Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

721–730 of 859 posts

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

#721
post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's true, but you don't see too many people raiding oncology forums on behalf of big quartz.

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

#723
post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep talking about "non-extremists" but you are not telling us what you mean by that.

I don't want to get political, but do you think Joe Rogan is an extremist? Jeanine Cummins? What about Ben Shapiro? These are people that the MSM is trying to cancel quite literally right now.

Haha the idea that incumbent news firms can do anything to Rogan is kind of hilarious. What are they going to do, shut down the internet and UFC? Close all the comedy clubs? He is completely insulated from anything they can do.

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

#724
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would you know? You can't see any of the comments because the mods generally remove them all.. The reason why YC seems more left-leaning nowadays compared to a few years ago, is exactly what the grandparent of this thread suggested, anyone right-leaning (or libertarian) has been harassed off the site / strongly discouraged from sharing their perspectives.

I'm surprised you have been here for 7 years and never looked at the 'showdead' flag in your user preferences.

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

#725
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

9-11 was a super edge case. Yes, absolutely it's difficult to make firm judgements about many issues, but we should still pay attention to edge cases because even though the people out at the edges of discourse seem nuts doesn't mean they're not serious or motivated or capable.

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

#726
post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, I don't think it's as simple as "just go back to smaller groups". For companies, more users = more revenue, there isn't realy much incentive to not try and pull in as many people as possible. And then for most normal users, if they here about some big site, they're inclined to join that so they don't miss out on the the funny tik tok memes/all of their friends being on instagram/etc. For them, what ben…

...it doesn't need to be a huge company (or company of any kind) to run these things. Back in the early 2000s, a volunteer who knew about computers would set up phpBB on a church's website, or a radio station would allow one IT person to spend half their time maintaining something like this, and that would be it. No need to turn millions in advertising dollars to have an online community. I do agree with the parent c…

I meant more that even a new, small company would have no incentive to not want to become the next big thing/the next facebook. Good point though that we don't need companies/start-ups to feed us online communities, particularly since the users are almost always the ones bringing value to platform like a message board/forum sites.

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

#727
You can't. The internet has grown in size irreversibly. There is more than eternal september. when you have billion-people "communities" you no longer have community, you have a large mob. In order for discussions to have depth, they need a certain shared framework of understanding and certain level of agreement on the definitions of words; in other words a baseline common culture. The more people are in a community the thinner this common culture gets as only the few common denominators survive. At this point, the discussion can no longer have depth because people will be arguing constantly about definitions and nothing productive will ever occur

The old story about the tower of Babel is true. It seems humanity has faced these moments before. The solution is to separate the bubbles in separate, more cohesive communities. Ideas need such sheltering in order to grow, even if this means they won't blend easily with other ideas.

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

probably doesn't help. look at youtube comments. you can set twitter to timeline it doesnt make a lot of difference

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

#728
I really doubt that people have overall become more contentious and disrespectful. It's just that, with social media and the Internet generally, it's so much more visible. People ranting about this and that were always there, but you had to go out of your way to hear them.

Back in the day, many Usenet groups were OK during summer, when only professionals were online, and suddenly became toxic in the fall, as students went online. And then, with the first public ISPs, they became toxic all year. That is, Eternal September.

So we can choose where to hang out. If we want interesting discussions, we can frequent highly moderated sites, such as HN and professional subreddits. If we want toxicity, we can frequent the chans or whatever.

Edit: I ought to have said that some "toxic" sites may be useful for finding stuff that's suppressed elsewhere. If for no other reason, to know what's happening.

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

#730
post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep talking about "non-extremists" but you are not telling us what you mean by that.

I don't want to get political, but do you think Joe Rogan is an extremist? Jeanine Cummins? What about Ben Shapiro? These are people that the MSM is trying to cancel quite literally right now.

"cancel" doesn't really mean anything here.

I don't think Joe Rogan or Ben Shapiro should get fired from the average workplace (I'm not familiar with Jeanine Cummins) unless they insist on trying to impose their views. I don't think they should be banned from presumably neutral platforms (reddit, Facebook, Twitter).

On the other hand, I don't think they should be given a column in other media publications and they're more than fair game for ridicule and criticism. I don't think they have a moral right to publish in any subgroup within ostensibly neutral platforms (Facebook group, subreddit).

Post reply on HN