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

481–490 of 555 posts

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#481

Post by Tiksi »

bdreadz wrote: post #127
jgrahamc wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think about it, before AIM and online chat (way before texting), people hardly ever faked their emotions so much In the late 1980s terms like LOL were used on BBSes and on Usenet. Perhaps you just aren't old enough to remember that? :-)

Thank you. On BBSes and even IRC /me laughs, /me Before LOL I'd use hahaha or hehehe all the time as well in IRC, Chat Rooms, BBSes, etc.

  * Tiksi slaps bdreadz around a bit with a large trout.
I remember reading a study that people laugh more around other people. Anecdotally, I can definitely see this in myself. If I find something funny that isn't shared with other people, I might not outwardly laugh, and it would look like my lol, rofl, hahaha, etc isn't genuine, but with a group of people I'd probably be laughing out loud at the same thing. It might just be expressing the same emotion differently.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#482

Post by michaelmrose »

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…

What about letting people decide whose votes they want to count for them. You can be as meta as you want to be with this.

I don't want to count the votes of anyone my friend considers an idiot.

I don't want to count the vote of anyone whose tagged as a #foo by anyone tagged as a #bar by such and such a group.

Alternatively you want their vote to count double.

Instead of a single score you have as many scores as you have users and its impossible to interfere much in others affairs.

I think that this could be a very important improvement.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#483

Post by 13thLetter »

danharaj wrote: post #136

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…

> But really what has happened is that the absence of tension engendered by the undemocratic dissemination of information in the pre-Internet age has been revealed to be a lie: people have been angry for a while and they're angry for reasons. Shocking.

How would we tell the difference between "people have always been angry, this just exposes it" and "the pathological design of social networks like Twitter makes people angry when they wouldn't have otherwise been"?

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#484

Post by sosuke »

DenisM wrote: post #426
derefr wrote: 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…

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

I would as well. Sarcasm is a problem though. I don't like sarcasm over text. People tend to type their messages and perform gestures as they do so as if they were speaking to the recipient in person. Of course this causes all sorts of problems.

Personally I had a minor cultural clash over someone saying "whatever" to me in professional conversation over text. It turned out that as it was very offensive to me meant nothing of the sort them.

Text is read in the voice of the reader, its meaning is relative to the reader, and should aim to be as clear as possible whenever possible.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#485

Post by sosuke »

kedean wrote: post #331
hueving wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem isn't the occasional disagreement, it's when communities raid each other, since people are much more brazen online than in person. In person, thousands of atheists would never march into a church during mass and start berating members for their beliefs, but that's very common in unmoderated communities. Moderation solves this issue when you can shard your communities (see reddit), but Twitter is just a gl…

"communities raid each other"

I love that image and it makes a clear picture for me. Playing on a PvP server of WoW before any expansions there was no formal PvP game. What spontaneously happened though was the raiding and taking over of the other factions town. Making a mess and disrupting otherwise normal play until everyone got tired and went to sleep.

It feels so much more intense (real?) in the social media world though.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#486

Post by smcnally »

Shad0w59 wrote: post #435
meric wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like using the 'Well played!' when my opponent makes a horrendously bad move.

This happens in Blizzard's Hearthstone as well. People enjoy saying "Hello" just as they deliver the finishing blow.

Interesting: In World Series of Poker, "Thanks!" is one of the permitted auto-texts. I find it annoying when people say "Thanks!" immediately after winning a hand / before anyone compliments them on their play or win. Sounds like Hearthstone's "Hello" deathblows.

That says something about language, how the rules affect what's considered "offensive," and how some will work within the rules to create new offenses.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#487

Post by mst »

derefr wrote: post #395
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…

I am part of a couple of groups where outrage/offendedness is really not socially tolerated, and will lead to tempbans and then permanent exclusion if continued. But they're closed groups built by invite; the concept could in theory be scaled up but I don't know how you'd make the moderation work out in terms of effort to available volunteer time.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#488

Post by Outdoorsman »

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…

We're human...everything we attempt involves other humans...

Most "intelligent" humans think, at some point, that the way we go about our lives, on this planet, could be improved upon...

How to build consensus...? How to design a series of universal (planetary, in our case) truths that all will immediately recognize as valuable, and be willing to live by...?

Tons of obstacles, because we're human...tribalistic, nationalistic...we're short-sighted, likely by nature...

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#489

Post by meric »

smcnally wrote: post #486
Shad0w59 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens in Blizzard's Hearthstone as well. People enjoy saying "Hello" just as they deliver the finishing blow.

Interesting: In World Series of Poker, "Thanks!" is one of the permitted auto-texts. I find it annoying when people say "Thanks!" immediately after winning a hand / before anyone compliments them on their play or win. Sounds like Hearthstone's "Hello" deathblows. That says something about language, how the rules affect what's considered "offensive," and how some will work within the rules to create new offenses.

I think "offence" is required to build human relationships. I find myself say something in a joking manner to my best friend that would be offensive to anyone else. In a way I think it's a test - you test if the relationship is strong enough to withstand the offence, and if the friend gives the appropriate response to show you he in fact did not get offended, the relationship is affirmed and becomes stronger. Here's an example on a phone call to my friend, who is engaged, on Valentine's night.

Me: "whatcha doing?"

Him: "eating dinner"

Me: "With two girls? You fox"

Him: "haha, parents"

Me: "Wish them a sexy valentine's day in bed for me"

Him: "Haha you fuck."

Then we both laugh.

And then there are times, when I probe potential new friends with the less intense, but same kind of speech, and they take it seriously, and that's a "test failure" meaning a confirmation it'll be difficult to build a relationship with them. Of course, sometimes it works, and I make a new friend.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#490

Post by 746F7475 »

s_dev wrote: post #255
746F7475 wrote: post #250

What's the big deal? If you don't like how a platform works just leave it, I haven't used either Facebook or Twitter ever (I do have accounts, but I think you can count my posts and tweets combined with fingers of one hand) and it hasn't affected my life at all

Thats exactly what Stephen is doing. He doesn't like it anymore so he's leaving. What makes it it a big deal is that twitters success is based on prolific twitterers like Stephen Fry using the service and using it well. At the moment people are discussing how twitter is "doomed" for many different reasons this new piece of information just seems to add to the pile of evidence that twitter isn't providing value to the…

So then twitter dies and something better takes it's place. I really don't see a way out of this. I mean if random people being mean is the issue what can they do? Other than start monitoring and censoring everything tweeted
Post reply on HN