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Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

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Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#521

Post by hooph00p »

timbo1642 wrote: post #520

Reddit has done nothing but censor. Its own CEO spez has edited comments of others. The mods have removed all the comments that don't fit their narrative or liking in every big news or political sub. Anything pro conservative or anti-liberal has been removed no matter how true it is. Its pure censorship and nothing else. They even banned a complete subreddit because they found out the people that were working at redd…

> pro-conservative or anti-liberal

hmm... you might be on a different part of reddit than I am.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#522

Post by dredmorbius »

panarky wrote: post #37

> Struggle to Detoxify the Internet The internet isn't toxic. It's the people who are toxic. These people are just as noxious in real life even if some of them hide it when their identities are known. Can anything be done to detoxify the people, or do we just treat them like spam and filter them out? And what happens next when millions of rabid voices are suppressed? The toxic people don't cease to exist, we just won…

It's not Little Boy that created a runaway supercritical explosive nuclear reaction, it was uranium that created a runaway supercritical explosive nuclear reaction.

Except that that uranium had to be mined, refined, separated, shaped, and placed into a gun-type fission physics package.

The toxic people you mention existed before Reddit (and Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or other various online media). However they weren't manifesting the same effects as we're seeing now, for the most part, until Reddit (and Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or other various online media) came along.

It's not the components that have changed, but the relationships, vectors, and mediation between them.

We could, of course, note that there were earlier periods in which we saw similar types of situations evolve. And I could respond in turn that many of those instances were themselves the result of changes in the media landscape: AOL and Usenet, 24 hour cable television news, talk radio, FM radio, CB radio, handheld megaphones, Xerox machines, mimeographs, television (both terrestrial, cable, and satellite), radio, large-scale public address systems, high-speed printing presses, widespread literacy, population concentrations in cities, railroads, and more.

And from these: the 2003 Iraq War, the Gigritch "Contract on America", the Rwanda massacre, the Yugoslav civil war, the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, the 19760/70s Vietnam War protests, the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights movements, McCarthyism, Father McCoughlan, Fascims and Nazism, the Russian Revolution, the Revolutions of 1840, the Chartist Movement, the French Revolution, the American Revolution.

Changing how a system receives, transmits, and processes information will fundamentally change that system itself.

The Internet is, in significant part, toxic.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#523

Post by dredmorbius »

dalbasal wrote: post #299

With the benefit of hindsight, I think “free-form platforms” like reddit or youtube may be the road to mediocrity. Youtube is still the major player even though twitter, Facebook & netflix grew around them. It is less opinionated on how video should be consumed. Less opinionated on what should be consumed. Anyone can post. Anyone can see it. Problem is, youtube doesn’t really have a purpose that it is trying to serve…

The principle that mass platforms breed mediocrity is an old one.

Dwight MacDonald's "A Theory of Mass Culture" (1953) is some decades old, but still among the more recent additions to this field.

https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDon...

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#524

Post by a_bonobo »

siegecraft wrote: post #148

This 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.

I don't think it's that easy.

Having a toxic sub-community leaks into other communities. I've noticed that myself, the /lit/ subboard no literate on 4chan has been taken over by /pol/ users.

It has been shown that when Reddit banned two toxic subreddits, the users of those subreddits either left completely or drastically reduced their hate speech in other subreddits:

>Within the frame RQ1 and RQ2 provide, we find that the ban worked for Reddit. Many more accounts than expected discontinued their use of the site; and, among those that stayed active, there was a drastic decrease (of at least 80%) in their hate speech use

See http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf

In other words, even if you filter your own subreddits to the ones you 'like', chances are that the toxicity leaks into your favorites.

(This is the same paper quoted in the OP's text)

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#525

Post by jessaustin »

mistermann wrote: post #516
jessaustin wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging solely on the number of HN commentators who are absolutely incapable of detecting irony or satire, and indeed who may feel those are entirely out of place on HN, the average citizen isn't capable of considering two mutually contradictory propositions at the same time, let alone becoming "well-informed". The various exhortations in this thread to "just teach them!" bespeak a similar innocence. We have a rather…

Critical thinking, specifically, is taught on a widespread basis? What country are you writing from, and could you give some specific examples?

Most of our high schools despair of teaching mathematics to the level of algebra, to most of their students. Many haven't yet despaired of conveying literacy to those same students, but the outcome is by no means certain. I would consider both of those prerequisites to "critical thinking", no matter what particular idiosyncratic definition of that phrase you might prefer. Therefore I suggest that we aim lower, for a sort of animal suspicion that comes naturally to all humans. The result, from the perspective of political harmony, will be the same: hundreds of millions of critical thinkers would not magically all arrive at the same conclusions on any set of topics. In a perfect world of critical education, not only would you still disagree with most people's conclusions, but you would also still disagree with how they arrived at those conclusions.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#526

Post by disconcision »

mistermann wrote: post #518
icanhackit wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might open people's eyes to some of the hypocrisy in the current public dialogue, just one of many issues being that the same action (wearing revealing clothing) is considered just fine and don't you dare even question it you victim-blamer when committed by one gender, and sexual assault when committed by another. Oh and by the way, "all we want is to be treated equally'. I'm not seeing apples for apples in your…

> I'm not seeing apples for apples in your argument - it'd be valid to say the popular female opinion (whatever that is) is hypocritical if their stance was that men couldn't wear revealing clothing Isn't that their stance? If a man went out in public with 1/3 of the flesh of his penis showing, everyone would be cool with it? The reality is, he'd be arrested for indecent exposure. In this case, the equivalent of what…

It's not very obvious, to me at least, what your overall point is?

> If a man went out in public with 1/3 of the flesh of his penis showing, everyone would be cool with it? The reality is, he'd be arrested for indecent exposure. In this case, the equivalent of what women do on a regular basis is quite literally illegal.

I don't understand what the specific double-standard you're alluding to it? I don't think a woman with exposed genitals is going to escape an indecent exposure charge.

Upthread you liken men wearing revealing clothing to sexual assault, but I've never seen this as a talking point in the gender discourse.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#527

Post by wslh »

larkeith wrote: post #512
VLM wrote: post #164

For, uh, purely scientific purposes I've noticed the posting volume on pr0n subreddits like /r/gonewild and uh, a few dozen similar subreddits, is perhaps 100 to 1000 times the sheer posting volume of a controversial subreddit like /r/the_donald. The sheer volume of relatively R rated pr0n is perhaps 1000 times the volume of everything else. There seems to be tap dancing around the issue that reddit is a 1960s Playbo…

I think it's disingenuous to try to classify Reddit as only a porn site, or to report on its communities in that context - by nature of its size and nature, individual (or groups of) subreddits are nearly as disparate as two separate websites, and should not be generalized based on Reddit as a whole; while the porn communities of Reddit may be the largest section, that does not exclude functionally distinct bodies su…

> I think it's disingenuous to try to classify Reddit as only a porn site

I completely agree, there are zillions of different experiences depending the subreddit and many of them can amaze you. For example, I have asked very specific questions in subreddits like sysadmin and networking on how AWS and Google Cloud handle layer 2 network protocol like Ethernet, and received the correct answers that I never received posting on the specific AWS or Google Cloud groups outside Reddit.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#528

Post by tmuir »

floren wrote: post #339

I can't wait for the word "toxic" to drop out of favor. It implies that the person is not just giving a bad opinion, but is in fact fundamentally flawed and dangerous. Arsenic isn't toxic because it had a bad day at work, arsenic is by its nature a deadly poison and you can't change it, only avoid it. The vast majority of people labeled "toxic", though, are just humans with a variety of opinions and beliefs, some you…

I submit to you, a subreddit I've found in the past week that is absolutely horrifying, and I think stands quite counter to the "variety of opinions" model you put forth.

This isn't anything visually graphic, but the opinions expressed in this subreddit make me believe that these people are preparing for a violent insurrection, full stop.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CBTS_Stream/

CBTS stands for the Calm Before The Storm. These people follow an anonymous online poster named "Q" who posts vague, short posts on some other site (not sure where), and then lots of other subscribers repost these and form general conspiracy theories that all revolve around the deep state, the NWO, and other nefarious groups colluding to remove Donald Trump from office. Its not your standard fare related to the ongoing investigations in congress or the special counsel, these people are the dangerous combination of paranoid, gullible, and angry. As an outsider just perusing, its obvious that this place is crawling with charlatans and con artists who understand that they are addressing a crowd of people who are more prone to believe an idea simply because of the tantalizing ramifications of if it turned out to be true. Anyone can spout out the most hairbrained idea, and three people will show up to give vague, outrageous stories that confirm the original idea.

I don't have an answer, but surely there must be a level of fomenting anger and general mob action that deserves some sort of modulation/regulation.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#529

Post by sizzle »

InvisibleCities wrote: post #159
gdubs wrote: post #150

We 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 wh…

>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. Is this true? I always assumed it was because it's pretty much impossible to pull open a door when you are being crushed by people pressing against one another trying to escape.

Norman doors https://99percentinvisible.org/article/norman-doors-dont-kno...

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#530

Post by thaumasiotes »

branchless wrote: post #466
thaumasiotes wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you referring to a feudal lord as a "private landlord" or a "devolved local state"? Both would be more or less fully appropriate. "Devolved local state" is slightly more accurate than "private landlord", because unlike a landlord in a more commercialized society, a feudal lord was not legally able to sell the land he owned. He was legally able to govern it.

My interest is that the feudal lord was living off the backs of others. The state taxing land to build hospitals is not the same thing.

Lords often got their start in lording by building a bridge.
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