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The internet wants to be fragmented

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Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#161

Post by TobyTheDog123 »

borski wrote: post #128
TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all false equivalencies, as you're talking technology and implementation instead of a consumer product or idea. The author is talking about centralization of moderation and audience, not how it's hosted or how that moderation/audience is presented to the user People moved off of IRC because it was inconvenient for less-technical users, it is far easier to just download an app. That doesn't mean they want th…

I agree, but I’d also argue discord or Slack does this, in the same way that IRC did; you essentially spin up separate servers and thus separate communities. Sure, it’s still hosted by a central entity, but the moderation and discourse is all yours to manage.

I have no idea how I blanked on Discord. To me Slack still screams "business tool" and "only business tool," but you're very much right regardless.

There's also Reddit (to an extent)

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#162

Post by TchoBeer »

Nextgrid wrote: post #113
dayvid wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem is that you can make money from the internet. The internet was more about self-expression and fun. Then people realized they can sell things or themselves (being a "content-creator", "thought-leader", etc.). As a result the most active people are tailoring their actions towards increasing engagement, getting you to buy something, getting you to think a certain way, etc. and we have a divide betwee…

I would say the biggest problem is advertising. It would be much less harmful if commercial content was upfront about asking for your wallet, and the transaction ended there (the publisher's incentives are directly aligned with the end-customer's). Instead, we have stuff that's technically "free" but actually comes with plenty of strings attached such as mismatched incentives - the content is only there as bait and t…

I've said this for so long. The horrible mismatched incentives that ad money has wrought is disasterous.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#163

Post by zackmorris »

dayvid wrote: post #70
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 that you can make money from the internet. The internet was more about self-expression and fun. Then people realized they can sell things or themselves (being a "content-creator", "thought-leader", etc.). As a result the most active people are tailoring their actions towards increasing engagement, getting you to buy something, getting you to think a certain way, etc. and we have a divide betwee…

To expand on Parkinson's Law: capitalism grows to fill the space allotted to it.

The 90s internet was great because it was built by academia. Post Dot Bomb, the internet got saturated by big business. Everything evolves so quickly on the web that we're already finding ourselves living under the eventualities of late-stage capitalism and ultimate wealth inequality (slavery).

I've come to view tech as an ever-tightening noose that solves every problem except how to get out of it. Loosely that means that whatever goal each of us has for going into tech will be the one that gets us in the end. We get older, conditions change and we find ourselves becoming the villain of our own story. Even if we succeed, we fail.

Stepping outside of that, I've decided to embrace magical thinking in my own life. I believe that ultimately tech will bring magic back into the world and we'll find ourselves confronting the ethical dilemmas of fairy tails. In the New Age, when everyone has the ability to change the world for better or worse, wisdom becomes more important than knowledge.

The status quo is threatened by that, so there's already a backlash against stuff like wokeism. Socialism becomes the bogeyman to keep us distracted so we don't turn our attention away from systems of control in general. And so on.

How to protect ourselves from that? I think it's helpful to meditate on what the opposite of all this might look like. What's the opposite of profit? Or power? Softer questions might be: what's our individual definition of success? Why are we doing this?

Now to get back to watching superhero movies on New Year's Day..

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#164

Post by jacooper »

fleddr wrote: post #147
LinuxBender wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think Mastodon has the tendency to grow into the opposite extreme of toxicity: fragility. People as well as instances are very generously blocked, leading to perfectly peaceful bubbles. Which are not that great. There's almost perfect ideological agreement...but not really. A handful of people dominate conversation by posting frequently whilst the rest barely engages and/or is afraid to speak their mind. As an exam…

But is that limited to just Mastodon?

That happens on other social media to avoid getting banned.

One example is anything showing disagreement with LGBTQ movement from the east, no matter how much you think that is a done thing, it definitely not, especially there.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#165

Post by TEP_Kim_Il_Sung »

pixl97 wrote: post #149
culi wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imo there's dimensions to which different systems let users express themselves. 1. The like button (e.g. Twitter) [1 dimension, discrete] 2. Clapping (e.g. Medium) [1 dimension, (kinda-)cotinuous] 2. Upvote/downvote (e.g. Reddit) [1 dimension, 2 directions, discrete] 3. Preset reactions (e.g. iMessage) [multiple dimensions, discrete] 4. Any emoji reaction (e.g. Slack) [(kinda-)infinite dimensions, discrete] 5. User-d…

I've always wondered why someone hasn't created what I call the 'orange slice' expression button. Much like cutting an orange in half it gives a preset amount of positive and negative values. Sort of a play off the meta moderation that Slashdot did. For positive values it you could have something like [I believe this is truthful], [I like this content],[Funny],[Positive message] and for negative values [I believe thi…

That's what trive.news was about. Turns out crowd sourcing truth gives a weighted average towards accuracy. Something tells me businesses relying on getting "experts" to sell you on things, would want to keep general public opinion out of the equation.

http://www.trive.news/Whitepaper.0.2.6x.pdf

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#166

Post by adesanmi »

lapcat wrote: post #9

I found myself agreeing with every word of this article. The penultimate paragraph summarizes it well: > People call Twitter an indispensable public space because it’s the “town square”, but in the real world there isn’t just one town square, because there isn’t just one town. There are many. And the internet works when you can exit — when you can move to a different town if you don’t like the mayor or the local cult…

Same here. The biggest annoyance for me was whenever people use the “town square” analogy, especially as a Brit.

The idea that my “town square” is owned by a private American company is a nightmare.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#167

Post by lapcat »

vorpalhex wrote: post #153
lapcat wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Historically, forming these tiny niche communities wasn't possible. Friends?

Your friends were your church, schoolmates, etc. You can't pick "People who are X, Y, Z and support only A and B" because the pool of potential friend candidates just wasn't large enough. On Twitter, I can choose to only be friends with conservative libertarian furries who believe in crypto. That doesn't scale to real life.

> Your friends were your church, schoolmates, etc. You can't pick "People who are X, Y, Z and support only A and B" because the pool of potential friend candidates just wasn't large enough.

It seemed to work well enough for me. One thing worth noting is that people who live in the same geographical location already tend to be somewhat like-minded, for obvious reasons. But you seem to be talking about a "perfect match", which is an impossible, unnecessary standard.

> On Twitter, I can choose to only be friends with conservative libertarian furries who believe in crypto.

You're not friends with people on Twitter. If you think you are, try leaving Twitter, and see how many of your "friends" still talk to you afterward.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#168

Post by fleddr »

LinuxBender wrote: post #158
fleddr wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Mastodon has the tendency to grow into the opposite extreme of toxicity: fragility. People as well as instances are very generously blocked, leading to perfectly peaceful bubbles. Which are not that great. There's almost perfect ideological agreement...but not really. A handful of people dominate conversation by posting frequently whilst the rest barely engages and/or is afraid to speak their mind. As an exam…

toxic positivity Positively toxic echo chambers. I think you summed it up perfectly. I've seen what you described occur in the past on other chat platforms and forums. Mostly forums. People that think alike get some high rank and access to private sub-forums and people that have thoughts not aligned with the tribe start to think the forum is no longer being used. Not sure how that would translate into the Mastodon pl…

I think today it translates into every platform due to the highly polarized political landscape. This sorts people into just 2 buckets, after which each bucket is dominated by radicals or semi-radicals.

That's why I dislike the term "bubble", because it fails to describe the inner working of the bubble. It suggests that it is uniform and consensus-based, whilst instead they are ran by an autocratic elite that "softly" silence dissent. By making dissent costly.

The state of online conversation: 50% of the population is evil. Luckily I'm in the good 50%, which is full of terrible ideas but I can't afford to challenge them.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#169

Post by yawnxyz »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #146
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…

What about upvoting and downvoting in hn? Do you find that to be positive? Personally, I find I have to work to not write striking statements because I know they give me chance of getting a ton of upvotes. If I’m tired, the temptation is harder to resist

On Reddit, sometimes it's fun to sort by "most controversial", e.g. posts with most upvotes AND downvotes. That's where some of the most "edgy takes" lie. I kind of wish you could do that here, too

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#170

Post by greggman3 »

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…

It's not the "like" button. It's the "likes" number. Hide the number and the like button is signal to the system. So "likes" and it's a signal to the poster. That IMO is the problem, not the button itself, the "score" you see visually.

I've hidden the score here on HN for myself and on StackOverflow. Two places where score has a negative effect on myself.

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