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Everyone’s offended these days

eev.ee

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Re: Everyone’s offended these days

#21

Post by Joeboy »

theseatoms wrote: post #17
masklinn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you actually read the article? Or did you just look at the title and see a "witty quip" opportunity? Because the latter seems far more likely given your comment seems unrelated to the article's content.

No, I didn't read it. From a quick skim, the article doesn't look worth reading, given its length. Are we not allowed to discuss the title of submissions, only the body of text?

This is very often a bad idea as titles are often not written by the articles' authors, and are often written to generate clicks rather than to accurately summarize the article. IMO it's to be discouraged.

Edit: It's kind of like discussing the layout of the site. There are occasions when it's reasonable to do so, but generally people want to discuss the content.

Re: Everyone’s offended these days

#22

Post by cmrx64 »

jimrandomh wrote: post #9

I think this is a property of the way voting/distribution work on some sites, but not others. On Twitter or Tumblr, if you want to reply to something, you have to increase its visibility in the process. So if something is really wrong and everyone wants to correct it, it creates these horrible positive-feedback spirals where mass-outrage explodes out of nothing. This doesn't happen on Hacker News, partly because the…

I think you're spot-on. It's interesting to note that 4chan had 'sage' to help counter that effect.

Re: Everyone’s offended these days

#23

Post by masklinn »

theseatoms wrote: post #17
masklinn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you actually read the article? Or did you just look at the title and see a "witty quip" opportunity? Because the latter seems far more likely given your comment seems unrelated to the article's content.

No, I didn't read it. From a quick skim, the article doesn't look worth reading, given its length. Are we not allowed to discuss the title of submissions, only the body of text?

> Are we not allowed to discuss the title of submissions, only the body of text?

You're certainly allowed to do anything you wish for, just as you're allowed to discuss novels based solely on their title. However you seem quite offended, is that some sort of meta-acting demonstrating your original thesis through the medium of yourself?

Nevertheless, if you're discussing the title and ignoring the body, you're quite literally missing the forest for the tree, or in this case missing the forest for a signpost. This article is not a Cosmo listicle, its title is neither its meat nor its thesis, it's a starting point.

Re: Everyone’s offended these days

#24

Post by iokanuon »

cmrx64 wrote: post #22
jimrandomh wrote: post #9

I think this is a property of the way voting/distribution work on some sites, but not others. On Twitter or Tumblr, if you want to reply to something, you have to increase its visibility in the process. So if something is really wrong and everyone wants to correct it, it creates these horrible positive-feedback spirals where mass-outrage explodes out of nothing. This doesn't happen on Hacker News, partly because the…

I think you're spot-on. It's interesting to note that 4chan had 'sage' to help counter that effect.

It still has.

Re: Everyone’s offended these days

#25

Post by lmm »

"None of our platforms are built to deal with it" is a false equivalence. The same social factors exist on every platform, but somehow you don't get the same outrage-storms on other platforms, only Twitter and Tumblr.

I don't suggest people who find themselves offended quit the Internet. But I do suggest that they, and everyone else, quit Twitter. You'll find you're much happier for it.

Re: Everyone’s offended these days

#26

Post by jerf »

jimrandomh wrote: post #9

I think this is a property of the way voting/distribution work on some sites, but not others. On Twitter or Tumblr, if you want to reply to something, you have to increase its visibility in the process. So if something is really wrong and everyone wants to correct it, it creates these horrible positive-feedback spirals where mass-outrage explodes out of nothing. This doesn't happen on Hacker News, partly because the…

I've made a minor hobby of studying how communities are formed by the technical structure of the community, and what interactions they enable. The control of visibility is actually a subtle art, and a lot of things like Twitter or Facebook start with an initial design that is quite unsubtle that works at first, but scales poorly.

I'm not convinced Twitter is fixable as-is. The most obvious technical solution is to do what Reddit did and make sub-Twitters, but they're not going to do that. But as one big global broadcast platform, it too easily exceeds the ability of the human mind to deal with things when you get even modestly popular, to say nothing of being a celebrity trying to directly participate.

But in reality there's simply no way to be a member of a "community" of that size. Arguably that's one of the places where this essay sort of stalls out... there's no community here to be discussing in the first place. Just a really, really big pile of people, with affiliations too loose to even remotely be a community. If there is "power" here, it's not at all clear to me who has it, and it certainly seems on the evidence that Stephen Fry is actually on the short end of that stick rather than the long one. To the extent that the essay seems to vaguely try to suggest that he did the wrong thing, itself ironic in light of, well, itself, I don't think the case was made.

Re: Everyone’s offended these days

#27

Post by davidism »

There's a mismatch in scale: the number and diversity of members on platforms like Twitter is huge, but the ability to moderate is tiny. It would be interesting to see if a system could detect the dogpile effect, by looking at common phrases, checking if many users messaging one user all follow a common user, etc. and offer some sort of temporary relief until a controversy dies down. On the other hand, that's not actually solving the root of the problem.

Re: Everyone’s offended these days

#28

Post by VLM »

Egalitarianism is dead, most opinions aren't worth hearing.

Democracy is dead, once shared common culture is destroyed the polis turns into a rampaging destructive mob.

So the people pushing this, not the foot soldiers but the people at the top, whats their angle, their logical next step? My guess is authoritarianism, mass censorship, a return to some kind of monarchy. Or maybe they just like watching the world burn. Or they think 1984/BNW/AF are instruction manuals not dystopias. I suppose for the ruling classes, those books ARE utopias. We seem very comfortable with those folks being the only people with money; perhaps its time for us to give them all our civil rights too.

Divide and conqueror... people pay too much attention to the former and forget the purpose of all the drama is the latter.

Re: Everyone’s offended these days

#30

Post by bargl »

oldmanjay wrote: post #8
adam12 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN gets offended by people who joke.

Boring, obvious jokes aren't really contributing much, are they?

I find this idea interesting! Look at what John Oliver, John Stewart, Jay Lenno, etc. have done with jokes as a method to make a point have more bite. They entertain and also report information. So jokes' by themselves are not bad. The thing that detracts from conversation are jokes without content which only server to annoy and clutter. Much like comments that do the same.
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