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

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#181

Post by VLM » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:53 PM UTC

apeace wrote: post #133

A lot of commenters here are mentioning that better education could help solve this problem. I agree. What if there were a new type of "teacher" who replaced or augmented regular mods on sites like Reddit? Universities strive to hire professors who will teach students to be open-minded, consider the sources of information, and just think better in general. The prestige of each university is largely based on this fact…

"How do universities prevent the "echo chamber" effect where a few mods or a few users can take the whole conversation in one direction?"

They turbocharge group think. Probably not the best example of an open minded community.

A distant cousin of my wife went to a Seminary; within a relatively narrow range of beliefs, he claimed there was a lot more intellectual freedom than universities along the lines of teaching how to talk to devil's advocates and heresies and converting non-believers. More of a carrot and stick than university which is solely stick-style, who can most emphatically say "I can't even" and so on.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#182

Post by s73v3r_ » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:53 PM UTC

ScipioAfricanus wrote: post #42

oblio wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, trolls have not existed in the form they exist since the emergence of the internet. Self-censorship is a wonderful thing. And the way it works is: you say dumb things (especially as a kid), you get slapped by your parents/friends/people around you. By age 18 or 21, you know instinctively that what you can and cannot say around other folks. At least the vast majority of folks do. On the internet however, there's n…

Ok so some random person is saying something you find offensive or hurtful. You can block them so you don't have to see what they post. It's a decentralized solution to a decentralized problem.

I would encourage you to look up the GamerGate scandal from a few years ago, and update your knowledge on the topic of online trolling/harassment.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#183

Post by zaroth » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:53 PM UTC

s73v3r_ wrote: post #154

UrukParthian wrote: post #119

Toxic statements = statements from a different political orientation Why are people so willing to embrace Orwellian doublethink? My prediction is that such a sword will do decapitate undeserving people of all political aisles.

"Toxic statements = statements from a different political orientation" Wrong. Saying so is dangerously minimizing the problem.

Have you been following what’s going on in the UK with their anti-“hate” speech laws?

Tweet something that someone decides is offensive to them, get a visit from the police? I’d say it’s a very rational concern that these regulations would be weaponized against “wrongthink”.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#184

Post by etblg » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:53 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.

Worked, but not 100%. Many people were still willing to pay 10$ over and over and over again, for whatever reason, to reregister and keep posting (badly) just to get banned again.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#185

Post by losteric » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:53 PM UTC

shaki-dora wrote: post #134

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economic incentives are misaligned. Fake news helps with page views and other KPI. If there was an actual enforcable cost associated with misrepresenting the truth, we'd see a slowdown in fake news. The restoration of the Fairness Doctrine would also help stymie some of the biggest promulgators like Fox News * * you can search for "fox news viewers misinformed" and encounter studies and results like http://public…

The analogy of food nicely shows that some sort of race-to-the-bottom does not necessarily occur: there’s still organic or other high quality fresh food even though McDonald’s has been around for a while. Similarily, there are still excellent news sources. The Economist is often cited in these discussions, and the New York Times is also vigilant in their reporting and the correction of errors when they occur[0]. What…

I disagree with the fast food analogy because that has obvious and direct personal costs, while infotainment negatives are subtle and externalized.

Re: trust and appeal to authority; your example made me realize people are drawn to grand conspiracies because unverifiable theories are infallible... Luring in people unfamiliar with probabilistic reasoning and consilience.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#186

Post by jpindar » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:53 PM UTC

salvar wrote: post #21

ScipioAfricanus wrote: post #8

It's not that the "trolls are winning", it's that people are allowing the trolls to bother them. Trolls have always existed; it's our heightened sensitivity and inability to just shrug them off or laugh in the face of their obscenity that's letting them "win".

Ah, the old "We just need to change human behaviour" solution. Yeah, that would definitely work if it worked.

When's the last time you saw someone smoking a cigarette?

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#187

Post by wolfgang42 » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:53 PM UTC

Slansitartop wrote: post #78

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It just occurred to me that that forum moderation is essentially politics, and the failure modes of web-forums follow the failure modes of the political systems their moderation emulates. The most common form anarchic moderation (i.e. no moderation). When a forum's small, unwritten social rules keep things under control. However, as forum grows, that breaks down, and things become more chaotic. Metafilter essentially…

LambdaMOO tried switching to democracy around 1993, with "LambdaMOO Takes A New Direction". Basically, the mods ("wizards") instituted a petition system for technical changes and ceded all social decisions to a separate arbitration board. The resulting three and a half years of chaos is summarized in the last post on http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/LambdaMOO

In the end, the wizards published "LambdaMOO Takes Another Direction" and took back control, concluding:

> Over the course of the past three and a half years, it has become obvious that this [refraining from making social decisions] was an impossible ideal: The line between 'technical' and 'social' is not a clear one, and never can be.

A great deal has been written about this experiment (and a Web search will find much analysis, along with full text of LTAND and LTAND2), and there are a wide variety of perspectives on why LTAND failed, but one conclusion that nearly everybody seems to reach is that attempting to give a community democracy with no higher guidance is almost guaranteed to be a recipe for disaster.

Reflecting on all of this, I have no idea how the US founders managed to get something that worked at all, much less as well as it does. (And notice that it took them several tries to get it right.)

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#188

Post by prepend » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:54 PM UTC

cup-of-tea wrote: post #155

I quit reddit for good on Saturday. There are two major problems with it: - Downvoting creates echo chambers, - No accountability for moderators. I think the downvoting should be removed completely. Downvoting is basically giving people the power of a mini-censor and the people love it. Subreddits can be completely censored by moderators and there's no way to know this is happening. Maybe reddit can develop a way to…

How do you filter out user sentiment without downvotes?

I think there are flaws in downvoting, but they are less than systems with only upvote (eg Facebook).

Upvote only encourage extreme views that attract attention because if 5% like and 95% dislike (theoretical) this is ranked higher than 4% and 0% dislike.

What we really need is a score that is like as percentage of views that will be more meaningful.

Mixing in some sort of cost to post/vote will help as well because people will be more judicious with likes. Currency is hard to work out as steem is a big fluffed-fest. Maybe something where you get credits every day and can exhaust or bank them.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#189

Post by allthenews » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:55 PM UTC

I detest this smug mentality, that so called trolling is trivial to identify and differentiate from legitimate, but unpopular opinion.

I feel strongly about it because it creates opportunity for censors, both in the form of moderators and communities themselves, to stifle debate under the guise of "detoxification." This kind of communal policing is ground zero for the echo chamber phenomenon.

We live in a reality where there will always be those who abuse platforms of communication for nefarious purposes. We also live in a reality where we are able to temper our own outrage, and we must if we wish to maintain healthy, open dialogue.

Offense is taken, not given.

Re: Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet

#190

Post by gdubs » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 7:55 PM UTC

InvisibleCities wrote: post #159

gdubs wrote: post #150

We tend to think we’re more in control of our behavior than we actually are. That is, our brains are operating from habit a large amount of the time, and the idea of the CEO brain consciously deciding our every action is largely an illusion. This is why emergency exit doors must open outwards. People have died in fires in theaters trying to push on doors that said “Pull”. The crash bar on an emergency exit door is wh…

>This is why emergency exit doors must open outwards. People have died in fires in theaters trying to push on doors that said “Pull”. The crash bar on an emergency exit door is what’s known in design as an affordance. Is this true? I always assumed it was because it's pretty much impossible to pull open a door when you are being crushed by people pressing against one another trying to escape.

Thanks - you correctly caught an error and I’ve edited the post to address it. The danger is in the confusing affordances, and the point was about that and not the direction of the door swing (which as you’ve correctly pointed out has other more primary considerations.)