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Too many people have peed in the pool (2016)
- dredmorbius 9y agoAs someone once put it: "There's a sort of Gresham's Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it." http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html I've seen any number of fora over the ages, and the debasement problem is a significant one. It's not limited to online, as the saga of The American Mercury illustrates: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Mercury https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Mercury My preference, increasingly, is to be acutely aware of the limits of my own time and attention, to block fuckwits with abandon, and to treasure both the individuals and fora which actually do deliver quality. On which, a thank you to HN's mods, dang and scbt, both of whom put in a hell of a lot of work, much of it gentle, and for which HN is decidedly one of the better, and longer-lived, discussion platforms on today's Internet. (Metafilter also seems particularly resilient.)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- teddyh 9y agoTL;DR: Stephen Fry quits Twitter in early 2016.
- LeoPanthera 9y agoStephen has since returned to Twitter, though he tweets much less than he used to. I wonder if he is now treating it as a write-only medium. I'm one of the lucky 50K people he still follows (he used to follow everyone who followed him, in the very early days of Twitter, but that quickly stopped), but when you have 12 million followers, I imagine your use of Twitter is somewhat different to most peoples.
- zeroer 9y ago> Where Stephen Fry discovers the concept of the Eternal September.
- Tade0 9y agoWhat I dislike about Twitter is how much significance things that happen on it are given. With over 300mln active users if something has been retweeted, say, 15,000 times it still can't be reasonably counted as a "storm".
- Pfhreak 9y agoI feel the same way. It's the exact same issue sports arena has ... if 40,000 people show up for a game, that still can't be reasonably counted as an "audience". /s
- Tade0 9y agoIf they are the only 40k people interested in seeing this game and absolutely no one is watching the live transmission then it's hardly a major sporting event. A spike of retweets from 0,05% of the users is hardly a spike. If so, you would have to call every link to a funny cat gif on twitter a "Twitter Storm".
- cocktailpeanuts 9y agoGood job on the investigation and the math but that's not how it works. Unlike closed social networks like Facebook, everything on Twitter is public. Which means their active user count may be 300m, but they reach far wider audience than that through citations through all kinds of other media, either through indirect mentions or through direct embeds. Of course, the fact that they're not monetizing their influence effectively is another story, but just counting their user number to say they have smaller influence is just being naive.
- wernercd 9y agoI dislike how both sides take an issue... cherry pick 3 tweets out of thousands and act like their side is DESTROYING the other side MERCILESSLY!!! You don't need something to go VIRAL! to be blown out of proportion...
- naturalgradient 9y ago
- alvah 9y ago"A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous" - clearly Mr Fry doesn't spend a lot of time looking in the mirror!
- Avshalom 9y agoAs eevee put it https://eev.ee/blog/2016/02/15/everyones-offended-these-days/ https://eev.ee/blog/2016/02/15/everyones-offended-these-days... : >I love Stephen Fry, really I do, but this oft-repeated quote is bullshit and he is perfectly demonstrating why that is. What he’s really saying is this: everyone else’s feelings don’t matter, but his do, because he frames them as universal rules of discourse rather than feelings. >Look at his post again — that’s exactly how he words his point of view. “Too many people have peed in the pool.” “Now the pool is stagnant, …frothy with scum.” Fry’s feelings aren’t feelings — they are a universal and objective standard of behavior, which everyone else is violating. All those angry people, yelling that Fry has violated a universal and objective standard of behavior? Ah, they’re just perpetually offended, you see. Totally different.
- coldtea 9y agoThere at least an order of magnitude more crap and less eloquence and content in the kind of comments Fry complains about than in the stuff he writes. The author has seen the average Twitter/Reddit/forum comments, I presume. Do they look anything like what Fry (or any talented writer for that matter) posts? So, yeah, Fry is right, what he complains is people actually breaking "universal rules of discourse".
- obstinate 9y agoOne can be a quite talented writer and still have regressive views. These two properties are orthogonal. Not saying Fry is regressive -- I honestly don't know his views -- just saying that the "rules of discourse" are not about how well you write, aesthetically.
- alvah 9y agoIndeed I have, and I agree with this part of the point. However, for Stephen Fry to call out self-righteousness in others....pot, meet kettle!
- perseusprime11 9y agoWhat about Marc Andreesen? He quit Twitter but I see him lurking around liking things and stuff. Not sure why he went into a read-only mode.
- elliotec 9y agoGave away too many secrets
- perseusprime11 9y agoWhat do you mean?
- Clubber 9y ago>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. That's been the majority of comments / forums since at least 2001. It also sounds a whole lot like the modern "tabloid" news.
- cgag 9y agoI don't know where you hang out but it seems like a recently development to me. It sounds like you either hung out in a very different corner of the internet than I did or haven't seen the worst of Twitter.
- irrational 9y agoI've been on the Internet since the late 1980s (and the WWW since the mid 1990s). It started _long_ before 2001.
- AndrewUnmuted 9y agoOnline discourse has certainly declined in recent years. But you're right, people seeking conflict online is nothing new. What I believe HAS changed in more recent years, however, is the heavy subject matter being invoked today by these trolls. Flame wars over PC hardware and Linux distros on message boards is nothing new, but the very aggressive accusations of racism, bigotry, marginalizing, and sexism that get lobbed at people on social media is a new form of online viciousness.
- Freak_NL 9y agoIts effect on the off-line world is that much greater as well.
- stingraycharles 9y agoI think the best documented case for the internet is probably the Eternal September. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- r721 9y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11104006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11104006
- mgalka 9y agoPeople have a tendency to forget that famous public figures are people and feel comfortable saying mean things without thought. I think Few's experience of Twitter is probably an amplified version of what most of us know. I still like Twitter. Compared to other online forums, it still has the most thoughtful discourse I know of (except for HN). Even if it means tolerating a bunch of unpleasant garbage along the way.
- z1mm32m4n 9y agoI think the fact that Twitter made a name for itself by restricting the degree to which you can actually express your thoughts (by constraining response length) doomed them. It's far easier to be snarky and mean in 140 characters than it is to be rational and respectful.
- fattire 9y agoYou think, if only they were given more space, the trolls would suddenly find themselves unspinning their vitriol into coherent, well-expressed and thoughtful sentiment? Or would they just shit-talk with more words?
- santoshalper 9y agoOr just continue to be terse and shitty. Unless the also implemented a minimum, I don't see how raising the maximum would help very much. At least that has been my experience in forums for many years.
- gaius 9y agoby constraining response length To be fair to Twitter that wasn't a philosophical decision - 140 chars was what fit into the 160-char SMS protocol limit, with the remainder given over to their own layer.
- mort96 9y agoIt wasn't originally, but twitter over SMS hasn't been relevant for a long time now. They definitely would have gone away from the 140 char restriction if they thought it would have made their service better.
- pfarnsworth 9y agoNot to Godwin myself, but an example someone once used was that in Nazi Germany, only a small percentage of Germans actually were firm Nazis. The moderate majority, however, let the radical minority dictate the agenda for everyone, and that's how Nazism gained power. In the same way, I see this phenomenon all over our world. I don't know if it's because of 24-hr news cycle, Twitter/Facebook or whatever, but we see the radical, loud minority dictate the agenda. So even Fry says that it's only a small percentage of trolls that are ruining it for him, but it's enough to drive him off Twitter, despite all of his fans that want him on Twitter. In other words, the signal-to-noise ratio is very low, but people are now taking the noise as signal and reacting to it. It's not a good thing when trolls and radicals dictate the agenda for the silent, moderate majority. All the noise from the media and anti-Trump haters is a good example of where people who listen too closely to the noise end up missing the signal where it matters, and don't react properly. I think if the Democrats really know how Middle America was feeling, they would have conducted a much different campaign, but they listened to the wrong things.
- obstinate 9y agoIt's fascinating that, in your analogy, folks sharing progressive views on Twitter are the Nazis, considering that literal white supremacists tend to favor the other side.
- pfarnsworth 9y agoNope, not what I said at all. I was talking about the trolls on Twitter. My point is that if you listen to the noise, rather than true signal, you might take the wrong path or get the wrong idea. In the case of the election, EVERYONE thought Clinton was going to win in a landslide, and the real signal was that it was a lot closer than that. But you never would have seen that from Twitter or the media. And that's the problem. If the Democrats were able to root out the true signal, they probably could have stopped Trump with better communication to Middle America, and stopped this debacle that we're currently in.
- obstinate 9y ago
- wyldfire 9y agoIs it still distasteful if you just use it as fire n forget to broadcast your thoughts?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- marze 9y agoIt is inevitable. Why? Because the paid "influencers" such as PR firms will be attracted to any popular and/or influential discussion forum to promote the "point of view" they are paid to promote, or viewpoints they are paid to muddy or obfuscate. Once the site/forum reaches a certain level of influence they show up, and to the casual viewer it appears as added noise.
- deft 9y agoHe should come to mastodon. Way nicer place and a better feature set. Not to mention a WAY better UI. Oh, and no ads.
- tajen 9y agoand fewer censorship ? Problem is, if you want to advertise ideas (such as: "Democrats are good!") and influence public opinion, is Mastodon a good place?
- BinaryIdiot 9y agoSorry but I think mastodon is DOA. The user experience for on-boarding is atrocious. Think of what the average user would do if you tell them to join mastodon. First if you search for it and go to the first page it talks about open source (no average user knows what that is; some have vague ideas but in my experience none of them know what it is beyond the very rare person who heard a report on TV and thinks it's "nerds doing something for free"). Then it talks about "blah blah blah social should be decentralized blah blah blah you cannot sign up here because we believe in decentralization!" (paraphrased, of course) Now the user, the average user who very likely doesn't understand why this pure decentralized thing is better than Facebook or Twitter since he or she can go to one one place, sign up and immediately start posting, has to somehow find somewhere else to sign up because of some purity stance? Look I'm all for decentralizing things. But it's never, ever going to see the growth of average users having this much friction. When you want to take growth away from highly popular incumbents you need a way to have less friction than them (at least usually, in my experience). Decentralizing, at least in this form, adds an order of magnitude more friction.
- icebraining 9y agoWhy is it DOA just because the average user can't signup? If anything, it might help with the problem described in the article.
- BinaryIdiot 9y agoA social network being accessible only by a specific niche will severely limit its growth and reach. If that's all the network wants then that's fine but that's by far NOT how I've seen mastodon marketed. Regardless, even being accessible by only people who know what's going on still doesn't guarantee success. There is still significant friction there. I know HN decentralized everything is pretty popular but when it comes to UX I've never seen it test well because I haven't seen a good enough UX to just about any decentralization of a normally centralized service that also lowers friction of use.
- Eerie 9y ago1. There is a 4chan meme that goes approximately like this: Newbie: "Remember the time when 4chan was good?" Veteran: "4chan was never good." "4chan" can be easily replaced with "Twitter" or "The Internet" here. 2. There's a universal tendency for people to reminisce fondly about the good old days and contrast them with the ostensibly bad present. It has nothing to do with the truth. It is simply a syndrome of getting old. People were doing it 3000 years ago.
- jknoepfler 9y agoBBS being the slightly more dated version of this, yes.
- LoSboccacc 9y agoEternal september is a thing tho
- rtpg 9y agoThe thing is 4chan's raison d'etre is to be kinda shitty (or rather, a bit of a rough wasteland). Twitter could clean itself if they weren't so afraid of the wannabe Nazi crews + follower bots, and the effects cleaning up would have on their already bad-looking user metrics.
- cgag 9y agoIm not convinced there isn't a universal tendency for communities to get worse over time.
- Mathnerd314 9y agoTwitter isn't really suitable for intelligent conversations; 140 characters is too short. But it's enough to share links, hence it replaced / is replacing RSS, trolling, and pingbacks. http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-killed-rss-and-thats-a-bad-thing-2014-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-killed-rss-and-thats-...
- Eerie 9y ago>Twitter isn't really suitable for intelligent conversations; 140 characters is too short. A lot of people break that rule by posting images with walls of text.
- jimjimjim 9y agoUsenet Slashdot twitter I've been in a lot of "discussion things" over the years and i've seen them go bad. As they become more well known the worse they get. Initially somewhat-like-minded people are drawn to something for somewhat-similar reasons. When things become popular the noise from people of all walks of life drowns out the signal of like mindedness. In the case of twitter some of the noise Actively tries to ruin the signal. The initial users of tv, radio and even cars must have felt a similar despair (after the initial thrill of their interest becoming used by more people). It's not nostalgia, things were better "back then" where "back then" is a point between gaining users and acceptance by the general population.
- Joeri 9y agoYet HN is so far managing the onslaught. Part of that is of course very tightly controlled moderation where crass behavior is immediately and severely punished, but maybe requiring civility at all times is the only way to have a meaningful discussion.
- jgtrosh 9y agoAlso possible one of the least flashy UIs. It's not just about making the content stand out, Medium does it better and is quite a bit closer to Twitter in terms of quality of content/interaction. It's also about being actively simplistic, and requiring some effort from the reader. But also the tight moderation.
- nthcolumn 9y agoI value the equality and freedom (and not being downmodded anonymously and unfairly) on Twitter but I also value this space. They are merely different spaces. I don't have to choose. Nobody reads all of twitter - it is what you make it. This place has a much more restricted demographic than Twitter. Twitter is shouting things in Central Park, whereas you wouldn't do that (I hope) at a wedding in New England. I hope I am always civil but only expect that in return in some spaces.
- k__ 9y agoHN is widely know for being full of self absorbed white tech guys. Yes it got more civilized in the last years, but while not being offensive it's still filled with one sided views of the world by <1% of its population.
- gaius 9y agoFry was at the forefront of those who weaponized Twitter, with an army of sycophants attacking any of his real or imagined foes. He was instrumental in creating the problem he bemoans.
- SeanDav 9y ago> "Fry was at the forefront of those who weaponized Twitter, with an army of sycophants attacking any of his real or imagined foes. He was instrumental in creating the problem he bemoans." A comment like this absolutely requires sources. OP might be correct, but without any attempt to justify or corroborate, this just smacks of trolling and is a perfect example of what is wrong with Twitter.
- 1918391291 9y agoI very much doubt this was a troll. It just highlights that talkers on both sides of any given issue are the problem. People doing real work have no time to even be on Twitter.
- watwut 9y agoIt is kinda unfair to blame twitter for accusatory comment on hacker news.
- throw2016 9y agoThe Internet is great for information and light-hearted banter but not necessarily discussion. Most discussions are plagued by trolling, astroturfing, brigading and gratuitous rudeness. Anonymity is important but it also allows pointless discussions and arguments between let's say a child or someone not interested or versed in a subject and an expert. The value of discussion remain low and people behave in ways they simply wouldn't face to face. In the real world these kind of discussions would be a pointless waste of time for all involved and would simply not happen. You could try to change this by taking away the anonymity or extremely strong moderation but as we have seen with Facebook and even here the lack of anonymity doesn't stop snarky or bad behavior and there are far too many people who by default assume a tone of authority when they don't really know what they are talking about.
- DanBC 9y agoMore people should read this: https://www.joe.co.uk/news/why-gary-lineker-lily-allen-and-you-shouldnt-comment-93236 https://www.joe.co.uk/news/why-gary-lineker-lily-allen-and-y...
- killbrad 9y agoTwitter is and always has been a pile of trash. It's the "please limit your response to 30 seconds" of the internet.
- beedogs 9y agoStephen will be happy to know that Twitter has done a complete 180 and is now predominantly a Nazi hangout.
- mcv 9y agoIs that a 180? I thought it was already a Nazi hangout back in the GamerGate days. In fact, wasn't that what convinced Twitter to finally start to clean up a bit?
- lyra_comms 9y agoYou should check out Lyra, a conversation service which isn't designed to recirculate its own waste. www.hellolyra.com
- mcv 9y agoI've never really seen the point in twitter. I know it's popular, and for Dutch politicians, tweeting seems to be a requirement, but to me it has always seemed like a medium that's primarily for shouting into the void. And some people clearly love shouting abuse or inane crap into that void. In any case, it's not a medium for discussion, and it seems designed to provide as little context as possible, so it's easy to take things out of context.