Just the past week: - New Yorker publishes this article - Mayor of London at SXSW called for tighter tech regulation. - UK Culture Secretary declares social media "broken", states he wants to time-limit children's access to social media and "impose stricter checks on the age limits when children can first set up a social media profile" - Tim Berners-Lee said "we must regulate tech firms to prevent 'weaponised' web" -…
Had to scroll down all the way to your comment until somebody finally gets the meta view. Just amazing how the usually brilliant minds of HN are baited into this morronic censorship discussion.
how about asking kids parents to detoxify their kids than solving the problem way down the chain of command?
People are shitty online because they have anonymity. Now instead of going ahead and removing that, it might be worth going backward even more and going to the person.
people need to be nice on the internet. The internet does not need to be nice to people. Detoxifying internet is no different than censorship. I can say this with certainty that as soon as we ask companies and governments to detoxify, it will get misused [un]intentionally.
I can't be the only person who is just not bothered by this kind of thing at all, am I? I'm way more worried about political indoctrination in upper education than trolls on the internet.
Then you are running in the wrong circles where you can't just reject any oposing viewpoint as 'Russian bots'.
I can't be the only person who is just not bothered by this kind of thing at all, am I? I'm way more worried about political indoctrination in upper education than trolls on the internet.
I'm the same, and I take it a step further: I personally believe that the push to associate emotional triggers with words, phrases, and news events to the point where seeing someone else "say the Wrong Thing" causes anything resembling emotional distress, is the most powerful weapon of social destruction in use today. The solution to "toxicity" on social media isn't better moderation, better filtering, better banned words and phrases lists... it's being able to see 280 characters on the screen, representing ideas you wholeheartedly disagree with, and not get worked up about it as your eyes move to the next thing on the list and you go about your life as usual. Sadly, the current structure of things incentivizes the former behavior and disincentivizes the latter. Corporations (especially news corporations) and politicians see no problem with conditioning people on a mass scale, and few people seem to question the narratives being spun all around them instead of just blindly believing whatever their social sphere agrees with.
How about this: first teach advanced critical thinking skills, so people have the skills (if not the will, that's another problem) necessary to see through propaganda from both sides. I have a feeling a lot of people would have issues with this approach though.
How do you teach critical thinking?
By giving people things to think critically about, and ensuring that they respond in an appropriately thoughtful manner.
Of course this doesn't work when politics is taboo.
This argument is completely disingenuous. Your average person is capable of critical thinking and logical reasoning -- those who aren't are either wards under the care of another person. Normal people just think logically and critically in reference to local optima, and that's not something that we can or should try to program out of them. That quality is also known as adaptability and it's crucial to successful surv…
> All we can do is understand that our own perspective is not the default or de-facto correct one, and that other people are entitled to their own assumptions and unfalsifiable opinions just as we are. They're entitled to their own credibility heuristics and decisions about who is worth trusting. People are free to make their own decisions and conclusions, whether we agree with them or not. For opinions, perhaps. The…
>There are also people who reject facts.
Most people don't reject facts, they reject certain interpretations of facts.
For example, some people believed epilepsy came from evil spirits. They didn't deny that the person was shaking on the ground. They just had a different explanation for it than we do now.
> reddit is a 1960s Playboy magazine fifty years in the future [...] Just like the old saying about Playboy, I only read it for r/ama not the nekkid ladies. That's a thought-provoking way of putting it, though I'd add the /r/gonewild subreddit and its variants makes it considerably more meta. A lot of people, particularly females, are posting explicit imagery of themselves - revealing a hidden culture exhibitionism a…
> revealing a hidden culture exhibitionism Not only do many females seem to enjoy exhibitionism on subs like /r/gonewild, there's also a not-so-hidden culture of exhibitionism that takes place in real life that "strangely" seems to have so far escaped being raised in the ongoing gender wars discussions. Human beings are very complex beings.
> culture of exhibitionism that takes place in real life that "strangely" seems to have so far escaped being raised in the ongoing gender wars
I'm not sure what discussing a lack of clothing or dressing provocatively would achieve - it's never an adequate defence for poor behaviour or assault by a third party. Any nuanced debate about the topic is difficult and likely to be a no-win scenario.
One of the few reasonable points to be made is that revealing clothing can be inappropriate in professional settings, however I think other females need to be the ones who encourage appropriate attire in the office. A male delivering the message would lead to anger and resistance as it'll be viewed as a form of control rather than something formed from consensus.
This might be an overly simplistic way of looking at it, but female exhibitionism is not dissimilar from a guy flashing how much power and resources they have. It's a signalling system, and it attracts both wanted and unwanted attention, but in a civil society assault and harassment are never acceptable no matter how provocative someone's behaviour might seem.
I have had an SA account for years and never been banned. I don't appreciate being called a sucker and I think the price is fair for what I get. When I use Facebook I am the product, not the customer. This means the platform is optimized to put my eyeballs on advertisements or provide data about me to marketers. It is not optimized to provide high quality conversation.
Good for you but it's hard to take you remotely seriously when you try to relate SA and high quality conversation.
You're spoiled beyond belief if you view "toxic" comments online as a serious problem. If it is truly "a problem", then the larger problem is tying your emotions to what anonymous people say. You live vicariously through an image of how offended someone else might be. Instead of tending to the garden you can actually protect and uphold. Do you think the poor bastards in Skid Row feel better because some (literal) whi…
Sorry, but this idea of "Sticks and Stones" hasn't been true for a long, long time. You may be able to shug off terrible, racist, bigoted slurs hurled at you, but people who have that slung at them day after day after day might not be, and I'm not going to blame them for not wanting to take it anymore.
Then why are they on the racist slur subreddit? Same with Twitter, you don't have to follow people who insult you, or the people who retweet the insults to you.
You're spoiled beyond belief if you view "toxic" comments online as a serious problem. If it is truly "a problem", then the larger problem is tying your emotions to what anonymous people say. You live vicariously through an image of how offended someone else might be. Instead of tending to the garden you can actually protect and uphold. Do you think the poor bastards in Skid Row feel better because some (literal) whi…
You could argue that toxic comments on the internet are the only reason the current president got elected in the US. Should said president lead us to a nuclear holocaust, or any number of other real possibilities due to his proven negligence, toxic internet comments would have a very real impact on the material conditions of citizens in this country.
Huh? What if Clinton had won and started a nuclear holocaust? Who's to blame then? You must be opposed to all political advertising for the party you don't like because somehow you're able to see that it's bad and the other half of the population isn't. That's being hopelessly blinded by partisanship.