22 ms·

Too many people have peed in the pool

• 6d6b73 11y ago
  Or maybe you just have to go to a pool in a better neighborhood? After all on Twitter you can choose from whom you're getting status updates, can't you?
  • fideloper 11y ago
    1. You can't choose your followers, nor stop them from @mentioning you. 2. That statement is awfully close to (if not outright) victim blaming.
    • doktrin 11y ago
      > You can't choose your followers Can't you? I thought protected feeds were a thing (wherein subscribers would need the account holder's permission to follow / view their tweets)?
      • ryanlol 11y ago
        They are.
      • fideloper 11y ago
        You're (willfully?) ignoring the implication of a private feed: lack of discoverability (finding new followers), for those of us who use Twitter as a source of promotion for our side projects/businesses/careers.
        • doktrin 11y ago
          > You're (willfully?) ignoring the implication of a private feed Egads! You saw through my duplicitous scheme! Alternatively, I was simply pointing out that this is - in fact - a feature. To your point, I'm not sure how you could both have audience selection and discoverability. How do you plan to both self-promote and cherry pick your viewers?
          • thomyorkie 11y ago
            Could have a semi-private feed, where viewing is open but commenting is somewhat restricted.
          • thomyorkie 11y ago
            Could have a semi-private feed, where viewing is open but commenting is somewhat restricted.
  • johneth 11y ago
    It's probably the notifications and @ing that's bothering him.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • bcraven 11y ago
    I'd suggest that perhaps fishing out the turds, as Stephen's analogy would likely have it, is not a good solution.
  • dagurp 11y ago
    I bet he was too busy going through replies and direct messages to look at status updates
  • Karunamon 11y ago
    Not since Twitter has chosen to start "shadowbanning" users. When this happens, you can explicitly follow someone, but you will not see their messages in your timeline. Unfollowing/refollowing the user seems to clear it at least for a time, but you have to be really paying attention to even notice that it happens. I'm going to guess that it takes the form of a "silent" unfollow on their backend. And on a more opinionated note: No prizes for guessing the political leanings of those this happens to.
    • mmel 11y ago
      Monarchists?
  • norea-armozel 11y ago
    Twitter is far more open than that. It's probably the only thing I liked about Google+ vs Twitter or Tumblr. You can choose to block certain people and limit your posts to certain circles or to just one person, thus it never shows up in the public feed. It's sad no one else replicated that aspect of Google+ or that it took off. It really designed better in terms of how content was dispersed from your account POV.
  • equalsione 11y ago
    A post the author of ggautoblocker on what is missing from twitter when it comes to dealing with trolls etc: https://medium.com/@randileeharper/putting-out-the-twitter-trashfire-3ac6cb1af3e#.gzqv4iktz https://medium.com/@randileeharper/putting-out-the-twitter-t...
    • FireBeyond 11y ago
      This was actually a useful post, moreso than I expected. But in it, you can see shades of Randi's personality: "That is dumb and you are dumb for suggesting it" gives me memories of her latest encounter with FreeBSD, in which she tells people they "fucking suck" (this is someone who claims to run an online harassment organization), changed her Twitter name to "Kill All Men", posted pictures of her drinking from a mug with the words "Male Tears" on it, etc. But yes, many of these suggestions would go a long way to helping people manage their Twitter experience the way they want, which is a good thing.
• lordnacho 11y ago
  It's a wonder he lasted as long as he did. I've joined a number of online forums through the years, and I've always ended up leaving them due to a spiral of "tone gets rough / the good people leave". I'm still in this one, but I guess we'll see how long it lasts here. Seems different somehow, but they all do in the beginning. What are some innovations in solving the asshole/quality spiral? There's lots of takes on moderation, but what are some interesting ones?
  • lmm 11y ago
    Anonymity helps a lot, I think. This site isn't completely anonymous but it de-emphasizes usernames such that it's easy to miss them. Explicit policies are the other thing, and strong personal leadership. It's when the moderators become an unaccountable committee that a site starts to go downhill.
    • Doctor_Fegg 11y ago
      Conversely, the best online community I know is our village website, where real names are required - on the basis that you're less likely to be rude to someone who you might meet in the street tomorrow. It's notable that the biggest aggro we have is generally from people who live outside the village and therefore aren't invested in making relationships work. And yes, I do realise it's all a bit Royston Vasey - "a local website for local people"...
      • jtnegrotto 11y ago
        I'm working with the editor of our local newspaper to put together something for our community, and would be interested in hearing more about your village website. Could I get a link?
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      • Eiriksmal 11y ago
        I grew up on anonymous message boards in small communities, largely the ones surrounding video game music and chiptunes/"micromusic." There was some nasty behavior exhibited and I always figured it was the anonymous pseudonyms. Then I joined Facebook and saw the same thing playing out with real names and, usually, real faces as avatars. In America, we have a social network called NextDoor that uses aggressive methods to keep outsiders from being able to post in your hyper-local community/neighborhood. Your village's site is the same concept, only maybe without the postcard-mailed address verification step. It's a great concept. Just neighbors helping each other out, right? I thought that, besides the required real names, most members having profile pictures of their real faces, and many of them having their exact addresses listed on their profile page (oh, Bob lives 8 houses down from me!), would put a halt to the vitriol I saw on Facebook. It hasn't. It must be something about looking at a picture on a screen instead of a human who's reacting, visibly, in real-time to our hateful words, that lets us do what we do online.
• Zikes 11y ago
  Now that Twitter has created a committee by which those people are given actual power on the platform, I'd say the pool is now mostly urine with just a bit of chlorine.
• djaychela 11y ago
  I'm not surprised - I wouldn't be famous for all the money available (not an option anyway, particularly given my lack of talent!) - so many people now think they have a right to you, if they're a fan, or they've bought your work, or they don't like your work, or whatever. Twitter seems to bring those sorts of things much closer (as, of course, does much social media), and I'd think anyone with any opinions on just about anything will end up getting drawn into arguments over just about everything with people they've never met, whose opinions they probably wouldn't care about in any other sphere. I seriously think there will be a huge backlash against all of this sort of thing in the next few years - people have binged on it ad nauseam, and given the way my two teenage step-kids have reacted (removing themselves almost entirely from most social media, and only using it to talk to people they actually know and like IRL), I'd think there's more to come, in terms of people just leaving such an arena behind.
  • mediocrejoker 11y ago
    > I'm not surprised - I wouldn't be famous for all the money available (not an option anyway, particularly given my lack of talent!) Not sure that's a prerequisite anymore.
• danieka 11y ago
  I think this is a natural consequence of the twitter format. The short message motivates (some) users to win cheap points, offend or simply scream loudly in order to get attention. In my Luddite mind the political conversation is becoming Twitter-fied and now focuses more on short sound bites rather than a sound discourse.
  • rglullis 11y ago
    Now? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death [Neil Postman] also repeatedly states that the eighteenth century, being the Age of Reason, was the pinnacle for rational argument. Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed. Postman gives a striking example: Many of the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their written words. However, the reverse is true today. The names of presidents or even famous preachers, lawyers, and scientists call up visual images, typically television images, but few, if any, of their words come to mind. The few that do almost exclusively consist of carefully chosen soundbites.
    • Semiapies 11y ago
      Soundbites created by speech writers other than themselves, for that matter.
    • GnarfGnarf 11y ago
      Postman's is an excellent book. McLuhan said it: The Medium is the Message.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • Touche 11y ago
    Not just the short format but also the stream makes tweets disappear quickly. Most tweets are never seen by anyone else. If you say something provocative it stands out and lives a little longer than the typical tweet. This gains you followers so your tweets will live a little longer. You say something else provocative and you wind up with a positive feedback loop.
• jccc 11y ago
  > 'to turn as swimmers into cleanness leaping.’ I had to look that one up: Peace, by Rupert Brooke, 1914: "A paradoxical image, comparing going to war as an act that cleanses the participants, like a dip in a pool or river." https://movehimintothesun.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/rupert-brooke-peace/ https://movehimintothesun.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/rupert-br... I'm assuming that connection was intentional, because Stephen Fry is smarter than me.
  • pgeorgi 11y ago
    Just remember that this vision of war was the prevailing attitude in pre-WW1 Europe (maybe also in America, but what do I know?). It helped that the (thought) leaders espousing such nonsense rarely fought at the front lines. For them the only things that could be bruised by war were their ego and their wallet. WW1's reach changed that (and WW2 shook it up some more)
• carsongross 11y ago
  I'm a bit monomaniacal about this, but the current online culture wars (and the previous offline culture wars) make me wish that secession didn't have such a bad name. It is obvious that large groups of people have irreconcilable differences of opinion on matters of free speech, sexuality, gun ownership and so on. It is a shame that rather than a firm handshake and friendly wave goodbye, we will end up with a totalitarianism of one ideology or another, violence, or both.
  • dasil003 11y ago
    The problem is twofold: low bar to grabbing torches and pitchforks, and a high bar for recognizing someone else's humanity. In the old days you might not agree with your neighbor, but you had to live next to them. Now with the flick of a thumb you can denounce someone's entire existence before breakfast.
    • ZeroGravitas 11y ago
      It seems to me that in the old days, not that long ago, people literally formed a mob, and often the catalyst was about who got to live next door to who. Even the bad boys of twitter, which goes right up to mobs of people trying to ruin peoples lives with death threats etc doesn't seem quite as bad as bombing someone's church for example.
      • dasil003 11y ago
        Sure, I'm not trying to say it was all perfume and roses before, but they had to put some effort into it at least. The problem now is it becomes reflexive and casual—you don't even really need the strength of your convictions to attack someone online.
      • pyre 11y ago
        It seems like it's probably "lower" impact (i.e. no physical bombs) by higher participation (people are more likely to shout on Twitter than actually bomb some place).
    • 11y ago
• MCRed 11y ago
  "To leave that metaphor, let us grieve at what twitter has become. A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended – worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know. It’s as nasty and unwholesome a characteristic as can be imagined. It doesn’t matter whether they think they’re defending women, men, transgender people, Muslims, humanists … the ghastliness is absolutely the same. It makes sensible people want to take an absolutely opposite point of view. I’ve heard people shriek their secularism in such a way as to make me want instantly to become an evangelical Christian." This is a fair description of how Stephen Fry (as much as I love him) acted towards me on Twitter several years ago. (about the time I left twitter for good) I don't think he's a bad guy, I think there is just an authoritarian streak running thru out culture right now that is so strong that a guy who, at the time, had just played a persecuted gay man in V for Vendetta was advocating for the persecution of people he didn't like! (though I'm sure he didn't realize it/recognize it/intend it.) I think Stephen is a well intentioned guy who doesn't intend to piss in the pool, but I think propaganda has scared and manipulated him, as it has done so many others over history.
• malsun 11y ago
  I left Twitter last year when it looked like the 'professionally offended' were becoming too influential. They didn't affect me as I keep a low profile, but it was like seeing an omen and noticing friends were buying into their hype. The way Twitter is now pandering to this lot with the recently announced Orwellian-style group, and other odd behaviour suggests that they approve of the current momentum. I'm just glad to no longer have its weight on my shoulders. Life is great without social media, but it must be difficult for public figures who stick with it for the free promotion.
  • braythwayt 11y ago
    If you take a moment to look around, you’ll realize that a lot of socially progressive people are saying the exact same thing about Twitter, that the “professionally offended” are becoming too influential. Mind you, they’re talking about what happens when a woman criticizes video game culture and winds up with death threats and snuff porn choking her mentions. I am not saying this to suggest that one “side” or “the other” is right or wrong or has it worse than the other, but just making the general observation that Twitter does have a problem, and it seems to provide a terrible experience for all sorts of people with all sorts of social views. We blame it on the people dogpiling, or brigading, or whatever, but that shouldn’t prevent us from recognizing that Twitter is doing a terrible job of providing an environment for anything except “Interacting with Brands” and sharing low-emotional-content memes.
    • TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
      I don't think Twitter is making things worse than they used to be. Society has the problem. Twitter just makes it public. Remember, the US used to have anti-communist witch hunts in which people were forced to give up their careers, it had actual physical lynchings, and it still has a culture where the police can do more or less whatever they want with limited accountability. People being disrespectful or even stalkerish on a social network isn't good news, but it's a long way short of the very bad things that happen regularly offline. If anything Twitter's problem is more that it works well for promoting celebrity vapidity, but less well for providing a mass audience for the stories of ordinary people. You could argue there's not much interest in the latter, but then we're back to society having the problem, and Twitter being a medium for a certain expression of it. I think Quora does a much better job of dealing with real stories and relatively civil debate - but I'd guess it's much less popular than Twitter.
• r721 11y ago
  I wonder is it so hard to build an automatic "insult" detector with all recent progress with deep learning. Quick googling gave quite a couple of older papers: "Offensive Language Detection Using Multi-level Classification" http://www.eiti.uottawa.ca/~diana/publications/Flame_Final.pdf http://www.eiti.uottawa.ca/~diana/publications/Flame_Final.p... "Automatic identification of personal insults on social news sites" http://labfs.eecs.northwestern.edu/~sara/Site/Publications_files/JASIST_r1.pdf http://labfs.eecs.northwestern.edu/~sara/Site/Publications_f...
  • Zikes 11y ago
    How many false positives would you be willing to put up with before you left a platform altogether?
    • r721 11y ago
      I'm not saying the detector should filter all tweets everywhere, was just thinking about an option for some sensitive people to turn on which would affect only tweets mentioning them, for example.
  • joopxiv 11y ago
    When this was a topic in University a few years ago, it was still very hard to properly detect humor, especially sarcasm. If I understood this correctly, this whole episode was kicked of by Stephen making a joke about some lady's attire. I don't know what would be worse; the sanctimonious fallout or his tweet being censored by an automatic insult detector in the first place. (actually I do: the second).
    • r721 11y ago
      I was thinking about a tool, not a universal censor :) Something like a special place for notifications: "Hate mail" - some people with loads of noise replies would definitely appreciate that. Also offensive replies could be shown last when displaying tweet with replies, for example.
• michh 11y ago
  I think this is a tricky problem to properly solve. Or rather: An opportunity for Twitter to really mess up attempting to fix this. A big part of what makes Twitter interesting/worthwhile is the ability to interact with lots of different people you wouldn't have stumbled upon. But also, especially when you're just starting out on Twitter, people you otherwise wouldn't have been able to get through to. On Twitter I get to have a conversation with someone famous (in the industry but even bona fide celebrities like the author). People who I could never send an email, letter, call and actually get a response. On Twitter, I have a really good chance someone like Stephen Fry will actually read my tweet and even responding. I'm guessing the odds I'd be able to get him on the phone or have him accept my Facebook friend request are rather low. If Twitter builds a filter bubble around all famous/verified users, it loses a big chunk of it's a appeal to the nobodies. Which includes both trolls and decent people. And I think Twitter can't do without the civilized nobodies.
  • tomp 11y ago
    > I think this is a tricky problem to properly solve I don't think it is. I think a few simple settings could easily fix this problem; like (enabling/disabling) direct messages from people you don't follow, and customizable opt-in-able blacklists (of either users or words/phrases) that could be shared throughout the community. That way, some would be able to keep saying whatever they want, while others would be able to not feel offended by them.
• moron4hire 11y ago
  The problem isn't that this is a Twitter problem. It's that this is a cultural problem. People kinda suck. People kinda suck a lot. I was having a conversation with a friend at lunch, when I started putting ketchup on my hotdog. He looked at me and incredulously questioned, "really? What are you, like, 8 years old?" I had never even heard of the idea that "only children put ketchup on a hotdog." Yet here was someone I had originally thought of as a rational human being elevating it to a serious issue. A lot of this stuff gets defended as "just a joke", but I don't see anyone laughing. If you're so bad at making jokes, maybe you should just give up the practice and stick to being generally pleasant to be around. I guess I'm lucky that I'm not famous enough to get any randos following me on Twitter. The people who follow me are interested in my work, they aren't hero-worshipping me. I get to have excellent conversations with people on Twitter. But that is only because--even though it's not 100% in my control--my lack of celebrity allows me to guide and design my Twitter sphere. For a celebrity, they just get inundated with folks they don't want to hear from. Just read the replies to Notch's tweets sometime. I'm surprised he hasn't become a complete recluse. Almost every single one has some 13 year old complaining about "Minecraft sucks now that you're gone", even though he's been gone longer than they've been playing it.
  • Kiro 11y ago
    Where are you from? I'm very surprised anyone would even consider eating hotdog without ketchup so it must be a cultural thing.
    • jsmthrowaway 11y ago
      It's a capital crime in Chicago, if you do it in public. That's where the joking about it comes from; ketchup on hot dogs is one of those things that people take jestingly serious with tongue firmly planted in cheek at all times. Nobody actually cares, nobody's actually going to kill you in Chicago despite my joke, but people interpret the joshing as caring and demeaning because nobody can actually take a joke any more, as evidenced by GP (and which is far more often the problem). And yet here we are, lamenting the downfall of society. I can't even fathom a world where someone giving a friend crap over lunch for their choice of condiment is enough to start a Serious Conversation about Culture. That's funny in itself, honestly, but I don't want to live in that world. That's why I eschew social media altogether. I remember when I was a boy, laughing was something to be celebrated, because sharing something funny with your friends was one of the high points of life. Actually cutting loose and laughing with your friends about the stupidest things is easily one of the best feelings you can experience, but now every time I genuinely laugh at something that I find funny, I often have to look around and be worried about who saw me do it. It's genuinely depressing, the older I get. I don't even have humor any more. Now I just have liquor.
• Nickoladze 11y ago
  > to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know Never thought about it like this before. Sounds really strange when you put it this way.
• jonstokes 11y ago
  I have a theory about FB and Twitter -- or maybe more of an observation. Anyway, back in the stone age, people had bumper stickers with little slogans on them. And in the break rooms of various places of work, there was always a bulletin board an on a corner of it there was always some faded-from-to-many-xeroxes bit of humor/racism/sports fandom/sexism/dirty joke or other us-vs.-them thing on it that people would look at and amuse themselves with. Now thanks to Twitter and FB, these little types of tribal territorial markings are just about all that's left of public discourse. I see things get passed around and think, 20 years ago this would have been mimeographed and hung on a break room bulletin board, where it might have acted as a crude conversation starter about some aspect of "who are we?". But now people consider sharing and liking these things as their /contribution/ to a conversation. It's like the way that millennials communicate with emoji, except it's image macros and memes and slogans and "gotchas" and hot takes that we consume, copy, and share. The copying and sharing of all that stuff is what passes for discourse now. Me, I think that this development is double-plus bad.
  • jgrahamc 11y ago
    It's like the way that millennials communicate with emoji I'm GenX and not a millennial. I don't see anything wrong with using some emoji as part of my language. I already speak a language (English) which is some bastard child of French, German, Dutch, Arabic, etc. I'm happy to add a (poo emoji) when it's appropriate.
    • KaiserPro 11y ago
      emoticons were annoying on MSN messenger. I'd hope that people will grow out of it, like they did back then. but perhaps they are here to stay.
      • cazum 11y ago
        I don't think MSN users grew out of emoticons, they just stopped using MSN. Facebook chat, Skype and SMS picked up where MSN left off, and all three of those have a strong emoticon game.
• JamesBaxter 11y ago
  I've been thinking a lot about online communities since I listened to "So you've been publicly shamed" by Jon Ronson [0]. I quite like twitter just now but I don't follow many people and nobody follows me. I often see tweets from indie game devs discussing yet another Twitter storm in a teacup and I'm frustrated by how much stupid stuff escalates. [0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/So-Youve-Been-Publicly-Shamed/dp/0330492292/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1455554372&sr=1-1&keywords=so+you%27ve+been+publicly+shamed http://www.amazon.co.uk/So-Youve-Been-Publicly-Shamed/dp/033...
• bshimmin 11y ago
  Probably worth noting as a bit of context to this that Fry was presenting the BAFTA awards last night, said something offensive about someone who was a friend of his (but the public wouldn't necessarily have known that), and people on social media reacted badly.
  • tomku 11y ago
    People on social media reacted stupidly, but then he tried to engage the horde and prove that they were wrong to be offended by retweeting dozens (hundreds?) of people who backed him up. That was a strategy that could not result in anything but defeat and misery. He worked himself up into a rage trying to change the internet's mind, and when he failed, he took his ball and went home. I was and still am a fan of his, but for his own mental health, I'm glad he's not on Twitter any more.
    • bshimmin 11y ago
      I agree with this. I like Stephen Fry too, but I think his public persona of being this loveable gentleman of the people - entertaining, eccentric, erudite - quite often clashes with his tendency to make either silly or spiteful remarks in public; and the difference between Fry and the people who make their living from saying horrible things (eg. comedians in Britain like Jimmy Carr or Frankie Boyle) is that 1) there's an expectation that these people will say horrible things periodically; and 2) they can take the abuse when it's dished back to them. (I personally very much enjoy James Blunt's approach to Twitter.)
  • FussyZeus 11y ago
    Is there anything social media people don't react badly too? Facebook/Twitter just move from one social snafu to the next, facts be damned, we're offended over here!
• k-mcgrady 11y ago
  Twitter needs to be very careful. I use Facebook to follow my friends. I use Twitter to follow influencers/celebrities. If they start leaving and Twitter is just left with the musings of the average joe they're going to lose and lot of users.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  • riebschlager 11y ago
    Came to HN and saw this comment with a reaction gif and I was all like [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pot_calling_the_kettle_black https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pot_calling_the_kettle_bla...
• marban 11y ago
  I miss Pownce.
• CultState 11y ago
  The internet was designed to survive nuclear war, not psychologicl war. Until you realize that this is a coordinated, systemic attack against spontaneous global organization designed to look like a complex grassroots organic cancer, then you aren't even talking about the same problem. http://cultstate.com/?p=167 http://cultstate.com/?p=167
• bendykstra 11y ago
  It was through the angry backlash to a tweet that I discovered Stephen Fry. About eight years ago, Stephen couldn't get a Windows laptop to connect to wifi. His Twitter outburst and the reaction of Windows fans became grist for the tech blogs, which is how I noticed it. I wonder if Stephen is romanticising the early years of Twitter or if those angry reactions have just become more common. (Either way, I don't blame him for leaving.)
• nickysielicki 11y ago
  Prediction: A neo-luddite renaissance is on the horizon. The anti-social media sentiment that has only been seen among techhies is going to spread into otherwise-mainstream youth conservatives. The only thing in the way is that current services have not censored, but they're beginning to, and decentralized alternatives haven't existed. A maturation of bitcoin over the next year, especially with the fork, will result in bringing novel usages of the blockchain to the average consumer.
• haberman 11y ago
  Sanctimonious indignation is toxic. But to be fair, people post really offensive stuff too, and often it's well-meaning people who don't even seem to realize what they are doing. The best example I've seen lately is Richard Dawkins, who posted a video I won't link to where an Islamist and a Feminist are singing a song together. The video makes a real point that isn't intrinsically offensive. But the highly caricatured portrayal of these two people is, to me at least, a pretty inflammatory gesture. Also it came out that the feminist caricature is based on a real person who has received death threats for her work. Humans aren't programmed to live together with people who are really different from them. We evolved to preserve our in groups and unify against out groups. We have huge blind spots about how other people will perceive things. We can absolutely learn, but it takes effort and we'll make mistakes as we go. Twitter is all of this happening in real time.
  • Niten 11y ago
    I think you've recognized something important here, which is that offense is generally a subjective matter. In such cases an clear-headed statement of objection may be warranted, but dogpiling and outright bullying is never excusable.
• rblstr 11y ago
  I watched the BAFTAs with my girlfriend last night and I have to say, when Stephen made that comment we both said 'woah that's a bit mean' out loud. Of course, being the general public we're not aware of Mr Fry's relationship with the lady who won the award but from an outside perspective it came across as a bit bullying. I only found out today about the twitter backlash and I don't think it should be lumped in with so called SJW movements, or the anti-anti-offensive movement, it really sounded like a hurtful unnecessary comment that he shouldn't have made without context or clarifying their relationship. It really seemed un-characteristically mean for Mr Fry.
  • KerryJones 11y ago
    This is the problem. He shouldn't have to clarify his relationship, he shouldn't have to explain everything. In essence, that destroys jokes. It's not our job to know, but as we should assume innocence until proven guilty we should assume friendliness before assuming ridicule. If Beaven had a problem -- let her handle it. She's a big girl, we're not her collective parents.
    • rblstr 11y ago
      Without clarifying it it looks like he stood on stage in front of a bunch of rich celebrities and slagged off the winner of an award for not wearing conventional dress to an award show. I'm all for offensive comedy, but this wasn't a joke, he was basically slagging her off in public, live on television to a room full of people. Without context of their relationship it really looks like bullying. That's completely different to an offensive stand up comedy joke, especially when its so personally targeted. Some context to clarify that it wasn't mean and they're friends would have taken the edge off the 'joke' and nobody would have cared, but it was so off the cuff and mean it just looks like he is bullying her, which is probably what touched a chord with so many people. I'm sure Mr Fry is the last person who would want to be seen as bullying anyone.
      • monksy 11y ago
        Take a look at what was actually said: "Only one of the great cinematic costume designers would come to the awards dressed like a bag lady." If people weren't so quick to jump on the "blame the white guy" wagon... you'd see that it was actually a pretty clever statement.
• hnlogics 11y ago
  It is never acceptable to attack and use violence against other individuals. The fact that you perceive them as making money from their marginalization does not make it acceptable for you and others to attack them to send death threats, and to engage in other horrific and violent behavior. It is reprehensible and disgusting that you think your hatred and bigotry is acceptable... because somebody might've made money. (and it's only marginally worse when you realize that they almost never make meaningful money anyway).
  • lhnz 11y ago
    I don't know what you're talking about as I've never engaged in violent or horrific behaviour or sent death threats. Bigotry and hatred are disgusting. Not once did I say they were acceptable. I think deep down you know you're making vicious, unfounded accusations and that's why you feel the need to do so from a new account disconnected from your real name.
    • hnlogics 11y ago
      You're right. You didn't make death threats. You just explicitly defended sending death threats to marginalized people who you feel have found a way to profit from being marginalized; and indicated your belief that if a marginalized person finds a way to profit from being marginalized then it is acceptable to threaten them, and to do violence against them. Fortunately for you, HN is a safe space for bigots, so your horrific, amoral defense of coercion and violence will be celebrated mightily. And the brigade of people who think it's oh-so-hard to be a white man will down vote me. And assholes like you attack me for using a persona, even though my alternative would be to receive death threats and complaints to my employer about fabricated events. But yeah... you have it hard.
      • mineshaftgap 11y ago
        Hypersensitive clowns like you are why Trump is a viable candidate.
      • lhnz 11y ago
• sixQuarks 11y ago
  Everything is evolving all the time, and future iterations are based on, a reaction to, or rejection of what came before. There are going to be cycles of products, some you love, some you hate, but what won't change is that there are still like-minded people out there, no matter what your tastes or opinions. We will learn from this generation of social media , and future products will solve some of these problems to a large degree, only to evolve into something we detest again - but each time it should get a little better.
• bricemo 11y ago
  There have been numerous studies showing that outrage is one of the most viral emotions. For whatever reason, seeing something that makes you upset has a very high correlation with people sharing/liking/retweeting. I think this unfortunate fact is what is being born out in social media. Smithsonian had a good short article on it: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-emotion-goes-viral-fastest-180950182/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-emotion-go... Research shows that amazing good news, like a huge leap forward in cancer research, is even more viral. But unfortunately those happen much more rarely up than someone saying something stupid and getting lambasted. Ryan Holiday's book "Trust me I'm lying" also really opened my eyes to how a lot of this stuff works.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • derefr 11y ago
    I've always wondered whether you could just have a community that banned outrage. Literally: express outrage, get banned. "Signal boost" someone else's outrage, get banned. It's not welcome within the community. Would this even make sense? Or would this shove so hard against human nature that people would never be able to abide it? (Of course, sometimes you'd be outraged at the community—or its management—and that'd be sort of an insidious policy in that case. I think it could still work if there was a "side" area—like MetaFilter's MetaTalk—that allowed outrage, but with the strong rule of not linking to the side area from the regular area, so people wouldn't just be having the same viral arguments by link-proxy.)
    • pyre 11y ago
      > Literally: express outrage, get banned. What is one to do then when someone does something truly outrageous? Ban the entire community?
      • Joeboy 11y ago
        So outrageous that literally nobody is able to talk calmly about it? I doubt such a thing is possible.
• deleted 11y ago
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• gthtjtkt 11y ago
  This is true of almost any internet forum today. Every comment you make is meticulously deconstructed in an effort to find some kind of "gotcha". Well, either that or it's completely ignored. And god forbid you have an opinion on any subject in which you don't hold a doctorate degree. You can't even tell people "it's alright to eat eggs" without the conversation devolving into a back-and-forth war of citations.
  • teach 11y ago
    My wife does have a doctorate degree and you still get the back-and-forth of citations. Because she has a PhD in nutrition (really!) I can confirm that, yes, it is okay to eat eggs. (Though I'd shoot for organic and cage-free, personally.) But I still get arguments/pushback. Guh.
• dustingetz 11y ago
  Twitter is powered by an evil feedback loop where making people upset makes twitter more money. Their UX is designed to generate easily-amplified content, and amplify it, and this is the unanticipated consequence. I doubt they can fix the feedback loop without torpedoing engagement.
  • CM30 11y ago
    Isn't that like any news site ever? There's a reason why articles in tabloids and on clickbait websites tend to be as inflammatory as possible, because the inevitable flame war in the comments will likely bring the page views (and the links from people attacking it elsewhere will bring the backlinks for SEO purposes).
• danharaj 11y ago
  The presence of justice and the absence of tension are not the same thing. I think a lot of people have lived a large part of their lives completely insulated from the tension that has existed in society over social justice issues for centuries. Now that you can go on Twitter and find out exactly how and why everyone is mad, it looks like comity and mutual respect has evaporated. But really what has happened is that the absence of tension engendered by the undemocratic dissemination of information in the pre-Internet age has been revealed to be a lie: people have been angry for a while and they're angry for reasons. Shocking. Asking someone to shut up is much easier than assuming they're acting in good faith and have reasonable motivations that you can't perceive, because, you know, it's the Internet and nothing is more ridiculous than a person looking at the Internet and nodding condescendingly while explaining the exact nature of all these human beings they disagree with. If from the get-go you assume people are acting in bad faith and you demand that they admit that this is the case before you even consider them as reasonable people, you are asking for full surrender instead of treating them as equals.
  • chc 11y ago
    > people have been angry for a while and they're angry for reasons The reason they're mad here, evidently, is that Stephen made a joke to his friend. It doesn't seem like it's Stephen who failed to assume good faith.
    • danharaj 11y ago
      he made a joke to his friend in public. i have friends to whom i could shout "i hope you fucking die, you bloated moist abscess" at, but if i did that on twitter as a famous person without the context of our friendship readily visible, what people ought to think? once it came to light that he was ribbing his good friend, then people ought to have apologized and moved on. it doesn't make them terrible people for being a little on edge about powerful famous men ribbing less powerful, less famous women. the world isn't in the shitter just because he was misunderstood on twitter.
      • chc 11y ago
• hindsightbias 11y ago
  He should have read: http://web.mit.edu/marshall/www/papers/CyberBalkans.pdf http://web.mit.edu/marshall/www/papers/CyberBalkans.pdf
• dwrs 11y ago
  it says right here in the HN approach to comments that "HN is an experiment. As a rule, a community site that becomes popular will decline in quality. Our hypothesis is that this is not inevitable—that by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening." the question therein is where do we go now, and to which degree can we avoid twitter and other sites beyond their ostensible utility
• mclovinit 11y ago
  I bounced back and forth on and off FB until, I bit the bullet and deleted each one of my "friends" one by one. If I didn't do that, then I would be plunged in an infinite loop of deactivation/reactivation hell. It was interesting to see the reaction of people when I said I had deleted them in order to make it less enticing for me to use my account. They were actually offended for being deleted. Could it be that the mere perpetual overuse (and/or misuse) of social media breeds hypersensitivity? Hmm...I say yes. Nothing wrong with the occassional indulgence, but there's just more to life. But that's just my worthless 2 cents.
• typon 11y ago
  People are blowing this way out of proportion. Stephen Fry made a shitty joke about his friend, people objected, and he got angry at them for not finding it as funny as he did. He has the right to his opinion as do others. This outrage culture is only slightly more annoying than the people who constantly bemoan it.
• michaelwww 11y ago
  I've been accused of being sexist exactly once in my life, by an anonymous male friend of a woman on Twitter because I dared to answer a question she asked. I didn't realize she was asking in jest. Her friend said I should have known that she was a very knowledgeable person (I didn't) and her question was a joke, and because I answered it I was implying that she didn't know the answer and therefore was manspainling and generally being a sexist dick. This person wasn't satisfied and pursued me for several tweets until I apologized. I did apologize, but I've noticed that it kind of soured me on Twitter. I'm proud of my record of working women in tech and raising an independent daughter. I use my real name on Twitter and I don't need some anonymous busybody attacking me in public for dubious reasons. Perhaps if Twitter had a real name policy it would level the playing field. I'm sure a famous person like Stephen Fry is under constant attack from anonymous trolls.
  • tokai 11y ago
    >Perhaps if Twitter had a real name policy it would level the playing field Didn't work at all with youtube comments.
    • ashark 11y ago
      We need the opposite. The collision of economic incentives to self-promote online under one's real name with the way the Web works has been a disaster, in many ways. We need a no real names policy.
• deleted 11y ago
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• 746F7475 11y ago
  What's the big deal? If you don't like how a platform works just leave it, I haven't used either Facebook or Twitter ever (I do have accounts, but I think you can count my posts and tweets combined with fingers of one hand) and it hasn't affected my life at all
  • s_dev 11y ago
    Thats exactly what Stephen is doing. He doesn't like it anymore so he's leaving. What makes it it a big deal is that twitters success is based on prolific twitterers like Stephen Fry using the service and using it well. At the moment people are discussing how twitter is "doomed" for many different reasons this new piece of information just seems to add to the pile of evidence that twitter isn't providing value to the right people and this threatens its future.
    • 746F7475 11y ago
      So then twitter dies and something better takes it's place. I really don't see a way out of this. I mean if random people being mean is the issue what can they do? Other than start monitoring and censoring everything tweeted
• chatmasta 11y ago
  My Facebook newsfeed feels like a cocktail party where the host has surreptitiously arranged for the silent majority to observe a performance wherein the most "unsophisticated" guests squabble with each other over politics. The opinions on the feed, regularly produced by the same small group of people, are rife with dramatization and lacking any substantive argument. Yet hardly any of them come from friends who I know closely on an individual basis. Facebook seems like a platform that amplifies the voice of a minority on the outskirts of the social graph, distributing its opinions to the silent majority. This seems good in theory, and would hopefully result in some meaningful improvements to civil discourse. However, it remains unclear whether expectation meets reality in that regard.
  • rdancer 11y ago
    I have found that unfriending/muting people whose contributions to my feed I don't value makes all the difference. Facebook is what you make of it.
    • spin 11y ago
      I totally agree. I have un-followed a few people and now I only friend people that actually want to be friends with. I try to avoid posting political or technical things (mostly). So now, my FB is mostly just sharing pics and events with friends. (Actual friends, that I see IRL.) (... now if only I could get rid of the ads...)
      • rdancer 11y ago
        > (... now if only I could get rid of the ads...) uBlock Origin
        • spin 11y ago
          Oh, hey! That worked like a charm. Thank you.
• jccalhoun 11y ago
  I think one of the problems about social media is that the experience for the common person is often very different than that of (even moderately) famous people. I hear tech journalists talking about their experiences on twitter and they are so different than mine and I have to think it is because they have thousands of followers and I have around 100. If they do something they get tons of feedback but if I tweet the same thing I would hardly get any. Certainly there are times when things erupt and someone becomes "famous" and is bombarded but for most of us that doesn't happen.
• DenisM 11y ago
  And so, the Eternal September strikes again [1]. There's a ton of gold in figuring out how some communities succumb to it, and others don't. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  • chippy 11y ago
    I believe it is to do with group psychology, the network effect and the drive of VC funded companies for "growth". I'm not sure about the growth thing yet though, but it kind of implies the more people the better.
  • CM30 11y ago
    I suspect it's at least partly to do with the subject matter. If the community is united around a common interest, they can (sometimes) put aside their differences elsewhere to talk about that one thing in a moderately civil way. If it's a free for all about anything and everything, then well, it's like herding cats and a vicious flame war is likely to ensue at some point.
• markatkinson 11y ago
  Up you go! Best part of not having Twitter and the book of faces is the mysteriousness that you project when attempting to court the opposite sex, either that or just a doushy superiority complex. Either way I want nothing to do with Facebook (twitter is useful for finding out the status of services like Firebase etc). As far as I am concerned in life, distraction is the enemy, and if distraction is the enemy well then that makes Facebook a windmill to my Don Quixote.
• guelo 11y ago
  In certain forums these types of posts are called Goodbye, Cruel World posts and they are summarily ridiculed. HN takes itself too seriously to give this post the proper treatment.
• vectorpush 11y ago
  This is not a twitter problem. If you're a famous celebrity with a gigantic megaphone you have to accept the fact that the masses are going to react to what you put out there. I think it's funny when celebrities get all wrinkled over internet outrage but take for granted the fact that they are leveraging the masses (via twitter and other platforms) to boost their own careers. Woops, you said something that some people on the internet disagree with, suddenly you have a deluge of hate mail instead of doting adoration. Well, what did you expect? The masses are not autonomous eye-balls, they are people with disparate ideas and opinions and if you say things that piss some people off, this is the reaction you get. So, in the face of internet controversy, what does a celebrity do? Retreat to a convenient forum where they explicitly control the discourse so they can publicly broadcast their disdain for the fickle judgment of masses without having to actually listen to them. I suppose the so-called SJWs aren't the only ones that need a "safe space" to speak their minds without fear of criticism.
• mattbgates 11y ago
  Get the out and take a piss outside of the pool, assholes.
• woah 11y ago
  Might have been spending too much time on the internet.
• bambax 11y ago
  The irony here is that the person acting most offended is Stephen Fry himself, who decides to quit in high fashion because, alleges he, some people pissed in the pool. Twitter is not his pool; it's not even a pool: more like the sea. Many people -- and all kinds of living things -- piss in the sea and do many other things in it; if you're unhappy with that, well yes it's better if you stay on the shore, but don't go around pretending you're so pure. You're just afraid of the sea.
• arjn 11y ago
  I agree with Stephen. A while ago I came to the conclusion that widespread use of social media such as FB, tumblr and Twitter (especially twitter), has caused a severe degradation in public discourse and conversation.
• arjn 11y ago
  I agree with Stephen. A while ago I came to the conclusion that widespread use of social media such as FB, tumblr and Twitter (especially twitter), has caused a severe degradation in public discourse and conversation.
• kyledrake 11y ago
  My new years resolution was to stop using Twitter actively, and I've basically done that (spare a few offenses). I was intending to pin up a link to a page explaining my reasons, but haven't gotten to it yet. Public venues like Twitter have devolved into pitchfork-wielding mob battles over extremely stupid, petty nonsense (on all sides of the political spectrum), and I expect this to just continue to happen over and over again as the influentials of the "Twitterati" get better at pushing manipulable people into whatever half-baked agenda they want to use them for. The "influentials" are the people most rewarded by this system of relentless psuedo-controversy: petty, shrill narcissists that contribute little (or negatively) to anything of genuine value, merit or productivity. Through a few personal experiences, I've been made a lot more cognizant of the fact that I won't be able to avoid the mobs by staying out of them. I've decided it's best to just not participate at all, and to work to break the systems that enable the mobs in the first place by coming up with better systems. We need to go back to having sane, civil, intelligent discourses about real issues online, and figuring out the best way to facilitate them. Twitter is never going to work for that, no matter how many lunatics-running-the-asylum tribunals they come up with.
• maolt 11y ago
  The way I see it: 1: Really low barriers to entry for each snowflake to express their views. 2: Social networks work as echo chambers, which allow anyone to find dozens that share their views ("If they think like me, it must mean that I am right!!"). 3: Misunderstanding of the way the cyberspace works, with people not understanding really that it is encroaching on the "physical" world, and professing extreme opinions they would never have dreamed of voicing if not in front of a screen in the safety and "privacy"(hum) of their home. 4: The powers that be, that is to say the social networks operators have so much at stake that they are walking on eggs, wary of taking any action that could jeopardise their cash cow(actual or potential). The situation is a mix of all those factors, and the result is I think a bit depressing. Can you imagine our societies without a police force? Today's social networks are not far from that imho.
• nkjoep 11y ago
  Just a stupid rant.
• VonGuard 11y ago
  Sad to say, but humans have been bred over millennia to be clannish, violent, and prone to witch hunts. Quite literally, all of European history is about taking the peasants off to murder other people, and bringing back only the strongest ones who survived the battle to spread their seed to the next generation. The ones in the aristocracy interbred to the point of serious genetic flaws p https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_intermarriage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_intermarriage ]. So, choose your side: the ones born from the strongest, heartiest fighters, or the ones produced by many generations of selective in-breeding... At least, this is the story for us white folks.... Humans are just irrational, flawed, and prone to freak out. And I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords...
• f_allwein 11y ago
  Wonder if Stephen Fry will blog more often now - I noticed ths is his first blog post since May 2015.
• gadders 11y ago
  It's ironic that social justice warriors have driven one of the most progressive celebrities off Twitter.
• stretchwithme 11y ago
  There's tons of crap in real reservoirs. But we filter and chlorinate.
• pervycreeper 11y ago
  In a medium such as Twitter, there is not enough incentive to make users post quality. Morons can post about whatever irrelevant nonsense they want and gain approval from other morons. From inside a filter bubble, PC policing a celebrity can seem incredibly courageous and clever, when in fact it is the opposite. The potential harms of this are real. Richard Dawkins suffered a stroke last week following such an incident, where a random interloper peppered him with a barrage of criticism, taking her gang of followers with her.
• zarkov99 11y ago
  Assholes, the self righteous,plain evil, or simply stupid kind, are a minority but they have a tremendous impact in any community which does punish or prevent bad behavior. This is why we have to have door locks, police, jails, passwords, etc. Any sufficiently large online community will end up including a bunch of douche bags which, unconstrained by the these old school deterrents, will eventually destroy it.
• musesum 11y ago
  How about an "untweet". Basically a thumbs down for tweets that smell. Then use collaborative UN-filtering. Or how about using Word2Vec to usher turds to a remote part of the tweet space. Use sliders to adjust your results. For example "I need a twitter hug. What would happen if I turn down the 'Outrage' and turn up the 'Kittens' -- awwww, how cute! Ok, now what would happen if I turn up the 'Death Metal' -- kittens and death metal -- whoooah!
• pklausler 11y ago
  For me, what's important is not avoiding disagreement, conflict, or rage -- what I want to somehow exclude from my social media existence is just good old craziness. The Internet has been enormously empowering to the stark barking mad.
• wcummings 11y ago
  I love Stephen Fry, but I'm conflicted. On one hand, he's upset that people are offended and without a hint of irony is obviously very offended by their sensibilities. That said, celebrities (intentional or otherwise) have a very different experience on social media than the lay person.
  • dclowd9901 11y ago
    You've never had anyone dig into a comment you've made looking for you to have been the most cynical version of yourself? It's awful.
• melted 11y ago
  Should have gone full @Nero, and started tearing them new ones. They can't win against a well spoken gay person who chooses to not give a damn.
• nullc 11y ago
  I always thought it was called _twit_ter for a reason.
• nullc 11y ago
  I always thought it was called _twit_ter for a reason.
• andrewbinstock 11y ago
  While I agree that much of social media is as he describes, I don't have this problem on Twitter. I follow just over 100 people whose thoughts interest or entertain me. I shut off the screamers, the haters, the high-emotion types. With the result that my experience of Twitter is pleasant. Is there some reason OP couldn't do the same?
• mcv 11y ago
  I'm not active on twitter, but from what I've seen, particularly in the aftermath of GamerGate, is that it's a putrid mess of hatred, threats, and bigotry. The problem doesn't so much seem to be that people are defending others, but that they are attacking them. I never really saw the point, but it in the past few years it has seemed even more pointless. You just can't have a good, nuanced conversation in 140 characters. You can only shout one-liners and threats. It's what the medium seems designed for.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]