11 ms·

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.

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.
    - KaiserPro 11y ago
      interesting, first it appears people really love emojis here, my original post lost me some karma... second there was a massive gap in my friend group between MSN emoticons dieing out and emojis seeping in. Perhaps my experiences are abnormal....
  - freehunter 11y ago
    I don't think they'll ever go away, and that's because of the nature of short-form text communications. You need to express emotion, something language is bad at doing in short-form. Longer expressions can have great flowery emotion, but "im gonna kill you" can mean a lot of different things depending on the emoticon or emoji that follows it. And that's really important. Some people write long messages to convey emotion. Others use ambiguous phrases and follow it up with a quick expression of emotion to set the context.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- zkhalique 11y ago
  Emojis are fine. But I remember the first times I started seeing "LOL" and "ROTFLMAO". And I realized that the person wasn't really laughing, but they were quietly typing that on the keyboard. If you think about it, before AIM and online chat (way before texting), people hardly ever faked their emotions so much. I mean, you could fake a small laugh, but you didn't outright say that you're rolling on the floor laughing, while you weren't even cracking a smile physically. That would be impossible over the phone, and AFAIK people didn't do it over email, either. It's a product of the instant-message culture. And it also symbolizes the disconnect between the online persona on facebook, posting all those cool photos, and the real-world person sitting by the computer all those lonely nights. The emotions and the fulfillment of the emotions have become stilted, computers now provide a superstimulus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus) that replaces deep, real-life conversations with a steady stream shallow online interactions. Notifications pull us back in for more like an addictive slot machine. And our kids are ill-equipped to fight it, which is why they spend a great deal of their lives addicted to effectively meaningless communication with people who are not next to them: http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-teens http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-te...
  - jgrahamc 11y ago
    If you think about it, before AIM and online chat (way before texting), people hardly ever faked their emotions so much In the late 1980s terms like LOL were used on BBSes and on Usenet. Perhaps you just aren't old enough to remember that? :-)
    - bdreadz 11y ago
      Thank you. On BBSes and even IRC /me laughs, /me <action|emotion> Before LOL I'd use hahaha or hehehe all the time as well in IRC, Chat Rooms, BBSes, etc.
      - Tiksi 11y ago
        * Tiksi slaps bdreadz around a bit with a large trout. I remember reading a study that people laugh more around other people. Anecdotally, I can definitely see this in myself. If I find something funny that isn't shared with other people, I might not outwardly laugh, and it would look like my lol, rofl, hahaha, etc isn't genuine, but with a group of people I'd probably be laughing out loud at the same thing. It might just be expressing the same emotion differently.
- gaur 11y ago
  > I already speak a language (English) which is some bastard child of French, German, Dutch, Arabic, etc. It's a Germanic language (not a child of German), with significant lexical input from French and Latin. The input from "Dutch, Arabic, etc." is minor.
  - tremon 11y ago
    But the Germanic language family is quite large; it basically describes every language spoken on the Northern Atlantic coast. You can't say "it's Germanic" and then say "it's hardly related to Dutch or German". As for the development of the English language, I believe it derives mostly from Saxon - Frisian - Norse - French, in chronological order. I'm pretty sure Celtic should also be on that list, but I don't know in what order or to what extent.
    - JetSetWilly 11y ago
      English and Dutch are similar because they share a common ancestor. But the direct influence of Dutch upon English is minimal. Relatedness and Influence are distinct concepts, the language that influenced English was an ancestor of both Dutch and English, and so the influence of Dutch itself on English has been small compared to other languages like French.
    - gaur 11y ago
      > You can't say "it's Germanic" and then say "it's hardly related to Dutch or German". That's not what I said. I said "it's Germanic" and "it's not a child of German or Dutch".
- jonstokes 11y ago
  Gahh.. I actually don't have anything against emojis, and I use them, too. I probably agree with 90% of the pro-emojii sentiment in this sub-thread. The emoji thing was a bad analogy and I should have just left out that clause entirely and started that sentence some other way.
- madaxe_again 11y ago
  Indeed. I actually find the fact that we've come full circle and are going back to ideograms rather fascinating. If anything, see Japanese - Kanji are essentially ancient Chinese emoticons, which succinctly express common notions which would be far more expansive in katakana or hiragana. I can't read the latter, but I can read Kanji - which gets me by in both China and Japan. Emoticons are even more universal.
- notahacker 11y ago
  Using emojis (and acronyms, abbreviations and even to some extent memes) to augment conversation isn't the problem. Using them in such a random or repetitive way that they substitute for conversation - to the extent that some human interactions would struggle to pass a Turing test - is the problem. Twitter, where the bot feeds are often indistinguishable from the human ones, is pretty much the poster child for this sort of communication malaise.
justifier 11y ago
i consider emojis as the tonal element missing from text think of it as visual intonation (o) (o) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_(linguistics)
- danharaj 11y ago
  I like your interpretation which ascribes intelligence and meaning to other peoples' behavior instead of the grandparent which seems to imply that the kids these days are just stupid and don't have any interesting thoughts to convey. You can't find the meaning in other peoples' behavior if you just assume it's meaningless from the get-go.
  - justifier 11y ago
    :P
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      Oh, well played sir!
  - mhurron 11y ago
    > kids these days are just stupid and don't have any interesting thoughts to convey. It's not kids these days, it's always been like this for everyone.
  - justifier 11y ago
    the history of emoji coming from japanese culture is pertinent.. i am unable to speak for middle eastern or cyrillic languages due to a shameful unfamiliarity, but as for western and a majority eastern languages, the core of the japanese language is substantially, yet casually, more capable japanese is comprised of three alphabets: kanji : an enormous, complex, and ancient chinese character set katakana and hiragana: syllabic runes that bridge japanese phonemes to its own complex characters or even other languages the japanese even created a phoneme set using latin characters called romaji the japanese have a japanese numeral system but also use arabic numerals what's more is these elements of the language can all appear on the same poster one walks by while walking down the street and yet still more, those elements can all be meant to be read in different directions japanese texts are written horizontally and vertically japansese books can be printed and read either page flipped right to left, or similarly to the west, left to right one may argue a dislike for or refuse the use of emojis but it could be said that one of the most literate cultures in the world looked at their tools of communication and felt them wanting
AJ007 11y ago
There is no friendly way to say it, the mass market are morons. It might be derogatory jokes, but this can also include things like spreading urban legends which were debunked four decades ago. Just like Usenet and countless other online communities, what starts a a small group of fairly privileged and elite eventually degrades in to garbage as the reach increases. This is not so much an overall size issue but a relative one. I saw it happen to very small online communities in the 90s. In some respects, I watched it occur on a community I ran nearly 10 years ago. Facebook's aggressive censorship along with non-public networks give each user a white washed micro-community. Public forums, such as Twitter and Instagram, do not.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - sesutton 11y ago
    This is an amusing comment because that's not how averages work.
    - tlrobinson 11y ago
      Well, if you're talking about median it is.
      - logfromblammo 11y ago
        And in a normal distribution--which measured attributes like height, IQ, and birth weight typically have--median, mean, and mode are all the same.
  - typon 11y ago
    Yea and I'm sure none of them are on this thread. The self congratulatory opinions in this thread are super cringe worthy.
baltar 11y ago
"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 " This sort of dreck was as despicable then as it is now, off- or online. If people posting such things now leave Twitter, I'm all for it. They can go back to the stone age where they belong - oh wait, even then most people were likely better than that: http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/geschlechterrollen-forscher-entzaubern-die-steinzeit.976.de.html?dram:article_id=342902 http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/geschlechterrollen-fors... (in German).
- striking 11y ago
  It seems you'll get your wish soon enough, at least with respects to Twitter. But how clean is clean enough?
  - baltar 11y ago
    Simple: no racism, sexism or any other de-humanizing speech based on identity is "clean enough".
    - striking 11y ago
      How would you define the line between race discussion and racism? Or between meaningful discourse about gender/sex and sexism?
      - baltar 11y ago
        It's not my job to pick a definition but Twitter's (and other social sites'). In fact, they already did (defining "hateful conduct"): "You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease." Pretty basic stuff. If it was my choice, I'd pick a wider definition, accepting that there will be an area of uncertainty and errors. However, I think that it is still far better to exclude some people (for a while?) than to e.g. subject many more people to constantly being called pejorative terms (including implications to being a slave, an animal or an exhibit)/belittled because of identity/violently threatened etc. You could also see it this way: up to now the officially used definition was in effect that nothing is racist/sexist.
lkrubner 11y ago
"this development is double-plus bad" You meant: "this development is double-plus ungood"
pier25 11y ago
Voluntary newspeak
Brakenshire 11y ago
The problem is that the abstractions for working out what gets attention/promotion on social media favour the lowest common denominator. Both Twitter and Reddit are genuinely useful for connecting together like-minded communities with well established standards of behaviour, but they both struggle enormously when they attempt to find some objective criteria which can create a ranking for comparing these communities to one another, and use that ranking to synthesize everything together to create a shared public space. On Twitter, trending is principally about volume. On Reddit, you can view and upvote 100 image macros in the time it takes to read one long-form article. So almost by definition the shared space will be filled with information that is quickly digestible, or that people have not read or watched. In attempting to synthesize and rank every piece of information on these sites, we are effectively trying to automate an editorial process for deciding what is currently the most important thing in the world, in the meantime separating what is poor content from what is merely controversial, and ranking an image macro against a 10,000 word essay. This is a herculean task, and the methods we are using are manifestly not up to the job.
- buddapalm 11y ago
  > The problem is that the abstractions for working out what gets attention/promotion on social media favour the lowest common denominator. IMHO you've identified the root problem. it's simply very easy to optimize a feed around quick interaction signals as a way of surfacing what's important, and still get the quality wrong. > we are effectively trying to automate an editorial process for deciding what is currently the most important thing in the world, in the meantime separating what is poor content from what is merely controversial, and ranking an image macro against a 10,000 word essay. This is a herculean task, and the methods we are using are manifestly not up to the job. what's needed IMO are user satisfaction signals. I wonder if social networks could invite users to report content that makes them mad or they find useless. not for abuse, simply to identify what different users like and start understanding what groups of people prefer
dageshi 11y ago
That has been my opinion for a while as well. It's really a huge amount of social signalling where people can group themselves into specific tribes by broadcasting how offended they are by something someone well known has said or done. And because of that it's effectively become news, papers like The Guardian in the UK have endless opinion pieces which basically amount to people commenting on other people being angry on someones behalf about something someone said or did.
typon 11y ago
If you doubt the immense amount of creativity in the language and slang used by teenagers, you need to take a Linguistics 101 and you'll find plenty of evidence. There is something to be said about the oversharing effects of social media on human psyche, but this old school yearning for a better intellectual past is bullshit.
david-given 11y ago
My theory is that it's because social media systems encourage and publicise agreement, while discouraging and hiding disagreement. This leads to a huge positive feedback effect on any meme that catches even a tiny number of people's attention, no matter how crazy. On twitter, you signify agreement by retweeting; this takes seconds and permanently adds to the tweet's score. But to disagree, I have to write a message of my own. It'll show up in the conversation feed but doesn't affect the original message. And each disagreement stands alone, so they'll never accumulate a high score, so even the people who see them won't consider them as important as the original message. Let's say somebody posts a Twitter message about, oh, how they've just tried cleaning their ear using trained caterpillars. It gets passed around a bit among the ear-canal-caterpillar-cleaning community, all five of them. But then a friend-of-a-friend-of-an-acquaintance retweets it, and suddenly thousands of people see it, and it's off-the-wall enough that a small percentage of them pass it on. Suddenly it's got thousands of retweets. It's become a movement. Bloggers write about it, a few mainstream journalists comment on it, and abruptly Caterpillar-Facilitated Ear-canal Maintainance is a thing. Meanwhile have written a tweet about how this is a really crazy idea and don't do it, seriously, it's just dumb. It'll get passed on a bit among my friends and will peter out. It's not just Twitter; most social media networks do this. Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment.
- pdonis 11y ago
  > Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment. 100% agree. And note that HN is already running this experiment; we have downvotes as well as upvotes.
  - emp_zealoth 11y ago
    And I personally think it is even more insidious. When I'm on facebook and see some extreme rightwing nutjob upvote ring I see what's going on On HN on a lot of downvoted commets it makes sense, they are poorly written and full of bs. But every time there is a little more political and/or contentious issue on all I see is Political Correctness police mercilessly downvoting and flagkillig anything that dares to even doubt. It is insidious and ironically has exactly the oposite effect (look:most of europe extreme right rise in popularity)
Disruptive_Dave 11y ago
My theory, since you all asked, and with my dozens of years of behavioral studies experience (just kidding, I do marketing stuff and things), is that we - human beings, that is - aren't really designed to communicate with the world. It's just not something we're ready for right now. We went from small tribes to friggin Twitter way too fast. We're in the "figure out wtf is going on right now" phase, which could end up being a totally reasonable transition. But we all seem to be addressing these topics as if they are as natural as plants growing. IDK, I often ask myself "why?" when considering the innovations I experience on the daily. This isn't to say there doesn't exist wonderful benefits of "connector" services like FB/Tw, I'm just not sure we're ready for it all. Then again, maybe this is how progress happens?
taurath 11y ago
Imagine you have 10 people standing in a circle having a conversation. At any given time only a max of say 2 people can be talking at once, and its usually one. How do people communicate, when they can't speak? Image macros and memes are just stand-ins for facial expressions and body language, something humans are hard wired to process, but is severely lacking when communicating through text. Its a way that people form real relationships over the internet. There's nothing awful about it. Go look at any group of 20 year olds and see how they communicate in real life - you'll be just as off-put as when you see their online communications.
Nelson69 11y ago
There never was a serious public discourse. Why would giving everyone access to easy ways to contribute simply make that happen? I don't know the reason why, it could be simple as most people aren't that smart, but the truth is the vast vast vast majority don't have anything interesting to add and most probably don't care what you're talking about anyways. Just think about this for a bit: it was a socially acceptable social meme that people would stand around the "water cooler" and talk about TV shows. TV Shows!? That's what we've got when the masses are left to their own devices. What I do think could potentially become a net positive is that in the bad old days, you had to catch someone putting that racist cartoon on the bulletin board or follow them to see the bumper sticker on their car. Now you can search them out, that's kind of interesting. I don't know that it will cure racism, sexism or other discrimination but it will further push them back in to a smaller place.

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.
  - KaiserPro 11y ago
    interesting, first it appears people really love emojis here, my original post lost me some karma... second there was a massive gap in my friend group between MSN emoticons dieing out and emojis seeping in. Perhaps my experiences are abnormal....
- freehunter 11y ago
  I don't think they'll ever go away, and that's because of the nature of short-form text communications. You need to express emotion, something language is bad at doing in short-form. Longer expressions can have great flowery emotion, but "im gonna kill you" can mean a lot of different things depending on the emoticon or emoji that follows it. And that's really important. Some people write long messages to convey emotion. Others use ambiguous phrases and follow it up with a quick expression of emotion to set the context.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
zkhalique 11y ago
Emojis are fine. But I remember the first times I started seeing "LOL" and "ROTFLMAO". And I realized that the person wasn't really laughing, but they were quietly typing that on the keyboard. If you think about it, before AIM and online chat (way before texting), people hardly ever faked their emotions so much. I mean, you could fake a small laugh, but you didn't outright say that you're rolling on the floor laughing, while you weren't even cracking a smile physically. That would be impossible over the phone, and AFAIK people didn't do it over email, either. It's a product of the instant-message culture. And it also symbolizes the disconnect between the online persona on facebook, posting all those cool photos, and the real-world person sitting by the computer all those lonely nights. The emotions and the fulfillment of the emotions have become stilted, computers now provide a superstimulus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus) that replaces deep, real-life conversations with a steady stream shallow online interactions. Notifications pull us back in for more like an addictive slot machine. And our kids are ill-equipped to fight it, which is why they spend a great deal of their lives addicted to effectively meaningless communication with people who are not next to them: http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-teens http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-te...
- jgrahamc 11y ago
  If you think about it, before AIM and online chat (way before texting), people hardly ever faked their emotions so much In the late 1980s terms like LOL were used on BBSes and on Usenet. Perhaps you just aren't old enough to remember that? :-)
  - bdreadz 11y ago
    Thank you. On BBSes and even IRC /me laughs, /me <action|emotion> Before LOL I'd use hahaha or hehehe all the time as well in IRC, Chat Rooms, BBSes, etc.
    - Tiksi 11y ago
      * Tiksi slaps bdreadz around a bit with a large trout. I remember reading a study that people laugh more around other people. Anecdotally, I can definitely see this in myself. If I find something funny that isn't shared with other people, I might not outwardly laugh, and it would look like my lol, rofl, hahaha, etc isn't genuine, but with a group of people I'd probably be laughing out loud at the same thing. It might just be expressing the same emotion differently.
gaur 11y ago
> I already speak a language (English) which is some bastard child of French, German, Dutch, Arabic, etc. It's a Germanic language (not a child of German), with significant lexical input from French and Latin. The input from "Dutch, Arabic, etc." is minor.
- tremon 11y ago
  But the Germanic language family is quite large; it basically describes every language spoken on the Northern Atlantic coast. You can't say "it's Germanic" and then say "it's hardly related to Dutch or German". As for the development of the English language, I believe it derives mostly from Saxon - Frisian - Norse - French, in chronological order. I'm pretty sure Celtic should also be on that list, but I don't know in what order or to what extent.
  - JetSetWilly 11y ago
    English and Dutch are similar because they share a common ancestor. But the direct influence of Dutch upon English is minimal. Relatedness and Influence are distinct concepts, the language that influenced English was an ancestor of both Dutch and English, and so the influence of Dutch itself on English has been small compared to other languages like French.
  - gaur 11y ago
    > You can't say "it's Germanic" and then say "it's hardly related to Dutch or German". That's not what I said. I said "it's Germanic" and "it's not a child of German or Dutch".
jonstokes 11y ago
Gahh.. I actually don't have anything against emojis, and I use them, too. I probably agree with 90% of the pro-emojii sentiment in this sub-thread. The emoji thing was a bad analogy and I should have just left out that clause entirely and started that sentence some other way.
madaxe_again 11y ago
Indeed. I actually find the fact that we've come full circle and are going back to ideograms rather fascinating. If anything, see Japanese - Kanji are essentially ancient Chinese emoticons, which succinctly express common notions which would be far more expansive in katakana or hiragana. I can't read the latter, but I can read Kanji - which gets me by in both China and Japan. Emoticons are even more universal.
notahacker 11y ago
Using emojis (and acronyms, abbreviations and even to some extent memes) to augment conversation isn't the problem. Using them in such a random or repetitive way that they substitute for conversation - to the extent that some human interactions would struggle to pass a Turing test - is the problem. Twitter, where the bot feeds are often indistinguishable from the human ones, is pretty much the poster child for this sort of communication malaise.

justifier 11y ago

i consider emojis as the tonal element missing from text think of it as visual intonation (o) (o) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_(linguistics)

danharaj 11y ago
I like your interpretation which ascribes intelligence and meaning to other peoples' behavior instead of the grandparent which seems to imply that the kids these days are just stupid and don't have any interesting thoughts to convey. You can't find the meaning in other peoples' behavior if you just assume it's meaningless from the get-go.
- justifier 11y ago
  :P
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Oh, well played sir!
- mhurron 11y ago
  > kids these days are just stupid and don't have any interesting thoughts to convey. It's not kids these days, it's always been like this for everyone.
- justifier 11y ago
  the history of emoji coming from japanese culture is pertinent.. i am unable to speak for middle eastern or cyrillic languages due to a shameful unfamiliarity, but as for western and a majority eastern languages, the core of the japanese language is substantially, yet casually, more capable japanese is comprised of three alphabets: kanji : an enormous, complex, and ancient chinese character set katakana and hiragana: syllabic runes that bridge japanese phonemes to its own complex characters or even other languages the japanese even created a phoneme set using latin characters called romaji the japanese have a japanese numeral system but also use arabic numerals what's more is these elements of the language can all appear on the same poster one walks by while walking down the street and yet still more, those elements can all be meant to be read in different directions japanese texts are written horizontally and vertically japansese books can be printed and read either page flipped right to left, or similarly to the west, left to right one may argue a dislike for or refuse the use of emojis but it could be said that one of the most literate cultures in the world looked at their tools of communication and felt them wanting

AJ007 11y ago

There is no friendly way to say it, the mass market are morons. It might be derogatory jokes, but this can also include things like spreading urban legends which were debunked four decades ago. Just like Usenet and countless other online communities, what starts a a small group of fairly privileged and elite eventually degrades in to garbage as the reach increases. This is not so much an overall size issue but a relative one. I saw it happen to very small online communities in the 90s. In some respects, I watched it occur on a community I ran nearly 10 years ago. Facebook's aggressive censorship along with non-public networks give each user a white washed micro-community. Public forums, such as Twitter and Instagram, do not.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- sesutton 11y ago
  This is an amusing comment because that's not how averages work.
  - tlrobinson 11y ago
    Well, if you're talking about median it is.
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      And in a normal distribution--which measured attributes like height, IQ, and birth weight typically have--median, mean, and mode are all the same.
- typon 11y ago
  Yea and I'm sure none of them are on this thread. The self congratulatory opinions in this thread are super cringe worthy.

baltar 11y ago

"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 " This sort of dreck was as despicable then as it is now, off- or online. If people posting such things now leave Twitter, I'm all for it. They can go back to the stone age where they belong - oh wait, even then most people were likely better than that: http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/geschlechterrollen-forscher-entzaubern-die-steinzeit.976.de.html?dram:article_id=342902 http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/geschlechterrollen-fors... (in German).

striking 11y ago
It seems you'll get your wish soon enough, at least with respects to Twitter. But how clean is clean enough?
- baltar 11y ago
  Simple: no racism, sexism or any other de-humanizing speech based on identity is "clean enough".
  - striking 11y ago
    How would you define the line between race discussion and racism? Or between meaningful discourse about gender/sex and sexism?
    - baltar 11y ago
      It's not my job to pick a definition but Twitter's (and other social sites'). In fact, they already did (defining "hateful conduct"): "You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease." Pretty basic stuff. If it was my choice, I'd pick a wider definition, accepting that there will be an area of uncertainty and errors. However, I think that it is still far better to exclude some people (for a while?) than to e.g. subject many more people to constantly being called pejorative terms (including implications to being a slave, an animal or an exhibit)/belittled because of identity/violently threatened etc. You could also see it this way: up to now the officially used definition was in effect that nothing is racist/sexist.

lkrubner 11y ago

"this development is double-plus bad" You meant: "this development is double-plus ungood"

pier25 11y ago

Voluntary newspeak

Brakenshire 11y ago

The problem is that the abstractions for working out what gets attention/promotion on social media favour the lowest common denominator. Both Twitter and Reddit are genuinely useful for connecting together like-minded communities with well established standards of behaviour, but they both struggle enormously when they attempt to find some objective criteria which can create a ranking for comparing these communities to one another, and use that ranking to synthesize everything together to create a shared public space. On Twitter, trending is principally about volume. On Reddit, you can view and upvote 100 image macros in the time it takes to read one long-form article. So almost by definition the shared space will be filled with information that is quickly digestible, or that people have not read or watched. In attempting to synthesize and rank every piece of information on these sites, we are effectively trying to automate an editorial process for deciding what is currently the most important thing in the world, in the meantime separating what is poor content from what is merely controversial, and ranking an image macro against a 10,000 word essay. This is a herculean task, and the methods we are using are manifestly not up to the job.

buddapalm 11y ago
> The problem is that the abstractions for working out what gets attention/promotion on social media favour the lowest common denominator. IMHO you've identified the root problem. it's simply very easy to optimize a feed around quick interaction signals as a way of surfacing what's important, and still get the quality wrong. > we are effectively trying to automate an editorial process for deciding what is currently the most important thing in the world, in the meantime separating what is poor content from what is merely controversial, and ranking an image macro against a 10,000 word essay. This is a herculean task, and the methods we are using are manifestly not up to the job. what's needed IMO are user satisfaction signals. I wonder if social networks could invite users to report content that makes them mad or they find useless. not for abuse, simply to identify what different users like and start understanding what groups of people prefer

dageshi 11y ago

That has been my opinion for a while as well. It's really a huge amount of social signalling where people can group themselves into specific tribes by broadcasting how offended they are by something someone well known has said or done. And because of that it's effectively become news, papers like The Guardian in the UK have endless opinion pieces which basically amount to people commenting on other people being angry on someones behalf about something someone said or did.

typon 11y ago

If you doubt the immense amount of creativity in the language and slang used by teenagers, you need to take a Linguistics 101 and you'll find plenty of evidence. There is something to be said about the oversharing effects of social media on human psyche, but this old school yearning for a better intellectual past is bullshit.

david-given 11y ago

My theory is that it's because social media systems encourage and publicise agreement, while discouraging and hiding disagreement. This leads to a huge positive feedback effect on any meme that catches even a tiny number of people's attention, no matter how crazy. On twitter, you signify agreement by retweeting; this takes seconds and permanently adds to the tweet's score. But to disagree, I have to write a message of my own. It'll show up in the conversation feed but doesn't affect the original message. And each disagreement stands alone, so they'll never accumulate a high score, so even the people who see them won't consider them as important as the original message. Let's say somebody posts a Twitter message about, oh, how they've just tried cleaning their ear using trained caterpillars. It gets passed around a bit among the ear-canal-caterpillar-cleaning community, all five of them. But then a friend-of-a-friend-of-an-acquaintance retweets it, and suddenly thousands of people see it, and it's off-the-wall enough that a small percentage of them pass it on. Suddenly it's got thousands of retweets. It's become a movement. Bloggers write about it, a few mainstream journalists comment on it, and abruptly Caterpillar-Facilitated Ear-canal Maintainance is a thing. Meanwhile have written a tweet about how this is a really crazy idea and don't do it, seriously, it's just dumb. It'll get passed on a bit among my friends and will peter out. It's not just Twitter; most social media networks do this. Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment.

pdonis 11y ago
> Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment. 100% agree. And note that HN is already running this experiment; we have downvotes as well as upvotes.
- emp_zealoth 11y ago
  And I personally think it is even more insidious. When I'm on facebook and see some extreme rightwing nutjob upvote ring I see what's going on On HN on a lot of downvoted commets it makes sense, they are poorly written and full of bs. But every time there is a little more political and/or contentious issue on all I see is Political Correctness police mercilessly downvoting and flagkillig anything that dares to even doubt. It is insidious and ironically has exactly the oposite effect (look:most of europe extreme right rise in popularity)

Disruptive_Dave 11y ago

My theory, since you all asked, and with my dozens of years of behavioral studies experience (just kidding, I do marketing stuff and things), is that we - human beings, that is - aren't really designed to communicate with the world. It's just not something we're ready for right now. We went from small tribes to friggin Twitter way too fast. We're in the "figure out wtf is going on right now" phase, which could end up being a totally reasonable transition. But we all seem to be addressing these topics as if they are as natural as plants growing. IDK, I often ask myself "why?" when considering the innovations I experience on the daily. This isn't to say there doesn't exist wonderful benefits of "connector" services like FB/Tw, I'm just not sure we're ready for it all. Then again, maybe this is how progress happens?

taurath 11y ago

Imagine you have 10 people standing in a circle having a conversation. At any given time only a max of say 2 people can be talking at once, and its usually one. How do people communicate, when they can't speak? Image macros and memes are just stand-ins for facial expressions and body language, something humans are hard wired to process, but is severely lacking when communicating through text. Its a way that people form real relationships over the internet. There's nothing awful about it. Go look at any group of 20 year olds and see how they communicate in real life - you'll be just as off-put as when you see their online communications.

Nelson69 11y ago

There never was a serious public discourse. Why would giving everyone access to easy ways to contribute simply make that happen? I don't know the reason why, it could be simple as most people aren't that smart, but the truth is the vast vast vast majority don't have anything interesting to add and most probably don't care what you're talking about anyways. Just think about this for a bit: it was a socially acceptable social meme that people would stand around the "water cooler" and talk about TV shows. TV Shows!? That's what we've got when the masses are left to their own devices. What I do think could potentially become a net positive is that in the bad old days, you had to catch someone putting that racist cartoon on the bulletin board or follow them to see the bumper sticker on their car. Now you can search them out, that's kind of interesting. I don't know that it will cure racism, sexism or other discrimination but it will further push them back in to a smaller place.