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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

#301

Post by scrollaway »

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…

In computer science, when we have too much data to process at once, we shard it. We separate it into manageable chunks and we stop looking at every single data point and just at summaries.

I was using this very analogy to explain the advent of CCG "formats" (MTG, Hearthstone) a few days ago and it seems like the same analogy could be used here. There is a point where a discussion/dicussion room contains too much data to be manageable and the only way to fix that is to break it up into chunks.

We see it on Reddit, too, with subreddits becoming "too big" and naturally breaking up into smaller subreddits.

I suspect there's a universal truth hidden in there somewhere.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#302

Post by Shog9 »

pixl97 wrote: post #232
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…

Dislike/down votes have there own for of abuses such as vote brigades. I'm pretty sure there is not an easy answer to this problem.

So, this - the pile-on voting - is something folks get really frustrated about. Every system I've ever used that allows down-ranking has these regular screeds from one side or another about how the system is being ruined by gangs of like-minded voters blindly censoring dissent.

And for sure, it happens. And sometimes discourse suffers for it: good arguments get buried instead of being heard.

Then again, there are much worse things than getting your argument buried on the Internet. And Twitter has some of best examples of this... People being harassed, doxed, threatened, driven out of their jobs, their homes, their communities... All over In a system mostly optimized for pithy one-liners, I'd argue it's a pretty serious defect that a bad joke can so easily escape the bounds of its intended audience and any semblance of context and cost you your reputation. But it appears that's what we've ended up with...

Twitter's userbase has a fine tradition of building social conventions to paper over the deficiencies of the system. In this case, they've reinvented the pillory to replace the hated censor.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#303

Post by blhack »

lhnz wrote: post #164
braythwayt wrote: post #27

Earlier 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…

A problem I've noticed is that offensive content seems to float to the top. Outside of Twitter I rarely see the kind of hatred I'm about to refer to. For example, the other day Trump RT'd a tweet by an account with a name like 'White Genocide'. I kid you not. Anybody that clicks this is going to find very unpleasant material about 'the end of the white race' including photos of blood-covered Swedish women, etc. Not v…

>"just don't show me things that are going to cause me to lose hope in the human race". Seriously.

How could twitter determine things that are going to make you lose faith in the human race?

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#304

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#305

Post by hueving »

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…

But your defending the problem we have now. People are encouraged to get into feedback loops and not ever see anything that disagrees with them.

If you're a hunter or animal rights activist, it would be much better for you to be reminded that there are people out there that disagree with you.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#306

Post by lhnz »

blhack wrote: post #303
lhnz wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A problem I've noticed is that offensive content seems to float to the top. Outside of Twitter I rarely see the kind of hatred I'm about to refer to. For example, the other day Trump RT'd a tweet by an account with a name like 'White Genocide'. I kid you not. Anybody that clicks this is going to find very unpleasant material about 'the end of the white race' including photos of blood-covered Swedish women, etc. Not v…

>"just don't show me things that are going to cause me to lose hope in the human race". Seriously. How could twitter determine things that are going to make you lose faith in the human race?

I am way less sure of how to do that and can only hazard a guess.

Do not show me controversial accounts, tweets or tags not 'generally liked by the people one degree of separation away from me'?

I'd experiment to see if that helped, but if it doesn't try more things.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#307

Post by fweespeech »

nitrogen wrote: post #292
humanrebar wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Maybe retweets should be associated with and grouped by SlashDot-style reasons/reactions? So you can see x approving retweets, y disapproving, etc.

I think it'd be an improvement:

Up/Down [ Agreement; no real filtering mechanic ]

Tag -> Reason [ Other filtering / reactions ]

Flag -> spam filter signal

However, I think a real universal solution is unfortunately just non-obvious and likely not anything we've tried so far.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#308

Post by blakeyrat »

cousin_it wrote: post #227
danharaj wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so, a safe space from activism? :p i think your desire is reasonable. however, i think it would be unreasonable to demand it of something as public and global as Twitter.

Agreed that Twitter shouldn't be activism-free, but they could try to make it less threatening, e.g. by hiding or slowing down replies that are likely to be part of mobbing.

Twitter could do a million things to improve the platform (when it comes to reducing abuse), sadly they've chosen to introduce only orthogonal features nobody really wants, like "Moments".

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#309

Post by notahacker »

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.

Using emojis (and acronyms, abbreviations and even to some extent memes) to augment conversation isn't the problem. Using them in such a random or repetitive way that they substitute for conversation - to the extent that some human interactions would struggle to pass a Turing test - is the problem. Twitter, where the bot feeds are often indistinguishable from the human ones, is pretty much the poster child for this sort of communication malaise.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#310

Post by cJ0th »

pdonis wrote: post #213
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…

> 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.

> 100% agree. And note that HN is already running this experiment; we have downvotes as well as upvotes.

I'd say that even though upvotes and downvotes are somewhat helpful it is the mentality that differentiates HN from other communities most significantly. We can't outsmart human stupidity with technology.

Sure, we have loads of people who want to game HN to push their own agendas but at its core HN users actually welcome new points of view.

There is nothing wrong wrong with, say, fighting for animal rights. But the moment you consider yourself an animal rights activist you're very likely to give up common sense and the ability to value any input that doesn't conform with your peers' opinion. Basically you become a one-dimensional character.

Pleas note I used the word "likely." I am not ruling out that there are open-minded animal rights activists!

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