[HN Gopher] Don't let social media think for you
___________________________________________________________________
Don't let social media think for you
Author : hnthrowaway2
Score : 355 points
Date : 2021-06-08 09:53 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.disgustinglyoptimistic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.disgustinglyoptimistic.com)
| cindarin wrote:
| I don't understand these posts.
|
| Why must the world at large censor themselves so an author can
| demand everyone see her work as perfection without hearing any
| other opinion? Why are the various, discordant voices considered
| "social media thinking for you", but the demand of absolute
| acquiescence is not?
| tristor wrote:
| I don't believe that's an accurate representation of the point
| the author of the article was trying to make. I believe that
| their point was that we should not pile on with mobs, believing
| that popularity or trends of the moment are correct (letting
| social media think for you) and instead perform our own
| analysis of available information or better yet avoid
| contentious situations altogether.
|
| Their point wasn't really about the author or the book, or the
| situation, it was a meta-analysis of the fact that many of the
| later participants in the mud-slinging online were reacting to
| the furor on social media, rather than to the original
| situation. If you analyze this more expansively, it's just an
| observation of the well understood sociological trend of
| reactionaries and counter-reactionaries.
| cindarin wrote:
| There's no analysis here. There's no detail whatsoever; those
| are intentionally omitted, supposedly to protect the readers
| from being bored. Instead, the blogger offers only opinion
| with no support at best, and falsehoods presented as truth at
| worst.
|
| I choose not to let them think for me. I will not disavow
| social media simply because some blogger expressed their own
| irrational, negative opinions of it.
| jiofih wrote:
| Very edgy. But you're not making any sense.
|
| The article has a clear message about mob mentality which
| you're simply choosing to ignore. It's an opinion piece, it
| doesn't need "truths". You can disagree if you want, but
| not discredit it.
| cindarin wrote:
| I am ignoring nothing. It is obvious that the author is
| stating that social media causes breakdowns into unruly
| mobs. I disagree with that sentiment. The author and I
| have differing opinions.
|
| However, the author decided to post a longform article on
| the topic with no evidence to support their claims, and
| in some cases, outright lies. I don't believe that claims
| should go unchallenged, especially when made on such
| flimsy ground.
|
| Don't allow your biases and reactionary tendencies to
| force you into the mob mentality you claim to stand
| against.
| jiofih wrote:
| I guess you're not on Twitter much? Mobs are an almost
| daily occurrence in my feed.
|
| What are the lies? Where is your challenge of them? So
| far you've only tried to directly discredit the author
| and not offered any counterpoints.
| cindarin wrote:
| I thought you believed truth and evidence were not
| necessary when sharing an opinion? What changed your
| opinion so quickly? Is it only necessary because I
| disagree with you?
|
| "my biggest gripe with social media. There is no room for
| nuance, there is no room for grey. Every interaction is
| based on reaction alone - reflection is rendered moot,
| because there will always be another scandal that needs
| attending to."
|
| That is inaccurate description. There are millions of
| voices with competing perspectives. Perhaps, borne of
| ones own ignorance, things can be viewed to be
| dichotomous, but choosing to be ignorant does not justify
| condemning others.
|
| "These pluralities are unable to exist on social media.
|
| There must always be objective truth, there must always
| be a side that wins, a side that loses, and there are
| extra points to whoever gets there first, never mind the
| consequences. This constant need for triumph is so
| dangerous and reductive. It removes the requirement for
| individual critical analysis - it is so easy to get swept
| up in the herd mentality and feel a rush of adrenaline
| when you agree with thousands of others online."
|
| This is a description of a subset of possible human
| communications. This is not an attribute of social media.
| This certainly doesn't describe the majority of
| interactions on Twitter, let alone the majority. Yes,
| sometimes some people behave this way. It's likely that
| all of us do at times. However, this reductive
| communication style has always existed.
|
| Blaming the medium for the negative interactions of the
| few is lazy, tired, and wholly uninteresting to me.
| jiofih wrote:
| I'll refrain from commenting on the first point - you
| already accused me of "bias and reactivity" and now that
| I asked you to flesh out your thoughts you turn to
| personal attacks, just like you did with the author.
| That's something to reflect on.
|
| It's not "the negative interactions of the few" when you
| have thousands upon thousands of people jumping into the
| latest issue of the day. Usually they're people from all
| over the world, without any access to context or more
| information on whatever is going on, which means there is
| no room for analytical thought - you watch the events
| unfold from afar, without interjecting, or you join the
| mob. See the recent basecamp controversy.
|
| You're intentionally ignoring the evidence as "not the
| majority", "the lazy", but it's a fact that this is
| happening, and happening on platforms like Twitter and
| Reddit. We didn't have this on Usenet, forums, news sites
| or any other previous media tool - it is evidently a
| product of social media, it's format and reach today. The
| existence of this phenomenon was not even in question in
| the article, the point is _how to interpret_ these
| events.
|
| Those quotes are not statements of absolute truth, but
| the author is trying to paint, in broad and colorful
| swathes for illustration purposes, the mentality that
| emerges from this phenomenon.
| cindarin wrote:
| Your very first words to me were an attempt at an insult,
| so please save the crocodile tears from having your
| hypocrisy mentioned. I accused you of bias and
| reactionary tendencies, although I was intending anyone
| who reacts to the existence of social media this way.
|
| I'll attempt to be clear. I believe your bias is your
| agreement with the author on this topic. The reactionary
| tendency to which I referred is the one I believe you and
| the author share, that social media inherently diminishes
| discussions and people involved into an unthinking mass.
| There's no evidence of this, so I assumed it was simply a
| delusion borne of reaction to seeing something you didn't
| like. These are clearly unproved assumptions on my part,
| but you've done nothing to indicate otherwise.
|
| To address the rest of what you said, it's largely false.
| The phrase "Flame War" originated on usenet and other
| early message boards. The undesirable human communication
| styles existed prior to any internet medium and certainly
| will differ in form medium to medium.
|
| On Twitter, the people who interact with a post are a
| small fraction of those who see the post who are fraction
| of the people using the medium. Of those who interact,
| there are likely to be various opinions. It is quite
| literally the few. It can still be an easily recognizable
| phenomenon while being perpetrated by relatively few
| members of the population.
|
| Yes, the scale of communication between individuals has
| continued to increase as time progresses. The internet
| has revolutionized that. That unfortunately does mean
| that you will come into contact with more individuals who
| say or do things you dislike. Broadly condemning people
| as unthinking or other baseless assumptions is not a
| reasonable response to this phenomenon. It's lazy.
| askafriend wrote:
| > Blaming the medium for the negative interactions of the
| few is lazy, tired, and wholly uninteresting to me.
|
| The medium (in this case Twitter) is in fact a part of
| the problem and there are very specific features that
| contribute to it. The quote tweet feature is a good
| example. It fundamentally amplifies and encourages
| combative exchanges and negativity through its design.
|
| In fact looking at how a platform can prevent or
| encourage certain kinds of behavior/interactions is
| _super interesting_ when you dive deep - I don 't find it
| lazy or tired at all.
| cindarin wrote:
| What you have to say is very interesting. However, it is
| not the content of the article.
| philsnow wrote:
| > These pluralities are unable to exist on social media. There
| must always be objective truth, there must always be a side that
| wins, a side that loses [...]
|
| But neither side "wins". They both just shout louder and louder
| in their own side's echo chamber, with only a tiny porthole into
| the other's echo chamber, until it finally blows over.
|
| Getting bent out of shape on twitter is like screaming
| obscenities into a pillow, but there's a public record of what
| you screamed.
| root_axis wrote:
| Live by the sword die by the sword. The author in question wanted
| to share and cash in on her story by selling it to the masses,
| when someone among the masses reacted with very mild criticism to
| her work she antagonized them publicly and the masses didn't like
| that. Oh well, be nice online if you want to harvest the denizens
| of the internet to make a living.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Well, there's an old saying: "there's no such thing a bad
| publicity". Every time you enrage one group on Twitter, you
| potentially engage another.
| ggggtez wrote:
| This subject was written about as well by the esteemed Jon
| Ronson, in "So you've been publicly shamed". Reading it today may
| sound quaint, but it's also interesting to know that he also
| wrote about Alex Jones several years before 2016.
| sattoshi wrote:
| It's such an unpleasant experience speaking to someone who has
| bought into some form of group-think on a topic. One of my
| college friends, otherwise an extremely bright guy would
| frustrate me immensely whenever any political topic came up.
|
| Not because we disagreed, but rather because I felt I was talking
| to John Oliver or whatever other pundit he recently listened to
| on a topic. Same points. Same statements. Same words.
|
| Discussing the root of his propositions were impossible, because
| they weren't his. He didn't think about them, someone else did.
| kwyjibo1230 wrote:
| I agree with the sentiments about mob rule on social media being
| extremely negative.
|
| The thing that always amuses me about any sites with ratings is
| that most people (the site owners, the reviewees, the reviewers)
| often assume that everyone has the same barometer for 1-5 stars.
| That's very likely not the case.
|
| Take Goodreads as an example. My Personal barometer is
|
| * 5 star = I would re-read this multiples because it was so
| interesting/engaging/life changing.
|
| * 4 star = I really liked this book. I probably wouldn't re-read
| it but it was memorable.
|
| * 3 star = Pretty good book.
|
| * 2 star = Book had some flaws or it didn't appeal to me for
| specific reasons. I didn't like it.
|
| * 1 star = I did not like this book at all, and I would tell
| people not to read it.
|
| I think there are probably a lot of people that disagree with my
| barometer :) Maybe their 5 star is anything "pretty good" or
| above, and their 1 star is "this author should be banned from
| authorship, that's how much I disliked this book."
|
| Curious to see what other folks' barometers are.
| ggggtez wrote:
| I imagine many people use:
|
| 5 stars - I liked it
|
| 1 star. - I didn't like it
|
| In fact, I imagine many people do this.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| This gets to my biggest issue with social media: the primacy of
| the collective opinion.
|
| As the article states, nuance has no place, nor does the idea
| that we should evaluate something based on its intrinsic
| qualities. Instead, the most important thing about _everything_
| is what We think about it in this instant. And that is highly
| mutable: We will change that whenever we wish, and you need to
| keep up.
|
| The very notion that something can be evaluated based on
| intrinsic qualities (such as a person's character, a thing's
| aesthetics, the efficacy of a policy) is devalued because they do
| not serve the ultimate goal of a collective opinion. Science is a
| meme/religion we trot out to justify our already-formed beliefs.
|
| The reason this is such a problem is that you cannot develop any
| sort of taste if you are constantly out-sourcing it to a
| constantly-shifting collective opinion. And taste is a requisite
| for skill.
| Growling_owl wrote:
| It's not just social media.
|
| Media in general has a heavy bias on negative reporting , that's
| because humans are wired to have huge spikes in attention when
| there is a hint of bad news or character assassination.
|
| Back in the days it used to be monodirectional stream: from the
| Newspapers, Radios, TV towards the population. The internet and
| social media just amped up this phenomenon globally and the
| person which is the subject of the character assasination du jour
| has the immediate feedback of millions of people piling in and
| commenting aganist them.
|
| There is no defense mechanism really. The only way is trying to
| make money having the least amount of interactions as possible
| and in a position which is not under the spotlight.
|
| New York City, Wall Street and the financial sector will benefit
| from this, also sports betting comes to mind and every domain
| where the arena is already built and you enter it knowing that
| it's a zero sum game. Other winners will be a particular
| demographic which historically always needs to be on the lookout
| for social unrest and people ganging up against them. They have
| the most sensitive internal alarms and have timely retreated to
| finance
| throwkeep wrote:
| Yes, the news media is a slower and more centralized outrage
| machine. The upside of social media is that it's harder to
| manufacture consent (h/t Noam Chomsky) as it consists of
| millions of voices. Though that's threatened by the coordinated
| censorship of big tech, as we saw with the lab leak hypotheses
| and people being silenced on twitter, facebook and youtube for
| challenging the approved narrative on that. It finally broke
| though, but it took over a year! Although without social media,
| maybe that process would have taken decades?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Idk - I think manufacturing consent may be easier rather than
| harder these days. The fact that it's now realistic to accuse
| people of being a bot (GPT-3) means that elites could just
| deploy large numbers of language models fine tuned and
| prompted correctly to AstroTurf and manufactur consent "from
| the ground up".
| klyrs wrote:
| It's not even hypothetical; governments can and do fund
| astroturfers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27368214
| beloch wrote:
| "Within five minutes of this decision I became distracted by my
| phone and started scrolling through twitter. One of the trending
| topics was "Lauren Hough, Goodreads" and since I was determined
| to procrastinate on my literary endeavours for as long as
| possible (what's another five minutes on a five year record?), I
| decided to have a look. "
|
| It sounds like Hough knows how to whip up some social media
| outrage to generate free press. The author of this piece would
| never have heard about Hough or her book were it not for a little
| incendiary language lighting a giant signal fire of hate on the
| endless pile of fuel that is twitter. The author of this post
| literally let social media select a book for him/her to read. If
| you go on to read Hough's book because of this post on HN, you
| can join the club!
|
| It does make you wonder how many awesome books will go completely
| ignored over the next decade because their authors didn't know
| how or weren't willing to ride the social media hate wave.
| paxys wrote:
| 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 "<company> 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.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Crucial distinction:
|
| * Individual identities are less important/influential on HN
| than twitter
|
| * The community is much smaller on HN than twitter
|
| * The conversation is more nuanced. We have paragraphs vs. 240
| characters
|
| * We have voting to squelch really low effort or trolling. The
| informal guidelines of the community discourage downvoting an
| otherwise decent post because you don't agree.
|
| ---
|
| This all adds up to a very different kind of "mob action".
| young_unixer wrote:
| I don't think those are the important differences.
|
| Reddit has most of that, and a significant amount of subs
| there are just cesspools of hate.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Points 2 and 4.
|
| HN is like the equivalent of a small, curated, relatively
| mature subreddit that avoids being discovered by other
| reddit users.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Accurate, but this is a somewhat imperfect strategy in
| many contexts. You will probably find this article
| interesting.
|
| https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/
| [deleted]
| mavsman wrote:
| These are two really good points. I feel much more innocent
| attacking a large corporation than I do individuals.
|
| > You cannot fix the problem without acknowledging that we are
| all part of it.
|
| I think this one is even more important because it's more far-
| reaching and applicable. It's easy to point fingers but hard to
| look inside and cleanse the inner vessel.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| > Almost every day there's a "<company> did bad thing to me"
| article on the front page and people immediately pick up their
| pitchforks and join the mob
|
| It's even worse than that: Frequently there's a "Cool
| technology blog by company," and people come chime in with
| their completely unrelated grievance with <company>.
| sbagel wrote:
| 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 culture is arrogant and overly pragmatic which is especially
| egregious when dealing with nuanced topics. At least on twitter
| you can find takes from different viewpoints of a topic, not
| the monoculture hivemind created by social sites with upvotes
| and downvotes.
| joshlemer wrote:
| What might be a better mechanism to bring the best content
| forward, which doesn't suffer from this issue? Would you just
| advocate against downvoting in general, or is there something
| else you have in mind?
| sigotirandolas wrote:
| Traditional forums (such as phpBB) where posting "bumps" a
| thread are better in some regards. "Bumping" a thread at
| least requires you make more effort than clicking a button,
| posts inside a thread are unranked, and they encourage more
| in-depth discussion since threads can be long-lived.
|
| RSS is great once you find interesting content but it
| doesn't help much in finding new content.
|
| Otherwise... if you browse ranked boards such as
| HN/Reddit/etc., for topics such as politics (anything
| without a demonstrable answer, really), its also worth
| looking at both the stream of new comments, as well as the
| _worst-rated_ comments. Most often the worst-rated comments
| are often just dumb spam or someone who makes no logical
| sense, but if someone tries to make a point and still gets
| massively downvoted for it (as opposed to just ignored), he
| may be striking on something.
| coldtea wrote:
| It's not that the people who form a twitter mob don't think or
| "let twitter think for them".
|
| It's that they actively enjoy hurting someone as a mob. They get
| a kick out of it, and it's not discouraged (as would be actually
| forming a mob out in the streets be). If anything, it's
| encouraging, and gives them not just the joy of kicking someone
| who is down, but also "good person" credits (because the one
| getting kicked is a bad person, of course).
|
| In other words, people are not mislead "against their better
| nature": they are just encouraged to embrace their badness.
| semitones wrote:
| I was thinking something similar. If a person has the
| inclination to jump on the bandwagon for any given situation,
| they are probably actively getting something out of it.
|
| I have a theory that it could have something to do with the
| haves and the have nots. Whenever some relatively public figure
| (by default, without critical thinking, is usually labeled as a
| "have"), slips up in some way, no matter how small, the have
| nots jump on the opportunity to join a crusade of righteousness
| where they strike down the goliath for abusing their unfairly
| acquired power.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| It's not necessarily the "have nots" who jump on the
| bandwagon. Many of these mob inciters are clearly middle
| class or upper middle class. I've even seen news anchors
| participate, people who earn several hundreds of thousands a
| year. In some cases, it may have to do with crab mentality.
| Wanting to pull someone down who has more than them:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
|
| However, if you look at the way James Damore was taken down,
| or that woman who made a stupid joke at the airport, these
| people weren't particularly rich compared to their peers. I
| think that had more to do with wanting to silence dissenting
| voices and kick someone while they're down, never giving them
| an opportunity to defend themselves or to have an open
| discussion.
| sneak wrote:
| > _It 's that they actively enjoy hurting someone as a mob._
|
| The "mob" analogy is a bad one here. Sending mean tweets and a
| group beating someone to death in a town square are nowhere
| near equivalent.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Wish there was a double upvote button for this. Far too often
| we assume ignorance when malice/sadism is a more correct
| diagnosis. (reversing the common adage of not attributing to
| malice what is better attributed to ignorance)
|
| For example, many of my friends don't understand why Americans
| like to watch biased news. Many think that it's not a concious
| choice from most Americans. The reality is that most Americans
| know that they can watch C-SPAN to avoid being lied to - they
| just don't do it because it's so fking boring. Americans want
| to be lied to, much as Twitter users want to mob and destroy
| "bad people"...
| munificent wrote:
| It's interesting that this comment and its replies use the
| third person "they" where many other comments in this thread
| use "we" (or the even more othering and accusatory
| "Americans").
|
| I agree completely that one of the main drivers of mob behavior
| is that it feels good. However, I don't pretend to be immune to
| that dark corner of human psychology.
|
| We are a tribal species. Our evolutionary history is imprinted
| with the reality that for thousands of years sticking with our
| tribe meant survival, as did warring with other tribes that
| wanted our resources. And even within our tribe, shunning has
| always been an important form of social control.
|
| Now, I'm not committing the naturalist fallacy and saying that
| this behavior is _right_ or justifiable. But the seeds of mob
| mentality are within us all and we won 't make progress by
| blaming it all on others without acknowledging that they aren't
| so different from ourselves.
|
| If you want this to happen less often, you need to learn how
| some people avoid it and teach that skill to others.
| neolog wrote:
| > However, I don't pretend to be immune to that dark corner
| of human psychology.
|
| I honestly don't think I have that impulse, and I know other
| people who don't seem to either. It's always disturbing when
| I see my peers turning into a mob.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _It 's interesting that this comment and its replies use
| the third person "they" where many other comments in this
| thread use "we" (or the even more othering and accusatory
| "Americans")._
|
| Well, I for one don't use Twitter or pile on for mob jobs
| elsewhere. At worst, I can bore someone with my multiple
| responses and counter-arguments on HN!
|
| > _I agree completely that one of the main drivers of mob
| behavior is that it feels good. However, I don 't pretend to
| be immune to that dark corner of human psychology._
|
| I'm not immune to other dark corners of human psychology, but
| I'm pretty immune to that. I hate mobs, and I might even
| argue the opposite way than those who have the upper hand in
| such a situation, just for balancing things out (a sort of
| "devil's advocate").
|
| I think because of some spectrum issues, one of my problems
| is the opposite, being too neutral to bond with my peer group
| (even if I have one).
|
| So, even though I'm generally leftist, for example, and can
| defend even Stalin with the best of them, I can also argue
| for conservative positions just as easily (and at the very
| least, don't reject the arguments of the other side
| immediately and impulsively, as many do. I have to analyze
| them to death, and will happily accept one if it sounds
| logical to me.
| jjulius wrote:
| >... and it's not discouraged...
|
| There are a lot of people who have been speaking out against
| "cancel culture", would that not be a form of trying to
| discourage social media mobs?
| awillen wrote:
| That depends a lot on the context of who's saying it, which
| leads back to the same problem of a lack of nuance and
| understanding.
|
| If you're Donald Trump saying that people decrying the fact
| that you caused the attempted coup on January 6th is cancel
| culture, then no, you're not trying to discourage social
| media mobs. You're selfishly employing the cancel culture
| trope as a shield against any attack, by employing the logic
| that if a lot of people are attacking you, it must be a
| raging cancellation mob.
|
| If you're OP, on the other hand, speaking out in an objective
| way about an event that you're not associated with, then
| yeah, you're trying to discourage social media mobs and good
| on your for that.
|
| At this point, many of the accusations of "cancel culture"
| are from people who are trying to cancel people criticizing
| them. The only way out of it is for everybody to really
| understand the stuff they're talking about and provide well-
| informed thoughts that don't use buzzwords like "cancel
| culture."
|
| How we achieve that, I do not know.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| A lot of people who most loudly decry cancel culture are
| themselves big practitioners of it and are just being
| hypocrites - I'm referring to celebrity pundits and other
| public figures, not you.
| coldtea wrote:
| Sure, that's in a sense a movement to discourage this.
|
| But my point was that it is still a niche movement, in the
| sense that when you're acting as part of an internet mob or a
| cancel mob or any kind of social mob, you don't get much of a
| backlash for it (even if you're not just a cog, but a
| prominent part of one).
|
| Whereas if you were being a jerk in some other way, you'd
| immediately be called on that.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Not letting social media think for you applies equally well to HN
| comment sections.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > _After a cursory glance, and getting through the heated bluster
| that often clogs up any twitter debate, I had a general
| understanding of the situation._
|
| I'm not sure if this was layered meta-commentary or a lack self-
| awareness. Either way, I chuckled
| wonderfulness wrote:
| > These pluralities are unable to exist on social media
|
| I broadly agree with the author, but I have a small nit regarding
| the above sentence. Pluralities definitely are able to exist on
| social media, it's just that it is far easier to get swept up in
| sensationalism, outrage and gossip than it is to find and
| continue seeing sensible and well-thought posts. The initial days
| of social media enabled the former, but got drowned out when mass
| popularity was reached. Think early days Twitter and Quora.
|
| I say this as a person who has no social media accounts, but uses
| twitter intermittently without an account. It is possible to find
| nice things on the internet using a pull-based model, i.e. when
| you actively search for (not just passively follow!) the good
| stuff and actively block out all the bad stuff. Problem is that
| SM companies make it increasingly difficult to do this, plus
| trusting your reading list to the "recommended" and "trending
| now" sections of a social media feed causes issues. But knowing
| for what to search and how yields good results which you would
| not be able to find if you have a blanket ban on anything social-
| related.
| js8 wrote:
| I think curation (of said pluralities) would be possible on
| social media (like it's possible for example on Wikipedia), but
| the interactions are effectively owned (controlled) by the
| media owner, and they don't necessarily want the participants
| to have that power.
| rurabe wrote:
| https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/giants.html
| mjparrott wrote:
| Social media is great for finding people with similar interests.
| I like to cook a certain type of food, and there is a community
| there of people who share ideas and the dishes they have made. I
| like it. It's great.
|
| If 'hate' is your 'interest', then you can find lots of people
| with similar hate online.
| throw67456756 wrote:
| I used to approach social media this way but lately it's become
| miserable. Politics has seeped into every corner, including
| real life, and everyone seems radicalized to one extreme or
| another. For example, I like art, most artists are leftists,
| same thing with writing and writers, and a few other areas. My
| views do not align to any particular side. Now years ago, this
| wouldn't have been a problem, most people did not have a
| problem being friends with people of different views. But now,
| if I want to participate in any community I have to bite my
| tongue. I see people getting bullied and ostracized for the
| most minor stuff. There's a mob waiting around every corner. I
| have to keep any politics completely out of any accounts
| (instead I know have one for just politics, which probably
| makes it sound obsessed, but what else is there to do). In
| some, like writing, I've stopped participating. Meanwhile the
| communities just get more and more toxic and political and it
| sucks all the fun away to even consume them.
| nemosaltat wrote:
| Bennie Noakes sits in front of a set tuned to SCANALYZER orbiting
| on Triptine and saying over and over, "Christ what an imagination
| I've got!"
| KittenInABox wrote:
| I feel like the described events as depicted lack nuance, which
| is ironic because the essay itself describes nuance. It misses,
| for example, that Lauren didn't react this way to one Goodreads
| reviewer, but several, and didn't remove the reviewers' names
| when blasting people to her many many thousands of followers.
|
| I totally and entirely agree that Twitter has too much of a mob
| mentality from a lack of nuance but I am very against depicting
| this lack of nuance with a lack of nuance. The backlash against
| Lauren was utterly ridiculous and indefensible but that is not a
| reason to sensationalize and flatten facts.
| SamBam wrote:
| 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 they really do such
| wrong that the 10,000th voice is needed?
|
| I am ashamed to say I've done it myself, back when I was on
| Twitter. My feed would start lighting up with some really Bad
| thing that so-and-so said -- and generally it _was_ "Bad" -- and
| I'd add my voice somewhere to that cacophony. Not necessarily
| writing to the Bad Person, but chiming in on someone's long
| thread.
|
| Now I look back and see I was another participant in the mob.
|
| Look, the author described in the post absolutely did herself no
| favors. Her book may have been great, but the way she interacted
| with people on social media was absolutely not. But being the
| 10,000th person to tell her that is _never_ necessary. That 's
| just wanting to join a mob, because mobs are fun, because you're
| all justified in this act together.
|
| Mobs are scary, _because_ everyone thinks they are justified. A
| good friend of mine grew up in Kenya and recounted that when he
| was about nine, he saw a mob catch a thief. Joining in with
| everyone else, he took a wire and whipped the man. Next thing he
| knew, the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him
| on fire. He has never forgotten the guilt he felt.
| cableshaft wrote:
| 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 friends list.
| I click them, and 80% of their feed is just their takes on the
| daily outrage du jour. I don't really know who they actually
| are as people anymore, unless this is the entirety of their
| being now.
|
| So now as a general rule I don't post anything about current
| events on social media, and stick with things actually about
| myself. I might make a comment on someone else's post
| sometimes, but not post about it myself.
|
| I will probably make an exception here or there about climate
| change, because in my opinion that subject is being way too
| glossed over by society as a whole and is a much larger and
| more imminent threat than "this person did a bad thing and we
| must shun them now".
| jrmg wrote:
| The meme of "if you don't speak up, you're complicit" is part
| of this.
|
| I appreciate the sentiment, but there are just too many
| (terrible!) inequities in the world to live by this and not
| have it be a full time preoccupation.
| parafactual wrote:
| Also, is social media really the best way to take action
| against terrible inequity? I would think if one believes
| the uninvolved are complicit, they would also look for more
| effective methods than saying something is bad on Twitter.
| thewakalix wrote:
| Related: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-
| perfect-ever...
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| That's why I quit Twitter. I use to have four topic-specific
| accounts. However, it eventually ended up that I was seeing
| the same outrage du jour on all four and that's when it was
| time for me to leave.
| ph2082 wrote:
| 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.
| throwkeep wrote:
| 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? Instead spending their time creating tools and
| methods to censor non-mob participants? (e.g. those who were
| exploring the lab leak hypothesis) Why isn't the mob a top
| priority?
| slightwinder wrote:
| > Why has Twitter the company and its employees not taken
| action to deal with this?
|
| They did. They tried many things, still do. But it's hard to
| fix without wasting the whole platform and becoming another
| reddit. What makes Twitter great is also what makes it
| aweful.
| cvwright wrote:
| Just goes to show how the fundamental design decisions
| guide how the system as a whole will behave. Short messages
| and no coherent threading makes for a perfect breeding
| ground for snark and hot takes. It's hard to say something
| thoughtful in 280 characters, but it's easy to say
| something nasty.
|
| You can spend tons of money on trust & safety, tweaks to
| the UI, whatever. But a bad system design is still a bad
| system design.
|
| It's kind of like trying to make an old C codebase secure
| by throwing in lots of calls to strlen() and changing some
| sprintf()'s to snprintf(). It may help a little, but it's
| not enough to turn the ship.
| bluGill wrote:
| Facebook doesn't have the same 280 character limit, yet
| it suffers from similar problems.
| cvwright wrote:
| Good point. Another hypothesis then: The real problem is
| the ad-driven "curation" that selects for drama and
| outrage to keep users "engaged" so they stay on the site
| for longer to view more ads.
|
| This would explain why "social media" like FB and Twitter
| are so much worse than their predecessors (blogs, forums,
| email, sms, ...). All of the previous media could be bad
| too, but this is different.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _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 them a
| notification, and they're right back into the ad delivery
| mill, engaged and outraged.
|
| And all that means more money for the company. Which is their
| interest.
|
| YouTube's guiding goal (at least some years back, as I heard
| it) was to increase hours watched. Period. Hours watched was
| the metric they optimized for, above all else. And it showed
| in the various recommendations that looked very broken from
| the outside world, but those tended to add hours watched.
|
| I don't think the algorithms were nearly smart enough to know
| that they were recommending some conspiracy theorist gateway
| video, or extreme political content, or such. They simply
| knew, "If we get people to watch this video, they will then
| spend a lot more time on YouTube." So, the more people that
| watch that video one way or another, the more hours watched,
| problem improved! It's very "paperclip maximizer" seeming
| sort of algorithm.
|
| Given that it's been known for years how to "drive your users
| nuts to keep them coming back" and social media companies
| have refined this to near perfection (it's Vegas in your
| pocket, without any of the regulations and rules Vegas
| casinos have to abide by), I'm in favor of some regulation on
| this sort of stuff, but I'm not at all sure it will actually
| matter. :/
| edmundsauto wrote:
| > Angry, pissed off, outraged users are, from the
| perspective of social media companies, the best users
|
| In the long term, these users make a community toxic and
| less viable in the long run. People don't come back after a
| long enough time.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Because it's not their job to moderate this stuff
|
| And I'm not sure it would be better if it were. I don't
| care if a bunch of people I've never met are talking about
| what a horrible person I am (well ok, I do, but that's more
| of a me problem than a them problem). I do care when my
| employer joins the mob and ignores any evidence I might
| present of my innocence. What we need are for the people
| who can mete out the _consequences_ to start thinking
| longer and harder before they capitulate to the outrage
| mob. A little less "better him than me" and a little more
| "I'd hate to be treated this way myself".
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| "So what if our AI is becoming self-aware and making
| questionable decisions? Or job is to win government
| contracts" - skynet employee, August 3rd, 1997 :)
| AndrewUnmuted wrote:
| > it's Vegas in your pocket, without any of the regulations
| and rules Vegas casinos have to abide by
|
| > I'm in favor of some regulation on this sort of stuff
|
| You really nailed the problem but I am not so sure about
| your solution. The gambling industry's regulations do not
| do very much to reduce the volume of lives ruined by the
| gambling industry.
|
| We've been gambling since the paleolithic period, and like
| other vices, its regulation serves largely to hide it from
| public view, rather than actually fix any social problems.
| Regulating social media in any meaningful way will do the
| same; compliance with these regulations will force the
| issue further into the corporate depths and away from
| public view.
|
| We already know the social media firms collude with
| governments around the world in secretive tribunals to deal
| with issues of "national security." We don't want to
| encourage further developments on this front.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _The gambling industry 's regulations do not do very
| much to reduce the volume of lives ruined by the gambling
| industry._
|
| No, but if I walk into a casino, there's at least some
| chance I can come out with more money than I went in
| with.
|
| Consider a slot machine app. Not only do you have no idea
| what the payout is, you're _guaranteed_ to lose money if
| you pay for any coins in that game, which I assure you,
| people do. For reasons I don 't understand, but I've seen
| it happen.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Not defending online casinos, but there are some people
| who enjoy playing slot machines even without the
| possibility of winning money, just like some people like
| playing Candy Crush -- or Call of Duty, for that matter.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Twitter is largely a platform for self-promotion. This Hough
| lady wanted to promote her snarky attitude and encourage her
| followers to dunk on people who leave book reviews on
| GoodReads. it's a good example of 'be careful what you ask
| for'; if you cultivate attention in order to be toxic, you
| can't really complain when that rebounds upon you.
|
| It's often _not_ the case that people see a mob forming and
| jump in, in most cases. What people see is someone they know
| quote-tweeting an obnoxious person, or someone they already
| follow saying something obnoxious, and they condemn the
| obnoxious behavior. The more engagement an original tweet
| gets the more likely other people are to see it in their
| feed, regardless of whether it 's obnoxious, funny, or
| whatever.
|
| One time I replied to a sanctimonious statement from a
| politician with a mildly critical but also mildly witty
| reply, read a few other tweets and went on with my day. I
| don't get notifications from Twitter and was astonished to
| find the next day that my tweet had blown up and been quoted
| in a national publication. In fact all of my 'high
| performing' tweets over the years have been casual
| witticisms, but I've never seen one take off in real time
| because I only look at it intermittently. I suggest that
| rather than an angry mob, what you're seeing is simply the
| aggregation of multiple similar reactions. Few to none of
| those were necessarily invested with enormous significance by
| the people making them, unlike a real world mob.
|
| This is not to say, of course, that theren't people who like
| going around condemning others, and Twitter does have a habit
| of showing you multiples of people posting about the same
| thing, as opposed to showing The Thing once and observing
| that 10 people you follow have left comments about it.
| corndoge wrote:
| Engagement
| qsort wrote:
| > 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 solved this problem by effectively
| limiting access to large scale communication, with small
| elites acting as gatekeepers. Social media tore down the
| metaphorical wall, allowing any random person to talk to
| anybody who will listen.
|
| This is, by and large, a _good_ thing. However, those elites
| did play a role, because they could keep each other in check
| and enforce standards of behavior that would prevent the
| worst abuses.
|
| So the question is not how we go back to the 70s or something
| (yet again, the change is overall in the right direction),
| but how we can replace the missing piece. Needless to say, I
| don't even know where to start.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Large-scale community is an oxymoron, and I think the
| sooner we realise that the better.
|
| Communities are built on trust and relationships, what
| happens at social platforms is that people with "large
| communities" are just creating followings the same way that
| celebrities always have, which are a weird modern
| corruption of the idea of a community (or if you want the
| academic term for it, a parasocial relationship).
| sharken wrote:
| I think of Hacker News as a community, but it's still
| large enough that you don't really notice who is posting.
|
| What makes a difference to me are the insights you get
| here combined with thoughtful answers, as in rarely the
| lowest common denominator type of discussions.
|
| For that there are all too many forgettable social media
| sites.
| OJFord wrote:
| It took me years, (I don't mean that to sound like I was
| trying) but I have actually started recognising quite a
| few usernames. Not even particularly prolific/high karma
| users, or at least not only them, just people with some
| common interests so we're frequently reading/commenting
| on the same things I suppose.
| lurker619 wrote:
| Exactly. Many times I've typed out a comment and at the
| last moment refrain from posting, because I feel it
| doesn't really add to the discussion. I'd rather there be
| less higher-quality comments, than many comments like
| mine justing adding +1. Ironically, I almost deleted this
| comment.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Hacker News isn't a community in any meaningful sense. I
| have had interpersonal interactions with maybe half a
| dozen people from here, all very positive but I don't
| _know_ these people like I know my neighbours or my
| friends or even the people who work at the local shop.
|
| Hacker News is a very large and impersonal forum. You can
| have interesting conversations on a forum, but the degree
| to which they are a community is the degree to which you
| develop relationships with the other people. I wouldn't
| call /r/videos (or any other massive subreddit) a
| community either, and they have the same level of social
| intimacy.
| Multicomp wrote:
| > Hacker News is a very large and impersonal forum
|
| Agreed. Aside from recognizing some familiar
| usernames[1], unless you know someone from IRL or via
| another social media platform, the posts all 'pseudo-
| anonymously' blend together. The standardized comment
| formats, fonts, and command bar next to each comment help
| make it so, even if you perform per-page custom styling.
|
| [1] my personal list OTOMH is tctpateck(sp?),
| dragonwriter, doreenmichelle, dang(ok thats a gimme),
| sklabnik
| anigbrowl wrote:
| People with huge followings are just e-celebs, but one
| can be a (shallow) part of a large community of people
| with similar interests in a particular topic. To the
| extent that you have somethin gin common with other
| people, and to the extent that that thing is unusual or
| costly in some fashion, you'll typically going to feel a
| sense of connection to someone you hear or read about
| without necessarily knowing them.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Yes I think there are two things that are needed to form
| bonds: small numbers, and common context. Having a common
| interest in motorcycle repair or horticulture or
| something works, but HN's common interest is just
| commenting on the Internet and probably being a
| programmer, which isn't significant to bond over even
| disregarding the huge group size.
| gjhh244 wrote:
| You're definitely right. If you don't personally know and
| somewhat trust other people in your community, chances
| are it's not really a community at all.
| bckr wrote:
| > 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 attention management.
|
| I think I need to write my senators.
| qsort wrote:
| > Web forums and blogs were better.
|
| I don't think they were _inherently_ better. And don 't
| get me wrong, I have a mostly positive experience with
| forums and blogs and an extremely negative experience
| with social networks, eventually I deleted every single
| account I am not required to have for work-related
| reasons.
|
| However, I believe the underlying reason is that pre-
| Facebook communities were more "selective". Being part of
| those forums or reading blogs was more of a deliberate
| choice rather than the societal average, something like
| HN, early Slashdot or early Reddit. This resulted in user
| bases that were _not_ cross-sections of the general
| population.
|
| In the alternate universe where forums and blogs became
| the mainstream, I believe we would have seen the same
| problems.
|
| Algorithmic feeds are literally evil incarnate and I'd
| love nothing more than to see them nuked out of
| existence, but I don't think they are the root of the
| problem, at least not in this particular case.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I think I can break your point down into two smaller
| facets:
|
| * the notion of voluntary association. How many social
| media users use social media because they think they're
| supposed to? Voluntary association facilitates the
| perception of good faith on the part of others by its
| nature.
|
| * the type of user, e.g. an enthusiast vs otherwise. A
| lot of social media's problems stem from it's crazy
| scale, which, as a byproduct, increases the amount of bad
| apples and their visibility.
|
| Forums and their ilk had similar problems with cabals and
| such, but the fact that they weren't the single
| destination to be made the stakes lower. I can see a
| future where we cede current social networks to the very
| online crowd and let them continue to play their power
| games in their own little sandbox while the rest of the
| world moves on.
| vlunkr wrote:
| 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.
| throwkeep wrote:
| A good start would be:
|
| Remove the algorithmic feed
|
| Remove the Trending bar
|
| Increase character length
|
| Ban witch hunts
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I have tweets come up in chronological rather than
| selected order, and it's still crap on a regular bases
| because people are crap. There's not much you can do
| besides unfollowing people who are consistently annoying
| or vapid.
|
| I think retweets/quote tweets are a bigger problem. I can
| understand why a large number of people I follow might
| tweet about the same thing, but I don't need to see that
| thing reproduced 10 times.
| Domenic_S wrote:
| When everyone has a megaphone you only hear the people who
| are screaming next to you.
| Jorengarenar wrote:
| > I've heard it said that it was intended to be a place for
| good discussion
|
| What? No. Where had you heard that? Twitter was meant to be
| SMS in the Internet - for _quick_ comments, _quick_ news,
| _quick_ updates, _short_ notices, _short_ etc.
| jonfromsf wrote:
| because it makes money. Why would they want to stop it?
| People have a weird mental model where they think private
| companies are the government. They're just a group of people
| getting paid to make money for investors.
| [deleted]
| randphys wrote:
| Is it really only the job of government to make ethical
| decisions? Surely companies and employees can and should
| try to be ethical. Just because there is profit involved
| doesn't mean that we should throw out our humanity.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > Is it really only the job of government to make ethical
| decisions?
|
| one of the theoretical principals of capitalism is that
| free markets allow people to use their money as a proxy
| for ethical support and ethical decision making.
|
| this principal is theoretical because of straight up
| apathy - people just cant be fucked. there are other
| minor contributing factors like information asymmetry,
| but the real issue with capitalism, like any
| politcal/economic system, is the people. PEBKAC.
|
| if people cared and the market was free enough, ethical
| companies would simply put others out of business.
| qsort wrote:
| The point is, there are a lot of conflicting ways to be
| 'ethical'. It's not like we have a universal loss
| function we should minimize.
|
| Any moral dilemma slightly more complicated than 'is
| killing wrong' is a tradeoff, and sometimes you can't
| blame people if they prefer a point on the curve
| different from the point on the curve you like.
|
| Maybe in this case they are just wrong -- I have no
| sympathy for Twitter either. But I'd rather companies, in
| general, not try and play God. Even more so, I _really_
| would rather the government not try and play God.
| bluGill wrote:
| > Any moral dilemma slightly more complicated than 'is
| killing wrong' is a tradeoff
|
| Even killing is a trade off. Every country has a military
| of some sort. Every village has some form of police that
| can kill (some are much more likely to kill than others,
| but eventually all police forces can bring on death if
| the situation is bad enough). There have been cannibal
| societies in history (not very common from what I can
| tell, but they did exist) that would give a different
| answer as to what killing is moral than most of us.
| qpwoeirut wrote:
| In the end, the government answers to the people and
| companies answer to shareholders. Of course I agree that
| companies should be ethical, but they currently have no
| incentive to do so other than their own morals and I'd
| imagine those are pretty quickly squashed in the face of
| shareholders looking for profits and an "everybody else
| is doing it" argument.
|
| Companies like Twitter and Facebook exist and thrive
| _because_ they have taken the less ethical route.
| parafactual wrote:
| They should, but they mostly don't.
|
| And I don't think it's easy; I suspect corporations do
| bad things _despite_ the good intentions of employees.
| Each one, driven by subtle incentives, makes a somewhat
| less ethically sound decision than they would otherwise.
| And the effects of those decisions are often abstracted
| away from the decision-makers. The status quo gradually
| becomes worse and worse.
| splithalf wrote:
| Work requires compromising ourselves. We do this for
| survival. There is no way to make most tech ethical. It's
| an economic reality that is quite evident in the
| historical data. When was the last time we had an ethical
| tech company? We have apple, facebook and google, all
| evil in slightly different ways, all taking more from
| humanity than they give back.
| agumonkey wrote:
| There's a weird biological thing at play here. As if we have a
| reflex to clean what too many people agree on.
|
| But so many time it ends up being entirely wrong I really
| wonder why it's still at play.
|
| We kinda had to invent justice structures to avoid blunt
| reactions.
|
| Also who thinks internet focuses too much on endless debates
| and abnormal relations. Did we spend so much time arguing
| before ? I'm so jaded I just want sharing chitchat jokes and
| food and nothing more. And I kinda believe that it's a more
| balanced approach to society. But i'm kinda digressing (an
| proving the opposite of my point partly)
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| 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 Reddit
| misidentified the Boston Bomber or other instances. The moment
| they attacked Margret Atwood they attacked the very idea of due
| process which she strongly warned women about in her book "The
| Handmaid's Tale". Nonetheless, it is part of the human
| condition how we organize into social structures whether being
| a small town in New England or a capitalist economy to join
| groups attacking someone else since it prevents the focus of
| the attack being on ourselves.
|
| The only way out is through due process and supporting it even
| for the worst of the worst.
|
| (EDIT: Weak downvoting this comment without responding with a
| counter comment.)
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crucible
| dionidium wrote:
| When the mob can literally set you on fire, then you should be
| worried about the mob, but, crucially, the mob on social media
| _can 't actually hurt you_; they can only convince other people
| to hurt you. It's those _other people_ , the people who hold
| positions of responsibility and authority -- your boss, your
| dean, anybody with the power to hire or fire you -- who are
| really responsible here. The shame of cancel culture is
| entirely theirs.
| SamBam wrote:
| No. 10,000 voices braying your name as an evil-doer itself
| does harm. This isn't a kid being told on a playground that
| "words will never hurt you," that's always been a lie.
|
| Here is a case [1] of a man being falsely doxxed for the
| assault on two kids on a bike path last summer. The voices
| calling for him to be brought to justice, calling him a
| racist, etc, numbered in the tens of thousands. The
| retractions from people who realized they had made a mistake
| for calling for the blood of the wrong person numbered in the
| tens.
|
| Beyond the psychological damage this may have caused, will
| this man ever feel safe submitting a resume for a job again?
| When he does so, does he need to attach a note saying "When
| you Google my name, all those mentions of me being a racist
| are false." If he does that, does he already subconsciously
| look distasteful in the recruiter's eyes?
|
| 1. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/what-its-like-to-
| get...
| dionidium wrote:
| I'm not so sure proof by counterexample is useful here. My
| point is that in _most cases_ the people screaming at you
| _seem_ like they 're doing harm, but they can't actually do
| harm until somebody in a position of power in your life
| listens to them. [0]
|
| I think you can mostly forgive the cowardly behavior of
| these authority figures up to about a year or so ago on the
| grounds that the social media mob _sure feels_ like a real
| mob that can literally put tires around you and set you on
| fire. But we know now that that 's a mistake. They can't do
| that. And so people in positions of power need to
| understand that in most cases they can actually _just
| ignore the mob and nothing happens._
|
| Every institution should have a "social media mob"
| procedure (i.e. what to do when a member of the
| organization becomes a target). If you plan to handle this
| in an ad hoc way, then you'll almost certainly make
| mistakes (because the ad hoc approach usually boils down
| to, " _Ahhhhh! this feels bad! We have to do something!
| Quick, get rid of the person!_ ") People should be thinking
| about how they'll handle it when it happens to one of their
| employees or members.
|
| [0] _I think I 'd want to clarify that I actually agree
| that the braying mob does inflict its own kind of harm;
| it's merely that it's a harm I'd be willing to endure as a
| consequence of putting my ideas out there on a platform
| like Twitter, whereas nobody would be willing to endure
| getting kicked out of college or fired from their job just
| to have an argument on the internet. For example, my
| comment above is getting downvoted to hell. Feels bad! But
| it's several orders of magnitude removed from losing your
| job._
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| Reputational damage is real damage, unless you are
| arguing that reputation isn't a thing which is patently
| false.
|
| Careers and lives are made and lost on the back of
| reputation. Companies can be destroyed by the social
| media mob.
|
| "Everyone should just ignore them" is not a reasonable
| argument. Even if there were no actual consequences, fear
| of consequences or fear of others' fear of
| consequences... is enough. It's a coordination problem.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I think you're conflating 'getting targeted by a huge
| social media crowd on a false basis' with 'getting your
| own opinions trashed by a huge social media crowd.'
|
| The bicyclist in the example wasn't trying to persuade
| anyone on Twitter of anything. It was the public
| authority figures who misdirected the crowd's attention
| to him by releasing inaccurate information about when a
| (real) crime had occurred.
| dionidium wrote:
| Yeah, that's fair. Sometimes the mob comes for something
| you said on the internet. And sometimes they come for you
| for something you did in a viral video. Two separate
| issues that I don't intend to confuse. (But oftentimes
| the end result and the solutions are similar.)
| abnry wrote:
| And what drives these decision makers to act so shamefully is
| the reputational economy. Yes, sometimes a boycott will
| damage the bottom line, but most often it is the damage to
| one's status within the wider society that is being protected
| by the decision to fire someone. If you personally want to
| avoid this, reduce your dependence on reputation.
| AndrewUnmuted wrote:
| Reputation is also often the cause for corporations
| venturing into "anti-racism," and censorship territory.
|
| When the telecoms were buying up media companies and
| film/tv studios, suddenly all of their most expensive
| assets (actors & personalities) started falling out due to
| cancel culture. Bill Cosby, Matt Lauer, Rosanne Barr, etc.,
| must have driven the execs at AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon
| completely nuts. The highest paid CEO used to be CBS's,
| until they also got him on cancel culture. If CBS's most
| profitable asset, Judge Judy, were a man, she'd already
| have been cancelled a decade ago. (She's fought with CBS
| execs over her exorbitant contract for over a decade now.)
| acituan wrote:
| > The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social
| media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size.
|
| There can be no _mob_ without twitter 's involvement.
|
| There are always two parts to social media; _social media the
| people at scale_ and _social media the recommendation engine_
| with impulse driven features that actively rank orders and
| promotes what content meets what eyes. By definition internet
| brings the scale, i.e. the _size_. But size in itself does not
| create a mob. You could walk around in a crowded square and
| mumble all the controversial things to yourself; people will at
| most give a bad stare, but mostly ignore you, a mob will not
| form after you.
|
| It would take a shit-stirrer to actively _salience_ the thing
| you said to the people in that crowd who would be most
| motivated to come after you.
|
| Twitter et al are the shit-stirrers that makes money every time
| they can make a person engage with a content, regardless of the
| thoughtfulness or the sentiment of the engagement.
| rdudekul wrote:
| "the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him on
| fire".
|
| A single person brave enough to think against crowds could have
| STOPped this atrocity from happening.
|
| Reminds me of how Mahatma Gandhi was attacked in South Africa
| by a group of predominantly white-males, was literally being
| beaten to death, when just one white-female STOPped this
| atrocity from happening (source: Gandhi the Man -
| https://www.amazon.com/Gandhi-Man-Changed-Himself-
| Change/dp/...).
|
| Most of us are too afraid to stop atrocities (Ex: Recently
| Muslims getting killed in Delhi while Modi was adulating
| Trump). But a few who do could may help save humanity.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| No, not necessarily. A single person can sometimes make a
| difference but in real life such people are frequently just
| pushed aside. It is more a matter of luck than morality about
| where they happen to be in the crowd, whether they can make
| themselves heard at a critical moment and so on.
|
| I mean sure, if you see an injustice taking place in front of
| you, you should certainly attempt to intervene. But there is
| absolutely not guarantee your intervention will be effective.
| jrm4 wrote:
| But of course -- compared to what?
|
| Twitter sounds awful in a vacuum if described like this, and
| indeed it does have lots of problems. But, if we are going to
| have very huge and influential corporate sources of
| information, Twitter is MUCH more defensible than e.g.
| MSNBC/CNN/Fox, in that its _significantly_ more "little d"
| democratic. The thousands of voices available there are far
| better than the tiny few coming from many other sources, and
| because the platform is generally "open" in that we can see
| what others post.
|
| I think Twitter is actually doing an _excellent_ job, given the
| incredible difficulties involved with what it does, especially
| as compared to a Facebook, etc.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > But did they really do such wrong that the 10,000th voice is
| needed?
|
| Size is power, and size comes from Engagment. Each voice gives
| more attention to the problem and prevents it from sinking in
| the ocean of meaninglessness of twitter. At least for the
| moment the topic is trending.
|
| > I am ashamed to say I've done it myself, back when I was on
| Twitter. My feed would start lighting up with some really Bad
| thing that so-and-so said -- and generally it was "Bad" -- and
| I'd add my voice somewhere to that cacophony. Not necessarily
| writing to the Bad Person, but chiming in on someone's long
| thread.
|
| And now you are here; is this not the same?
|
| > Mobs are scary, because everyone thinks they are justified.
|
| Who says they are not? It's just one little voice. One of many,
| but still one.
|
| Whether it's justified is more a matter of perspective. In the
| end it's just people talking and gossiping, they have no real
| power. But people are giving them power by listening to them.
| But it's also questionable how many are doing this. At the end
| the mob is still a single voice of many, maybe moving
| something, maybe not.
|
| > A good friend of mine grew up in Kenya and recounted that
| when he was about nine, he saw a mob catch a thief. Joining in
| with everyone else, he took a wire and whipped the man. Next
| thing he knew, the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief
| and set him on fire. He has never forgotten the guilt he felt.
|
| Ok, that's definitly a different dimension than Twitter. That's
| not your typical cybermob. Though, there is also this insanity
| spreading from Virtual Places to real world. But this is not
| limited to Twitter. Reddit has their dark history in that area,
| as also facebook, discord, even ancient IRC and usenet had this
| crap.
| SamBam wrote:
| > And now you are here; is this not the same?
|
| ...no, because I'm not participating in a mob here?
| cindarin wrote:
| It's not the actions that we need to address, just the
| number of people doing them?
| SamBam wrote:
| I'm confused how this comment relates in any way to the
| question of whether my existing on Hacker News is the
| "same thing" as participating in an online mob against a
| person.
| ourmandave wrote:
| The twitter mob can come for you too.
|
| If you're mis-identified and doxxed then your life can be in
| danger.
|
| https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/what-its-like-to-get...
|
| And the consequences for the accuser are nothing.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I think there should be a bit less focus on the 'the mob' and
| a bit more on the platform.
|
| _"We are seeking the public's assistance in identifying the
| below individual in reference to an assault that took place
| this morning on the Capital Crescent trail. Please contact
| Det. Lopez with any information," read a tweet sent June 2
| from the department and shared more than 55,000 times.
|
| But the Park Police had made an error. "Correction, the
| incident occurred yesterday morning, 6/1/2020," they wrote in
| a follow up tweet. As with most such clarifications, it had
| only a fraction of the reach: a mere 2,000 shares._
|
| [...]
|
| _On Twitter, Maryland attorney general Brian Frosh [...] had
| asked all of Twitter for help finding the man in the video.
| "If anyone can identify this man, please let me know," he
| said, and nearly 50,000 people retweeted him.
|
| [...] He sent a tweet confirming that there was a suspect and
| "it is not Mr. Weinberg." (228 retweets.)_
|
| Relying on people to amplify accuracy and context is doomed
| to failure because people react to sensation. You show a
| video of a person doing something awful, naturally there will
| be a big reaction. The follow up tweet specifying some
| overlooked but important detail is simply not emotionally
| activating the same way.
|
| However, it is within Twitter's capability to _automatically_
| propagate that additional context /correction to everyone who
| interacted with the original tweet. Indeed, it's within
| Twitter's capability to force them to look at the update and
| not proceed with using Twitter until they've acknowledged it.
|
| Another approach could be that when a public figure
| (especially an authority figure) makes a mistake like this,
| they should be billed for the cost of advertising the
| correction to an equivalently large audience.
| throwkeep wrote:
| > And the consequences for the accuser are nothing.
|
| That's a great point. Accusers are not only incentivized to
| whip up a mob, but have virtually no downside. No skin in the
| game if they're wrong. That asymmetry needs to be resolved
| somehow.
| elliekelly wrote:
| > Each individual voice may be perfectly right. So-and-so may
| really have done wrong. But did they really do such wrong that
| the 10,000th voice is needed?
|
| This is how I felt yesterday reading the repl.it thread.
| mavsman wrote:
| If you don't feel like it will perpetuate it, what thread are
| you talking about?
| Andrex wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195
| textgel wrote:
| Meh; the situation was pointed out to people like you at the
| time. All the drawing of parallels with events in history, all
| the calls for reason and rationality and all the highlighting
| of holes in logic didn't do anything to stop the problem.
|
| Your words now will make as much impact on the people you hope
| it will as they would have had at the time on you.
| [deleted]
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| HANGMAN: Now, you're wanted for murder.
|
| For the sake of my analogy, let's just assume that you did it.
|
| Now, John Ruth wants to take you back to Red Rock to stand
| trial for murder.
|
| And if you're found guilty, the people of Red Rock will hang
| you in the town square.
|
| And, as the hangman, I will perform the execution.
|
| And if all those things end up taking place, that's what
| civilized society calls justice.
|
| However, if the relatives and the loved ones of the person you
| murdered were outside that door right now, and after busting
| down that door, they drug you out into the snow and hung you up
| by the neck, that would be frontier justice.
|
| Now, the good part about frontier justice is it's very thirst-
| quenching.
|
| The bad part is it's apt to be wrong as right.
|
| Well, not in your case.
|
| In your case, you'd have it coming.
|
| But other people, maybe not so much.
|
| OSWALDO: But ultimately, what's the real difference between the
| two?
|
| HANGMAN: The real difference is me.
|
| The hangman.
|
| To me, it doesn't matter what you did.
|
| When I hang you, I'll get no satisfaction from your death.
|
| It's my job.
|
| I hang you in Red Rock.
|
| I move on to the next town.
|
| I hang someone else there.
|
| The man who pulls the lever that breaks your neck will be a
| dispassionate man.
|
| And that dispassion is the very essence of justice.
|
| For justice delivered without dispassion is always in danger of
| not being justice.
| unholythree wrote:
| I've noticed a unfortunate conflation of word lynching with
| racism motivated homocide lately. Even from authorities
| (newspapers, lawyers, some state ACLU) that have to know they
| aren't always the same.
|
| I think the nuance of these specific injustices is important
| because the solutions are different. A killing could even be
| lawful but racist and therefor unjust, but that's a distinct
| (albeit important) problem from mob violence or murder.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Lone Star beer used to have images under their bottle caps
| as puns[1]. One of them used an image of a noose as part of
| the puzzle, which was completely unrelated to race, or
| death - it was simply using the word as a similar word to
| "news".
|
| Someone went apeshit on Twitter[2], and now all the puns
| are gone while Lone Star reviews them for sensitivity.
|
| I'm politically liberal, and I'm fucking ashamed of the
| fact that this kind of stupid behavior is associated with
| liberal politics.
|
| 1. https://lonestarbottlecaps.com
|
| 2. https://www.mysanantonio.com/food/bars-
| drinks/article/what-h...
| dahfizz wrote:
| It is the same way that "the mob" identified the ok-hand
| as a symbol of hate.
|
| There is a real desire to be outraged. The mob members
| get awarded with internet points and smug self-
| righteousness when they are outraged. Combined with the
| zero downside they face, _any_ amount of mental
| gymnastics to be outraged at something is worth it.
| That's how they can think a completely normal thing, that
| millions of people do, is suddenly a symbol of fascism or
| whatever.
|
| See also: wearing red hats is "bad" according the
| mob[1][2]. Its a perfect metaphor, really. They can't
| bother to look at the hat and see if its MAGA or not,
| they just see something vaguely similar to something they
| don't like and go off. This one in particular annoys me
| because I have an actual "red hat" baseball cap from
| redhat the linux company. Its a really cool hat but I get
| snide comments every time I wear it. Absolutely
| ridiculous that the mere color red "triggers" some
| people.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/style/red-
| baseball-hats-m...
|
| [2] https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/liberal-
| author-normal...
| jfengel wrote:
| There's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated to
| death. That's what they're for. The puzzle may not be
| related to death, but the noose is.
|
| And in the US there's no such thing as a noose that's
| unrelated to race. They are being used, today, as racist
| threats. When a noose appears, lynching is the assumed
| meaning, and not just by black people [1].
|
| So it's a good thing that Lone Star is taking a look at
| the entire project. Using a noose was a mistake. One
| presumably made in good faith, but a mistake nonetheless.
| So the right thing to do is pull not just it, but to make
| sure that they didn't make other mistakes -- a sign of
| good faith.
|
| I'm all for accepting a good and sincere apology. A lot
| of people have made bad and insincere apologies, and not
| only does that not help, it makes things worse by giving
| people an excuse to pretend that good apologies aren't
| worth doing. This is a good choice and I'd encourage
| people to take that.
|
| [1] https://thehill.com/homenews/state-
| watch/554694-amazon-closi...
| exporectomy wrote:
| The funny thing about this offense is it seems that was
| created by the offended so they could become victims of
| it. Nooses used to represent suicide or maybe western
| movie culture. The race thing seems to have been kind of
| resurrected by social media. Though I'm only an outside
| observer of American culture so perhaps the noose=suicide
| is because that's pretty much always been their only use
| in my country.
|
| Does this picture suggest to you that he's planning to do
| some black people lynching in the holidays or something
| else?
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSimpsons/comments/218bbe/not_
| tod...
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I didn't downvote you, but a noose in a locker is wildly
| different from making a pun about "headline news", and to
| suggest otherwise is foolish.
|
| "There is no such thing blah blah" - yes, there is, it's
| called context. Someone who feels threatened by a pun
| "headline news" with a noose is not properly adjusted to
| the adult world.
|
| Do kids not play hangman anymore?
|
| More broadly, I think twitter lowers the bar for whining
| and manufacturing rage. In a pre-Internet world, would
| that woman have cried, or otherwise been mortified at the
| beer top? Would she have taken a picture and sent it to
| the investigative reporter in Dallas where Lone Star is
| brewed? Or would she have gone "Huh, that's rude, how
| strange" and thrown it away?
|
| It's easy to get wrapped up in the hate-think, and I
| think this is a case of it.
| verall wrote:
| Yes, and a part of this context is that Lone Star invokes
| images of the old state of Texas. When they lean into
| this, if they are not careful, they lean into some really
| awful events. It's not the same as the same pun on a
| bottle of Snapple.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| > in the US there's no such thing as a noose that's
| unrelated to race
|
| People do frequently hang themselves, and there have been
| some stories of people tying nooses as jokes about
| suicide or overwork that were misinterpreted as racist
| threats.
|
| I'm not sure if a joke about suicide is much better than
| a joke about lynching, and not being aware of the
| possible racist interpretation is tremendously ignorant
| at best, but it's clearly not as horrendous as an actual,
| real death threat.
|
| We should strive to leave at least a little room for
| nuance and context, and making broad statements like "in
| the US there's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated
| to race" leaves none.
| ta2162 wrote:
| >There's no such thing as a noose that's unrelated to
| death.
|
| There's no such thing as a skeleton that's unrelated to
| death.
|
| >That's what they're for. The puzzle may not be related
| to death, but the noose is.
|
| That's what they're there for. The puzzle may not be
| related to death, but the skeleton is.
|
| >And in the US there's no such thing as a noose that's
| unrelated to race. They are being used, today, as racist
| threats.
|
| Maybe if you suffer from American Exceptionalism, but
| nooses and lynchings transcend the US and specific races.
| The largest lynchings in the US were targeted against
| Chinese and Italians as an example.
| [deleted]
| verall wrote:
| Hey, as a fellow Lone Star drinker, I really don't think
| it's possible to separate the noose from its history,
| particularly in our great state.
|
| Sure, it's just a pun, but for many people it conjures a
| very particular image. They don't want to open their beer
| to an image of a noose, regardless its context. And
| really, the lone star is the emblem of the Republic of
| Texas which was founded in large part due to Mexico's
| outlawing of slavery.
|
| The noose on a Lone Star bottle cap has this particular
| context. I think it's pretty gross and I'm glad they
| chose to remove it rather than defending it has "history"
| or something.
|
| Really, though, I always buy the cans.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I just don't like the stink that someone made about it,
| and don't think it's that big a deal. Even had they
| quietly said "sure" to removing it, that would have been
| one thing, but to pander to the sensitive crowd irks me.
|
| All that stuff you said may be true in the strictest
| sense, but I still think one has to train themselves to
| get mad about that kind of thing. It's unnatural to
| instantly get infuriated and see hate in a bottle top, is
| all.
| aeturnum wrote:
| >The man who pulls the lever that breaks your neck will be a
| dispassionate man.
|
| >And that dispassion is the very essence of justice.
|
| >For justice delivered without dispassion is always in danger
| of not being justice.
|
| Based on the reporting I've read on the internal cultures of
| police departments and the wider "law enforcement" community
| (federal law enforcement, prison administration, etc) I am
| pretty skeptical that "justice" is dispassionate. Instead, I
| think these groups wrap themselves in a myth of dispassion
| while they place thumbs (and larger things) on the scale in a
| way that reflects their personal beliefs and biases.
| karmanyaahm wrote:
| I think rrrrrrrrrrrryan is talking about the ideal
| scenario, in the real world there will always be some
| biases.
| mariodiana wrote:
| Maybe the essence of justice is its effect, and by effect
| we're not talking about its effect on the accused but on
| the rest of society.
|
| The political science class I took back in college (over 20
| years ago now) began with the _Oresteia_ trilogy, by
| Aeschylus. The issue there is between "frontier justice"
| (actually, blood feuds) and civil justice (justice of the
| _polis_ ). The message there is that there can be no
| civilization unless the people of a society sublimate their
| (intrinsic?) passion for frontier justice towards civil
| justice.
|
| The myth, as you call it, is there to bind us as a society
| -- as any myth does.
|
| I don't know what movie is being referred to above, but the
| idea from that passage doesn't originate with the movie.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| The Hateful Eight.
|
| Really long (it's more of a stage play), but like most of
| Tarantino's films, the dialogue is stellar.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| It should probably be noted that the hangman proves to be
| quite passionate before the film is through.
| aantix wrote:
| I'm always perplexed at how engineers fall into these tribal
| traps. People that deal with complex nuance all day fully
| denouncing any idea from specific people.
|
| E.g. I've even seen things like "if you follow Uncle Bob Martin
| I'm unfollowing you".
| barbacoa wrote:
| It's because tribalism exists on a different domain than logic
| and intelligence. It occupies the same region of your brain and
| satiates the same primordial needs that organized religion once
| did. We used to circle around our priests and their sacred
| idols for our sense of unity, now we circle around our
| politicians and made up genders.
| parafactual wrote:
| I don't think specifying "made up genders" makes much sense.
| The progressives and trans people I know, to the extent that
| they think tribally, do so with respect to ideology like
| anyone else.
| kache_ wrote:
| The hubris on hackernews is appalling. Being an "engineer"
| doesn't make you immune to what affects all human beings.
| Buldak wrote:
| Before I switched to computer science, I studied philosophy,
| and I encountered lots of people who seemed to think that
| philosophers had some kind of special relationship to critical
| thinking. That makes sense in a way, but I also imagine that
| adherents to just about any discipline, whether it's
| mathematics or history or journalism, tell themselves a story
| like this.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The most powerful propaganda are the ideas that the people
| _believe_ are their own.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| One of the great social advantages is the outsourcing of
| thinking; knowing everything about everything is just not
| possible.
|
| There have always been distortions due to this, particularly in
| small insular communities. Social media seems to amplify the
| distortions though; you can end up with a _large_ insular
| community. After all, if dozens of people all agree with X and
| nobody disagrees with X, how can it be wrong?
| Animats wrote:
| _" A month ago I decided to try and get out of the reading slump
| I have been in - slump is a kind description for what has been a
| half-decade period of me not picking up a book."_
|
| And he's writing about book reviews?
| Evenjos wrote:
| I'm active in many writing communities. There is a culture, among
| writers, to "Never respond to reviews." Those who dare break that
| taboo are asking for trouble, in the form of twitter mobs and
| online bullying.
|
| Writing is a cut-throat, competitive industry. All of the arts
| are, once you get beyond hobbyist level and into the realm of
| professionals.
|
| I would not be shocked if a lot of that abuse came from other
| writers.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| After reading the quote at the beginning, the article didn't go
| the way I thought it would.
|
| I end up seeing a lot more shades of gray because of my
| experience on Twitter. If you ever ask yourself "how could
| someone possibly believe...", that someone is on Twitter and
| probably wants to tell you why.
|
| I generally operate under the stance of "the platform is neutral,
| it's what we make of it that matters". I'm not entirely sure
| that's true - I am currently on a Twitter hiatus to reset some
| things mentally - but it's true to an extent.
|
| Why are you on the site? Do you want the sensationalism, the
| absolutism, the drama? Or do you want to hear thoughtful
| discussion from a range of interesting voices?
|
| This post articulates Twitter's pitfalls, but I'm not sure
| they're inherent or unavoidable.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Personally, I still believe the platform is neutral, and what
| we make of it matters. But if we make mostly bad things out of
| it, modifying the platform (or, if the platform's owners will
| not modify it, choosing voluntarily to leave it) may be a
| sensible reaction.
|
| Leaf-fall and dead trees on the ground are neutral, but if a
| forest fire is rampaging a dozen miles away, you cut a
| firebreak through that stuff instead of taking a laissez-faire
| approach and letting it be fuel to carry the fire to the
| nearest populated town. And if you _live_ in that town and you
| notice the local firefighters don 't much care about firebreaks
| (or cannot successfully cut them given the size and frequency
| of fires), maybe it's time to pack up and move.
| hirundo wrote:
| > I generally operate under the stance of "the platform is
| neutral, it's what we make of it that matters". I'm not
| entirely sure that's true
|
| I left the platform when I found that neutrality not to be
| true. I could tolerate the insanity from other users by simply
| not following them. But when Twitter itself started to censor
| direct messages due to links in them to an article they did not
| approve of, I made of it an exit.
|
| I will gladly participate in a neutral forum that includes some
| of the wonderful voices I used to follow on Twitter. I really
| hope that one or more emerges that are driven by protocols
| rather than proprietary platforms.
| myfavoritedog wrote:
| Social media interactions are like daily Black Swan events to
| most people. The scale of the interactions is just not intuitive
| enough for them to process in a healthy way.
|
| I'm optimistic that eventually, society can learn to deal with
| it, however.
| kortex wrote:
| Reminds me of the theory that reasoning is a mechanism for
| persuasion and social cohesion, not truth discovery.
|
| The twitter mob isn't trying to anneal to some maximally accurate
| Goodreads rating of the book. It's "trying to do" (in the
| anthropogenic agency sense, like how evolution "wants") something
| else. Something more social and tribal in nature. But the system
| starts to go highly nonlinear once the crowd gets bigger than
| some size, and when the crowd is anonymous/pseudonymous handles,
| not members of your Dunbar's-number-sized-tribe, where reacting
| hyperbolically has real social consequences.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/people-argue-just-to...
| 2malaq wrote:
| Just as important is to not let the mainstream media do your
| thinking for you either.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's bizarre to use an author who demands 5/5 star reviews and
| insults personally people who gave her 4/5 star reviews in a take
| about nuance _criticizing the people who criticized her for doing
| that_.
|
| Blogs are also social media, this is just additional pile-in. I
| think this is supposed to be better because it uses too many
| words, tries to make the personality flaws that it ascribes to
| reviewers universal, and has a bunch of emotionally performative
| talk about moved to tears and having your heart broken mixed with
| talk about trauma.
|
| edit: maybe the blog author should spend the time to listen to
| the life stories of the people who review books. If there were a
| more traumatic story from one or more of them, expressed well,
| would they win the sympathy contest?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I believe the article's author is not saying that the author
| was in the right; quite the contrary. Rather, the point is that
| the author can be in the wrong, and yet one can still
| sympathize with her situation and difficulty in being
| dispassionate about having her work rated. Yet, the mechanisms
| of social media (ranking, instant comments, etc.) push
| everything in the opposite direction of reflection and
| sympathy.
| jfengel wrote:
| Aggravatingly, in a lot of circumstances, 5/5 means
| "acceptable" and anything less is varying degrees of
| "unacceptable". That's not good, but it's very real. Uber
| drivers who fall below 4.6 can lose business, so a 4 rating can
| literally cost them money.
|
| Given that they might as well just go to a thumbs-up/thumbs-
| down system. There are a number of situations where I'd love to
| give somebody 4 stars as a way of saying "You did good but I'd
| prefer X", but I don't want that to be a black mark.
|
| I make the same mistake some times. If all other things are
| equal on a product I'll pick the 4.8 star one over the 4.6 star
| one, even though I know perfectly well that these are worse
| than useless.
|
| That's no excuse for an author to be a dick about it, but it's
| a really stupid bind they're caught in.
| yeahr4579 wrote:
| Same for a lot of colleges! If you don't have a straight 4.0
| you've "failed"
| cratermoon wrote:
| Rating systems online are generally skewed. Look at ebay or
| other marketplaces. Anything less than 95.5% favorable is
| treated as a problem or worse[1][2]. Look at restaurant
| ratings - 4 stars is not good. As best I can tell, there are
| really only two "true" ratings: good or bad. Part of the
| problem is that anytime a reviewer has a bad experience and
| comes away unsatisfied, they tend to go give a 1-star rating
| to "punish" the seller. The 5-star reviews typically only
| come from a. someone who had a memorably good experience and
| is very motivated to say so or b. fake. Someone who gets an
| "ordinary" experience in the transaction has little or no
| motivation to rate, so there's nothing in the middle.
|
| A star rating system I know of that makes sense and is
| relatively uncontroversial is the independent groups like AAA
| hotel ratings, where the number of stars is more-or-less
| objective based on the amenities, making them more of a
| classification than a rating.
|
| 1. https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/ebay/seller.htm
|
| 2. https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/ebay/seller.htm
| solutron wrote:
| We have a choice to make about the work we want to contribute to.
| Our hands, our minds. What world do you want to live in? Is your
| work contributing to that in a meaningful way, such that when
| you're gone those that come after can continue the work because
| it's worth doing? We only have so much time on this earth.
| aerospace_guy wrote:
| Thank you for posting this.
| spadros wrote:
| 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 back for me after quitting
| social media was that "slow thinking" brain that tries to
| empathize with all sides rather than just call out some "evil"
| and check out intellectually.
| hnthrowaway2 wrote:
| It is a bit like "don't let the truth get in the way of a good
| story". I have felt the urge to respond with something witty
| and scathing to a story online, only to realise after a
| moment's reflection that my response would be irrelevant in
| several scenarios. The disappointment that follows for wasting
| a witty response...that takes some resisting.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| My struggle is finding something that brings out the wit like
| a good tweet so I can put it to a more productive purpose.
| I've written novels worth of tweets because there's just
| enough good stuff to reply to that it's hard to leave without
| an alternative.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| The amount of comments here on HN that i never post or
| delete.... That's largely thanks to HN being quite strictly
| policed.
| weezin wrote:
| I recently deleted a lot of social media accounts. My concerns
| are any accounts I created for important things using social
| media accounts, and losing track of what behavior is publicly
| acceptable in the ever changing Overton window. I feel like the
| benefits to productivity and mental health will exceed those
| concerns greatly though.
| seneca wrote:
| > "losing track of what behavior is publicly acceptable in
| the ever changing Overton window"
|
| The largest benefit of abandoning social media is probably
| the realization that the "very online" type don't actually
| dictate social mores, and can (and should) be largely
| ignored. That feeling that the Twitter mob can tell you what
| is acceptable is "[letting] social media think for you", and
| is exactly the problem.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| This is it. People who are "very online" are a small
| percentage of the population -- one that is almost the
| polar opposite of people in meatspace. They tend to be a
| lot more isolated from society and radicalized by the echo
| chamber they exist in.
|
| Those with strong offline relationships tend not to have
| time to participate in these communities enough to
| influence them.
|
| I find the media is particularly egregious in giving these
| voices an outsized level of influence because journalists
| are lazy and source stories on Twitter and try to
| manufacture drama and page views. But this media is
| consumed by "less online" people which contributes to the
| view that those opinions are more prevalent than they
| really are.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| >> "losing track of what behavior is publicly acceptable in
| the ever changing Overton window."
|
| A good skill to cultivate for this worry is listening without
| interrupting or judging when you get feedback. Often what
| someone who feels hurt wants, regardless of the merit of that
| hurt, is to feel heard. Listening is timeless.
|
| "I don't fully understand, but I hear you."
|
| Sometimes the best you can do is get someone to move you out
| of their enemy bucket, but that's often enough. I'm often on
| the other side of that because there are parts of me that
| people don't get, but often feel qualified to speak on. The
| things they say aren't what hurt. It's the often aggressive
| refusal to accept the limits of their knowledge and
| experience that hurts. Hubris is the timeless enemy of
| listening.
|
| Real-world example: there was a now-closed Mastodon instance
| where it came out that the admin did a long, rambly thread
| where she confidently explained AMAB nonbinary people are
| just trans women who are too cowardly to transition. There's
| an interesting discussion to be had on how to define "woman"
| and where people draw the line on identifying as nonbinary vs
| woman vs nonbinary woman, but it doesn't start with a thread
| like that.
| weezin wrote:
| Thank you for sharing, I think what I'm also worried about
| is lack of sharing, for example the black squares on
| instagram. I was called out for not posting one (I had 1
| picture on IG from 3 years ago). Although I imagine that
| wouldn't have happened had I deleted IG prior. I just can
| see "I don't fully understand" when asked about something
| will become willful ignorance to people that deem the
| context unavoidable.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I think I'll have to take my own advice and say that,
| within the limits of my experience hanging out with lots
| of other marginalized people, this isn't something I see.
| It mostly seems to come from Well-Intentioned Allies(tm)
| outside the worlds I inhabit, and the people who aggro at
| folks who don't make the gesture are a subset of that.
|
| What I do for gestures aimed at marginalizations I don't
| share is listen to the people they're aimed at, but that
| can be hard if you aren't in a community where they exist
| in sufficient numbers and are comfortable sharing for a
| broad cross-section of opinions. I didn't even know any
| other out and vocal queer people until I started hanging
| out with furries, and even they have trouble making space
| for people of color to be out and vocal.
|
| I don't have a good solution to finding that cross-
| section, so I can see how getting off social media
| entirely is the safest path.
| jerf wrote:
| Unfortunately, in terms of staying in the Overton window,
| that advice is useless. You give good advice at how not to
| annoy one particular person, but the entire problem is that
| when speaking in public, everyone gets a crack at accusing
| you. It doesn't even have to be based on truth; they can
| accuse based on misunderstandings. They can accuse based on
| _deliberate_ misunderstandings, because they have other
| reasons to take you down, or just simply see a chance to be
| a hero at your expense. As weezin also shares in a sibling
| post, you can be attacked for _not_ doing something. It
| doesn 't matter how kind you are to one person, you can't
| do that for hundreds at a time, let alone to the millions
| that a wrong tweet can reach.
|
| In modern parlance, your post amounts to victim blaming.
| You can't simultaneously engage with thousands of people in
| _any_ manner that all of those thousands will find
| acceptable. That 's always been true; the change is the
| belief in a large number of powerful subcultures that they
| have a _right_ to be engaged with in manners they find
| acceptable, by people they 've never heard of, in
| interactions they aren't really a part of except that they
| happened to be within broadcast range, in the worst cases
| that they possibly even actively sought out precisely
| because it would give them something to be angry about.
| (I'm not accusing everybody of doing that. I think it's
| rare, most people have better things to do with their time.
| But there only has to be a few to be a problem.) In the
| long term, this is an impossible standard.
| bluGill wrote:
| I found facebook became more valuable to me once I decided I
| would only post about things I want my friends to know. That is
| pictures of my kid's new bike, or a video of the baby babbling.
| Facebook does a very good job of ensuring my close friends and
| family keep up with the cute little things in life.
|
| I'm still working on getting out of all the groups that waste
| space. Sadly many useful things have moved to facebook, and
| while good for facebook (more ads), other forums function
| better for keeping up with my hobbies - except for the lack of
| people checking them.
| wussboy wrote:
| Interesting. I had the opposite experience to this. Even
| though all I ever wanted to know about was what was happening
| to my friend's kids, my feed was taken over with political
| and social justice outrage. Outrage sells.
| bluGill wrote:
| It matters what everyone clicks like on. So you need to be
| careful there, and also help others be careful.
|
| There is way too much political outrage for sure. You just
| have to wade through it. Hopefully you can join me in
| spreading the facebook is about family message and get
| others to stop posting politics. (this is hard, it is so
| tempting to bait your political friends)
| Andrex wrote:
| > It matters what everyone clicks like on. So you need to
| be careful there, and also help others be careful.
|
| The OP's title, "Don't Let Social Media Think for You,"
| applies in this context too. Now you can't even click
| "Like" without being careful -- to be fair I avoid
| searching political topics and other sports teams on
| Google unless I'm incognito.
|
| I feel like we're increasingly trapped in a box by these
| algorithms and the need to keep them appeased.
| asciident wrote:
| I wish there was a way to turn off "external content", and
| only view content created by your friends. If my friend has
| an opinion about something (even if political, or a social
| issue), and they post it, I'm interested in reading. But I
| don't care if they are just posting a link to content that
| some stranger wrote, or a meme that someone else is
| spreading. It seems like social media has intentionally
| blurred the lines between "posting your content" vs
| "spreading someone else's content".
| emc3 wrote:
| > more valid grey opinion
|
| What makes the "grey" opinion "more valid"?
| cindarin wrote:
| because the person you're replying to agrees with that
| opinion at the exclusion of all others
| tristor wrote:
| It may not be. In fact, I'd suggest discussing the idea of
| validity in relation to opinions is probably fraught with
| peril itself. That said, any opinion which is more close to
| the unbridled truth is generally more structurally sound (and
| maybe that's a good hallmark for "validity") than opinions
| which are more sensationalized.
|
| "Grey opinions" are essentially the opposite of
| sensationalized. I'm not the original commenter, but if I
| read them correctly, I believe they mean that the least
| sensational and most deliberate opinions are more likely to
| fully account for the truth of the matter (and hence be
| "more" valid) than those opinions which sensationalize.
| riebschlager wrote:
| I would assume the author of that comment was using "grey" to
| describe an opinion that is more nuanced and carefully
| considered. A black/white opinion would be hyperbolic or
| simply expressed to provoke reaction.
|
| So if that's what a grey opinion is... then yeah. That's more
| valid. Especially if you value conversations aimed at
| exploring some reality rather than performative shouting
| matches.
| goalieca wrote:
| 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.
| TheHypnotist wrote:
| LinkedIn is chock full of people with bullshit professional
| titles posting nonsense. Half the time I wonder if they're
| bots.
| ta988 wrote:
| They may not be but social media make people act like bots.
| Humans just optimize for whatever reward they are after
| (likes, followers...)
| chestervonwinch wrote:
| I enjoy LinkedIn for keeping up with old colleagues. But --
| and I hate to be too sour on people who are earnestly excited
| about sharing their career progress -- everyone seems to
| announce every minor career move on LinkedIn in posts that
| read like a Grammy acceptance speech.
| dharmach wrote:
| On the flip side, all with nuanced, grey opinions will be left
| with no motivation to act and the fanatic, opinionated people
| will act.
|
| In a war if the leader has to select an army of thinkers &
| intellectuals versus that of fanatics & fundamentalists, which
| one will he choose?
| [deleted]
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Quite true. It's also the case that some situations demand a
| timely response, eg when a violation of some fundamental
| principle is occurring and ought to be interrupted.
| Intellectualizing everything can become an excuse for
| passivity. To be clear, if one is uncertain about what's
| going on it's generally better to hold back, but there are
| circumstances where someone does comprehend an issue clearly
| and simply wants to shirk an unpleasant engagement with it.
| throw737858 wrote:
| If you click on toxic content, algorithm is going to feed it to
| you. Twitter is perfectly fine if you unfollow and block toxic
| influencers. There is propably even keyword based filtering.
|
| For news you can watch international news stations from India.
| Very realistic and refreshing.
| hnthrowaway2 wrote:
| > For news you can watch international news stations from
| India. Very realistic and refreshing.
|
| Did you mean "if you are in India you can watch international
| news channels to get a better perspective"? If yes, I would
| agree with you.
| throw737858 wrote:
| No, I am in Europe and watch indian news about US politics
| etc.
| pjerem wrote:
| > Twitter is perfectly fine if you unfollow and block toxic
| influencers.
|
| Not my experience tbh. I quit Twitter after having tried to
| follow only accounts that interested me.
|
| But once Twitter starts to be unable to create a sufficiently
| dense "infinite feed", its algorithm starts to artificially
| fill your feed and shows you the likes and answers (and not
| only tweets & RTs) of the people you follow or the hottest
| tweets of people followed by people you follow.
|
| I was totally unable to protect myself from the "Twitter's
| today shitstorm". So I quit.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| I use Tweak New Twitter, which removes 'trending', reblogs,
| etc. from my feed.
|
| https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter/
| tester34 wrote:
| but what's the point of watching news? why bother?
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| The point is to let you know a bit about the reality you
| share with others. The stuff on the news is often things that
| are affecting others directly (do you want to avoid the area
| of town with unmasked protesters?) and indirectly (Is your
| neighbor going to increase racism towards Asian Americans in
| part because of folks linking a virus to a country?).
|
| News doesn't always have the most important things to you,
| but it clues you in on the world.
| douglaswlance wrote:
| If your goal is to better understand your reality, you
| would learn more about the world by reading books than by
| watching the news.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Books don't let you know that genocide is happening at
| the time, that the bars have been closed yet again, nor
| that you should probably postpone that trip due to bad
| weather.
|
| Books might capture the feelings of now: 1984 wasn't
| making predictions, but illustrated the concerns of the
| current time. Same for the things in "A Brave new World".
|
| Reading books about the history of cooking isn't going to
| give you much of a worldview, nor is it going to prepare
| you for a government restricting your ability to get
| birth control, abortion, or sterilization surgeries.
| Books also aren't worth much if you don't reflect on them
| - but once you do reflect, they aren't realistically all
| that much better or worse than other artistic mediums and
| you don't even have to read the books to get advantages
| (some visual adaptations are good, and there are always
| audiobooks too).
|
| It isn't to say that you cannot learn from them, but it
| isn't the same sort of information.
| throw737858 wrote:
| And watching news will somehow help?
|
| Some genocides are happening right now, news are silent.
|
| Men are already prevented from using anticonception and
| abortion. Some countries ban DNA paternity tests. I do
| not see any news about that.
| tester34 wrote:
| It's poor deal, it's not worth.
|
| Just because I may learn some small things that probably
| does not affect me directly and additionally receive some
| news that make my mood worse due to hearing some yet
| another negative news about bad stuff / politics / yada
| yada, what's the point?
|
| 80% of the news I read is HN and some programming related
| websites and whenever I jump into "mainstream" media, then
| I feel like I'm reading some shit - click baits, tragedies,
| controversial stuff, drama seeking, celebrities
|
| it's irrelevant for me
| fumblebee wrote:
| Not all news is made equal, though maybe you implied this
| by using the term _mainstream_.
|
| There's a profound difference in what you get out of a
| curated editorial in the Economist and the talking heads
| on Fox News.
|
| I'd argue the former has tremendous value and isn't
| presented in a way that pokes at our anxieties.
| throw737858 wrote:
| Most Americans do not realise how deep in their
| information rabbit hole they are. Denial is not solution.
| Outside perspective (indian news) improves your mental
| health and resistance. It is mainstream, but based
| perspective.
| tester34 wrote:
| I'm not American, I think the only "purely American" news
| that I see is probably something about $BIG politics like
| election outcome, war, blabla.
| bnralt wrote:
| Indeed. The other problem is that the news is often
| filled with misleading narratives that lead people to be
| less informed than before, and that it creates a huge
| opportunity cost in terms of attention. When you cut out
| the news you start to notice a lot of things around you
| that you were glossing over before.
| jiofih wrote:
| How do you get informed on things happening on the other
| side of the world? (please don't say Twitter!)
| bnralt wrote:
| I think people should spend a lot more time considering
| what they're trying to get informed about and for what
| purpose. Reading books (particularly older books),
| talking to a wide variety of people, looking at primary
| sources, paying attention to what's around you in your
| environment - all of those is going to put you in a much
| better position than being a media junkie.
|
| For instance, if you want to be an informed voter, then
| spending a few minutes flipping through the Vote411
| pamphlet put out by The League of Women Voters is going
| to put you ahead of the vast majority of people who
| absorb political news 24/7. It's also often the only
| information you'll find on many local races.
|
| Often people will tell you that they're watching the news
| to be an informed voter, except they're mostly watching
| things that align with the decisions they've already
| made. I know many people who decided years ago how they
| feel about a national candidate, spend hours every week
| for years watching news that just reinforces that, and
| then zero knowledge about any of the candidates in local
| races where there vote actually has a much greater
| impact. That's not being an informed voter, that's
| feeding a bad habit.
|
| Likewise with international news - what are people
| actually trying to accomplish? Most of the time it's not
| being informed, it's following a media narrative and
| ignoring things as soon as the narrative changes. Do you
| remember when Darfur was a big topic in the early 2000's?
| Mali about 9 years ago? Those conflicts are still
| ongoing, but seem to have been forgotten. How about
| "Bring Back Our Girls"? Likewise Libya, Syria, and a host
| of other conflicts that suddenly shift from "very
| important and everyone needs to be informed about it" to
| a distant memory.
|
| Again, the way these things are treated isn't about
| keeping people informed, but feeding media junkie habits.
| And the nature of this kind of poor reporting has very
| real consequences - just look at the Iraq War. Ignorance
| is preferable to disinformation.
| tester34 wrote:
| Generally:
|
| a) Through friends
|
| b) It's so big that's almost everywhere and you cannot
| escape it
|
| c) I don't get informed (but may later in time)
|
| Of course it's not perfect approach
| jiofih wrote:
| a) and b) just mean you're relying on someone else who
| watches the news, so the same drawbacks apply...
| robotbikes wrote:
| Corporate media is also pretty much an extension of
| corporate public relation firms a lot of the time. For
| instance I turned on broadcast TV for one minute this
| morning only to find a Amazon sponsored segment parading
| as a news piece promoting a feel good story about how
| Amazon was good for small businesses. People don't trust
| corporate media for good reason but many viewers probably
| lack training in media literacy that would be helpful for
| both consumers of social media and traditional media
| outlets. Vetting the veracity of independent news outlets
| is even more challenging at times and a failure to do so
| can result in suppression of good information and the
| propogation of disinformation.
| base698 wrote:
| Have you paid attention to the last two decades? The news
| is entirely garbage entertainment. It exists to rabble
| rouse the population into caring about causes that benefit
| the oligarchy.
|
| There is nothing actionable to be gained from the news. In
| a tragedy, victims have victim shit to do. They aren't
| learning what to do next by watching NBC. The authorities
| local to the incident manage the situation.
|
| http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| > The point is to let you know a bit about the reality you
| share with others.
|
| Best case scenario is that you are shown a select few
| fragments of reality, strategically arranged. Worst case
| scenario is the fragments themselves are questionable.
|
| I don't feel like someone is trying to inform me when I
| watch the news. I feel like someone is trying to manipulate
| me.
| croon wrote:
| > Best case scenario is that you are shown a select few
| fragments of reality, strategically arranged. Worst case
| scenario is the fragments themselves are questionable.
|
| 1) Things happen around the world that you can't observe.
|
| 2) People need to participate in democracy for democracy
| to work.
|
| 3) Things that happen elsewhere might affect things
| locally through latter order effects.
|
| Can we agree on those assumptions?
|
| If so, you may need to keep at least somewhat up to date
| on current events. How would you do so without news?
|
| Further; painting all "news" with the same brush is
| getting real old. It's not a single organism.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| > Can we agree on those assumptions?
|
| Kind of
|
| 1 - Sure. But the idea that your news of choice gives you
| a representative, unbiased picture of that is laughable.
|
| 2 - I disagree. Casting ballots to potentially swap heads
| of governments - who are largely symbolic and
| functionally impotent - barely qualifies as participating
| at all. Power in modern democracies spread very thin, and
| most of it is not elected.
|
| 3 - Sure, I suppose.
| BeetleB wrote:
| As a former news junkie, I can confidently state that
| getting a view of the (rest of the) world by watching the
| news will give you an _extremely_ skewed view of the world.
| Just look at how much coverage they give to one event (e.g.
| the recent Israel-Gaza conflict) vs others with an order of
| magnitude more casualties to get an idea of the skewness.
|
| An exercise I came up with years ago: On a piece of paper
| write down the most important issues in the world. If they
| match the exposure that the typical news media provides,
| then you've lost the ability to have an independent
| perspective.
| codeulike wrote:
| Fact x Importance = News
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC4vPR9e9NA
| maypop wrote:
| This discussion feels very meta. In the sense that Twitter is the
| "bad" person, and we are the actors contributing our individual
| outrage induced take.
|
| Why are we so compelled to participate?
| [deleted]
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