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De-escalating social media conflict

nickpunt.com

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Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#191

Post by silvat »

noobermin wrote: post #54
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.

I have apologized before on HN and people vote it up, so no I do not see it. It feels much more like people just dig in their heels due to selfish reasons.

I wouldn't be so sure. I read a book about rhetoric (basically the bread and butter of politicians, marketing and PR) and it strongly advocated never( or almost never) apologizing. I can't remember the exact reasoning but the the assertion was that it rarely has the desired effect and often weakens your position and your ability to actually fix the situation.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#192

Post by mirimir »

wolco wrote: post #179
guerrilla wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fascists on both the far-left While I appreciate your comment otherwise, fascism is universally agreed to be a far-right ideology and claiming otherwise at this point in history can't really be taken as anything but inflammatory, which isn't what belongs here in an otherwise insightful comment.

You proved that faacists can exist on both the left or the right by your last post. Imposing that point of view is equally unpleasant right or left.

Just how did they "prove" that? And just who is doing the "imposing" here?

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#193

Post by npunt »

zestyping wrote: post #169
npunt wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm a bit surprised nobody has picked up on the forgiveness part. The more I worked on this, the more it's necessity became clear. I think it's a more subtle point, but it's a powerful way to restore relationships and even potentially forge closer ties. I get that many people think Twitter or social media in general is a broken system. It's my belief though the same power of design to get us into the toxic situ…

The word "forgive" is a loaded one. I wonder if it wouldn't be easier for people to understand and accept if presented as a "heart" on the mea culpa itself, since that's already a familiar button and the use of the heart symbology gives it a touch of tenderness.

That's definitely an alternative, I almost did it that way!

I went with 'forgive' because I think the broader problem we have on social media is when looking across all users, it can be really ambiguous what things mean, which has led to a lot of misinterpretation of intent. The people entering the worldwide commons of Twitter are from every life stage, skill level, opinion tribe, culture, personality type, etc, and the tools we've used to find common ground among all of us in the past - language - is being thrown out in favor of hieroglyphs and UI structures that can be pretty ambiguous for a lot of people.

Adding ambiguity can be fun and quite useful in certain circumstances, especially with new things where the goal is to create emergent behavior. But for important things that strike at the core of who we are and have deep psychological impact, I'd prefer to see those rooted in specific meaning and intent. Concepts like forgiveness and mercy are things that span almost every culture throughout history and are part of the glue that tie us together, so I figured its probably better to be extra clear about that.

I also like to use design proposals to push people to think a bit, make them wrestle with things that sound silly because they're so straightforward, rather than just hand wave it (my other recent work on Spaces [0] is an example of this). But in this particular case, I loved the clarity of it. I do think it's worth further exploration and discussion tho!

[0] https://nickpunt.com/blog/spaces/

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#194

Post by antepodius »

TeaDrunk wrote: post #67
antepodius wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologising to people who would consider it an acceptable political outcome if you lost your job and killed yourself tends to embolden those partifluar people. Appeasing bullies doesn't work. They want to see you squirm and beg, because it's fun make someone grovel before you. The object-level discussion is secondary. Some people call this dichotomy good and bad faith, right?

I think at the same time there are circumstances in which the acceptable outcome is indeed a loss of job. (And to some moral codes, a loss of life- see advocates for the death penalty.) EG. A Manager who pressured people into sexual favors for promotions should lose the job of being a manager.

Sure, but the point is that if people who want you to lose your job are screaming about you on twitter, it's bad advice to apologise in an attempt to appease them- because the twitter mob won't be happy till you're in the ground. Whether you would be in the mob if the circumstances were turned around is a striking, but secondary, question.

Yes, my preferences may include that some people should lose their jobs. But in my case, I think it should only be when that manager is convicted in court, not when someone or some mob) accuses them on twitter. And, actually, if they really did something bad- then let the legal system punish and rehabilitate them!

And then don't try and stop them from ever having a job again. Aren't we liberal? Aren't we meant to be for rehabilitation rather than emotion-based punishment? Restorative justice? Or does all that go out the window if you're not politically useful?

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#195

Post by musicale »

anonms-coward wrote: post #26

This is very old but feels as relevant as ever http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

> most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics

Pretty sure this isn't true. French literature professors not only managed to survive a brutal graduate program but have also achieved something that is next to impossible: get a tenured job as a humanities professor. Physics is almost certainly the easier route, not just intellectually but in terms of sheer endurance.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#196

Post by luckylion »

tomp wrote: post #177
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…

> No well known advertiser wants their brand associated with something unpopular or toxic. That's pre-historic thinking. No reasonable long-term user of Social Media would think that a Frozen ad showing next to some BLM/white supremacist content means that Disney endorses violence/racism. It just means that you've liked Frozen (or similar things) before. The dinosaurs will die out. They'll be replaced by social-media…

That may be true at some point in the future, but I believe we're quite far away from it. Most users on the internet are not savvy at all, and I don't see that changing.

I had expected the younger generations to be "digital natives", but they're not. They know their apps and services, but it's not a generalized understanding to how things work or what's common. Imho the fact that adblocker-usage isn't approaching 100% is a powerful demonstration of it.

Additionally, there's the subconscious effects. Even if they consciously understand that it's based on their ad profile, brand will likely still not advertise there. There may be some exceptions (Benetton comes to mind), but I don't think Disney ever wants their ads to be displayed in an article about Auschwitz.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#197

Post by pegasus »

c3534l wrote: post #148
earthboundkid wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's definitely something of the paperclip maximizer to capitalism. It's due to corporations having the instrumental goal of maximizing shareholder value - which usually translates in making as much money as possible. If there is a way to convince people that paperclips in excess is what they most need, that's what they will have to do.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#198

Post by Viliam1234 »

softwaredoug wrote: post #94
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…

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.

People leaving is not necessarily a problem, if the new ones come faster. If you are small, you can grow exponentially even if literally all users left in a month. But this becomes a problem once you grow so large that there is nowhere to grow. Which is probably the case with Twitter -- everyone already heard of it, and everyone who was tempted to try it already did.

On Facebook, I think the only reasonable way to use it is to create groups and only debate within them. Also private messages, but only 1:1.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#199

Post by mdpopescu »

nl wrote: post #190
austhrow743 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is largely populated with the 1%.

Perhaps, in the financial sense. But that's very different to the people who are typically refereed to as "the elites". That typically includes - for example - journalists - who aren't well paid at all.

Journalists aren't the elite. They're the PR people working for the elite.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#200

Post by Viliam1234 »

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?”

It happens in capitalism, and it happens in socialism, because it happens everywhere. It is like saying "entropy increases in capitalism"; technically true, but misleading.

Things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law happen regardless of political regime or economical system. In different situations they take different forms: in capitalism, companies try to maximize (short-term) (perceived) shareholder value; in socialism, they try to maximize the favor of the ruling party. In capitalism, your values are important proportionally to how much money you have; in socialism proportionally to how good political connections you have. In capitalism, sometimes people starve to death; in socialism, sometimes people starve to death.

The world has many problems, but lack of military dictatorships controlled by a communist party is not one of them.

Of course, unless you meant "actually, true socialism has never been tried yet". In which case, sure, as a rule of thumb, imaginary countries do not suffer from real problems (unless the plot demands it).

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