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Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

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Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#211

Post by [deleted] »

n_e wrote: post #147
DanBC wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an administrator will prevent you from editing until you choose a new username, and you can continue afterward. No, an admin may instantly block you permanently, or may temporarily block you until you change your name, or may temporarily block you while they discuss it with you, or may not block you but apply one of two templates, or add your name to a username for discussion board where you'll have to try to justi…

> Reads some stuff about his company. He knows that information is factually incorrect. It's not harmful to his company, but it is misleading to people reading Wikipedia. He signs up for an account. The only interactions I had with Wikipedia are reading articles. Even I know it is frowned upon to edit your own articles.

[deleted]

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#212

Post by jamesj1980 »

Kaveren wrote: post #20
sigttou wrote: post #10

Am here for over 2 years now, rarely upvote something, haven't submitted anything and this is just my 2nd comment... Pretty sure this rule holds for close to all kind of forums.

I don't know if you're willing to make a 3rd comment, but I'm trying to understand the lurker mindset from the perspective of someone who posts quite actively. Is is just that you don't care enough to reply, feel like your opinions are unpopular, don't feel like you have anything to say, or something else?

No reason to engage. I think "discussing" a topic with another "online persona" is almost always a waste of time. I also find most comments to be speculative, argumentative, uninformed opinions, trolling, jokes or trash. It is great finding a decent comment chain, but usually I'm late to the show(like now)!

When I was young I enjoyed commenting and voicing my opinion, after 25 years online, I no longer derive satisfaction from it.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#213

Post by Loughla »

buboard wrote: post #49
jopsen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it holds throughout history? How many people posted letters to news papers in the hay day of paper news..

most probably much less. The big difference is that they would publish mostly in local papers while the internet's audience is always global.

Honestly, if you want to see what news editors see in the form of letters to the editor, go to your closest small(ish) (100k or less) town local newspaper or tv station's website and look through the comments on stories. They're frighteningly disjointed, insane, and disconnected from reality.

These are real, actual people who submit comments. And those people are anonymous and free to post whatever lies they care to come up with on forums such as this one.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#214

Post by redwards510 »

cholmon wrote: post #176
gniv wrote: post #157

Most 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 parallels civic/political engagement in real life. It's tough to get lurkers (like me) to speak up and shift the discussion when the emotional cost of doing so - arguing, being downvoted, getting defensive, being ridiculed - seems to make the effort simply not worthwhile for the individual. Not only on the web, but also in the office, at Thanksgiving dinner, at a cookout, etc.

This reminds me of when I attempt to send a Snopes link to someone who just forwarded me a chain email. They don't thank you, you get silence or worse.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#215

Post by Retra »

inequalitysir wrote: post #187
gniv wrote: post #157

Most 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…

Then people talk about inequality. Even in free thing like Reddit only 1% people create value because they get high from it. Inequality comes from nature, wether it's wealth or contribution on Reddit like sites.

Small pox came from nature too. But it's effectively gone. So is the Dodo bird, etc..

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#216

Post by Brain_Thief »

qwerty9876 wrote: post #141

One interesting thing regarding this was when Reddit added a "chat with a random user" -feature a few years back. I was so used to the high quality submissions and comment threads that when I was paired to chat with random lurkers it was kind of eye opening how they were just... really plain and hard to hold a interesting conversation with. And this is exactly why communism will NEVER work: 90% of the population just…

I've got to agree with this statement. In my opinion, it's an absolute blessing (and an unavoidable evolutionary outcome) that there is still varying degrees of friction inherent to the process of commenting on many websites. Imagine if every person could throw their uninformed opinions about every topic into the common space with no hassle whatsoever, the signal to noise ratio would be positively devastated. In fact, the coupling of frictionless 1->N communication capacity with continual reinforcement of poisonous ego-centrism in advertising appears to be the precise recipe for the construction of FaceBook-style intellectual wastelands. The blunt fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people appear to have very little of value to contribute to the vast majority of discussions or processes, except perhaps in a passive role. This is not a judgement of value, merely a fact that should be considered from a societal vantage when the design of large information systems is undertaken so that ethical and socially-beneficial decisions can be made.

The concept of preventing a dilution of discourse and output quality by intentionally maintaining a degree of friction in the participation process is well-embodied by, e.g., the effort required to start contributing to certain critical open-source projects like the Linux kernel (think email-based communications, packaging processes, etc.). The notion of friction extends directly to aesthetics as well - consider the difference in discourse level that exists between HN, Reddit, FaceBook, and so on. There are many factors involved in the gradient, but it is worth noting that the aesthetic model employed by a system or product is perhaps the clearest external signal of that system's intended purpose. To that end, the dramatic "gameification" of relatively frictionless communication protocols appears to be incompatible with the idea of truth on a fundamental level. This also applies to the modern incarnation of popular US "news" organizations - think Fox's dramatic music and hyper-augmented hollywood-style visuals, or my personal favorite, CNN's "situation room".

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#218

Post by closeparen »

naravara wrote: post #186
whatshisface wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between outlier actors and outlier Wikipedia editors are that outlier actors are better than everyone else at acting, but outlier Wikipedia editors need only be superhumanly obsessive. It used to be that the way in which you were an outlier had to be somewhat related to being good at the task you were competing for the honor of completing, but on social networks the only qualification is that you spend…

>but outlier Wikipedia editors need only be superhumanly obsessive. Yup. The way the internet works is it privileges the perspectives and opinions of people who have an abundance of time to spend on the internet (either because their jobs are online or because they just have a lot of free time). So you wind up seeing the perspectives of bored office workers overrepresented and manual laborers underrepresented, you se…

80% of US workers are in the service sector, 12.6% in manufacturing, 1.5% in agriculture. 60% spend the entire workday sitting.

The notion that manufacturing workers are the real America and desk jobs are held by privileged outliers may have been true at one time, but today it is a myth. The right model for “average working stiff” today works in a hospital, restaurant, or government office building.

Stats per BLS: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#219

Post by stcredzero »

airstrike wrote: post #199
gniv wrote: post #157

Most 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…

A related phenomenon I've been thinking about is the impact of traditional entertainment media (TV, Movies and Music) and the inherent bias in the sample of worldviews that the people who work in those businesses espouse. In other words, we only hear and watch stories from those people who chose storytelling as their career, and if you assume we are inevitably influenced by their views then we're effectively taking a…

In other words, we only hear and watch stories from those people who chose storytelling as their career

There has been a transition from culture being produced by members of one's community/village/family to culture being produced by professionals for money.

Stories and songs of the past were just as unbalanced and insane as stories and songs of the present. (Both in terms of being fantastical and showing only one side of complex emotional situations.) People grounded in the reality of making living things grow, keeping animals alive, and fixing their own houses and equipment most often understood those stories for what they were. What magic such people believed in was often closely tied to feelings of belonging and community. Gatherings of people often have such magic feelings, but this is quite a real phenomena of human social organization.

Now, there is less of such intense community, and we are bombarded by more commercially produced culture than we could possibly consume, made by people who often live lives of exaggerated imbalance, enabled by what our ancestors would have considered the phenomenal wealth of modern resources. What's more, so much of what we're given as non-fiction also fits into this model by varying degrees.

When Rome's military went from citizen soldiers to full time specialist professionals, the misalignment of incentives between the specialists and the citizens was the subtle, long term root of many problems. I think there is such a misalignment with how human civilizations in general produce culture.

I think this phenomenon may be a "Great Filter" answer to the Fermi paradox. We might not only be swallowed up by Virtual Reality, but also by the purely mental constructs of our own fantastical narratives, as we abandon more and more of the creature connections with nature which keep us grounded in reality.

(Plato. Cave. Shadows.)

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