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De-escalating social media conflict

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Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#141

Post by memexy »

oehpr wrote: post #126
memexy wrote: post #113

> Reply to your tweet, posting "I was wrong" There is another option. Quote tweet and say "I was wrong". Quote tweeting is a concept extension mechanism but people mostly use it for dunking. If you make a mistake then quote tweeting is the best way to correct it because people can then search for "I was wrong" and see the wrong tweet in context.

I don't believe that would work, because links to the original tweet will still be broken, allowing people to say "X deleted their tweet" without saying that they reposted and said they were wrong. Motivated actors loooooove this form of lying.

Can't really do much for the people that are not interested in finding out the truth so not much point in trying to address their concerns. The people that care about finding out will dig through the timeline and figure it out, especially if they consider the account to be trustworthy.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#142

Post by smabie »

dcow wrote: post #75
adventured wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What’s the alternative if one is not to use Twitter? How do you publicize your findings or insights to a broad population? If you can, you do it behind the shield of a faceless corporate entity (that you own) doing the promoting, rather than tying statements to your own personal identity. You don't stop using Twitter or Instagram et al., you stop using them to project your personal opinions out into the world. Your…

In other words: self-censor. Sorry not my style. I believe you have good points about keeping your work and personal lives as separate as possible and I believe your advice is very pragmatic. I don't, however, think it should be necessary nor is it realistic. Let's all go into sterile work environments for 8+ hours a day where we have to self-censor based solely on observations of how other people fucked up and anger…

You're going to self-censor on twitter, regardless. Might as well just not be on twitter. It's bad for your brain, anyways.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#143

Post by mistermann »

holler wrote: post #115
dcow wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter/FB just aren't the right platforms for nuanced discussion. I don't know why people keep trying to treat them that way or keep wanting them to become such. Easy for me to say as someone who has already come to this realization and has actively avoided building dependency on Twitter/FB in my daily life, I guess... But honestly I wish people who wanted to have real meaningful discourse with people would gravitat…

agree! It’s a challenging problem to solve. Im working on a new project that’s a sort of hybrid between twitter/slack/discord, and actively thinking about these issues... Still young but my aim is both scale and nuanced convo! (example post https://sqwok.im/p/TU2ba6D-iDEYuQ )

Is sqwok that project?

I'm curious to know some of the ideas you have in mind for increasing nuance, have you written them up anywhere?

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#144

Post by DonHopkins »

jacquesm wrote: post #33
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #29

I've always had a policy of promptly admitting when I'm wrong. It worked great, when I worked at a Japanese company. The Japanese respected it. The Americans, on the other hand, looked at it as a sign of weakness, and tended to "go for the jugular" (Carpe Jugulum) . I think that explains why so many folks "double down," when asked to correct statements. Also, lawyers. A standard piece of advice at American accident s…

This is precisely what is going on. You can see that dynamic at work here on HN on a daily basis.

A time proven technique for saving face when you say something stupid is to switch sides by replying to yourself.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#145

Post by DonHopkins »

DonHopkins wrote: post #144
jacquesm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely what is going on. You can see that dynamic at work here on HN on a daily basis.

A time proven technique for saving face when you say something stupid is to switch sides by replying to yourself.

That trick never works!

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#146

Post by analyst74 »

secondcoming wrote: post #76
noobermin wrote: post #57

I think this work is great and interesting, and I respect it. One of the things I feel like it lacks is a discussion of the broader context: we all sort of suspect that one of the reasons Twitter does not generally allow for de-escalation (like FB not censoring misleading news articles) is that such escalation is in fact part of their revenue stream (escalation=more engagement), so while I think ideas like this would…

If there's anyone out there who wants to earn money from advertising there are two words you need to be aware of: "BRAND SAFETY" No well known advertiser wants their brand associated with something unpopular or toxic. This is why YouTube is demonetising any video that mentions Covid-19. YouTube themselves technically probably don't care, but brand safety conscious advertisers certainly do, and so YouTube must too. Th…

> it can be forced to only allow content that advertisers approve of

This was already the case before social media, mainstream media has always been controlled by the powerful. By "the powerful", I don't mean a secret cabal of white men deciding what happens, but that only people with enough resources, right connections can have an influence over what gets published. This is a pretty small group and not representative of the general public.

Today's backlashes against social media platforms is just the existing elites trying to take back their control. I think they're going to succeed, and we'll go back to a higher barrier of entry in terms of influencing public opinions, which can be both a good and bad thing.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#147

Post by wisty »

doomrobo wrote: post #139
wisty wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often, society is wrong and capitalism is right. When society is prejudiced against a group (not the fake prejudice that society complains about - major broadcasters like Fox and CNN are both probably championing groups who have plenty of support from society, but maybe other groups are actually marginalised but it wouldn't be broadly OK to say it if they were) then it's not society's moral code that helps them (if a…

Examples?

Latinos and people with mental illness (and fat people) are kinda still acceptable targets. Poor whites. Men in some contexts. Asians in some contexts. One of the biggest issues with the whole anti-discrimination movement now is that it is inherently reductionist - it has to be some grand intersectional operatic fight with clear goodies and baddies who are always winners or losers in some deep conspiratorial structure of society, they can't appreciate that discrimination isn't always so black and white and that often context can matter because for the "theory" to work it always has to be about some imagined power struggle.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#148

Post by c3534l »

earthboundkid wrote: post #121
ssalazar wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Engagement" is the "paper clip maximizer"[1] of the modern software industry, or more generally an example of "instrumental convergence." Optimizing engagement without regard for negative externalities is a catastrophic ethical failure of the major players in the software industry, and we are finally seeing a backlash both from mainstream advertisers and widespread public outcry. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In…

Capitalism is the paper clip maximizer, non-metaphorically. Science fiction is pretty much always just about things that already happened. “What if we maximized a non-human value?” is just a subconsciously repressed way of asking “Did anyone notice we’ve been maximizing non-human values for a couple hundred years?”

This doesn't work because humans are the consumer. Humans purchase things based on their own person values. Capitalism has the instrumental goal of maximizing human values. In addition, humans engage in every stage of the process. Some of the biggest failures of capitalism are actually the results of human values: racism, sexism, nepotism. I can think of some issues with unregulated capitalism, but none of them seem to be a paperclip maximizer unless you're taking the phrase to be so non-specific that it essentially just means "unwanted side-effect."

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#149

Post by geodel »

Well the most nasty conflicts on social media are not about facts which once settled all parties can happily go home. If people were arguing who is tallest person in town it may be possible to make mistake, apologize and rectify. However most acrimonious conflicts are something like who is most evil person in town, I don't know how one can be objectively right or wrong about it or de-escalate during disagreement.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#150

Post by nullc »

class4behavior wrote: post #134
softwaredoug wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engagement can also ultimately at odds with retention. We see people leaving Twitter and Facebook all the time due to exhaustion with the toxic conflict. So they become self-reinforcing cess pools of thought that (hopefully) gradually lose relevance.

>So they become self-reinforcing cess pools of thought that (hopefully) gradually lose relevance. You've referenced engagement first, but then, you've ignored about it in your conclusion. That is, as long as the inflow counters the outflow of participants, the situation will not improve or will even worsen - just as we've experienced in the last decade.

Inflow is partially bots and sockpuppets-- and their share probably goes up the more toxic the environment is.

Have you seen the truly awesome GPT3 authored navy seal copypasta?

Perhaps twitter will eventually be autonomous machines throwing vicious and brilliant insults at each other.

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