To look at this a different way, a far larger percentage of people are generating content now than at any other time in the history of modern media. As others have pointed out, anyone creating content is an "outlier" in a sense, since the vast majority of people don't create content ever. But more do today than ever before, and when I think back to the 80's and 90's when content creation had such powerful gatekeepers, I'm think the trajectory we're on is a massive improvement.
Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
221–230 of 332 posts
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, people don't like being corrected when they are wrong. I've bumped into that a lot when discussing things on social media. I find that if you can manage to spare someone's ego when correcting them, it helps a lot. Rather than sending a link and saying something like "You're wrong!" If I can give them the opportunity to decide for themselves that they are wrong, by saying something like "Are you sure about that, this guy is saying something different," I often get a better response.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It certainly feels plausible and yet we have that issue. All our media tells us we should all carry guns and shoot people and yet gun violence is down. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/03/weve-... We have some of the sexyist media around telling us we should all be sleeping around and yet apparently sex is down too. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex... Are we sure it's an…
Media is dominated by news, and news is unavoidably carrying a bias. The things that matter are long term and commonplace, the news is novel and unusual. Major long term trends are not something that gets reported on because they’re not news. What gets reported are outliers and contrarian views.
That’s why if you want to be informed about the world you shouldn’t watch the news and just read books.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not sure that the contents of the censored site really matters to the point he's making.
While I agree with you, the complaint of the particular critic you're replying to isn't even about the contents of the site. It's that some of Gab's staff have, individually, said bigoted things.
Even assuming that's true (and I don't know or care if it is), it's unclear to me why it should reflect on the community. If tomorrow somebody were to leak a tape of Paul Graham or Joel Spolsky ranting about their hatred of some race, it wouldn't somehow reflect poorly on the character of anyone with a Hacker News or Stack Overflow account.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
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..
Your solution is to give Reddit Karma to people for reading so that the equality is maintained between the groups.
That's what you propose for wealth inequality.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#226Most 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, and if you assume we are inevitably influenced by their views then we're effectively taking advice from them. This means entertainment shapes the viewer-listener's interpretation of reality to better fit the model of reality to which storytellers subscribe, but I'm pretty sure that's not a desirable outcome in the long run.
This thought often crosses my mind in particular when I consume media that is more 'psychological' in nature. Much of the time I can't shake the feeling that no matter how convincing the characters and their 'inner life' is presented, we're still ultimately seeing a projection of the writer themselves.
Sometimes I notice how certain characters seem richer than others, and usually these characters are obviously closer to the writer's own life. Perhaps this is why slice-of-life shows seem to do well (Atlanta, Better Things, Louie), because they're just the writers writing about themselves.
Or when I read a Dostoevski novel, I can't help but wonder how much of these character's inner lives are really just thinly-veiled versions of Dostoevski's (and, considering my love for his novels, probably my thoughts are 'compatible' with his).
What makes all this worse or more complicated though is that especially for television as a media, there are all sorts of pretty serious constraints. A show needs cliffhangers, ideally every episode, and at least every season, and unless you're on Netflix, you need mini-cliffhangers before every ad block. I imagine that's got to have some significant effect on the story.
I rather like this article by David Foster Wallace that sort-of goes into all of this: https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf (E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction).
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#228Most 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…
> That would be an argument for lurkers to make an effort, even if, like this comment, it's just a barely-formed idea.
The content is there, by lesser known figures and lurkers alike. It’s just hard to discover. You need to stumble upon it by accident, instead of by a deliberate process like consuming the top upvoted posts.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#229Nowhere is this more apparent than the relationship subs. It's full blown Jerry Springer in there. The front page is pretty much trash TV.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#230Most 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 is also a reason why sometimes, while it might seem pointless, engaging in a discussion with someone you know won't change their point of view, can still be worthwhile. Because there's probably a huge number of lurkers who might either end up agreeing with you, or at least be deterred from simply agreeing with the person you're arguing with.