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Too many people have peed in the pool

stephenfry.com

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Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#51

Post by honksillet »

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…

Reddit might be the perfect analogy given the propensity for censorship demonstrated both by mods and the corporate folks.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#52

Post by Zikes »

moron4hire wrote: post #31

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…

People do suck, but platforms can do a lot to mitigate that. All they have to do is make it a lot more difficult for harassers to create extra accounts. That's all. Then their existing reporting/flagging systems will have some actual bite to them, since shutting down an account will actually be consequential.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#53

Post by jonstokes »

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…

"A long time ago, I used to believe that Internet would usher a new age of Enlightenment since every one would have access to many different opinions and unbiased sources."

Heh, same here. I think that so many of us simply underestimated the immense power of capitalism to co-opt and commodify everything it touches.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#54

Post by [deleted] »

llamataboot wrote: post #28
malsun wrote: post #17

I left Twitter last year when it looked like the 'professionally offended' were becoming too influential. They didn't affect me as I keep a low profile, but it was like seeing an omen and noticing friends were buying into their hype. The way Twitter is now pandering to this lot with the recently announced Orwellian-style group, and other odd behaviour suggests that they approve of the current momentum. I'm just glad…

By "professionally offended", I assume you mean mostly marginalized people who are the recipients of torrents of abuse/death threats/rape threats/sexual harrassment/etc nearly every day they are active on twitter.

[deleted]

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#55

Post by ryanlol »

doktrin wrote: post #35
fideloper wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

They are.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#56

Post by tomp »

michh wrote: post #30

I think this is a tricky problem to properly solve. Or rather: An opportunity for Twitter to really mess up attempting to fix this. A big part of what makes Twitter interesting/worthwhile is the ability to interact with lots of different people you wouldn't have stumbled upon. But also, especially when you're just starting out on Twitter, people you otherwise wouldn't have been able to get through to. On Twitter I ge…

> I think this is a tricky problem to properly solve

I don't think it is. I think a few simple settings could easily fix this problem; like (enabling/disabling) direct messages from people you don't follow, and customizable opt-in-able blacklists (of either users or words/phrases) that could be shared throughout the community. That way, some would be able to keep saying whatever they want, while others would be able to not feel offended by them.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#57

Post by gilleain »

willvarfar wrote: post #13
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…

Joel Spolsky wrote an excellent post on building a community: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswi... Of course he later closed his flourishing community suddenly. Very suddenly. Everyone was confused. And the worlds he's built since, such as StackOverflow, are deliberately completely devoid of all community. The smallest remnants of the community survive and evolve at http://www.crazyontap.co…

Totally agree that SO has little community (or quite a hostile one, if any) but that may be because it is a victim of its own success.

I see the same thing happening in other stack-exchange sites, sadly. The underlying problem may be the gradual fatigue at questions of the form:

"HOW DO I DO DIS???!! SOLVE THIS FOR ME NOW PLZ!!"

or even the more subtle "I was wondering about this homework-like question...?" which are - inevitably - just lazy students posting their homework. These get closed as "homework question".

On the flip side, there are interesting questions which don't fit into the SE model. These are the speculative or more open-ended discursive ones. These get closed as "too broad".

On SO itself, it kind of feels like most questions are homework - or even just people unable/unwilling to use search engines. Then innocent questioners who word their question wrong get caught in the crossfire, and have their question closed.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#58

Post by ZeroGravitas »

dasil003 wrote: post #22
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…

The problem is twofold: low bar to grabbing torches and pitchforks, and a high bar for recognizing someone else's humanity. In the old days you might not agree with your neighbor, but you had to live next to them. Now with the flick of a thumb you can denounce someone's entire existence before breakfast.

It seems to me that in the old days, not that long ago, people literally formed a mob, and often the catalyst was about who got to live next door to who.

Even the bad boys of twitter, which goes right up to mobs of people trying to ruin peoples lives with death threats etc doesn't seem quite as bad as bombing someone's church for example.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#59

Post by elcapitan »

dasil003 wrote: post #39
blhack wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It also doesn't have to live on life support from the advertising industry. That's quite important.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#60

Post by badloginagain »

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…

League of Legends have attempted to solve the problem by tying a reward structure to user interaction. Positive interactions get rewarded, negative interactions punished.

The upvote/downvote system works well for how simple it is for the end user. Although, this reward structure seems to favour opinion over fact- The stronger the opinion the more interest in generates. Also, the system only works well if the community is aligned. HN, for example, has enough people to flag flagrantly bad comments that it's managed to [mostly] maintain quality with growth. Reddit "blows up" when the company takes action to realign the community away from what it considers to be bad actors.

Twitter has no control over quality nor content. They've invested so much into developing a monetization platform (which some may argue has diminished quality of content) and they've ignored the core product- a community interacting with itself. Fake accounts, ads, and an organized faction of bad actors; one wonders how far-reaching the Twitter Exodus [of users and investors] will be.

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