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

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

#701

Post by dang »

rayiner wrote: post #653
rayuela wrote: post #51

Encourage people to participate in physical social gatherings that center around non-political issues, like hobbies. We need to start emphasizing what we have in common, help people see that ultimately we're really not all that different from each other. The internet lets people hide behind this isolating veneer that makes it too easy to just shout at each other and behave in extreme ways that would never be socially…

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological or, god help us, religious flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#702

Post by dang »

claytongulick wrote: post #198

As an intellectual exercise,since you seem so passionate about the subject of anti-vaxxers... Are all vaccines good? If not, who chooses? The government? What about when Gov. Rick Perry tried to force the HPV vaccine on all teenage girls in TX, even though it was suspected he had financial incentive to do so? Is it ok for the state to force you or your kids to receive a medical treatment? Even when there are multiple…

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22203689 and marked it off-topic.

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

#703

Post by anigbrowl »

MadWombat wrote: post #552
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…

Agreed. As I have said previously in a similar discussion, I don't think censorship works very well beyond a few specific cases (yelling "Fire!" in a theater and things like that). I would rather racists and misogynists and all sorts of other assholes were free to express their opinions and engage in debate with the rest of us that that they were hiding in some dark web, invite only circle jerks. Because however dist…

Bad news: Both are happening at the same time, which is colloquially called 'hiding your power level.' See note 11 in the linked article for an example, though you'll want to use Tor or at least Incognito mode. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hide-your-power-level

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

#705

Post by jessaustin »

anigbrowl wrote: post #669
ryandrake wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't wait for the future. You can have this life today. Whenever I read about how this Twitter stream is toxic, and that group is using Facebook to harass some person, about Gamergate and 4chan and The_Donald--how glad I am that I don't participate in any of these sites, and therefore have opted out of all of this drama! This stuff is almost 100% online. It's not invading your real life unless you invite it in. Swit…

Counterpoint: people who shoot up churches and the like.

Those people are vanishingly rare. You're vastly more likely to die in a traffic collision than to be shot because somebody doesn't like your church.

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

#708

Post by mwfunk »

IMO that probably has more to do with changes in your own reading habits or maturity level vs. 5-7 years ago. As toxic and ridiculous as any sort of electronic forum can get, I don't think it's any different now than it was on Usenet circa 1995.

For example, I started reading Slashdot not long after it started ('96?). I really enjoyed it, read it every day, occasionally posted. Then sometime around 2000 I just got disgusted with the quality of the comments- it seemed like there was a long slow decline, and no longer did the average commenter seem like they were my age or older, my level of experience or greater, my level of knowledge or greater- instead it just seems like a cesspool of pointless, toxic flamewars about stupid things that seemed to exist for their own sake. Reading Slashdot comments started making me feel stupider and angrier, not more informed. So I eventually stopped reading Slashdot.

But then, over the years I would talk to various people younger than me with the same experience- the only thing that changed was which year they thought Slashdot was good, and which year they thought it went so downhill that they just couldn't read it anymore. Like, "Slashdot was awesome circa 2007 but by 2011 all the commenters sounded like toxic teenagers". Which makes me think that what actually happened was Slashdot comments were always terrible, but if you started reading it your larval hacker years you might not know any better. Then you grow up some more and get more knowledgeable and mature, and the same level of commentary seems really inane.

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

#709

Post by aaron695 »

Step one - You need to understand the problem (ie. polarization != toxicicity)

Step two - You need to ask the correct question. There are lots of answers here that are both useless and answer you.

Step three - You need to get people to answer the actual question

You need the better answers to rise to the top

You need the answers to be directly actionable.

You preferably need it to be quantifiable

You need to understand how it will work in a marketplace.

As an example, we should try and understand what happened when Twitter doubled it's Tweet size. Did it make it better? Did it hurt their market? How important is message size?

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

#710

Post by nelblu »

chadmeister wrote: post #699
andy_ppp wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, this is a great idea... I’m going to try woodworking and make the shoddiest set of chairs one can imagine, but they’ll be my chairs. Could take up to a year maybe of practice but who cares!

I hope this leads you to make friends with the other local woodworking nerds :)

As a matter of fact, i picked up woodworking as a hobby last summer and made some really good friends. You don't have to be good at it, just the whole process of going through it is rewarding. Look up "Mr. Chickadee"s channel on YouTube, watching his videos is like a meditating experience.
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