The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric.
Speaking up used to be something you do to change someone's mind or yours. What's the point in speaking up if nobody does anything with what you said?
The like button reprogrammed people. They started getting positive feedback for speaking in an echo chamber, for saying and doing things their audience already agrees with. They started getting negative feedback for doing the thing language was designed for.
Normal purposeful speech makes different opinions closer, while speech under the feedback of the like button makes similar opinions even closer and different opinions further apart.
If the interaction stays the same of course fragmentation is inevitable - but that's not a good thing. This fragmentation extends to the real world and has real consequences. It will blow up. Even with Twitter being internally fragmented the polarization in society grew. Nobody wants to listen to the other side anymore, while there's always the most to be learned from listening to the other side.
The core of the problem needs to be addressed: that social media has reprogrammed people to the purpose of speech.
One of the reasons I'm even bothering with websites like HN as opposed to social media is because it still feels like there's a slight chance of making people change their minds here.
The biggest problem is that you can make money from the internet.
The internet was more about self-expression and fun. Then people realized they can sell things or themselves (being a "content-creator", "thought-leader", etc.).
As a result the most active people are tailoring their actions towards increasing engagement, getting you to buy something, getting you to think a certain way, etc. and we have a divide between "content-creator" influencers/producers and passive consumers who like or retweet things they haven't thought through but sound catchy and provide the same opinions.
It's not 100% bad; content is more polished and organized, but you have to be discerning in order to get good value and a lot of people don't have those abilities.
I would say the biggest problem is advertising. It would be much less harmful if commercial content was upfront about asking for your wallet, and the transaction ended there (the publisher's incentives are directly aligned with the end-customer's). Instead, we have stuff that's technically "free" but actually comes with plenty of strings attached such as mismatched incentives - the content is only there as bait and the actual objective is to get you to look at an ad or think a certain way for commercial gain. Worse, this "free" stuff being out there means there's not enough pressure to build a good, universal micropayments system to displace advertising, so the problem remains.
Not just advertising, its the ad networks that have been silently putting their finger on the scale to coax/trick the major corporate customers to support certain issues.
The reason surveillance capitalism will always win out is because with direct payments people only have to pay for something once.
Even if (and I hope this never happens) we had some "perfect system" where every website was automatically paid some fee every time there was a page view, the companies behind those websites would lose money on that deal.
If I own example.com and you click a link to www.example.com/somepage.html and after I serve you that page your bank account automatically transfers some small fee to me, that's the end of the transaction. You'd be done paying! Why would I want that when with surveillance capitalism you will continue to pay for the rest of your life?
If I collect huge amounts of your personal information, then sure, I can make money by using it to push ads in your face (and I will), but after I do that I still have all your data. I can leverage that later in any way that benefits me. I can use it manipulate you into loading more pages on my website, I can use it to safely increase the prices of things you buy from me, I can sell and resell that same data, in whole or in part, over and over to anyone who wants it. Combined with data about others it becomes even more valuable too.
You. on the other hand, will deal with the consequences of that data being used against you for your entire life. It will be used by scammers to try to trick you. It will be used by the state to control and monitor you. It will be used by other companies to take more of your money. It will be used by advertisers to manipulate you. It will be used against you in courts. It will be used against you by employers. You will never stop paying. You'll pay in ways you never imagined and in ways that aren't possible now, since your data will still be there when they become possible later. When consumers spend the rest of their lives endlessly paying for everything they have and everything they do it means more wealth and power for the few at the top.
Unless your new universal micropayments system can do all that, why would corporations switch to it?
To expand on Parkinson's Law: capitalism grows to fill the space allotted to it.
The 90s internet was great because it was built by academia. Post Dot Bomb, the internet got saturated by big business. Everything evolves so quickly on the web that we're already finding ourselves living under the eventualities of late-stage capitalism and ultimate wealth inequality (slavery).
I've come to view tech as an ever-tightening noose that solves every problem except how to get out of it. Loosely that means that whatever goal each of us has for going into tech will be the one that gets us in the end. We get older, conditions change and we find ourselves becoming the villain of our own story. Even if we succeed, we fail.
Stepping outside of that, I've decided to embrace magical thinking in my own life. I believe that ultimately tech will bring magic back into the world and we'll find ourselves confronting the ethical dilemmas of fairy tails. In the New Age, when everyone has the ability to change the world for better or worse, wisdom becomes more important than knowledge.
The status quo is threatened by that, so there's already a backlash against stuff like wokeism. Socialism becomes the bogeyman to keep us distracted so we don't turn our attention away from systems of control in general. And so on.
How to protect ourselves from that? I think it's helpful to meditate on what the opposite of all this might look like. What's the opposite of profit? Or power? Softer questions might be: what's our individual definition of success? Why are we doing this?
Now to get back to watching superhero movies on New Year's Day..
Circulating pamphlets was once a potent political tool, now they come sandwiched between ads in a newspaper that nobody reads.
Evaluate a randomly chosen NFT-referent for artistic merit and see how it stack up to a randomly chosen pre-nft art.
I'm still optimistic about the web though. It's more configurable than the other media. We may yet find a way to wall off the advertising cancer and make some space for cool stuff to survive.
There are many online radio stations without ads, and you can already wall off advertising with something like PiHole or extensions like uBlockO. I never hear or see ads anymore :)
If you're looking at a blog that might've been presented with ads, but you're not seeing those ads, well that's nice. I also rarely see those ads. But how do you know whether the blog itself is an ad? That's the more insidious problem.
A lot of internet advertising comes in different forms. For example, with Search Engine Optimization, businesses will create "content" or pages with information for keywords to get their pages ranked higher. This also applies to social media and youtube. In order to be popular or remained ranked, you have to put out video content or stream almost daily.
This is essentially "junk" content which shows itself as reaction videos and related content. If you want engagement, then it turns into having a strong opinion about something the creators probably don't care that much about because it will get people who agree or disagree with the stance to comment and get into comment battles, etc.
It's definitely not as annoying as TV commercials, but it's not good for people unaware of it who get anxiety or waste a lot of time feeling upset about things designed to push views to someone's platform, or in worst cases push their agenda.
That is exactly what “spending your time dealing with advertising” means. See also cigarettes and food products with the labels turned out. Soap operas are literally named after advertising. At least they’re honest about it.
TV is minimum 1/3 time advertising, 2/3 content, but that is ignoring shilling and product placement in the content.
I do not spend anywhere near 1/3rd of my time on the internet figuring out what is and is not advertising. Mostly by avoiding content with images and video.
I'd say 1/4 advertising, 2/3 content and 1/12 opening and closing credits but I take your point.
I don't know if you've tried to search for anything on the internet lately, but I've found that any time I'm trying to be an active rather than a passive consumer of the internet, it's getting damned hard to avoid things that are 'SEO optimized' and relevant content pessimized.
>The Internet is television with lower production value and longer commercials.
This is upside-down. In the old days stuff went to you: you had to tune in at 8p to see your show, you had to sit through or mute the commercial breaks every 8 or whatever minutes, which by the way are synced across every channel to punish people who try to tune it out.
It was a nightmare. There were no podcasts, 2 hours of unedited conversation; you had people wearing a ton of makeup screaming at each other and interrupting with one-liner quips. You had no ad blockers.
No. Way.
If you suffer ads online and getting mediocre content then the good news is it's under your control.
But in my experience, the goals shouldn’t be to as you state “to change their minds.” , it should be to listen and respond. If I disagree with you, I want to know how you came to that conclusion , I am not interested in your talking points you had recycled from somewhere.
This also makes discussions way more interesting. Now, this principle should extend to anyone, and the problem is that in online debates discussions often become asymmetrical. Say if your debate partner has no interest in listening, or argues with bad faith. Online communication should promote that mindset (something HN does in a form, but surely not perfected yet)
I said change theirs or yours. Not necessarily change it completely but at least learn where the difference comes from, and either move my position to account for new information or logic, or try to convince the other side.
But I do see it as a goal to get the opinions closer. I prefer listening while having a clear picture of what I'm currently thinking about it because only then you can realize where's the difference, and the difference is what you want to learn.
If the other side doesn't listen to statements, they might listen to questions. Asking what they think about X might get a better response than just stating X. Works in real world too against these types. Many times it's not because it's online, it's just narcissistic personality. Many people won't acknowledge when something moves their opinion.
Why does someone’s position need to change? That implies that somebody is wrong, and that’s not necessarily the case. More often, the “wrongness” comes from having a different point of view.
For example, it’s easy to say “fuck cars” when you live in the city and they are only polluting, noisy nuisances that are, at best, optional for living your life. But when you live where I do, not having a car means a significant number of unreasonable changes to your life.
Great example, because people saying "fuck cars" probably aren't talking about your cars or your situation. They mean the cities. They too have a different point of view. What discussion is good at is allowing us to talk about topics even with differing points of view, but a like/dislike button only rewards or disuades what you said. There is no opportunity for the meeting of minds, and it makes an echochamber.
Had you seen a video titled "Fuck cars" and disliked it, Youtube would a stop showing you that content, and now you only get pro-car content. Or someone who loves bikes sees the video, they like it, they would never get pro-car content, and would never see your point of view. No one is challenged, no one is brought closer together in understanding.
Generally from my experience, people saying "fuck cars" aren't just talking about cars alone. They're talking about all poorly designed towns, cities, and infrastructure that completely cater to cars while disregarding the necessity of human movement, transportation, and health.
So get rid of pre-fabbed "individualization" by the platform, and allow individuals to choose what they do&don't want to see. This usually cuts ads way down, so I see why they don't do it, but it would fix the issues of bubbles. (Assuming bubbles and division is not what they wanted in the first place).
The "fuck cars" position is a great example. I advocate for pedestrian and cyclist friendly infrastructure for our city at our local planning board. The quality of online discourse even for people that share my position is terrible. There's a lot to discuss like fire apparatus access or construction labor shortages causing backups, street classifications, but the online discourse has so little of that.
A lot of these folks are driven by YouTubers who do advocacy work for those unfamiliar with the debate. But actually showing up at a planning meeting with that kind of rhetoric makes no sense. And this isn't even beginning to engage with people with different positions on road infrastructure. It's the double edged sword of the internet that raises awareness for issues but loses nuance because nuance loses engagement.
Ever heard of someone saying "fuck cars" in person? Where the conversation just stood on "fuck cars", and stopped there? When someone on the internet says "fuck cars", it's because he's expecting to get some dopamine from getting liked by similarly minded friends who also hate cars.
If his purpose was to have a discussion, to convince you, it wouldn't be "fuck cars", it would be "cars are polluting". And even if he's an arrogant asshole in real life, you could explain how cars are useful to you, and ask what he's suggesting to do. Maybe 1% are such total careless assholes you shouldn't be talking to them, but others will try to come up with an answer, and if they fail to give it, they will remember it.
It's not a binary. The position doesn't have to change from one to the other. It's that with more information from each side, both positions should evolve. That's where progress can be actualized. Echo chambers don't get results, they just echo.
> Why does someone’s position need to change? That implies that somebody is wrong, and that’s not necessarily the case.
Depends on your purpose in talking. My purposes are to inform people of things, to request information about things, to ask people to do things, to play, or to indirectly express approval(hug) or disapproval(hiss.)
If I'm arguing with somebody, I should either be improving the quality of their information or improving the quality of my own, or determined to convince somebody that they should do something. If I'm playing, by definition I can't be seriously arguing. The only people who care about my approval or disapproval as such are my parents and other loved ones; to other people the news about my current feelings as an individual aren't important, and if other people who didn't care about me found them important, they wouldn't want innuendo, they'd just want the facts.
If we have two incompatible opinions about something, yet we have no desire to bring them into agreement, why are we even arguing about it? Surely there's something better we could be doing.
I think a lot of people have started to think that the internet loves or hates them personally, and are desperate for its approval in an unhealthy way. The fact that there's money to be made in being noticed on the internet makes the situation even worse.
> For example, it’s easy to say “fuck cars” when you live in the city and they are only polluting, noisy nuisances that are, at best, optional for living your life. But when you live where I do, not having a car means a significant number of unreasonable changes to your life.
"It's easy to say that if you're you" isn't part of any legitimate argument. It's just extraneous ad hominem that people add while making (or eliding past) an argument. It also doesn't get you out of explaining "significant number" or especially "unreasonable," which begs the question.
What about upvoting and downvoting in hn? Do you find that to be positive?
Personally, I find I have to work to not write striking statements because I know they give me chance of getting a ton of upvotes. If I’m tired, the temptation is harder to resist
On Reddit, sometimes it's fun to sort by "most controversial", e.g. posts with most upvotes AND downvotes. That's where some of the most "edgy takes" lie. I kind of wish you could do that here, too
Speech is also about comfort and venting where echo chambers shine. And those chambers predate the social media. IME even IRL people tend to congregate mostly with like minded individuals.
And if the congregation turns out to have too many views in contrast to ones own then folks tend to leave.
> even IRL people tend to congregate mostly with like minded individuals
Historically, forming these tiny niche communities wasn't possible. Sure you had different social groups but they were geographically limited. You are also stuck to a degree when there is conflict.
> if the congregation turns out to have too many views in contrast to ones own then folks tend to leave.
Sure and it tends to be moderate people who leave first. Groups become more dogmatic and cultish, more extreme over time as they demoderate.
Your friends were your church, schoolmates, etc. You can't pick "People who are X, Y, Z and support only A and B" because the pool of potential friend candidates just wasn't large enough.
On Twitter, I can choose to only be friends with conservative libertarian furries who believe in crypto. That doesn't scale to real life.
> Your friends were your church, schoolmates, etc. You can't pick "People who are X, Y, Z and support only A and B" because the pool of potential friend candidates just wasn't large enough.
It seemed to work well enough for me. One thing worth noting is that people who live in the same geographical location already tend to be somewhat like-minded, for obvious reasons. But you seem to be talking about a "perfect match", which is an impossible, unnecessary standard.
> On Twitter, I can choose to only be friends with conservative libertarian furries who believe in crypto.
You're not friends with people on Twitter. If you think you are, try leaving Twitter, and see how many of your "friends" still talk to you afterward.
I was so baffled years ago by a man on the street series of interviews where people in a Liberal US City were asked if they had any republican friends or if they would be friends with such. Most said no. I also know a US lady who echo's this. Today my YouTube feed is filled with both conservatives and liberals (most of which voted republican)
Sorry, I meant I was baffled at how they refused to have friends from the other side of the political aisle. That's real wacky. From watching political YT for years its clear that the left refuses to engage or discuss with people they disagree with, yet the moderates, republicans are happy to, in fact crave it.
It's heartwarming to me to see when someone from the other side will engage. Destiny is a great example but there are a few others, but not enough. It's these discussions where the two sides come together where there is the most information to glean.
This is one of the more astute things I’ve read in a while. The like button has become what an angry mob yelling to one another while holding pitchforks use language for. And this is what using the internet feels like now.
It's not the "like" button. It's the "likes" number. Hide the number and the like button is signal to the system. So "likes" and it's a signal to the poster. That IMO is the problem, not the button itself, the "score" you see visually.
I've hidden the score here on HN for myself and on StackOverflow. Two places where score has a negative effect on myself.
Once in a while I’ll say something snarky and get downvoted. I usually delete those because I’m not really adding to the dialog. But the world is full of uncomfortable truths, software doubly so (or at least, I can see more of them). It’s humbling when people agree, irritating or amusing when they don’t. Confusing when I say the same thing in two replies in one thread and one gets 25 downvotes while the other gets 35 upvotes.
My fake internet points go up every week whether I say something controversial or not so since they’re fake anyway what do I care? I know some people do but get a grip.
At the end of the day if you understand something that other people don’t, I figure that’s a way to stay gainfully employed. I don’t like cleaning up other people’s messes for long though. It’s fun at first and on some teams I get copycats and everything goes well, more or less. I’ve maybe made the world a better place by teaching some people something new. On others I become the janitor and end up leaving. Getting “downvoted” at work does matter.
I leave my stuff up, since most people downvote based on what they think I am trying to say, not based on what I am actually saying, at least seeing from responses I get.
Everything you say about the like button also applies to votes, so if the like button is what makes social media bad, I don't see why HN should be better.
When -4 pushes you to the very bottom of the page in text so grayed-out that it's not even readable unless you highlight it first, I'd still call that oblivion. Also, flags from just two (?) people remove your comment entirely.
Yeah, as much as I don't want it to be true, HN algorithm is one of the harshest I've seen in terms of allowing people to hide/remove unpopular opinions. Some people think it's a feature not a bug though. I am not one of those people.
It's definitely "an elegant system for a more civilized age". Not for whatever you call the internet in 2023.
I've seen my comments come back from -4, and being flagged. Apparently, 'unflag' action cancels one 'flag' action. Thus, local oblivion is not irrecoverable.
As far as I know, there is no such thing as an 'unflag' option.
I've heard of the existence of a 'vouch' option, but supposedly it only appears on [dead] comments, not the merely downvoted/flagged-into-oblivion. And of course [dead] comments are hidden entirely by default.
I think this might be structurally related to our political ideology of liberal democracy.
We assume that bad takes die out or are overcome by good takes in the marketplace of ideas. Therefore, the ‘magnitude’ of a bad take should intuitively be close to 0, and the magnitude of a good take should be positive and nonzero.
Allowing negative scores permits bad takes to become large in magnitude. Allowing or disallowing downvotes is basically just scaling the distribution of magnitude of takes since bad takes will sit closer to zero than good takes in general, even if they cannot be downvoted.
But lack of downvotes mixes "just average takes not worth a upvote" with "this guy is obviously a moron, why I'm even seeing his comments together with other competent people?"
>The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric.
ANY single metric is going to be unfit for purpose. We need to have a continuum of responses, tags or perhaps a vector for votes instead of a scalar.
It's like trying to force everything into a single hierarchy, it never works. You always end up at Matthew 6:24[1]:
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.
Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
Any single vote/rank/option range ends up serving mammon
6. Tags you can agree/disagree with (e.g. Kongregate) [infinite dimensions, bidirectional, discrete]
I could go on, but my point is that maybe the reason the like button is so bad is because it's literally the simplest possible implementation of user interactions to content. Perhaps a system that allowed for more nuance would make users consider their interaction more
The simplest possible implementation of user interaction is writing a response. It's already as rich as it can be. It gives less power to bots because bots are incoherent. I feel like the internet devolved us from eloquent human speakers back into monkeys making few noises for communicating. Emoji is similar.
Speak. Write text. Formulate your position. We're humans not apes. Get feedback from speaking. The video format in some cases is the same - ape like reaction movies, no content. Assume you're interacting with someone intelligent who isn't convinced by the funny number of likes on your post, but by the content of what you say.
I agree with this, but the point of these user interactions is to whittle them down to something that others can easily relate to.
If you then say "well people can agree/disagree" with comments, then we're back where we started. Why are they agreeing? Do they find it funny, useful, or just like the way the user makes their point? How MUCH do they agree? What if they disagree?
If your reaction is that we should completely kill these interactions then... well have you ever been on giant forums with no way to sort? Sometimes they're fine. Like when there's low volume. Some forums evolve chronologically and that method works as well. But if you're not gonna commit to reading a pamphlet, you're probably not gonna find such a comment section very useful
I've always wondered why someone hasn't created what I call the 'orange slice' expression button. Much like cutting an orange in half it gives a preset amount of positive and negative values. Sort of a play off the meta moderation that Slashdot did.
For positive values it you could have something like
[I believe this is truthful], [I like this content],[Funny],[Positive message]
and for negative values
[I believe this is false/untruthful],[I dislike this content],[Sad/hateful],[Something else negative I can't think of at the moment?]
That's what trive.news was about. Turns out crowd sourcing truth gives a weighted average towards accuracy. Something tells me businesses relying on getting "experts" to sell you on things, would want to keep general public opinion out of the equation.
the whitepaper offers no evidence for such claims except some vague about the "wisdom of the crowd"
Experience from political betting spaces tells me that the wisdom of the crowd rarely actually holds up to scrutiny. Political bettors[0] hardly ever do as good as simple poll aggregators like 538 or RCP.
The wisdom of crowds is a well known principle, used in engineering to overcome something that is extremely difficult to measure (noisy data for instance), considering only one single measurement would be very dangerous, since it might be extremely imprecise. However, if you measure 1000 times and take the average, the errors cancel out and you have a pretty accurate measurement :)
That's not wisdom of the crowds. That's just a big sample size
Also, the video you posted points out a critical part of it working: diversity
I think that's why an aggregation of independent pollsters, as few of them as there might be, often ends up giving us a more accurate prediction than the millions of users that engage in PredictIt or similar betting websites
The maximum amount of nuance is here: the Reply button. But I agree with your point. We need something short of the Reply button because reading large numbers of replies just to get a sentiment analysis is not practical.
1) "Speaking up" is just one of many forms of speech. Why is speaking up "the purpose of speech", or even the purpose of social media speech?
2) There are many reasons to speak up. One may be to organize like-minded people into an effective advocacy group. Another may just be to lament something that you can't change.
3) I'm not trying to be snarky, but do you have any examples of changing people's minds on HN or social media? I personally don't feel like I ever change anyone's mind.
No specific one comes to mind, but normally the comments move my position, not flip it on its head. This is most effectively done by the poster giving an example of something I didn’t know about along with a link to a primary resource.
Speaking is meant to exchange information. You're not exchanging any information when the other side agrees with you and knows everything you're saying.
An advocacy group is ineffective if all its members have this mindset. With signaling mindset you have no chance to convince anyone of anything. I'd rather get someone thinking differently a little bit confused than lament something with people who think the same. It doesn't reinforce helplessness.
I have many anecdotes with somewhat low chance of moving opinions. Few people will admit changing their minds, but sometimes they will agree with you but still offer a weaker counterpoint of the opposing narrative.
You can't flip someone's opinion 180° on the internet, but you can get someone on the other side to acknowledge a counter point.
Speaking has many purposes. Why do you keep trying to "limit speech", so to speak?
> You're not exchanging any information when the other side agrees with you
I disagree. Is there not a difference between facts and opinions? Why do I have to "change my mind" in order to learn a new fact? What if the new fact actually supports my opinion?
> and knows everything you're saying
Confirming that another person knows what you know can be useful.
> An advocacy group is ineffective if all its members have this mindset.
To the contrary, advocacy groups are most effective when the members agree with each other, and most ineffective when they fight among themselves.
> Few people will admit changing their minds, but sometimes they will agree with you but still offer a weaker counterpoint of the opposing narrative.
This gives the appearance to me that you're telling yourself you've changed other people's mind and that they now agree with you, despite evidence to the contrary.
> You can't flip someone's opinion 180° on the internet, but you can get someone on the other side to acknowledge a counter point.
What does this mean? To me it sounds kind of like debate club, a game with scoring.
> The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric
But there is a real need for some kind of post rating/ranking (like like/dislike button, or explicit point rating). Once you got to thousand-post threads the without ranking mechanisms interesting posts are lost in noise. I guess that effectiveness of these mechanisms is an important part of why people prefer one forum before others.
I agree. I also think the downvote button is a bad metric since it can be interpreted as, “this comment is wrong,” when often times it just means, “I don’t like this point of view,” “I disagree,” or even “I didn’t like something you said a month ago, so I’m going to be vindictive and downvote everything you say in the future.”
Even on Hacker News, I think it would improve the experience if you had to explain why you were downvoting (or upvoting) a comment before being allowed to do so. It would let everyone else know whether your reasoning justified the action.
I've caught myself being sensitive to the popular narrative when uttering my opinions, fearful of my "citizenship score". Shameful, yes. To a degree, here (yes!) but much moreso elsewhere (might be unavoidable).
Feedback is divine. Convenience is king. So let's go with the vote button. This distributed god-king is our best way to control this stuff (moderation, filteration etc).
We should not only be voting but looking at our peer's votes too. Weight votes by the voter. Stuff like that
Finally, big geek brains are going to get applied to this problem. Maybe we can come up with some algorithms to improve this experience! I was hoping this demographic would do something to fix the problems created... the last time this demographic tried to fix this and created these problems. ( glad to see such humility and self awareness on what made internet toxic in this discussion).
I'm pretty sure I agree with you 100% but as I write this I'm wondering how different an upvote is from a like button...
Also wondering if there was a pre-internet social equivalent of a like button. Maybe there wasn't one. It's probably dangerous to assume there was always some version of a like button. But it's probably just as dangerous to assume there wasn't?...
I think the like button is fine. There have been ways of expressing agreement or disagreement long before that idea came along. (See also: "This")
In my opinion, infinite scrolling is substantially more damaging. If you have poor self control, which I think many people do, using an app that does nothing to tell you when to quit is an open invitation to addiction.
> Normal purposeful speech makes different opinions closer, while speech under the feedback of the like button makes similar opinions even closer and different opinions further apart.
But there is another aspect to the complexities here.
Years ago, I started thinking of the LIKE/UPVOTE button as an "increase visibility" button.
I don't upvote just because I like it (humor perhaps being an exception).
Often, I'm not upvoting just the comments I like: I'm upvoting the whole containing _thread_, including the conflicting views if they seem to have been made in good faith.
Because when good quality discourse takes place, I want the whole instance to be seen.
In these cases, the intended audience of my upvotes is most immediately the algorithm (in a way), rather than human viewers.
Sometimes I've found myself wishing my upvotes could be made invisible to humans since I know many of them will interpret my upvote differently than intended. There is no nuance.
It gets me wondering how feedback mechanisms might be diversified to add nuance back into these systems (while still moderating complexity).
Emoticons (as on Slack) do add nuance, but every emoticon pack I've seen lacks nuance most in neutral and critical responses.
Of course, no technology we have now can compare with verbal discourse for nuance. But you and I are more likely to be able to influence feedback features on social media than to succeed in eliminating them.
> Years ago, I started thinking of the LIKE/UPVOTE button as an "increase visibility" button.
I think Mastodon tries to make that distinction with like vs boost. Boost seems to be about making a post more visible ("hey look at this!") and like is more about "thanks for posting". At least on the server I use.
The like button or upvote or whatever has the same meaning: the viewer is signalling most of the time "I agree with this". Once you factor in other things like quotes and replies you're no longer measuring "engagement". You're measuring and optimizing for "outrage".
Thing is, social media didn't invent this. Outrage-as-engagement existed on TV long before social media existed. For decades, local news has pushed the "crime is out of control" narrative because it gets viewers and readers. Car chases, wall-to-wall coverage of violent and property crime, etc. To do this, local news needs to cooperation of the police so the net effect is local news becomes the propaganda arm of the police.
Cable news has been on this bandwagon since at least the 1990s.
> ... that social media has reprogrammed people to the purpose of speech.
I disagree. We have this high-minded view of what speech used to be only because we weren't there. Go back and look at segregregation-era (let alone slavery-era) newspapers, speeches, etc.
I agree with you on mass media, in fact I think the problem already started there, and it's even worse because it's not even a conversation, it's one sided.
When I'm speaking in person it's still similar to what I'm describing. I could have political discussion in highly polarized family with different opinions and people listening, and with friends too.
It's not "used to be", unless somehow you stopped talking in the real world.
Being the same person online as offline destroyed everything great about the internet. When you were an asshole you got banned from the website, and then you had to trim some of your sharp edges off so you didn't get banned from the next one. These days being an asshole results in either you aurrou ding yourself entirely with other assholes or getting your real life ruined by losing your job or even being arrested in some countries. There's no more opportunity to learn and grow. You either get it right the first try or you keep your online discourse rated PG so you don't cross the wrong people.
Everything is so serious now. We couldn't even go back if we wanted to, because ignoring and banning xXWeedLuvurXx for calling you the n-word and moving on is a lot tougher when his name is John Smith and he works in accounting.
In my youth, the internet was about having fun, about being INTERESTING, even if your mom or your boss wouldn't understand. And you could always just walk away from your Buffy Xanga and get into something else.
Now, the language of ridiculous places like LinkedIn has become the norm, on pain of having your life derailed.
"HI MY NAME IS JOHN (HE/HIM), I LIVE AND BREATHE ENTERPRISE SALES SUPPORT IN THE THRILLINGLY DYNAMIC ECOSYSTEM OF SAAS, MY DREAM EVER SINCE I WAS A CHILD WAS TO BE SERIOUS ABOUT WORK, I WEAR MANY HATS, MY DOG IS MY SON, IT WAS A BLESSING TO ATTEND THE BLACK EYED PEAS CONCERT, SINCERE THANKS TO UNITED PETROLEUM AND ALSO TO ROSA PARKS"
I return again and again to the scene with the construction worker neighbor from Office Space:
Peter: "does anyone ever say to you 'sounds like someone has a case of The Mondays?'
Neighbor: "No, man. Shit, no, man! I believe you'd get your ass kicked saying something like that"
I think we are at the end of the road, it has already become impossible to have honest debate about something online. Some of us maintain the illusion that things will return to a somewhat more bearable state but it is futile. I think newer generations know it's not going to happen.
I fear that AI will lead to people basically talking to themselves and to their imaginary perfect friends. This will make people even nastier, and somewhat alien to each other. But maybe that's the natural course of things
Maybe you're right about us being at the end of the road for internet discussion, and at first I want to say "oh no," but maybe it's not a bad thing. No use continuing to pursue something once you know it won't work, and it's stupid to kill yourself trying.
I worry about your AI point, too. An imaginary perfect friend/sex bot/super advanced furby/whatever would be compelling in the short term, but ultimately it leads down a cold lonely road. I can immediately think of some acquaintances who already kind of live like this. It breaks my heart.
What do we do about it? Raise our kids so their allowance depends on the amount of broken phones they bring us?
Oh hey also could you please prove you're not an AI designed to say things I agree with?
I try to look at the bright side. It is true that many things that need discussion cannot be discussed online because people slide in moral arguments and derail it. But with an AI one can have a patient/unemotional discussion to see ho w deep the rabbit hole goes. Supposing AI can indeed converse, this will be productive.
But we have to detach social life from this. There is a role for the AI but communication is social and has other purposes. Perhaps we could communicate the results of our introspection with the AI, though
Many of the newer generation don't know what the world was like beforehand, so they may not be able to replicate it, know that something is missing or feel the need for that something.
There are still plenty of very large websites that make that possible though, and also plenty of large websites. I'd rather not lose my preferred identity on here, reddit, or twitter, but I could easily make another account on any of them if I got banned for being too spicy.
I found myself agreeing with every word of this article. The penultimate paragraph summarizes it well:
> People call Twitter an indispensable public space because it’s the “town square”, but in the real world there isn’t just one town square, because there isn’t just one town. There are many. And the internet works when you can exit — when you can move to a different town if you don’t like the mayor or the local culture.
> Disagreement in society is necessary for progress, but it’s most constructive when it’s mediated by bonds of trust and affinity and semi-privacy.
For what its worth, for a number of decades, American town squares have in many places been shopping malls, which are privately owned. There are several states where protestors can be thrown out of malls[0], free speech be damned. I'm frankly glad they're struggling.
I've experimented with something similar. Back when I still had a Facebook account, I unfollowed all of my friends (and purged my list to the bare minimum) and joined a bunch of local/regional groups. It infinitely improved Facebook as a tool for connecting with other people.
I don't have super-strong opinions on network size necessarily, but assuming that what you say is true, and that this isn't a generational/cultural preference that might evolve over time, it still doesn't strike me as a particularly powerful critique?
The argument here isn't that small towns are preferable, the argument is that they are better, and that they lead to overall healthier social groups.
I don't want to exercise. I want to eat sugar, I don't want eat whole foods. I might as well say, "when are these doctors going to realize that eating healthy and exercising isn't what people actually want to do?"
Whether or not smaller communities are healthier can be debated, but whether or not people want to have smaller social networks is kind of orthogonal to that debate. You can advocate for something that is healthier and that will make your life better and that will overall make you happier if you put in the effort to pursue it, while acknowledging that people are not generally biologically inclined to want to do that thing. In fact, most healthy things that we advocate for in life are not things that we instinctively want to do and are things that require conscious effort and conscious denial of behaviors that we might prefer -- that is in many ways the norm, not an exception.
The entire problem lies with the twisted motives of social media.
They don't want to make you happy or feel good, they want money, at all costs which results in you being angry and toxic.
I agree with this article in general, and think that its worth it to spend time arguing with people you care about rather some rando on twitter.
community run communities will probably have a resurge, the problem is the tech barrier, we have already seen how mastodon is seen as to complex or has "horrid UX" for normal users.
So I doubt anything will change for the mainstream, techies and other geeky communities might go to mastodon or create a forum, but normal users won't bother doing any of this.
Adding to this, having run small communities I can see platforms like Mastodon growing into Twitter albeit with a different twist of behavior but eventually becoming equally toxic, just a different flavor of toxic.
I believe one of the root causes is that the internet basically connected billions of people from many different cultures into one big pool without any arbiter mechanisms which is bound to get ugly fast. In this regard I agree with the article that the internet wants to be segmented. Mastodon will probably start with silos of similar thinking people but as it grows they too will run into culture clashes leading to groups of people being silenced. Then some other platform will come along to make smaller silos or tribes and this pattern will repeat.
I think Mastodon has the tendency to grow into the opposite extreme of toxicity: fragility. People as well as instances are very generously blocked, leading to perfectly peaceful bubbles.
Which are not that great. There's almost perfect ideological agreement...but not really. A handful of people dominate conversation by posting frequently whilst the rest barely engages and/or is afraid to speak their mind.
As an example, on a fairly large Mastodon instance I saw a popular user claiming how we should still wear masks. There were a few dozen replies, all in perfect agreement.
That's truly bizarre, as this is a topic that people have strong opinions on across the entire political landscape. Even amidst just progressives, there's no uniform consensus, granted people are free to speak their minds without repercussions. The fact that there wasn't even a hint of disagreement or nuance I find telling.
So I agree with your point, this too is a type of toxicity, just a different flavor. Fragility, toxic positivity, I'm not sure what to call it, but it's not healthy.
Another fun opposite effect (in comparison to Twitter) to reason about is algorithms and amplification. Mastodon has very little of that which is considered good. It's a more "organic" social network.
Quite a few users will discover though that an organic social network makes the chance of getting engagement on your posts even harder than it already was. Just getting your post seen at all is a challenge, and building somewhat of a following can takes months if not years of purposeful effort. This means that for the typical user, the feeling that you're screaming into the void will be common, leaving the question: why post at all?
> A handful of people dominate conversation by posting frequently whilst the rest barely engages and/or is afraid to speak their mind.
This is true of Twitter too.
> Just getting your post seen at all is a challenge, and building somewhat of a following can takes months if not years of purposeful effort. This means that for the typical user, the feeling that you're screaming into the void will be common, leaving the question: why post at all?
I've also felt this is true of Twitter.
> As an example, on a fairly large Mastodon instance I saw a popular user claiming how we should still wear masks. There were a few dozen replies, all in perfect agreement.
Maybe people aren't there for debate club? I personally joined Twitter, and Mastodon, for tech. In fact I first joined Twitter for a tech conference. I have very little interest in debating political and social issues on social media. I muted/blocked all that stuff on Twitter and will do so if necessary on Mastodon.
There are too many people on Twitter who are just looking for a fight. A lot of us aren't interested at that at all, and would rather just participate congenially in a shared interest. If that's a "bubble", then I'm happy to be a bubble boy.
Positively toxic echo chambers. I think you summed it up perfectly. I've seen what you described occur in the past on other chat platforms and forums. Mostly forums. People that think alike get some high rank and access to private sub-forums and people that have thoughts not aligned with the tribe start to think the forum is no longer being used. Not sure how that would translate into the Mastodon platform.
I think today it translates into every platform due to the highly polarized political landscape. This sorts people into just 2 buckets, after which each bucket is dominated by radicals or semi-radicals.
That's why I dislike the term "bubble", because it fails to describe the inner working of the bubble. It suggests that it is uniform and consensus-based, whilst instead they are ran by an autocratic elite that "softly" silence dissent. By making dissent costly.
The state of online conversation: 50% of the population is evil. Luckily I'm in the good 50%, which is full of terrible ideas but I can't afford to challenge them.
Meh. What's wrong with not wanting every online space I inhabit to be embroiled in ceaseless no-holds-barred political and social warfare? If I want that, it's easy to find, it doesn't have to be everywhere.
I think there is a spectrum of social behavior. The extreme bubble or silo is in my opinion just as toxic as the extreme toxicity of fringe ideas. There is probably a balance in there somewhere so that people can stay clear of social warfare and at the same time people can feel comfortable to be themselves and not have to wear a mask or have highly measured speech.
I honestly do not know how to achieve that balance. I think platforms that come close to having a balance still end up with people having to know their audience and have measured speech to some degree. Even HN is an example of that. It's probably the best balance I have seen but I have no idea how it could be made better other than having millions of small stand-alone self hosted platforms but then we move closer to those echo-chamber bubbles.
This is just my personal preference but I would not want to be in an echo chamber. If everyone just agreed with me all the time I would start to feel like I am in a room full of NS5 robots iRobot movie reference. "One of us..." That to me would be just as dystopian as being in a room full of fighting tribes. But that is just my own take on things. Perhaps it is a generational + personality tainted preference on my part.
That happens on other social media to avoid getting banned.
One example is anything showing disagreement with LGBTQ movement from the east, no matter how much you think that is a done thing, it definitely not, especially there.
No, I think the effect of "toxic positivity" is found wherever you create a small community, whether that be Reddit, Mastodon, or anything else.
Toxic positivity isn't necessarily about banning, it's rather "soft silencing" within the bubble. Those most ideologically active dominate the network and discourage any type of dissent.
To stick with my mask example. There's absolutely no consensus within progressive circles that mandatory masking should make a comeback. So there should be significant debate even within the progressive bubble. But there is none. Zero. That likely means that a lot of people in the bubble disagree yet are afraid to express that.
Earlier you said "claiming how we should still wear masks", and now you're discussing mandates. I don't think it's contradictory to be opposed to mandates of something you support.
As far as my opinion goes, we should still wear masks, but mandates just turn people into petulant children and aren't worth the trouble.
See, I was trying to find the most innocent progressive topic as to not derail from my main point. Which is not masks. It's unhinged ideological purity inside bubbles, which soft silences speech. Masks was just an example.
And yet still you manage to label anybody opposing your opinion as children, even before hearing any argument. You're part of the problem and the very reason people go into silent mode and simply stop bothering.
You can already see that. If you think Twitter moderation is arbitrary or weird, clearly you haven't seen some of the popular Mastodon servers. Meet the new boss same as the old boss.
The difference, as the article mentions, is that you can just leave.
You can follow the same content from another instance with other rules and not be effected by any of the weird laws on the main mastodon instance.
Do other people have to refollow you if you move? Can your client form a single timeline when you’re “actually” following from two different places? It seems inconvenient…
You lose your followers if you get banned. I was following someone who got banned for disagreeing with moderation policies. I suggested asking the admin to help with the migration; he did, and the admin refused.
This was a rather large server too, featured on JoinMastodon.
Generally all official mastodon servers are very left leaning, so if you are conservative, you might get banned quickly, and certainly the admin won't help you migrate.
> They don't want to make you happy or feel good, they want money, at all costs which results in you being angry and toxic.
I agree that the incentives between users and social media don't align. However, there still would be none if there was an incentive for social media to "make users happy" or "make users feel good". As long as a single entity is in in a position to control the experience of all users (for example by deciding which timeline/suggestion algorithms are used) users have to keep track of how the incentive structure of that entity evolve. That means as a user, I want to own my interface to networks (so I get to choose e.g. suggestion algorithms). That's one of the cool things of the fediverse or email. By design, no single entity can make the user experience for all users strictly worse because there is no way to force adoption of something that goes against users incentives.
> The entire problem lies with the twisted motives of social media
Exactly! I myself do not identify with "we take the internet wherever we go, and its little colored icons are always beckoning, telling us to abandon whoever we’re talking to or whatever we’re working on and check the latest posts."
This is due to a few things. First, having long established pattern of using desktop computers / laptops, revealing "smart" phones as frustratingly limited devices. I can tap out maybe 5wpm on a mobile device, perhaps 10-20wpm if it has swipe input. Yet on a familiar keyboard, I can do upwards of 120-140wpm. That's an order of magnitude difference, with the qualitative difference of being able to type at the speed I am thinking.
This means when I'm using a mobile device, I'm only using it begrudgingly because I'm away from a real computer and need to solve a problem. If I'm hanging out with friends and someone else texts me, basically the last thing I want to do is take my phone out of my pocket, focus on a tiny screen, and start plodding along tapping out characters. This behavior descends from having mobile computing devices much earlier than most people (laptop and palm pilot around Y2k), when it was not socially accepted to ignore the people you're with and play with your device.
The second is that for a long time I used a phone running Lineage/microG, with only software from F-droid. Free software is designed with its main goal of helping the user accomplish their own goals, rather than the perverse incentive of proprietary web/apps that treat the user as a subject to be sucked in for as long as possible ("engagement"). If I take my phone out of my pocket to use the calendar or calculator or whatever, it's not like I then want to continue scrolling through my calendar or dividing numbers. If I take my phone out to show someone some photos, that is a real-world social activity. Both are limited stimulation based on tasks that can be finished, rather than the endless drip-drip of social media.
Sadly I stopped using that phone due to the early 4G shutdown in the US, and I have yet to find a good device to replace it. I've been using a throwaway "full take" Android that the carrier sent me for free, but my usage patterns have basically stayed the same. When I'm home, I generally leave that phone near the door since I have no use for it until I go out again.
Of course it's easy for me to say this - the difficult part is how to kick one's own addiction to the always-on proprietary software hellhole. I'd propose a large part of this is segmenting your usage across different physical devices - despite the universality of computation, having one or two devices that encompass all of simple tasks like checking the weather, employment, personal productivity, creativity, active relaxation, and passive relaxation is an anti-pattern. It simply blurs the lines too much.
Get at least one new device, ideally running only Free software, but at the bare minimum you need to not install any of the corporate willpower-destroying apps. You can still keep your "trash" device with all those apps you can't imagine living without, but silence the notifications and leave it on a desk/coffee table/etc. Only check on it occasionally, like daily or when you're relaxing at night or when you need to accomplish a specific task on one of the corporate dopamine apps.
I tend to agree with the conclusions of the article but at the same time I think it leaves out a few important factors in comparing the old internet versus today's internet.
First, the political macro backdrop. The extreme political polarization in the US leading to the so-called culture wars. This is a massive driver of toxicity on social media. This conflict machine is relatively new, people fondly remember centralized social media as being far less "political" just a few years ago.
Second, the mobile revolution. Which leads to a dumbing down of engagement. Before, people would sit behind a PC with a large screen and functional keyboard, enabling deep engagement as seen here on HN. Today, people sit on the toilet, look at a tiny screen with endless content, and any engagement (most never engage at all) is very shallow and lazy: a like, a retweet. It's not a conversation, it's amplification. In the rare case where somebody produces original content (a self-composed tweet), Twitter's format incentivizes hot takes and makes context and nuance impossible or impractical.
Third, amplification. It's a specific choice by Twitter (UX, algorithms) to promote and reward the worst opinions. It's a complete inversion from real life.
Hence, rather than stating that human conversation absolutely does not scale, I'd refine that conclusion. It does not scale in these particular conditions.
> First, the political macro backdrop. The extreme political polarization in the US leading to the so-called culture wars. This is a massive driver of toxicity on social media. This conflict machine is relatively new, people fondly remember centralized social media as being far less "political" just a few years ago.
But social media is widely credited with causing this polarization. I would tend to agree. But I'm curious, do you have some other explanation?
The internet is vast. But if your attention is fully absorbed between twitter and substack (like the author is), you feel trapped, because, well, you are.
Maybe try to venture out of your internet comfort zone. It's not all spam out there, nor is it worthless because it was not recommended by someone cool. Just don't be lazy
This comment doesn't offer any practical advice on where to find content of higher quality, it just condescends people who don't feel like they have high quality options.
my comment is condescending to people who don't put the effort for searching needles in the haystack, but instead spend their whole online time in the well beaten path.
The content wont always be of "higher quality" , because quality is subjective. Here are two nearby sources of such content:
> my comment is condescending to people who don't put the effort for searching needles in the haystack, but instead spend their whole online time in the well beaten path.
Another way of saying this is that your comment is condescending to… most people.
Most people used to have an easy way to find forums on the internet, even if they were AOL chat rooms, where they could find moderated content that was interesting to them. That was the well beaten path.
Nowadays, that’s no longer the case, and most people don’t seek out those needles in the haystack.
My contention is that they shouldn’t have to, just as they didn’t have to before the 2010s.
A corollary: “just don’t be lazy” is almost never good advice, as there is almost always a reason people are “lazy.” People make similar arguments about the impoverished and how “if they just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and stopped being lazy” they could easily get out of it, but that’s really hard to do with two kids, three jobs, and no time to think about anything other than survival. They’re not lazy, they are overwhelmed.
I’d say that applies to a lot of facets of life, including time spent on the internet; amid the firehose of nonsense, and given that most of the internet (read: where most people spend time now) is literally rigged against moving away from it, by using human psychology to generate hits of dopamine in the form of likes and views, it is hard to find a better path, and the people who don’t aren’t necessarily lazy. They just don’t live on the internet, and it shouldn’t be that hard.
I think you re making the argument that people should stick to the mainstream of every medium (in this case the internet) because it's easy. That's why i called it lazy. I 'm not saying it's bad, but people shouldn't complain that everything looks alike, when they literally only stick to things that are alike
forums are just as hard to find today, as they were before. In fact many of them are back in the places where they used to be, it's just people have forgot about them because they chose to sell their attention elsewhere
I’m not saying they should stick to the mainstream, but I’m saying that a majority will. What has changed isn’t most people’s behavior, but the internet around them, and I’m arguing it’s changed for the worse.
no, really people's behavior has changed. Did you care about your online profile in 2002 (if you were around?). Now people primarily care about how they are seen online
The internet is in a feedback loop that both facilitated and is facilitated by this change.
Been around the internet for a very very long time :)
And sure, people absolutely cared. That’s why AIM profiles were a thing, and why people were so excited when they could build web pages easily with Frontpage or Dreamweaver or with Angelfire or Geocities, etc.
What’s changed is arguably that it is less acceptable to be anonymous now, but the concept of wanting to share and be seen is not new.
it feels very different. back then my 'profiles' were avatars, virtual personas, and people were careful to never dox themselves. Now the proportions are reversed
Now the article was only talking about twitter and social media, but I can't help react on the title since there really is no evidence at all of internet wanting to be fragmented. In fact it's just the opposite.
- Not even the most hardcore people are using IRC anymore
- All web hosting is now in the cloud
- There's basically only two rendering engines left, of which one is at the moment extremely marginalized
- GIT that was supposed to be distributed is now used as a centralized versioning system in centralized services.
If anything it seems that the internet wants to be consolidated.
I rarely use IRC any more and I used to run some small IRC servers. Most moved to Discord but I refuse to use such platforms for their abuse of retaining both text and voice transcription chat history forever. Discord voice transcription can run silently in any public or private channel and nobody can prove otherwise. This was not impossible on IRC but far less likely. Public channels were recorded with publicly visible bots that had permission to be in the channel. Some IRCD's had modules that would allow a NetAdmin to monitor private chats but that can be mitigated with clients that support OTR.
Nowadays if I need to spin up a chat with people I know I just give them a shell function that utilizes a self-hosted instance of devzat.
# uncensored chat using self hosted https://github.com/quackduck/devzat.git
# add to .bashrc or /etc/profile.d/functions.sh on a VM somewhere
function chat()
{
# make us a temporary nickname
Name=$(base64 /dev/urandom | tr -d '/+' | dd bs=12 count=1 2>/dev/null)
# make us a temporary throw away ssh key. key is our ID.
ssh-keygen -q -t rsa -b 2048 -N "" -C "${Name}" -f ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}"
# add +ssh-rsa in the event client restricts weaker ciphers
ssh -i ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}" -p 22 -4 -o "HostkeyAlgorithms +ssh-rsa" -o "PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes +ssh-rsa" "${Name}"@23.239.0.70
rm -vf ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}" ~/.ssh/.chat_"${Name}".pub
}
If things go sideways I just nuke that instance and what little chat history the daemon had is gone.
Devzat supports a "private" mode in which only some IDs you specify in the config file are allowed to join. In that mode, it disables the 16 message backlog on #main too. It seems like that would be a good option for you, but it looks like you're having the people you know gen new SSH keys every time (which is what IDs are based on). I'm curious why.
Would you have liked a standalone preference for whether to have a backlog? What features would you like / what things could be improved?
Always interesting to see how devzat is being used.
but it looks like you're having the people you know gen new SSH keys every time
This is just an example of an ephemeral implementation of your chat system. Spin up a node, have some people play around with it, communicate whatever they wish then destroy the node in the sense of destroying a VM. One could certainly leave it running and people could use persistent ssh keys like you do on your instance. Using ephemeral ssh keys implies more aspect of anonymity assuming one connects from a short-lived VM. People could of course adjust my example shell function to not remove keys and to use a persistent nick-name.
Would you have liked a standalone preference for whether to have a backlog?
That sounds like a great feature/configuration option. Maybe even allow a admin-defined backlog size for people that want persistent instances.
What features would you like / what things could be improved?
I think it is great as-is but that is just my personal take. For me, simpler is better. I appreciate that you added a configuration to disable external integrations. Less specific to devzat but more specific to golang would be to have default compile-time hardening options. I am impressed with how nice you made it look with the color schemes.
Perhaps others here will play around with it and offer suggestions. SSH based chat is not super popular which really surprises me. I could see devzat being an amazing fall-back for a private chat inside a company when Slack or Discord are having a moment or for those times when people want to say something that isn't recorded forever and especially not visible to their management. I think it would also be amazing for people in oppressive regimes that block access to all the mainstream chat platforms but allow SSH to specific VPS providers.
> SSH based chat is not super popular which really surprises me. I could see devzat being an amazing fall-back for a private chat inside a company when Slack or Discord are having a moment or for those times when people want to say something that isn't recorded forever and especially not visible to their management. I think it would also be amazing for people in oppressive regimes that block access to all the mainstream chat platforms but allow SSH to specific VPS providers.
:))))) I'm glad you like devzat. I'd love to talk to you on the main chat!
IRC has had encryption for a very long time. IRCS is typically on port 6697 but some admins also have it listen on 443 for people behind fascist firewalls.
anyone in IRC chat can still record everything just fine
I addressed this. Yes, someone can invite a bot in a channel they control and the channel operators can kick/ban a bot. Also people can achieve E2EE encryption using OTR. So in fact there are two layers of encryption, one of which individuals control and the IRC admin has no visibility into. There is an unsupported OTR custom client for Discord but it is against the terms of service.
Discord on the other hand has visibility into everything and no way for users to know this. Anything said on Discord in text or voice is a permanent transcription record. People are made to believe they can delete messages, but they are just flagged as deleted in Cassandra.
If I want a private voice conversation with someone or a group, I invite them to my private uMurmur server. There are clients for workstations and cell phones. Some people won't use such things and those are not people I would likely ever talk to anyway.
>IRC has had encryption for a very long time. IRCS is typically on port 6697 but some admins also have it listen on 443 for people behind fascist firewalls.
Transit encryption maybe, but admins can still read everything.
Yup like I mentioned there are modules that allow snooping. This is why if people truly want privacy they need to use a client that supports OTR add-ons providing end-to-end encryption. Pidgin is one of them.
Another option would be for each small circle of friends to run their own uMurmur or ngircd servers, then at worst the admin would spy on their friends. ngircd can be spun up in a few minutes, even faster if one already has some LetsEncrypt keys for a domain. uMurmur can also be spun up super fast on a linux home router.
These are all false equivalencies, as you're talking technology and implementation instead of a consumer product or idea. The author is talking about centralization of moderation and audience, not how it's hosted or how that moderation/audience is presented to the user
People moved off of IRC because it was inconvenient for less-technical users, it is far easier to just download an app. That doesn't mean they want those apps to be centralized, or don't want their social media to be fragmented so they're talking to only like-minded individuals.
It is 100% possible that someone creates a technologically-centralized app that allows for a decentralized audience and moderation. I'm not aware of anyone doing this though.
I agree, but I’d also argue discord or Slack does this, in the same way that IRC did; you essentially spin up separate servers and thus separate communities. Sure, it’s still hosted by a central entity, but the moderation and discourse is all yours to manage.
OK fine, I stand corrected. But my larger point was that the movement toward these types of communities / services is indicative of the article’s thesis being correct, in general.
People don’t use IRC anymore because there are better open alternatives like Matrix and ActivityPub based systems. Those are what the “hard core” people use.
As for the cloud there are loads of clouds. Web sites can be moved. Same with git hosting which just provides a convenient place to store the repo and post meta data like issues. Moving from GitHub to Gitea or GitLab is usually pretty easy.
More and more people seem to be at least trying a less centralized approach. Personally I think we passed peak centralization in the middle 20-teens when there were just a few social platforms everyone used and federated stuff was primitive and new. We are well into the beginning of the unbundling phase.
We can see this happening with Reddit. Either because they got fed up with the administration of the site, or were forcibly kicked off, a number of communities that were previously subreddits have branched off and made their own forums instead.
I'm not sure this was anything new, even when the original tweet was posted. I remember back in around 2000 when someone put up a page on a random domain that simply said "Well done, you have reached the end of the internet. You can now go outside." It was early enough that people could still remember when one person could have visited most sites on the internet, but that was long enough ago that it was clearly impossible to do again. I remember reading that page when someone sent it to me and feeling a deep sense of relief at the idea, even though I knew it was impossible.
One of the most frightening bits of social science/philosophy I heard
came from Slavoj Zizek, because it's about harbingers of big change.
I have tried in vain to find a written reference. It's buried within
some of his often tediously tangential talks - but I would love to
know if any former Yugoslavians can attest to the truth or falsity of
it.
Zizek said that the former Yugoslavia was a tense but stable amalgam
for decades in which good humour and brutally free speech - including
"edgy but acceptable" racism - was permitted and even celebrated.
Sometime before the 90s that changed, and a chilling taciturnity
overcame the nation. The "politically correct" atmosphere was a lead
up to civil war.
It's possible Zizek completely misreads cause and effect. But I always
take his point to be - as elementary psychoanalysis - that when people
stop talking about how they really feel, it's the start of a road to
trouble; jaw jaw jaw being better than war, war, war. The culture of
faux "offence" created by Social media had definitely done the same to
online discourse.
> Escalating racial and ethnic hate was lead up to war.
That's exactly what I'd think. And historically I'd wager
every well documented example shows it.
And yet Zizek gave that as a first hand account (that's where he is
from please correct me if I am wrong), and it's an intriguing
hypothesis. Certainly an unpopular one judging by my immediate
down-vote for even mentioning it (as an open question no less)
I don't think he was talking about "hate". He was talking about open
acceptance of difference. That's what it seems is getting ever less
permissible - and that's what I find concerning.
Can we no longer make that distinction? Are we too timid to even
discuss that? Is that what social media has done to us?
In 90 ties is when the nationalist movements grew. Serbian nationalism became Army ideology. That won't happen woth political correctness. The other nationalities build own separatist movements.
All of that involved a lot of talking. The run up to genocide was also not some kind of politically correct gentle talking period, not for everyone anyway.
When a country with by your characterization full of edgy race insults eventually descend into genocides and crimes against humanity, maybe some intellectuals refusing to engage with race insults in the run up to genocide are not the cause. Maybe they are people who realized where this is going and did not wanted to contribute.
I don't know about the specific case of Yugoslavia, but I'd be incredibly wary of drawing any broader conclusions, even if it were a factor in that specific case.
The US Civil War certainly had plenty of "jaw jaw jaw" before it, there was no "political correctness" at the time, and that didn't prevent it.
Similarly we've had something like three and a half decades of "political correctness" in the US without any civil war yet (Jan 6 notwithstanding). While you'd think that if political correctness really had such a strong effect, there would have been a second civil war by the late 1990's.
Not to mention that "jaw jaw jaw" can be the horrible hate speech that works to incite war.
If you look at history, the counterexamples seem incredibly more numerous. So hopefully we can feel less frightened by political correctness. :)
January 6th is a significant data point and shouldn't just be handwaved away. I've watched political correctness erode the dynamic of my own family, it's continuously sewing resent between people who have different angles of non-PC opinions.
It is freaking ridiculous to blame political correctness for actions of people who were literally at the opposite spektrum of politics for years. These are people that lived in opposite kind of bubble and listened to hard-core right wing media for years.
Interesting concept but what seems more compelling to me would be more like a Tiktok/Reddit hybrid. You log in and see content that "the algorithm" knows you'll like, but with an added element of community from people "the algorithm" knows you'll find cool/funny/insightful/etc. Like a simulacrum of the Facebook feed but instead of friends and family it's this "tribe". No need for labels or even naming those people.
Feels like this is what social media is trying to achieve anyway but they're mostly stuck with the existing social graph as a starting point...
I actually mention extremely good content aggregation in there, but more as a byproduct of good matching than as a way to arrive at it. But it really could work the other way around, with the things you and everyone else likes providing strong signal that can be correlated.
I hope this is the year we all get a thousand true friends! Instant connection every time
"Machine learning will help you find your best friends."
Yes, but how? How will it avoid optimizing on the wrong thing?
"It will gather a lot of data and then use algorithms to predict your affinities from it."
Yes, but how? What algorithm would do that? Ordinary recommender systems, neural networks, something else? And tight knit communities of close friends rarely have a lot of churn, but at-scale systems often do - how will it reconcile these tendencies?
I guess I was looking for something a little more like a research paper.
I don’t really get the premise here. The popular tweet relates because 15 years ago most people weren’t spending almost 1/3 of their day on a screen.
Now that is definitely the case and backed with data throughout the years.
The internet has always been fragmented. I think the arguments of Facebook or Twitter being some type of global consciousness is short sighted. It has maybe as many users as the population of the USA. The world has an estimated 5 billion people who have regular access to the internet. Is the world consciousness really representative of the most engaged internet users? That’s a huge problem in itself and the thought that journalists are stuck on Twitter makes no sense. If life is all about change and we see behemoths come and go, then surely journalism will evolve outside of a single platform.
Heavily agree with this. The internet of 1998 or even 2006 is very very different than the Internet of today.
However, I think this desire for fragmentation and divisiveness was inevitable. People were always in conflict with each other; we just didn't have the means to butt heads like we can now. If the Internet existed in 1920, I think we would (a) have some amazing historical artifacts, and (b) see a lot of the same behaviors we're seeing today.
If twitter dies, where do I find a site where I can follow at least one expert/leader in every major discipline/social/political-movement to get a sort of snapshot of what's happening in the world?
I don't need to agree with every expert/leader, I just want to know what they think.
First of all it needs a Change of attitude, from expecting recommendations to venturing into the unknown by ourselves. There are tons of people's online who can do this.
Unfortunately, even the adventurous ones got sucked into the populatity contest of social media and wasted a lot of time repeating the same points that others make.
Blogs were awful. Lack of actual discussion, just pontification and ultimately you curate your own list of (mainly) like minded blogs. Give me a reddit thread anyday where some rando (whose blog I never would have followed) calls out the original post with differing thoughts/viewpoints. Sites like reddit/twitter broke me away from the trap of blogs by people with great credentials giving/polished public face giving them un-deserved authority over my thinking. Reddit causes me to re-evaluate and change my positions regularly, something that neither blogs nor mainstream media ever managed to do. Twitter makes me actively angry if I read replies, but it has also surfaced many interesting people who are deep thinkers with positions other than mine. But twitter's most powerful revelation is when it shows me I HATE so many of the people whose positions I used to align with, and whose slower more thoughtful blog posts swayed me. When I see their immediate response to something, and it is just awful and ugly and full of hate, not rational thought but just knee jerk reaction, then yeah, no thanks. I don't need a deeper insight into your thoughts. Twitter has weeded out so many ugly people from having influence on me.
Reddit - injects thoughts/opinions I would never have sought out on my own.
Twitter - Shows the true face of 'thought leaders',takes away their polished persona and shows me when I have been giving too much credit to horrible people.
> just pontification and ultimately you curate your own list of (mainly) like minded blogs
is a curated list of fellow "leaders" pontificating on almost everything to blind "followers" helped by an opaque "algorithm" with the ability to block the "heretics" and direct their followers' hate against them, better?
notice the cultist terminology: leader, follower, heretic etc
> Give me a reddit thread anyday where some rando (whose blog I never would have followed) calls out the original post with differing thoughts/viewpoints
I am not advocating for blogs per se, but a reddit thread where "some rando calls out the original post" could have easily have been a thread of comments somewhere else that did not made money for reddit, but for the randos creating the actual content you are interested in
you are criticizing the presentation, but the actual meat (the value) is in the content.
> Sites like reddit/twitter broke me away from the trap of blogs by people with great credentials giving/polished public face giving them un-deserved authority over my thinking
sounds more like a your problem than a blogs problem honestly.
if you are assign authority to someone writing on the internet under fake credentials, it's not that it's written in a blog the issue IMO.
twitter and reddit (which are vastly different anyway both as kind of platform and as audience) made the problem worse, if anything.
> Reddit causes me to re-evaluate and change my positions regularly
again, good for you. but there's no inner quality of reddit that makes it especially good at that. I changed my mind a lot of times by reading books and when reddit was born I was already almost 30, so...
> Twitter makes me actively angry if I read replies, but it has also surfaced many interesting people who are deep thinkers with positions other than mine
replace the word Twitter with "internet" or "school" or "traveling or "hip-hop battles" and you'll find billions of people who had the same realization.
anyway, nothing that a good old BBS couldn't already do 40 years ago. It's where I discovered and then downloaded the Wolfenstein 3D demo.
To wrap it up: the question was "where could I follow X and Y if Twitter dies"?
The answer is: don't worry, Twitter eventually dying won't be an issue, they'll tell you where to follow them cause their status depends on it. You might as well ask them some money to follow them, they'll probably give it to you.
> People call Twitter an indispensable public space because it’s the “town square”, but in the real world there isn’t just one town square, because there isn’t just one town. There are many.
The Internet is simply following our current Globalist trend, where yes, there may be different physical towns, but there is only one acceptable way to think about the world, one acceptable form of government, and one acceptable set of morals.
Cities are becoming harder to distinguish since every new building looks the same. The same shops and chains are available. The clothing is the same. These aren't different town squares. These are the global monoculture made manifest. The Internet is simply another small part of this larger trend.
Meh. Community moderation upholds the values and standards of the community. So a community of neo-nazis will moderate themselves and protect their values and standards.
As will community of flat earthers etc etc
And this is why it's really hard to have any sort of "truth based ML moderation" - because in the extreme and obvious cases "the earth is actually round" directly threatens the community.
And in the middle case "excluding Mary simply because you'all don't like her or her family is unfair" also threatens the community.
In between those two is a spectrum of truth and decency that threatens every community
It was the smartphone. Not necessarily the phones themselves, but the wide reaching accessibility. Internet users skyrocketed and if phoneposters we're any indication of the aggregate impact - the quality of conversation deteriorated. And yes, mobile accessible platforms caused a sort of gravity and viola.
Also I'm reasonably sure this is just a truism. "Schismogenesis" in addition to the fact that everybody wants to be on the same page with their community. The nature of the internet in that it's basically just a huge, permanent log of interactions just allows us to observe this shit more easily and remark on it in post.
Not at all, we want to have a unified discourse, but we have vastly different values and therefore moderation preferences. The only solution to this is making moderation user-based, but with better UX than just block everyone you don't like. The user initiatives formed 'block lists' on twitter, which are kind of a good idea for this, you have decentralized decisions that get aggregated into a single filter which then the user simply applies if he chooses so.
This is already a solved problem. If I block every anti-vaxxer I see on Twitter, eventually Twitter will stop showing them to me. But if I view the tweet replies to President Biden, I see the anti-vaxxer replies right at the top. So they just need to apply the user preferences across the entire platform.
yea, thats what I mean, we have the solutions and they would also work for decentralized protocols which is always presented as the biggest obstacle for alternatives ...
> Why did this happen to the centralized internet when it hadn’t happened to the decentralized internet of previous decades?
The reason is that people scale poorly. Dunbar's Number[1] is a thing, and every human effort in physical- or cyber-space, sacred or profane, tends toward a Tower of Babel[2] over time.
Those that conform to Gall's Law[3] may prove relatively durable.
I think it’s reasonable to say federated blogging platforms are a solved problem in 2022 (2023!) I don’t think this is analogous to debates about economic systems.
Noah is perpetually, painfully online. He has to be, because he makes his living (a) pointing out when people are wrong on the internet and (b) trying to convince people that he's really smart. All of his interactions with reality are through that lens. Seriously, It's January 1. Go look at how many tweets and retweets the guy has on twitter in the last 24 hours.
The internet does not want to be fragmented, because the internet seeks status.
People on the internet will seek status (see: Smith, Noah), and barring that, will seek the knowledge of those who have claimed status. And as long as those with the MOST clout congregate on a single platform, the rest of the people on the internet will follow. It makes logical sense for all of the actually important journalists to centralize around a hub like twitter because it's a way for them to keep their ear to the pavement. They are expected to report quickly on issues and it gives them the ability to stay up to date on quickly changing issues. Even for things as mundane as sports, almost all sports journalism is broken first or simultaneously on twitter. Twitter is the tool. The true value is in who is using it. It's what Musk has gotten hilariously backwards and why it will eventually bite him in the ass.
The right-wing sphere has Gab, Parler, AND Truth Social. Nobody reads them. Donald Trump's own posts on his own platform get far more reach by second-hand screenshots on twitter than on the platform he owns. Candace Owens doesn't gain any visibility by fighting with a nazi on Gab. She can get a lot of views by nitpicking a post from Maggie Haberman though.
The internet has ALWAYS wanted to gravitate to central locations. The post-Usenet years were an abberation because it was a time when a centralized source for information and conversation was disrupted. Those people sought out Digg, and then reddit. They're still on reddit. If it wanted to fragment, it'd have done it already.
In the spirit of the article, how do you start your own community these days? I think it was phpbb that was popular last time I checked (perhaps 15 y ago).
But these are all closed communities. I just think that it would be a point in having a community that is also searchable from google? Why is closed communities like Discord so popular?
If you don’t mind being centralized Reddit is what really killed forums and is still very good despite a drive to make it worse every year. There are many Reddit clones as well.
Generally, what kills forums is they’re too much work to administer. When spammers are working full time, the only services that can survive also have full time admins.
And that’s ignoring that phpbb/wordpress are insecure and need patching all the time.
Funny how being interested in accountability, transparency and good journalism makes you "a weirdo" worth ignoring.
Oh well, if you're moderately effective about highlighting a problem you'll always get attacked with labels.
Funny too how he lumps them and other groups with "Nazis".
Feels like yet another person who is suddenly whining because their authoritarian websites are no longer controlled by their authoritarian ideologues they agreed with.
The Elon musk takeover has been very positive, if anything to display how hypocritical some of the authortiarians from any side are. It's all about censoring ideas they don't like because "they're righteous (TM)".
Having destroyed alternatives like Parler every time they got popular, makes it feel that no competition will be allowed and theres a sudden desperate turn to descentralization, which is awesome, but it will come with the same ridículous shouts of censorship when any idea authoritarians don't like, gets mainstream notoriety. Suddenly the interest of society will be to censor that descentralized network. The excuse will be one of the typical scares: terrorism, harm, crime, etc
Interesting times but not an interesting article. Just the typical "how do we go back to what I liked and agreed with me"
> Funny how being interested in accountability, transparency and good journalism makes you "a weirdo" worth ignoring.
Yes, that’s correct, because video game journalism literally doesn’t and can’t ever matter, so it doesn’t matter if it’s bad or not. Just like it doesn’t matter that tech gadget journalism or boat owner journalism is bad.
"doesn't matter" to you. Who are you to judge what does and doesn't? You can say the same thing about pretty much anything and yet, calling corruption and conflicts of interest in any business or organization is absolutely relevant for anyone who interacts with it.
There's also the fact that journalists switch topics and industries and the behaviours are not limited to one industry. The problems I mentioned and access journalism are absolutely prevalent in politics journalism, which I doubt you'd say "doesn't matter"
So your argument is just a poor attempt to dismiss a subject in a disingenuous way. The dismissive and rude label applied is just the cherry on top.
He's doing very similar things than what other authortiarians were. Censoring what he doesn't like or doesn't follow his ideology.
Problem is, the people who agree with doing this before are mad because now it's against them.
It's a positive.
As for the NNs labels. Well, it's the typical scaremongering argument that holds no water when you realize that, again, people will be inconsistent about who they apply X labels too and why they should be censored.
As for your ironic comment, it's really not. You can't call out hypocrisy on me because my stance has not changed. I'll give you the opportunity to speak and them. I'll call out your censorship and their censorship.
I would've hoped the guy in the article and many who foam at the mouth about EM and NN realized that "censorship was bad all along, we shouldn't have done it because it can turn against us" but alas, it wasn't meant to be.
>In fact, there were always Nazis around, and communists, and all the other toxic trolls and crazies. But they were only ever an annoyance, because if a community didn’t like those people, the moderators would just ban them. Even normal people got banned from forums where their personalities didn’t fit; even I got banned once or twice. It happened. You moved on and you found someone else to talk to.
Doesn't this create an opposite problem: echo chambers?
I mostly agree with the author in that everyone shouldn't be on one platform and that yes, Twitter, Facebook, etc., aren't anywhere close to ideal sites for actually forming strong relationships and having good discussions. I also agree that the separation of internet self and real self has all but vanished from the internet, despite my own personal attempts to retain it. Additionally, as someone who has spent their formative, adolescent, and even current years being parts of independent communities on the internet, I can assure you that there were people out there who knew what was being lost and what the problems were as Reddit, Facebook, and the others became the hubs for everything.
However, the author makes references to things like MUDs, IRC chats, web forums, and then antagonists like "random internet Nazis" (come on dude) and Gamergate of all things, and I can't help but feel that the author of the article is part of a intellectual group that appeared after things like internet forums, transient chatrooms, and video game servers. It's very popular to try to "dunk" on sowing doubt in a case like this because everyone cites that "Yet you participate in it. Curious!" comic in some way or another, but I think the doubt is warranted in this case.
The author may have been around when those things were active, but expressed no deep interest at worst or a passing interest at best in any of them until centralization became a problem to think about, and SUDDENLY all of those things captured their attention. A HN poster who doesn't really care about non-techie niche communities but puts on big airs about caring because rebelling against centralized monoliths like Twitter is part of (hacker) counterculture/social signaling.
The author didn't have to deal with being a powerless normal user as internet Nazi groups infiltrating communities they were a part of, never had to watch independent sites and projects get absorbed into Reddit and its abhorrent community; it's all just a fun intellectual thought puzzle to ruminate on with a buddy at a bar and philosophical soapbox to stand on with their web blog and Twitter account. The author even boils it down to political pundits retreating to private circles, which completely separates it from the real experiences of loss of and yearning for smaller communities.
We've read this same song and dance here on HN almost weekly if not daily here on HN: everyone's glued to their smartphones, Twitter and Facebook control all online content, return to tradition, yadda yadda. I don't really know how this comment is going to be taken but because of all these things, I find it very difficult to believe the author isn't subject to the tyranny of likes and internet attention himself, and that the post reads more as disingenuous intellectual fellatio than anything else, intended to resonate with those who closely follow hacker culture on HN for traction.
> never had to watch independent sites and projects get absorbed into Reddit and its abhorrent community
That’s not how Reddit works. Different people use different subreddits, there is no “community”.
The default subreddits have the opposite problem; they are so popular there is no “community” because the users are everyone on earth. You’re pretty much just saying you don’t like “everyone on earth”.
Which is fair because they’re quite bad at posting; that’s why AskReddit’s #1 post is, every week, yet another gender war question/sex question like “men, what do you think about women’s armpits?” or something.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I find the topic of annoying pop-ups interesting and was thinking, to align better with the site rules, maybe the OP could start an Ask HN topic about the pop-ups and we continue there.
Speaking up used to be something you do to change someone's mind or yours. What's the point in speaking up if nobody does anything with what you said?
The like button reprogrammed people. They started getting positive feedback for speaking in an echo chamber, for saying and doing things their audience already agrees with. They started getting negative feedback for doing the thing language was designed for.
Normal purposeful speech makes different opinions closer, while speech under the feedback of the like button makes similar opinions even closer and different opinions further apart.
If the interaction stays the same of course fragmentation is inevitable - but that's not a good thing. This fragmentation extends to the real world and has real consequences. It will blow up. Even with Twitter being internally fragmented the polarization in society grew. Nobody wants to listen to the other side anymore, while there's always the most to be learned from listening to the other side.
The core of the problem needs to be addressed: that social media has reprogrammed people to the purpose of speech.
One of the reasons I'm even bothering with websites like HN as opposed to social media is because it still feels like there's a slight chance of making people change their minds here.