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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

#131

Post by munificent »

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…

It's interesting that this comment and its replies use the third person "they" where many other comments in this thread use "we" (or the even more othering and accusatory "Americans").

I agree completely that one of the main drivers of mob behavior is that it feels good. However, I don't pretend to be immune to that dark corner of human psychology.

We are a tribal species. Our evolutionary history is imprinted with the reality that for thousands of years sticking with our tribe meant survival, as did warring with other tribes that wanted our resources. And even within our tribe, shunning has always been an important form of social control.

Now, I'm not committing the naturalist fallacy and saying that this behavior is right or justifiable. But the seeds of mob mentality are within us all and we won't make progress by blaming it all on others without acknowledging that they aren't so different from ourselves.

If you want this to happen less often, you need to learn how some people avoid it and teach that skill to others.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#132

Post by kortex »

Reminds me of the theory that reasoning is a mechanism for persuasion and social cohesion, not truth discovery.

The twitter mob isn't trying to anneal to some maximally accurate Goodreads rating of the book. It's "trying to do" (in the anthropogenic agency sense, like how evolution "wants") something else. Something more social and tribal in nature. But the system starts to go highly nonlinear once the crowd gets bigger than some size, and when the crowd is anonymous/pseudonymous handles, not members of your Dunbar's-number-sized-tribe, where reacting hyperbolically has real social consequences.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/people-argue-just-to...

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#133

Post by solutron »

We have a choice to make about the work we want to contribute to. Our hands, our minds. What world do you want to live in? Is your work contributing to that in a meaningful way, such that when you're gone those that come after can continue the work because it's worth doing? We only have so much time on this earth.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#134

Post by gjhh244 »

beaconstudios wrote: post #101
qsort wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

You're definitely right. If you don't personally know and somewhat trust other people in your community, chances are it's not really a community at all.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#135

Post by barbacoa »

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".

It's because tribalism exists on a different domain than logic and intelligence. It occupies the same region of your brain and satiates the same primordial needs that organized religion once did. We used to circle around our priests and their sacred idols for our sense of unity, now we circle around our politicians and made up genders.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#136

Post by aerospace_guy »

solutron wrote: post #133

We have a choice to make about the work we want to contribute to. Our hands, our minds. What world do you want to live in? Is your work contributing to that in a meaningful way, such that when you're gone those that come after can continue the work because it's worth doing? We only have so much time on this earth.

Thank you for posting this.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#137

Post by Multicomp »

beaconstudios wrote: post #116
sharken wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of Hacker News as a community, but it's still large enough that you don't really notice who is posting. What makes a difference to me are the insights you get here combined with thoughtful answers, as in rarely the lowest common denominator type of discussions. For that there are all too many forgettable social media sites.

Hacker News isn't a community in any meaningful sense. I have had interpersonal interactions with maybe half a dozen people from here, all very positive but I don't know these people like I know my neighbours or my friends or even the people who work at the local shop. Hacker News is a very large and impersonal forum. You can have interesting conversations on a forum, but the degree to which they are a community is t…

> Hacker News is a very large and impersonal forum

Agreed. Aside from recognizing some familiar usernames[1], unless you know someone from IRL or via another social media platform, the posts all 'pseudo-anonymously' blend together. The standardized comment formats, fonts, and command bar next to each comment help make it so, even if you perform per-page custom styling.

[1] my personal list OTOMH is tctpateck(sp?), dragonwriter, doreenmichelle, dang(ok thats a gimme), sklabnik

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#138

Post by unholythree »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #127
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…

HANGMAN: Now, you're wanted for murder. For the sake of my analogy, let's just assume that you did it. Now, John Ruth wants to take you back to Red Rock to stand trial for murder. And if you're found guilty, the people of Red Rock will hang you in the town square. And, as the hangman, I will perform the execution. And if all those things end up taking place, that's what civilized society calls justice. However, if th…

I’ve noticed a unfortunate conflation of word lynching with racism motivated homocide lately. Even from authorities (newspapers, lawyers, some state ACLU) that have to know they aren’t always the same.

I think the nuance of these specific injustices is important because the solutions are different. A killing could even be lawful but racist and therefor unjust, but that’s a distinct (albeit important) problem from mob violence or murder.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#139

Post by commandlinefan »

Syonyk wrote: post #72
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? 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…

> Because it's not their job to moderate this stuff

And I'm not sure it would be better if it were. I don't care if a bunch of people I've never met are talking about what a horrible person I am (well ok, I do, but that's more of a me problem than a them problem). I do care when my employer joins the mob and ignores any evidence I might present of my innocence. What we need are for the people who can mete out the consequences to start thinking longer and harder before they capitulate to the outrage mob. A little less "better him than me" and a little more "I'd hate to be treated this way myself".

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#140

Post by KittenInABox »

I feel like the described events as depicted lack nuance, which is ironic because the essay itself describes nuance. It misses, for example, that Lauren didn't react this way to one Goodreads reviewer, but several, and didn't remove the reviewers' names when blasting people to her many many thousands of followers.

I totally and entirely agree that Twitter has too much of a mob mentality from a lack of nuance but I am very against depicting this lack of nuance with a lack of nuance. The backlash against Lauren was utterly ridiculous and indefensible but that is not a reason to sensationalize and flatten facts.

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