Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#121

Post by rdl » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

Rather than censorship, just give readers better filtering tools. This was largely solved on USENET years ago, has been largely solved in email (to a great degree) -- it's just Twitter, FB, etc. which seem to have a hard time solving it.

If you made certain sets of filters the default, or available in groups, and did filtering based on your best beliefs about the desires of readers (based on keywords, senders, and maybe other characteristics of the conversation), it would go a long way.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#122

Post by Analemma_ » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:25 PM UTC

antishatter wrote: post #99

_m8fo wrote: post #46

So we've tried: - Real identities (Facebook comments) - Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.) - Strong moderation (Reddit, HN) They all result in toxic comments, trolling, an echo chamber,or worse, a complete lack of participation. There's no real solution to this problem. However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation…

I believe the somethingawful forums involve a cost to participate, something like a one time $10 fee that was designed to remove low content or negative content participators. Might be an interesting case study of your hypothesis.

Unfortunately, while this works, it does not align with the goals of the companies running these forums-- to get as big as possible, to get the biggest valuation and/or slice of advertising dollars as they can. Even small monetary barriers to entry decrease participation substantially, and that's just not acceptable.

This is why I'm quite pessimistic about the current situation: the current in-vogue business model of surveillance/advertising capitalism demands massive size beyond what can be moderated, and thus makes this problem inevitable. And it only gets worse when the most toxic users are the most profitable, viz. Twitter's refusal to ban Donald, even though by any reasonable interpretation of their TOS, he breaks it every other day.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#123

Post by yammajr » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:25 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #61

digitalantfarm wrote: post #25

Reddit used to be a place where you could post links to anything on the internet (kind of like this place) and comment on it (without signing up with your email). Now it's place more like Facebook with algorithms based on your personal taste, geolocation, forced email, shadow banning, banning of politically incorrect subreddits, endless political posts and "Futurology" and "Uplifting" news articles. Free speech on re…

There's no forced email for Reddit accounts. New accounts are midly painful with some delays in posting built in.

I made a new account about a week or so ago. Their new user form looks very much like you need an email to create an account, but you can just press continue without adding one, despite there being no indication of that. If I hadn't already known I didn't need an email, I would have either given them one or left the site and not returned, depending on how I felt giving them my email address.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#124

Post by SimbaOnSteroids » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:25 PM UTC

castis wrote: post #15

As long as there are no consequences to being a dick to people over the internet, "toxic internet" is here to stay.

What if a sampling of your comments floated around you in AR. Dystopian? Probably, but it would force you to face consequences.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#125

Post by jimhefferon » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:25 PM UTC

randyrand wrote: post #80

Does detoxify mean getting rid of mean speech?

A few minutes reading /r/The_Donald shows that there is a vast difference between saying "that guy on the internet hurt my feelings" and "this is a threat to civil society."

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#126

Post by crankylinuxuser » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:25 PM UTC

overcast wrote: post #2

The only way to detoxify the internet, is to get rid of the "social" aspect. Starting with gasp comments. My online experience has been that much better, since adding comment blockers to my browser.

I agree, on areas of general topics (news, current events, et cetera), the comments are cancer. As more comments are posted, racism/sexism/ageism/horribleness approaches 1.

The comment section changes a lot if you stick with tech sites and peoples' blogs, or project sites like github/gitlab/hackaday.io . In those cases, people are 99% of the time pretty decent. They may demand a feature on a FLOSS git* page, but aside of entitlement attitudes, it's relatively non-poisonous.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#127

Post by ronzensci » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:26 PM UTC

_m8fo wrote: post #46

So we've tried: - Real identities (Facebook comments) - Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.) - Strong moderation (Reddit, HN) They all result in toxic comments, trolling, an echo chamber,or worse, a complete lack of participation. There's no real solution to this problem. However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation…

There is a fundamental approach that has not been tried as yet

- Incentives

The real-world has that figured out long ago. If you find something that is truly useful & timely, you would be willing to pay real money for it.

Google Answers (answers.google.com) had tried an approach wherein a price can be put on a question and any legit reply which answers that q can claim it. 'Reputation' definitely still plays a role in this, but the system is flexible enough to allow a new comer to attempt answering a question & stake a claim to the funds.

The real-world has many of these aspects sorted out, like calling a plumber or a carpenter from your neighborhood to get your work done. The problem is we have embarked on creating a 'global' network (aka FB) without first having adequately understood how to create strong family & community network, before we go global with our social networking..

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#128

Post by Pxtl » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:26 PM UTC

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #60

_m8fo wrote: post #46

So we've tried: - Real identities (Facebook comments) - Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.) - Strong moderation (Reddit, HN) They all result in toxic comments, trolling, an echo chamber,or worse, a complete lack of participation. There's no real solution to this problem. However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation…

I think your suggestion would lead to an echo chamber. Take a look at metafilter and how samey they've gotten. One thing to remember is that even small barriers implicity give mods much more power.

An echo chamber is the only real option. Computers are unaware of concepts of good or evil, so at best a moderation algorithm can do is enforce a certain viewpoint. The question is what viewpoint? The viewpoint of the consensus of users, or the viewpoint of the community leadership?

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#129

Post by tonyedgecombe » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:26 PM UTC

panarky wrote: post #37

> Struggle to Detoxify the Internet The internet isn't toxic. It's the people who are toxic. These people are just as noxious in real life even if some of them hide it when their identities are known. Can anything be done to detoxify the people, or do we just treat them like spam and filter them out? And what happens next when millions of rabid voices are suppressed? The toxic people don't cease to exist, we just won…

These people are just as noxious in real life even if some of them hide it when their identities are known.

I suspect most of them are rather pathetic in real life.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#130

Post by cpncrunch » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:27 PM UTC

_m8fo wrote: post #46

So we've tried: - Real identities (Facebook comments) - Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.) - Strong moderation (Reddit, HN) They all result in toxic comments, trolling, an echo chamber,or worse, a complete lack of participation. There's no real solution to this problem. However, if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling at the cost of less participation…

HN generally works very well. The echo chamber problem is due to allowing downvotes IMO. In my experience that simply leads to minority viewpoints being downvoted. Instead, downvotes should be removed, and people should be allowed to flag abusive comments.