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Don't let social media think for you

disgustinglyoptimistic.com

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Re: Don't let social media think for you

#101

Post by beaconstudios »

qsort wrote: post #81
throwkeep wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is a particularly well refined mob machine. No room for nuance, distribution at the speed of light directly into your feed and/or Trending, participants immediately rewarded for generating and spreading outrage. I get that a lot of this was unintentional, but the dynamic has now been known for a decade and has only gotten worse. Why has Twitter the company and its employees not taken action to deal with this?…

> Why isn't the mob a top priority? Part of that is the incentives going in the opposite direction, as other commenters have noted. Even assuming they are in good faith, though, I believe it is an extremely difficult problem. Building and maintaining large scale communities is next to impossible, you can't just turn off a switch and make the mob go away, a mob is, by definition, out of control. Historically, we have…

Large-scale community is an oxymoron, and I think the sooner we realise that the better.

Communities are built on trust and relationships, what happens at social platforms is that people with "large communities" are just creating followings the same way that celebrities always have, which are a weird modern corruption of the idea of a community (or if you want the academic term for it, a parasocial relationship).

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#102

Post by aantix »

I'm always perplexed at how engineers fall into these tribal traps. People that deal with complex nuance all day fully denouncing any idea from specific people.

E.g. I've even seen things like "if you follow Uncle Bob Martin I'm unfollowing you".

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#103

Post by BeFlatXIII »

cableshaft wrote: post #100
SamBam wrote: post #42

The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size. It's the size that makes the mob, and everyone who has ever considered chiming in to add their voice why so-and-so was bad should stop to think about whether the world really needs that additional voice. Each individual voice may be perfectly right . So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did th…

Also, if you end up having to announce your take on every "bad" thing that happens, your feed becomes nothing but commentary on the bad takes, almost always identical to everyone else, and you dillute or lose what makes you interesting in the process. I've seen this in my own feed. Any time some "bad" person is exposed, I'm almost guaranteed to scroll past 30 almost identical takes on it by the same 30 people on my f…

That’s why I quit Twitter. I use to have four topic-specific accounts. However, it eventually ended up that I was seeing the same outrage du jour on all four and that’s when it was time for me to leave.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#104

Post by bckr »

qsort wrote: post #81
throwkeep wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is a particularly well refined mob machine. No room for nuance, distribution at the speed of light directly into your feed and/or Trending, participants immediately rewarded for generating and spreading outrage. I get that a lot of this was unintentional, but the dynamic has now been known for a decade and has only gotten worse. Why has Twitter the company and its employees not taken action to deal with this?…

> Why isn't the mob a top priority? Part of that is the incentives going in the opposite direction, as other commenters have noted. Even assuming they are in good faith, though, I believe it is an extremely difficult problem. Building and maintaining large scale communities is next to impossible, you can't just turn off a switch and make the mob go away, a mob is, by definition, out of control. Historically, we have…

> This is, by and large, a good thing.

I don't agree that social media (qua social networks) has moved us in the right direction.

Web forums and blogs were better.

I don't think we need to find the missing piece. I think we need to remove the unnecessary, super profitable poison.

Something like private, self hosted forums with universal log in, but no cross-contamination of "likes" and comments, and no algorithmic attention management.

I think I need to write my senators.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#105

Post by Syonyk »

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #83
Syonyk wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why has Twitter the company and its employees not taken action to deal with this? Because it's not their job to moderate this stuff. Angry, pissed off, outraged users are, from the perspective of social media companies, the best users. They refresh constantly (so more ad views), they come back constantly, and if they've gone away for too long, you can just figure out what's likely to piss them off the most, send th…

> it's Vegas in your pocket, without any of the regulations and rules Vegas casinos have to abide by > I'm in favor of some regulation on this sort of stuff You really nailed the problem but I am not so sure about your solution. The gambling industry's regulations do not do very much to reduce the volume of lives ruined by the gambling industry. We've been gambling since the paleolithic period, and like other vices,…

> The gambling industry's regulations do not do very much to reduce the volume of lives ruined by the gambling industry.

No, but if I walk into a casino, there's at least some chance I can come out with more money than I went in with.

Consider a slot machine app. Not only do you have no idea what the payout is, you're guaranteed to lose money if you pay for any coins in that game, which I assure you, people do. For reasons I don't understand, but I've seen it happen.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#106

Post by cvwright »

slightwinder wrote: post #87
throwkeep wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is a particularly well refined mob machine. No room for nuance, distribution at the speed of light directly into your feed and/or Trending, participants immediately rewarded for generating and spreading outrage. I get that a lot of this was unintentional, but the dynamic has now been known for a decade and has only gotten worse. Why has Twitter the company and its employees not taken action to deal with this?…

> Why has Twitter the company and its employees not taken action to deal with this? They did. They tried many things, still do. But it's hard to fix without wasting the whole platform and becoming another reddit. What makes Twitter great is also what makes it aweful.

Just goes to show how the fundamental design decisions guide how the system as a whole will behave. Short messages and no coherent threading makes for a perfect breeding ground for snark and hot takes. It's hard to say something thoughtful in 280 characters, but it's easy to say something nasty.

You can spend tons of money on trust & safety, tweaks to the UI, whatever. But a bad system design is still a bad system design.

It's kind of like trying to make an old C codebase secure by throwing in lots of calls to strlen() and changing some sprintf()'s to snprintf(). It may help a little, but it's not enough to turn the ship.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#107

Post by semitones »

coldtea wrote: post #92

It's not that the people who form a twitter mob don't think or "let twitter think for them". It's that they actively enjoy hurting someone as a mob. They get a kick out of it, and it's not discouraged (as would be actually forming a mob out in the streets be). If anything, it's encouraging, and gives them not just the joy of kicking someone who is down, but also "good person" credits (because the one getting kicked i…

I was thinking something similar. If a person has the inclination to jump on the bandwagon for any given situation, they are probably actively getting something out of it.

I have a theory that it could have something to do with the haves and the have nots. Whenever some relatively public figure (by default, without critical thinking, is usually labeled as a "have"), slips up in some way, no matter how small, the have nots jump on the opportunity to join a crusade of righteousness where they strike down the goliath for abusing their unfairly acquired power.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#108

Post by Andrex »

mavsman wrote: post #85
elliekelly wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Each individual voice may be perfectly right. So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did they really do such wrong that the 10,000th voice is needed? This is how I felt yesterday reading the repl.it thread.

If you don't feel like it will perpetuate it, what thread are you talking about?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#109

Post by kache_ »

aantix wrote: post #102

I'm always perplexed at how engineers fall into these tribal traps. People that deal with complex nuance all day fully denouncing any idea from specific people. E.g. I've even seen things like "if you follow Uncle Bob Martin I'm unfollowing you".

The hubris on hackernews is appalling. Being an "engineer" doesn't make you immune to what affects all human beings.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#110

Post by ph2082 »

SamBam wrote: post #42

The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size. It's the size that makes the mob, and everyone who has ever considered chiming in to add their voice why so-and-so was bad should stop to think about whether the world really needs that additional voice. Each individual voice may be perfectly right . So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did th…

Most of trends have less than 10k comments/likes/.... Etc. That means only 0.00014 percent people of the planet. Rest don't know or don't care. That realisation made me not to bother about latest outrage.

Whole Twitter experience become so much better when you only keep to people you like. Don't think twice to unfollow someone.

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