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De-escalating social media conflict

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Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#201

Post by luckylion »

taneq wrote: post #182
andrepd wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Like altruism, ethical behaviour is ultimately an expression of enlightened self-interest. People know this on an individual scale, and it's just as true on a corporate scale. When a company acts unethically, it is almost always paying a high price later for a small immediate win. We see this kind of behaviour a lot in companies that have been taken over by short-term MBA-style management, who temporarily boost quart…

> Like altruism, ethical behaviour is ultimately an expression of enlightened self-interest.

I somewhat disagree on a generalized form of "altruism is in the individual's interest" (as in "always"), but for ethical behavior, this essentially means that their is no ethical behavior for companies, only a mirroring of the perceived values of customers.

You need very different actions to not tarnish your reputation when you're dealing with very different customers. Since large companies typically do, there would only be very localized ethics, and they could be diametrically opposed (e.g. "expose & hunt down gays" in Riad, "expose & hunt down bigots" in Berkeley). Ethics is the wrong term here, as the company's actions are not based on principles but on the expectations and principles of the environment, their values are reactive.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#202

Post by thegayngler »

I quite like this study on de-escalation online. I myself have learned to not care about whether or not people forgave me for being wrong or instead just assume they forgave me for being wrong. If I think I am actually wrong i'll say it and then ignore any further replies to the post. In the case that I simply do not agree that I'm wrong, I do not apologize. I "pithily" re-iterate my opinion/disagreement/argument and why, then ignore any further responses. Keeping track of everyone else's petty beefs with me online is not worth the effort. shrug

As a side note: I do not believe in grudges. So..I do not stay mad.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#203

Post by luckylion »

zozbot234 wrote: post #72
joe_the_user wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you have someone determined to go after someone else, the most nuanced approach is not going to get you much. The attacker just rephrases it as they wish. Which is to say, when you have a medium like Twitter, where the entire world can march in and get involved with conversation X, a proposal for de-escalation seems futile and a bit absurd. Among other things, a lot of media personalities have built their en…

> Well, if you have someone determined to go after someone else, the most nuanced approach is not going to get you much. The attacker just rephrases it as they wish. They can do this but they no longer have plausible deniability, since they're attacking something that the other user has unambiguously disclaimed. They'll just look like a loser who is obviously not acting in good faith.

Will they care? Plenty of people got "cancelled" because of something they did/said/did not/did not say years ago. Imho, the actions aren't the reason they get attacked, they are the tool for the attack, so retracting them might make the attack weaker, but it won't make the attackers back down.

It's either a tribal thing ("I can hurt the other tribe if I hurt that individual because they are part of the other tribe") or purity signalling ("Look, I am clean and virtuous, and I purge even our circle from the unclean").

The tribal thing is somewhat reasonable from a collective stand point (which is why groups tend to look at their members' differently than the actions of competing groups), the purity spiralling is counter-productive in the larger conflict, as you're hurting your own group, but individuals have individual interests as well, and to advance those, they may be happy to sacrifice allies.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#204

Post by jasode »

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…

>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.

It's not that simple. The other angle you're missing is that advocacy groups (as a proxy for some customers) pressure advertisers to stop funding entities they don't approve of. E.g. the "Stop Funding Hate" to pressure companies to stop advertising in conservative newspapers.

Therefore, it's not enough if Disney itself doesn't approve of white supremacists. It's also not enough if Disney's customers also know that Disney doesn't approve of neo-Nazis. Instead, protesters would insist that Disney to take further measures of "not funding white supremacists" by not advertising (or allowing Google to show their ads) next to Nazi content.

Thus "brand safety" isn't just about association. It's also about how customers connect the dots between the company and the funding of activities they disapprove of.

[btw, I didn't downvote your comment.]

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#205

Post by pbhjpbhj »

mirimir wrote: post #189
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.

Actually the full quote is: > fascists on both the far-left and far-right of the political debate According to Merriam-Webster, fascism is:[0] > a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible su…

>the Soviet Union was arguably fascist //

You appear to be starting from an assumption that everything USSR did, politically, was left-wing; and thus concluding that fascism can be left wing.

A dictator is diametrical opposed to left-wing ideology.

What you're doing is like saying uxoricide (murdering your wife) is part of FOSS, because a proponent of FOSS did it.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#206

Post by _tw9j »

austhrow743 wrote: post #160
nl wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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%.

I doubt that is true. SV crowd may be loud but they aren't the majority on HN.

Here's how I would group HN based on income, what keywords make them click and demography.

1. Old system admins, FOSS lovers, and retired due to age folks.

Around median income.

Keywords - vim, Emacs, firefox, awk, unions, inequality, privacy, new tech bad, linux, open source projects, go, haiku, history, and against-big-tech.

2. Fresh college graduate/ enrolled in CS or equivalents, teenagers, hermits, and recently laid off.

Below median income or none.

Keywords - education, degrees, FAANGs, interviews, privacy, income inequality, against-the-popular-social-media, against-google-apple, firefox, chrome, free-speech, thought-crime, and twittter.

3. SV crowd, founders, and employees of a big company.

Above median income.

Keywords - rent, homelessness, parenting, investment, CA, economics, happiness, open source but the profitable or commerical kind (kubernetes tool, cockroachdb, materialize), startups, climate change, big-company-profit-loss, apple, security and immigration.

4. Researchers and retired by choice.

Above Median or low/no income.

Passive consumers so they click on wide variety of keywords. Occasionally, participate in something related to their field.

5. Long time active HN members.

Above median or median income.

They click on most posts on the front page but comment in their own silos or interests. They help direct the site by filtering from new or stopping hoard of initial comments.

6. Marketers, sales and non-tech crowd.

Median or lower median income.

Keywords - medium article, heres-why, how-I, growth, crypto, ads, effective-ways-to, and the likes.

This is only my observation so it will be biased and wrong but I definitely don't think hners are 1%.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#207

Post by zozbot234 »

_tw9j wrote: post #206
austhrow743 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is largely populated with the 1%.

I doubt that is true. SV crowd may be loud but they aren't the majority on HN. Here's how I would group HN based on income, what keywords make them click and demography. 1. Old system admins, FOSS lovers , and retired due to age folks. Around median income. Keywords - vim, Emacs, firefox, awk, unions, inequality, privacy, new tech bad, linux, open source projects, go, haiku, history, and against-big-tech. 2. Fresh co…

I like how all of these groups have some reason to oppose big-tech and social media. It's like the one thing we can all agree on here at HN.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#208

Post by foldr »

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…

>BLM/white supremacist content means that Disney endorses violence/racism

Are you trolling with this comparison? In a thread about de-escalation it seems a bit unwise to casually tie BLM to violence and suggest that it's somehow comparable to white supremacist extremism. I get that you were trying to choose one example from each 'end' of the political spectrum, but I think this particular choice was badly misconceived.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#209

Post by rapnie »

mdpopescu wrote: post #199
nl wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These generalizations and plattitudes are off the mark and dangerous. Sure, there are those working as PR for the elite, or they are honest journalists that work for MSM that is in the hands of the elites. Most journalists, especially investigative journalists want to do their job as well as they can, in an environment that is increasingly hostile to good journalism. We need these people to help keep our democracy intact.

Re: De-escalating social media conflict

#210

Post by jval43 »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #200
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?”

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…

Are you replying to the wrong comment? There's no mention of "socialism" in the parent comment?
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