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

The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 142 posts

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#121

Post by tomatotomato37 »

pjc50 wrote: post #85
sonnyblarney wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What is it about tweets that would mean they're not legitimate expressions of opinion? " It's not about the legitimacy of the tweet or even factualness. When journalists want to create a fake narrative, what they do is say "people are saying this" and then show a few tweets to support them. Even though almost nobody really may be thinking in those term. For example, there's a lot of social justice clamour over thing…

The old version of this is "vox pops", where a TV company goes out and interviews random people in the street. Both are vulnerable to cherrypicking the people that say what you'd prefer them to say.

At least with picking randos off the street you had to both physically make an effort to be there and could also only sample a limited amount of random population on a given day. With social media you have the ability to actively target super-minority opinions without getting up from your desk, which I believe has caused detrimental effects

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#122

Post by watwut »

eksemplar wrote: post #120
watwut wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not just that. Listen what exactly he wrote: "If you want to say that you think something is a bad idea, you sugarcoat it to hell and back, focusing first on complimenting your counterpart on where you think they are successful." Practically, lets say you are someone badly affected by that policy and attempt to participate. Your attempt to accurately describe how exactly it affects you, will make you seen as ru…

Protesting and complaining isn’t ideal responses in democracy where almost every decision is a compromise. Especially not if you are reactive rather than proactive. If you want real change, then you can’t just complain for a few days after something shitty happens. You gotta get out there and work for change. The school is a good example. If our parents protested instead of using the system to open private schools th…

Majority of protests are organized by long time activists and are rarely first step. It is great when discussion works and when compromise is possible. It is not easy to protest nor to get enough people in place. What you do what discussion does not work and when people who hold power are not willing to listen or compromise?

Situation you described had elite playing show in public and saying and doing something different in private where it matters. They demand to hear nice sugarcoated version of reality where their policies are praised and not criticized.

Had you described situation where everyone listens and people can criticize elite, then I would agree that cal discussion is way to go.

Also, this sounds like a situation with low conflict and risks. Private school wont be paid by parents money, their expenses can go slightly bit up but not much more. That is entirely different then closing public school in area where people cant affort private one and state wont pay.

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#123

Post by dnate »

intended wrote: post #60
gmueckl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you act instead? In the eyes of a someone with a sufficiently incompatible position you are a loonie who gets ignired after the dirst dissenting statement with a simple mouse click, never to be seen or heard from again on that platform. This is just so much easier than in the real world.

theres about 3 options. 1) Exit social media and save yourself. This is the best option 2) With unending patience, choose an individual and just interact with them at a human level till both sides achieve understanding ( no matter how distasteful or difficult the process ). This does not scale 3) Begin to invest in PR, think tanks, media firms, groups and so on to craft a message to sway large groups of people at one…

> this does not scale

If everyone did it, it would "scale" pretty well.

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#124

Post by intended »

dnate wrote: post #123
intended wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

theres about 3 options. 1) Exit social media and save yourself. This is the best option 2) With unending patience, choose an individual and just interact with them at a human level till both sides achieve understanding ( no matter how distasteful or difficult the process ). This does not scale 3) Begin to invest in PR, think tanks, media firms, groups and so on to craft a message to sway large groups of people at one…

> this does not scale If everyone did it, it would "scale" pretty well.

This is the true of all problems with humanity.

>think before sharing

>recycle

>wear seat belts

>be considerate

>stretch

>drink water regularly

>brush regularly

None of this scales, and none of it will ever scale, because humanity is designed to not follow that.

Human beings are an aggregate of all sorts of behavior, ranging from complimentary to those in active pursuit of mutual annihilation.

Any system/solution which expects uniformity in behavior or choice, is dead on arrival.

Unfortunately that leaves solutions that target biology and neural processing/heuristics.

Our businesses and science is actively about hacking brains and influencing choices.

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#125

Post by iamdave »

notacoward wrote: post #116
randomsearch wrote: post #63

“Enragement is engagement.” Social media is full of hot air and a lot of people producing nothing. Who cares. Most of the tweets on twitter are written by a tiny minority of people who like to hate or judge rather than act. Quit social media and leave that crowd to waste their time whilst you build something that actually improves the world.

Am I the only one who finds it a bit odd when people use the same media they condemn to exhibit the same behavior they condemn, and end by advocating the response they themselves have clearly not chosen? Apparently we all want those other rage-filled folks to quit social media and improve the world.

Integrity was never a prerequisite for public debate.

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#126

Post by Vrondi »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #30
onion2k wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tweets are presented all the time in articles as expression of legitimate opinion What is it about tweets that would mean they're not legitimate expressions of opinion? People write them, and publish them, and it'd be a bit unreasonable to assume they have some motive other that stating their opinion, so I don't really understand why you think tweets are something else .

"What is it about tweets that would mean they're not legitimate expressions of opinion? " It's not about the legitimacy of the tweet or even factualness. When journalists want to create a fake narrative, what they do is say "people are saying this" and then show a few tweets to support them. Even though almost nobody really may be thinking in those term. For example, there's a lot of social justice clamour over thing…

There is zero differwnce between this and the old fashioned practice of picking two or three random people on the street to ask an opinion of. Reporters have been giving "man on the street" opinions of news stories forever. The only difference is that with Twitter a reporter cam actually see a larher number of opinions easily, which are already public, without dragging a cameraman down the sidewalk.

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#127

Post by Vrondi »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #121
pjc50 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old version of this is "vox pops", where a TV company goes out and interviews random people in the street. Both are vulnerable to cherrypicking the people that say what you'd prefer them to say.

At least with picking randos off the street you had to both physically make an effort to be there and could also only sample a limited amount of random population on a given day. With social media you have the ability to actively target super-minority opinions without getting up from your desk, which I believe has caused detrimental effects

They can just as easily choose to broadcast only the person on the street who had the wildest opinion.

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#128

Post by bryanrasmussen »

oblio wrote: post #73
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hell is a place where you actually have favorite companies and engage in conversations with those companies. it is said that you should never meet your heroes (or I suppose your favorite celebs). Hell is a place where you are exposed to your heroes' casual thoughts. maybe it would just be hell for me; but a personality change so extreme that I ended up with favorite companies afterwards does sound like the plot to a…

People do want to meet their heroes, there's a reason we have terms such as "fans", "groupies", etc.

a fan does not necessarily want to meet their hero, whereas it is of course true that a groupie does. Nonetheless, the saying still exists that you should never meet your heroes, even if fans and groupies do want to do that which they should never.

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#129

Post by Dylan16807 »

watwut wrote: post #84
oblio wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Representative of what? First of all, there's many, many bots on Twitter. So the replies or the likes can be fake. Secondly, even if they're real, how do you know that they're representative of anything? Twitter is global. US politics, for example, could be followed by Afghan kids. Why would US news care about likes from people half a world away? Thirdly, there's a lot of dumb people around. There's several reasons o…

Is your idea is that only polls should be published or what exactly? They are as representative of their own opinions as any other person or activist or whoever quoted. Whether they are dumb is irrelevant. Plenty of senators are dumb too. Just because you don't like somebody does not mean he or she does not exist and that his or her opinions don't influence their votes, buying habits or otherwise have impact on world…

> One thing that curation of old media was bubble too. It made people convinced that "nobody think that" while quite a lot of people actually think that. I don't mean outright censorship here, but the range of arguments and opinions being expressed was much smaller.

You can still get that while citing twitter, but you can also get those 1:1000 opinions that were impossible to find before, and make them look unreasonably common.

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#130

Post by zhengwang »

rqs wrote: post #9

> The problem is the business model based on the manipulation of individual behavior. I don't think this is the right target to blame. The much deeper reason is people ARE stupid, while think they are clever and correct. You, me, all the others included. And at the same time, the education once applied to us, failed. Simply put, it's not a technology problem, it's a sociology problem. Around the year 2002, when I was…

I think you are massively underestimating the ability of social media to manipulate behavior. These things are built just like casinos, to occasionally give you a hit of dopamine and keep you playing until you get another.
Post reply on HN