[HN Gopher] Are a few people ruining the internet for the rest o...
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Are a few people ruining the internet for the rest of us?
Author : pseudolus
Score : 63 points
Date : 2025-07-13 20:44 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| oceanhaiyang wrote:
| I tried smaller internet for discussion like lemmy and mastodon,
| it's either boring or equally as toxic. Makes me think we've been
| conditioned to expect a ton of content and get upset easily. Both
| can be true. Blogs has been more interesting as often seen here.
| asdff wrote:
| It is interesting seeing the shift in tone from when you drop
| into an old forum thread from 25 years ago vs a similar sort of
| discussion today. People tend to always take the contrary
| opinion and argue it to death. Sometimes I find myself even
| reflexively wanting to do that and I have to stop myself
| because what is even the point? Sure there would be people
| getting at it in the forums but it would usually be like 2
| people going back and forth while everyone else sits back and
| waits for them to cool off or embarrass themselves. You get
| dogpiled today easily. Especially on systems with up and down
| votes, people get bathed in downvotes for valid but not-in-
| vogue-with-hivemind opinions. I'm not even talking about
| political stuff either but opinions on technical matters could
| devolve into people using the downvote button to disagree. Just
| tanks those opinions to the bottom of threads and makes it so
| the hivemind opinion is biased to be above the fold and
| perpetuated among more parrots. Happens on HN too where I see
| slightly faded comments for no real reason get piled on a lot,
| although at least votes are masked here which discourages some
| of that behavior.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| A good point.
|
| I handle the downvoted comments by 1) upvoting (but of
| course) but then also 2) adding a comment to the effect of
| "Hey, I upvoted you because ...".
|
| We've all seen the downvoted comment start to "fade back in"
| by doing this.
|
| Heck, I frequently even upvote greyed out comments I disagree
| with because I kind of root for the underdog anyway. Or, kind
| of as you say, think it is unfair (at least when the
| downvoted comment was sincere and not troll-bait or
| whatever).
|
| Personally I try to avoid downvoting a comment if I am
| unwilling to leave a comment as to why. This open the doors
| to my getting downvotes as well if I am off base.
|
| Regardless, watching my own comments get downvoted has been a
| good lesson for me. Sometimes I rethink my position ("Am I
| missing something here?") or, if nothing else, I rethink the
| tone I used ("Guess I need to make a better case next time --
| not come across so antagonistic.").
|
| (Corny examples, but you get the idea.)
| nmstoker wrote:
| Link to the paper it's based on (by same author):
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23522...
|
| Assuming the key points are valid (they seem reasonable), I'd
| argue that we'd probably be in a better position with social
| media if it weren't for the platforms taking on managing our
| interactions with others. If people had their own software/agents
| that would filter according to your own needs, we'd likely see
| less toxicity - but this comes tumbling down as I suspect the
| platforms would see a dent in their monetisation, and so
| naturally they wouldn't be in favour.
| crop_rotation wrote:
| > If people had their own software/agents that would filter
| according to your own needs, we'd likely see less toxicity
|
| Isn't that just another echo bubble? Telegram doesn't manage
| interactions yet every large channel is just an echo bubble or
| a cesspit.
|
| IMHO most human beings are simply not ready for this ultrawide
| real time communication networks.
| roscas wrote:
| Ads companies like google and facebook make their core business
| to put ads on your face. Same as, someone pays them loads of
| money for them to show you ads, so you can buy things you don't
| want or need. So when you use any of their "products", you are
| the product. This is nothing new. I hope that is not new to you.
| That said, their business spy also is good for spy agencies, so
| they take care of each other's business.
|
| And please don't ever say "social media" or "social plataforms"
| because those are not social. Those are indeed anti-social
| platforms. You can call them that.
|
| Take a look at twitter and what is has become. It was already
| bad.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > produced enough content to create the false perceptions that
| many people were vaccine hesitant.
|
| Many many people were vaccine hesitant. It was not a false
| perception that many were hesitant.
|
| I spent a lot of time with friends and family convincing them how
| to think about the risks and to convince them to take the
| vaccine.
| asdff wrote:
| Yeah long before covid people were vaccine hesitant too. You
| just didn't really see it come to a head until covid really
| forced those people out of the woodwork but they were there the
| whole time not doing their flu shot, not keeping up with their
| past shots, and doing bare minimum of immunizations for school.
| daft_pink wrote:
| It's pretty easy to cut yourself off from divisive content.
| asdff wrote:
| If the answer is to just not use the internet that is basically
| like saying "broken arm? use the other one." The issue is that
| it didn't used to be this bad. You could browse a forum and not
| have it be shills or shill accounts farming points so as to not
| appear as shill accounts. It was a more personal world without
| people trying to market themselves as none of that was
| incentivized in any way at the time. People prolifically
| posting videos for all 43 viewers for years and you'd never see
| them turn the camera at their face.
|
| It got too big and then it became worth the investment to
| advertise in, the meta was established, and then that was that.
| jjangkke wrote:
| we live in a society where we can't really voice, our opinions or
| grievances towards specific groups or cultures or issues as it is
| deemed politically incorrect, so a lot of that has moved online,
| behind anonymity. Anonymity also plays an amplifying role.
| Larping as the target group and in many instances it becomes even
| easier to manipulate this much is true, but this is the price of
| forcing all of the healthy debates away from the off-line world
| because we fear offending.
|
| The contrast between the online off-line world that the author in
| the article alludes to is indicative of this. It's the unspoken
| role where we all know that speaking out has consequences often
| that impacts are economic well-being. There would be no way to
| get farm something for which there is no demand for...
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Ha ha, "girls don't like it when I generalize about races." You
| don't have to be a racist to be annoying!
| tokinonagare wrote:
| I agree, but even online is now heavily censored. It's harder
| and harder to find a place to express even slightly non-PC
| opinions. In my opinion this is not gonna produce good results
| in the long run.
| genghisjahn wrote:
| What's a slightly non-pc opinion that's hard to find online?
| zdragnar wrote:
| I think there's a difference between an opinion being hard
| to find, and a place to express the opinion being hard to
| find.
|
| The more suppressed a view is, the more extreme the place
| where that view is allowed ends up being.
|
| Those places don't normally allow rational debate either.
| They're just a different kind of toxic, and have their own
| rules for what will get you dog piled.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| That's kind of how it has always been though.
|
| Finding out that the people that share your views are
| people that you wouldn't want to associate with (I'm
| putting words in your mouth here, I'm sorry) is how I
| find I was able to grow up intellectually.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > we live in a society where we can't really voice, our
| opinions or grievances towards specific groups or cultures or
| issues as it is deemed politically incorrect
|
| I'm not sure what that means when I see people say that.
|
| Is it "People don't like it when I'm a dick so I have to hide
| when I do it?"
|
| Because if it's not that, just say what you think. I'd like to
| think I do, in public with co-workers, etc. They judge me then
| by that and I kind of deserve their judgement (which ever way
| it goes).
| mousethatroared wrote:
| Or, it's criminal everywhere in the West except the USA. And
| not just dick opinions, pointing out the German politicians
| are not too bright has been criminalized now.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| This extraordinary claim requires a source.
| delusional wrote:
| >German politicians are not too bright has been
| criminalized now.
|
| Haven't insults like that been illegal in Germany since the
| 1800s? This hardly seems new. It's just how the Germans
| like to run their laws.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I confess I assumed the person I was replying to was in the
| U.S. (I also am in the U.S.).
| b-mmxx wrote:
| Source, please. Where there any changes to Article 5
| (Grundgesetz)?
| cjs_ac wrote:
| I think a big part of why influencers like Andrew Tate can
| speak unchallenged on social media is that anyone with the life
| experience, wisdom and social-media-savvy needed to be a better
| online role model for young men knows perfectly well that, due
| to the dynamics of such discourses, becoming that online role
| model will utterly destroy their life.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Too bad then that anyone should look to an online influencer
| as a role model.
| 9x39 wrote:
| We should not be surprised to see what pops up to fill a
| vacuum of positive in-person influence.
|
| Having their own firmer identity, adults may tut-tut at a
| new personality emerging they disagree with, but few of us
| ask why such personalities are finding root at all.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| To be sure. I grew up with an absent father, so I get
| that. Perhaps dad spends too much time online too now?
|
| (Whoops.)
| delusional wrote:
| You're way underplaying the aplifying role of anonymity and
| connectedness. I have not observed a decrease in peoples
| willingness to discuss "politically incorrect" topics in real
| life out of fear.
|
| I have however observed an increasing intolerance for diverging
| opinions, especially coming from the "politically incorrect"
| group.
|
| They are not afraid of being called out, they have become
| intolerant of being called out.
| jmugan wrote:
| I find it nearly impossible to avoid divisive content online.
| There are so many cool things in the world, but I can't find them
| because my timelines are all flooded with culture war. I wish I
| could find a platform that would listen to me when I say "show
| fewer posts like this."
| ylee wrote:
| Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 40 years ago when
| discussing online forums:
|
| >I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful
| of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore
| them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's
| not always easy to do.
|
| This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of
| the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design
| has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central
| authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups
| can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's
| designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to
| participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior.
| Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network
| declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative
| proportion of the overall traffic grew.
|
| That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of
| varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is
| people with actual mental illness; think "50 year olds with
| undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that
| there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the
| motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my
| experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives
| which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic
| declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This,
| not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.
|
| [1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here
| joecool1029 wrote:
| >This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.
|
| Usenet had a nonstop spam generator called Google Groups that
| shit it up for years. It wasn't just intentional spam but
| clueless people came in through there and bumped 20+ year old
| threads.
|
| The other factor related to the decline was ISP's stopped
| bundling usenet service in the 2000's.
|
| There are sill a handful of active groups but unfortunately at
| least a third of the remaining active lost access when the
| Google spam service stopped.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| One of the projects on my agenda is a classifier that detects
| those people on social media by detecting "signs of hostility."
| This was hung up for a while because I thought the process of
| making a training set would kill me [1] ( _not_ seeing these
| people was a major motivation for the project) but now I 'm
| more optimistic. I still gotta make a generic ModernBERT + LSTM
| + calibration classifier though.
|
| [1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/business/facebook-content-
| mod...
| k310 wrote:
| Root cause. Advertising. Quantity wins. Quality loses. Founders
| are all greed and no scruples. Money is God.
|
| Illustration: (Emily's Quotes)
|
| https://emilysquotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/capitali...
|
| The Internet's Original Sin It's not too late to ditch the ad-
| based business model and build a better web. [0]
|
| By Ethan Zuckerman
|
| The Internet Apologizes [1]
|
| Even those who designed our digital world are aghast at what they
| created. A breakdown of what went wrong -- from the architects
| who built it.
|
| By Noah Kulwin
|
| [0]
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/adver...
|
| [0] https://archive.is/NxfXW
|
| [1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/an-apology-for-
| the-i...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Since the article discusses the Algorithm that amplifies the
| trolls, your connecting it to advertising shouldn't be
| dismissed.
| k310 wrote:
| Clicks, clicks, no matter how you get them. The more the
| better. Anger works.
| sublinear wrote:
| I think people forget that the same things happen offline. These
| arguments that blame anonymity or large groups are flimsy.
|
| Just think about how embarrassing some friends or family can be.
| Think about why you went online in the first place.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I didn't go online to get away from a bigoted relative.
|
| To the contrary, the bigoted relative was no longer invited to
| various get togethers.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| More than a few.
|
| And rising.
|
| The result of leveraging one-to-many persuasive marketing-type
| efforts until its footprint encroaches on an unleveraged many-to-
| many ecosystem bad enough to compromise former utility more &
| more as technology advances.
|
| As opposed to mainstream users who should be gaining more from
| the same underlying infrastructure as improvements in technology
| occur. Which should theoretically have continued happening but it
| got reversed by overwhelming force.
| ileonichwiesz wrote:
| Outrage is the most valuable emotion a piece of online content
| can inspire.
|
| If you enjoy something, you'll like/heart/upvote it and move on.
| But if it outrages you, chances are you'll go straight to the
| comment section to argue. Maybe you'll repost it with your own
| take to show everyone how much you disagree. More ,,engagement" =
| more time to shove ads in your face = a nice juicy bonus for the
| ad execs who run all the websites now.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The word is "ragebait".
|
| In general there are a lot more "farming" type activities going
| on these days. Farming various kinds of engagement from
| different people, scientifically tuned much like in agriculture
| / animal husbandry. It's fascinating to watch unfold.
| tolerance wrote:
| This article is rife with wishful thinking and honestly I don't
| know if society has ever been as harmonious as I feel like it
| alleges. As if there was a time where everyone just got along and
| things were great and you could get an egg cream for a quarter
| after the sock hop.
|
| I seriously question whether there was ever a time where the
| masses weren't influenced by "a few people", for better or worse.
|
| The numbers don't move me and can't be the sole arbitrator of
| truth when the direction of humanity is involved.
|
| So while I'm not surprised that people report feeling less
| inclined toward inflammatory media after disengaging it, I just
| don't believe that there is a grand collective that we can return
| to that is free from the influential few.
|
| The issue is that there are many masses and many fews at odds to
| find their pair and wont to view the others as the outrageous
| ones.
|
| People can hardly curate outfits at their own discretion. They're
| going to defer to people who are deferring to what amounts to a
| cell of 3-4 guys linked to a larger apparatus of taste to find
| out what to wear, what to watch and what to think.
|
| That's just the way it is.
|
| The average person is well-meaning and reasonable up unto the
| this eerie point in their life where they feel existentially
| threatened and thrust on the stage of public opinion for the
| criticism of others.
|
| So I think that suggesting that society _isn 't_ toxic in it's
| current form and all it is is that we're just viewing the world
| through this funhouse lens because of a few bad guys on social
| media is a conceited perspective because the world as it is
| indeed is a carnival of ideas surrounding the marketplace and the
| internet is its pavilion, not its public square.
|
| And to dare to suggest that there is in fact one single true
| direction for people to choose demands contending against all the
| goofy ways people are turning and admitting that things are as
| bad as they appear, in spite of whatever ways we can come up with
| to assume the good faith of the common man.
|
| The irony is that this same outlet will unapologetically make its
| bones off the incessant reporting on all the ways that society is
| under peril. Sometimes obscuring these reports with solicitations
| to fund this effort.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I can only say that it is worse now than at any other time I
| have lived (I say this at 61 years old, white guy, FWIW).
|
| There's a complete lack of ... unity? Everything including the
| weather is now pigeon-holed into something political (and
| therefore "tribal"). Sock hops and the soda fountain were
| before my time, but I can speak for the 70's and say it was not
| this crazy.
|
| Nut jobs like The John Birch Society (just to pick on one group
| of the era) were not given a global megaphone. Say what you
| want about newspapers, etc. but the "Fourth Estate" had to earn
| reader's trust, could not expect to just act to inflame the
| fringe elements of society.
| asdff wrote:
| The answer is yes, and also yes towards that question for most
| other media. The fact propaganda is an industry is the issue. As
| soon as you have a population of people of sufficient mass, it
| becomes worthwhile to invest in attempting to influence the
| mindshare in some way towards a profitable end. This will be true
| for as long as we make use of propaganda for selling products,
| controlling votes, and how people think and behave. People might
| think it is only for the masses, but given their individual value
| you can probably be sure that all influential people in this
| world are also propagandized into making decisions that benefit
| other latent interests.
|
| I'm not sure how you get out of the fact that game theory
| suggests there will always be people operating selfishly like
| this and reaping benefit from it as such. You see it in
| ecosystems too. It is a perfectly valid evolutionary strategy to
| learn to rob a nest vs making your own way. The question is how
| we balance these realities about our animal selves and even try
| and counter them for collectively beneficial reasons, that also
| won't just be subverted for someone else. Especially as
| technology grows to be more esoteric and powerful in the future.
| jlaternman wrote:
| The author is describing the socially (and physically)
| destructive percentage of the population who just want to grab
| power through manipulation and control and the way they express
| this through social media, I believe (dark triad personality
| disorders, loosely). The only danger I see is an embrace of
| passivism in the form of "anyone who objects to things that are
| happening in passionate terms is the real problem." Which would
| be even worse, when that percentage has real power, and real
| ability to pull levers. Not to say everyone should go around
| screaming or protesting with every tweet, etc. It's the balance
| of these things I think is off-kilter, not a simple solution
| "just act aloof and block the right people, and all will be well
| in the world, just like it is in Starbucks when I leave my
| apartment each morning." In any case, that's my two cents.
| There's a balance to be struck, that this article doesn't really
| get at.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _When I scroll through social media, I often leave demoralized,
| with the sense that the entire world is on fire and people are
| inflamed with hatred towards one another. Yet, when I step
| outside into the streets of New York City to grab a coffee or
| meet a friend for lunch, it feels downright tranquil._
|
| Alternative explanation: The online world is "real" and the real-
| life interactions are "fake", at least as far as political
| opinions are concerned.
|
| The social conventions for online and face-to-face interactions
| are still markedly different (with good reason). When face-to-
| face, we generally care a lot more about maintaining a pleasant
| conversational environment and usually avoid things that would
| insult or hurt the person we are talking with. The focus is also
| a lot more about everyday issues and a lot less about abstract
| political topics like it would be online.
|
| All of this means that face-to-face, we will probably talk a lot
| less about divisive political topics than we would do online.
|
| But it does _not_ mean we have fewer opinions on those topics,
| only that we won 't show them so easily.
|
| So it could be that the online discourse really is a truthful
| mirror of the political division of society, only that in real
| life, those divisions are much more hidden behind layers of
| politeness.
| another_twist wrote:
| How does the alternate theory work ? The evidence here suggests
| that instigation on social media is usually targeted and
| limited to a handful of accounts. If it were indeed the case
| that people are more real online and more towards the right
| politically, then we shouldn't observe this concentration. It
| would be more diffused.
| albumen wrote:
| Or, online discourse has polarised opinion through The
| Algorithm promoting inflammatory, divisive content. In real
| life, when people talk, they see the other person as a human
| with more understandable motivations, and tend to find a lot
| more common ground.
|
| So perhaps instead of "in real life, those divisions are much
| more hidden behind layers of politeness"; "in real life,
| divisions turn out to be largely illusory (or more moderate; or
| more understandable) once you get to know someone".
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > All of this means that face-to-face, we will probably talk a
| lot less about divisive political topics than we would do
| online.
|
| I see your point -- I think more than a couple _Twilight Zone_
| episodes that Serling penned explored the "monsters" that are
| within us.
|
| But I disagree. Because I think when you are face-to-face
| you're more likely to see nuance in your option and others. "I
| hate gays!" you say. But then you find yourself chatting with
| your neighbor and his husband and have been thankful for them,
| on several occasions, for helping you get your car started in
| the winter, or whatever.
|
| "Black people scare me!" But then you have to admit that the
| two black families that go to your church are not threatening
| at all....
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Online discourse is a shard of a shattered mirror.
| 9x39 wrote:
| Prior to ubiquitous mobile Internet and social media, we had
| geographic boundaries around communities. Now those lines are
| being rapidly blurred, and there's bleedover in regional
| thought into some semblance of broader online community.
|
| But the point is that the observation that the world seems nuts
| and a liberal city in the West feels cosmopolitan isn't
| necessarily wrong - the liberal West is a global minority.
| Illiberal views are the global majority. What did we expect
| when we started merging thought globally? And most of the world
| isn't even 'online' yet in sense they've joined these spaces,
| they're marginally connected based on how you measure it, or in
| their own regional spaces.
| snitzr wrote:
| Zipf's law again!
| jongjong wrote:
| It's totally not true that only a small number of people are
| spreading all the contrarian ideas online.
|
| I remember where was some media coverage about 'The
| disinformation dozen' during COVID; what a load of rubbish. How
| can anyone believe this? In a world with billions of people
| connected to the internet, only 12 are spreading disinformation?
| This is impossible. There are surely at least 100 North Korean
| agents working full time being paid to spread non-stop
| disinformation... This is a really conservative guess. Now do
| that for every country who have a beef against the west you
| probably have tens of thousands of people being paid to spread
| disinformation. Then you probably have thousands of people
| spreading disinformation as a way to promote their books... Then
| you probably have millions of institutional insiders spreading
| various bits of contrarian information once in a while (which
| would be mislabeled as disinformation). It's not a small number
| of people either way. It's a LOT of people... Suggesting that
| it's only 12 people is comically wrong! I'm sorry but if you ever
| believed that, you need to adjust your worldview because you've
| been living in a bubble. It's not only physically impossible
| statistically, it's literally impossible to measure so you'd be
| wrong just for accepting any fixed number (let alone a tiny
| number)...
|
| The mainstream view is a simplified view and so there will always
| be people who can see fundamental flaws in parts of the
| mainstream argument because they have deeper knowledge on certain
| aspects than a journalist has. Mainstream news is written by
| journalists, they never know quite as much as the insiders. So
| anytime a news article is published, there will be a small number
| of people out there who know the full story and they will be
| surprised at the discrepancies between the story and their first-
| hand experience of it. If you're an expert in anything, it's
| likely a matter of time before you come across some media story
| about your field which you know doesn't quite correspond to
| reality. Once you experience that, it makes you doubt all media
| coverage of other fields too. It's just a fact that the media
| isn't fully accurate. It doesn't matter how reputable the
| organization is; they have a near monopoly so this allows them to
| add a lot of spin and make a lot of 'mistakes'.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Even more of a problem is journalists thinking twitter is an
| accurate portrayal of society.
| lapphi wrote:
| I would love it if there were a part of the internet where a) one
| person = one account and non-person accounts were somehow
| labeled. Kind of how south korea does it. But you know, better.
|
| And b) i could block that one person on each platform with one
| click on all my accounts, including screenshots of their posts.
|
| In real life i know the person talking to me is a unique
| individual and not one of several duplicate persons bc of
| physical limitations.
|
| Wishful thinking: we are reaching that point where AI could solve
| this instead of AI just making the issue worse.
| another_twist wrote:
| Technical question - they say people felt 23pc less animosity.
| Assuming their measurements are okay, what would the statistical
| power of this experiment ? I dont think they report a null
| hypothesis.
| nomdep wrote:
| How ironic coming from The Guardian, a big source of rage bait
| bgwalter wrote:
| This Guardian article contains rage material for at least 40
| tweets:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/01/epstei...
|
| Mainstream media is part of the problem. The other issue is that
| publicly polite people often do horrible things in the
| background, which leads to more online arguments.
|
| Perhaps there is a lot to be enraged about? Of course no one
| complains about the nice corner cafe in New York, that is a poor
| example.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| There are many instances where a few people are ruining the
| internet for the rest of us. And for me it is mostly about
| security. I'd rather do without all that encryption and passwords
| and security updates and anti-viruses. All that to prevent a few
| people from messing with us.
|
| Hateful people on social media? They are annoying, but at least,
| I can ignore them.
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