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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

#691

Post by tmuir »

Karunamon wrote: post #673
tmuir wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Most of your litany of questions can be answered by saying that nobody became a cultist by only reading words on a screen of what the cult believes. Take Scientology for instance. I have access to the whole of their printed words online, yet I am not a Scientologist. You wouldn't be either. You can sub out "Scientology" for any other cult or any other odious group (including race nationalists, terrorists, etc.) and t…

The flaw in your argument is that the obedience must be demanded at gunpoint. In actuality, the obedience can be gained through a combination of continuously putting people under stress, and framing yourself as the only viable solution to the stress. Its how you train dogs, and how you train Marines.

Narcissists and con artists don't need to threaten violence to achieve their means. The threat of violence is simply one of the most effective methods of placing someone under emotional stress. It is once these people are under emotional stress that their defenses are down, and they are vulnerable to brainwashing.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#692

Post by Karunamon »

tmuir wrote: post #691
Karunamon wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of your litany of questions can be answered by saying that nobody became a cultist by only reading words on a screen of what the cult believes. Take Scientology for instance. I have access to the whole of their printed words online, yet I am not a Scientologist. You wouldn't be either. You can sub out "Scientology" for any other cult or any other odious group (including race nationalists, terrorists, etc.) and t…

The flaw in your argument is that the obedience must be demanded at gunpoint. In actuality, the obedience can be gained through a combination of continuously putting people under stress, and framing yourself as the only viable solution to the stress. Its how you train dogs, and how you train Marines. Narcissists and con artists don't need to threaten violence to achieve their means. The threat of violence is simply o…

Fair, but how do you continuously put people under stress using only words on a screen? The comment you originally replied to asserted that "There's no words that can make robots out of people", and so far you've provided counterexamples that use many more things; none of which are restricted to internet comments.

Keeping the original topic in mind, we're talking about online comments. Not cults, not marines, not anything other than words on screens.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#693

Post by castis »

intended wrote: post #558
castis wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with "getting your feelings hurt". If someone is a dick to you IRL, you just go about life without them and its of zero consequence to you. Imagine if they stayed in your life outside of your own accord and just yelled dumb shit at you from the sidelines. Not everyone is built as strong as you, it bothers some people.

Thats untrue - in that what you describe is the kind of trolling we would wish for because its benign. Trolls actively target forums for support groups. Today they can attack groups and classes of people. At this point, expecting people to "grow a thick skin" is not an option, because a major aspect of their life is fighting for their rights against people who are attacking them, or people who have hurt them. At this…

Your definition of 'complicit' appears to be flawed.

Choosing not to be involved is clearly not the same as actually starting the behavior to begin with.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#694

Post by jstarfish »

wolfgang42 wrote: post #187
Slansitartop wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just occurred to me that that forum moderation is essentially politics, and the failure modes of web-forums follow the failure modes of the political systems their moderation emulates. The most common form anarchic moderation (i.e. no moderation). When a forum's small, unwritten social rules keep things under control. However, as forum grows, that breaks down, and things become more chaotic. Metafilter essentially…

LambdaMOO tried switching to democracy around 1993, with "LambdaMOO Takes A New Direction". Basically, the mods ("wizards") instituted a petition system for technical changes and ceded all social decisions to a separate arbitration board. The resulting three and a half years of chaos is summarized in the last post on http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/LambdaMOO In the end, the wizards published "LambdaMOO Takes Another Dir…

Freedom fighters rebelling against authoritarian regimes also start out with the goals of empowering the populace ("power to the people!"). They cast off their shackles, stage a coup and seize control...only to realize after some amount of chaos that people are incapable of governing themselves, and the former champion of freedom becomes the new dictator.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#695

Post by verylittlemeat »

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…

Why not just engage in conversations on the principle of charity and good faith. There's also the concept of steel manning other peoples arguments to help extend good faith.

Not every conversation has to become a burned bridges and salt the earth affair. If the other person is just trying to "win" then disengage from the argument. If the other person is arguing with you in good faith then maybe you're wrong or have something to learn from a new perspective.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#696

Post by tmuir »

tmuir wrote: post #691
Karunamon wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of your litany of questions can be answered by saying that nobody became a cultist by only reading words on a screen of what the cult believes. Take Scientology for instance. I have access to the whole of their printed words online, yet I am not a Scientologist. You wouldn't be either. You can sub out "Scientology" for any other cult or any other odious group (including race nationalists, terrorists, etc.) and t…

The flaw in your argument is that the obedience must be demanded at gunpoint. In actuality, the obedience can be gained through a combination of continuously putting people under stress, and framing yourself as the only viable solution to the stress. Its how you train dogs, and how you train Marines. Narcissists and con artists don't need to threaten violence to achieve their means. The threat of violence is simply o…

@Karunamon: I'm not sure why, but I have no reply link under your latest post, so I'm posting as close to it as I can.

I don't think its controversial at all to say that both Facebook and Reddit are brainwashing people. Not to say that the companies themselves are doing the brainwashing, just that they are effective platforms for anyone to do it on. Do you really not know anyone who literally lives on one of the two sites? They are both highly addictive echo chamber services that people willingly return to, hoping that the next page load will contain their unicorn story that confirms everything they want to be true. Its the dopamine cycle of what makes social media interesting in the first place. These are two of the four most visited sites in America. I can't control for peoples previous experiences, or say that Reddit or Facebook are the exclusive causal factors, but I think that just the fact that they are excellent at getting users to self select for interesting content, at the expense of content that may challenge their opinions, is enough to count these services as brainwashing platforms. People are figuratively screaming to the void "I want to be entertained!!!" Trump answered the call. The repeated dopamine cycle of discovering outrageous content, and then eventually petering out to boredom, is the stress. Once you are sufficiently stressed out, you are far more susceptible to believing that the media is lying, and the FBI is biased, the intelligence community and government at large is filled with evil actors with their own agenda. I mean, how interesting would that all be, right?

Another point to consider is that I don't necessarily think any one organization has caused all of this to happen. Internet addiction has obviously existed nearly as long as the internet. My theory is that Facebook and Reddit effectively teed up millions of people for someone else to come along, and capture their minds.

As I've said throughout this thread, I'm not suggesting a minority report situation, or that circumstantial evidence should depose a president, or that censorship is the answer to any of this. What I'm more lamenting is that the charlatans are winning, and their methods are nearly impervious to defense in a modern democracy. As best I can tell, all I can do is try to convince people of what I think is at play, and hope that it resonates.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#697

Post by slayed0 »

wfo wrote: post #670
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 genoci…

You're mixing beliefs with tactics/behavior. The behavior you described is "toxic" no matter what your beliefs are. I agree that the lack of repercussions and social feedback online lead to an increase in people acting like this and it is a problem for pretty much all public forums. However, it is neither constructive, nor is it truthful, in my opinion, to attach this behavior to a single group, side, or set of beliefs. All you'll end up doing is driving moderates of said group further to the extremes. You can call out ideas you think are bad and you can call out behavior you think is bad, but "other-ing" an entire group based on the worst actions at the fringes of their membership just isn't going to change any minds. It only widens the divide.

Edit: The exception, of course, is if the behavior that is at issue is actually encouraged by a foundational belief of the group.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#698

Post by jstarfish »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #131
jstanley wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to see moderation decoupled from the forum namespace. So you'd subscribe to a forum namespace in order to see posts about a topic (say, AskScience), but you would then also subscribe to whichever moderators you want. The moderation wouldn't be inextricably tied to the namespace. Anybody can post anything in any namespace (and anybody can declare themselves a moderator of any namespace), but people will only…

Yep. That was usenet. But in those days, we didn't have 3rd party recommended filters - but there's no reason why they wouldn't work now. Maybe it's time to remake Usenet, minus binaries. Binaries, piracy, and their data load per server are what killed Usenet. (Yes, I know it's still living on in paid-service world. But gone are the days your ISP runs a machine.)

> Binaries, piracy, and their data load per server are what killed Usenet.

Binaries and piracy were two of the biggest reasons to use Usenet.

Spam is what killed it.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#699

Post by tmuir »

el_cid wrote: post #683
tmuir wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow... instead of debating the pertinent points raised, you resort to name-calling.

Let's not pretend you're not attempting to gaslight me. I _returned_ name calling, as my interlocutor decided the easiest way to dismiss my claim was to frame it as chicken little proclaiming that the sky is falling. Then I debated his points.

Lets break it down point for point:

- lopmotr framed my comments as a conspiracy theory. I retorted that there is obvious evidence all over reddit that supports my claims.

- lopmotr brought up examples of victimhood as the causes for decline of states, and drew a line to whats happening in America with blacks as equivalent. I retorted that conservatism has this same victim complex, and that its ironic that people can see in others much easier than they can see in themselves.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#700

Post by mistermann »

moduspol wrote: post #634
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?

> 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 t…

> because it hasn't.

Implying it's been tried, and failed.

Where has widespread teaching of critical thinking been tried?

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