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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

#251

Post by chatmasta »

My Facebook newsfeed feels like a cocktail party where the host has surreptitiously arranged for the silent majority to observe a performance wherein the most "unsophisticated" guests squabble with each other over politics. The opinions on the feed, regularly produced by the same small group of people, are rife with dramatization and lacking any substantive argument. Yet hardly any of them come from friends who I know closely on an individual basis.

Facebook seems like a platform that amplifies the voice of a minority on the outskirts of the social graph, distributing its opinions to the silent majority. This seems good in theory, and would hopefully result in some meaningful improvements to civil discourse. However, it remains unclear whether expectation meets reality in that regard.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#252

Post by [deleted] »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #128
lmm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anonymity helps a lot, I think. This site isn't completely anonymous but it de-emphasizes usernames such that it's easy to miss them. Explicit policies are the other thing, and strong personal leadership. It's when the moderators become an unaccountable committee that a site starts to go downhill.

Conversely, the best online community I know is our village website, where real names are required - on the basis that you're less likely to be rude to someone who you might meet in the street tomorrow. It's notable that the biggest aggro we have is generally from people who live outside the village and therefore aren't invested in making relationships work. And yes, I do realise it's all a bit Royston Vasey - "a loc…

[deleted]

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#253

Post by jccalhoun »

I think one of the problems about social media is that the experience for the common person is often very different than that of (even moderately) famous people. I hear tech journalists talking about their experiences on twitter and they are so different than mine and I have to think it is because they have thousands of followers and I have around 100. If they do something they get tons of feedback but if I tweet the same thing I would hardly get any. Certainly there are times when things erupt and someone becomes "famous" and is bombarded but for most of us that doesn't happen.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#254

Post by tremon »

tekromancr wrote: post #161
cm2012 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"lol" is an amazingly useful addition to written, casual language. It's the textual equivalent of a smile/head nod in normal conversation. Remember that in physical conversation, body language conveys 80-90% of the message - phrases like "lol" and emojis take the place of body language.

Possibly interesting side note, I have noticed over the last few years the vocalization of 'lol' being used more and more genuinely as an affirmation of a mildly humorous situation or statement that didn't actually happen to produce a laugh. I think it started being used sarcastically or ironically, but has lost that attribute for the most part.

Yes, I noticed that too. I always thought it was a Dutch thing, since "lol" is a proper Dutch word meaning "fun".

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#255

Post by s_dev »

746F7475 wrote: post #250

What's the big deal? If you don't like how a platform works just leave it, I haven't used either Facebook or Twitter ever (I do have accounts, but I think you can count my posts and tweets combined with fingers of one hand) and it hasn't affected my life at all

Thats exactly what Stephen is doing. He doesn't like it anymore so he's leaving. What makes it it a big deal is that twitters success is based on prolific twitterers like Stephen Fry using the service and using it well. At the moment people are discussing how twitter is "doomed" for many different reasons this new piece of information just seems to add to the pile of evidence that twitter isn't providing value to the right people and this threatens its future.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#256

Post by moron4hire »

Kiro wrote: post #43
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…

Where are you from? I'm very surprised anyone would even consider eating hotdog without ketchup so it must be a cultural thing.

I usually like them with chilli, but whatever. The point wasn't the hotdog. The point was that "I can't believe you like a thing I don't like" is pervasive in our culture. Things could be political candidates or sports teams or sex positions or music genres or entire races of people. We have figured out that it's not good to do that to gay people or black people, but somehow we haven't figured out it's not good to do it in general.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#257

Post by humanrebar »

madaxe_again wrote: post #206
marcosdumay wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What?!? Masses usually act like morons. That's a well known phenomenon, old enough to become jokes in movies, and the entire audience (a mass) to get it. When people are acting smartly, they each do different things, and don't form a mass at all.

Or is it the other way around, that people act smartly and rationally individually but when taken as a whole become a singular moronic entity? See also: corporations, nations.

If that's true, why is it so hard to beat the market in the long run.

It's better to say that experts are better at some things and crowdsourcing is better at others. Though that's neither snarky nor pithy.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#258

Post by [deleted] »

madaxe_again wrote: post #206
marcosdumay wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What?!? Masses usually act like morons. That's a well known phenomenon, old enough to become jokes in movies, and the entire audience (a mass) to get it. When people are acting smartly, they each do different things, and don't form a mass at all.

Or is it the other way around, that people act smartly and rationally individually but when taken as a whole become a singular moronic entity? See also: corporations, nations.

[deleted]

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#259

Post by poof131 »

AJ007 wrote: post #102
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…

There is no friendly way to say it, the mass market are morons. It might be derogatory jokes, but this can also include things like spreading urban legends which were debunked four decades ago. Just like Usenet and countless other online communities, what starts a a small group of fairly privileged and elite eventually degrades in to garbage as the reach increases. This is not so much an overall size issue but a rela…

The mass market isn’t so much “morons” as just the lowest common denominator. Everyone is “smart” about the niche areas that interest them. These niches seldom overlap. So the mass market is more about things that cross the boundaries: sports, weather, politics, jokes, etc. So what starts as a niche (not so much privileged or elite) either stays as a niche or appeals to a mass audience by finding the common denominators.

Personally, sports bore me and I find the hero worship disgusting, but I recognize that I lose the ability to relate with a lot of people because of this disinterest. I wish more people were interested in computer science, political-economics, and defense policy, but most aren’t. While at times I want to scream, “stop worrying about bread and circuses,” I understand peoples desire to find common ground with others. [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#260

Post by HCIdivision17 »

emp_zealoth wrote: post #240
pdonis wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment. 100% agree. And note that HN is already running this experiment; we have downvotes as well as upvotes.

And I personally think it is even more insidious. When I'm on facebook and see some extreme rightwing nutjob upvote ring I see what's going on On HN on a lot of downvoted commets it makes sense, they are poorly written and full of bs. But every time there is a little more political and/or contentious issue on all I see is Political Correctness police mercilessly downvoting and flagkillig anything that dares to even d…

Each community specializes in something (which may be a bit tautological), but they do not do so well in the other things, too. So when I see some sort of political post on HN, I go in knowing it's going to be a little bit pants. Probably not terrible, probably a bit noisy as an echochamber, but certainly not what this community is good at. By contrast, if there's a bug writeup for how a screen redraw glitch was fixed by bitfiddling, well, that's the cake I came here for.
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