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Don't let social media think for you

disgustinglyoptimistic.com

141–150 of 266 posts

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#141
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…

> The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size.

There can be no mob without twitter's involvement.

There are always two parts to social media; social media the people at scale and social media the recommendation engine with impulse driven features that actively rank orders and promotes what content meets what eyes. By definition internet brings the scale, i.e. the size. But size in itself does not create a mob. You could walk around in a crowded square and mumble all the controversial things to yourself; people will at most give a bad stare, but mostly ignore you, a mob will not form after you.

It would take a shit-stirrer to actively salience the thing you said to the people in that crowd who would be most motivated to come after you.

Twitter et al are the shit-stirrers that makes money every time they can make a person engage with a content, regardless of the thoughtfulness or the sentiment of the engagement.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#142
post #35
post #3

Yes I quit social media a couple of years ago and agree with pretty much everything the author says. Social media environments encourage incendiary discussion because it fuels upvotes and general attention. Most people won't take the time to consider a more valid grey opinion because they've jumped to a conclusion and are busy attacking someone, or because it won't get as much attention. The first thing that came bac…

I found facebook became more valuable to me once I decided I would only post about things I want my friends to know. That is pictures of my kid's new bike, or a video of the baby babbling. Facebook does a very good job of ensuring my close friends and family keep up with the cute little things in life. I'm still working on getting out of all the groups that waste space. Sadly many useful things have moved to facebook…

I wish there was a way to turn off "external content", and only view content created by your friends. If my friend has an opinion about something (even if political, or a social issue), and they post it, I'm interested in reading. But I don't care if they are just posting a link to content that some stranger wrote, or a meme that someone else is spreading. It seems like social media has intentionally blurred the lines between "posting your content" vs "spreading someone else's content".

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#143
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…

The twitter mob can come for you too. If you're mis-identified and doxxed then your life can be in danger. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/what-its-like-to-get... And the consequences for the accuser are nothing.

> And the consequences for the accuser are nothing.

That's a great point. Accusers are not only incentivized to whip up a mob, but have virtually no downside. No skin in the game if they're wrong. That asymmetry needs to be resolved somehow.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#144

Live by the sword die by the sword. The author in question wanted to share and cash in on her story by selling it to the masses, when someone among the masses reacted with very mild criticism to her work she antagonized them publicly and the masses didn't like that. Oh well, be nice online if you want to harvest the denizens of the internet to make a living.

Well, there's an old saying: "there's no such thing a bad publicity". Every time you enrage one group on Twitter, you potentially engage another.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#145
post #49

If you click on toxic content, algorithm is going to feed it to you. Twitter is perfectly fine if you unfollow and block toxic influencers. There is propably even keyword based filtering. For news you can watch international news stations from India. Very realistic and refreshing.

> Twitter is perfectly fine if you unfollow and block toxic influencers. Not my experience tbh. I quit Twitter after having tried to follow only accounts that interested me. But once Twitter starts to be unable to create a sufficiently dense "infinite feed", its algorithm starts to artificially fill your feed and shows you the likes and answers (and not only tweets & RTs) of the people you follow or the hottest tweet…

I use Tweak New Twitter, which removes 'trending', reblogs, etc. from my feed.

https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter/

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 de…

Facebook doesn't have the same 280 character limit, yet it suffers from similar problems.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#147
post #74

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?…

What could be changed about twitter to make this better? The entire design feeds right into this. I've heard it said that it was intended to be a place for good discussion, but I really don't believe that. Good discussion isn't had 140 characters at a time. The whole point of the site is to give everyone a megaphone.

When everyone has a megaphone you only hear the people who are screaming next to you.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#148
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really only the job of government to make ethical decisions? Surely companies and employees can and should try to be ethical. Just because there is profit involved doesn't mean that we should throw out our humanity.

The point is, there are a lot of conflicting ways to be 'ethical'. It's not like we have a universal loss function we should minimize. Any moral dilemma slightly more complicated than 'is killing wrong' is a tradeoff, and sometimes you can't blame people if they prefer a point on the curve different from the point on the curve you like. Maybe in this case they are just wrong -- I have no sympathy for Twitter either.…

> Any moral dilemma slightly more complicated than 'is killing wrong' is a tradeoff

Even killing is a trade off. Every country has a military of some sort. Every village has some form of police that can kill (some are much more likely to kill than others, but eventually all police forces can bring on death if the situation is bad enough). There have been cannibal societies in history (not very common from what I can tell, but they did exist) that would give a different answer as to what killing is moral than most of us.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Lone Star beer used to have images under their bottle caps as puns[1]. One of them used an image of a noose as part of the puzzle, which was completely unrelated to race, or death - it was simply using the word as a similar word to "news".

Someone went apeshit on Twitter[2], and now all the puns are gone while Lone Star reviews them for sensitivity.

I'm politically liberal, and I'm fucking ashamed of the fact that this kind of stupid behavior is associated with liberal politics.

1. https://lonestarbottlecaps.com

2. https://www.mysanantonio.com/food/bars-drinks/article/what-h...

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#150
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…

It's not necessarily the "have nots" who jump on the bandwagon. Many of these mob inciters are clearly middle class or upper middle class. I've even seen news anchors participate, people who earn several hundreds of thousands a year. In some cases, it may have to do with crab mentality. Wanting to pull someone down who has more than them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

However, if you look at the way James Damore was taken down, or that woman who made a stupid joke at the airport, these people weren't particularly rich compared to their peers. I think that had more to do with wanting to silence dissenting voices and kick someone while they're down, never giving them an opportunity to defend themselves or to have an open discussion.

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