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De-escalating social media conflict

nickpunt.com

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Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#151

Post by pfooti »

npunt wrote: post #131
pfooti wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can distinguish apologies into two top-level categories: meaningful and meaningless. Meaningless apologies can be further subdivided ("I'm sorry you were offended", or "It's just my culture to be a jerk"), but I'm not interested in that - they're all meaningless. Meaningful apologies can be easily found via the search engine of your choice, "How to apologize" brings up lots of hits. The thing they all have…

One of the explicit design choices in this was to limit people's tendency to screw up apologies in the heated moments when they haven't yet internalized the outside world's perspective of their message. I'm glad you brought up the searching of how to apologize - it's one of those super important life skills that we haven't done a good job of teaching people about. We have to design with this constraint in mind. One o…

Yes, I agree with your overall thesis. A feature like this can help normalize people publicly admitting that they made a mistake, and walking back that original Bad Tweet (or whatever).

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#153

Post by ImaCake »

pabs3 wrote: post #140

This reminded me of Polis: https://pol.is/ https://github.com/pol-is/ Taiwan use it for their multi-stakeholder decision making to find points of agreement. Their application of it to the Uber vs Taxis situation was quite interesting. https://debconf18.debconf.org/talks/135-q-a-session-with-min... https://blog.pol.is/pol-is-in-taiwan-da7570d372b5 https://blog.pol.is/uber-responds-to-vtaiwans-coherent-blend...

That is excellent. Tools like this get us close to the kind of granular democracy that our ancestors could only dream of.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#154

Post by nl »

analyst74 wrote: post #146
secondcoming wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 representativ…

> Today's backlashes against social media platforms is just the existing elites trying to take back their control.

That's not really the case, as can been seen by the hate given to both FB and Twitter on HN.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#155

Post by rexgallorum2 »

Ultimately I think the best solution will be universal 'deamplification', i.e. disabling all features that facilitate virality/contagion. It is unfortunate that Facebook, Twitter, et. al. have tweaked their entire platforms and business models to profit from phenomena that appear to be almost without exception socially corrosive and destructive. Modern soc med platforms work like factories for the memetic reproduction and dissemination of bad ideas, half-truths, and other rubbish, as well as for disturbing mob behaviour. Regarding the article, providing 'mea culpa' tools would only reinforce the dictatorship of the online mob, who would invariably bully users into issuing apologies.

It might seem like a stretch, but I suspect that ultimately all of these platforms are going to end up being carved up by regulators, co-opted by governments, subjected to national firewalls, etc. on account of their potential for mischief, misuse, disinformation, misinformation, open source intel gathering by hostile powers, meddling, etc.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#156

Post by JauntyHatAngle »

wisty wrote: post #147
doomrobo wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 structur…

What? That isn't the argument most anti-discrimination people make.

Most argue that subconscious bias and wealth inequality due to historical reasons are a significant part of discrimination. I've not met someone 'anti-discrimination' who believes there is a deep conspiracy of people working to instill discrimination across society.

In modern times in the western world, conspiratorial sort of discrimination seems to me to occur more in pockets or if the culture of an organisation goes bad and festers. But it's rarely overt or widespread. More subtle and nuanced forms of discrimination are still everpresent of course, but everyone I discuss and work with in these issues knows this all too well.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#157

Post by WhompingWindows »

dcow wrote: post #87
FooBarWidget wrote: post #5

Even increasing the content limit will go a long way towards deescalation. I find that, on Twitter, one often has to resort to oversimplified hyperbole and sarcasm because it's very difficult to fit more thoughtful and nuanced messages in the content limit. Yes it's possible to write multiple tweets. But that takes significantly more effort.

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…

The reason people want social media to host more nuanced discussion is because we are stuck with them...we can not convince people to stop using the services, so let's convince the service to adjust to the people.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, just stating their case.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#158

Post by rexgallorum2 »

andrepd wrote: post #89
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…

Why should a for-profit enterprise have any kind of ethical consideration at all? It seems that's your mistake.

This shouldn't have been voted down. It is actually a sound question and one that should be examined.

Edit: I looked at the previous replies. All of this talk of 'society' this and 'we' that is of no use whatsoever when you are talking about global phenomena and companies like Facebook/Twitter/etc. Under the given circumstances, the ethical questions are much larger. The problem is probably totally intractable.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#160

Post by austhrow743 »

nl wrote: post #154
analyst74 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 representativ…

> Today's backlashes against social media platforms is just the existing elites trying to take back their control. That's not really the case, as can been seen by the hate given to both FB and Twitter on HN.

HN is largely populated with the 1%.
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