Everyone pays too much attention to Twitter. I think it is responsible for radicalising many people. People seem to get easily swept up and not apply the same filtering as they do in real life. Not to mention Twitter/Facebook etc actively wage war on their users psyche for extra views and clicks.
Rule 14: Do not argue with trolls — it means they win.
This has been a basic tenet of the Internet for decades - until Twitter and FB became huge.
Now the regular people don't know or understand this and continue to interact with trolls (retweeting, subtweeting, basically bringing attention to their idiocy). This just feeds the anger cycle and shuts down all attempts at sane discourse.
You don't tell a troll you're not arguing with them, don't block them (that's a win), you just ignore it completely. If everyone would follow this rule, the crazies would be left alone shouting into the emptiness.
Godwin's law was not the reason that your code reviews needed to be locked down, it was that your employer had a terrible work environment, terrible employees, or both.
Actually it was neither of those. Just because a discussion is approaching Godwin's law doesn't necessarily mean anyone is being offensive or, as you say, terrible.
Also, sometimes it's not anyone's fault. It can just be down to circumstances.
No one had mentioned Hitler at that point. See another child comment for clarification.
Edit: To quote the CTO later on "I could see where the endless review discussions might end up heading so I split the team into product and project before we hit Godwin's law."
Yep, it was an organisational issue with different work types.
To quote the CTO later on "I could see where the endless review discussions might end up heading so I split the team into product and project before we hit Godwin's law."
If they had become vile then someone would have been fired. CTO did a good job and stepped in before that happened.
That's subtly different to what you said before. Godwin's Law wasn't why you had to lock down code reviews. It was in anticipation of the law being true that you did it, which isn't quite the same thing. Self-fulfilling prophecy, perhaps.
On a more serious note, there is an argument for all computing being fundamentally authoritarian. You have one root account dictating how other users can consume resources, and from that you descend onto things like "the project owner". If this model is not tempered downstream, I can see how people can end up shouting "nazi" at each other.
(still, I guess one should probably catch himself before violating Godwin's Law in a work environment...)
RMS was anti-root (or anti-"wheel", I can't remember) for basically this reason.
There certainly is a lot to be analyzed in the power relations of control of the means of production and distribution of information, from the society wide scale to the individual device, but technologists are remarkably bad at doing this.
But also why conflate the arrangement of performance sensitive digital procedures and the social structure behind several billion people living on the same planet?
Because it incentivises a specific mindset, which then cascades into everyday situations. Computers do what they are told (by root), other humans don’t do that - it can be a source of friction and frustration. A frightening amount of radicalised terrorists eventually turn out to be IT people... IMHO we don’t yet appreciate the influence that the tools we live and breathe have on ourselves.
Twitter and FB brought a lot of people to the internet who weren't exposed to cultural things like Rule 14 that I feel went a long way to maintaining civility.
They also normalized bringing your identity online. Back in the days i.e. when slashdot would have been HN everyone was anonymous. I feel like it made it easier to focus on ideas instead of the people saying them.
4chan is a shining example of the outright failure of anonymity on the internet shines a light on the discussion. That concept just introduces people who will argue completely in bad faith, have their argument taken down eloquently by a new user not realizing what is going on, the that same troll will just post the argument again, constantly.
Real names are absolutely not necessary for a good discussion but social and structural consequences are very important in removing trolls.
HNs rule if allowing throwaway accounts for discussing sensitive content is a good thing, but I'd prefer some kind of linking to the main account to make it obvious that if you're making a green account you troll it will effect your main account as well.
Facebook is a shining example of the outright failure of Real Names Policy on the internet. That concept just pushes people to extremes, and excludes moderate voices that will be canceled by all sides for having an opinion that is not exactly in alignment with either extreme
Real Names polices that have been tried have also proven to do nothing to remove trolls at all, in fact the only thing that remains is shit string trolls and extremist that want to yell at each other after the shit stirring trolls rile them up
It is concerning that I am seeing more and more people push for a resurgence of "Real Names" policies on the internet as a way to curb extremism and/or trolling even after it has been proven to do nothing of the sort
You may be looking back into the past with some rose color glasses. SD was not that good either. Its moderation system basically enforces first posting being the ones who got to control the conversation. So it encouraged camping so you could yell loudest. They added a 'troll' over on soylent. But that did nothing. It just gave people more ways to abuse each other. They even gave more people more mod points. Thinking that would fix things. But it still has the -1/5 problem SD has. The up/down system that hacker and reddit use has its own issues very similar to SD. Early ideas get the most attention late ones get nothing. Wisdom of the crowd sometimes works. But it also can create a negative feedback loop where bad ideas do pop to the top touted as good ones.
One of the underlying issues is the use of text. Text is a terrible way of conveying conversational meaning. Which I personally think is how many people consume the internet. "oh that is a good idea" can have so many shades of meaning from "that is actually a really terrible idea lets never talk about that again" to "yes I 100 percent agree lets do that right now". In conversation depending on which word gets the inference the meaning changes. In my head I hear it one way. But you read it a different way and the next person reads it in a totally different way.
It's a bit of a double-edged sword, no? In many contexts, having identity tied to your online profile should make people act more like humans and less like they're role-playing their anonymous internet troll persona.
>>In many contexts, having identity tied to your online profile should make people act more like humans and less like they're role-playing their anonymous internet troll persona.
This is only true if everyone agrees on facts. It is perfectly reasonable for people to get shocked by the other side's views if they do not disagree on the facts. When people are in fundamental disagreement with other viewpoints, I would say their behavior is often one angry message away from the anonymous troll personas. It is a very short fuse.
A good example is the idea of the "cancel culture". Do you think it is a reality? Someone like Stefan Molyneux would say yes. Someone like AoC would say no.
The person who thinks cancel culture is a real thing will say things which just seem completely idiotic to the other side, and vice versa. And they are still using real names.
Using real names in fact becomes a liability if there is actually a cancel culture. So, for example, I am safer making this point anonymously. If I accidentally end up offending you, at least I don't have to worry about losing my job.
> In many contexts, having identity tied to your online profile should make people act more like humans
That's the point, isn't it? A person can be good or bad, but when you group people together via social media, you find out just how many of them are just terrible human beings. People acting like humans is exactly what you don't want to happen.
> If everyone would follow this rule, the crazies would be left alone shouting into the emptiness.
On the other hand, unless that's society consensus, you'll just have the crazies screaming, the media picking it up and amplifying it and the politicians acting on it.
Unless we vote on everything in person (or commit to not changing policy), not publicly disagreeing with something is a problem.
I've had this happen (accidentally, there wasn't any malicious intent, I believe) in a community I'm part of. Some people felt that a certain policy was unfair, so they petitioned for its removal. I (and apparently most others) hadn't bothered paying attention to the "Feature Request" forum for policies, so nobody spoke up to point out the side effects of the intended change. The change went through, we suffered the fallout. The side effects weren't "omg the community is broken now" large, otherwise the change would surely have been reverted, but they were significant enough that you could measure it.
That's my main issue with the whole public debate thing. You can either tune out and fatalistically accept whatever happens, or you can tune in and try to stop what you consider to be detrimental. There's no "hey, this works, let's just keep it working, and not spend so much energy on how it could be changed" position. I usually choose fatalism these days because my energy is limited, but of course that means that those who choose to invest their energy into politics instead of contribution are in charge, and I'm not so sure they're the people we want to be in charge.
Trolling as a tactic won, because DFTT was never sufficient and banning was the only way. Once trolling was normalized by a presidential candidate, it was impossible to argue that he should just be ignored.
Trump isn't a troll, he has no sense of whimsy and he obviously cares way too much. The whole point of old-school trolling is to wind up the rubes over some trivial nonsense for your own amusement.
Incidentally, PHP is a fantastic language and Haskell is hot garbage.
But the modern meaning is basically either just "someone I disagree with", "someone I don't like", "someone acting in bad faith", or "someone in the out group". It's a word that means practically nothing now.
You completely misunderstand trolling if you think a real politician using his real name would be trolling on the internet!
Saying stupid things or even outrageous (in your view) things is not trolling unless it's said for the sake of provoking people who hold those views. If you actually believe your stupid points of view, you should not be called a troll, merely an idiot.
> Saying stupid things or even outrageous (in your view) things is not trolling unless it's said for the sake of provoking people who hold those views.
Are you implying that there is some other motive to the President's tweeting? I always understood it as simply a way to piss off his opponents (and thus distract them with nonsense while energizing his supporters).
Gleefully annoying people by posting is the very definition of trolling.
It seems pretty clear that he’s narcissistic, it’s not like his behavior has all of the sudden changed when he had a shot at being the presidential candidate. So I would say the motive is always to keep the spotlight on him and to bully others. He doesn’t want to be viewed as weak so he’s always on the attack. It’s not some well thought out strategy but it’s working with his base because a lot of them agree with that strategy. It’s the terrible way of thinking that you are manly and strong by picking on others, when in actuality you are insecure. I mean there are a lot of things behind his rise but each party invokes the name of the other party to convey negative feelings. I mean I heard my father call something communist, it actually wasn’t but that word is used by Republicans mean something that is bad. It’s an odd time in US politics, and you can see that the actual Conservative Republicans are stepping aside from their real views and values because it doesn’t matter as long as their team is winning, even if their leader loves Russia and is actively pushing the US towards authoritarianism.
That was sort of a rambling comment, but it’s just so odd to me that hate can be amplified so easily now a days. It’s been good to see the fight for equality lately with BLM, equality is a very American value (despite us needing to go so much further in that regard). But we have a President saying there are good racists out there and how we need to preserve the Confederacy. It makes no sense.
Is it? The USA has one of the least egalitarian societies in the developed world.
Assuming you're talking about equality of opportunity: given the ridiculous cost of higher education and healthcare in the USA (as opposed to most developed countries, where it's nearly free to attend even the best universities or get treated in hospital), do you really believe there's a high level of consideration given to equality in American society?
We've all stopped saying provocative things on social media for fun, because it's become too easy to rile people up like that - it used to actually take effort before people would take your flame bait seriously. Shooting fish in a barrel is no fun!
"the troll in the proper sense is one who speaks to a community and as being part of the community; only he is not part of it, but opposed. And the community has some good in common, and this the troll must know, and what things promote and destroy it: for he seeks to destroy. Hence no one would troll the remotest Mysian, or even know how, but rather a Republican trolls a Democratic blog and a Democrat Republicans."
"... indeed some say that Socrates was a troll, and so that the good man also trolls. ... he told the Athenians to care for their souls, rather than money and honors, and showed that they lacked knowledge. And this is not trolling but the contrary, exhortation and truth-telling— even if the citizens get very annoyed. For annoyance results from many kinds of speech; and the peculiarity [idion] of the troll is not annoyance or controversy in general, but confusion and strife among a community who really agree."
> unless it's said for the sake of provoking people who hold those views
Trump does it precisely for that reason. You can see his trolling spiking when he has to divert attention from bad news. Most of his activity is basically 50/50 between "energize base by creating outrage that feeds into victim narrative" and "define what news media will talk about next".
It's not particularly original, Berlusconi did it too (albeit with more traditional means).
Anyway, riling people up for your own entertainment is both contemptible and far too mainstream at the moment. Rod Liddle has had a newspaper column out of it for decades. As have the Sp!ked magazine lot.
There is a subtle difference in traditional propaganda and modern troll-influenced versions.
Traditional propaganda wants to be true, it wants to persuade you that what it saying is the truth. It bombards you with consistent messages that, repeated often enough, become true in the collective conscience. That’s the classic XX-century playbook.
Modern techniques are not meant to expose a consistent truth. Statements are often retracted or modified (“i was misinterpreted”). The real aim is to generate an immediate fightback, a virtual altercation, so that your side can claim to be a victim of “the system”; to force opponents into arguments that are based on false premises (and hence “unwinnable”) but that enable dogwhistling your sentiment to people; and to manipulate the media into covering these arguments rather than more substantive issues, effectively performing a DDOS on the capacity of regular people to be informed.
Modern politicians like Trump and Berlusconi thrive on the opposition arguing their proclamations as they were traditional propaganda, because it ends up amplifying the subtexts that establish an emotional bond with their electorate. Truth does not matter (“enough of experts”), not even establishing truth matters; what matters is triggering the response you want out of your opposition, which cascades into positive electoral effects by counterpoint. That’s very troll-like.
Some of these techniques are not entirely new, of course, but they seem to have become the principal instruments of political action now, and that’s novel.
Right, retweets are there to enhance "engagement" and "engagement" sells ads. Twitter is a platform for selling ads and nothing else - that you're allowed to converse on it is a secondary feature.
> Isn't that just every social media or discussion site?
Do you see ads next to this comment? What about on IRC? Mastodon? What if I told you that even many of the youtube series you may like are available on other platforms and you can pay a subscription fee to see them without ads?
There are alternative to "engagement" based networks, they exist now and you can support them and choose to use them over Twitter and Facebook.
I can understand strangers or acquaintances to some extent but you’ll have siblings and parents and children hanging their dirty laundry out in the open ???
Like WTF... it’s worse than having a yelling match out in the driveway for neighbors to hear because eventually the neighbors forget.
Agreed. But I think the point is it goes out the window, particularly on facebook and twitter. I.e., the "common sense" isn't that common, and the platforms enable and amplify the behaviour.
> Rule 14: Do not argue with trolls — it means they win.
Now of course, if you systematically do that, the version of reality that trolls are broadcasting wins. Because no other then trolls voice is to be heard.
And that what happening on the internet for years, where people who were harassed and trolled were expected to shut up and leave the place. And recently, I am equally thankful to historians who do engage with what trolls are saying. Because "smart" people just used to let trolls version of it to stand.
That rule made people who followed it fail and loose. So, people are not following it anymore.
Sometimes yes, just like in real life. Not always through.
What is complicity through, is to favoring trolls speech. Telling troll victim to shut up or to tell him that what is happening to him is because he was not sufficiently silent.
Sometimes, trolling is crazies. Other times, and quite often, it is tactic to shut up opponents. And it works and used to work. People who ignored trolls are not to be heard, because trolling stopped their speech.
And yet other times, what you call troll is someone espousing genuine opinion, but it is too comfortable and politically beneficial to pretend it does not exists.
A: "Nobody is saying X!"
B: "This person here is saying X, I am getting tons of messages to that effect!"
A: "These are just trolls! It is all ironical and they dont count!"
If you are invested in people claiming X is not existing or not an issue, then it is comfortable to pretend that anyone who say X is a troll. But often they are not. They are expressing their opinions or are trying push others toward that opinion.
That part of about people who will insist that someone is troll to stop discussion, because they dont like the discussion against said person. It was not meant to be about people who simply do not cared about the whole thing, decided this is not the case where they will join the argument.
I am definitely not saying that everyone must join every single argument or outraged group on the internet.
It's far easier online to find and follow people who have the same opinion as you, and block out people with views that you disagree with. And before you know it, you're sucked into an echo chamber with only news that confirms your views.
This echo chamber concept is cited time and time again in mainstream discussions, so much so that communication researchers argue that it has created “its own discursive reality”[1]. In fact, there is very little empirical support for the filter bubble and echo chamber concepts as a population-wide phenomenon. Social media users have been found to encounter more diverse news than non-users. And even when we think about people holding extremist views, findings suggest them to be even more engaged with the mainstream news compared to other news users—after all, they are interested to know what “the enemy” might be up to.
If you’re interested, the article below gives a great overview on the origin of this concept and different disciplines’ view on the subject (it’s open-access as well).
This is amusingly visible in lots of discussion groups (including HN!), where you will find large numbers of participants arguing that the group itself is an echo chamber—but each of them arguing that it is an echo chamber with a very different viewpoint, usually diametrically opposed to the person making the argument.
I don't think that social media users encounter less diverse news, it's that they encounter news that's specifically engineered for distribution via social media. This is not always written from a particular point on any political spectrum, but is almost always written with strong appeal to emotion, a deficiency of nuance, and a deeply dehumanizing view of the "other."
But filter bubble (FB) and echo chamber (EC) are two different concepts. They are not synonymous. The former is passive, and you have no choice. The latter is human nature. Birds of a feather and such. It's hard to imagine human nature reversing eons of evolution.
> "..indeed, search and social media users generally appear to encounter a highly centrist media diet that is, if anything, more diverse than that of non-users..."
"Appear to encounter" is a vague. Thst aside, encounter doesn't mean you're open to those ideas. Imagine seeing something in your feed that is close to a polar opposite of your view. The majority of the time that is interpreted as "That's BS. See. I knew I was right." That is, few have the time to pause and ask "what if?" or "did I miss something?" The exposure doesn't open their mind, it backfires and pulls the blinders even more narrow. I missed where this study addresses that boomerang effect.
Who are non-users? Fox News watchers? Or Rachel Maddow devotes? That's a pretty low bar. More diversity than than isn't saying much? Also, diversity in sources isn't necessarily diversity in ideas and perspectives. Most media sources are so worried about readers/viewers and ad revenue that they dare not venture too far from the prevailing narrative. Add in cancel-culture and an endless list of triggers and the reporting deviates further and further from traditional journalisms. Yes, content is delivers, how often would it qualify as intellectual junkfood?
> "Nechushtai and Lewis reported that Google News searchers in the US were directed overwhelmingly to 'longstanding national newspapers and television networks'"
That might be true, but it's not proof that FB or EC don't exist. I don't want to get off topic but most of the major news sources suffer from mono-vision, narrative preservation, parroting "conventional wisdow", and so on. The lack of depth and breadth and the sources is and continues to be a problem.
Furthermore, getting results in a SERP does not mean there was a click-through to read. Again, "exposure" isn't necessarily leading to more diverse ideas.
> "...fragmentation of national mediaspheres..."
IDK. From multiple sources I've read that limited ownership is leading to consolidation. With what data do they make this assumption? Most seem to agree that consolidation of ownership has led to lens that zoom in and stay tightly on message, as opposed to zoom out and look for possible other insights.
---
I have to read more later. Hopefully it gets better. I'm not so sure this holds enough water for me. Yes, that's my interpretation. It will be interesting to see how this pov is treated here. Ironic?
You raise some points that were also raised by a sibling commenter, but I’ll try to reply to them. You are correct that FB and EC are different concepts that are unfortunately often used interchangeably (even in research). This stems from the fact that there was no robust definition offered when the concept was introduced. Bruns offers a definition to distinguish the concepts.
> The former is passive, and you have no choice. The latter is human nature. Birds of a feather and such.
Both concepts are closely related to the idea of homophily, the preference to connect or communicate with like-minded individuals (birds of a feather, as you say). In Bruns’ definition, echo chambers mean the preference to connect, while filter bubbles mean the preference to communicate. Both of them are, as you say, human nature at their core. The concepts go further than homophily, though, in that they also exclude individuals or information outside of the chamber or bubble.
> "Appear to encounter" is a vague.
This is from the research abstract summarising recent empirical findings. I think some critical distance is warranted.
> Thst aside, encounter doesn't mean you're open to those ideas. (…) The exposure doesn't open their mind, it backfires and pulls the blinders even more narrow. I missed where this study addresses that boomerang effect.
This effect is addressed as a “oppositional reading stance” in the section “Social and Political Relevance and Impact”.
> Again, "exposure" isn't necessarily leading to more diverse ideas.
You are correct. However, if individuals are encountering information contrary to their bubble’s or chamber’s belief, we would have to conclude that there is no FB or EC at work as it has failed to exclude this information. If the bubble or chamber was as robust as claimed by Pariser and others, this content would not have reached the individual.
> From multiple sources I've read that limited ownership is leading to consolidation.
You are referring to ownership structures. “Fragmentation of national mediaspheres” here refers to the audience, specifically the concern that the increasing number of media offers, especially with the advent of the internet, would fragment the national audience and have adverse effects on discourse and democracy.
> That might be true, but it's not proof that FB or EC don't exist.
It is not epistemologically possible to prove that these effects do not exist. There is limited evidence that they exist in specific contexts, but barely any evidence for a population-wide effect.
> Social media users have been found to encounter more diverse news than non-users. And even when we think about people holding extremist views, findings suggest them to be even more engaged with the mainstream news compared to other news users—after all, they are interested to know what “the enemy” might be up to.
But that's perfectly compatible with echo chambers. They will interact with the outside world, but their interpretation of things that happen comes from within the echo chamber. Anti-Vaxxers know that there are people believing in vaccinations, they read about them in the papers, but then they might just post a comment "it's what Bill Gates wants you to believe so he can sell more 5G towers to Huawei". The echo chamber does echo their world view and interpretation of events, and just exposing them to "diverse news" won't change that, or we really wouldn't have a large variety of fringe groups.
You raise very valid points. The case you describe would be characterised as “oppositional reading” of mainstream media by those believing in a conspiracy.
However, this is unrelated to the common understanding echo chambers. A big problem with the concept is that there is no robust definition, and the fact that it is used widely in mainstream discussion does not make it easier. The tendency to preferentially connect or communicate with like-minded people (homophily) is nothing new, we encounter it everywhere—think hobby groups, special-interest forums like HN etc. Social media’s affordances especially promote homophily. What the filter bubble/echo chamber concepts add to this preference is an exclusion of outsiders. The above commenter summarised a purported consequence as “you’re sucked into an echo chamber with only news that confirms your views”. In this sense, using diverse news would be incompatible with an echo chamber.
What is especially interesting, then, is that ideological polarisation is very much alive on the internet, despite (or indeed because of) the absence of echo chambers.
I thoroughly recommend the article I linked above. It touches upon these concepts and cites current research that allows you to dig deeper.
It's difficult with academic researchers using terms with significantly different meaning from the public at large. I wonder whether it's more harm- than useful, as it'll typically lead to the public either misunderstanding what they say or dismiss them completely because they're "obviously talking nonsense".
The scientific research into echo chambers seems almost straw-man-y, e.g. "echo chambers are perfectly sealed to the outside, no contact whatsoever is possible", so they check and find "that's not really happening" because people might talk about politics with one group exclusively, but will also talk about sports so they're not in an echo chamber. Does that provide value, when they are in a political echo chamber?
The problem with scientific terminology is widely recognised in communication science. The issue is that while terms used by disciplines such as physics, law or medicine are sufficiently esoteric that someone “on the outside” wouldn’t use their terms casually, so they are somewhat protected from “watering down” their concepts in public discourse—or not, as we are seeing with anti-vax ideology, for instance. Terms in communication science also carry specific meaning to those who know them, but can just as well be interpreted as everyday language by outsiders.
I also get what you mean by “straw-man-y”. I think the issue is that definitions have to be robust and hypotheses falsifiable in order to make them researchable, so they must be kind of stringent. Exactly as you say, someone might be in a political echo chamber, but that is not their entire life. They have peers, family, friends, colleagues that also expose them to political information. By focusing so much on the online, the echo chamber assumption was very limited from the start.
I think it's worse than that. What Twitter especially does is make it easy to find people who are the worst possible version of those you disagree with. Every "nobody REALLY thinks that" is easy to disprove (although still generally accurate!)... You find ACTUAL neoNazis. ACTUAL tankies. ACTUAL fill in the blanks.
That's what radicalizes people. That, and the easy ability to mob folks who don't toe the line on whatever issue. The most disgusting takes on both sides are amplified, not blocked. And even when blocked, still screen-capped. You see the most unreasonable perspectives amplified but the broad middle folk, or those who have legitimate points, either driven off the platform or who just aren't amplified.
EDIT:I know this is usually frowned upon on HN, but I must ask: Why the downvotes?
I'm not sure echo chambers are bad - I like the "warrens and plazas" idea. If ideas really are a market - or more relevantly, policy is a market - we'd never buy anything if we only had half-baked prototypes to choose from.
That said, twitter really makes me appreciate traditional politics.
Party states in their manifesto they value x, y, z
Party representative does something that is consistent, or not, with that (individuals get to decide this, even if the media get to present "an angle").
Some "undesirable group" (Neo-nazis, tankies, etc) may vote for that party, but they don't control the message. Or if they do, the party leader has failed.
Twitter politics, by contrast, is built on the fundamental attribution error. If you don't take the most charitable interpretation of my side, and the worst interpretation of theirs, you're my enemy.
Both sides think they are arguing with the reasonable people on the other side of the debate,but in actuality the extremists are posting a lot more content than most users and they are get amplified as they get more "engagement". Engagement is a terrible measure for a single tweet in the nieve way because it amplifies really awful things that produce anger.
What reddit, twitter even youtube get wrong is that mixed up and down votes might mean very engaging but it does not mean good wholesome healthy content, infact it definitely means the opposite. If you just amplify engagement as they do today it might bring more clicks but it hurts society and builds extremists.
I often complain how people are ignoring context nowadays. Twitter makes the problem worse, because of the nature of it, there is not even space for the context. Just a knee-jerk-raction propagation machine.
I have realized that Twitter/FB are really unhealthy for me. You get dragged down the argument path so quickly. There is really no point in engaging. Just stay away, has been the best cure for me.
But are you referring to interactions on twitter or reading other people's post? I don't have a twitter account and couldn't care less about comments on youtube videos or twitter. But I do follow certain people (just by having them as favorites in by browser). I read twitter as kind of blog.
You can still refer to the absence of filters, you read people's opinion without the filter of a newspaper editor. But I never thought newspaper editors should be trusted for anything.
The “filtering” that seems to exist in meatspace interactions has many names including “white supremacy” and “the patriarchy” and “manufactured consent”.
There’s a rough road to consensus ahead for human culture as long as there’s this attitude that social media is “good” or “bad” rather than “inevitably chaotic”. if you look beyond the obvious bots you’ll realize these conversations are going to happen eventually with or without highly polarizing platforms designed to be addictive. our social media folks have only greased the tracks into conflict that was going to happen anyway.
Just a few years ago you could find plenty of opinion articles talking about the necessity of “the marketplace of ideas” for political discourse. None of that now....
I disagree that these conversations are inevitable and I disagree about your contention that the marketplace of ideas is no longer a foundational concept in our discourse.
People filtered in the past by what they cared about and who they spoke to. Now much of that filtering and indeed much of your friends are algorithmic suggestions. We're put into interactions on the internet with people you'd conceivably never meet offline. The fact that wasn't true in the past isn't white supremacy or the patriarchy or manufactured consent, it's logistic. It simply wasn't possible for the average person pre-phone, full-stop. Now people follow the people that they feel epitomize the precepts of the identity they agree with most which means naturally the popular people to follow must either become purer representations of the ideology or become less popular than those who are willing to adopt a more refined tankie, neo-nazi, athletic, techie, or what have you interests based persona.
And many many people still believe strongly in the marketplace of ideas. Just look at the Harper's letter from last week. I doubt the many intellectuals there don't represent a broad base of three population.
> People filtered in the past by what they cared about and who they spoke to. Now much of that filtering and indeed much of your friends are algorithmic suggestions.
But the suggestions are based on what you like (or what the algorithm "thinks" you like), and I don't believe that we're converting communists into libertarians because Twitter says "other people you might like: ".
The process is very similar but has gotten gotten much more efficient, because you're not limited to the people in your immediate vicinity. You don't need to move to a big city to find other people who think like you. The world has become a village, and you can now connect with your ideological doppelgangers around the world from the comfort of your home.
This is a lazy justification with little substance that applies just as much to the users and content and voting structure of this forum. The alternative is not talking to anyone or not choosing who we talk to.
Is it though. How many people are preoccupied with concerns outside their own tribe, and are prepared to throw away 99% of ideas in order to refine and filter the remaining 1%, multiple times? Ie. do impactful work with meaning, without directly benefiting themselves?
Do you have an example? I can’t make a head or tail of what you’re saying. It sounds like you have an extremely specific metaphysical process you have in mind.
I was answering to your last line: "Just a few years ago you could find plenty of opinion articles talking about the necessity of “the marketplace of ideas” for political discourse. None of that now...."
We've seen how accellerated communications create "social" bubbles and outrage, while we know true policy-making will require much more refinement of ideas through representatives that are eager to think beyond their tribe and tend to the greater good. The opposite is happening in later populist movements, and we instead witness corruption at the highest position exploiting outrage and dissent.
Everyone pays too much attention to Twitter. Social media has produced an environment in which short, highly emotional content reproduces the fastest, thus the evolution of information in our society has trended toward memetic oversimplifications and absolutes, driven by vanity and outrage and virtue signaling. We are optimizing for the worst qualities of discussion at the largest scales.
And yet it seems hard to imagine it could be any other way. Our evolutionary biology and inbred tribalism, social proclivities and laziness are what make the platforms so popular, the evolution of our memes is directly tied to our evolutionary biology's feedback mechanisms. It's hard to see just how we could optimize for nuanced, balanced and productive discussion at scale. We have platforms that could in theory optimize in that direction, but the widest audiences trend toward the simplest to consume content (reddit is filled with interesting discussion in the right places, but most of its audience just see the quick reinforcing memes that occupy the front page).
So do journalists pay too much attention to Twitter? Well if we value nuance and balance in our information then yes, any attention on Twitter is probably too much. But of course we don't, not at scale, rather we value audience size. And for that Twitter is a great place to pay attention. Hence much modern journalism is just a glorified retweet, part of Twitter and Facebook even if it is posted elsewhere. In the memes arms race the best weapons are those that can be spread widely and quickly, and for that Twitter provides ample ammunition.
The funny thing is that 4chan and twitter aren't that different in terms of hate and troll. They were at some point, but the lines keep blurring.
Sure you can find places in twitter that aren't toxic cesspools, but you can also find that in 4chan (/m/ for example).
The weirdest thing is that people in twitter is doing 4chan tier stuff under their real names and faces, which is just baffling to me. I always thought the whole 4chan loltroll hate machine thing was because of anonymity, but I'm starting to reconsider that stance.
Anonymity wasn't why the 4chan hate machine would fire up--it was because a few people could look like a lot of people. It looked like you had a mob right at hand.
Hmm, that's an interesting take. I always thought it was the "I can say whatever and they'll never know it was me, mwahaha the perfect crimeeee!" or something.
Other people (or maybe the same people saying dumb shit) also say brilliant things there. Dissuading use of a platform of a certain type over another (like this forum)is irrational.
We need better software for displaying said content, not banning the content entirely.
Also, freedom of speech isn't what most people think it is.
Agreed, the signal to noise ratio is poor, but there are some really thought provoking comments in there. Wasn't some decades old mathematical problem solved by a random 4chan post?
Curious what you mean by the freedom of speech not being what people think it is?
Professional (print) journalism (pre-internet if you wish) vs journalism which now includes bloggers, vloggers, anyone who has a profile and presents him/herself literate in the domain they’ve chosen to write in.
Yes because it is an easy way to craft what ever narrative is desired. There are people with ever possible view point on twitter so once you have the narrative you can find the appropriate tweet to embed.
"There was large scale outrage on twitter about decision X..." followed by an embed of one of three tweets.
It would be very interesting to chart the rise of twitter citations as compared to other sources.
News outlets have been doing this since long before Twitter was a thing. Any time you hear/read “x is facing criticism...”, “x is under pressure...”, “x is being praised...”, “many people are saying...”, “people familiar with the issue...”, “inside/anonymous sources...”, “x calls for...”, “experts say/warn...”, everything you hear/read after that point is 100% curated editorial opinion, and news outlets have been pedalling that for at least as long as I’ve been old enough to read the news.
Those kinds of statements are so vague that they’re pretty much always guaranteed to be true, so you don’t even need to provide a factual basis for them, but before Twitter news outlets would just go and interview random uninformed passers by on the street and gather a couple of good common-man sound bites to reinforce whatever bad opinion it is they’re pushing. My favourite technique that I’ve seen become more common over the past few years is to print an article claiming “x is facing online death threats” for anybody they want to generate some sympathetic support for. Are such headlines true? Almost certainly. Would that headline be true for any public figure you can possibly think of? Almost certainly.
Even nobodies on the internet have received death threats, haven’t we all had at least one at this point? I don't even remember how many I have had now. Given I have been using the internet since the late 1990s its got to average at least 1 a year but some years like the Usenet years I received a lot more than that average. Its probably less than 100 but I have no idea how many it actually is. I received many of these post about Java (the programming language) and not objectionable things, I received one for a post showing a no op stream!
I've gotten death threats on Reddit from people that I have never even argued with. The guy was deeply mentally ill with some kind of superiority complex so it came as no surprise. Anyway it made me think of how much identifying information I might have left behind and if someone patient enough to go through my entire comment history could doxx me. I've been using new accounts every couple months ever since while trying to change the subs I comment on every now and then.
Hell, some guy I cut off while driving told me to go kill myself today! It's unfortunate that comments that most everyone would disregard as meaning very much take on some weight online. It's pure cancer and is destroying the world.
It's trivially easy to affect real change on Twitter through bots, so it should come as no surprise that that's exactly what's happening.
Twitter isn't disgusting because of what people say on it, it's disgusting because of how it makes people feel.
One of the darker sides of Twitter is that it's basically a mean adult version of 'Yo Mamma' jokes. Put downs, one upping and bringing to light unsavory things that should remain unsaid. It has some flipside as a substitute to RSS feeds, but I'd rather go back to RSS.
A friend of a friend once took us along to a Yelp Elite meetup / party. It’s what I imagined a Twitter party might be like, along the lines you described, if Twitter had a way of collecting cliques together IRL and letting them socialize.
I use to go-to IRC parties in the 90s. I remember my first one being a really odd mix of people. from button down conservative suit types to people literally having sex in the living room in front of everyone. the common denominator was a random IRC channel. it opened my eyes to the people behind the scrolling text.
I've noticed the Twitter embeds becoming more common in mainstream news sources in the last few years. I think I subconsciously attributed it to the fact that the US President uses Twitter as a major tool of communication, and many journalists followed suit (this attribution of causality could be entirely wrong as I'm not a Twitter user myself, just an occasional visitor to the site).
Despite this, if the embedded tweets do not contain primary evidence or quality secondary evidence, it would become more difficult for it to gain real traction in other news outlets, no?
> Despite this, if the embedded tweets do not contain primary evidence or quality secondary evidence, it would become more difficult for it to gain real traction in other news outlets, no?
> I think I subconsciously attributed it to the fact that the US President uses Twitter as a major tool of communication, and many journalists followed suit
I think you've got that backwards. Journalists quoting tweets to construct the desired narrative gave legitimacy to twitter.
Trump rode on those coat-tails. His birther campaign should have never gained mainstream traction but the media couldn't help themselves from reporting on a conspiracy theory because Trump is a salacious figure.
They Streisand effected his entire campaign and presidency.
Twitter works for them as they can shape the narrative to their own preconceived notions.
Just write "twitter users blast X" which in reality is like 5 people.
Its a fig leaf for whatever they want to write.
Oh man that has to be one of the most frustrating things whenever I go somewhere that has the news on...Hell, I saw someone use a twitter thread as a "source" as support for an argument on facebook.
Twitter can be such a cesspool...I'm just always surprised at how people can't stop looking at it despite it making them miserable.
Keep in mind that in your examples, those 'someones' are Musk, Chance, and the US/China ambassadors. Not exactly no bodies. For better or worse, Twitter has become an official communication channel for many, and is news.
To make a statement like that 'quite unsubstantianted' on the one of the most common things is very strange.
I feel like something was missed or lost along the way. The parent said articles are quoting tweets more often embedding opinion that match the story they want to tell.
This morning I saw a sports story from two different papers both with the embedded tweets both with different replies that were opposite and both presented as majority opinion.
Journalists looking to twitter for the "pulse" of culture or current "narrative" is akin to creatures of the jungle who sit under mango trees and wait to consume rotting mangoes that fall beneath the tree. After a while, they don't mind the stench, they're lazy and intoxicated without exerting much effort at all.
Journalists like twitter because it allows them to “build a personal brand” i.e. they are less beholden to the publication/broadcaster which they are employed. It allows them a direct line to their audience to promote their work and news orgs see value in employing journalists with large follower counts. I’ve worked for a couple of large news orgs over the years and just by virtue of including them in my Twitter bio And being followed by journo friends my follower count increased to the high hundred/ low thousands— I barely tweet at all.
A side effect of all this is that journalists (and others with high follower counts) have a very distorted idea of how Twitter works and feels for most people and tend to ascribe more importance to it than perhaps it deserves. Thing is it’s kind of a self fulfilling prophecy.
Ps. I haven’t actually read the linked article so apologies if I’m repeating its contents
True but you can't talk about one without the other.
Young journalists have to be active on it in order to establish themselves. But by being active they're overexposed to it.
In theory, you can both be there and keep it in perspective: to know it's a dirty pub for angry people and robots to yell at each other, that doesn't represent the real world.
But that's hard, and not everyone can do it long-term, especially when more and more people around you spend a lot of time in the same fun house.
Feel free to pay some attention to the small bubbles that form around like-minded people in their twitter echo-chamber but it is doing frustrating amount of damage to community and individuals when lazy journalist just take an twitter outrage/trends as an estimate of "what's in people's mind".
Checking twitter for general consensus, opinions or trending topic is like checking tabloid stand at the gas-station for it. Vast majority of people don't give a single crap about the private affairs of actors nor the new hottest diet/cars/fashion that tabloids makes you believe.
Journalist seem to over estimate how many users Twitter have, I think. It’s even worse outside the US where Twitter is even less popular. It sometimes seems like Twitter is a platform for journalists.
Non US person here. Nobody I know really uses Twitter in any significant way.
Instagram is the top around these parts, while previously relegated to FOMO inspiring photos.. it has grown increasingly political since Facebook took over. Not sure if it's a coincidence or some nefarious scheme.
Actually, I don't think that's the issue - at least in the UK. I've heard journalists openly talk about the fact that Twitter is absolutely essential for readership numbers on their articles, and that's not an estimate, they obviously have the raw data from their website.
Politicians and journalists alike use it to gain influence. Which would be fine in and of itself.
But they absolutely do pay too much attention to it. My problem is how many of them then mistake the screaming extremists in the comment threads on there for "public opinion" and the rest of us have to suffer this nonsense - until there's a vote on something that doesn't go anything like the way they thought it would, time and time again (there have been several examples in the UK in recent years).
They do, but thank you Twitter for congregating all the journalists into a public square to let us see how narratives form and the sausage gets made re: news.
I was always shocked at the cultural norms (ideas and behavior) manifest on Twitter and was always repeatedly laughed at (by myself, included) for being concerned about that. Twitter was no representation of real life; but then ever year I see real life (ideas and, maybe, behavior) conforming to yesteryear's Twitter. I do think a lot of things start in Twitter and move out into the mainstream; it's not a bad place to look (if you want to know see where we are headed) or it's a terrible place to look (if you care about where we are headed).
This is possibly self fulfilling: journalists or others pay more attention to Twitter than they “should”, which gives Twitter a disproportionate degree of influence, in turn justifying why they pay attention to it
I've always suspected that the big draw of Twitter is that there is never any need to inquire whether or not something on Twitter is quotable.
Many Facebook posts, etc. are friends-only, perhaps presenting at least a momentary ethical question. With Twitter, it is clear that the posts are definitively in the wild and in the public square.
And since the tweet itself often is the story, they also don’t need to bother with fact checking or verifying sources. It doesn’t matter if the tweet is factual or not, just that some person of interest said it.
It also probably helps that many people have a morbid curiosity about what celebrities are doing and saying, and can’t help but click on those articles.
Journalists used to speak to sources and collate a point of view. Now even the TV channels literally screenshot the tweet and display it. So lazy and a bugbear of mine. If I wanted to see a Twitter feed, I'd just to read Twitter.
Journalism is definitely going downhill. All news organizations are hurting for money and cutting to the bone. Local newspapers are dying, and television news is getting worse. I don’t think it’s laziness, it’s just that they can’t afford real journalism any more.
Tweets are not news. Journalists today who base a story on a tweet are no better than the journos of yesteryear who wrote their stories by "pasting up" press releases from their subjects. They're shills. (The same might be said for political reporters who sit around the office watching C-SPAN and writing stories. But, no digression.)
If a tweet announces (for example) a move to change a particular government regulation, that might be news. But the Twitter medium is NOT the message. It's closer to something scrawled on the wall in a public toilet than it is to even a press release. A competent journo will follow up to obtain more or deeper sources, and background.
Here's an over-the-top idea: Twitter should introduce a feature that randomly attributes one tweet in a thousand to the wrong account. And Twitter should publicize that change and include it in their terms of service. The effect: journos risk their reputations who don't follow up to verify the source and content of tweets they report.
Twitter will never make this change. But putting the burden on journos to distrust and verify restores a part of that profession that's been fading away along with newspaper revenue.
Maybe there's another way to reduce the trustworthiness of Twitter content just enough to make verification necessary, and to put the burden on journos. They're trained to verify, hopefull.
Now, a certain 45th holder of a certain visible job tweets a lot. Stories saying that person tweeted something inflammatory may be news. But they're old and boring news. McDs has golden arches. Pope's Catholic. DJT spews rubbish on twitter.
Problem is Twitter is heavily manipulated by actors with the money.
Journalists weakened position as laborers created a generation of journalists without real mentorship. This in turn made us lose knowledge of consequences and thus ethics.
Finally neo journalists just watch Twitter all day long, which makes it their main source. This amplifies the adverserial content farms employed by centralized money.
In a sense, mass "social" media is the modern incarnation of royalty's replacement for religion.
Too much of anything happens on Twitter. People evolved to resolve conflicts face-to-face. It's so easy to interact on Twitter in a way that very few ever would in "real" life. It doesn't feel good to be mean to someone's face, especially if they seem like a mostly nice and reasonable person (as most are). Take that away and we naturally fall into toxic shout matches that go nowhere and slowly emit a cloud of intangible tension and stress that hangs over everything.
Twitter has no incentive to change the current structure as their platform now has a massive sway over discourse and an unrivaled ability to create seeming majority opinions. Why would they build tools to make this better?
I think this sort of thinking oversimplifies the problem. While we experience the deterioration of these norms as “the problem”, the deeper issue is the environment that caused them to deteriorate in the first place.
There are systemic and environmental reasons that good journalists following these rules “lost out” to those who didn’t - reducing the root of the issue to a moral failing of modern journalists is, IMO, largely unproductive.
Another point I’d add is that these rules are not impervious to abuse by bad actors. If you’re a bad actor, knowing the algorithm used to hold you to account makes it much easier to plan around. Think of this is a Type II error: the journalism system fails to denounce someone it ‘should’ — implicit in these rules is a preference set, how often are we willing to accept Type I v Type II errors.
The twitter outrage phenomenon, taken charitably, is frustration with “the standard media algorithm”, because it produces a large and persistent number of Type II errors. They believe bad actors have grown so adept at circumventing these rules that they should be retired. They view the “cost” of a Type I error as less important.
The info consumer needs to more aware of what they are consuming; truth in food labeling if you will.
Editorial is not journalism.
Deviating from the Jim Leher rules is not journalism.
And so on. The root problem is it's the media's job to educate and they are the #1 beneficiary of the market being uneducated. At this point, it's naive to believe the media is going to police itself. Clearly, that's not happening.
It seemed like it got enough hype and got a lot of tech media journalists to sign up and then.... It was just them complaining that it was just journalists on there.
I think that was a telling tale about what their incentives are .
They’re incentives were an attempt to change social media with a more refined version of interactions. Of course getting big names on it early on would drive interest. That sort of business behavior was not done in bad faith.
The problem was that it was subscription based. The interactions between its users were thought out and professional. The trade of journalism itself had nothing to do with its failures — people did not have interest in paying for something they could do for free on Twitter.
(1) I’m curious if part of the problem is that the marginal cost of gathering information through Twitter is so much lower, that it’s practically irresistible for increasingly cash constrained media outlets. Traditional modes of journalism are costly and myopic: traveling a journalist around the country, and interviewing people individual by individual.. it’s no wonder they’re drawn to a (free!) place that aggregates public sentiment from the comfort of your desk
(2) Too much in comparison to what. I can assure you they pay too much attention to Twitter in comparison to my preference, but I’m not sure that’s a meaningful comparison. How should journalists decide “how much” attention to pay to any source? I don’t think there’s consensus on this, which is a deeper problem than twitter itself
my wife started her career as a journalist (she's now a teacher). I was telling her the other day that it isn't fair someone who signs up at twitter and wordpress all of the sudden gets to call themselves a Journalist. she just looked at me sorta aggravated and said "no shit."
Twitter is just a glorified internet forum with a few active celebrity (openly) and journalist posters.
I find the fact the majority of the news cycle now runs on collating a bunch of tweets just as absurd as if they were collating a bunch of reddit posts all day.
It is not the real world journalists acting that it is just because they have a 3000-10000 follower count and a checkmark is just as ridiculous as them pretending reddit is the real world because they have 7 figures of comment upvotes and some nuggets of reddit gold.
Email is still the best for text based discourse, IMO. Asynchronous especially.
I can synchronously connect to groups via messenger and iPhone built-in email a link to grandma. No social media account required to connect to friends and family.
One touch video/voice chat are accessible and disposable enough, not all of them require logins or drag all the features of Slack along.
Facebook and Twitter take up the same conscious space for me as MySpace and AIM.
What's the difference between public restroom wall and twitter? Anyone can write what ever they want. Don't follow any links. Some of writing is with $hit.
When talking about journalists, HN comments generally seem pretty antagonistic and hostile. Why is that so? Yes, a lot of cable news is driven by outrage cycles, its what attracts views and the ad industry follows the views. Unironically, the online media properties of these firms are huge influential operations precisely due to the adtech industry that Silicon Valley has built/enabled ...
Journalists that work for non-cable news outlets generally do a pretty good job of reporting on current events. These are very smart folks, trained in the profession of Journalism who often put themselves at risk to report truth to power. And they present it in ways that are easily understandable for their readers... its not an easy job, and there is a spectrum of capability in journalism. I bet readers of HN would be pretty upset if they were similarly stereotyped based on a narrow but vocal minority (e.g. movie-style hackers?).
Both Journalists and people in Tech use twitter to have reasonable discussions about current events. It depends on who you follow: you get to select the corner of twitterscape that you want to inhabit.
People speaking truth to power are doing a difficult job that's worth defending.
These days most "news content" is speaking power to truth instead. No real effort to uncover truth is made, instead a "both sides" narrative is manufactured and awful people given platforms to lie.
> I bet readers of HN would be pretty upset if they were similarly stereotyped based on a narrow but vocal minority
Would they be upset or not, but that's what is happening pretty much in every article about "Silicon Valley" that I've read lately in mainstream press. Stereotyping is rampant. And movie-style hackers is way not the worst stereotype promoted by the press.
> Both Journalists and people in Tech use twitter to have reasonable discussions about current events
Unless "reasonable discussion" means "throwing insults or 'right on, bro!'s at each other", twitter is pretty much built to prevent any possibility of reasonable discussions. I can allow that despite being built to prevent it, some people with heroic superhuman effort manage to do it anyway. I tip off my hat to them and remain astonished why they chose such an unsuitable platform. But then there are people who write US Constitution on a grain of rice - just for the sake of accomplishment. But this is a rare occurrence which is completely atypical to what is usually happening on twitter. Probably the grain of rice thing happens more often.
You won’t find the reasonable discussions if you’re only looking at the outrage inducing, highly retweeted comments.
Without giving much details, it makes 0 point to continue this discussion as I can simply say that you’re not looking at the “nicer parts” of twitter. Its a complex issue and is not amenable to that kind of reductionism.
I'm not looking at any parts of twitter, as much as I can avoid it. Twitter is a lost cause, and for any people that are trying to have "nicer parts" there I'd only say - stop supporting the cesspool by your contribution and find a platform that actually tries to support what you're doing instead of trying to ruin it.
You have a point, but it’s like with tech. The stuff that just grinds away in the corner, doing it’s job doesn’t get reportede on. Same with journalists, only the exceptional, be it good or bad, gets discused. And the journalist who done poor or even wrong reporting far exceed those who are exceptional. The largest group, the boring middle who just grinds away, doing their job, they aren’t interesting enough to be debated.
Yes, maybe only the sensational stuff bubbles up. But that doesn’t invalidate the excellent work that those in the press corps do every day, just like Oracle or Facebooks shenanigans don’t invalidate the good work most software engineers do even if the shenanigans might be what gets all the attention.
Non-journalists people: why can't you just report "the truth" ? why are you trying to push an agenda ? Why are you so lazy that you have to take your informations from Twitter ?
Non-tech people: why is this slow ? why do you have so many bugs ? why do you need one week to deliver this but two months for that ?
Unless you are familiar with a profession one tend to simplify the challenges of it. That's why I try not to give any judgement on others' work.
This is exactly correct. Journalism is a serious profession, and I have mad respect for folks who dedicate their lives to it. It’s one of the pillars of democracy. And yet, that profession is vilified to no end in a forum that I count as reasonable.
Which makes it clear that even smart people can be so easily duped into an alternate reality... quite depressing.
