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Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?

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271–280 of 859 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?

#271
Solution: K-means clustering of accounts, with long term effect.

Everyone starts out as a “noob”, seeing the unfiltered cesspool, and nobody with significant grouping weight sees their comments (except other noobs, and people who’ve categorized themselves as “noobs” by Liking inflammatory nonsense and Disliking reasoned debate.

In the year or so it takes for your identity to begin to develop weight toward your cluster, you see less and less “noob” content, and more “cluster” content.

If you like one-sided (eg. dismissive statist left/right, or aggrieved libertarian, ...) or perhaps reasoned principled respectful debate — that’s what you’ll see.

Everyone wants to see debate they’re comfortable with. If you want garbage, that’s what you’ll see. If you want understanding of opposition views in a reasoned, respectful environment, that’s what you’ll see.

What you won’t see is — trolls. They’ll all be busy trolling eachother, and we won’t see their garbage.

The idea that we can use single-axis rating to create a universally acceptable online environment is just, well, crazy. And yet, since the mid-80’s, that is what literally every online “social” tool has been trying, vainly, to accomplish! It’s stunning, really.

Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?

#272
post #158

>I've noticed a huge uptick in the toxicity online in the last 5-7 years. You're crazy my dude(tte). I've been on the interbutts since 1991 and Usenet days, and it's exactly as it always was. The big difference is we have reporter ding dongs on Twitter thinking Twitter, aka the comments section they removed from their web presence, is the real world. Also old people on Facebook who never learned the lessons of being…

When reporters on Twitter freak out about the trolls on 4chan like it's some disease infecting our precious wholesome web, I can't help but remember (through my biased lenses of course) when most of the web (that I visited) looked like 4chan. What the folks who think the web is 'degrading' don't seem to realize is how much of a wild west it used to be, and how much corporations have tried to (and somewhat succeeded i…

They were right to freak out. Swastikas and the n-word being tolerated as "jokes" for years was a breading ground from which militant fascists emerged.

Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?

#273
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People are lying" - "They'd say that you are lying" - "BUT I AM RIGHT". That's not rationalism, that's just saying "I'm right, they are wrong, end of discussion".

That's because this conversation is occurring in the abstract - surely you can think of examples which don't fall into your supposed pattern (flat earth, pizza parlors, etc.)

But those are super edge cases, the vast super majority of things aren't clear cut at all. "Is that policy going to increase employment? Will it depress wages, and by how much?"

Good luck with judging who's right and who's wrong.

Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?

#274
Discussions like this are frustrating to me because they always seem to skip over what feels like a crucial element:

Do you know _why_ this uptick has happened? Does anyone?

I get the feeling, in general, when people talk about wanting to "Do Something" about this sort of thing, they are always focused on managing the symptom and never focused on addressing the cause. Frequently, when I try to bring this up, the cause is waved away with "oh they're just stupid/ignorant/angry" or some other such explanation. The current-year favourite is "they just believe fake news", and I'm sure next year there will be a political explanation, and then the year after that we'll loop back to generic ones. (The irony of denouncing other people as causing polarization "because they're just angry and stupid" is lost on most people)

I don't know why this is happening. But I do know that until the why is address, and done so with care and respect, this problem will be papered over at best but never solved.

Also

> Do we ditch them and go back to a literal timeline?

If I got one wish to change the world, but I had to give up a bunch of great things, I would sell out all technological wonder in order to get literal timelines back. As soon as other people decided they knew what I wanted to see better than I did, the problem started. And as soon as they got tired of doing that and made computers do it for them, it got worse

Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?

#275
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem from the last 10 years is the spread of "everyone's entitled to an opinion". It seems that objective truth no longer exists in the eyes of the population. This is both a cause and a consequence of the defunding of journalism and the change of the profession from news to views.

Erm... defunding journalism by who? Private funding is making the situation worse. Public funding is the instrument of authoritarian regimes- state sponsored media. I think the root cause is lack of objective, critical thinking skills, and the glorification of "how it makes you feel" being more important than "is this reasonable". I.e. emotion driving reason, rather than reason driving emotion.

By society. We don't want to fund people to separate fact from fiction, yet we lack the time and ability as a population to do it ourselves, so we latch onto outlets (especially celebrities) that seem to match our world view, and we treat what they say as gospel.

Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, except for the scale, and the fact that it's infected the mainstream media, and the accelerants making it even worse, it's the same old thing? So we can summarize as "there's been a huge uptick in the toxicity online (which was always there)?"

The quantity has increased, if the quality is still basically the same. Also, I bet the average education/intelligence of the typical user has shifted as the internet user looked more and more like the typical population.

Also different is the velocity. It's easier than ever before to spread something far and wide.

Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?

#277

>I've noticed a huge uptick in the toxicity online in the last 5-7 years. You're crazy my dude(tte). I've been on the interbutts since 1991 and Usenet days, and it's exactly as it always was. The big difference is we have reporter ding dongs on Twitter thinking Twitter, aka the comments section they removed from their web presence, is the real world. Also old people on Facebook who never learned the lessons of being…

I've been on dial-up bulletin boards since 1983, Usenet since around the same 1991. Though in some ways it's the same, here is the difference: it has become more diverse. In 1991, the people you might have conversed with on Usenet were a lot similar to you. Of course, if we go to some comp.lang.* newsgroup or whatever, people are similar even today. But I mean that if you went into any newsgroup whatsoever in 1991, o…

I agree. Big centralized platforms (youtube, Reddit, the chans, HN to some exent) mean that the internet riff raff (i.e. people with no interest in the niche and who may feel like trolling) are free to show up in any given niche area of the platform (e.g. a subreddit or someone's channel) and then shit all over it. A community that would have been perfectly peaceful on a newsgroup, IRC channel or forum now has to contend with literally anyone from anywhere else on the platform. The old 4chan quip about /b/ leaking is now the default state on basically every platform because the platforms are so big even a small trickle of trolls is a full on flood of crap. People are getting fed up. I think there will be some decentralization in our future.

Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?

#278
I think it is more of a social problem we can’t solve with code.

As methods of communication get cheaper and more accessible, it opens the world up to see what humanity is, not what humanity wants itself to be.

People that maliciously attack those online are broken people. Broken people exist in reality, thus broken people will exist online.

Google and Facebook can write code to stop harassment, but they can’t do so without marginalizing people who are already on the fringes of society. Plus, their system can be gamed. The output of such changes would mean that it would stop some harassment at the cost of losing accessibility for everyone and a meta game playing in the background that costs the corporations engineering resources.

The best answer right now, in my opinion, is to create tools to fight harassment, but give those tools to the users of the site rather than automated algorithms. A good example of this is a mute feature. Other tools like customized word filters, block lists and safe lists can also help empower users.

Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?

#279
post #50

Stop responding to it. No seriously, just stop. This isn't a "complex problem that needs nuanced technical and legislative solutions". Back in the old day, there was this saying. "Do not feed the trolls". Sadly, we've forgotten that. Our current approach is, "create rigorous 30 minute point by point take down videos to defeat their point of view". Our urge to debate and correct people who are wrong just fuels them ma…

I think its a fallacy at this point to assume the people pushing toxic or objectively wrong viewpoints are trolls. If it ever was 100% trolls, that time has passed and their target audience is expanding their work in earnest. We now have people who 100% believe objectively wrong things and have an obsession to spread their belief as fact. Edit: If there is a solution to this issue, it will depend on the ratio of thes…

> We now have people who 100% believe objectively wrong things and have an obsession to spread their belief as fact.

There's usually enough truth behind every lie - enough to make it compelling enough to believe in. I'm sorry but I don't think it's as obvious as you're making it out to be. We all probably believe something that's objectively wrong. The truth is really in the middle, but all I see is people going further towards fringe opinions.

Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?

#280
Convince 7 billion people harm reduction should be seen as the ultimate motivation of society.

The web has nothing to do with it.

For a while we thought more people were getting cancer. Turned out cancer detection rates were low and lots of mysterious deaths in history were probably just cancer.

The web has helped illuminate in the US how big the political ideology gap always was. It was papered over by information manipulation of the corporate press for decades, coddling sensibilities of luddites, innumerate, and nesters who preferred to stay home rather than see for themselves. They also made up the biggest voting block for years.

I grew up in Trump country and left two decades ago. Was shocked to find coasties really were convinced it was Leave it to Beaver land while rural folks were convinced urban areas are universally slums. Those are REAL narratives I get from people today. Shocked about how ass backwards the other cohort feels about life. Ridiculously sheltered attitudes on both sides. Complete disinterest in negotiating. As we see in Congress.

Consider that perfect rural life and urban police dramas are common fiction tropes and it’s not hard to see why those emotional descriptions are knee jerk go to for the masses

Free speech doesn’t oblige anyone else to abide the embedded semantics of the speech in question. Emit whatever syntax you want, no one has to put their agency into the behaviors the speaker thinks achieve the outcome they seek with their speech.

Good luck.

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