It was through the angry backlash to a tweet that I discovered Stephen Fry. About eight years ago, Stephen couldn't get a Windows laptop to connect to wifi. His Twitter outburst and the reaction of Windows fans became grist for the tech blogs, which is how I noticed it. I wonder if Stephen is romanticising the early years of Twitter or if those angry reactions have just become more common. (Either way, I don't blame him for leaving.)
Too many people have peed in the pool
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Re: Too many people have peed in the pool
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 stalke…
> Society has the problem. Twitter just makes it public.
Every tool, every medium, has some effect on its content. It makes something things easy, others difficult. It amplifies some channels, squelches others. It speeds some things up, slows others down.
Society has all sorts of wonderful things and terrible things. But we humans choose which tools to build and which media to promote. We can observe this and criticize choices accordingly.
Re: Too many people have peed in the pool
#73Earlier 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…
Reddit might be the perfect analogy given the propensity for censorship demonstrated both by mods and the corporate folks.
There's two reasons for strong moderation (sometimes called 'censorship' by people who don't like it) on the internet:
Jackasses creating an unsafe space for other parts of the community, and making a space safe for advertisers.
The first reason comes down to having a choice between taking action against jackasses to allow groups like "women" and to have a place on your site. This is pretty damn important, and something that places like twitter and reddit have been horrible at. To the extent that there's less harassment on sites like Instagram, I wonder if it's just that the jackasses have confined themselves to Reddit.
Advertising is a different issue altogether, and pretty much comes down to the Q-Tip corporation not wanting their ads to run on r/penetration. Which, meh, as far as I'm concerned, but companies based on ad revenue need to be able to sell ads.
Both of these become bigger issues, however, as the sites get bigger and have a larger need for advertising dime to keep the lights on, and just have a bigger pool of jackasses to deal with. Reddit seems to have scaled... poorly... in both of these regards, and needs to think hard about both issues.
Re: Too many people have peed in the pool
#74It'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…
Either Haskell or Erlang. I'm 90% sure it was Erlang.
Re: Too many people have peed in the pool
#75It'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…
HN still works if you belong to the right school of thought. Quality has gone down in the sense that variety of viewpoints has been diminished. Within the filter bubble, there are still enough interesting articles to make it worthwhile.
Re: Too many people have peed in the pool
#76Earlier 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.
I think there's probably an upper limit for how big any community can become before it becomes fractured. This size is probably variable, and dependent on the medium and structure of the community to an extent, but I'd posit it exists for any community. See: reddit, Stack Overflow, Facebook, any church, any religion, any politcal party, any country.
Often secession is what happens: new subreddits, new churches, new countries. But as they grow, the same problems return.
One thing I've often thought about is some kind of community-space with a fixed upper-bound on the size of communities, essentially forcing a community to split to add new members, like an old cell.
Re: Too many people have peed in the pool
#77Prediction: A neo-luddite renaissance is on the horizon. The anti-social media sentiment that has only been seen among techhies is going to spread into otherwise-mainstream youth conservatives.
The only thing in the way is that current services have not censored, but they're beginning to, and decentralized alternatives haven't existed.
A maturation of bitcoin over the next year, especially with the fork, will result in bringing novel usages of the blockchain to the average consumer.
Re: Too many people have peed in the pool
#78I'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…
As an anarchs-capitalist I'd be happy to have a society where anarchs-communists had their communes and lived under their own rules. This may seem off topic but its directly relevant- we regularly have these debates in the anarchist community. But at the end of the day, it seems the anarchs-communists don't want to live under their own rules for themselves, they want us to live under their rules too. (Yes, the irony…
> But at the end of the day, it seems the anarchs-communists don't want to live under their own rules for themselves, they want us to live under their rules too.
The main difference between the libertarian left and right tends to be whether they see property rights as some sort of special exception from the principle of maximising liberty, or a some form of theft because it limits liberty. I don't know many far left libertarians (anarchists or otherwise) who'd give a shit how you choose to live as long as you are not proposing systems that would limit the liberty of others.
The right libertarian ideas that tends to be seen by the left as drastically limiting the liberty of others tends to be right libertarian ideas about strict enforcement of property rights and shared responsibility for externalities.
E.g. if you see property as theft, then someone wanting to wall off land is not a simple matter of you wanting to live differently, but a matter of you wanting to deprive others of liberty.
So from the left libertarian point of view, there is no irony, but the consequence of following the principle of maximizing personal liberty to the end, rather than making large carve-outs for property.
Re: Too many people have peed in the pool
#79Earlier 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…
"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.
Your dig on capitalism is ironic, given that the original post was about the power of activism to politicize everything it touches.
Re: Too many people have peed in the pool
#80Or 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?
A post the author of ggautoblocker on what is missing from twitter when it comes to dealing with trolls etc:
https://medium.com/@randileeharper/putting-out-the-twitter-t...