Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Too many people have peed in the pool

stephenfry.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 555 posts

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#31

Post by moron4hire »

The problem isn't that this is a Twitter problem. It's that this is a cultural problem. People kinda suck. People kinda suck a lot.

I was having a conversation with a friend at lunch, when I started putting ketchup on my hotdog. He looked at me and incredulously questioned, "really? What are you, like, 8 years old?" I had never even heard of the idea that "only children put ketchup on a hotdog." Yet here was someone I had originally thought of as a rational human being elevating it to a serious issue.

A lot of this stuff gets defended as "just a joke", but I don't see anyone laughing. If you're so bad at making jokes, maybe you should just give up the practice and stick to being generally pleasant to be around.

I guess I'm lucky that I'm not famous enough to get any randos following me on Twitter. The people who follow me are interested in my work, they aren't hero-worshipping me. I get to have excellent conversations with people on Twitter. But that is only because--even though it's not 100% in my control--my lack of celebrity allows me to guide and design my Twitter sphere. For a celebrity, they just get inundated with folks they don't want to hear from.

Just read the replies to Notch's tweets sometime. I'm surprised he hasn't become a complete recluse. Almost every single one has some 13 year old complaining about "Minecraft sucks now that you're gone", even though he's been gone longer than they've been playing it.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#32

Post by reitoei »

seren wrote: post #23
carsongross wrote: post #15

I'm a bit monomaniacal about this, but the current online culture wars (and the previous offline culture wars) make me wish that secession didn't have such a bad name. It is obvious that large groups of people have irreconcilable differences of opinion on matters of free speech, sexuality, gun ownership and so on. It is a shame that rather than a firm handshake and friendly wave goodbye, we will end up with a totalit…

I don't know if it will prevail in the end, but I think that Reddit approach by splitting the community in small subgroups/communities has a better chance to last in the long run. Of course, you'll create feuds between communities but at least it is somewhat confined and not always spilling in the common public space. Unfortunately it also greatly increases the echo chamber / filter bubble but it seems you can not ha…

In-fighting within communities is one of reddit's biggest problems.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#34

Post by Semiapies »

rglullis wrote: post #18
danieka wrote: post #11

I think this is a natural consequence of the twitter format. The short message motivates (some) users to win cheap points, offend or simply scream loudly in order to get attention. In my Luddite mind the political conversation is becoming Twitter-fied and now focuses more on short sound bites rather than a sound discourse.

Now? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death [Neil Postman] also repeatedly states that the eighteenth century, being the Age of Reason, was the pinnacle for rational argument. Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed. Postman gives a striking example: Many of the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recogni…

Soundbites created by speech writers other than themselves, for that matter.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#35

Post by doktrin »

fideloper wrote: post #3
6d6b73 wrote: post #2

Or maybe you just have to go to a pool in a better neighborhood? After all on Twitter you can choose from whom you're getting status updates, can't you?

1. You can't choose your followers, nor stop them from @mentioning you. 2. That statement is awfully close to (if not outright) victim blaming.

> You can't choose your followers

Can't you? I thought protected feeds were a thing (wherein subscribers would need the account holder's permission to follow / view their tweets)?

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#36

Post by Zikes »

r721 wrote: post #26

I wonder is it so hard to build an automatic "insult" detector with all recent progress with deep learning. Quick googling gave quite a couple of older papers: "Offensive Language Detection Using Multi-level Classification" http://www.eiti.uottawa.ca/~diana/publications/Flame_Final.p... "Automatic identification of personal insults on social news sites" http://labfs.eecs.northwestern.edu/~sara/Site/Publications_f...

How many false positives would you be willing to put up with before you left a platform altogether?

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#37

Post by vidarh »

reitoei wrote: post #32
seren wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it will prevail in the end, but I think that Reddit approach by splitting the community in small subgroups/communities has a better chance to last in the long run. Of course, you'll create feuds between communities but at least it is somewhat confined and not always spilling in the common public space. Unfortunately it also greatly increases the echo chamber / filter bubble but it seems you can not ha…

In-fighting within communities is one of reddit's biggest problems.

Yes, but then those who don't enjoy that infighting can, and often do, leave and form their own.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#38

Post by jonstokes »

I have a theory about FB and Twitter -- or maybe more of an observation. Anyway, back in the stone age, people had bumper stickers with little slogans on them. And in the break rooms of various places of work, there was always a bulletin board an on a corner of it there was always some faded-from-to-many-xeroxes bit of humor/racism/sports fandom/sexism/dirty joke or other us-vs.-them thing on it that people would look at and amuse themselves with.

Now thanks to Twitter and FB, these little types of tribal territorial markings are just about all that's left of public discourse.

I see things get passed around and think, 20 years ago this would have been mimeographed and hung on a break room bulletin board, where it might have acted as a crude conversation starter about some aspect of "who are we?". But now people consider sharing and liking these things as their /contribution/ to a conversation.

It's like the way that millennials communicate with emoji, except it's image macros and memes and slogans and "gotchas" and hot takes that we consume, copy, and share. The copying and sharing of all that stuff is what passes for discourse now.

Me, I think that this development is double-plus bad.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#39

Post by dasil003 »

blhack wrote: post #21
lordnacho wrote: post #4

It's a wonder he lasted as long as he did. I've joined a number of online forums through the years, and I've always ended up leaving them due to a spiral of "tone gets rough / the good people leave". I'm still in this one, but I guess we'll see how long it lasts here. Seems different somehow, but they all do in the beginning. What are some innovations in solving the asshole/quality spiral? There's lots of takes on mo…

I've been on this one for a pretty long time. A little over 7 years according to my user page. The quality has not noticeably gone down. There are a lot less technical articles now than I feel like there used to be, but that might very well just be because I've gotten more technical, and now everything seems like an opinion. I think it's because HN is actually willing to defend itself. We used to have days where ever…

Indeed, I joined 9 days after you (and have within 1% of your karma (!)), and my experience is the same. HN was founded with a keen awareness of how online forums tend to go downhill over time, and there are specific rules to avoid it.

But IMHO, the saving grace is the fact that HN is not built to grow. Growth is what ruins every online community. There are still plenty of small communities have have been going fine for years or even decades because they didn't experience explosive growth. As soon as you have something like Twitter with massive investment and market expectations, you know the community is done for. To Twitter's credit though, the mechanic of following individuals does scale much better than a forum though. Subreddits were also a good idea that allows some community while scaling. But in both those cases it works because they create sub-divided communities rather than one massive one which inevitably breaks down.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#40

Post by mediocrejoker »

djaychela wrote: post #10

I'm not surprised - I wouldn't be famous for all the money available (not an option anyway, particularly given my lack of talent!) - so many people now think they have a right to you, if they're a fan, or they've bought your work, or they don't like your work, or whatever. Twitter seems to bring those sorts of things much closer (as, of course, does much social media), and I'd think anyone with any opinions on just a…

> I'm not surprised - I wouldn't be famous for all the money available (not an option anyway, particularly given my lack of talent!)

Not sure that's a prerequisite anymore.

Post reply on HN