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

As someone who had a seven year account banned from YC previously for debating against socialism, you're wrong. Regular debate is labeled toxic all the time if you are anywhere to the right of pure Marxism on the political scale.

Does free speech include yelling down other speakers? In the physical world this rarely happens. But spamming and vandalizing an intelligent conversation with sock-puppets and intentionally disingenuous posts is trivial and universal on the web.

Consider a parallel phenomenon: I notice there is outrage among gamers when cheating happens. But ironically cheating in conversation causes less active outrage. Both of these behaviors happen easily on the web but are difficult in real life. Maybe because conversation destroying behavior is less well understood or more stealthy. Maybe because it's so unimaginable in real life, people aren't used to dealing with it. Whatever the cause it's absurd that for games the problem is solved more zealously than in conversations that have serious impact.

While driving the marginal cost of communication to zero would seem to bring people together, what it really does is bring similar people together but also exposes significant differences between people.

The essential reason for the toxicity is the contestation of online spaces, which are virtual territory over which proxy wars can be fought as a low-cost substitute for physical violence (although there is a direct nexus to physical violence, and the threat thereof, by both individual and state actors, is a factor in the aforementioned contestation.

There are 3 basic approaches to encroaching toxicity:

  a. ignore it aka 'don't feed the trolls.
  b. implement technical solutions to manage it.
  c. Fight it aka flame wars.

Ignoring it doesn't work. It just tells the most vulnerable members of a community that they don't matter and that if they are repeatedly harassed other community members will sympathize but not really do anything to help.

Technical solutions originate with the California preference for systems thinking, and are reflective of the legislative and administrative technology in which they've been incubated. They are somewhat effective, but any system can be gamed. Most sites opt for a mix of technical means and hands-on moderation by a benevolent* dictatorship which works moderately well but is not responsive or effective against determined attack.

* benevolent in terms of close alignment with the ethos of the forum, whatever that happens to be

dictatorship in terms of being arbitrary rather than mechanistic, semi-transparent, and unilateral

Flame wars are upsetting to everyone, and people in the first 2 camps view as the worst-case outcome because they take over the thread/forum/platform where they occur and are destructive of comity, much like their real-world analogs. However, they can be effective in repelling invasive toxicity - if a sufficient majority of the forum regulars participate cooperatively. If too few participate or forum norms inhibit or punish participation, then toxicity will prevail or advance.

Here's some empirical evidence supporting this based on data collected from raiding behavior on Reddit, which is similar enough to HN to serve as a useful comparison (includes links to papers, slides): https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/

Cross-platform raiding behavior has existed as long as bulletin boards, and has been systematized and refined in line with the systematization and refinement of game and software development strategies. Here's a (somewhat offensive) overview from some years ago of trolling strategies, summarized near the end in a convenient flowchart: https://digitalvomit.wordpress.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-the...

The sophistication of raiding tactics, documentation, and so on has increased significantly since that was published. Ultimately toxicity online is neither a product of technology or the exposure of an inherent flaw of human nature, but the visible manifestation of multilateral information warfare, which is itself preliminary maneuvering and battlespace preparation for more overt forms of conflict like cyberwarfare, open economic warfare, and kinetic warfare.

Agreed.

The rhetoric now is even worse because some people maintain that “words = violence” and real violence is needed to shut down this “wrong think”.

I think some people would be amazed if they realized that it’s OK when people disagree[0] and doubly OK when people have different opinions on how to fix something[1].

Finally it’s become hard or impossible to stand up for the RIGHT of people to express marginalized opinions lest you yourself get accused of having those opinions. Wonder if the ACLU could ever “get away” with defending free speech even for bigoted groups in 2020.

[0] - Some people have genuine and compelling (for them, at least) reasons to be pro life despite society as a whole disagreeing with them.

[1] - Plenty of people agree that global warming is a problem, but disagree with the popular narrative on how (or even how fast) they need to fix it.

Just because people mislabel things doesn't mean the meaning of the word suddenly changes. While languages evolve, it's not as simple as having a bunch of people on a website re-declare a word at will.

Regarding debate or YC or socialism: unless people get abusive I find it hard to believe that it would be called toxic. If you could link to it or provide an except of content that would be called 'toxic' without that content being 'abusive' that would be helpful.