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

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#661

Post by ekianjo » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 4:16 PM UTC

aninhumer wrote: post #652

ekianjo wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. No, I am not asking for that kind of platforms. I am saying to let people express what they want to say, and the only restrictio…

>Everything else should be able to be said and be heard But what does that actually mean? If all you're saying is that the state should not stop them, then relatively few people disagree with that, but the argument usually goes further. There are many ways people's speech can be limited without the involvement of the state. Be that de-platforming, protests or economic or social limitations. >Restricting Free Speech p…

> Just saying "don't restrict speech", and thinking that gives everyone a voice, is incredibly politically naive.

I don't see how "incredibly naive" is something that is the fundamental piece of Western Civilization (at least in most of the English world).

> It is not physically possible to let everyone speak to everyone

No, but first not putting any filter on the nature and contents of speech, as long as it is not violent, is something we should stand for. The "How" is irrelevant.

> However we structure our societal discourse, it will always privilege some speech over other speech.

This should be an individual's choice to make, as in what "speech" you want to listen to. When you go on social networks for example, it should be expected and natural to find people who share different views, no matter how revolting they might appear to you. And we should find comfort in the fact that they are allowed to be expressed, because in turn we are allowed to express ourselves just as well. So in fact, there is no intervention needed by any state actor - on the contrary, free speech is the tool that enables us to discourse and experiment with ideas. Just shutting the door, or filtering inconvenient speech is not making it go away, and certainly will end up having no positive effect towards those who profess such speech, because it could further solidify their opinions and prevent them from being receptive in the future.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#662

Post by bluGill » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 4:16 PM UTC

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #336

bluGill wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Organic food is not higher quality. Organic just means they cannot use some arbitrary list of farming practices, (some good some bad). Sure McDonalds is not good, but there is also plenty of organic that equally bad (or worse).

> Organic food is not higher quality. That depends. Sometimes European organic veg is preferable to Chinese industrially farmed veg when your local supermarket offers only those two choices. This is definitely true of garlic: Chinese garlic tends to be notoriously bitter and lack juice, but Spanish organic garlic is very sweet, pungent, and juicy. Now, the fact that the European organic choice was made according to t…

That is not a property of organic though. Non-organic farmers are able to produce at least as high a quality as organic (nothing an organic farmer does is prohibited for the non-organic farmer, while there are a number of things the conventional farmer can do to increase quality that is prohibited to organic farmers). Of course just because they can doens't mean they do.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#663

Post by AnimalMuppet » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 4:19 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #542

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... downvotes are definitely abused. They're not supposed to be used to express disagreement, and they are. All. The. Time. And it stinks to be on the receiving end of that. But I'm not sure that they should be eliminated. The alternative is to leave moderation as the only way to deal with bad (abusive, off-topic, trolling, unintelligible) posts. I'm not sure that having people flag every bad post they think they…

> They're not supposed to be used to express disagreement That's a common misconception. Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 I think people have the wrong idea about HN downvotes because they think Reddit rules apply to HN. It's a bit like how in Canada we think we have Miranda rights because we've seen it on American TV.

I stand corrected. I agree with zaarn, though - overuse of downvotes for disagreement is not helpful for having a real discussion.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#664

Post by oblio » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 4:25 PM UTC

thomastjeffery wrote: post #364

oblio wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, trolls have not existed in the form they exist since the emergence of the internet. Self-censorship is a wonderful thing. And the way it works is: you say dumb things (especially as a kid), you get slapped by your parents/friends/people around you. By age 18 or 21, you know instinctively that what you can and cannot say around other folks. At least the vast majority of folks do. On the internet however, there's n…

So your answer to people you don't like is corporal punishment. Do you honestly believe that is the best method to improve discourse?

> So your answer to people you don't like is corporal punishment.

A) Who said it's my answer?

B) Just because I listed corporal punishment, it doesn't mean it's the only one form of punishment used.

That how society works, especially for kids. Kids are jerks to each other. After a childhood of interacting with jerks, we learn what we can and cannot say. We react to stimuli. A huge chunk of these stimuli is negative, i.e. a form of punishment.

Does it improve discourse? I believe it does, not all of it is negative. It forces us to learn and to better ourselves.

Obviously it shouldn't be the only form of interaction. You also need the carrot, not only the stick.

But the internet proved that the "stick" is there for a reason. You either have a "carrot" for everything (impossible, and also doesn't work, since people get used to rewards and become desensitized to them after a while) or you need at least the threat of a "stick".

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#665

Post by citruscomputing » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 4:40 PM 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…

> Maybe human nature is a "problem". But what you're going to do, replace humanity with better species?

I agree that the root of the "problem" currently lies within people and not process. I agree that changing people wholesale is not easy and not desirable. I agree that there has been some improvement.

I also think human nature is a product of the environment. The way people behave on different websites, in different countries, and in different social situations shows this rather clearly. There is no fixed set of anything that constitutes the whole of how people act. Put someone in a nudist colony, and the environment changes, and the way they act changes (with time). If a reddit user starts going to 4chan, the environment changes, and the way they act changes. Put someone who follows the "always defect" strategy in a community of "always cooperate" people, and the environment changes, and the way they act changes. Put a racist in a racially diverse community of acceptance, and the environment changes, and the way they act changes.

If you accept this idea, it follows that certain environments can be better for society as a whole. Case in point with Reddit: they decided an environment without beastiality and certain violent elements would be better. Maybe they were wrong, but I don't think so. I'm not suggesting I have a wonderful theory of what the best environment is, only that there are better and worse ones. The problem of what we value is hard, but that doesn't mean it's not worth trying.

This ties the loop back: human nature is a product of environment, and environment is a product of humans. We have the power to create environments that make thoughtful discussion easier and hate harder. We can put energy toward solving the problem by changing the environment. HN has an environment I am very fond of, despite being here for only a couple years. I appreciate the work that has gone into making the comments an insightful, respectful, and generally nice place.

We can't replace humanity. We can't change people without changing the conditions they exist in. We can change the circumstances of our struggle in order to grow together as a species.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#666

Post by newen » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 4:47 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #507

newen wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SA is basically 4chan except you have to pay 10 bucks to join. I don't really see the joke here.

The "joke" is that you complain about the lack of high quality conversation on SA, and yet your posting style here is extremely shitty. No wonder you got banned so quickly there...

What, am I supposed to list my reasons with citations (of course) to justify my opinion about some historical relic of a site? And I didn't get banned from SA; I just know a lot of people who did.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#667

Post by dang » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 4:51 PM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #598

dang wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're not supposed to be used to express disagreement That's a common misconception. Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 I think people have the wrong idea about HN downvotes because they think Reddit rules apply to HN. It's a bit like how in Canada we think we have Miranda rights because we've seen it on American TV.

I would argue that while it's totally okay to do it, I'd find it better if people used it less for simply disagreeing. In my experience, the resulting discussion ends up being of poorer quality because of it (and less exposure due to being pushed down and hidden once it hits a certain threshold)

Such evidence as I'm aware of points in the opposite direction: HN without downvotes would be like a body without white blood cells. Disease would quickly kill it.

The problem with your argument is that it doesn't reckon with just how lousy bad internet comments are, or how many of them there are, or how completely they take over if allowed to. To a first approximation, bad internet comments are the entire problem of this site.

It's easy to imagine an HN that would be just like the current HN, only with some negative X (e.g. bad downvotes) removed. Most of these ideas are fantasies, because the thing you'd have to do to remove X would have massive side effects. You can't hold the rest of the site constant and do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#668

Post by mmirate » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 4:56 PM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #504

InitialLastName wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like it or not, you can't just beat "undesirable" views out of people, either with schools or social media moderation. You absolutely can. An example: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2012/sep/22...

That is indeed an inspirational example.

Broken clocks are right twice a day.

Religion sucks, but Soviet Communism's anti-religious nature doesn't excuse its foibles.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#669

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 4:57 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #562

dredmorbius wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are in fact system dynamics in which specific behaviours are unhealthy. Toxic, if you will. Consider these, generally, hygiene factors. There are substances which are toxic in specific concentrations or circumstances , which are otherwise healthy: oxygen, CO2, water, vitamin D, salt, nutritional iron. Certain forms of discourse. My view increasingly isn't that there are things , but interactions or behaviours .…

> My view increasingly isn't that there are things, but interactions or behaviours. A thing isn't, but is what it does or how it behaves. The "belief in things" is itself a cognitive simplification we make, probably for the sake of efficiency. To use a programming analogy, toxicity as a concept is a function of at least three arguments - toxic(what, to-what, context) - but we attach it as a label to the first argumen…

What's your meaning of arity here?

"Things" with some bounded shape or form (or other properties) may be related to perceptual apparatus.

We see, or hear or smell or taste or feel, etc., the boundaries, emissions, or other perceptible manifestations of objects or phenomena. If you will, those are their interfaces.

As in other domains, an interface may reveal, or conceal, some more complex back-end, inner working, or larger system.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#670

Post by wfo » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 5:03 PM UTC

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…

Spoken like someone who hasn't spent much time on reddit recently. Since the massive surge in white nationalist, alt-right, and other right-hate ideologies online (and particularly the creation of the_donald, a subreddit which has shockingly avoided the ban hammer for an inexplicably long time given its obvious explicit purpose: to be an echo chamber to spread hate, scream slurs, threaten people with death and genocide, and dox enemies).

In literally any part of reddit, if there is any post on anything that could be construed as racial or about any gender, even innocuous, hordes of extremist right wing trolls descend upon it and spew horrifying screeds of hate. They abuse people into silence. They are toxic. These things leak. And toxicity is real. Hate begets hate, saying nasty horrible things to people and advocating for genocide are not innocuous "beliefs that other people might have" they are unacceptable behavior in civil society.

If you do this in real life you are ostracized, beaten, you lose your job, you are abandoned by your family and friends. And this is good. Social signals and actions to prevent "toxic" behavior have existed since forever. But the Internet is the property of a few companies who are loath to enforce those same social rules. Sometimes, they get pushed far enough they feel have to.