Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Too many people have peed in the pool

stephenfry.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 555 posts

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#311

Post by yorwba »

effie wrote: post #284
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…

> 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.

> I've encountered quite a few posts that were unreadable.

You mean they were so faded that the text merged with the background? Highlighting it with the mouse usually works for me in this case.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#312

Post by yummyfajitas »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #61
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…

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…

Remember, the US used to have anti-communist witch hunts in which people were forced to give up their careers,...

Actually we still have those, and twitter often plays an important role. C.f. Pax Dickinson, Justine Sacco or Brandon Eich.

Luckily we've moved beyond lynchings and other such political terrorism in the US. It still seems to happen in Europe, however: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/26/french-taxi-dri... http://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2015/nov/12/greek-g...

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#313

Post by buddapalm »

Brakenshire wrote: post #138
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…

The problem is that the abstractions for working out what gets attention/promotion on social media favour the lowest common denominator. Both Twitter and Reddit are genuinely useful for connecting together like-minded communities with well established standards of behaviour, but they both struggle enormously when they attempt to find some objective criteria which can create a ranking for comparing these communities t…

> The problem is that the abstractions for working out what gets attention/promotion on social media favour the lowest common denominator.

IMHO you've identified the root problem. it's simply very easy to optimize a feed around quick interaction signals as a way of surfacing what's important, and still get the quality wrong.

> we are effectively trying to automate an editorial process for deciding what is currently the most important thing in the world, in the meantime separating what is poor content from what is merely controversial, and ranking an image macro against a 10,000 word essay. This is a herculean task, and the methods we are using are manifestly not up to the job.

what's needed IMO are user satisfaction signals. I wonder if social networks could invite users to report content that makes them mad or they find useless. not for abuse, simply to identify what different users like and start understanding what groups of people prefer

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#314

Post by hodgesrm »

sterl wrote: post #172
[deleted] wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Half of all people are below 'median' intelligence :P

Technically shouldn't you say "at least half of all people are at or below median"?

(Sorry, I just couldn't resist. It seemed apropos to the overall conversion. :)

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#315

Post by askafriend »

braythwayt wrote: post #72
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 critici…

So you would prefer to build tools to mask society's problems instead of uncovering them so that we can stare them in the face and have some type of discussion about them?

(Just playing devil's advocate here)

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#316

Post by zazen »

hueving wrote: post #305
skybrian wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a very interesting question: when does a community become an echo chamber? To use the hunting example: I imagine sometimes the hunters talk about stuff to do with hunting itself; the merits of different rifles, or where to find game, or whatever. And this is a reasonable community discussion for them to have, and it wouldn't help to have activists shouting "hunting is evil" over conversations such as that.

But sometimes the hunters will talk about the politics of hunting: one will say, "those activists are wrong to complain about animals suffering, because ", and then another will say "yes, it's so obvious they're wrong, because are so obviously right", and the echo chamber is ringing - this is the situation where people ideally would be brought into contact with the opposing view.

Can an online community promote the first type of conversation while challenging the other? How would we set about that?

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#317

Post by drostie »

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.

Well, maybe. I would instead say that the rapid churn of social networks is a "reincarnation"-type solution to the problem. Fry's leaving of Twitter is precisely the answer to the problem.

To see why, let's focus on what the problem actually is: we're social animals who crave authentic connection with others, not just to hear but to be heard. We can't just be passive consumers of news but wish to comment on it and be heard and replied to and have meaningful discussion. The problem is that a voting bloc systematically muffles some peoples' speech, ostracising them from the community due to their disagreement -- but then the community becomes an echochamber and fails to satisfy our needs for diversity.

One solution to this has been randomization -- think Omegle etc. -- which works but encourages a different sort of inauthenticity due to anonymity. Another has been the Reddit/LiveJournal model: make it easy to spawn new communities when old ones die out. It's a lot less clear why, say, LiveJournal has mostly died, but probably it was a little too egotistical and people therefore as they grew up got bored with just sharing their own viewpoints without some sort of cohesive blogging narrative, and it just died.

Somewhere there's some room for a solution which batches together communities of 50 people more-or-less randomly with some form of self-selection, and encourages them to talk about some sort of topic-of-the-day that would be relevant to all of their interests. In the meantime our solution is to join a social network and have fun until our community gets too large and we cannot get the attention we crave, at which point we'll swap to another and repeat the process again.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#318

Post by vectorpush »

This is not a twitter problem. If you're a famous celebrity with a gigantic megaphone you have to accept the fact that the masses are going to react to what you put out there. I think it's funny when celebrities get all wrinkled over internet outrage but take for granted the fact that they are leveraging the masses (via twitter and other platforms) to boost their own careers. Woops, you said something that some people on the internet disagree with, suddenly you have a deluge of hate mail instead of doting adoration. Well, what did you expect? The masses are not autonomous eye-balls, they are people with disparate ideas and opinions and if you say things that piss some people off, this is the reaction you get.

So, in the face of internet controversy, what does a celebrity do? Retreat to a convenient forum where they explicitly control the discourse so they can publicly broadcast their disdain for the fickle judgment of masses without having to actually listen to them. I suppose the so-called SJWs aren't the only ones that need a "safe space" to speak their minds without fear of criticism.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#319

Post by monksy »

muglug wrote: post #220
monksy wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at what was actually said: "Only one of the great cinematic costume designers would come to the awards dressed like a bag lady." If people weren't so quick to jump on the "blame the white guy" wagon... you'd see that it was actually a pretty clever statement.

Something can be both clever and offensive – the two are not mutually exclusive...

Could you explain to me how that statement is "offensive"?

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#320

Post by simonbyrne »

dasil003 wrote: post #39
blhack wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed, I joined 9 days after you (and have within 1% of your karma (!)), and my experience is the same. HN was founded with a keen awareness of how online forums tend to go downhill over time, and there are specific rules to avoid it. But IMHO, the saving grace is the fact that HN is not built to grow . Growth is what ruins every online community. There are still plenty of small communities have have been going fine…

Your comment brought to mind my favourite story about a long-lived online community (which was definitely not aiming for growth):

http://www.metafilter.com/98848/The-Post-That-Cannot-Possibl...

Post reply on HN