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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

#181

Post by sbagel »

paxys wrote: post #76

There are so many comments here blaming Twitter while blissfully unaware that HN fuels the exact same online outrage. Almost every day there's a " did bad thing to me" article on the front page and people immediately pick up their pitchforks and join the mob. You cannot fix the problem without acknowledging that we are all part of it.

100% and in many cases communities like HN are worse than sites like twitter because it has upvotes and downvotes which effectively drowns out and silences marginalized voices. You can't downvote or flag a twitter post preventing others from reading it.

I mention flagging because users here regularly flag opinions they strongly disagree with in mass as a way of removing them from discussions to great effect.

HN culture is arrogant and overly pragmatic which is especially egregious when dealing with nuanced topics. At least on twitter you can find takes from different viewpoints of a topic, not the monoculture hivemind created by social sites with upvotes and downvotes.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#182

Post by Jorengarenar »

vlunkr wrote: post #74
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?…

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.

> I've heard it said that it was intended to be a place for good discussion

What? No. Where had you heard that? Twitter was meant to be SMS in the Internet - for quick comments, quick news, quick updates, short notices, short etc.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#183

Post by unethical_ban »

young_unixer wrote: post #165
unethical_ban wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crucial distinction: * Individual identities are less important/influential on HN than twitter * The community is much smaller on HN than twitter * The conversation is more nuanced. We have paragraphs vs. 240 characters * We have voting to squelch really low effort or trolling. The informal guidelines of the community discourage downvoting an otherwise decent post because you don't agree. --- This all adds up to a ve…

I don't think those are the important differences. Reddit has most of that, and a significant amount of subs there are just cesspools of hate.

Points 2 and 4.

HN is like the equivalent of a small, curated, relatively mature subreddit that avoids being discovered by other reddit users.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#184

Post by anigbrowl »

ourmandave wrote: post #75
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…

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.

I think there should be a bit less focus on the 'the mob' and a bit more on the platform.

“We are seeking the public’s assistance in identifying the below individual in reference to an assault that took place this morning on the Capital Crescent trail. Please contact Det. Lopez with any information,” read a tweet sent June 2 from the department and shared more than 55,000 times.

But the Park Police had made an error. “Correction, the incident occurred yesterday morning, 6/1/2020,” they wrote in a follow up tweet. As with most such clarifications, it had only a fraction of the reach: a mere 2,000 shares.

[...]

On Twitter, Maryland attorney general Brian Frosh [...] had asked all of Twitter for help finding the man in the video. “If anyone can identify this man, please let me know,” he said, and nearly 50,000 people retweeted him.

[...] He sent a tweet confirming that there was a suspect and “it is not Mr. Weinberg.” (228 retweets.)

Relying on people to amplify accuracy and context is doomed to failure because people react to sensation. You show a video of a person doing something awful, naturally there will be a big reaction. The follow up tweet specifying some overlooked but important detail is simply not emotionally activating the same way.

However, it is within Twitter's capability to automatically propagate that additional context/correction to everyone who interacted with the original tweet. Indeed, it's within Twitter's capability to force them to look at the update and not proceed with using Twitter until they've acknowledged it.

Another approach could be that when a public figure (especially an authority figure) makes a mistake like this, they should be billed for the cost of advertising the correction to an equivalently large audience.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#185

Post by unethical_ban »

jfengel wrote: post #160
unethical_ban wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

There's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated to death. That's what they're for. The puzzle may not be related to death, but the noose is. And in the US there's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated to race. They are being used, today, as racist threats. When a noose appears, lynching is the assumed meaning, and not just by black people [1]. So it's a good thing that Lone Star is taking a look at the entire p…

I didn't downvote you, but a noose in a locker is wildly different from making a pun about "headline news", and to suggest otherwise is foolish.

"There is no such thing blah blah" - yes, there is, it's called context. Someone who feels threatened by a pun "headline news" with a noose is not properly adjusted to the adult world.

Do kids not play hangman anymore?

More broadly, I think twitter lowers the bar for whining and manufacturing rage. In a pre-Internet world, would that woman have cried, or otherwise been mortified at the beer top? Would she have taken a picture and sent it to the investigative reporter in Dallas where Lone Star is brewed? Or would she have gone "Huh, that's rude, how strange" and thrown it away?

It's easy to get wrapped up in the hate-think, and I think this is a case of it.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#187

Post by [deleted] »

unethical_ban wrote: post #185
jfengel wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated to death. That's what they're for. The puzzle may not be related to death, but the noose is. And in the US there's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated to race. They are being used, today, as racist threats. When a noose appears, lynching is the assumed meaning, and not just by black people [1]. So it's a good thing that Lone Star is taking a look at the entire p…

I didn't downvote you, but a noose in a locker is wildly different from making a pun about "headline news", and to suggest otherwise is foolish. "There is no such thing blah blah" - yes, there is, it's called context. Someone who feels threatened by a pun "headline news" with a noose is not properly adjusted to the adult world. Do kids not play hangman anymore? More broadly, I think twitter lowers the bar for whining…

[deleted]

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#189

Post by anigbrowl »

rdudekul wrote: post #124
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…

"the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him on fire". A single person brave enough to think against crowds could have STOPped this atrocity from happening. Reminds me of how Mahatma Gandhi was attacked in South Africa by a group of predominantly white-males, was literally being beaten to death, when just one white-female STOPped this atrocity from happening (source: Gandhi the Man - https://www.amazon…

No, not necessarily. A single person can sometimes make a difference but in real life such people are frequently just pushed aside. It is more a matter of luck than morality about where they happen to be in the crowd, whether they can make themselves heard at a critical moment and so on.

I mean sure, if you see an injustice taking place in front of you, you should certainly attempt to intervene. But there is absolutely not guarantee your intervention will be effective.

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