Live data from Hacker News

Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

newyorker.com

571–580 of 757 posts

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#571
post #200
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its also impossible. You're not going to have a close conversation with a group of people when a little kid is jumping up and down and screaming for attention in public. Ignoring them doesn't work for either trolls or bullys. Either they run the show, or you do something about them, end of story.

> Ignoring them doesn't work for either trolls or bullys. This goes against decades of received wisdom: DNFTT, anyone? For what it's worth, I agree with you, and I always thought simply not feeding trolls was pointless: There's something similar to a broken window effect in terms of overall tone. If someone comes to a site, sees a lot of negative comments and general asshattery, they'll file that place away as "where…

DNFTT worked in an older era.

It doesnt work now, and with the diversification and use of the net by vulnerable groups.

Having a users on a generalist forum suddenly exposed to flashing lights to induce a seizure, or ambushed by images of dead people, or being attacked for being a woman or a minority group?

Yeah you cannot expect people to shrug that off, without also expecting a large mass of humanity to be essentially living without a normal emotional response.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#572

Reddit doesn’t owe anyone anything. how about asking kids parents to detoxify their kids than solving the problem way down the chain of command? People are shitty online because they have anonymity. Now instead of going ahead and removing that, it might be worth going backward even more and going to the person. people need to be nice on the internet. The internet does not need to be nice to people. Detoxifying intern…

People are shitty even without anonymity. Theres enough people on Facebook who say horrible things, or push for horrible and hurtful ideas.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#573
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the reference. Why are manhole covers round? I always thought it was to prevent the cover from falling into the hole. Is that not the case?

That is the argument but actually any lipped shape can give this guarantee. Even historically manhole and utility covers had to be somewhat flush to the ground and so they've always had to be lipped for this. You can see lots of utility covers that are hinged, square, or other options, but all are lipped for safety. While a circular profile makes the lipping easier, it doesn't seem to influence many utility covers.

FYI, I've personally dropped a rectangular manhole cover into a properly lipped hole. They do fit all too well.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#574
post #548
post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. I'm not familiar with that subreddit, but I think I'm familiar with the mindset you are describing. Nothing in your description seems to set it apart from the "variety of opinions" model the GP proposed. Other than your feeling that these ideas are…

I don't disagree that just about any regulation of these groups will be interpreted as more conspiracy.

I guess the crux of my argument is that these people are the victims of psychological warfare. I'm not throwing out the word brainwashing for emphasis, but I truly believe a lot of these people are actually brainwashed. To give context, I don't believe its controversial at all to say that boot camp in the American armed forces, and most assuredly other countries as well, is brainwashing, through and through. Put people in a prolonged state of stress. After sufficient time, tell these people you can end all of the stress if they just follow your directions. Run till you puke. Have trained soldiers screaming in your face. Be woken at all times of the night to both run till you puke and have trained soldiers scream in your face.

Instead, many conservatives in America have been fed a constant diet of outrage/dopamine cycles about how evil Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and anyone associated, are. They're given 30,000 emails to peruse that are eventually framed to "unveil" a pedophile ring tied to all of the current players in the democratic establishment.

Then most importantly, a billionaire with no political experience, no political capital to lose, whatsoever, comes along and trolls, and proves wrong, nearly the entire national media for over a year. Nearly every week, he makes some offensive remark that leads every veteran of any election anywhere to believe he has committed political suicide. Thus, a year and a half of reporting that Trump will soon quit the race, and has no chance to win. But since, unlike all of those previous politicians, Trump has no "betters" to please, no one in American politics had anything with which to pressure Trump to do anything he didn't want to do. So when Trump won the election, the brain washing was complete. Trump had lead them out of the "prolonged stress" of Barack Obama's 8 years, and the year and a half long prospect of Hillary Clinton being President for 4 years after that. Everything he said about the lying media turned out to be "correct". Witnessing Trump win under the unique circumstances in which he won has had the psychological effect of making him a nearly god like figure in the eyes of his base. He has cut through political correctness, sexual assault claims, ethics concerns, taken his red meat to the supreme court and won. In the eyes of someone already inclined to pull for they guy on their side, Donald Trump became nothing short of Luke Skywalker. If you think this is hyperbole, heres another example of how people can be brainwashed by witnessing uncanny success against all odds, especially when that success stands to improve the brainwashed's lives immediately.

There is a known email scam where the scammer emails a sufficiently large enough pool of marks, the winning team for a single National Football League game every week, ahead of the game, so the marks can bet on the game. Every week (out of 16), the scammer simply takes the group of people who "won" the previous weeks game, and splits them in half, telling half that team A will win, and half that Team B will win. Obviously, no one will listen to someone who picks losers, so assume that every week, half of the marks leave the scam. If the pool is sufficiently large, (only 32768) after 15 weeks, there will still be marks who have been given the winning team ahead of time, for 15 consecutive weeks by some anonymous stranger. It's not controversial to see why those marks may have been brainwashed by the process, and would be willing to pay large sums of money for that 16th pick.

Obviously, Donald Trump didn't run this scam, but it goes to show that people can be casual observers to information, and be presented with just the right information to be essentially brainwashed.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#575
post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But, I think unrestricted speech may be an insufficient value It looks like you are imagining that every speech has objective "value" which can be determined (maybe it's hard to do, but if we throw enough "big data" magic dust onto it we can get at least close) and then somehow speech can be sorted by value. I think it's completely wrong from the premise up. The value of the speech is a subjective measure. Some peo…

> Thus I think "value" exists only in the eye of beholder, and trying to objectify it would only mean dismissing the values of part of the audience and emphasizing values of some other part of the audience. And yet we need to do it. As you observed, "way more people value rants than measured, polite discussion", and I'd claim that this is a problem . The "value" may be subjective, but the consequences of both "kinds…

> And yet we need to do it

Who are "we"? And what is "it"? Do you just take on yourself the mantle of decider for the whole world who is worthy and who is not? Or how is it determined? Who is worthy to wear that mantle? I don't think any human is.

> I'd claim that this is a problem

Maybe human nature is a "problem". But what you're going to do, replace humanity with better species? Do you have one in mind? Beyond that, I don't see how declaring it "a problem" helps anything, unless there's a fix to this problem. History teaches me that all attempts to create a "new, better human race" didn't just end badly - they ended so awfully terrible that when people point at it, other people get offended that you dare to compare their ideas to that. So, we have to deal with what we have now - and had for millienia. Given what we did with it - well, not ideal, but certainly there have been some improvement.

> it would be great to incentivize the kind that leads to a more stable, more just society

How do you know what leads to more just society? Maybe rants would lead to more just society faster? As for stability, stability is only good when we're at the optimum. Are we?

> I feel we need to try and walk that fine line, if we want to have a society that's better than just random.

Which fine line? Everybody has their own fine line, that's the point. You could maybe find a bunch of people whose fine line is similar to your own, if you don't look too far into the future (and if you do, what you get is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4) - but pretending there's some line that's good for everybody is just willful blindness. And out of all possible ways of building a better society, I don't think dismissing people that have different views as something that doesn't matter is the best one to start with.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#576
post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thus I think "value" exists only in the eye of beholder, and trying to objectify it would only mean dismissing the values of part of the audience and emphasizing values of some other part of the audience. And yet we need to do it. As you observed, "way more people value rants than measured, polite discussion", and I'd claim that this is a problem . The "value" may be subjective, but the consequences of both "kinds…

> And yet we need to do it Who are "we"? And what is "it"? Do you just take on yourself the mantle of decider for the whole world who is worthy and who is not? Or how is it determined? Who is worthy to wear that mantle? I don't think any human is. > I'd claim that this is a problem Maybe human nature is a "problem". But what you're going to do, replace humanity with better species? Do you have one in mind? Beyond tha…

This post is basically saying the problem is not worth looking at because it's too scary...

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think this is close to the right interpretation. Much of internet usage is, essentially, a giant slot machine. We've studied the things that make gambling addictive and intentionally incorporated them into social platforms to keep eyeballs on. The goal is to generate a reflexive subconscious impulse to check for new inputs with specific relation to the platform. A good high-level overview of this is the book…

And for any that are skeptical about the gambling link, think about the now-ubiquitous pull-to-refresh gesture on mobile interfaces -- does it remind you of anything... like a slot machine perhaps?

Even worse than gambling--the output isn't random. You can actually affect the result, a lethal combination for gambling behaviors. With slot machines it's at it's worst when the gambler believes there's a system that works. In this case there actually is one making it capable of drawing in folks who would not be at risk of being pulled into a slot machine.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#578
post #569
post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean preparing for violent insurrection that they believe is about to be started by someone else. I don't think they are planning to start it. So many of the posts are alluding to events that are imminent. My fear is not that the logical progression of this group is a pre planned and executed terror attack of some kind, but that they are being radicalized, and are not far off from a mob of Manchurian candidates. Pe…

That may or may not be true that they are expecting doomsday of sorts, but there are a lot of conspirologists which predict imminent doom literally for decades, and when it never comes they aren't bothered by it even a little. If that day will never come - and most likely that's exactly what would happen, if history teaches us something - there wouldn't be no other harm done than a bunch of folks wasting a lot of tim…

I'll whole heartedly agree that there is no smoking gun to any of my theories. I don't equate this speech with violence. My point is just that situations that result in mob violence can deteriorate at a rate far faster than rational voices can prevail. People are programmable. The level of fervor I see on some of these subreddits tells me that someone is programming these people. People are using the tools of psychology to achieve goals that would not be achievable otherwise. In the time elapsed since the programming of this particular group of people, two years ago, all of the protests I've seen from Trump's base have not been airing of grievances, but more of "lets go gloat in public and see if we can trigger the left.". Trumps base is triggered with shadenfreude, not anger. My point is that there is a singular event, Trump leaving office prematurely, that large groups of the right will inevitably interpret as a coup. If that very situation arises, then the calm, see-it-coming-a-mile-away, clear signs of trouble you envision, is suddenly hundreds of thousands of people in crisis mode.

I realize that there is a spectrum of using psychology to influence people, and I can't tell you where the line is of too far, but can we agree that the line exists?

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I don't believe in trying to control people at such a low level? What if I think people should be allowed to be as ranty as they want without having to worry about being "disincentivized"?

Then I'd like to talk with you, see if you have an alternative way of keeping the society from self-destructing.

So we've got desires to identify with groups, and we've got desires to share criticisms of groups, and we struggle to find a balance. If we never criticize, we stagnate, if we never identify, we "self-destruct". We can come up with a "quick solution" as the notion of keeping more of our criticisms to ourselves, but that's certainly not a goal you want to pursue overzealously. You need to be able to share criticisms.

We can tell people it's not attractive to be ranty, but I'm not very comfortable going further than that, at the risk of wandering into thought policing.

Look at some modern political opinion, I'm sure you've seen it as much as me. Ranting is cool. Calling everything under the sun "problematic". The tricky thing is it's not always wrong. There's surely a nearly infinite list of "problems" one could identify, and some of them are truly important. But we just need to turn down the heat on the criticism for just a second. But you can't just ask bipartisans to listen to each other more. We need to make it less cool to be blindly partisan. We need to increase the value of being able to identify with anyone. And we need to make it really uncool to judge hundreds of millions of people you've never met with deep assumptions.

I don't know, it's an interesting problem and I haven't thought of it this way very much. All I'm sure of is that this growing lack of interest in protecting free speech is about the only topic in modern politics that I give a shit about.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#580
post #569
post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean preparing for violent insurrection that they believe is about to be started by someone else. I don't think they are planning to start it. So many of the posts are alluding to events that are imminent. My fear is not that the logical progression of this group is a pre planned and executed terror attack of some kind, but that they are being radicalized, and are not far off from a mob of Manchurian candidates. Pe…

That may or may not be true that they are expecting doomsday of sorts, but there are a lot of conspirologists which predict imminent doom literally for decades, and when it never comes they aren't bothered by it even a little. If that day will never come - and most likely that's exactly what would happen, if history teaches us something - there wouldn't be no other harm done than a bunch of folks wasting a lot of tim…

I guess this has been longer ago, but the Malhuer National Wildlife Refuge takeover by the Bundys was essentially a militia challenging the government to armed conflict. I'm well aware that the case against these people ended in a mistrial because of exculpatory evidence that was withheld. That doesn't change the fact that conservatives have threatened violence in recent political protest.
Post reply on HN