Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Toxicity on Social Media

thenoisyroom.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 136 posts

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#121

Post by pibaker »

energy123 wrote: post #14
JimmyBuckets wrote: post #9

This seems like a great idea. Even without the linked surveys. Two questions I have: - how you does this handle the fact that a lot of accounts on social media platforms are bots that maybe controlled by a small number of people. - how do we actually get this implemented?

Regulating the algorithm is my favorite answer. Ban the recommendation engine on large social media sites. Make it a chronological feed of who you follow. Make it boring. I don't know all the details, but something like this.

How many people do you think use HN's "new" and "comments" pages? These are exactly what you asked for, a feed of the website you are currently on without the recommendation system's influence.

I personally find them nigh unusable because of the lack of any kind of filtering. I am on HN precisely because it has a somewhat working post sorting system — a recommendation engine, as an activist who wants to get HN in trouble might say.

Anyway I doubt a regulation as such would fly under the first amendment. Recommendation is expressing and opinion and expressing an opinion is speech. If I think one post is better and deserves to be on the top spot, I believe I should have a right to say it without some guy in DC telling me to shut up.

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#122

Post by pibaker »

mrmarket wrote: post #39
krapp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you strip social media down to its essential parts it's simply a multimedia communications and networking paradigm. Nothing ontologically good or evil about it. You aren't listing problems intrinsic to social media per se, so much as how people choose to use it and how specific platforms choose to operate. The latter of which is a problem when Twitter, Facebook and the like optimize for engagement through controve…

well yeah. like hacker news is a social platform with checks and balances in place to prevent mass hysteria and ragebaiting. but if we're honest about the biggest social media platforms of the day, each of the things listed are features of them. and because these tools are actually incentivized against fixing each of the problems listed, they will not fix them. so they're functionally essential parts of the social me…

HN is better than a lot of places such as most of Reddit but saying HN prevents mass hysteria is laughable. When xz was backdoored I saw people were asking open source projects to require government IDs to prevent future attacks. When LK99 came out I was told on HN that it must be real because the prediction markets say it is real. HN also loves to hate certain libraries and softwares the industry has converged into using — which is related to the point in TFA about a minority of peoples speaking over a majority.

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#123

Post by wrxd »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #34
seltzerboys wrote: post #17

This article is awesome but it doesn't acknowledge that the problem has been maliciously manufactured by social media companies. they do not have incentive to curb the distortion of extremism and therefore any attempt to do so in a grassroots way will likely not be effective. then there's the bot problem but that is probably easier to address if we actually committed to doing so.

Do we need their permission to implement it? Could be a browser extension.

It could. But most people use social media from mobile apps so it doesn’t really help in the grand scheme of things

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#124

Post by throwawayffffas »

doginasuit wrote: post #63

Platform algorithms are a big part of the problem but I think this misses another important part. I don't think it is simple as a passive silent majority being drowned out by a few loud voices. For most of its history, Reddit didn't have an algorithm that promoted stories beyond upvotes and time since posting, that might even still be the case. Despite this, we have still seen a steady trend toward extreme views on t…

It's pretty clear, the platforms feed and profit of promoting the loudest most toxic views out there. It's time to just treat these platforms as publishers instead of platforms and make them liable for their speech. Because that is what it is the automation around the method the speech is delivered is irrelevant. As is the viability of the platforms in a environment where they are responsible for what happens on them. We were fine before them, some of them are already dying.

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#125

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

swed420 wrote: post #115
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like OpenAI back when it was a nonprofit?

So figure out what they did wrong. It's going to have to be more original than the easily subverted traditional "nonprofit" model.

Maybe the right lawyer is out there for that challenge. But legal code is running on compromised infrastructure these days so I think we should plan to operate as if the law is against us.

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#126

Post by CM30 »

Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #74
doginasuit wrote: post #63

Platform algorithms are a big part of the problem but I think this misses another important part. I don't think it is simple as a passive silent majority being drowned out by a few loud voices. For most of its history, Reddit didn't have an algorithm that promoted stories beyond upvotes and time since posting, that might even still be the case. Despite this, we have still seen a steady trend toward extreme views on t…

> Despite this, we have still seen a steady trend toward extreme views on the platform. There were 3 conditions that were working and were removed very very quickly 1) it was a web application only. Which enforces an interaction that is more contientous 2) it skewed older. Compared to other sites like IFunny or Instagram the age profile was closer to 30 than 12. 3) the upvote/downvote mechanic was used to upvote rele…

It also had a design that was offputting to a lot of casual users, which probably kept out folks that didn't really have anything meaningful to say/didn't want to contribute much. Same with Hacker News: the average Joe doesn't find this site all that appealing compared to Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/whatever, so it mostly appeals to more techy, intellectual users than those platforms do.

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#127

Post by CM30 »

genghisjahn wrote: post #102
Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Despite this, we have still seen a steady trend toward extreme views on the platform. There were 3 conditions that were working and were removed very very quickly 1) it was a web application only. Which enforces an interaction that is more contientous 2) it skewed older. Compared to other sites like IFunny or Instagram the age profile was closer to 30 than 12. 3) the upvote/downvote mechanic was used to upvote rele…

Slashdot's rating system was the best I've ever seen. But I'm sure it doesn't help improve engagement, in fact the system had so many rules (for an online ratings system) that I'd guess it reduced engagement. Which might have been a feature in its glory days.

You mean how you had to give a reason for your rating rather than just choosing 'like' or 'dislike'?

Honestly, I think that more nuanced setup may help limited toxicity quite a lot. If there's no general upvote/downvote option, people might have to actually think why they like/dislike something rather than treating the system as a "I dislike this because I disagree and everyone should think the same way I do" setup.

It's why I quite like the reaction systems some forum scripts have. Yeah they're not perfect (many still have like/dislike options by default), but giving users reasons for why they upvote/downvote a post makes things a lot more meaningful. I also quite like how for some of them, agree and disagree don't actually change how the post appears or count as a rating. They just exist so people can see how many people agree or disagree with something and that's it.

Re: Toxicity on Social Media

#128

Post by array_key_first »

gosub100 wrote: post #98
okr wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, have the same sentiment towards Twitter before it has been bought by Mr. Musk. You were always close to being banned. And the American government was colluding. I don't like the tone on X now, but hey, no one silences me, and that is awesome.

A group of whistleblowers tried to come forward about twitter before Elon bought it. There were entire departments dedicated to suppressing certain ideas and trends, while amplifying others.

Realistically this is something you need to do to some degree. I mean, you probably want to silence the "kill yourself" part of twitter and want to amplify the "please don't kill yourself" part.

Regardless, I think it's fairly clear that twitter is as manufactured as it ever was.

Post reply on HN