spun
| up super fast on a linux home router.
| quackduck wrote:
| Hiii, I'm the person who made devzat.
|
| Devzat supports a "private" mode in which only some IDs you
| specify in the config file are allowed to join. In that mode,
| it disables the 16 message backlog on #main too. It seems
| like that would be a good option for you, but it looks like
| you're having the people you know gen new SSH keys every time
| (which is what IDs are based on). I'm curious why.
|
| Would you have liked a standalone preference for whether to
| have a backlog? What features would you like / what things
| could be improved?
|
| Always interesting to see how devzat is being used.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| _but it looks like you 're having the people you know gen
| new SSH keys every time_
|
| This is just an example of an ephemeral implementation of
| your chat system. Spin up a node, have some people play
| around with it, communicate whatever they wish then destroy
| the node _in the sense of destroying a VM_. One could
| certainly leave it running and people could use persistent
| ssh keys like you do on your instance. Using ephemeral ssh
| keys implies more aspect of anonymity assuming one connects
| from a short-lived VM. People could of course adjust my
| example shell function to not remove keys and to use a
| persistent nick-name.
|
| _Would you have liked a standalone preference for whether
| to have a backlog?_
|
| That sounds like a great feature/configuration option.
| Maybe even allow a admin-defined backlog size for people
| that want persistent instances.
|
| _What features would you like / what things could be
| improved?_
|
| I think it is great as-is but that is just my personal
| take. For me, simpler is better. I appreciate that you
| added a configuration to disable external integrations.
| Less specific to devzat but more specific to golang would
| be to have default compile-time hardening options. I am
| impressed with how nice you made it look with the color
| schemes.
|
| Perhaps others here will play around with it and offer
| suggestions. SSH based chat is not super popular which
| really surprises me. I could see devzat being an amazing
| fall-back for a private chat inside a company when Slack or
| Discord are having a moment or for those times when people
| want to say something that isn't recorded forever and
| especially not visible to their management. I think it
| would also be amazing for people in oppressive regimes that
| block access to all the mainstream chat platforms but allow
| SSH to specific VPS providers.
| TobyTheDog123 wrote:
| These are all false equivalencies, as you're talking technology
| and implementation instead of a consumer product or idea. The
| author is talking about centralization of moderation and
| audience, not how it's hosted or how that moderation/audience
| is presented to the user
|
| People moved off of IRC because it was inconvenient for less-
| technical users, it is far easier to just download an app. That
| doesn't mean they want those apps to be centralized, or don't
| want their social media to be fragmented so they're talking to
| only like-minded individuals.
|
| It is 100% possible that someone creates a technologically-
| centralized app that allows for a decentralized audience and
| moderation. I'm not aware of anyone doing this though.
| borski wrote:
| I agree, but I'd also argue discord or Slack does this, in
| the same way that IRC did; you essentially spin up separate
| servers and thus separate communities. Sure, it's still
| hosted by a central entity, but the moderation and discourse
| is all yours to manage.
| TobyTheDog123 wrote:
| I have _no_ idea how I blanked on Discord. To me Slack
| still screams "business tool" and "only business tool,"
| but you're very much right regardless.
|
| There's also Reddit (to an extent)
| poszlem wrote:
| I think the reason why you disagree is because you mean a
| different thing by "the internet".
|
| "The internet" - the corporate internet. "The internet" -
| normal people on the internet. "The internet" - etc.
| api wrote:
| People don't use IRC anymore because there are better open
| alternatives like Matrix and ActivityPub based systems. Those
| are what the "hard core" people use.
|
| As for the cloud there are loads of clouds. Web sites can be
| moved. Same with git hosting which just provides a convenient
| place to store the repo and post meta data like issues. Moving
| from GitHub to Gitea or GitLab is usually pretty easy.
|
| More and more people seem to be at least trying a less
| centralized approach. Personally I think we passed peak
| centralization in the middle 20-teens when there were just a
| few social platforms everyone used and federated stuff was
| primitive and new. We are well into the beginning of the
| unbundling phase.
| Wazako wrote:
| What is important is, as the article says, "to be allowed to
| leave", this consists in having alternatives.
|
| - The web hosting is in the cloud, but if it's easy to change
| it, what's the problem?
|
| - Git a url and you can easily change the central backup server
| point.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| One of the most frightening bits of social science/philosophy I
| heard came from Slavoj Zizek, because it's about harbingers of
| big change.
|
| I have tried in vain to find a written reference. It's buried
| within some of his often tediously tangential talks - but I would
| love to know if any former Yugoslavians can attest to the truth
| or falsity of it.
|
| Zizek said that the former Yugoslavia was a tense but stable
| amalgam for decades in which good humour and brutally free speech
| - including "edgy but acceptable" racism - was permitted and even
| celebrated.
|
| Sometime before the 90s that changed, and a chilling taciturnity
| overcame the nation. The "politically correct" atmosphere was a
| lead up to civil war.
|
| It's possible Zizek completely misreads cause and effect. But I
| always take his point to be - as elementary psychoanalysis - that
| when people stop talking about how they really feel, it's the
| start of a road to trouble; jaw jaw jaw being better than war,
| war, war. The culture of faux "offence" created by Social media
| had definitely done the same to online discourse.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't know about the specific case of Yugoslavia, but I'd be
| incredibly wary of drawing any broader conclusions, even if it
| were a factor in that specific case.
|
| The US Civil War certainly had plenty of "jaw jaw jaw" before
| it, there was no "political correctness" at the time, and that
| didn't prevent it.
|
| Similarly we've had something like three and a half decades of
| "political correctness" in the US without any civil war yet
| (Jan 6 notwithstanding). While you'd think that if political
| correctness really had such a strong effect, there would have
| been a second civil war by the late 1990's.
|
| Not to mention that "jaw jaw jaw" can be the horrible hate
| speech that works to _incite_ war.
|
| If you look at history, the counterexamples seem incredibly
| more numerous. So hopefully we can feel less frightened by
| political correctness. :)
| Taek wrote:
| January 6th is a significant data point and shouldn't just be
| handwaved away. I've watched political correctness erode the
| dynamic of my own family, it's continuously sewing resent
| between people who have different angles of non-PC opinions.
| watwut wrote:
| Escalating racial and ethnic hate was lead up to war. Just
| like, before Russia attacked now, the anti Ukrainian propaganda
| went up.
|
| And before WWII, nazi went up with hate and their anti Jews
| language went up both in lead up to war and during ir,
| culminating in holocaust.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > Escalating racial and ethnic hate was lead up to war.
|
| That's exactly what I'd think. And historically I'd wager
| every well documented example shows it.
|
| And yet Zizek gave that as a first hand account (that's where
| he is from please correct me if I am wrong), and it's an
| intriguing hypothesis. Certainly an unpopular one judging by
| my immediate down-vote for even mentioning it (as an open
| question no less)
|
| I don't think he was talking about "hate". He was talking
| about open acceptance of difference. That's what it seems is
| getting ever less permissible - and that's what I find
| concerning.
|
| Can we no longer make that distinction? Are we too timid to
| even discuss that? Is that what social media has done to us?
| EZ-Cheeze wrote:
| It's going to be paradise when we can find our natural best
| friends AT SCALE
|
| Here's my second most recent idea on how to do it, haven't
| written up the latest yet:
|
| http://zeroprecedent.com/A%E2%9D%AF%E2%9D%AEON%20deck%20v.3....
| npilk wrote:
| Interesting concept but what seems more compelling to me would
| be more like a Tiktok/Reddit hybrid. You log in and see content
| that "the algorithm" knows you'll like, but with an added
| element of community from people "the algorithm" knows you'll
| find cool/funny/insightful/etc. Like a simulacrum of the
| Facebook feed but instead of friends and family it's this
| "tribe". No need for labels or even naming those people.
|
| Feels like this is what social media is trying to achieve
| anyway but they're mostly stuck with the existing social graph
| as a starting point...
| EZ-Cheeze wrote:
| I actually mention extremely good content aggregation in
| there, but more as a byproduct of good matching than as a way
| to arrive at it. But it really could work the other way
| around, with the things you and everyone else likes providing
| strong signal that can be correlated.
|
| I hope this is the year we all get a thousand true friends!
| Instant connection every time
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not
| only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric.
|
| Speaking up used to be something you do to change someone's mind
| or yours. What's the point in speaking up if nobody does anything
| with what you said?
|
| The like button reprogrammed people. They started getting
| positive feedback for speaking in an echo chamber, for saying and
| doing things their audience already agrees with. They started
| getting negative feedback for doing the thing language was
| designed for.
|
| Normal purposeful speech makes different opinions closer, while
| speech under the feedback of the like button makes similar
| opinions even closer and different opinions further apart.
|
| If the interaction stays the same of course fragmentation is
| inevitable - but that's not a good thing. This fragmentation
| extends to the real world and has real consequences. It will blow
| up. Even with Twitter being internally fragmented the
| polarization in society grew. Nobody wants to listen to the other
| side anymore, while there's always the most to be learned from
| listening to the other side.
|
| The core of the problem needs to be addressed: that social media
| has reprogrammed people to the purpose of speech.
|
| One of the reasons I'm even bothering with websites like HN as
| opposed to social media is because it still feels like there's a
| slight chance of making people change their minds here.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Finally, big geek brains are going to get applied to this
| problem. Maybe we can come up with some algorithms to improve
| this experience! I was hoping this demographic would do
| something to fix the problems created... the last time this
| demographic tried to fix this and created these problems. (
| glad to see such humility and self awareness on what made
| internet toxic in this discussion).
| hinkley wrote:
| Once in a while I'll say something snarky and get downvoted. I
| usually delete those because I'm not really adding to the
| dialog. But the world is full of uncomfortable truths, software
| doubly so (or at least, I can see more of them). It's humbling
| when people agree, irritating or amusing when they don't.
| Confusing when I say the same thing in two replies in one
| thread and one gets 25 downvotes while the other gets 35
| upvotes.
|
| My fake internet points go up every week whether I say
| something controversial or not so since they're fake anyway
| what do I care? I know some people do but get a grip.
|
| At the end of the day if you understand something that other
| people don't, I figure that's a way to stay gainfully employed.
| I don't like cleaning up other people's messes for long though.
| It's fun at first and on some teams I get copycats and
| everything goes well, more or less. I've maybe made the world a
| better place by teaching some people something new. On others I
| become the janitor and end up leaving. Getting "downvoted" at
| work does matter.
| TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote:
| I leave my stuff up, since most people downvote based on what
| they think I am trying to say, not based on what I am
| actually saying, at least seeing from responses I get.
| lapcat wrote:
| 1) "Speaking up" is just one of many forms of speech. Why is
| speaking up "the purpose of speech", or even the purpose of
| social media speech?
|
| 2) There are many reasons to speak up. One may be to organize
| like-minded people into an effective advocacy group. Another
| may just be to lament something that you can't change.
|
| 3) I'm not trying to be snarky, but do you have any examples of
| changing people's minds on HN or social media? I personally
| don't feel like I ever change anyone's mind.
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| Speaking is meant to exchange information. You're not
| exchanging any information when the other side agrees with
| you and knows everything you're saying.
|
| An advocacy group is ineffective if all its members have this
| mindset. With signaling mindset you have no chance to
| convince anyone of anything. I'd rather get someone thinking
| differently a little bit confused than lament something with
| people who think the same. It doesn't reinforce helplessness.
|
| I have many anecdotes with somewhat low chance of moving
| opinions. Few people will admit changing their minds, but
| sometimes they will agree with you but still offer a weaker
| counterpoint of the opposing narrative.
|
| You can't flip someone's opinion 180deg on the internet, but
| you can get someone on the other side to acknowledge a
| counter point.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Speaking is meant to exchange information.
|
| Speaking has many purposes. Why do you keep trying to
| "limit speech", so to speak?
|
| > You're not exchanging any information when the other side
| agrees with you
|
| I disagree. Is there not a difference between facts and
| opinions? Why do I have to "change my mind" in order to
| learn a new fact? What if the new fact actually _supports_
| my opinion?
|
| > and knows everything you're saying
|
| Confirming that another person knows what you know can be
| useful.
|
| > An advocacy group is ineffective if all its members have
| this mindset.
|
| To the contrary, advocacy groups are most effective when
| the members agree with each other, and most ineffective
| when they fight among themselves.
|
| > Few people will admit changing their minds, but sometimes
| they will agree with you but still offer a weaker
| counterpoint of the opposing narrative.
|
| This gives the appearance to me that you're telling
| yourself you've changed other people's mind and that they
| now agree with you, despite evidence to the contrary.
|
| > You can't flip someone's opinion 180deg on the internet,
| but you can get someone on the other side to acknowledge a
| counter point.
|
| What does this mean? To me it sounds kind of like debate
| club, a game with scoring.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| If you change your mind right now that people's minds are
| changed on HN then you will have evidence of it happening : -
| )
| nickthegreek wrote:
| I've had my mind changed due to HN. But the posters of
| comments would never know. I'll give them an upvote and move
| on.
| lapcat wrote:
| > I've had my mind changed due to HN.
|
| Do you have an example?
| nickthegreek wrote:
| No specific one comes to mind, but normally the comments
| move my position, not flip it on its head. This is most
| effectively done by the poster giving an example of
| something I didn't know about along with a link to a
| primary resource.
| greggman3 wrote:
| It's not the "like" button. It's the "likes" number. Hide the
| number and the like button is signal to the system. So "likes"
| and it's a signal to the poster. That IMO is the problem, not
| the button itself, the "score" you see visually.
|
| I've hidden the score here on HN for myself and on
| StackOverflow. Two places where score has a negative effect on
| myself.
| culi wrote:
| Imo there's dimensions to which different systems let users
| express themselves.
|
| 1. The like button (e.g. Twitter) [1 dimension, discrete]
|
| 2. Clapping (e.g. Medium) [1 dimension, (kinda-)cotinuous]
|
| 2. Upvote/downvote (e.g. Reddit) [1 dimension, 2 directions,
| discrete]
|
| 3. Preset reactions (e.g. iMessage) [multiple dimensions,
| discrete]
|
| 4. Any emoji reaction (e.g. Slack) [(kinda-)infinite
| dimensions, discrete]
|
| 5. User-defined tags (e.g. Steam) [infinite dimensions,
| discrete]
|
| 6. Tags you can agree/disagree with (e.g. Kongregate) [infinite
| dimensions, bidirectional, discrete]
|
| I could go on, but my point is that maybe the reason the like
| button is so bad is because it's literally the simplest
| possible implementation of user interactions to content.
| Perhaps a system that allowed for more nuance would make users
| consider their interaction more
| harvey9 wrote:
| The maximum amount of nuance is here: the Reply button. But I
| agree with your point. We need something short of the Reply
| button because reading large numbers of replies just to get a
| sentiment analysis is not practical.
| culi wrote:
| Right, I generally agree. But even comments can be
| agree/disagreed with or voted on or saved to lists or...
| etc. We're back to where we started
|
| Imagine hackernews or stackexchange if there was absolutely
| no upvote/downvote mechanism
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| The simplest possible implementation of user interaction is
| writing a response. It's already as rich as it can be. It
| gives less power to bots because bots are incoherent. I feel
| like the internet devolved us from eloquent human speakers
| back into monkeys making few noises for communicating. Emoji
| is similar.
|
| Speak. Write text. Formulate your position. We're humans not
| apes. Get feedback from speaking. The video format in some
| cases is the same - ape like reaction movies, no content.
| Assume you're interacting with someone intelligent who isn't
| convinced by the funny number of likes on your post, but by
| the content of what you say.
| borski wrote:
| > It gives less power to bots because bots are incoherent.
|
| ChatGPT would like a word with you.
| culi wrote:
| I agree with this, but the point of these user interactions
| is to whittle them down to something that others can easily
| relate to.
|
| If you then say "well people can agree/disagree" with
| comments, then we're back where we started. Why are they
| agreeing? Do they find it funny, useful, or just like the
| way the user makes their point? How MUCH do they agree?
| What if they disagree?
|
| If your reaction is that we should completely kill these
| interactions then... well have you ever been on giant
| forums with no way to sort? Sometimes they're fine. Like
| when there's low volume. Some forums evolve chronologically
| and that method works as well. But if you're not gonna
| commit to reading a pamphlet, you're probably not gonna
| find such a comment section very useful
| pixl97 wrote:
| I've always wondered why someone hasn't created what I call
| the 'orange slice' expression button. Much like cutting an
| orange in half it gives a preset amount of positive and
| negative values. Sort of a play off the meta moderation that
| Slashdot did.
|
| For positive values it you could have something like
|
| [I believe this is truthful], [I like this
| content],[Funny],[Positive message]
|
| and for negative values
|
| [I believe this is false/untruthful],[I dislike this
| content],[Sad/hateful],[Something else negative I can't think
| of at the moment?]
| TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote:
| That's what trive.news was about. Turns out crowd sourcing
| truth gives a weighted average towards accuracy. Something
| tells me businesses relying on getting "experts" to sell
| you on things, would want to keep general public opinion
| out of the equation.
|
| http://www.trive.news/Whitepaper.0.2.6x.pdf
| neilwilson wrote:
| The dislike button is worse than the like button.
|
| You may as well say get lost.
|
| The Orville episode "Majority Rules" allegorises the concept
| wonderfully
| swayvil wrote:
| I've caught myself being sensitive to the popular narrative
| when uttering my opinions, fearful of my "citizenship score".
| Shameful, yes. To a degree, here (yes!) but much moreso
| elsewhere (might be unavoidable).
|
| Feedback is divine. Convenience is king. So let's go with the
| vote button. This distributed god-king is our best way to
| control this stuff (moderation, filteration etc).
|
| We should not only be voting but looking at our peer's votes
| too. Weight votes by the voter. Stuff like that
| zajio1am wrote:
| > The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is
| not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric
|
| But there is a real need for some kind of post rating/ranking
| (like like/dislike button, or explicit point rating). Once you
| got to thousand-post threads the without ranking mechanisms
| interesting posts are lost in noise. I guess that effectiveness
| of these mechanisms is an important part of why people prefer
| one forum before others.
| ilyt wrote:
| The problem is no system is immune to
| incompetent/uncooperative users.
|
| If in reddit/hn-like sites users use up/downvote as "okay,
| this is interesting discussion"/"this adds nothing to the
| topic" it works reasonably well.
|
| If they decide that it is just same as like/dislike button
| (as is common on many bigger subreddits), then we get back to
| promoting echo chambers
| postalrat wrote:
| Maybe AI is the answer. It can be be the better judge of
| comments in a conversation.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| "Ah sorry the magic AI has decided only comments aligned
| with <X> political party are good. It must be correct!"
|
| AI is just an algorithm. It's not a magic truth knower.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| What about upvoting and downvoting in hn? Do you find that to
| be positive?
|
| Personally, I find I have to work to not write striking
| statements because I know they give me chance of getting a ton
| of upvotes. If I'm tired, the temptation is harder to resist
| yawnxyz wrote:
| On Reddit, sometimes it's fun to sort by "most
| controversial", e.g. posts with most upvotes AND downvotes.
| That's where some of the most "edgy takes" lie. I kind of
| wish you could do that here, too
| jmyeet wrote:
| The like button or upvote or whatever has the same meaning: the
| viewer is signalling most of the time "I agree with this". Once
| you factor in other things like quotes and replies you're no
| longer measuring "engagement". You're measuring and optimizing
| for "outrage".
|
| Thing is, social media didn't invent this. Outrage-as-
| engagement existed on TV long before social media existed. For
| decades, local news has pushed the "crime is out of control"
| narrative because it gets viewers and readers. Car chases,
| wall-to-wall coverage of violent and property crime, etc. To do
| this, local news needs to cooperation of the police so the net
| effect is local news becomes the propaganda arm of the police.
|
| Cable news has been on this bandwagon since at least the 1990s.
|
| > ... that social media has reprogrammed people to the purpose
| of speech.
|
| I disagree. We have this high-minded view of what speech used
| to be only because we weren't there. Go back and look at
| segregregation-era (let alone slavery-era) newspapers,
| speeches, etc.
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| I agree with you on mass media, in fact I think the problem
| already started there, and it's even worse because it's not
| even a conversation, it's one sided.
|
| When I'm speaking in person it's still similar to what I'm
| describing. I could have political discussion in highly
| polarized family with different opinions and people
| listening, and with friends too.
|
| It's not "used to be", unless somehow you stopped talking in
| the real world.
| falcolas wrote:
| Why does someone's position need to change? That implies that
| somebody is wrong, and that's not necessarily the case. More
| often, the "wrongness" comes from having a different point of
| view.
|
| For example, it's easy to say "fuck cars" when you live in the
| city and they are only polluting, noisy nuisances that are, at
| best, optional for living your life. But when you live where I
| do, not having a car means a significant number of unreasonable
| changes to your life.
| hattmall wrote:
| It's not a binary. The position doesn't have to change from
| one to the other. It's that with more information from each
| side, both positions should evolve. That's where progress can
| be actualized. Echo chambers don't get results, they just
| echo.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Why does someone's position need to change? That implies
| that somebody is wrong, and that's not necessarily the case.
|
| Depends on your purpose in talking. My purposes are to inform
| people of things, to request information about things, to ask
| people to do things, to play, or to indirectly express
| approval(hug) or disapproval(hiss.)
|
| If I'm arguing with somebody, I should either be improving
| the quality of their information or improving the quality of
| my own, or determined to convince somebody that they should
| do something. If I'm playing, by definition I can't be
| seriously arguing. The only people who care about my approval
| or disapproval _as such_ are my parents and other loved ones;
| to other people the news about my current feelings as an
| individual aren 't important, and if other people who didn't
| care about me found them important, they wouldn't want
| innuendo, they'd just want the facts.
|
| If we have two incompatible opinions about something, yet we
| have no desire to bring them into agreement, why are we even
| arguing about it? Surely there's something better we could be
| doing.
|
| I think a lot of people have started to think that the
| internet loves or hates them personally, and are desperate
| for its approval in an unhealthy way. The fact that there's
| money to be made in being noticed on the internet makes the
| situation even worse.
|
| > For example, it's easy to say "fuck cars" when you live in
| the city and they are only polluting, noisy nuisances that
| are, at best, optional for living your life. But when you
| live where I do, not having a car means a significant number
| of unreasonable changes to your life.
|
| "It's easy to say that if you're you" isn't part of any
| legitimate argument. It's just extraneous ad hominem that
| people add while making (or eliding past) an argument. It
| also doesn't get you out of explaining "significant number"
| or especially "unreasonable," which begs the question.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| The "fuck cars" position is a great example. I advocate for
| pedestrian and cyclist friendly infrastructure for our city
| at our local planning board. The quality of online discourse
| even for people that share my position is terrible. There's a
| lot to discuss like fire apparatus access or construction
| labor shortages causing backups, street classifications, but
| the online discourse has so little of that.
|
| A lot of these folks are driven by YouTubers who do advocacy
| work for those unfamiliar with the debate. But actually
| showing up at a planning meeting with that kind of rhetoric
| makes no sense. And this isn't even beginning to engage with
| people with different positions on road infrastructure. It's
| the double edged sword of the internet that raises awareness
| for issues but loses nuance because nuance loses engagement.
| ehnto wrote:
| Great example, because people saying "fuck cars" probably
| aren't talking about your cars or your situation. They mean
| the cities. They too have a different point of view. What
| discussion is good at is allowing us to talk about topics
| even with differing points of view, but a like/dislike button
| only rewards or disuades what you said. There is no
| opportunity for the meeting of minds, and it makes an
| echochamber.
|
| Had you seen a video titled "Fuck cars" and disliked it,
| Youtube would a stop showing you that content, and now you
| only get pro-car content. Or someone who loves bikes sees the
| video, they like it, they would never get pro-car content,
| and would never see your point of view. No one is challenged,
| no one is brought closer together in understanding.
| feet wrote:
| Generally from my experience, people saying "fuck cars"
| aren't just talking about cars alone. They're talking about
| all poorly designed towns, cities, and infrastructure that
| completely cater to cars while disregarding the necessity
| of human movement, transportation, and health.
| TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote:
| So get rid of pre-fabbed "individualization" by the
| platform, and allow individuals to choose what they
| do&don't want to see. This usually cuts ads way down, so I
| see why they don't do it, but it would fix the issues of
| bubbles. (Assuming bubbles and division is not what they
| wanted in the first place).
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| Ever heard of someone saying "fuck cars" in person? Where the
| conversation just stood on "fuck cars", and stopped there?
| When someone on the internet says "fuck cars", it's because
| he's expecting to get some dopamine from getting liked by
| similarly minded friends who also hate cars.
|
| If his purpose was to have a discussion, to convince you, it
| wouldn't be "fuck cars", it would be "cars are polluting".
| And even if he's an arrogant asshole in real life, you could
| explain how cars are useful to you, and ask what he's
| suggesting to do. Maybe 1% are such total careless assholes
| you shouldn't be talking to them, but others will try to come
| up with an answer, and if they fail to give it, they will
| remember it.
| poszlem wrote:
| Isn't the whole point that you can change the position of a
| person who says "fuck cars" by talking to them and telling
| them why some people need them?
|
| If they are not trolls, learning about how much of the world
| is reliant on cars should absolutely change their position.
| sokoloff wrote:
| My experience is that people who say "fuck cars" are
| entirely aware of how much of world is absolutely reliant
| upon them.
| pkdpic wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I agree with you 100% but as I write this I'm
| wondering how different an upvote is from a like button...
|
| Also wondering if there was a pre-internet social equivalent of
| a like button. Maybe there wasn't one. It's probably dangerous
| to assume there was always some version of a like button. But
| it's probably just as dangerous to assume there wasn't?...
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Everything you say about the like button also applies to votes,
| so if the like button is what makes social media bad, I don't
| see why HN should be better.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| HN's vote count is not public, and negative count is capped
| at -4 so you can't downvote someone into oblivion.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Most social networks don't have an equivalent to downvotes
| at all.
| mikrl wrote:
| I think this might be structurally related to our
| political ideology of liberal democracy.
|
| We assume that bad takes die out or are overcome by good
| takes in the marketplace of ideas. Therefore, the
| 'magnitude' of a bad take should intuitively be close to
| 0, and the magnitude of a good take should be positive
| and nonzero.
|
| Allowing negative scores permits bad takes to become
| large in magnitude. Allowing or disallowing downvotes is
| basically just scaling the distribution of magnitude of
| takes since bad takes will sit closer to zero than good
| takes in general, even if they cannot be downvoted.
| ilyt wrote:
| But lack of downvotes mixes "just average takes not worth
| a upvote" with "this guy is obviously a moron, why I'm
| even seeing his comments together with other competent
| people?"
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| That's why upvotes and downvotes should be shown
| separately.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I feel the better approach would be where if you wish to
| downvote you must give a reason for the downvote.
|
| This would eliminate the snowball effect.
| crazygringo wrote:
| When -4 pushes you to the very bottom of the page in text
| so grayed-out that it's not even readable unless you
| highlight it first, I'd still call that oblivion. Also,
| flags from just two (?) people remove your comment
| entirely.
| poszlem wrote:
| Yeah, as much as I don't want it to be true, HN algorithm
| is one of the harshest I've seen in terms of allowing
| people to hide/remove unpopular opinions. Some people
| think it's a feature not a bug though. I am not one of
| those people.
|
| It's definitely "an elegant system for a more civilized
| age". Not for whatever you call the internet in 2023.
| airstrike wrote:
| _> The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is
| not only a bad metric - it 's the worst possible metric._
|
| Upvoted for this
| mypetocean wrote:
| For me it was this:
|
| > Normal purposeful speech makes different opinions closer,
| while speech under the feedback of the like button makes
| similar opinions even closer and different opinions further
| apart.
|
| But there is another aspect to the complexities here.
|
| Years ago, I started thinking of the LIKE/UPVOTE button as an
| "increase visibility" button.
|
| I don't upvote just because I like it (humor perhaps being an
| exception).
|
| Often, I'm not upvoting just the comments I like: I'm
| upvoting the whole containing _thread_, including the
| conflicting views if they seem to have been made in good
| faith.
|
| Because when good quality discourse takes place, I want the
| whole instance to be seen.
|
| In these cases, the intended audience of my upvotes is most
| immediately the algorithm (in a way), rather than human
| viewers.
|
| Sometimes I've found myself wishing my upvotes could be made
| invisible to humans since I know many of them will interpret
| my upvote differently than intended. There is no nuance.
|
| It gets me wondering how feedback mechanisms might be
| diversified to add nuance back into these systems (while
| still moderating complexity).
|
| Emoticons (as on Slack) do add nuance, but every emoticon
| pack I've seen lacks nuance most in neutral and critical
| responses.
|
| Of course, no technology we have now can compare with verbal
| discourse for nuance. But you and I are more likely to be
| able to influence feedback features on social media than to
| succeed in eliminating them.
| idatum wrote:
| > Years ago, I started thinking of the LIKE/UPVOTE button
| as an "increase visibility" button.
|
| I think Mastodon tries to make that distinction with like
| vs boost. Boost seems to be about making a post more
| visible ("hey look at this!") and like is more about
| "thanks for posting". At least on the server I use.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| This is one of the more astute things I've read in a while. The
| like button has become what an angry mob yelling to one another
| while holding pitchforks use language for. And this is what
| using the internet feels like now.
| dayvid wrote:
| The biggest problem is that you can make money from the
| internet.
|
| The internet was more about self-expression and fun. Then
| people realized they can sell things or themselves (being a
| "content-creator", "thought-leader", etc.).
|
| As a result the most active people are tailoring their actions
| towards increasing engagement, getting you to buy something,
| getting you to think a certain way, etc. and we have a divide
| between "content-creator" influencers/producers and passive
| consumers who like or retweet things they haven't thought
| through but sound catchy and provide the same opinions.
|
| It's not 100% bad; content is more polished and organized, but
| you have to be discerning in order to get good value and a lot
| of people don't have those abilities.
| zackmorris wrote:
| To expand on Parkinson's Law: capitalism grows to fill the
| space allotted to it.
|
| The 90s internet was great because it was built by academia.
| Post Dot Bomb, the internet got saturated by big business.
| Everything evolves so quickly on the web that we're already
| finding ourselves living under the eventualities of late-
| stage capitalism and ultimate wealth inequality (slavery).
|
| I've come to view tech as an ever-tightening noose that
| solves every problem except how to get out of it. Loosely
| that means that whatever goal each of us has for going into
| tech will be the one that gets us in the end. We get older,
| conditions change and we find ourselves becoming the villain
| of our own story. Even if we succeed, we fail.
|
| Stepping outside of that, I've decided to embrace magical
| thinking in my own life. I believe that ultimately tech will
| bring magic back into the world and we'll find ourselves
| confronting the ethical dilemmas of fairy tails. In the New
| Age, when everyone has the ability to change the world for
| better or worse, wisdom becomes more important than
| knowledge.
|
| The status quo is threatened by that, so there's already a
| backlash against stuff like wokeism. Socialism becomes the
| bogeyman to keep us distracted so we don't turn our attention
| away from systems of control in general. And so on.
|
| How to protect ourselves from that? I think it's helpful to
| meditate on what the opposite of all this might look like.
| What's the opposite of profit? Or power? Softer questions
| might be: what's our individual definition of success? Why
| are we doing this?
|
| Now to get back to watching superhero movies on New Year's
| Day..
| hinkley wrote:
| The Internet is television with lower production value and
| longer commercials.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I spend far less time subjected to advertisements on the
| internet than when I used to watch TV. Near zero time,
| actually.
|
| Now it is a game of figuring out the shills that are
| advertising, but trying to disguise their content as not
| advertising.
| hinkley wrote:
| That is exactly what "spending your time dealing with
| advertising" means. See also cigarettes and food products
| with the labels turned out. Soap operas are literally
| named after advertising. At least they're honest about
| it.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| TV is minimum 1/3 time advertising, 2/3 content, but that
| is ignoring shilling and product placement in the
| content.
|
| I do not spend anywhere near 1/3rd of my time on the
| internet figuring out what is and is not advertising.
| Mostly by avoiding content with images and video.
| hinkley wrote:
| I'd say 1/4 advertising, 2/3 content and 1/12 opening and
| closing credits but I take your point.
|
| I don't know if you've tried to search for anything on
| the internet lately, but I've found that any time I'm
| trying to be an active rather than a passive consumer of
| the internet, it's getting damned hard to avoid things
| that are 'SEO optimized' and relevant content pessimized.
| dayvid wrote:
| A lot of internet advertising comes in different forms.
| For example, with Search Engine Optimization, businesses
| will create "content" or pages with information for
| keywords to get their pages ranked higher. This also
| applies to social media and youtube. In order to be
| popular or remained ranked, you have to put out video
| content or stream almost daily.
|
| This is essentially "junk" content which shows itself as
| reaction videos and related content. If you want
| engagement, then it turns into having a strong opinion
| about something the creators probably don't care that
| much about because it will get people who agree or
| disagree with the stance to comment and get into comment
| battles, etc.
|
| It's definitely not as annoying as TV commercials, but
| it's not good for people unaware of it who get anxiety or
| waste a lot of time feeling upset about things designed
| to push views to someone's platform, or in worst cases
| push their agenda.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Money does this to everything.
|
| Radio used to be cool, now it's mostly ads.
|
| Circulating pamphlets was once a potent political tool, now
| they come sandwiched between ads in a newspaper that nobody
| reads.
|
| Evaluate a randomly chosen NFT-referent for artistic merit
| and see how it stack up to a randomly chosen pre-nft art.
|
| I'm still optimistic about the web though. It's more
| configurable than the other media. We may yet find a way to
| wall off the advertising cancer and make some space for cool
| stuff to survive.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I would say the biggest problem is advertising. It would be
| much less harmful if commercial content was upfront about
| asking for your wallet, and the transaction ended there (the
| publisher's incentives are directly aligned with the end-
| customer's). Instead, we have stuff that's technically "free"
| but actually comes with plenty of strings attached such as
| mismatched incentives - the content is only there as bait and
| the actual objective is to get you to look at an ad or think
| a certain way for commercial gain. Worse, this "free" stuff
| being out there means there's not enough pressure to build a
| good, universal micropayments system to displace advertising,
| so the problem remains.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I would hazard a guess to say that the best micropayment
| service in the world is going to have trouble competing
| with "free" for the average user.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I've said this for so long. The horrible mismatched
| incentives that ad money has wrought is disasterous.
| creeble wrote:
| Pushing like button on this.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Speech is also about comfort and venting where echo chambers
| shine. And those chambers predate the social media. IME even
| IRL people tend to congregate mostly with like minded
| individuals.
|
| And if the congregation turns out to have too many views in
| contrast to ones own then folks tend to leave.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| > even IRL people tend to congregate mostly with like minded
| individuals
|
| Historically, forming these tiny niche communities wasn't
| possible. Sure you had different social groups but they were
| geographically limited. You are also stuck to a degree when
| there is conflict.
|
| > if the congregation turns out to have too many views in
| contrast to ones own then folks tend to leave.
|
| Sure and it tends to be moderate people who leave first.
| Groups become more dogmatic and cultish, more extreme over
| time as they demoderate.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Historically, forming these tiny niche communities wasn't
| possible.
|
| Friends?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Your friends were your church, schoolmates, etc. You
| can't pick "People who are X, Y, Z and support only A and
| B" because the pool of potential friend candidates just
| wasn't large enough.
|
| On Twitter, I can choose to only be friends with
| conservative libertarian furries who believe in crypto.
| That doesn't scale to real life.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Your friends were your church, schoolmates, etc. You
| can't pick "People who are X, Y, Z and support only A and
| B" because the pool of potential friend candidates just
| wasn't large enough.
|
| It seemed to work well enough for me. One thing worth
| noting is that people who live in the same geographical
| location already tend to be somewhat like-minded, for
| obvious reasons. But you seem to be talking about a
| "perfect match", which is an impossible, unnecessary
| standard.
|
| > On Twitter, I can choose to only be friends with
| conservative libertarian furries who believe in crypto.
|
| You're not friends with people on Twitter. If you think
| you are, try leaving Twitter, and see how many of your
| "friends" still talk to you afterward.
| nunez wrote:
| I think the like button is fine. There have been ways of
| expressing agreement or disagreement long before that idea came
| along. (See also: "This")
|
| In my opinion, infinite scrolling is substantially more
| damaging. If you have poor self control, which I think many
| people do, using an app that does nothing to tell you when to
| quit is an open invitation to addiction.
| prox wrote:
| First, I agree with the reprogramming.
|
| But in my experience, the goals shouldn't be to as you state
| "to change their minds." , it should be to listen and respond.
| If I disagree with you, I want to know _how you came to that
| conclusion_ , I am not interested in your talking points you
| had recycled from somewhere.
|
| This also makes discussions way more interesting. Now, this
| principle should extend to anyone, and the problem is that in
| online debates discussions often become asymmetrical. Say if
| your debate partner has no interest in listening, or argues
| with bad faith. Online communication should promote that
| mindset (something HN does in a form, but surely not perfected
| yet)
| chrisweekly wrote:
| "Seek to understand before seeking to be understood."
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| I said change theirs or yours. Not necessarily change it
| completely but at least learn where the difference comes
| from, and either move my position to account for new
| information or logic, or try to convince the other side.
|
| But I do see it as a goal to get the opinions closer. I
| prefer listening while having a clear picture of what I'm
| currently thinking about it because only then you can realize
| where's the difference, and the difference is what you want
| to learn.
|
| If the other side doesn't listen to statements, they might
| listen to questions. Asking what they think about X might get
| a better response than just stating X. Works in real world
| too against these types. Many times it's not because it's
| online, it's just narcissistic personality. Many people won't
| acknowledge when something moves their opinion.
| zackees wrote:
| [dead]
| mikewarot wrote:
| >The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not
| only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric.
|
| ANY single metric is going to be unfit for purpose. We need to
| have a continuum of responses, tags or perhaps a vector for
| votes instead of a scalar.
|
| It's like trying to force everything into a single hierarchy,
| it never works. You always end up at Matthew 6:24[1]:
| No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one,
| and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and
| despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
|
| Any single vote/rank/option range ends up serving mammon
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_6:24
| nathias wrote:
| Not at all, we want to have a unified discourse, but we have
| vastly different values and therefore moderation preferences. The
| only solution to this is making moderation user-based, but with
| better UX than just block everyone you don't like. The user
| initiatives formed 'block lists' on twitter, which are kind of a
| good idea for this, you have decentralized decisions that get
| aggregated into a single filter which then the user simply
| applies if he chooses so.
| fexecve wrote:
| This is already a solved problem. If I block every anti-vaxxer
| I see on Twitter, eventually Twitter will stop showing them to
| me. But if I view the tweet replies to President Biden, I see
| the anti-vaxxer replies right at the top. So they just need to
| apply the user preferences across the entire platform.
| nathias wrote:
| yea, thats what I mean, we have the solutions and they would
| also work for decentralized protocols which is always
| presented as the biggest obstacle for alternatives ...
| tshadley wrote:
| If twitter dies, where do I find a site where I can follow at
| least one expert/leader in every major
| discipline/social/political-movement to get a sort of snapshot of
| what's happening in the world?
|
| I don't need to agree with every expert/leader, I just want to
| know what they think.
| fleddr wrote:
| There's no singular replacement currently that meets those
| conditions. Which is also the one thing almost guaranteeing
| Twitter's survival.
| seydor wrote:
| First of all it needs a Change of attitude, from expecting
| recommendations to venturing into the unknown by ourselves.
| There are tons of people's online who can do this.
|
| Unfortunately, even the adventurous ones got sucked into the
| populatity contest of social media and wasted a lot of time
| repeating the same points that others make.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| the way we did before massive corporate social walled gardens
|
| people keep a blog and you subscribe to the blog feed.
|
| bonus point: it's completely free, you don't even need to give
| away your personal data and be forced to watch ads.
|
| but it's 2023, realistically if Twitter dies these people will
| open a fediverse account that you can follow.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Blogs were awful. Lack of actual discussion, just
| pontification and ultimately you curate your own list of
| (mainly) like minded blogs. Give me a reddit thread anyday
| where some rando (whose blog I never would have followed)
| calls out the original post with differing
| thoughts/viewpoints. Sites like reddit/twitter broke me away
| from the trap of blogs by people with great credentials
| giving/polished public face giving them un-deserved authority
| over my thinking. Reddit causes me to re-evaluate and change
| my positions regularly, something that neither blogs nor
| mainstream media ever managed to do. Twitter makes me
| actively angry if I read replies, but it has also surfaced
| many interesting people who are deep thinkers with positions
| other than mine. But twitter's most powerful revelation is
| when it shows me I HATE so many of the people whose positions
| I used to align with, and whose slower more thoughtful blog
| posts swayed me. When I see their immediate response to
| something, and it is just awful and ugly and full of hate,
| not rational thought but just knee jerk reaction, then yeah,
| no thanks. I don't need a deeper insight into your thoughts.
| Twitter has weeded out so many ugly people from having
| influence on me.
|
| Reddit - injects thoughts/opinions I would never have sought
| out on my own. Twitter - Shows the true face of 'thought
| leaders',takes away their polished persona and shows me when
| I have been giving too much credit to horrible people.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Blogs were awful. Lack of actual discussion
|
| citation needed?
|
| > just pontification and ultimately you curate your own
| list of (mainly) like minded blogs
|
| is a curated list of fellow "leaders" pontificating on
| almost everything to blind "followers" helped by an opaque
| "algorithm" with the ability to block the "heretics" and
| direct their followers' hate against them, better?
|
| notice the cultist terminology: leader, follower, heretic
| etc
|
| > Give me a reddit thread anyday where some rando (whose
| blog I never would have followed) calls out the original
| post with differing thoughts/viewpoints
|
| I am not advocating for blogs per se, but a reddit thread
| where "some rando calls out the original post" could have
| easily have been a thread of comments somewhere else that
| did not made money for reddit, but for the randos creating
| the actual content you are interested in
|
| you are criticizing the presentation, but the actual meat
| (the value) is in the content.
|
| > Sites like reddit/twitter broke me away from the trap of
| blogs by people with great credentials giving/polished
| public face giving them un-deserved authority over my
| thinking
|
| sounds more like a your problem than a blogs problem
| honestly.
|
| if you are assign authority to someone writing on the
| internet under fake credentials, it's not that it's written
| in a blog the issue IMO.
|
| twitter and reddit (which are vastly different anyway both
| as kind of platform and as audience) made the problem
| worse, if anything.
|
| > Reddit causes me to re-evaluate and change my positions
| regularly
|
| again, good for you. but there's no inner quality of reddit
| that makes it especially good at that. I changed my mind a
| lot of times by reading books and when reddit was born I
| was already almost 30, so...
|
| > Twitter makes me actively angry if I read replies, but it
| has also surfaced many interesting people who are deep
| thinkers with positions other than mine
|
| replace the word Twitter with "internet" or "school" or
| "traveling or "hip-hop battles" and you'll find billions of
| people who had the same realization.
|
| anyway, nothing that a good old BBS couldn't already do 40
| years ago. It's where I discovered and then downloaded the
| Wolfenstein 3D demo.
|
| To wrap it up: the question was "where could I follow X and
| Y if Twitter dies"?
|
| The answer is: don't worry, Twitter eventually dying won't
| be an issue, they'll tell you where to follow them cause
| their status depends on it. You might as well ask them some
| money to follow them, they'll probably give it to you.
| rc-1140 wrote:
| I mostly agree with the author in that everyone shouldn't be on
| one platform and that yes, Twitter, Facebook, etc., aren't
| anywhere close to ideal sites for actually forming strong
| relationships and having good discussions. I also agree that the
| separation of internet self and real self has all but vanished
| from the internet, despite my own personal attempts to retain it.
| Additionally, as someone who has spent their formative,
| adolescent, and even current years being parts of independent
| communities on the internet, I can assure you that there were
| people out there who knew what was being lost and what the
| problems were as Reddit, Facebook, and the others became the hubs
| for everything.
|
| However, the author makes references to things like MUDs, IRC
| chats, web forums, and then antagonists like "random internet
| Nazis" (come on dude) and Gamergate of all things, and I can't
| help but feel that the author of the article is part of a
| intellectual group that appeared _after_ things like internet
| forums, transient chatrooms, and video game servers. It 's very
| popular to try to "dunk" on sowing doubt in a case like this
| because everyone cites that "Yet you participate in it. Curious!"
| comic in some way or another, but I think the doubt is warranted
| in this case.
|
| The author may have been around when those things were active,
| but expressed no deep interest at worst or a passing interest at
| best in any of them _until_ centralization became a problem to
| think about, and SUDDENLY all of those things captured their
| attention. A HN poster who doesn 't _really_ care about non-
| techie niche communities but puts on big airs about caring
| because rebelling against centralized monoliths like Twitter is
| part of (hacker) counterculture /social signaling.
|
| The author didn't have to deal with being a powerless normal user
| as internet Nazi groups infiltrating communities they were a part
| of, never had to watch independent sites and projects get
| absorbed into Reddit and its abhorrent community; it's all just a
| fun intellectual thought puzzle to ruminate on with a buddy at a
| bar and philosophical soapbox to stand on with their web blog and
| Twitter account. The author even boils it down to political
| pundits retreating to private circles, which completely separates
| it from the real experiences of loss of and yearning for smaller
| communities.
|
| We've read this same song and dance here on HN almost weekly if
| not daily here on HN: everyone's glued to their smartphones,
| Twitter and Facebook control all online content, return to
| tradition, yadda yadda. I don't really know how this comment is
| going to be taken but because of all these things, I find it very
| difficult to believe the author isn't subject to the tyranny of
| likes and internet attention himself, and that the post reads
| more as disingenuous intellectual fellatio than anything else,
| intended to resonate with those who closely follow hacker culture
| on HN for traction.
| sboomer wrote:
| There are many people who haven't seen the internet before 2010.
| Their internet experience of limited to Facebook, Instagram,
| YouTube, and WhatsApp.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| It _was_ the smartphone. Not necessarily the phones themselves,
| but the wide reaching accessibility. Internet users skyrocketed
| and if phoneposters we 're any indication of the aggregate impact
| - the quality of conversation deteriorated. And yes, mobile
| accessible platforms caused a sort of gravity and viola.
|
| Also I'm reasonably sure this is just a truism. "Schismogenesis"
| in addition to the fact that everybody wants to be on the same
| page with their community. The nature of the internet in that
| it's basically just a huge, permanent log of interactions just
| allows us to observe this shit more easily and remark on it in
| post.
| reidrac wrote:
| [flagged]
| lapcat wrote:
| "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances--e.g.
| article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button
| breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| FWIW I just disable JavaScript on Substack.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I find the topic of annoying pop-ups interesting and was
| thinking, to align better with the site rules, maybe the OP
| could start an Ask HN topic about the pop-ups and we continue
| there.
| nunez wrote:
| Heavily agree with this. The internet of 1998 or even 2006 is
| very very different than the Internet of today.
|
| However, I think this desire for fragmentation and divisiveness
| was inevitable. People were always in conflict with each other;
| we just didn't have the means to butt heads like we can now. If
| the Internet existed in 1920, I think we would (a) have some
| amazing historical artifacts, and (b) see a lot of the same
| behaviors we're seeing today.
| waspight wrote:
| In the spirit of the article, how do you start your own community
| these days? I think it was phpbb that was popular last time I
| checked (perhaps 15 y ago).
| sboomer wrote:
| I believe Discord and Telegram may fill in the gap. WhatsApp is
| kind of personal, where you communicate with your real world
| friends.
| waspight wrote:
| But these are all closed communities. I just think that it
| would be a point in having a community that is also
| searchable from google? Why is closed communities like
| Discord so popular?
| doublepg23 wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse If you're
| thinking closer to forum software of yore.
|
| If you don't mind being centralized Reddit is what really
| killed forums and is still very good despite a drive to
| make it worse every year. There are many Reddit clones as
| well.
| ultra_nick wrote:
| Marketing is the eternal way.
|
| Software changes frequently.
| waspight wrote:
| What do you mean?
| seydor wrote:
| The internet is vast. But if your attention is fully absorbed
| between twitter and substack (like the author is), you feel
| trapped, because, well, you are.
|
| Maybe try to venture out of your internet comfort zone. It's not
| all spam out there, nor is it worthless because it was not
| recommended by someone cool. Just don't be lazy
| Taek wrote:
| This comment doesn't offer any practical advice on where to
| find content of higher quality, it just condescends people who
| don't feel like they have high quality options.
| seydor wrote:
| my comment is condescending to people who don't put the
| effort for searching needles in the haystack, but instead
| spend their whole online time in the well beaten path.
|
| The content wont always be of "higher quality" , because
| quality is subjective. Here are two nearby sources of such
| content:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments
| borski wrote:
| > my comment is condescending to people who don't put the
| effort for searching needles in the haystack, but instead
| spend their whole online time in the well beaten path.
|
| Another way of saying this is that your comment is
| condescending to... most people.
|
| Most people used to have an easy way to find forums on the
| internet, even if they were AOL chat rooms, where they
| could find moderated content that was interesting to them.
| That _was_ the well beaten path.
|
| Nowadays, that's no longer the case, and most people don't
| seek out those needles in the haystack.
|
| My contention is that they _shouldn't have to_ , just as
| they didn't have to before the 2010s.
|
| A corollary: "just don't be lazy" is almost never good
| advice, as there is almost always a reason people are
| "lazy." People make similar arguments about the
| impoverished and how "if they just pulled themselves up by
| their bootstraps and stopped being lazy" they could easily
| get out of it, but that's really hard to do with two kids,
| three jobs, and no time to think about anything other than
| survival. They're not lazy, they are overwhelmed.
|
| I'd say that applies to a lot of facets of life, including
| time spent on the internet; amid the firehose of nonsense,
| and given that most of the internet (read: where most
| people spend time now) is literally rigged against moving
| away from it, by using human psychology to generate hits of
| dopamine in the form of likes and views, it is _hard_ to
| find a better path, and the people who don't aren't
| necessarily lazy. They just don't _live on the internet_ ,
| and it _shouldn't be that hard._
| seydor wrote:
| I think you re making the argument that people should
| stick to the mainstream of every medium (in this case the
| internet) because it's easy. That's why i called it lazy.
| I 'm not saying it's bad, but people shouldn't complain
| that everything looks alike, when they literally only
| stick to things that are alike
|
| forums are just as hard to find today, as they were
| before. In fact many of them are back in the places where
| they used to be, it's just people have forgot about them
| because they chose to sell their attention elsewhere
| borski wrote:
| I'm not saying they _should_ stick to the mainstream, but
| I'm saying that a majority _will_. What has changed isn't
| most people's behavior, but the internet around them, and
| I'm arguing it's changed for the worse.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Reminds me of people who complain about how all music sucks
| nowadays but only passively listen to the radio.
| lebaux wrote:
| agreed
| [deleted]
| isaacremuant wrote:
| > weirdos mad about video game journalism.
|
| Funny how being interested in accountability, transparency and
| good journalism makes you "a weirdo" worth ignoring.
|
| Oh well, if you're moderately effective about highlighting a
| problem you'll always get attacked with labels.
|
| Funny too how he lumps them and other groups with "Nazis".
|
| Feels like yet another person who is suddenly whining because
| their authoritarian websites are no longer controlled by their
| authoritarian ideologues they agreed with.
|
| The Elon musk takeover has been very positive, if anything to
| display how hypocritical some of the authortiarians from any side
| are. It's all about censoring ideas they don't like because
| "they're righteous (TM)".
|
| Having destroyed alternatives like Parler every time they got
| popular, makes it feel that no competition will be allowed and
| theres a sudden desperate turn to descentralization, which is
| awesome, but it will come with the same ridiculous shouts of
| censorship when any idea authoritarians don't like, gets
| mainstream notoriety. Suddenly the interest of society will be to
| censor that descentralized network. The excuse will be one of the
| typical scares: terrorism, harm, crime, etc
|
| Interesting times but not an interesting article. Just the
| typical "how do we go back to what I liked and agreed with me"
| andrepd wrote:
| >The Elon musk takeover has been very positive
|
| Of course it has. Twitter stopped censoring neonazis and
| harassment and started censoring things Musk doesn't like.
|
| >authortiarians from any side. It's all about censoring ideas
| they don't like
|
| How ironic
| lapcat wrote:
| I found myself agreeing with every word of this article. The
| penultimate paragraph summarizes it well:
|
| > People call Twitter an indispensable public space because it's
| the "town square", but in the real world there isn't just one
| town square, because there isn't just one town. There are many.
| And the internet works when you can exit -- when you can move to
| a different town if you don't like the mayor or the local
| culture.
|
| > Disagreement in society is necessary for progress, but it's
| most constructive when it's mediated by bonds of trust and
| affinity and semi-privacy.
| adesanmi wrote:
| Same here. The biggest annoyance for me was whenever people use
| the "town square" analogy, especially as a Brit.
|
| The idea that my "town square" is owned by a private American
| company is a nightmare.
| foddermange wrote:
| We can see this happening with Reddit. Either because they got
| fed up with the administration of the site, or were forcibly
| kicked off, a number of communities that were previously
| subreddits have branched off and made their own forums instead.
|
| Examples:
|
| https://rdrama.net
|
| https://ovarit.com
|
| https://patriots.win
|
| https://hexbear.net
|
| https://www.thefemaledatingstrategy.com/forum
|
| https://www.saidit.net/s/TumblrInAction
| causality0 wrote:
| Being the same person online as offline destroyed everything
| great about the internet. When you were an asshole you got banned
| from the website, and then you had to trim some of your sharp
| edges off so you didn't get banned from the next one. These days
| being an asshole results in either you aurrou ding yourself
| entirely with other assholes or getting your real life ruined by
| losing your job or even being arrested in some countries. There's
| no more opportunity to learn and grow. You either get it right
| the first try or you keep your online discourse rated PG so you
| don't cross the wrong people.
|
| Everything is so serious now. We couldn't even go back if we
| wanted to, because ignoring and banning xXWeedLuvurXx for calling
| you the n-word and moving on is a lot tougher when his name is
| John Smith and he works in accounting.
| slater- wrote:
| I think you're exactly right.
|
| In my youth, the internet was about having fun, about being
| INTERESTING, even if your mom or your boss wouldn't understand.
| And you could always just walk away from your Buffy Xanga and
| get into something else.
|
| Now, the language of ridiculous places like LinkedIn has become
| the norm, on pain of having your life derailed.
|
| "HI MY NAME IS JOHN (HE/HIM), I LIVE AND BREATHE ENTERPRISE
| SALES SUPPORT IN THE THRILLINGLY DYNAMIC ECOSYSTEM OF SAAS, MY
| DREAM EVER SINCE I WAS A CHILD WAS TO BE SERIOUS ABOUT WORK, I
| WEAR MANY HATS, MY DOG IS MY SON, IT WAS A BLESSING TO ATTEND
| THE BLACK EYED PEAS CONCERT, SINCERE THANKS TO UNITED PETROLEUM
| AND ALSO TO ROSA PARKS"
|
| I return again and again to the scene with the construction
| worker neighbor from Office Space:
|
| Peter: "does anyone ever say to you 'sounds like someone has a
| case of The Mondays?'
|
| Neighbor: "No, man. Shit, no, man! I believe you'd get your ass
| kicked saying something like that"
| Kenji wrote:
| [dead]
| giardini wrote:
| _aurrou ding_ !?
|
| Is this a new Australian metaphor?
| burnished wrote:
| Think it was intended to be surrounding
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I don't really get the premise here. The popular tweet relates
| because 15 years ago most people weren't spending almost 1/3 of
| their day on a screen.
|
| Now that is definitely the case and backed with data throughout
| the years.
|
| The internet has always been fragmented. I think the arguments of
| Facebook or Twitter being some type of global consciousness is
| short sighted. It has maybe as many users as the population of
| the USA. The world has an estimated 5 billion people who have
| regular access to the internet. Is the world consciousness really
| representative of the most engaged internet users? That's a huge
| problem in itself and the thought that journalists are stuck on
| Twitter makes no sense. If life is all about change and we see
| behemoths come and go, then surely journalism will evolve outside
| of a single platform.
| fleddr wrote:
| I tend to agree with the conclusions of the article but at the
| same time I think it leaves out a few important factors in
| comparing the old internet versus today's internet.
|
| First, the political macro backdrop. The extreme political
| polarization in the US leading to the so-called culture wars.
| This is a massive driver of toxicity on social media. This
| conflict machine is relatively new, people fondly remember
| centralized social media as being far less "political" just a few
| years ago.
|
| Second, the mobile revolution. Which leads to a dumbing down of
| engagement. Before, people would sit behind a PC with a large
| screen and functional keyboard, enabling deep engagement as seen
| here on HN. Today, people sit on the toilet, look at a tiny
| screen with endless content, and any engagement (most never
| engage at all) is very shallow and lazy: a like, a retweet. It's
| not a conversation, it's amplification. In the rare case where
| somebody produces original content (a self-composed tweet),
| Twitter's format incentivizes hot takes and makes context and
| nuance impossible or impractical.
|
| Third, amplification. It's a specific choice by Twitter (UX,
| algorithms) to promote and reward the worst opinions. It's a
| complete inversion from real life.
|
| Hence, rather than stating that human conversation absolutely
| does not scale, I'd refine that conclusion. It does not scale in
| these particular conditions.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Chatrooms replace twitter like book clubs replace cities.
| seydor wrote:
| Do they? Those are different behavior patterns. We have a lot
| of different behaviors as humans, we don't need to replace one
| with another
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