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Too many people have peed in the pool

stephenfry.com

421–430 of 555 posts

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#421
post #419

The presence of justice and the absence of tension are not the same thing. I think a lot of people have lived a large part of their lives completely insulated from the tension that has existed in society over social justice issues for centuries. Now that you can go on Twitter and find out exactly how and why everyone is mad, it looks like comity and mutual respect has evaporated. But really what has happened is that…

> people have been angry for a while and they're angry for reasons The reason they're mad here, evidently, is that Stephen made a joke to his friend. It doesn't seem like it's Stephen who failed to assume good faith.

he made a joke to his friend in public. i have friends to whom i could shout "i hope you fucking die, you bloated moist abscess" at, but if i did that on twitter as a famous person without the context of our friendship readily visible, what people ought to think?

once it came to light that he was ribbing his good friend, then people ought to have apologized and moved on. it doesn't make them terrible people for being a little on edge about powerful famous men ribbing less powerful, less famous women. the world isn't in the shitter just because he was misunderstood on twitter.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#422
post #395

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…

I've been playing Clash Royale on iPad (it's a multiplayer battle game set in the Clash of Clans universe that essentially drops the base building element and concentrates on the strategic combat).

Generally, competitive multiplayer games can be pretty harsh (devolving into toxic) communities. Clash Royale addresses this problem in an interesting way. You're allowed to communicate with your opponent, but only from a fixed vocabulary. There's just no way to be really hostile - the closest it gets is an angry face, which says more "I'm frustrated!" than anything else. There are a few faces and some simple speech -- "Good luck!", "Well played!", etc.

This has a really nice effect - it's actually a pleasant game to play and it's pretty common to get a 'Good game' or 'Well played' at the end, or even during the game when you make a good move. It works well in this situation because it's a 1-vs-1 game -- you aren't coordinating complex actions with teammates, which is where I think something like this would fall down.

Without hostility being in the vocabulary to begin with, you don't really feel like anything is missing and it gets around the whole hurt-feelings problem of 'banning' nicely in this case.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#423
How about an "untweet". Basically a thumbs down for tweets that smell. Then use collaborative UN-filtering.

Or how about using Word2Vec to usher turds to a remote part of the tweet space. Use sliders to adjust your results. For example "I need a twitter hug. What would happen if I turn down the 'Outrage' and turn up the 'Kittens' -- awwww, how cute! Ok, now what would happen if I turn up the 'Death Metal' -- kittens and death metal -- whoooah!

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#424
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the job of good moderation I think.

Perhaps. But I think it would take a particularly far-sighted and philosophical moderator to down-vote/remove a perfectly civil post whose message he agreed with, _just_ because it was contributing to an echo-chamber effect.

I would think this could be accomplished with just a policy to never, ever discuss the politics of the community's niche, and to remove posts that do.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#425
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've been playing Clash Royale on iPad (it's a multiplayer battle game set in the Clash of Clans universe that essentially drops the base building element and concentrates on the strategic combat). Generally, competitive multiplayer games can be pretty harsh (devolving into toxic) communities. Clash Royale addresses this problem in an interesting way. You're allowed to communicate with your opponent, but only from a…

>... You're allowed to communicate with your opponent, but only from a fixed vocabulary.

This is what Nintendo did, at least in online Mario Kart for WiiU, and it's great. I allow my 6 year old get acquainted with this very safe version of online play and she loves saying all the positive things to the other players.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#426
post #395

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…

If you ban sarcasm in addition to outrage I'll sign up to whatever thingamajig you're making there.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#427
post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Political Correctness police mercilessly downvoting and flagkillig anything that dares to even doubt. We really need to move beyond the idea that just because an idea is contentious, it must be downvoted due to the "PC police", and not just due to "unpopular". And seriously, blaming the rise of the right in Europe as being due to downvote/mark-unpopular mechanisms? That has to be the most banal political statement…

Flagkilling/hiding something that is not blatantly offensive or false just because you don't agree is not criticism. It's censorship.

Banal political statement? What about western media trying to cover up the whole Kologne debacle (at least for few days) It's just an obvious recent example And it's just a tiny symptom

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#428
post #21

It's a wonder he lasted as long as he did. I've joined a number of online forums through the years, and I've always ended up leaving them due to a spiral of "tone gets rough / the good people leave". I'm still in this one, but I guess we'll see how long it lasts here. Seems different somehow, but they all do in the beginning. What are some innovations in solving the asshole/quality spiral? There's lots of takes on mo…

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…

If I recall correctly, there was a noticeable difference in the HN front page on Christmas day. More unusual articles were upvoted than what usually gets posted. It could be due to the difference in visitors, but it might also be just that fewer people were voting, and there was less people to upvote what might normally be a popular post and that caused less generic posts to stay visible.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#429
post #395

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…

You could do real time sentiment analysis on what someone is saying and it it is negative open a new input area for an explanation of their anger, greater than 500 chars (and validated as well as possible for realistic word structure), so the person would have to think through their anger, and possibly change their opinion or push it through with its attendant explanation as a expandable area on the message.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#430
post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people have been angry for a while and they're angry for reasons The reason they're mad here, evidently, is that Stephen made a joke to his friend. It doesn't seem like it's Stephen who failed to assume good faith.

he made a joke to his friend in public. i have friends to whom i could shout "i hope you fucking die, you bloated moist abscess" at, but if i did that on twitter as a famous person without the context of our friendship readily visible, what people ought to think? once it came to light that he was ribbing his good friend, then people ought to have apologized and moved on. it doesn't make them terrible people for being…

But didn't you just say, "If from the get-go you assume people are acting in bad faith and you demand that they admit that this is the case before you even consider them as reasonable people, you are asking for full surrender instead of treating them as equals"? Isn't failing to do this precisely the source of the outrage? And yet now you seem to be suggesting it was perfectly reasonable for people to assume bad faith and try to tear him down, up until good faith was proven.
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