It's far easier to be negative than to be positive. I think people who would normally try to be more positive have just given up trying. Everything has gone downhill; there's virtually no serious journalism anymore (it's all ad-money seeking with link-bait headlines), people who claim to be "leaders" are not setting good examples (they act like bad children!), etc. So people just have accepted this is the way it is.
Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?
311–320 of 859 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s the same old same old. People used to heckle in theatres, because the audience lent them anonymity. Mobs are mobs because in a mob you are the mob. Lift the social contract by granting anonymity and we fairly instantaneously resort to slinging faeces at one another. I think the GP has nailed it, however - we are reporting theatre hecklers as news, and instead of watching the play, everyone is now watching the pu…
I used to agree fully with what you say. But only a few days ago it occurred to me that in the early days of the web (let's say late '90, early 2000s) I thought that the internet was going to make the world a more peaceful place: everybody would have talked directly with one another, irrespective of distances and languages; we would have understood each other better and disagreements would have been smoothed out. Wel…
Its a war over controlling the narrative. The little people seem clueless about what will, can and probably should happen when the status quo loses their grip on them. If people had half a clue about the prosperity that awaits them the narrative would effortlessly flip 180 degrees. We should all be as mad as General Smedley D. Butler about it.
Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s the same old same old. People used to heckle in theatres, because the audience lent them anonymity. Mobs are mobs because in a mob you are the mob. Lift the social contract by granting anonymity and we fairly instantaneously resort to slinging faeces at one another. I think the GP has nailed it, however - we are reporting theatre hecklers as news, and instead of watching the play, everyone is now watching the pu…
Anonymity isn’t it, or isn’t all of it. YouTube comments were deanonymized but that didn’t improve discourse. Look at Facebook and some of the “discussions” about politics there. Newspapers tried running comment sections, but either they’re a cesspool, real names or no, or they just gave up having comment sections entirely. Even locale isn’t a help - NextDoor is full of the same, or worse, combative vitriol. Sure, ch…
> Anonymity isn’t it, or isn’t all of it.
I think people have realized what the real line of what will be tolerated in society. There isn't any repercussion for being a pos in real life or online. I think we're to polite to the people being rude.
Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?
#314Thanks for asking!
Just wanted to point out to the thread: this is a question that is a great fit for VC3 (https://vc3.club). I started VC3 to try and bring together people to answer questions like this (and others) that pertain to building more meaningful community through the Internet. If you're interested in discussing this, you'd be a great fit! Send us an application and we'll get you in the discussion!
Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?
#315I 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…
I’ve got a solution. Have each domain need to reflect the nation of its authorship. Ie a U.K. vlog has to post to a .uk domain. Really only meant for the big media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, FB, etc. What they would see at the .com site is all of their local content maybe with a trending globally section.
Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. That's not remotely a new thing. Ever since bits could be sent over the wire we've had Dale Gribbles trying to spread their weirdass conspiracies using the web. Only difference is that back then it existed in the form of homemade webpages with remarkably bad color theory rather than the poorly punctuate…
I think the difference is that it’s not fringe obsessives but rather everyday people spreading bad info. Stuff like QAnon, white nationalism, anti-vax, GamerGate and so on might be mostly started and kept well alive by fringe obsessives but plenty of normal people are sharing their memes, lies and content in an uncritical manner in a way that’s very different to personal websites. Social networks have made it much easier for these lies to be spread and repeated whitewashing their true origins and becoming accepted.
Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?
#317Sounds like "Naive Realism" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology... "Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?" - George Carlin. Funny... but what's even funnier is that EVERYBODY THINKS THIS. People dont realize that it's not that there are a group of bad drivers out there, but that everyone drives badly sometimes.…
But this is possibly a kind of a fallacy in itself: it's possible that there is bad behaviour out there, and that it's associated with one particular group as opposed to another; there's points to be scored by pushing a particular position online if it influences reality. In my experience on some forums, mention anything about Brexit and a flood of anti-Brexit comments appears; either there were hundreds of lurkers t…
There may be groups of bad actors coordinating, maybe. But you remind me of this Alan Moore quote:
"The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless."
The more I learn about probability and complexity, as well as the lack of general knowledge of ergodicity leading us to make fallacious conclusions, the more this rings true.
Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think OP is claiming toxicity is new, but the extreme polarization of everything is. Look into the lives of politicians in the 1950's and 1960's. They frequently socialized together and worked together. They were able to find common ground. Every victory for one party wasn't necessarily a loss for the other. How often do you think Mitch McConnell goes out for a drink with Bernie Sanders? Tribalism, especially…
"Look into the lives of politicians in the 1950's and 1960's. They frequently socialized together and worked together. They were able to find common ground. Every victory for one party wasn't necessarily a loss for the other. How often do you think Mitch McConnell goes out for a drink with Bernie Sanders?" That's the problem with transparency and constant scrutiny. In the 50s and 60s you could hide affairs like Kenne…
It isn't necessarily about making backroom deals. The tribe mentality is so deep that I'm not sure that Sanders and McConnell would recognize that the other person is trying to do what they think is best for the country. I'm not sure they could sit down and talk about their families or their favorite place to travel.
Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?
#319There is nothing to fix, except for the attitude of those who think there is something to be fixed, because essentially it's they who demand something unreasonable: censoring of the free speech. It is unreasonable, because that assumes somebody (the person or group, who "fixes" the problem) can and must decide, what is good and bad in regards of what you are saying. And unless this person is you, you always will be dissatisfied with the results to say the least.
Instead, you should try to accept the truth: free speech is ugly, deal with it. There always are some people, who are nice, but all people are never nice. A lot of different people with different opinions freely voicing their opinions in the public space will always be ugly.
Ok, now let's assume you don't care and get to actually answering your question. In order to remove "ugly" you need to remove some of the elements:
1. Different opinions. People with different opinions are removed from society, everybody in the community must be as similar as possible. There are multiple ways to achieve that to multiple degrees, but the key is closed communities, since banning faster than they appear (or find a way to return, which is relevant for the web) is a hard work.
2. Freely voicing them. Again, multiple ways: good old moderation of the content, make everybody have a stake in what they are saying (reputation systems, goods exchange, game mechanics enforcing cooperation), etc.
3. Public space. Move all discussions to PM, so they still argue, but you don't see it and feel good about yourself and your platform.
4. Speech. Just don't let people communicate. Easiest to achieve on a given platform, and the most effective.
Re: Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>> When reporters on Twitter freak out about the trolls on 4chan like it's some disease infecting our precious wholesome web Without making excuses for 4chan, perhaps the reporters should freak out about their own behavior first? So much of the news-media has an incredibly narrow focus, almost to be lying by omission. For a minority member of society, reporters are the 4-chan. One of thousands of examples: https://ww…
However, this factor is better now then it used to. If anything the previously less represented groups have much more ability to make themselves heard then before. The mass media used to be more uniform before the internet got popular.