6 ms·

It's out of control largely because it's arguably what social media is best at facilitating. Legitimate discussion and debate are drowned out by insane verbal

It's out of control largely because it's arguably what social media is best at facilitating. Legitimate discussion and debate are drowned out by insane verbal "body-slams" on Twitter, because Twitter doesn't really exist to promote legitimate discussion. And with the endless amounts of content and data we consume daily, we place far more importance in services like Twitter to help us navigate the sea of noise instead of taking the time to dig deeper into issues. It's far easier to just attack someone on Twitter if you disagree than it is to thoroughly debate why you disagree with them. Ultimately, one gets the sense that there isn't enough time to have a complete and nuanced conversation about a controversial topic because there are so many other things vying for our attention.

porpoisely 8y ago
Is it social media or the news? Is it CNN, Foxnews, NYTimes, BuzzFeed, Huffpo, MSNBC, etc or social media? Did rolling stone intentionally lying about campus rape cause the problem or social media? Is the media constantly peddling lies like "campus rape crisis", "racist attacks", etc the problem or social media? I don't remember social media having this level of problem until the news industry forced it's way into social media. The outrage isn't being driven by social media. It's being driven by the news industry and the media in general. But I guess blaming russia hasn't worked so now we can scapegoat social media. From UVA to Covington to Mollett and everything else, is it the platform or the journalists, celebrities, etc creating the message.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  This is very true. It's also easy to blame this on profit motive and clickbait driven advertising but a lot of these journalists are ideologically motivated in large part due to their ironically upper middle class liberal arts education (read privileged).
  - save_ferris 8y ago
    I'm not a journalist and I've only ever worked for one news publication in my career, so I obviously can't speak for all journalists. That said, we can't ignore the impact that traffic quotas have had on the industry since the collapse of print media. I worked for a paper in 2016 on their software team and saw how much of an impact that Trump's name in a headline had on the traffic an article received. Everyone on the outside was screaming about why the media was giving him so much attention while the industry, in the middle of a financial crisis, was less than interested to leave money on the table. In the age of internet journalism, orgs are heavily incentivized to produce what they think the community wants, and that has some really dangerous long-term implications. People don't realize how bad the financial situation is for newspapers across America, and how desperately print media orgs are trying (and in many cases, failing) to stay afloat.
    - repolfx 8y ago
      I think this is where I do my usual comment and observe that print media isn't struggling to stay afloat. There are plenty of publications that are profitable. This is invariably ignored and a 'crisis' generalised to the entire industry because the profitable papers tend to be owned by Rupert Murdoch, and they tend to be profitable because they put up paywalls and charge money for their analysis and opinions rather than give them away for free. This doesn't jive with the agenda of most journalists, who very much want to "change the world" and "do what is right not what is easy", etc. They see a big part of their job as guiding readers to the correct decisions and protecting them from false ideas, but of course if you throw up a paywall and charge money, you're much less able to do that. I used to be quite sympathetic to the plight of the news industry - it wasn't their fault that times were changing, that they were now all competing with each other, that Craigslist outdid them on classified ads etc. But then some papers started turning things around financially, I realised nobody forced these papers to put all their content online for free, and I became much more aware of the extent to which journalists try to manipulate their reader base. My sympathy is now gone: newspapers are businesses, and they need to turn a profit by charging for their services. If that means giving up influence, well hey, welcome to the world the rest of us live in.
      - 8y ago
  - PaulHoule 8y ago
    Yeah, the pundits always have the same thing to say to the Democrats, which is "move to the right" but they never say the Republicans should "move to the left". Go figure.
    - yellowapple 8y ago
      I think it's less "move to the right" and more "admit you've already moved to the right". Democrat attitudes feel increasingly puritan instead of actually liberal to me (as demonstrated by the continued insistence on everyone aligning to a specific moral framework), while Republican attitudes feel increasingly laissez-faire instead of actually conservative (as demonstrated by the continued insistence on destroying our environment instead of, you know, conserving it). The reality is that the political spectrum is not one-dimensional, or even two-dimensional.
      - krapp 8y ago
        To be fair, both Democrats and Republicans claim to have moral high ground over the other. Evangelical Christians tend to vote Republican because that party has successfully sold itself as the party defending traditional Christian morality and American culture.
        malvosenior 8y ago
        What is now happening though is that the right is now gaining people who are not religious but are pro-free speech and a host of other related but not religious issues. I used to consider myself pretty far on the left. In the 80s and 90s the Evangelical Christians were the problem. They tried to censor music, video games... Now the censorship and dogma comes from the left. What's very interesting is that those same Christians who I thought were very intolerant of others views (and make no mistake they were and sometimes still are) have accepted people like me. Some of it is that we now have a common enemy but it also feels like they've realized that religion is no longer mainstream and thus have come to accept other less than mainstream opinions even if they don't agree with them.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- save_ferris 8y ago
  It's not an either-or problem: both contribute to the outrage crisis. The difference is that media doesn't provide the platforms for individuals to communicate with each other and the world. That responsibility falls on social media. > I don't remember social media having this level of problem until the news industry forced it's way into social media. I'd argue that this is largely due to the fact that it took many years for social media companies to onboard large portions of the modern world. You may notice a correlation here, but where's the evidence of causality? > The outrage isn't being driven by social media. It's being driven by the news industry and the media in general. I disagree with this. Many social media platforms guide their users to certain types of content automatically using their recommendation engines. As an example, I consume a lot of political content on Youtube, and yet I get recommendations to watch conspiracy theory videos constantly. CNN isn't telling me to watch Q, YouTube is.
  - PaulHoule 8y ago
    I remember Twitter being an instant hit with people in the news biz. I attended an early "Times Open" conference where they were quite shocked that people were live tweeting it.
    - save_ferris 8y ago
      Not saying that this isn't the case. The person I responded to conflates the rising popularity of social media with the entrance of news organizations into the space, which I believe is an oversimplification.
  - porpoisely 8y ago
    So what if people communicate with each other? That's the point of the internet and has been forever. That's like blaming telephones for outrage. What does Q have to do with outrage? Is Q responsible for Smollet and the race baiting by CNN and the rest of the media? Is Q responsible for the russia fearmongering? Are you really blaming small fringe youtube channels for the current state of affairs? Most people get brainwashed into hysteria by CNN, MSBNC, Foxnews, NYTimes, etc, not fringe youtube channels. Conspiracy has been on youtube and the internet forever. It's nothing new and it is fringe. What's new is that the entire media apparatus has decided to shift blame onto social media for the problems they caused. The extremism isn't on youtube, it's on CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, Huffpo, Buzzfeed, TheVerge and all the rest of the media. They are the ones spreading conspiracies. They are the ones spread lies. They are the ones spreading hate. They are the ones claiming one side are nazis and the other side are commies. They are the ones lying about trump being a putin slave just like 8 years ago some in the media painted obama as a foreign born muslim. The only ones blaming "Q" are propagandists working for the media or politically affiliated groups. 99% of americans haven't even heard of Q. But 99% of americans have heard the hate-filled divisive propaganda from CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, etc. Blaming social media for the current outrage is like blaming mortgage borrowers, rather than the multinational banks for the financial crisis. It's absurd. Also, don't you think it's a bit odd that outrage has increased since youtube, google, facebook, etc shifted their algorithm to favor CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, etc. I wonder why. And most importantly, much of the outrage is coming from the left, not the fringe Q crowd. You know the people consuming CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, etc. But we can blame "Q" or "4chan" or "russia" or any of the other nonsense the people pretending to be journalists love to spout.
- PaulHoule 8y ago
  I remember the news getting a lot worse in the late 1980s. I think the O.J. Simpson affair was the watershed, but just before that I remember shows like "Hard Copy" moving into the timeslot between 4pm and 6pm on broadcast TV. Cable wasn't so important back then. CNN found its stride which was extreme low-cost programming based on the same talking heads blathering endlessly about the latest "news". For instance, CNN kept talking about MH370 for months despite there being no real developments in the case. On a slow news day when there were not any plane crashes or school shootings, the CNN anchors might wonder why their ratings are so bad and why people don't take their civic duty of watching CNN seriously. Trump changed all that. Ever since he started his campaign you never knew what crazy thing would come out of his mouth next. Then he became president and it's been like a terrorist attack every day -- and the best thing is that they can sit on their touches in Atlanta and D.C. and not pile on short notice into an airplane to go visit some school that got shot up in a flyover state or go to Egypt and get beat up by Mubarak's thugs the way Anderson Cooper once did.
- afiori 8y ago
  There is a real problem of journalist and people who work in media in general being too entrenched in social media
0815test 8y ago
Yup - and this gets amplified by the tendency that most social media platforms have, of heavily boosting the visibility of clickbait and repost-bait content. It's, yes, the "Sad!" pattern of conveniently deflecting controversy by attacking one's perceived opponents, plus the increased visibility that this gets you. This is something that social media platforms could very much work on - even some simple sentiment analysis could be useful in stopping these outrage cascades.
nerdponx 8y ago
It's just a cheap attention grab, and we are in an attention arms race. Once one person starts doing it, everyone else has to do it in order to keep up.
jumpman500 8y ago
Couldn't agree more. It's too god damn easy to tear someone's life apart online. You don't have to see their face, don't have to know how they feel, or worry about physical retaliation. Social media in its best case is a platform to prove to the world what a creative and good person you are and connect you with others that appreciate you. But it's been twisted to a platform for us to bring down people that we think are lesser than us. We've built a hate generation machine for ad money.
amenod 8y ago
And in less than an hour, this post is flagged and removed from HN first page (with >160 votes). It is very difficult to have any kind of rational discussion if people feel threatened by it. It is a controversial topic, but that doesn't mean that we should shut up the sides we disagree with.
- 0815test 8y ago
  > And in less than an hour, this post is flagged and removed from HN first page (with >160 votes). Well, if this is what it takes to stop the outrage cascades from taking over HN too, I'm quite fine with it. It's not like the article was telling us anything we didn't already know - no point in just rehashing the same old stuff over and over.
  - _carl_jung 8y ago
    I don't like this view that somehow the HN readership is too sensitive to inflammatory/controversial information and must be protected from it. If there's "no point", then I'd expect it not to be upvoted. Obviously HN finds it relevant otherwise it wouldn't have been the top post.
    - krapp 8y ago
      > I don't like this view that somehow the HN readership is too sensitive to inflammatory/controversial information and must be protected from it. It's less about protecting the readership from inflammatory information as protecting the community from inflammatory discussion, because it is true that there are a number of people here who are too sensitive about certain topics to be able to discuss them civilly. Hacker News is fine when discussing technical issues (as long as a certain language doesn't come up) but as soon as you see a topic relating to feminism, political correctness, race, gender, American politics, etc... it seems to be a toss up whether that thread will turn out to be worthwhile or yet another flaming garbage fire of polemic nonsense. That said, while I can understand why threads like this get flagged, it's worth pointing out that flagging a thread doesn't block the comments in it from appearing on the comments page afaik, while hiding a thread does. So if people just don't want to see the discussion at all it's preferable to hide it and leave it be when it clearly already has some traction.

porpoisely 8y ago

Is it social media or the news? Is it CNN, Foxnews, NYTimes, BuzzFeed, Huffpo, MSNBC, etc or social media? Did rolling stone intentionally lying about campus rape cause the problem or social media? Is the media constantly peddling lies like "campus rape crisis", "racist attacks", etc the problem or social media? I don't remember social media having this level of problem until the news industry forced it's way into social media. The outrage isn't being driven by social media. It's being driven by the news industry and the media in general. But I guess blaming russia hasn't worked so now we can scapegoat social media. From UVA to Covington to Mollett and everything else, is it the platform or the journalists, celebrities, etc creating the message.

malvosenior 8y ago
This is very true. It's also easy to blame this on profit motive and clickbait driven advertising but a lot of these journalists are ideologically motivated in large part due to their ironically upper middle class liberal arts education (read privileged).
- save_ferris 8y ago
  I'm not a journalist and I've only ever worked for one news publication in my career, so I obviously can't speak for all journalists. That said, we can't ignore the impact that traffic quotas have had on the industry since the collapse of print media. I worked for a paper in 2016 on their software team and saw how much of an impact that Trump's name in a headline had on the traffic an article received. Everyone on the outside was screaming about why the media was giving him so much attention while the industry, in the middle of a financial crisis, was less than interested to leave money on the table. In the age of internet journalism, orgs are heavily incentivized to produce what they think the community wants, and that has some really dangerous long-term implications. People don't realize how bad the financial situation is for newspapers across America, and how desperately print media orgs are trying (and in many cases, failing) to stay afloat.
  - repolfx 8y ago
    I think this is where I do my usual comment and observe that print media isn't struggling to stay afloat. There are plenty of publications that are profitable. This is invariably ignored and a 'crisis' generalised to the entire industry because the profitable papers tend to be owned by Rupert Murdoch, and they tend to be profitable because they put up paywalls and charge money for their analysis and opinions rather than give them away for free. This doesn't jive with the agenda of most journalists, who very much want to "change the world" and "do what is right not what is easy", etc. They see a big part of their job as guiding readers to the correct decisions and protecting them from false ideas, but of course if you throw up a paywall and charge money, you're much less able to do that. I used to be quite sympathetic to the plight of the news industry - it wasn't their fault that times were changing, that they were now all competing with each other, that Craigslist outdid them on classified ads etc. But then some papers started turning things around financially, I realised nobody forced these papers to put all their content online for free, and I became much more aware of the extent to which journalists try to manipulate their reader base. My sympathy is now gone: newspapers are businesses, and they need to turn a profit by charging for their services. If that means giving up influence, well hey, welcome to the world the rest of us live in.
    - 8y ago
- PaulHoule 8y ago
  Yeah, the pundits always have the same thing to say to the Democrats, which is "move to the right" but they never say the Republicans should "move to the left". Go figure.
  - yellowapple 8y ago
    I think it's less "move to the right" and more "admit you've already moved to the right". Democrat attitudes feel increasingly puritan instead of actually liberal to me (as demonstrated by the continued insistence on everyone aligning to a specific moral framework), while Republican attitudes feel increasingly laissez-faire instead of actually conservative (as demonstrated by the continued insistence on destroying our environment instead of, you know, conserving it). The reality is that the political spectrum is not one-dimensional, or even two-dimensional.
    - krapp 8y ago
      To be fair, both Democrats and Republicans claim to have moral high ground over the other. Evangelical Christians tend to vote Republican because that party has successfully sold itself as the party defending traditional Christian morality and American culture.
      - malvosenior 8y ago
        What is now happening though is that the right is now gaining people who are not religious but are pro-free speech and a host of other related but not religious issues. I used to consider myself pretty far on the left. In the 80s and 90s the Evangelical Christians were the problem. They tried to censor music, video games... Now the censorship and dogma comes from the left. What's very interesting is that those same Christians who I thought were very intolerant of others views (and make no mistake they were and sometimes still are) have accepted people like me. Some of it is that we now have a common enemy but it also feels like they've realized that religion is no longer mainstream and thus have come to accept other less than mainstream opinions even if they don't agree with them.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
save_ferris 8y ago
It's not an either-or problem: both contribute to the outrage crisis. The difference is that media doesn't provide the platforms for individuals to communicate with each other and the world. That responsibility falls on social media. > I don't remember social media having this level of problem until the news industry forced it's way into social media. I'd argue that this is largely due to the fact that it took many years for social media companies to onboard large portions of the modern world. You may notice a correlation here, but where's the evidence of causality? > The outrage isn't being driven by social media. It's being driven by the news industry and the media in general. I disagree with this. Many social media platforms guide their users to certain types of content automatically using their recommendation engines. As an example, I consume a lot of political content on Youtube, and yet I get recommendations to watch conspiracy theory videos constantly. CNN isn't telling me to watch Q, YouTube is.
- PaulHoule 8y ago
  I remember Twitter being an instant hit with people in the news biz. I attended an early "Times Open" conference where they were quite shocked that people were live tweeting it.
  - save_ferris 8y ago
    Not saying that this isn't the case. The person I responded to conflates the rising popularity of social media with the entrance of news organizations into the space, which I believe is an oversimplification.
- porpoisely 8y ago
  So what if people communicate with each other? That's the point of the internet and has been forever. That's like blaming telephones for outrage. What does Q have to do with outrage? Is Q responsible for Smollet and the race baiting by CNN and the rest of the media? Is Q responsible for the russia fearmongering? Are you really blaming small fringe youtube channels for the current state of affairs? Most people get brainwashed into hysteria by CNN, MSBNC, Foxnews, NYTimes, etc, not fringe youtube channels. Conspiracy has been on youtube and the internet forever. It's nothing new and it is fringe. What's new is that the entire media apparatus has decided to shift blame onto social media for the problems they caused. The extremism isn't on youtube, it's on CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, Huffpo, Buzzfeed, TheVerge and all the rest of the media. They are the ones spreading conspiracies. They are the ones spread lies. They are the ones spreading hate. They are the ones claiming one side are nazis and the other side are commies. They are the ones lying about trump being a putin slave just like 8 years ago some in the media painted obama as a foreign born muslim. The only ones blaming "Q" are propagandists working for the media or politically affiliated groups. 99% of americans haven't even heard of Q. But 99% of americans have heard the hate-filled divisive propaganda from CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, etc. Blaming social media for the current outrage is like blaming mortgage borrowers, rather than the multinational banks for the financial crisis. It's absurd. Also, don't you think it's a bit odd that outrage has increased since youtube, google, facebook, etc shifted their algorithm to favor CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, etc. I wonder why. And most importantly, much of the outrage is coming from the left, not the fringe Q crowd. You know the people consuming CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, etc. But we can blame "Q" or "4chan" or "russia" or any of the other nonsense the people pretending to be journalists love to spout.
PaulHoule 8y ago
I remember the news getting a lot worse in the late 1980s. I think the O.J. Simpson affair was the watershed, but just before that I remember shows like "Hard Copy" moving into the timeslot between 4pm and 6pm on broadcast TV. Cable wasn't so important back then. CNN found its stride which was extreme low-cost programming based on the same talking heads blathering endlessly about the latest "news". For instance, CNN kept talking about MH370 for months despite there being no real developments in the case. On a slow news day when there were not any plane crashes or school shootings, the CNN anchors might wonder why their ratings are so bad and why people don't take their civic duty of watching CNN seriously. Trump changed all that. Ever since he started his campaign you never knew what crazy thing would come out of his mouth next. Then he became president and it's been like a terrorist attack every day -- and the best thing is that they can sit on their touches in Atlanta and D.C. and not pile on short notice into an airplane to go visit some school that got shot up in a flyover state or go to Egypt and get beat up by Mubarak's thugs the way Anderson Cooper once did.
afiori 8y ago
There is a real problem of journalist and people who work in media in general being too entrenched in social media

0815test 8y ago

Yup - and this gets amplified by the tendency that most social media platforms have, of heavily boosting the visibility of clickbait and repost-bait content. It's, yes, the "Sad!" pattern of conveniently deflecting controversy by attacking one's perceived opponents, plus the increased visibility that this gets you. This is something that social media platforms could very much work on - even some simple sentiment analysis could be useful in stopping these outrage cascades.

nerdponx 8y ago

It's just a cheap attention grab, and we are in an attention arms race. Once one person starts doing it, everyone else has to do it in order to keep up.

jumpman500 8y ago

Couldn't agree more. It's too god damn easy to tear someone's life apart online. You don't have to see their face, don't have to know how they feel, or worry about physical retaliation. Social media in its best case is a platform to prove to the world what a creative and good person you are and connect you with others that appreciate you. But it's been twisted to a platform for us to bring down people that we think are lesser than us. We've built a hate generation machine for ad money.

amenod 8y ago

And in less than an hour, this post is flagged and removed from HN first page (with >160 votes). It is very difficult to have any kind of rational discussion if people feel threatened by it. It is a controversial topic, but that doesn't mean that we should shut up the sides we disagree with.

0815test 8y ago
> And in less than an hour, this post is flagged and removed from HN first page (with >160 votes). Well, if this is what it takes to stop the outrage cascades from taking over HN too, I'm quite fine with it. It's not like the article was telling us anything we didn't already know - no point in just rehashing the same old stuff over and over.
- _carl_jung 8y ago
  I don't like this view that somehow the HN readership is too sensitive to inflammatory/controversial information and must be protected from it. If there's "no point", then I'd expect it not to be upvoted. Obviously HN finds it relevant otherwise it wouldn't have been the top post.
  - krapp 8y ago
    > I don't like this view that somehow the HN readership is too sensitive to inflammatory/controversial information and must be protected from it. It's less about protecting the readership from inflammatory information as protecting the community from inflammatory discussion, because it is true that there are a number of people here who are too sensitive about certain topics to be able to discuss them civilly. Hacker News is fine when discussing technical issues (as long as a certain language doesn't come up) but as soon as you see a topic relating to feminism, political correctness, race, gender, American politics, etc... it seems to be a toss up whether that thread will turn out to be worthwhile or yet another flaming garbage fire of polemic nonsense. That said, while I can understand why threads like this get flagged, it's worth pointing out that flagging a thread doesn't block the comments in it from appearing on the comments page afaik, while hiding a thread does. So if people just don't want to see the discussion at all it's preferable to hide it and leave it be when it clearly already has some traction.