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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

#391

Post by CM30 »

dustingetz wrote: post #135

Twitter is powered by an evil feedback loop where making people upset makes twitter more money. Their UX is designed to generate easily-amplified content, and amplify it, and this is the unanticipated consequence. I doubt they can fix the feedback loop without torpedoing engagement.

Isn't that like any news site ever? There's a reason why articles in tabloids and on clickbait websites tend to be as inflammatory as possible, because the inevitable flame war in the comments will likely bring the page views (and the links from people attacking it elsewhere will bring the backlinks for SEO purposes).

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#392

Post by CWuestefeld »

Kalium wrote: post #389
CWuestefeld wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd go so far as to say that attacking someone else's tribe and poison their territory is one of the stronger ways to signal tribal membership.

Sure - but the signal can only be heard from within your in-group's discussion. So they'll generally flock together taking potshots at the outgroup from afar. There are of course cases of drive-bys, but that's harder to organize and rarer.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#393

Post by CM30 »

DenisM wrote: post #261

And so, the Eternal September strikes again [1]. There's a ton of gold in figuring out how some communities succumb to it, and others don't. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I suspect it's at least partly to do with the subject matter. If the community is united around a common interest, they can (sometimes) put aside their differences elsewhere to talk about that one thing in a moderately civil way.

If it's a free for all about anything and everything, then well, it's like herding cats and a vicious flame war is likely to ensue at some point.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#394

Post by drdeca »

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.

What if, instead of trying to determine an objective ranking for content based on [up/down]votes, we used a correlational voting thing?

Things upvoted by people who vote similar things to oneself are ranked higher for oneself, and things downvoted by people who vote more similarly to oneself are ranked lower for oneself.

This might be computationally expensive, but approximations to it would be cheaper I think, and still give some good results.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#395

Post by derefr »

bricemo wrote: post #111

There have been numerous studies showing that outrage is one of the most viral emotions. For whatever reason, seeing something that makes you upset has a very high correlation with people sharing/liking/retweeting. I think this unfortunate fact is what is being born out in social media. Smithsonian had a good short article on it: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-emotion-go... Research shows that amaz…

I've always wondered whether you could just have a community that banned outrage. Literally: express outrage, get banned. "Signal boost" someone else's outrage, get banned. It's not welcome within the community.

Would this even make sense? Or would this shove so hard against human nature that people would never be able to abide it?

(Of course, sometimes you'd be outraged at the community—or its management—and that'd be sort of an insidious policy in that case. I think it could still work if there was a "side" area—like MetaFilter's MetaTalk—that allowed outrage, but with the strong rule of not linking to the side area from the regular area, so people wouldn't just be having the same viral arguments by link-proxy.)

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#396

Post by pervycreeper »

In a medium such as Twitter, there is not enough incentive to make users post quality. Morons can post about whatever irrelevant nonsense they want and gain approval from other morons. From inside a filter bubble, PC policing a celebrity can seem incredibly courageous and clever, when in fact it is the opposite. The potential harms of this are real. Richard Dawkins suffered a stroke last week following such an incident, where a random interloper peppered him with a barrage of criticism, taking her gang of followers with her.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#397

Post by gaur »

tremon wrote: post #225
gaur wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I already speak a language (English) which is some bastard child of French, German, Dutch, Arabic, etc. It's a Germanic language (not a child of German), with significant lexical input from French and Latin. The input from "Dutch, Arabic, etc." is minor.

But the Germanic language family is quite large; it basically describes every language spoken on the Northern Atlantic coast. You can't say "it's Germanic" and then say "it's hardly related to Dutch or German". As for the development of the English language, I believe it derives mostly from Saxon - Frisian - Norse - French, in chronological order. I'm pretty sure Celtic should also be on that list, but I don't know i…

> You can't say "it's Germanic" and then say "it's hardly related to Dutch or German".

That's not what I said. I said "it's Germanic" and "it's not a child of German or Dutch".

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#398

Post by derefr »

kps wrote: post #386
rustynails wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your sentiment but it's far too simplistic. Take for example, a forum on ISIS. Yes, I've just triggered Godwin's law. I'm sorry about that. Now, the idea is that there should be no challenge to ISIS on some parts of the Internet because they have the same right as anyone else. However, this fails Karl Popper's criteria, don't tolerate the intolerant. I support the criticism of any prejudiced and intolera…

> However, this fails Karl Popper's criteria, don't tolerate the intolerant. It's worth pointing out what he meant by ‘intolerant’: | they are not prepared to meet us on the level | of rational argument, but begin by denouncing | all argument; they may forbid their followers | to listen to rational argument, because it is | deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments | by the use of their fists or pistols. ‘Intoler…

Thank you, I had no idea that the statement was tempered that way. The quip and the explanation together are a much more powerful and useful idea than the quip alone.

This article (http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/29/the-spirit-of-the-first...) expresses much the same thing, but takes a couple of pages to do it. Having a word ("intolerant" has been diluted, but maybe we can forge a new one) for people who silence arguments instead of answering them seems seems like it would greatly simplify almost all discourse.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#399

Post by zarkov99 »

Assholes, the self righteous,plain evil, or simply stupid kind, are a minority but they have a tremendous impact in any community which does punish or prevent bad behavior. This is why we have to have door locks, police, jails, passwords, etc. Any sufficiently large online community will end up including a bunch of douche bags which, unconstrained by the these old school deterrents, will eventually destroy it.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#400

Post by CamperBob2 »

yorwba wrote: post #311
effie wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What I don't understand is why it apparently doesn't occur to the HN admins that "fading" peoples' posts into oblivion makes people pay more attention to them. If HN's intent is to make undesirable opinions less visible, it's a colossal failure.

Often it's a waste of time to highlight those posts with my mouse, because they're usually downmodded for good reasons. But I still feel compelled to look, and I doubt I'm alone in that respect.

To fix this, I'd limit the text contrast to two levels -- normal and obviously-but-not-illegibly faded. In other words, don't make it look like you're trying to hide something from me. If a post is so bad that it deserves to be rendered at near-zero contrast, then it's bad enough to delete altogether... and only blatant spam falls into that category IMO.

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