The internet wants to be fragmented
noahpinion.substack.com
The internet wants to be fragmented
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Re: The internet wants to be fragmented
#2Written on substack no less…
Re: The internet wants to be fragmented
#3Written on substack no less…
And yet you participate in society
Re: The internet wants to be fragmented
#4The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric.
Speaking up used to be something you do to change someone's mind or yours. What's the point in speaking up if nobody does anything with what you said?
The like button reprogrammed people. They started getting positive feedback for speaking in an echo chamber, for saying and doing things their audience already agrees with. They started getting negative feedback for doing the thing language was designed for.
Normal purposeful speech makes different opinions closer, while speech under the feedback of the like button makes similar opinions even closer and different opinions further apart.
If the interaction stays the same of course fragmentation is inevitable - but that's not a good thing. This fragmentation extends to the real world and has real consequences. It will blow up. Even with Twitter being internally fragmented the polarization in society grew. Nobody wants to listen to the other side anymore, while there's always the most to be learned from listening to the other side.
The core of the problem needs to be addressed: that social media has reprogrammed people to the purpose of speech.
One of the reasons I'm even bothering with websites like HN as opposed to social media is because it still feels like there's a slight chance of making people change their minds here.
Re: The internet wants to be fragmented
#5Not at all, we want to have a unified discourse, but we have vastly different values and therefore moderation preferences. The only solution to this is making moderation user-based, but with better UX than just block everyone you don't like. The user initiatives formed 'block lists' on twitter, which are kind of a good idea for this, you have decentralized decisions that get aggregated into a single filter which then the user simply applies if he chooses so.
Re: The internet wants to be fragmented
#6Written on substack no less…
"Fragmented" is not "eradicated".
The Famous Article:
> Why did this happen to the centralized internet when it hadn’t happened to the decentralized internet of previous decades?
The reason is that people scale poorly. Dunbar's Number[1] is a thing, and every human effort in physical- or cyber-space, sacred or profane, tends toward a Tower of Babel[2] over time.
Those that conform to Gall's Law[3] may prove relatively durable.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_la...
Re: The internet wants to be fragmented
#7The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric. Speaking up used to be something you do to change someone's mind or yours. What's the point in speaking up if nobody does anything with what you said? The like button reprogrammed people. They started getting positive feedback for speaking in an echo chamber, for saying and doing things their audience al…
Everything you say about the like button also applies to votes, so if the like button is what makes social media bad, I don't see why HN should be better.
Re: The internet wants to be fragmented
#8[deleted]
Re: The internet wants to be fragmented
#9I found myself agreeing with every word of this article. The penultimate paragraph summarizes it well:
> People call Twitter an indispensable public space because it’s the “town square”, but in the real world there isn’t just one town square, because there isn’t just one town. There are many. And the internet works when you can exit — when you can move to a different town if you don’t like the mayor or the local culture.
> Disagreement in society is necessary for progress, but it’s most constructive when it’s mediated by bonds of trust and affinity and semi-privacy.
Re: The internet wants to be fragmented
#10The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric. Speaking up used to be something you do to change someone's mind or yours. What's the point in speaking up if nobody does anything with what you said? The like button reprogrammed people. They started getting positive feedback for speaking in an echo chamber, for saying and doing things their audience al…
Speech is also about comfort and venting where echo chambers shine. And those chambers predate the social media. IME even IRL people tend to congregate mostly with like minded individuals.
And if the congregation turns out to have too many views in contrast to ones own then folks tend to leave.