Fascinating reading the comments on Reddit and here. "Diff'rent strokes" = understatement of the century to date.
Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
151–160 of 332 posts
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#152Yes. Most of the content you watch on TV was written and acted by outliers. The products you use and consume were crafted, marketed and even distributed by outliers. First, when zoomed out, outliers in all possible tasks become more common — internet commenting is just a subset for silly folks like me. Secondly, the emergent human social fabric is built to recognize and amplify outspoken and / or talented outliers, v…
I still think it's surprising that there are so many lurkers who literally never engage in the discussion, considering the barriers to do so are so low.
Same with my blog: there are perhaps 40 people who actually comment vs thousands whose presence is subliminal.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still think it's surprising that there are so many lurkers who literally never engage in the discussion, considering the barriers to do so are so low.
I think it's mostly a psychological barrier in most respects. There's also no necessity to comment - lurking, despite the quite awful name we've given the behaviour, is a perfectly normal thing to do. Plenty of people read books who don't write them, etc. I'd also presume (and it is a presumption!) that people who are commenting on one platform will likely also to be commenting on another. As in, I would presume they…
Related: "The best response is no response."—Dr. Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics"
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#154Looking at it from a different perspective: creating content requires lot of work, while consuming content requires little to no effort. Hence, looking from this perspective, it's natural that the majority of us are content consumers and not content producers.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The cost function to repeat a message drops precipitously every time it’s repeated (influences status quo). I'm not trying to be a contrarian on this point but some social forums (e.g.: reddit, where this was linked from) end-up being sgemented into their own forms of echo-chambers, where any dissenting outliers - however valid - are voted into oblivion, simply because it doesn't agree with "muh viewpoint". IMHO, th…
Given your point about the donald, you'll despair at https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/117289/86725 . Check out the history and the comments-moved-to-chat. Answerer suggests creating lots of social media accounts as a way to drive bad search results about you off the first page of Google, and lists a bunch of possible sites to sign up to, including Gab. The mention of Gab gets censored by a moderator, but not befo…
I'd encourage anyone convinced by this comment to do some research into the antisemitic and white supremacist comments which representatives of Gab have openly, publicly made.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#156Reddit is an echo chamber. Almost nobody contributes to the conversation, but they sure are quick to exercise insecurity for very minor things. I deleted my account there last year and life has improved as a result.
I agree. It's my opinion its become toxic over the past few years. Generally speaking I prefer unmoderated discussion forums. I rather choose what to read instead of being "protected".
You might enjoy Hubski.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#157Most of the comments here are either elaborating on the OP, or justify lurking. I am a mostly-lurker myself, but I felt the need to comment here, since I was hoping to see the discussion go into a different direction.
The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their image. They might have an interesting angle on the story, or they might just be saying trivial things with beautiful prose. In any case, there is a lack of diversity in general -- discussions are driven by the worldview of a few.
That would be an argument for lurkers to make an effort, even if, like this comment, it's just a barely-formed idea.
Edit: "molding the discussion" -> "molding every discussion"
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well all the info I have about it comes from a single source published by the developers of the format but apparently just one reference isn't good enough.
That source (published by the developers) is a primary source. Encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, are tetriary sources that are based on secondary sources and not directly on primary sources. In other words, unless there are reliable secondary sources to base the article on, it is considered original research and is not a good fit for Wikipedia. I guess part of the reason that new contributors feel bad is confusion…
It's not just goals and nature. It's rules that can be pretty silly and unhelpful when they're taken to extremes rather than applied sensibly. In this case you have documentation that can't be referenced in a Wikipedia article. Yet, if someone wrote a blog post that liberally quoted that documentation, that would probably be an acceptable source.
The basic ideas of not doing original research or relying on primary sources are fine. But writing just about any article requires synthesizing multiple sources to some degree. Rules are one thing. Saying that the documentation is not a suitable source for information about a file format is something else.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#159Yes. Most of the content you watch on TV was written and acted by outliers. The products you use and consume were crafted, marketed and even distributed by outliers. First, when zoomed out, outliers in all possible tasks become more common — internet commenting is just a subset for silly folks like me. Secondly, the emergent human social fabric is built to recognize and amplify outspoken and / or talented outliers, v…
> First, when zoomed out, outliers in all possible tasks become more common
Sure, but we should consider which outliers most internet discussions end up encouraging. They're going to encourage people with fewer family/community/social/hobby/work obligations, because the more of those obligations one has the less time one has for online discussions. It's going to encourage people who spend less time writing their comments, because if you're spending 15-45 minutes making sure your comment is of high enough quality you're simply not going to be able to make many comments. If you spend a few seconds/a few minutes writing one, you can make a lot. It's going to encourage comments when people are outside of their own areas of expertise or when they don't have much to say (because you're not going to be seeing all the people who refrained from commenting).
You mentioned voting, but the same issue applies. Someone who has fewer time obligations is going to end up upvoting/downvoting a lot more comments than someone with an very active offline life. Someone who votes before reading an entire comment is going to be able to make a lot more votes than someone who does. Someone who upvotes/downvotes everything because of how they feel is going to be giving out more votes than someone who wants to reserve those for truly bad/truly good comments. Someone who checks whether or not a comment is true is going to have less time to vote than someone who doesn't. Someone who has time to refresh a page every 10 minutes throughout the day is going to be voting earlier, affecting what comments/posts even get seen by less active user (people with other things to do miss a post because really active users downvoted it off the front page within 30 minutes).
A lot of people seem to be unaware that this is an issue, and think the internet is representative of society at large. But commenting and voting as much as you want encourages certain kinds of content from certain kinds of people (a small subsection of people[1]), and discourages content from others.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#160Most of the comments here are either elaborating on the OP, or justify lurking. I am a mostly-lurker myself, but I felt the need to comment here, since I was hoping to see the discussion go into a different direction. The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their…
this argument does resonate.
i started getting downvoted a lot. since then, i've become much more of a lurker and have remained logged-out.
to me it's obvious, and necessarily the case, that the conversation happening is not representative of my views because i'm not sharing them. it's not worth it to me to contribute to the conversation, and get embroiled in an accidental dispute.
my views are my own, and i don't need to spend a lot of time sharing them at other people in order to live a satisfied life.
the internet, like the real world before it, is not my own space... and to the extent that i exist in it, i'm happier going my own way and not encountering lame-o jerks.