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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

#231

Post by dwaltrip »

Syonyk wrote: post #72
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?…

> Why has Twitter the company and its employees not taken action to deal with this? Because it's not their job to moderate this stuff. Angry, pissed off, outraged users are, from the perspective of social media companies, the best users. They refresh constantly (so more ad views), they come back constantly, and if they've gone away for too long, you can just figure out what's likely to piss them off the most, send th…

Companies have moral responsibilities. Societies must incentivize and regulate companies such that they strive to meet these responsibilities.

In addition, individual citizens (not “consumers” or “users”) matter immensely as well. Companies are aggregations of individuals and the behavior of each of us determines the behavior of companies. The cultural, legal, biological, and environmental factors that affect all of us individuals determine the macro behaviors of companies and governments. We can and must strive to improve these factors and thus improve the macro dynamics.

Obviously, the details of this will involve endless debate and there are many ways to approach the problem. But if we don’t try, we are asking to live in a shitty world.

P.S. These are rough thoughts that I quickly typed up and could definitely use some polishing. Some other time…

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#232

Post by 0x737368 »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #66
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…

Remember Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" from secondary school? [0] Fundamentally these coordinated social media attacks are witch hunts. When the 'good feminists' viciously attacked Margret Atwood accusing her of being a 'bad feminist' as she strongly supported due process defending a male professor being accused of sexually impropriety is the moment when these modern witch hunts went too far. More so than when Reddi…

I can't speak for the people who downvoted you, but I'll bet you a USB stick that the reason you got downvoted is because of "When the 'good feminists' viciously attacked Margret Atwood accusing her of being a 'bad feminist'".

Some people have reached a point where not even disagreeing with them, but simply mentioning someone they don't like in a positive light or mentioning someone they do like in a negative light, no matter how factual the statement is, will get you downvoted.

They can't even articulate it, hence why you didn't get any responses - they just got used to being in their echo chamber where their opinions are always echoed and fervently applauded. After a while, whatever the echo chamber promulgates becomes that person's ground reality. As soon as they see something that disagrees with this reality - it is an offense to them and their whole worldivew, but they can't argue for their beholden view or against the offending view, so they have an emotional outburst.

I've met a few people who proclaimed themselves to be very politically educated individuals, but as soon as it came to a debate they'd get frustrated by failing to answer basic questions about their opinions and excuse themselves. No wonder, who wants their whole paradigm to be crashed in one evening?

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#233

Post by akomtu »

bckr wrote: post #104
qsort wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why isn't the mob a top priority? Part of that is the incentives going in the opposite direction, as other commenters have noted. Even assuming they are in good faith, though, I believe it is an extremely difficult problem. Building and maintaining large scale communities is next to impossible, you can't just turn off a switch and make the mob go away, a mob is, by definition, out of control. Historically, we have…

> This is, by and large, a good thing. I don't agree that social media (qua social networks) has moved us in the right direction. Web forums and blogs were better. I don't think we need to find the missing piece. I think we need to remove the unnecessary, super profitable poison. Something like private, self hosted forums with universal log in, but no cross-contamination of "likes" and comments, and no algorithmic at…

Better for whom? Most people out there aren't able to produce their own thoughts and have an attention span of a frog. They wouldn't know what to write in a blog. Bursts of primitive emotions is the only thing that distracts them from dull reality. Social media is great for these people: it's a stadium where they come, shout at each other and go home, feeling fulfilled and morally superior.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#234

Post by ebcode »

goalieca wrote: post #10
spadros wrote: post #3

Yes I quit social media a couple of years ago and agree with pretty much everything the author says. Social media environments encourage incendiary discussion because it fuels upvotes and general attention. Most people won't take the time to consider a more valid grey opinion because they've jumped to a conclusion and are busy attacking someone, or because it won't get as much attention. The first thing that came bac…

I'm on linked-in for obvious reasons but i largely ignore the posts. I don't get how so many people are political on a site largely concerning itself with employment. Other than that, reddit was the last piece of social media that i quit last year. I consider it more of a social media service than an a forum for discussion.

> I don't get how so many people are political on a site largely concerning itself with employment.

Because employment, like almost everything else in life, is political[0].

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/politics (see definition 5 a, especially)

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#236

Post by akomtu »

ph2082 wrote: post #110
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…

Most of trends have less than 10k comments/likes/.... Etc. That means only 0.00014 percent people of the planet. Rest don't know or don't care. That realisation made me not to bother about latest outrage. Whole Twitter experience become so much better when you only keep to people you like. Don't think twice to unfollow someone.

Listening to only people you like sounds like a privilege to me. I bet, a few years down the road Twitter will stuff the feed of such purists with a more diverse set of viewpoints.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#237

Post by prawn »

throwkeep wrote: post #155
vlunkr wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A good start would be: Remove the algorithmic feed Remove the Trending bar Increase character length Ban witch hunts

Use https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ - normal chronological feed and no trending anything. Then prune your following. I don't see any witch hunts; my feed is generally very positive.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#239

Post by Zpalmtree »

sbagel wrote: post #181
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 cultu…

I was under the impression that twitter replies with more retweets/likes were displayed higher up in the reply list, similar to HN?

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#240

Post by Fogest »

cableshaft wrote: post #100
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…

Also, if you end up having to announce your take on every "bad" thing that happens, your feed becomes nothing but commentary on the bad takes, almost always identical to everyone else, and you dillute or lose what makes you interesting in the process. I've seen this in my own feed. Any time some "bad" person is exposed, I'm almost guaranteed to scroll past 30 almost identical takes on it by the same 30 people on my f…

I've "muted" quite a few people on various social media apps who essentially just are reposting some quote or post from someone else who is outraged about xyz current woke topic. Almost daily these people will share some new thing to be outraged about.

Of course do they actually ever do anything beyond sharing a post and acting like a good person? Nope. I don't see these people volunteer, donate, or do anything except share crap. So when they are someone I know in some way I just mute them instead of unfollowing.

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