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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

#61

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

braythwayt wrote: post #27
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…

If you take a moment to look around, you’ll realize that a lot of socially progressive people are saying the exact same thing about Twitter, that the “professionally offended” are becoming too influential. Mind you, they’re talking about what happens when a woman criticizes video game culture and winds up with death threats and snuff porn choking her mentions. I am not saying this to suggest that one “side” or “the o…

I don't think Twitter is making things worse than they used to be.

Society has the problem. Twitter just makes it public.

Remember, the US used to have anti-communist witch hunts in which people were forced to give up their careers, it had actual physical lynchings, and it still has a culture where the police can do more or less whatever they want with limited accountability.

People being disrespectful or even stalkerish on a social network isn't good news, but it's a long way short of the very bad things that happen regularly offline.

If anything Twitter's problem is more that it works well for promoting celebrity vapidity, but less well for providing a mass audience for the stories of ordinary people.

You could argue there's not much interest in the latter, but then we're back to society having the problem, and Twitter being a medium for a certain expression of it.

I think Quora does a much better job of dealing with real stories and relatively civil debate - but I'd guess it's much less popular than Twitter.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#62

Post by lhnz »

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.

The "professionally offended" are actually a much smaller subset of the group of marginalised people - probably 0.1% at most, and many of them holding a lot of privilege.

The "professionally offended" are by definition those that make money from others' marginalisation. They benefit from prolonging inequality and maximising the emotional pain of others by spreading grievances as far and wide as possible. They do this as leverage for personal financial gain.

The average "marginalised" person doesn't deserve to be tarnished with the same brush. It's extremely bad of you to attempt to use them as a shield.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#63

Post by jgrahamc »

jonstokes wrote: post #38

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 loo…

It's like the way that millennials communicate with emoji

I'm GenX and not a millennial. I don't see anything wrong with using some emoji as part of my language. I already speak a language (English) which is some bastard child of French, German, Dutch, Arabic, etc. I'm happy to add a (poo emoji) when it's appropriate.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#64

Post by CultState »

The internet was designed to survive nuclear war, not psychologicl war.

Until you realize that this is a coordinated, systemic attack against spontaneous global organization designed to look like a complex grassroots organic cancer, then you aren't even talking about the same problem.

http://cultstate.com/?p=167

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#65

Post by KaiserPro »

jgrahamc wrote: post #63
jonstokes wrote: post #38

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 loo…

It's like the way that millennials communicate with emoji I'm GenX and not a millennial. I don't see anything wrong with using some emoji as part of my language. I already speak a language (English) which is some bastard child of French, German, Dutch, Arabic, etc. I'm happy to add a (poo emoji) when it's appropriate.

emoticons were annoying on MSN messenger. I'd hope that people will grow out of it, like they did back then.

but perhaps they are here to stay.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#67

Post by dustingetz »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #42
reitoei wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

(Not directly applicable to Twitter, but to online communities in general) It'd be interesting if you could have two votes: whether you liked what the person posted (which would only be visible to them) and whether you'd personally share it with your friends (which would affect it's ranking only among your friends) Or put differently, I wonder if it's not possible to create a system that dynamically sorts content, in…

The follower system on twitter already sorts content like that, it's just the retweet system amplifies certain types of content so strongly that it drowns out other types. Amongst other glaring problems, like driving an evil feedback loop that makes twitter money by making everyone angry.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#68

Post by dasil003 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #58
dasil003 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, I'm not trying to say it was all perfume and roses before, but they had to put some effort into it at least. The problem now is it becomes reflexive and casual—you don't even really need the strength of your convictions to attack someone online.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#69

Post by [deleted] »

jgrahamc wrote: post #63
jonstokes wrote: post #38

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 loo…

It's like the way that millennials communicate with emoji I'm GenX and not a millennial. I don't see anything wrong with using some emoji as part of my language. I already speak a language (English) which is some bastard child of French, German, Dutch, Arabic, etc. I'm happy to add a (poo emoji) when it's appropriate.

[deleted]

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#70

Post by seren »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #42
reitoei wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

(Not directly applicable to Twitter, but to online communities in general) It'd be interesting if you could have two votes: whether you liked what the person posted (which would only be visible to them) and whether you'd personally share it with your friends (which would affect it's ranking only among your friends) Or put differently, I wonder if it's not possible to create a system that dynamically sorts content, in…

> I don't want an echo chamber, and I want to be challenged -- but I don't want a daily rage fest against whomever the internet currently hates either

There is some scaling effect at play.

Let's say in community of 1,000 - 10,000 it is easy to keep a civil discourse by small moderation and self-policing. In the 100,000 - 1,000,000 range it is much much harder.

I have no idea of the size of HN but I believe it is closer to 50,000 and thus still "nice".

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