4 ms·

I don’t think we need decentralization as much as we need curated platforms. Facebook is useless because the village idiot gets more say than the scholar, and t

I don’t think we need decentralization as much as we need curated platforms. Facebook is useless because the village idiot gets more say than the scholar, and that makes the content stupid. Addictive, sure, but stupid. Ultimately that leads for smart people to leave, making the content dumber by the day. You can argue that the same thing happened to Usenet during eternal September, and you would be correct. HN is so valuable because it’s curated by its users, and so far, they prefer intelligent content, but just imagine what would happen if HN had its own eternal September and all of reddit decided to visit. I mean, /r/technology wasnt always the political battleground it is now, and /r/programming wasn’t always teenagers arguing about what language will replace what. When you allow everyone to speak on equal terms, all you get is squabbled noise, and it’s often dominated by the people with the most free time, and those typically are the people with the least to contribute. Of course the internet hasn’t had a great deal of luck with curated forums either. Especially not if it didn’t want them to be echo chambers. But I suspect the first technology or media house, or perhaps library, that manages to make a curated forum for intelligent content and debate will have a lot of followers. Because all those platforms we no longer use, like Usenet, were actually really good, until they were ruined by the noise.

andromedavision 8y ago
> Facebook is useless because the village idiot gets more say than the scholar This here is a problem in and of itself. Selecting whose voice is to be heard the loudest is no mean feat and simplifying this problem by simply throwing scholars at it shows a lack of respect for just how hard this problem is. Scholars have been known to hold and present pretty atrocious and even murderous ideologies. Who's to say we should trust them and not ordinary Joe who goes about his business in a small but deeply meaningful way?
- pacifika 8y ago
  Because Joe doesn’t have decades of peer reviewed work as his context when posting his views and thus reasons from statistically limited experience.
  - jmathai 8y ago
    Pretty sure that's precisely what makes Joe's views more appealing to many (most?) people.
    - eksemplar 8y ago
      Sure, but that's also why children are dying because their parents didn't vaccinate them after they listened to a bunch of fools.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  Well, you should hear from “evil” scholars, because you can still learn from them. You probably shouldn’t follow them though. By contrast you can learn nothing from what joe had for dinner yesterday. Not that scholars aren’t filling their Instagram profiles with pictures of food.
uabstraction 8y ago
As far as decentralization and curated platforms go, I think the former is practically a prerequisite for the latter. It all boils down to moderation. Moderation is what makes the difference between a productive debate and a room full of idiots screaming at each other. Sure, centralized services can and do have moderation, but when they grow past a certain size, this seems to break down catastrophically. I believe this begins to happen when a service grows past serving the needs of a single community, and begins taking on various factions and tribes with conflicting needs and interests. This is a problem which absolutely confounds the centralized social media giants of the day. No matter what approach they take, they are bound to piss off millions of users, so they do next to nothing short of removing death threats. The end result: a practically unmoderated forum, and a room full of idiots screaming at each other. I don't recall this problem being nearly as pervasive in the days where each community had it's own independent bulletin board with active moderation. There were trolls, but they were the exception, not the norm. Different communities have different needs, and applying a one-size-fits-all moderation policy is harmful to productive discourse. There is a difference between what behavior is acceptable at the library, the coffee shop, the church, and the pub, and online communities are no different. Each community needs moderators, but they serve different roles within each one. Federated services (ideally) make this as frictionless as possible.
krapp 8y ago
>Facebook is useless because the village idiot gets more say than the scholar, and that makes the content stupid. This misunderstands the intended use case for Facebook as well as demeans most of the people who use it as intended. Not every social media platform is, or needs to be, about curating "intelligent" content, any more than the web itself needs to be about sharing whitepapers between university peers, or phone calls need to be primarily about business. The problem with Facebook, specifically, is that it's curated too much rather than not enough -- people just want to be able to form networks with their friends and share content within that network. > but just imagine what would happen if HN had its own eternal September and all of reddit decided to visit It used to be so common to accuse HN of "becoming Reddit" that it was mentioned specifically as something to avoid in the comments. And... there is a large overlap between the HN community and Reddit. A lot of the content that gets posted here is posted from Reddit. I hate to break it to you but a lot of the intellectual elites here are also on Twitter and Reddit and Facebook and sometimes they share pictures of their food and cats. And there's nothing wrong with that. Also, complaining about Eternal September on the World Wide Web is a bit like cancer complaining about lymphoma.

andromedavision 8y ago

> Facebook is useless because the village idiot gets more say than the scholar This here is a problem in and of itself. Selecting whose voice is to be heard the loudest is no mean feat and simplifying this problem by simply throwing scholars at it shows a lack of respect for just how hard this problem is. Scholars have been known to hold and present pretty atrocious and even murderous ideologies. Who's to say we should trust them and not ordinary Joe who goes about his business in a small but deeply meaningful way?

pacifika 8y ago
Because Joe doesn’t have decades of peer reviewed work as his context when posting his views and thus reasons from statistically limited experience.
- jmathai 8y ago
  Pretty sure that's precisely what makes Joe's views more appealing to many (most?) people.
  - eksemplar 8y ago
    Sure, but that's also why children are dying because their parents didn't vaccinate them after they listened to a bunch of fools.
eksemplar 8y ago
Well, you should hear from “evil” scholars, because you can still learn from them. You probably shouldn’t follow them though. By contrast you can learn nothing from what joe had for dinner yesterday. Not that scholars aren’t filling their Instagram profiles with pictures of food.

uabstraction 8y ago

As far as decentralization and curated platforms go, I think the former is practically a prerequisite for the latter. It all boils down to moderation. Moderation is what makes the difference between a productive debate and a room full of idiots screaming at each other. Sure, centralized services can and do have moderation, but when they grow past a certain size, this seems to break down catastrophically. I believe this begins to happen when a service grows past serving the needs of a single community, and begins taking on various factions and tribes with conflicting needs and interests. This is a problem which absolutely confounds the centralized social media giants of the day. No matter what approach they take, they are bound to piss off millions of users, so they do next to nothing short of removing death threats. The end result: a practically unmoderated forum, and a room full of idiots screaming at each other. I don't recall this problem being nearly as pervasive in the days where each community had it's own independent bulletin board with active moderation. There were trolls, but they were the exception, not the norm. Different communities have different needs, and applying a one-size-fits-all moderation policy is harmful to productive discourse. There is a difference between what behavior is acceptable at the library, the coffee shop, the church, and the pub, and online communities are no different. Each community needs moderators, but they serve different roles within each one. Federated services (ideally) make this as frictionless as possible.

krapp 8y ago

>Facebook is useless because the village idiot gets more say than the scholar, and that makes the content stupid. This misunderstands the intended use case for Facebook as well as demeans most of the people who use it as intended. Not every social media platform is, or needs to be, about curating "intelligent" content, any more than the web itself needs to be about sharing whitepapers between university peers, or phone calls need to be primarily about business. The problem with Facebook, specifically, is that it's curated too much rather than not enough -- people just want to be able to form networks with their friends and share content within that network. > but just imagine what would happen if HN had its own eternal September and all of reddit decided to visit It used to be so common to accuse HN of "becoming Reddit" that it was mentioned specifically as something to avoid in the comments. And... there is a large overlap between the HN community and Reddit. A lot of the content that gets posted here is posted from Reddit. I hate to break it to you but a lot of the intellectual elites here are also on Twitter and Reddit and Facebook and sometimes they share pictures of their food and cats. And there's nothing wrong with that. Also, complaining about Eternal September on the World Wide Web is a bit like cancer complaining about lymphoma.