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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

#281

Post by Disruptive_Dave »

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…

My theory, since you all asked, and with my dozens of years of behavioral studies experience (just kidding, I do marketing stuff and things), is that we - human beings, that is - aren't really designed to communicate with the world. It's just not something we're ready for right now. We went from small tribes to friggin Twitter way too fast. We're in the "figure out wtf is going on right now" phase, which could end up being a totally reasonable transition.

But we all seem to be addressing these topics as if they are as natural as plants growing. IDK, I often ask myself "why?" when considering the innovations I experience on the daily. This isn't to say there doesn't exist wonderful benefits of "connector" services like FB/Tw, I'm just not sure we're ready for it all. Then again, maybe this is how progress happens?

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#282

Post by hnlogics »

jff wrote: post #160
fche wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It is never acceptable to attack and use violence against other individuals." We're talking about electronic communications here, not meatspace.

Ah, but you see, if you redefine violence to include "anything I dislike"...

We get it jff, you also think it's fine to threaten to kill and rape women.

Congratulations, you're part of a truly enormous group of men who think that is acceptable and defensible behavior.

Next time you see your mother and father, make sure to tell them that you spend your spare time arguing that it's A-OK to threaten to kill and rape women on the internet. Seriously. Tell them. They deserve to know what sort of human being they raised.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#283

Post by rblstr »

xiaoma wrote: post #204
rblstr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without clarifying it it looks like he stood on stage in front of a bunch of rich celebrities and slagged off the winner of an award for not wearing conventional dress to an award show. I'm all for offensive comedy, but this wasn't a joke, he was basically slagging her off in public, live on television to a room full of people. Without context of their relationship it really looks like bullying. That's completely dif…

The thing is, it wasn't their business to care. They had no part in it or knowledge of the people involved but they leapt into avenger mode anyway. And a lot of their responses were way outside of civil interactions. This is one of the very least appealing changes in Anglophone culture over the past 10 years. The world would be far better off if Twitter made personal attacks, doxxing, etc (except possibly against pol…

I'd like to be clear that I'm not advocating anyone on twitter or anything that was said, I have not read any of the twitter response to this.

I just wanted to say that I could understand why people saw it the way they did, because to me it came across as really mean. It really stood out and made Mr Fry seem rather mean even compared to some of his other jokes. I'm not personally offended and I'm not going to twitter about it but I can see why people felt it was harsh because it felt harsh to me.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#284

Post by effie »

humanrebar wrote: post #244
fweespeech wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My theory is that it's because social media systems encourage and publicise agreement, while discouraging and hiding disagreement. This leads to a huge positive feedback effect on any meme that catches even a tiny number of people's attention, no matter how crazy. Well, honestly, I think that effect is largely an outgrowth of how we've designed anti-spam processes to date. Scalable agreement systems where large num…

> We'd really need to figure out a better way of mitigating problematic content without using up/down votes before we can solve this problem unfortunately. Agreed. All sharing platforms, HN included, conflate agreement with importance. I can't disagree with someone without silencing them on HN and Reddit. And I can't congenially disagree on Facebook or Twitter, at least not in a way that transparently affects the var…

> I can't disagree with someone without silencing them on HN

This bothers me too. I've encountered quite a few posts that were unreadable. Why? Was it because they violated some rule, or was it because they were unpopular opinion? I have no way to know. This is the largest problem with HN I can see.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#285

Post by david-given »

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…

You don't have to score the two using the same metric.

Ars Technica's comment system scores agrees and disagrees separately, and reports them separately. The extra axis of information seems useful.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#286

Post by sdenton4 »

Karunamon wrote: post #176
sdenton4 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 someth…

We disagree (and I get the impression this is the root of much strife) on the definition of the word "safe" in "safe space". Safe from what? From having your views challenged? From someone calling you an asshat? From people making non-credible threats (Think navy seal copypasta)? From people making legitimate threats? Talk to 10 different people and all will have different definitions as to what the meaning is there.

Sure. It's incumbent on a platform for a wide variety of communities to provide the tools for those communities to define and enforce their own norms. A big part of the problem at Reddit last year was failing to provide good tools for mods of subreddits.

Why not give mods a knob that auto kills ninety percent of the stuff they end up deleting, to keep them from just getting worn down dealing with this shit?

For my own part, the 'non credible' threats are a huge part of the problem. They stop being non credible if there's enough of them, or if you're getting private messages from people with your home address and a rapid or murder threat. That's the level of unsafe that I'm talking about here. And communities need the tools to stop bullshit before it gets out of hand. I actually think that the sort of over reactionary pc-ness that Steven Fry is concerned about could be a reaction to a lack of such tools.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#287

Post by taurath »

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…

Imagine you have 10 people standing in a circle having a conversation. At any given time only a max of say 2 people can be talking at once, and its usually one. How do people communicate, when they can't speak?

Image macros and memes are just stand-ins for facial expressions and body language, something humans are hard wired to process, but is severely lacking when communicating through text. Its a way that people form real relationships over the internet. There's nothing awful about it. Go look at any group of 20 year olds and see how they communicate in real life - you'll be just as off-put as when you see their online communications.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#289

Post by derekp7 »

skybrian wrote: post #235
david-given wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My theory is that it's because social media systems encourage and publicise agreement, while discouraging and hiding disagreement. This leads to a huge positive feedback effect on any meme that catches even a tiny number of people's attention, no matter how crazy. On twitter, you signify agreement by retweeting; this takes seconds and permanently adds to the tweet's score. But to disagree, I have to write a message o…

The problem with downvoting (at least simple versions) is that it allows separate communities to interfere which each others' communications. So, say you have hunters and animal-rights activists. They should be able to talk among themselves on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook without interference from the other side. You don't want one side to start downvoting the other side's posts into oblivion so they can't even talk…

I've often thought the same thing, that the score you see should be based on your own voting history. Either based on you voting specifically, or agreeing / disagreeing with existing votes. Extend it even further by having posts from people that you normally agree with get highlighted even if they haven't had upvotes for the specific post.

Just out of curiosity, how much of that data is available via HN's public API (or other large enough forum)? I'd like to see someone run some analysis on it to see if up/down votes do tend to cluster like this.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#290

Post by Kalium »

skybrian wrote: post #235
david-given wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My theory is that it's because social media systems encourage and publicise agreement, while discouraging and hiding disagreement. This leads to a huge positive feedback effect on any meme that catches even a tiny number of people's attention, no matter how crazy. On twitter, you signify agreement by retweeting; this takes seconds and permanently adds to the tweet's score. But to disagree, I have to write a message o…

The problem with downvoting (at least simple versions) is that it allows separate communities to interfere which each others' communications. So, say you have hunters and animal-rights activists. They should be able to talk among themselves on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook without interference from the other side. You don't want one side to start downvoting the other side's posts into oblivion so they can't even talk…

A lot of people believe it's their right to disrupt the communities of others. They call it "activism" or "advocacy" or "defending family values" or whatever the justification du jour is. It's all basically trying to stake a claim to the whole service as the territory of your tribe.

I like the idea of reinforcing some separation, but I also fear it may be too late. A lot of people seem to derive joy from attacking the community of others, to the point where that's the focal point of some whole communities. Trying to stop this internecine fighting really is an attack on such communities...

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