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The case against social media is stronger than you think

arachnemag.substack.com

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Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#281

Post by m3047 »

blitz_skull wrote: post #24

The last week has taken me from “I believe in the freedom of online anonymity” to “Online anonymity possess a weight that a moral, civil society cannot bear.” I do not believe humans are capable of responsibly wielding the power to anonymously connect with millions of people without the real weight of social consequence.

If the internet is in fact "the largest social media platform", then anonymity absolutely has to go as my public-facing telemetry server [0] based on DNS as a transport, and not rooted to the ICANN DNS tree, gets 1000+ abusive requests for every legitimate one. I'm supposed to return REFUSED to each and every one [1] of them (not drop them) and I'm not supposed to publish the IP addresses involved. Granted they could be spoofed, but the only way we'll ever know is to go ahead and publish so that a global picture can be developed and the owners of the addresses can tell us that they're being spoofed.

[0] One of the pieces of telemetry is the addresses abusing the server.

[1] I, and many other operators violate this stability requirement and drop traffic. [2]

[2] There are no internet police. If there were then BCP 38 would be enforced and this particular problem would largely go away.

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#282

Post by keybored »

Lerc wrote: post #11

Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litigated on substack. A lot of things suck right now. Social media definitely give us the ability to see that. Using your personal ideology to link correlations is not the same thing as finding causation. There will be undoubtedly be some damaging aspects of social media, simply because it is large and complex. It would be hi…

> Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litigated on substack.

For all we know there are millions who have withdrawn and are making the case outside of social media. Or living the case.

This reply seems a bit fish-in-water to me.

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#283

Post by alexpotato »

A lot of the comment seem to ignore Hotelling's Law [0].

When applied to politics the game plan is:

- In a two party system, start by framing your message to the middle of your party

- This means you capture everyone from middle of your party to the political middle of the population (we'll call these the "closest to center") AND get a few folks farther out from your middle

- This will help you win the "primaries"

- After that, you want to slowly drift towards the middle of the population. This allows you to pull most of the "close to center" folks from your party AND people from the other side

NOTE: the other side should be doing the exact same but coming from the other direction.

Now, people may also ask "Why not start out in the population middle??". The reason is that you:

a. don't win any primaries this way

b. you get "crowded out" by the winners of the two party primaries

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#284

Post by r721 »

zyxzevn wrote: post #270
btreecat wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with social media (and all media) is opinion-based censorship, causing group-think. And the chaos of replies that are uncategorized. All people are biased. It's impossible to also avoid bias needed to filter out the firehose of data. What your describing is often a form of moderation. > Different opinions do matter. But due to the algorithms, the most emotional responses are promoted. There is no way to…

I am thinking of some moderation systems that focuses on categorization instead of censorship. There will be a bias in moderation, but that will have less of an effect when there is no deletion. If possible, the user could choose their preferred style (or bias) of moderation. If you want full freedom, you can let users select "super-users" to moderate/categorize for them. Emotional responses and troll jokes could be…

>categorization

This exists on Bluesky under "labeling" name: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39684027

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#285

Post by foxglacier »

Chris2048 wrote: post #239
foxglacier wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a society as toxic as that. It's New Zealand. One of the minor parties currently in government aims to undo systemic racism. However, the popular opinion is that they are the racists because of that. I don't dare tell people that I voted for them because I'll be judged as a racist by some of my family members and loose friends. If I say it on the local internet groups, others will be hostile to me for it. A…

> aims to undo systemic racism ... they are the racists because of that this sounds like a suspicious characterisation - how are they trying to undo systemic racism, and what do they identify as "systemic racism"?

https://www.act.org.nz/defending-equal-rights-democracy

For example, "Ended race-based waitlists" (for healthcare).

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#286

Post by foxglacier »

synecdoche wrote: post #198
foxglacier wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a society as toxic as that. It's New Zealand. One of the minor parties currently in government aims to undo systemic racism. However, the popular opinion is that they are the racists because of that. I don't dare tell people that I voted for them because I'll be judged as a racist by some of my family members and loose friends. If I say it on the local internet groups, others will be hostile to me for it. A…

I understand this view is unpopular, but nevertheless. For something to be systematic there needs to be some set of rules governing it. I have yet to see any evidence of discriminatory rules as part of any western company or government policy, except for affirmative action and equivalent policies which do have such rule sets, where some group is prioritised to the detriment of other.

I meant systematic then, sorry. It's the system of rules that's racially discriminatory. We even have different voting rights based on race.

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#287

Post by tptacek »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #186
scarface_74 wrote: post #7

I really hate the narrative that social media has increased polarization knowing that my still living parents grew up in the Jim Crow south where they were literally separated from society because of the color of their skin. The country has always been hostile to “other”. People just have a larger platform to get their message out.

Race relations were better in the 2000-2010 period, according to Gallup data: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx Easy to cherry-pick stuff. You can cherry-pick Jim Crow south; I can cherry-pick Chicago in the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDmAI67nBGU I think we have to get past black-and-white thinking and see it as a matter of degree. With 340 million people in the USA, realistically, at le…

I don't understand the claim here about "Chicago in the 1990s". Can you say more? I lived here through the 1990s and it was a major city like any other. But maybe that's what you were saying?

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#288

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

scarface_74 wrote: post #247
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Race relations were better in the 2000-2010 period, according to Gallup data: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx Easy to cherry-pick stuff. You can cherry-pick Jim Crow south; I can cherry-pick Chicago in the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDmAI67nBGU I think we have to get past black-and-white thinking and see it as a matter of degree. With 340 million people in the USA, realistically, at le…

You call 60 years of racial segregation that affected an entire race of people in several states “cherry picking”? It’s a huge difference between “a few people being racist” and laws enforcing segregation and laws against interracial marriage. The racists have always been in power. You can look at the justice system, the disparity between sentencing for the same crimes across races etc. The Supreme Court said you can…

>You call 60 years of racial segregation that affected an entire race of people in several states “cherry picking”?

Why are people who call themselves "progressive" so obsessed with events from half a century ago?

>The racists have always been in power.

It amazes me how quickly people forgot that we had 8 years of Obama. That was a lot more recent than racial segregation.

>the disparity between sentencing for the same crimes

The vast majority of this disparity seems to go away when you control for arrest offense, criminal history, etc.: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1985377

>The Supreme Court said you can’t use race as a basis for college admissions. But you can use it as a basis for arresting someone.

Well yeah, if someone fits the description of a criminal suspect, why not?

>Fox News is the most popular news network and isn’t part of social media.

When's the last time Fox News advocated for segregation or laws against interracial marriage?

IMO you've been making some very handwavey arguments which are collapsing important distinctions.

In any case... you can see from Table 13 in this PDF (page 13) that the rate of black-on-white crime is over 3x the rate of white-on-black crime: https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv23.pdf

This isn't something which happened 60 years ago. This is data from 2023. It's more recent / greater in magnitude than most of the points you've been making. So, would it be fair to conclude that black people in the US are hostile to the "other", akin to the conclusion you made in your original comment?

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#289

Post by Lerc »

Llamamoe wrote: post #180
Lerc wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have wondered if it's not algorithmic curation per-se that is the problem, but personalised algorithmic curation. When each person is receiving a personalised feed, there is a significant loss of common experience. You are not seeing what others are seeing and that creates a loss of a basis of communication. I have considered the possibility that the solution might be to enable many areas of curation but in each do…

> the solution might be to enable many areas of curation but in each domain the thing people see is the same for everyone. Doesn't this already happen to some extent, with content being classified into advertiser-friendly bins and people's feeds being populated primarily by top content from within the bins the algorithm deems they have an interest in? > Once you feel like it is not necessary to make your case, but ju…

>Doesn't this already happen to some extent, with content being classified into advertiser-friendly bins and people's feeds being populated primarily by top content from within the bins the algorithm deems they have an interest in?

The distinction I think would be with publicly disclosable algorithms, you would at least know why you were receiving a particular thing and have the option to not subscribe to that particular algorithm. Ideally such things would be properly, open source. Once public, algorithms are subject to gaming. Open source provides the many eyes and feedback required to stay ahead of the bad actors.

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#290

Post by phendrenad2 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #197
blitz_skull wrote: post #24

The last week has taken me from “I believe in the freedom of online anonymity” to “Online anonymity possess a weight that a moral, civil society cannot bear.” I do not believe humans are capable of responsibly wielding the power to anonymously connect with millions of people without the real weight of social consequence.

And this is how we get things like TSA and Patriot Act. "I was totally in favor of freedom, until one bad thing happened, and now I think freedom should never have existed in the first place!"

Nah I think in this case free speech was a nice experiment, but the world has changed, and perhaps it's time to try something else.
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