Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web? • Hacker News Board

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

#411

Post by austincheney » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 8:36 PM UTC

deepspace wrote: post #406

austincheney wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> silencing anyone who disagrees with you. Agreed. Disagreement, tolerance, and diversity are healthy. The opposite is censorship, insecurity, and conformance.

A big problem with giving hate mongers a platform is that they do not return the courtesy. Try posting a well-written and well-thought-out criticism of Trump on /r/thedonald and see how many seconds it takes before the post is taken down and you are banned. They are not interested in disagreement, tolerance and diversity. They are only interested in having a platform to spew their hate from.

That is why moderation and balance are important. r/thedonald is an echo chamber lacking balance, and therefore lacking tolerance, diversity, and mutual respect.

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

#412

Post by fergonco » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 8:36 PM UTC

eqdw wrote: post #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 caus…

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

I don't know but my take is that media makes more money if we get angry, and this anger-inducing style is permeating in the population.

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

#413

Post by richk449 » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

asdf21 wrote: post #381

oneplane wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly; toxic isn't a word for 'people speaking their minds' or 'speaking up about problems'. It's someone who is abusive, unsupportive, or unhealthy emotionally towards others and in some forms themselves. Or so the dictionaries say.

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.

> As someone who had a seven year account banned from YC previously for debating against socialism...

Did you win?

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

#414

Post by oneplane » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

Disruptive_Dave wrote: post #404

oneplane wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not seen that definition anywhere, or a definition like that for any other specific word.

The world does not operate on definitions.

Communication and language works on shared concepts and wording, which can be collected as a set of definitions. If we were to not do that, language and communication would not work very well, and with that there would be no foundation for sensible discourse. Or at least, that is what I have seen and experienced so far.

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

#415

Post by databus » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

kerkeslager wrote: post #359

I don't know if I know the solution, but I know one thing that isn't the solution: silencing everyone who disagrees with you. A lot of the people complaining about "toxicity" on the internet seem to be under the impression that if we "deplatform" the so-called toxic people, that will fix things. But on the contrary, that makes things worse. If someone says something awful on the internet, and everyone either ignores…

Communicating financial or medical lies can lead to repercussions. The same should be true for communicating false political information.

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

#416

Post by smrq » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 8:38 PM UTC

databus wrote: post #415

kerkeslager wrote: post #359

I don't know if I know the solution, but I know one thing that isn't the solution: silencing everyone who disagrees with you. A lot of the people complaining about "toxicity" on the internet seem to be under the impression that if we "deplatform" the so-called toxic people, that will fix things. But on the contrary, that makes things worse. If someone says something awful on the internet, and everyone either ignores…

Communicating financial or medical lies can lead to repercussions. The same should be true for communicating false political information.

I don't know, there's still a lot of dialogue about healing crystals and essential oils out there.

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

#417

Post by awb » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 8:39 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #351

krick wrote: post #319

There 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 d…

There definitely is something to fix, and it has nothing to do with free speech. Something about text communications makes people much more aggressive than they would be face to face. People wouldn’t say half the things they say online if they had to say them out loud. PM, public forum, real names on Facebook, it doesn’t matter. Something inherent to text communications makes people more toxic than they would be in p…

> Something about text communications makes people much more aggressive than they would be face to face. People wouldn’t say half the things they say online if they had to say them out loud.

I do think you have a point, but also remember how public hate can be: slavery, segregation, genocide, Inquisition, witch trials, terrorism, violent crime, etc.

Unfortunately, humans have a history of willingly and publicly spreading hate without hiding behind text.

This is a huge topic with many possible solutions, but one option is to choose how we respond to it and how we let it affect us. Just knowing that someone might be more aggressive through text than in person might help to dampen the impact we let text have on us.

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

#418

Post by oneplane » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 8:41 PM UTC

asdf21 wrote: post #403

oneplane wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I debated against socialism / expanding government in a thread about UBI or something similar. I was told by a mod that my comments were deleted and that they were "tedious" and "idealogical flamebait". When I complained about his moderation by saying this: >A moderator just a hair left of your current moderation approach on the authoritarianism scale would "flag and remove" PG's entire recent article about income in…

I can't find a recent article on HN containing debates on/against/about/for socialism with banned accounts in them, so it's hard to see the content/context that would then be called toxic, but I do see in your reply that you mention "tedious" and "idealogical flamebait" which is not mutually exclusive to toxic behaviour. I suppose someone could write flamebait or be tedious without being toxic.

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

#419

Post by pnako » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 8:41 PM UTC

deepspace wrote: post #406

austincheney wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> silencing anyone who disagrees with you. Agreed. Disagreement, tolerance, and diversity are healthy. The opposite is censorship, insecurity, and conformance.

A big problem with giving hate mongers a platform is that they do not return the courtesy. Try posting a well-written and well-thought-out criticism of Trump on /r/thedonald and see how many seconds it takes before the post is taken down and you are banned. They are not interested in disagreement, tolerance and diversity. They are only interested in having a platform to spew their hate from.

That's a problem with reddit, whose narrow-focused subreddits encourage groupthink. It's not specific to Trump, I'm sure doing the same in pro-Sanders or pro-Warren subreddits will have the same effect. Or indeed pro-Rihanna or pro-Metallica subreddits.

You'll have better luck with 4chan. People will call you a lot of bad words for sure, but they will also debate your point to death.

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

#420

Post by notadev » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 8:41 PM UTC

I am basing this on nothing but my own opinion. This has been going on for a while. Sometime around 2010-2012 many news sites started removing their comment sections. While most people thought many of these comment sections were "cancer", it was a still way to comment on, add context to, or dispute something posted to a news site. The claim was that "trolls" were causing too many problems. This was around the same time the definition of troll changed to mean anyone who disagreed with the OP or the content of a news article.

Once that happened, more and more opinion pieces started to be passed around as "news" articles. As opinions are biased, those biases got more and more apparent over time. With a lack of a way to respond, people turned to Twitter and other services.

Add to that, a continual redefining of what speech is "appropriate" and what speech is "problematic". This was a further attempt to control the discussion/debate by defining what tools could and could not be used when discussing/debating. This is seen by many who do not consider themselves "liberal" or deeply concerned with social justice issues as another attempt to exert power and control the narrative by silencing any opposition.

That's where it's all coming from. Toxic, problematic, etc. Are just synonyms for those who exert power, namely those few who are given a voice...the self-described journalist's, to label stuff they don't like. They use other terms like racist, mysoginy, Nazi, Alt-right, all synonyms for people who hold ideas contrary to their own.

As soon as we have a level playing field online, where all voices can be heard, not just blue checkmark, then maybe we'll make progress. Until then, things will get so worse and when they have the power to do so, these avenues of expression...FB, Twitter, will just be more places where you can express yourself freely as long as you say what you are allowed to say.