Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

831–840 of 859 posts

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

#831

Post by ping_pong »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #812
ping_pong wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. On Usenet there were still moderated groups, because there were assholes that were willing to start flame wars. The term "flame war" came from Usenet, as did "trolling". The original meaning of "trolling" was making a post that provoked a huge number of responses, be it good or bad. Now it has morphed to meaning you say something shitty. > That's a purely American phenomenon This is wrong. Europe turned…

The US has been struggling with it since the very start. KKK, segregation, McCarthyism, the list goes on.

Europe has been categorically worse, considering the scale of antisemitism, ie. the Holocaust.

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

#832

Post by breuleux »

kerkeslager wrote: post #822
breuleux wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that's true, I think it's worth pointing out that it is a mirror of your own statement that "the average left-leaning person today doesn't see bigots even as people any more." Neither statement is true. They are the same kind of hyperbolic/uncharitable extrapolation of a group's inner thoughts.

That's true, it is a mirror, which should be disturbing to anyone on the left who doesn't want the left to be a mirror of the right. > They are the same kind of hyperbolic/uncharitable extrapolation of a group's inner thoughts. Is it, though? What does saying, "I don't think you deserve to be heard" say about the person saying it?

> That's true, it is a mirror, which should be disturbing to anyone on the left who doesn't want the left to be a mirror of the right.

I mean, sure, but I was meaning to make you think about your own tendency to fall into the same trap.

Also, the left can scarcely avoid being a mirror of the right in many ways, given that both groups are made out of humans. The influence of ideology on social dynamics is overstated.

> What does saying, "I don't think you deserve to be heard" say about the person saying it?

But see, you're putting words in people's mouths here. This saying is far from the average left-leaning position.

Even if we were to look at the subsection of the left that wishes to de-platform certain individuals, they generally wouldn't say something as crude and caricatural as "I don't think you deserve to be heard." This is, perhaps, what you think that they think, but this is uncharitable and dismissive.

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

#833

Post by praptak »

thinkingemote wrote: post #791
praptak wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was shown repeatedly not to work. The only troll-free forums are those with good moderators.

In terms of forums, the trolls existed but people knew how to ignore them. They didn't remove the troll, they just didn't feed them.

You may ignore the trolls. Still there is always enough trolls and enough easily baited people for the S/N ratio to drop.

"Just ignore the troll" is a good personal advice it is just not sufficient for the forum as a whole.

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

#834

Post by fastball »

Barrin92 wrote: post #816
fastball wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't really explain why many people are not assholes when given anonymity. And whatever those people have, we need to replicate in everyone else. Unless you believe that those people are somehow genetically "nice" and it is impossible to replicate with environmental factors.

To be honest I think that's overstating how many nice people there are on the internet. In purely anonymous communities the discourse is almost always toxic. Even on a small website like HN with people who frequently have their names exposed in their profile discourse is rough. Look at the amount of moderation the average Reddit community needs. Everybody is meaner on the internet, people are mean even on facebook ju…

I actually always found 4chan to be more courteous/less toxic than Reddit, even with it's extra level of anonymity - in its own, incredibly offensive way.

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

#835

Post by KajMagnus »

peckrob wrote: post #98

It's a big problem without one simple solution. One thing we can do, though, is not enable it when possible. One big thing I have zeroed in on recently is comments. When I redesigned my blog/website last year, I intentionally removed Disqus and all commenting ability. In fact, what prompted the redesign was that I wanted to add a box pleading with people to not use comments for tech support for various open source pr…

> I intentionally removed Disqus [...] pleading with people to [...] file Github issues instead

What could the reasons be, that GitHub works better? That people are more polite, there?

> When comments become a breeding ground for the worst aspects of human behavior

For what reasons, do people feel they can be more "toxic", in blog post comments, than at GitHub?

What would you say are the lessons that could be learned, from how things work at GitHub?

(Disclosure: I'm building a commenting system & Q&A forum software. I have a blog post here: ` https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments ` 145 comments, 0% toxic angry comments in my case. )

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

#836

Post by KajMagnus »

lukaszkups wrote: post #446

I was thinking about a solution that could be implemented by big players like Disqus - I've took some ideas from StackOverflow reputation idea - here you can read about it: https://lukaszkups.net/notes/what-disqus-can-learn-from-stac... &tldr; limit comments per day, require minimum amount of positive reputation to leave a comment, make it customizable per website by its owners.

> require minimum amount of positive reputation to leave a comment

How can one get positive reputation, without first having published a few comments that got upvoted?

Anyway here's a commenting system with a built in trust level system — more similar to the one you'd find in Discourse, than at StackOverflow though: https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments (I'm developing it). There are Like votes = upvotes, neutral Disagree votes, and (for community core members & mods only) the Unwanted vote, which works like downvotes and destroys "karma" (not completely implemented).

From your blog:

> Users should be able to gain reputation through their comments — we are currently able to upvote or downvote each user comment — that should somehow influence user profile reputation

And maybe an upvote or downvote by someone with high rep, could carry more weight, than from a new member?

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

#837

Post by KozmoNau7 »

ping_pong wrote: post #831
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has been struggling with it since the very start. KKK, segregation, McCarthyism, the list goes on.

Europe has been categorically worse, considering the scale of antisemitism, ie. the Holocaust.

Someone else being just as bad/worse is not a valid excuse.

My point is that racism and right-wing nationalism isn't something that somehow started in Europe in the last couple of decades and then came to the US. It's been there since the beginning on both sides of the Atlantic, and systematic racism in the US has been a thing since before the founding fathers put ink to paper.

In addition, you can't just say "Europe" as one unit. There are vast cultural differences between even neighboring countries. Europe does not act as one united country, it's a patchwork of localized opinions and cultures.

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

#838

Post by anigbrowl »

luckylion wrote: post #778
anigbrowl wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, sure, but "serious, motivated and capable" still doesn't give them leverage. You will always have individuals committing terrible things, there will always be the next school shooter or terrorist, but those are, while tragic, small events, and if you didn't turn on the TV, you usually wouldn't notice them if you lived a few hundred miles away. Change the policies of a nation and you'll have a much larger effect…

Changing policies is the point of terrorism. You seem to be assuming it's randomized and atomized rather than itself being networked and (loosely) coordinated.

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

#839

Post by anigbrowl »

Udik wrote: post #641
jessaustin wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fair to call this phenomenon "leftwing". My perception is that those who advocate deplatforming/censorship are centrists who call themselves "progressives". They do this mostly in order to support existing power structures that they fear are threatened by free speech. Very few actual leftists in the American context are against free speech.

I wanted to stress that I didn't mean it as a leftwing phenomenon. It's just that the GP seemed to describe it as a peculiarly rightwing one, and I think we've seen instances on the left as well (particularly recently). And while the left is generally much more averse to physical violence than the right, it's also more socially accepted and mainstream, so the outrage storms are more pronounced and the calls for censo…

I didn't agree with your first comment above, as I mostly focus on violent extremism, but you do raise a good point about the general intensity of polarization and how there is certainly support on the left for social sanctions against those we disagree with.

I don't exactly subscribe to the proposals in your example article, but I do think that climate denial is a sort of fraud which has real externalities, and have suggested that people should listening to or engaging with known climate deniers. It seems to me that there's something fundamentally wrong with the idea that it's OK to lie about products or policy for the sake of profit and then assign blame to the victims of predictable externalities for their credulity or lack of preparedness.

One thing we've learned in the age of social media is that false information is considerably more likely to go viral than true information- good news for the entertainment industry, less good in areas like public health or policymaking. It's likely that the ease of transmission is that false information tends to leverage easy prior assumptions over difficult unintuitive ones such that cognitive bias could be said to yield a 'liar surplus' which has an economic value to the deliberate proponent of untruth. It's possible that this will lead to the development of weighting tools for assessing the reliability of information through analysis of the rate and direction of its transmission, but as long as it's profitable to sell false information we will continue to get more of that.

Post reply on HN