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The internet wants to be fragmented

noahpinion.substack.com

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Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#71

Post by amadeuspagel »

ilyt wrote: post #68
mikrl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this might be structurally related to our political ideology of liberal democracy. We assume that bad takes die out or are overcome by good takes in the marketplace of ideas. Therefore, the ‘magnitude’ of a bad take should intuitively be close to 0, and the magnitude of a good take should be positive and nonzero. Allowing negative scores permits bad takes to become large in magnitude. Allowing or disallowing…

But lack of downvotes mixes "just average takes not worth a upvote" with "this guy is obviously a moron, why I'm even seeing his comments together with other competent people?"

That's why upvotes and downvotes should be shown separately.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#72

Post by giardini »

causality0 wrote: post #44

Being the same person online as offline destroyed everything great about the internet. When you were an asshole you got banned from the website, and then you had to trim some of your sharp edges off so you didn't get banned from the next one. These days being an asshole results in either you aurrou ding yourself entirely with other assholes or getting your real life ruined by losing your job or even being arrested in…

aurrou ding !?

Is this a new Australian metaphor?

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#73

Post by poszlem »

falcolas wrote: post #49
machina_ex_deus wrote: post #4

The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric. Speaking up used to be something you do to change someone's mind or yours. What's the point in speaking up if nobody does anything with what you said? The like button reprogrammed people. They started getting positive feedback for speaking in an echo chamber, for saying and doing things their audience al…

Why does someone’s position need to change? That implies that somebody is wrong, and that’s not necessarily the case. More often, the “wrongness” comes from having a different point of view. For example, it’s easy to say “fuck cars” when you live in the city and they are only polluting, noisy nuisances that are, at best, optional for living your life. But when you live where I do, not having a car means a significant…

Isn't the whole point that you can change the position of a person who says "fuck cars" by talking to them and telling them why some people need them?

If they are not trolls, learning about how much of the world is reliant on cars should absolutely change their position.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#74

Post by ilyt »

jacooper wrote: post #13

The entire problem lies with the twisted motives of social media. They don't want to make you happy or feel good, they want money, at all costs which results in you being angry and toxic. I agree with this article in general, and think that its worth it to spend time arguing with people you care about rather some rando on twitter. community run communities will probably have a resurge, the problem is the tech barrier…

> The entire problem lies with the twisted motives of social media.

Just media. Social media might be latest iteration, but traditional media works the same way, outrage gets you views or sells your newspaper.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#75

Post by mikewarot »

machina_ex_deus wrote: post #4

The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric. Speaking up used to be something you do to change someone's mind or yours. What's the point in speaking up if nobody does anything with what you said? The like button reprogrammed people. They started getting positive feedback for speaking in an echo chamber, for saying and doing things their audience al…

>The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric.

ANY single metric is going to be unfit for purpose. We need to have a continuum of responses, tags or perhaps a vector for votes instead of a scalar.

It's like trying to force everything into a single hierarchy, it never works. You always end up at Matthew 6:24[1]:

  No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. 
  Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
Any single vote/rank/option range ends up serving mammon

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_6:24

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#76

Post by poszlem »

crazygringo wrote: post #53
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN's vote count is not public, and negative count is capped at -4 so you can't downvote someone into oblivion.

When -4 pushes you to the very bottom of the page in text so grayed-out that it's not even readable unless you highlight it first, I'd still call that oblivion. Also, flags from just two (?) people remove your comment entirely.

Yeah, as much as I don't want it to be true, HN algorithm is one of the harshest I've seen in terms of allowing people to hide/remove unpopular opinions. Some people think it's a feature not a bug though. I am not one of those people.

It's definitely "an elegant system for a more civilized age". Not for whatever you call the internet in 2023.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#77

Post by poszlem »

LinuxBender wrote: post #35
jacooper wrote: post #13

The entire problem lies with the twisted motives of social media. They don't want to make you happy or feel good, they want money, at all costs which results in you being angry and toxic. I agree with this article in general, and think that its worth it to spend time arguing with people you care about rather some rando on twitter. community run communities will probably have a resurge, the problem is the tech barrier…

Adding to this, having run small communities I can see platforms like Mastodon growing into Twitter albeit with a different twist of behavior but eventually becoming equally toxic, just a different flavor of toxic. I believe one of the root causes is that the internet basically connected billions of people from many different cultures into one big pool without any arbiter mechanisms which is bound to get ugly fast. I…

You can already see that. If you think Twitter moderation is arbitrary or weird, clearly you haven't seen some of the popular Mastodon servers. Meet the new boss same as the old boss.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#78

Post by ilyt »

LinuxBender wrote: post #37
Puts wrote: post #25

Now the article was only talking about twitter and social media, but I can't help react on the title since there really is no evidence at all of internet wanting to be fragmented. In fact it's just the opposite. - Not even the most hardcore people are using IRC anymore - All web hosting is now in the cloud - There's basically only two rendering engines left, of which one is at the moment extremely marginalized - GIT…

I rarely use IRC any more and I used to run some small IRC servers. Most moved to Discord but I refuse to use such platforms for their abuse of retaining both text and voice transcription chat history forever. Discord voice transcription can run silently in any public or private channel and nobody can prove otherwise. This was not impossible on IRC but far less likely. Public channels were recorded with publicly visi…

Uh, IRC didn't even had encryption and anyone in IRC chat can still record everything just fine. That's so weird thing to have issue with.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#79

Post by Kenji »

causality0 wrote: post #44

Being the same person online as offline destroyed everything great about the internet. When you were an asshole you got banned from the website, and then you had to trim some of your sharp edges off so you didn't get banned from the next one. These days being an asshole results in either you aurrou ding yourself entirely with other assholes or getting your real life ruined by losing your job or even being arrested in…

Very true.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#80

Post by poszlem »

Puts wrote: post #25

Now the article was only talking about twitter and social media, but I can't help react on the title since there really is no evidence at all of internet wanting to be fragmented. In fact it's just the opposite. - Not even the most hardcore people are using IRC anymore - All web hosting is now in the cloud - There's basically only two rendering engines left, of which one is at the moment extremely marginalized - GIT…

I think the reason why you disagree is because you mean a different thing by "the internet".

"The internet" - the corporate internet. "The internet" - normal people on the internet. "The internet" - etc.

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