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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

#321

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

cJ0th wrote: post #310
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.

> 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…

> but at its core HN users actually welcome new points of view.

No. Try posting anything here that opposes the groupthink. You'll get the downvote hammer used against you very quickly.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#322

Post by tokai »

michaelwww wrote: post #171

I've been accused of being sexist exactly once in my life, by an anonymous male friend of a woman on Twitter because I dared to answer a question she asked. I didn't realize she was asking in jest. Her friend said I should have known that she was a very knowledgeable person (I didn't) and her question was a joke, and because I answered it I was implying that she didn't know the answer and therefore was manspainling a…

>Perhaps if Twitter had a real name policy it would level the playing field

Didn't work at all with youtube comments.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#323

Post by kefka »

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…

I'm wondering how many similarities your comment also has to do with capitalism...

Some areas of business make a good local idea, regional idea, but VC firms want you to expand and swallow the world. Maybe that's also the wrong way to think about it: maybe coexisting in the local economy is a better, more stable, and amicable way to go.

Just a thought that your post had on me.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#325

Post by CWuestefeld »

Kalium wrote: post #290
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…

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 th…

IMHO, the problem is not disruption by outsiders. The worst cesspools I see are entirely in-group.

It seems to me that the in-group echo chamber becomes not a discussion, but a means for all to signal their right-thinking loyal membership of the group. Just over the last couple of days I've seen some awful stuff along these lines on Facebook, regarding the new opening on the Supreme Court. Someone will share a meme that was posted by one of their in-group pages. This turns into a bunch of "me too" replies, but each of them needs to share a comment that includes a non-clever pun based on misspelling an opponent's name, and many of which declare how evil the other side is and deserves whatever they get. (notice I'm not taking sides: I think this applies equally across the board)

The problem here is that from a few cheers that get the ball rolling, any semblance of discussion evaporates. It's like when the neighbor's dog barks in the middle of the night, so your own dog replies, and then another gets into the act, and pretty soon the cacophony has everyone awake - but nobody's any better off from knowing that there are a bunch of dogs in the neighborhood.

I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think that the problem is outsiders being disruptive - it's insiders clambering to signal their tribal membership.

EDIT: missed the "not" in first sentence. BIG difference!

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#326

Post by enraged_camel »

jimbokun wrote: post #239
enraged_camel wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I'm not sure I can relate, though. I'd rather listen to Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins talk about evolution and atheism than someone of average intelligence.

Because you really just want reinforcement for ideas you already believe?

I didn't say anything about whether I agree with those ideas or not. Stated simply, I'd rather hear any given argument from someone who is intelligent than someone who isn't. Extraneous factors, such as the arguer's humility or tone of delivery, don't enter the picture for me when evaluating the merit of the idea being argued.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#327

Post by potatolicious »

lmm wrote: post #98
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…

I think Twitter by its very nature promotes that kind of thing. The 140-character limit inherently pushes towards zingers and outrage. Nuance is stripped away by the medium.

Exactly - it's too easy to say that Twitter is simply a reflection of society itself, technology is not a completely neutral pass-through filter.

The 140-character limit strips all nuance out of conversation, so it's no surprise that when it comes to controversial topics everyone is an asshole. It turns out we need more than 140 chars when talking about complicated, important topics.

More than that, Twitter's choice of how users relate to each other also contributes to the nastiness - it's a medium specifically designed so that a single message can traverse a huge portion of the user graph, and this causes a lot of problems.

On Facebook, if you post something stupid, insensitive, or generally moronic, at worst you'd have your friends (or friends-of-friends) telling you off, it almost never goes beyond that simply by nature of how friending works. FB's privacy settings (by default at least) literally prevents anything from being shared past N distance from you.

Ditto on old-school web forums - if you post something stupid, insensitive, or generally moronic, you'll at worst be dogpiled by the forum's own users, but that's it. The link may be spread around, but few people will sign up to some new phpBB webforum just to yell at your stupidity.

On Twitter though your tweet goes viral and traverses many, many different communities, each of which get to layer their own outrage on. More than that, they are all free to respond to you, without filters. The pile-on effect is the scariest we've seen from any social network in existence.

Reddit also suffers from a similar problem - communities cross into each other almost too easily, so brigades are common. At the very least though most subreddits are moderated, whereas Twitter is really a free for all. We've seen how well Twitter's abuse team handles overt death threats and other far-beyond-the-pale abuse (read: lol).

This might not be particularly insightful coming from someone who never really got into Twitter, but their whole model of user interaction is fundamentally defective.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#328

Post by skybrian »

Kalium wrote: post #290
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…

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 th…

Well, yes, there's no system that's truly value-neutral. (What would that even mean?) But generally speaking, I expect that the large social networks will try not to encourage open conflict between groups that would otherwise keep to themselves, to avoid driving members away. So this is a bias towards peacefulness rather than conflict.

One example of this is how resharing a post on Google+ starts a new comment thread underneath it. This allows posts to cross communities while somewhat discouraging them from mixing it up in the comments. (You can click on the original if you want to.)

The web does this too: a web page can be discussed in any number of forums, independently of each other, without conflict, by sharing the URL. Comments directly on the web page don't work that way, which is why they're so often worse.

If people are deliberately trying to fight, things get even more difficult. Banning people from your feed can sometimes work, but is vulnerable to sock-puppetry and doesn't scale to large groups.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#329

Post by tomjen3 »

Kalium wrote: post #290
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…

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 th…

It is almost like humans are tribal and will defend their own tribe and attack other tribes.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#330

Post by [deleted] »

david-given wrote: post #154
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 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…

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