51–60 of 224 posts
What changed? Is it morale? Or something that happens at scale? Does the rate of leaks say anything about the health of the company?
I feel like all of this debate is painfully missing the point. The problem is not some content moderation policy, the problem is that social media has changed social conversations from small local interactions into monstrous virtual fight clubs between millions of people simultaneously, and where the most extreme opinions are rewarded with the most attention. Boring level headed opinions used to at least have a chanc…
"The only winning move is not to play."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just saying, only ~1/3 of the population votes. These elections are already illegitimate if you believe that they're supposed to express some kind of will of the majority. Additionally, the only areas of real contestation are suburban areas filled with reactionaries and relatively wealthy people. Dems have a lock on cities, Rs have a lock on rural areas. EDIT: Those of you downvoting, I think it's amusing that you th…
All of these presume low shifts in the Overton window, which may or may not currently hold true. Further, 1/3 of the population voting may be "rational" (folks figure their individual votes don't sway things or are uninformed and don't care to take the time), may be due to suppression (gerrymandering, ID hurdles for non-evident potential problems), or other factors.
If people think their votes don't matter in an alleged democratic system, that's a huge problem for its legitimacy. If they're uninformed, it's because they probably think that their vote doesn't matter or there's no good information for them. Both are troubling.
I feel like all of this debate is painfully missing the point. The problem is not some content moderation policy, the problem is that social media has changed social conversations from small local interactions into monstrous virtual fight clubs between millions of people simultaneously, and where the most extreme opinions are rewarded with the most attention. Boring level headed opinions used to at least have a chanc…
The other problem is that the business model of social media is based on generating "engagement" at all costs, so the platforms are built to encourage outrage as it generates lots of engagement, among other addictive behaviors (the infinite "algorithmic" feed for example). Social media was supposed to be a tool that serves people but its current business model encourages it to work against people. There were plenty o…
I haven't seen evidence that outrage driven engagement is profitable, though the statement is frequently repeated.
Is it possible that divisiveness is an intended effect?
We know that governments sow discord to achieve selfish ends. Why wouldn't similarly powerful business interests?
I feel like all of this debate is painfully missing the point. The problem is not some content moderation policy, the problem is that social media has changed social conversations from small local interactions into monstrous virtual fight clubs between millions of people simultaneously, and where the most extreme opinions are rewarded with the most attention. Boring level headed opinions used to at least have a chanc…
This is so right. But are you aware of any ideas what to do about this? It seems like everyone has just accepted that‘s the way it is now.
I think the idea is we need diversity in online social media. I'd like to see human editors come back. Here's how Benjamin Franklin dealt with his social media platform: "In the conduct of my newspaper, I carefully excluded all libelling and personal abuse, which is of late years become so disgraceful to our country. Whenever I was solicited to insert anything of that kind, and the writers pleaded, as they generally…
> I think the idea is we need diversity in online social media. I'd like to see human editors come back. People have tried. Either highly-moderated networks or "middle of the line" media. Other than a few exceptions (Real Clear Politics comes to mind), they've all failed. It's unfortunately clear that people don't want this.
It's that given an option to express themselves on social media, people like expressing strong tribalism the most. And then, all you need is to add even a hint of recommendation engine boosting more engaging content to the top (a very reasonable idea, heck, HN does that) and you have a vicious cycle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other problem is that the business model of social media is based on generating "engagement" at all costs, so the platforms are built to encourage outrage as it generates lots of engagement, among other addictive behaviors (the infinite "algorithmic" feed for example). Social media was supposed to be a tool that serves people but its current business model encourages it to work against people. There were plenty o…
> There were plenty of other technologies that could've been used to organize large-scale virtual fight clubs (forums, BBSes, chatrooms, maybe even the telephone) but this didn't happen because nobody actually wanted to foster such toxic behavior. “Nobody” is leaving out some pretty notorious sources of toxicity (e.g. 4chan). I think a key difference is that these huge platforms dramatically increase the reach of tho…
Facebook's famously tight-knit and tight-lipped engineering organization has become increasingly leaky in the past couple of years, as posts and data make it to the press with surprising regularity. What changed? Is it morale? Or something that happens at scale? Does the rate of leaks say anything about the health of the company?
What changed is that the company has grown immensely in numbers.
Maintaining a culture among an ever growing group of people is a tough task.
Does WeChat cause the same problems in China as Facebook & Twitter in the west?
Maintaining societal cohesion is the justification for a great many of PRC's actions (I would say 'evils', but that's my judgement), including the Great Firewall, extermination of Uyghurs, etc. It is fundamentally a waste of time to compare that society to America's melting pot on the level we're discussing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world is a big place, if you take any piece of content it’s bound to offend someone. Should we ban content that promotes the Big Bang theory because it’s offensive to creationists?
Does the Big Bang Theory encourage violence against creationists? I don’t ask that question seriously, just to point out that generalising things isn’t always useful. For example, “hate speech” is a defined term and the Big Bang theory ain’t it.