Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#631

Post by aninhumer » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 10:29 AM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #566

dalbasal wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an insightful analogy. To stretch it a bit, I'd say there's an important difference between a fire door and reddit. The fire door knows its job is to prevent people burning to death. Reddit... does it know it's job is to prevent outraged reaction? I think this is one of the things that made facebook so problematic on politics, it can't tell the the good likes, comments and shares from the bad ones. I'm not su…

> Free speech is also problematic, when taken as 'all speech is equal.' Free speech is not problematic, as long as everyone has the right to speak and falsehoods can be debunked - there should be no "safe place" for the exchange of ideas, whether they are good or not. Starting by saying that 'free speech' has a problem is a very, very dangerous place to go to.

> there should be no "safe place" for the exchange of ideas

What do you think a "safe space" is? If you are arguing that there should be platforms where people can speak without being shouted down when the audience strongly disagrees with what they're saying, that is a safe space. In order to construct that space, you have to deny some rights of the audience to speak in that context.

And this is the whole problem with naive free speech advocacy. Unrestricted free speech is not possible anymore than unrestricted freedom in general is possible. People cannot possibly hear every single person's viewpoint, so some people will always be denied a platform to speak to some other people.

The question is how best to structure our societal discourse. What values are important, and how do we protect them? And the question needs an answer more complicated and nuanced than "free speech". Because when we don't acknowledge the complexity of this question, we become blind to the de-facto decisions that we're making about which speech to prioritise.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#632

Post by tmuir » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 10:47 AM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #601

tmuir wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 psychol…

> I don't equate this speech with violence. Oh I don't say you do. I am saying the need of so many people to do it suggests there's a distinct lack of violence to point at, otherwise they'd be pointing at it, instead of pointing at words. And since these people are highly motivated to find anything to point at, their failure to find it suggests maybe there's indeed not much political mob violence to find. > The level…

"There's no words that can make robots out of people"

How do you explain cults? How do you explain the effects of advertising? How do you explain the uniform levels of discipline achieved by basic training? How do you explain phone scammers? How do you explain the success of the public relations industry? How do you explain Bernie Madoff? How do you explain cigarette smokers? How do you explain the effects of what we refer to as echo chambers? Everyone of these consists of people being programmed or brainwashed in one way or another.

You hear the word brainwashing and immediately think of someone thats hypnotized, or a zombie, the typical hollywood trope. But its a far more common thing.

If you're interested in reading about this, there is a book by a psychologist named Robert Cialdini, called Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion.

https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Rober...

One interesting persuasion trick is to start with extreme opening bids in negotiation, and then back off to what you really want. This is how the actors of Watergate were able to convince others to go along with the plan to break in to the Watergate. The original plan was far more involved, with a $1,000,000 budget, and included kidnappings. G Gordon Liddy used this as an extreme opening bid, and eventually convinced everyone that what eventually took place was a reasonable compromise. After, its not like they kidnapped anyone, and they only needed $250,000.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#633

Post by ghettoimp » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 11:06 AM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #575

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…

> 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…

Picking out only a very small thing that you said:

> I don't see how declaring it "a problem" helps anything, unless there's a fix to this problem.

This seems wrong to me.

The process of (as a group) clearly identifying things that are problems, and coming to agreement that they are problems, and coming to agree on whether they are important, is of fundamental value, regardless of whether we have solutions at hand.

Without this step, folks will either be ignoring problems because they don't know about them, or proposing "solutions" to things that others don't even see as problems, neither of which can lead to any good...

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#634

Post by moduspol » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 11:15 AM UTC

mistermann wrote: post #482

moduspol wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's plenty of material out there that isn't remotely touched upon in a traditional education. Right. I took a logic class for my undergraduate degree. It's actually the source of the "modus" in my username. I guess to me that's a far cry from what people refer to as "critical thinking." Being able to identify textbook logical fallacies isn't the same thing as rationally and objectively forming a judgment about…

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?

> Do you think we've reached the absolute apex of having a well-informed citizenry?

Of course not.

> If not, if critical thinking doesn't work, what could we do to improve this situation?

I'm not sure "well-informed" and "critical thinking" are even relevant to each other, but putting that aside, I genuinely don't know. That's why I asked how you teach critical thinking.

It's possible people are bound to retreat to their biases and it's a futile effort. I'm just not convinced attempting to teach people "critical thinking" will work, because it hasn't.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#635

Post by icc97 » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 11:24 AM UTC

etblg wrote: post #184

antishatter wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the somethingawful forums involve a cost to participate, something like a one time $10 fee that was designed to remove low content or negative content participators. Might be an interesting case study of your hypothesis.

Worked, but not 100%. Many people were still willing to pay 10$ over and over and over again, for whatever reason, to reregister and keep posting (badly) just to get banned again.

At least you get money out of the trolls though. Just donate some of it to a bullying campaign.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#636

Post by icc97 » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 11:26 AM UTC

nickthemagicman wrote: post #149

ronzensci wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

skeptics stackexchange is a good example. Lots of people complain that too many comments are deleted, but it's an absolute lions den of controversial issues. The mods do a very tough job and handle hate speech better than anywhere I've seen.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#637

Post by belorn » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 11:55 AM UTC

shaki-dora wrote: post #134

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economic incentives are misaligned. Fake news helps with page views and other KPI. If there was an actual enforcable cost associated with misrepresenting the truth, we'd see a slowdown in fake news. The restoration of the Fairness Doctrine would also help stymie some of the biggest promulgators like Fox News * * you can search for "fox news viewers misinformed" and encounter studies and results like http://public…

The analogy of food nicely shows that some sort of race-to-the-bottom does not necessarily occur: there’s still organic or other high quality fresh food even though McDonald’s has been around for a while. Similarily, there are still excellent news sources. The Economist is often cited in these discussions, and the New York Times is also vigilant in their reporting and the correction of errors when they occur[0]. What…

The breakdown in trust of news institutions has many sources, so correcting factual faults is just addressing one part. Omission and selective use of facts, misleading context, and misleading language seem to carry a higher penalty for trust in todays environment where it is very easy to provide the original source when ever a slightly biased news article is published. A factually error is very binary, true or false, while omission and selective use of facts gives room for much more outrage and distrust of otherwise well establish news institutions.

The Economist and the New York Times may have good practices in regard to errors, but there is a clear difference in their reporting to independent fact checking sites. To make matters worse, even those examples of "excellent" news papers tend to have a clear and open political alignment. With increased political polarization this then result in a rather natural distrust of news institutions, even those that are vigilant in correcting errors after they have occurred.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#638

Post by dsacco » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 11:57 AM UTC

rorykoehler wrote: post #510

moduspol wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you teach critical thinking?

Philosophy

You’d think that, but Wittgenstein minted his career on calling philosophers out for not thinking critically enough in debates.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#639

Post by kerkeslager » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 12:08 PM UTC

projektir wrote: post #583

kerkeslager wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Poisoning a conversation is a thing. And if you've participated in online discussions I don't see how you can honestly say it doesn't exist. "Poisioning a conversation" is a bad metaphor that conflates two different things which do exist, but need to be dealt with in two different ways: 1. Baiting: trying to say something horrible to anger people for their own entertainment. The proper response to this is simply to…

It's not a bad metaphor. If your community is ignoring trolls instead of banning them, it's effectively sending the message that the trolls are very welcome. I've never observed that a no-moderation community is free of trolls, and ignoring trolls often results in them just taking over because they just start talking to each other and everyone else leaves. These things are caused poison because even a small amount ca…

> It's not a bad metaphor. If your community is ignoring trolls instead of banning them, it's effectively sending the message that the trolls are very welcome. I've never observed that a no-moderation community is free of trolls, and ignoring trolls often results in them just taking over because they just start talking to each other and everyone else leaves.

Which form of trolls from my post are you talking about? I insist that we not pretend these are the same group of people.

I think that good moderation filters out the baiters and lets the people who believe what they're saying stay. And contrary to what you're saying, I don't think that such communities end up with just trolls. There were plenty of reasonable conversations on Reddit before Conde Nast took over and dropped the banhammer.

> I think what you're missing is that a very large amount of people simply do not enjoy a certain style of discourse to the point that they'll opt out of a community that doesn't ban that discourse. You may not like it, you may think those people are weak or something, but the rest of us want to talk to them, and we want them to feel welcome.

I'm not missing that--in fact, I don't enjoy talking to people with hateful beliefs either.

But the alternative you're proposing is an echo chamber where you don't have to hear those people, but they still believe what they believe, and those beliefs become our leaders and laws. If we ignore bigots on the internet we get bigots in office.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#640

Post by t3po7re5 » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 12:14 PM UTC

_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…

There was a podcast (I think freakonomics?) saying that sports forums had the least toxic political discussions on the internet. This was probably due to their common interest in a sports team over their political views.