Most people are idiots. Consider that half of the population (hypothetically) has less than a 100 IQ score. Idiots did different things together 100 years ago and, 1000 years before that, groups of idiots would get together to raid and rape and pillage. They still do that in other places in the world. Now they come onto the internet to send hateful things and porn to one another. Most of the biggest idiots do not go on reddit. When the idiots on reddit act up, management cleans it up a little bit. Is there an issue that needs to be fixed here? I think anyone even claiming to have a solution may belong to the former group
Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
141–150 of 757 posts
Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
#142Oh, mai. Where is the tldr; for this one
Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not quite correct. We've tried: - Real identities (Facebook comments) - Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.) - Strong moderation (Reddit, HN) All within the context of rampant financialisation, land policies returning us to feudalism and continuous lying about the banking bailout including removing the one candidate who was going to take on the banks (Bernie). Maybe it's not "the internet" that's the problem…
How can I read up on these land policies?
I don't like "the economist" however a while back they did do a piece on land value tax, maybe HN will find it more palatable coming from this journal:
https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-va...
Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
#144Rather than censorship, just give readers better filtering tools. This was largely solved on USENET years ago, has been largely solved in email (to a great degree) -- it's just Twitter, FB, etc. which seem to have a hard time solving it. If you made certain sets of filters the default, or available in groups, and did filtering based on your best beliefs about the desires of readers (based on keywords, senders, and ma…
How would you do that in such a way as to prevent a Twitter army from piling on someone? Or at least make it so they don't feel they're being bombarded?
Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
#145So we've tried: - Real identities (Facebook comments) - Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.) - Strong moderation (Reddit, HN) They all result in toxic comments, trolling, an echo chamber,or worse, a complete lack of participation. There's no real solution to this problem. However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation…
We really just need better public education, as well as clearer separation between information and entertainment. Facebook/Reddit/Twitter/etc promote a regression towards the mean understanding... viral content reflects and amplifies the "average user's" sentiment and values. Acceptable for entertainment, but inherently prone to misinformation, propaganda, and demagoguery. Education requires valuing subject matter ex…
We really just need better public education
That's great but it's a slow cultural change. Well-educated countries can still fall into extremism, which is driven by emotional and atavistic factors as well as economic and political ones, and can't simply be dispelled with doses of Rationality (tm). Arguably, the failure of rational utilitarianism to engage with this aspect of humanity and to simply dismiss everything that can't be quantified as irrationality exacerbates the growth of toxicity.
On a more practical level, the US is a country where part of the population rejects the theory of evolution on religious grounds, historical narratives are intensely contested, and political life is objectively and increasingly polarized. Educational change happens over generational timescales, and if it were as simple as making it available all our social ills would have been dispelled long ago.
Of course education and critical thinking skills are essential for a healthy social body, but when I see people saying 'we just need better education' I feel like I'm on a bus that's headed towards a cliff edge and well-meaning people are suggesting that the solution to this is better driving lessons.
Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
#146So we've tried: - Real identities (Facebook comments) - Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.) - Strong moderation (Reddit, HN) They all result in toxic comments, trolling, an echo chamber,or worse, a complete lack of participation. There's no real solution to this problem. However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation…
Real identities doesn't work when FB threads aren't indexed by Google. If googling myself found comments I'd make on "platform X," you can be sure I'd carefully consider my comments on that platform. Having anonymous commenting is important, but if you want a less toxic platform for mainstream comments, real identities + indexing is a good start. The real WTF moment for online discussion is yet to come. When ML chatb…
This nightmare scenario has natural stable states, I think. At some point, it will cease to be profitable to propagandize at machines, no? We should work to construct a society that negatively incentivizes bot proliferation, but it can't be a purely financial incentive. Free speech must not have a price tag, or else "stop, thief" may become impossible to shout.
Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
#147So we've tried: - Real identities (Facebook comments) - Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.) - Strong moderation (Reddit, HN) They all result in toxic comments, trolling, an echo chamber,or worse, a complete lack of participation. There's no real solution to this problem. However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation…
> However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation and an echo chamber (though, you could argue that not all participation is equal and you're mainly removing poor participants).
Twitter actually does this but only for some types of accounts. Every see the "see more" button under replies? That's where people of low quality go. Twitter has a sort of rating for figuring out if someone is of low quality or not and they usually get hidden. Even their likes and retweets get hidden.
Hasn't to help overall on Twitter though I have noticed I get less assholes replying to me.
Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
#148This problem is easy to solve: give users the tools to do their own filtering. But services like to pretend that it's a hard problem because they don't want to actually cede that control to their users. The whole point of controlling the communication networks is to control what and how people say and hear.
Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
#149So we've tried: - Real identities (Facebook comments) - Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.) - Strong moderation (Reddit, HN) They all result in toxic comments, trolling, an echo chamber,or worse, a complete lack of participation. There's no real solution to this problem. However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation…
There is a fundamental approach that has not been tried as yet - Incentives The real-world has that figured out long ago. If you find something that is truly useful & timely, you would be willing to pay real money for it. Google Answers (answers.google.com) had tried an approach wherein a price can be put on a question and any legit reply which answers that q can claim it. 'Reputation' definitely still plays a role i…
Stack Overflow site utilizes this really well. You get more privileges the more trusted you are.
Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet
#150We tend to think we’re more in control of our behavior than we actually are. That is, our brains are operating from habit a large amount of the time, and the idea of the CEO brain consciously deciding our every action is largely an illusion.
This is why emergency exit doors must open outwards. People have died in fires in theaters trying to push on doors that said “Pull”. The crash bar on an emergency exit door is what’s known in design as an affordance.
When you present people with a door handle that affords “pulling”, they will pull even if the sign says “push”.
Now consider the fact that the primary affordance of social media is the “reaction”. Is it a surprise that content that garners a reaction will trend towards the outrageous?
If proactivity is the road to a more fulfilled, more civilly minded life and society, maybe we need to think of our affordances. Because we’ve made it awfully easy to be reactive, and awfully cumbersome to be proactive.
Edit: The comments below correctly point out an error; what I should have said was that there’s a danger in putting a “pull” handle on an emergency door that pushed outward, because of the confusing affordance.