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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

#621

Post by tmuir »

lopmotr wrote: post #587
tmuir wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow. You seem to be experiencing your own conspiracy theory. Not every popular idea has some puppet master controlling it. It's completely understandable that supporters of a widely ridiculed underdog would gloat about his success. It was just another election, and just another president, not the end of the world. America hasn't collapsed. Nonetheless, I don't want to censor your ideas. Let people make their own mind…

If you don't believe there are massive psychological exercises successfully influencing, and arguably radicalizing people, occurring on the internet, specifically on Reddit, you're being willfully ignorant. Or a Trump supporter, but I repeat myself.

I realize that the topic of brainwashing is loaded enough that any rational discussion of it can easily be derailed by someone by simply making the strawman you just made, by comparing my arguments to claiming the end of the world or collapse of America.

Isn't it ironic that you can easily spot a culture of victimhood in others, the psychological effects, the futility of it, but I imagine you don't see the same thing in your average revanchist conservative? The level of hatred and frothing at the mouth over 8 years of Barack Obama, fed by people like Donald Trump, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, and other charlatans created a victim complex that seems to persist even now in many Trump supporters.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#622

Post by AllegedAlec »

Shivetya wrote: post #614
AllegedAlec wrote: post #607

> To its devotees, Reddit feels proudly untamed, one of the last Internet giants to resist homogeneity. Waitwhat? Reddit is a huge hivemind, with each subreddit having more or less the same views, since people who do not agree to the narrative of that subreddit are quickly downvoted so much that they can't post more than once a day or something.

and one fact they want to ignore, many of the politically oriented subs are managed by PACs who worked for years to get their people into moderator positions if not create subs as they needed them. then through mailing lists, text alerts, and such, they know what stories to post and act on. reddit is anything but wild wild west anymore, its been co-opted by those who know how to manipulate opinion of products and per…

I don't think this is all that specific to Reddit, though. I mean, even /pol/ was 'infiltrated' by the likes of CTR (although this of course doesn't work, since 4chan is aggressively anti-everything).

Furthermore, the fact that all moderated political (and even many nonpolitical) forums are pushed and pulled towards the extreme fringes is understandable, even to be expected: those who take moderator jobs are those who are most driven about the subject at hand, and those are most often the ones with a fringe opinion.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#623

Post by labster »

jessaustin wrote: post #506
mistermann wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think we've reached the absolute apex of having a well-informed citizenry? If not, if critical thinking doesn't work, what could we do to improve this situation?

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…

Dialectics are hard, man.

But to be fair, the longer we get into the current era of politics, the harder it is to distinguish between earnestness and satire. Young people who watch the movie Network today don't see Howard Beale as satirical, because there are too many people like him today who are deadly serious.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#624

Post by jstarfish »

verylittlemeat wrote: post #462
Retra wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By giving people things to think critically about, and ensuring that they respond in an appropriately thoughtful manner. Of course this doesn't work when politics is taboo.

I think emotional maturity is more important than critical thinking. People in our culture have this life or death anxiety over being right, especially in social groups. You see it all the time on social media. Person 1 makes a throwaway facebook post which contains some kind of factual error. Person 2 points this out. Person 1 feels personally attacked and becomes emotionally invested in "winning." The more pushback…

It comes from the fact that when you say anything incorrect online, there's an infinite number of people who will call you out on it. Your intellect is always on trial. You have to convince a jury of the entire planet that your opinion is valid.

Take the same comment or opinion and air it among three friends in person (or a very tight social network). You only need to convince two or three people who likely trust and respect you already, and who are not inclined to want to spend an infinite number of hours debating such trivia across all time zones.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#625

Post by krapp »

jstarfish wrote: post #624
verylittlemeat wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think emotional maturity is more important than critical thinking. People in our culture have this life or death anxiety over being right, especially in social groups. You see it all the time on social media. Person 1 makes a throwaway facebook post which contains some kind of factual error. Person 2 points this out. Person 1 feels personally attacked and becomes emotionally invested in "winning." The more pushback…

It comes from the fact that when you say anything incorrect online, there's an infinite number of people who will call you out on it. Your intellect is always on trial. You have to convince a jury of the entire planet that your opinion is valid. Take the same comment or opinion and air it among three friends in person (or a very tight social network). You only need to convince two or three people who likely trust and…

But... an infinite number of people aren't reading every page on the web, all the time. Even on Reddit, you're only really interacting with the limited subset of users who choose to comment, out of the limited subset who read a thread - which is still possibly bigger than a circle of friends, but smaller than any significant fraction of the human population.

There is the perception that "the entire world" is watching you on the web, criticizing your every move, but that's not a fact.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#626

Post by aje403 »

lopmotr wrote: post #490
aje403 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspected that I shouldn't have put that into my post or should have qualified it with a statement regarding how completely useless of a metric it is. My general point was that probably around half of the planet is humping a tree as we type at our computer and pontificate about the human potential and dignity, regardless of a useless score that slightly correlates with things.

IQ isn't useless. It does correlate with violence (rape and pillage?) and of course it's a powerful predictor of academic performance, future income, and even life expectancy.

As soon as it gets mentioned to make a point, it incites a completely orthogonal discussion about what it means, its validity, socioeconomic bias, racial bias, etc

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#627

Post by waterhouse »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #394
sctb wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...I suspect that the average votes per comment on HN has gone way down year over year OK, I'll bite! A cursory look at the data shows a clear increase in average votes on comments from 2007 until 2012, which is the only year with a dip, followed by steady growth until the present all-time high.

Huh. Is this total votes or votes per comment? I'm curious what the median number of total votes on comments that have at least one vote is.

I wonder if (or how) one should take population into account, too. We might figure that a majority of the people read only threads that are on the frontpage, so, if the number of people on HN has doubled, then each thread will get viewed by 2x as many people, and, if the new crowd has the same likelihood of voting on each comment as the old crowd, then you'd expect 2x as many votes, assuming no change in comment quality. Instead you might want "votes per comment, divided by number of users".

Of course, there are lots of "all else being equal" implicit assumptions there. First, if the population doubles but stories move off the frontpage in 0.7x the time, then you'd only get 1.4x as many votes—and this is one of InclinedPlane's points. Second, the newer crowd could be significantly more, or significantly less, active. To control for these two things, the measure you might use instead is "votes per comment per pageview", or "votes per comment per second a user spends on the page". Third, there might be more comments posted—well, duh, it would be weird if the new users never posted any comments.

Fourth—and I think this another thing InclinedPlane wants to focus on—comment quality could have changed. Comment sorting is relevant too, because I'm sure lots of users don't read everything. If we suppose that, due to an increase in population, we get 2x as many comments but they have the same quality distribution, and if we suppose the best comments always go to the top, then the average quality of the top n comments should increase; you can see something like this in extremely popular Reddit threads, where the top several highly upvoted comments are clearly optimized for something (often clever jokes). If we suppose a decent population of users only read the top n comments, and always use the same function that maps "quality of a comment" to "probability of upvoting", then, when the set of comments doubles and (by assumption) the best rise to the top, we'd expect these users to generate more upvotes overall, and hence "average votes per comment viewed" should go up. (It's also possible that people's standards would rise. But I think people's changing standards would lag behind the changes in what they're viewing.) That said, for the comments that aren't in the top n, the fraction of people that view them (and consequently might comment on them) would go down.

The question of how long threads sit on the frontpage is relevant, both for comment exposure and for InclinedPlane's point about conversation longevity. (There are also pages like "new" and the no-longer-linked-at-the-top "best".) I wonder how best to quantify that... perhaps "the frontpage tenure of the thread with the longest tenure of all threads on that day".

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#628

Post by austincheney »

treerock wrote: post #616
AllegedAlec wrote: post #607

> To its devotees, Reddit feels proudly untamed, one of the last Internet giants to resist homogeneity. Waitwhat? Reddit is a huge hivemind, with each subreddit having more or less the same views, since people who do not agree to the narrative of that subreddit are quickly downvoted so much that they can't post more than once a day or something.

That's not my experience. There seems to be subreddits on every conceivable topic, and you can subscribe to whatever variety you want and you'll get a wildly varied range of views/politics/whatever. There are even 'change my view' type subreddits for people looking to understand and debate the 'other side' of their arguments.

The comment you are replying to becomes more valid the larger the subreddit regardless of its subject. You wouldn't think subreddits like javascript and programming would be hotbeds of rampant emotional insecurity fueled by deep echo chambers, but they certainly are.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#629

Post by saurik »

hnuser1234 wrote: post #560
TeMPOraL wrote: post #556

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…

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"?

Facebook and YouTube already do stuff like this: "too many people are just having fun clicking like on funny images instead of typing long comments, so let's increase the newsfeed and recommendation penetration of posts and videos with more comments... oh, shit, but now we are promoting flame wars as the best way to get more comments is to troll people".

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#630

Post by gaius »

keepper wrote: post #117
_m8fo wrote: post #46

So 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 haven't really tried "real identities". We've come close. Real identities would require verification, which sites like FB only do after the fact. I fear that a huge repercussion of the election issues is that we will get there. A real ID may be required for you to post comments in all websites. And i'm not sure how I feel about that. Reality is that it would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identi…

There are two kinds of people who use real names on FB: those who never post offensive content anyway (the vast majority), and those who simply don’t care if offensive content is associated with their real identity (a small minority).

Those who post offensive content and do care, find it completely trivial to get a fake name. FB’s enforcement of their policy is basically nonexistent. This is the second-biggest group of users.

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