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Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease'
- mc32 8y agoHe’s right. The problem is the incentive for “popularity” running amok. If Linus’s angry emails are on a distribution list, the exposure is minimal and the damage is contained. His same excess in social media is reproduced and exploited for various reasons, positive and negative and overflows into unrelated circles where unrelated people have input into something containment would prevent them from being exposed. This state of total diffusion without commensurate dilution is the problem. Everyone is a perpetrator and everyone is a victim. An analogue in biology might be tumors. The individual cells might not be bad but them running unstopped can have negative consequences. Social media needs to attenuate virality. But that’s at odds with their current economic model. So in the meantime they implement useless ineffectual bandaids they know don’t address the problem head on but gives them a plausible “we’re trying” or “shikata ga nai” 仕方がない
- austincheney 8y agoPopularity is a behavior. Its either marketing or some form of narcissism.
- ghaff 8y ago>If Linus’s angry emails are on a distribution list, the exposure is minimal and the damage is contained. Perhaps. Another way to say the same thing however is something along the lines of the following. If you behave... poorly within a relatively narrow community, given sufficient authority you can just get away with it. Maybe you drive people away but it's all pretty invisible to the broader world and those that remain just put up with it because that's the way things are. Perhaps that's deemed acceptable.Perhaps not. But just because things happen behind relatively closed doors doesn't make them right.
- mc32 8y agoI get your point. He acted badly and I think social media has dulled his appetite for that, however, his peccadilloes are not the main point. It’s the greater idiocy that current social media fosters which is a multiple orders of magnitude a bigger problem than these provincial disputes ever were. Let’s take people who are against childhood vaccinations. Their unfounded beliefs would remain contained and would not proliferate beyond their circles vs everyone gets exposed and people who’d never think of this anti scientific position become convinced this position kinda somehow makes sense.
- ghaff 8y agoAnd I don't disagree with that. There's a whole outrage culture that social media certainly contributes to (as does click-driven "journalism"). Every intemperate or ill-advised--or seen as inappropriate by some segment of the internet--remark gets endlessly repeated and amplified.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoCoincidentally this came up in a conversation with a friend recently, where we drew parallels between the way hallucinogens cause normally disconnected parts of the brain to interact and how the internet has done the same for global society. From a certain perspective, the noospehere is currently tripping balls on social media.
- vokep 8y agoFrom Metal Gear Solid 2: >Colonel: You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems. >Rose: Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. >Colonel: The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. >Rose: Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth."
- hnsukas 8y agoAbsolutely right. Mr Linus is are one the people who do not follow mainstream .. I could not be more happier. Man with backbone !
- KasianFranks 8y agoSpot on. We saw this with BBSs vs Compuserve and then with AOL, MySpace, Friendster etc.
- TheSoftwareGuy 8y agoI wonder what he thought made Google+ "less mindless" than the other platforms.
- mgbmtl 8y agoThe article quotes: "If you cannot prove your identity, your crazy rant on some social-media platform shouldn't be visible", which I think G+ tried to do. On mailing-lists, worst case there is "that guy", and you can filter them out. Maybe you'll meet at a conf eventually and work things out in person. On Twitter/Facebook, you have to spend a lot of time blocking people and trolls have full control of the platform.
- random878 8y agoI think it was because of the type of people who were early adopters. Essentially, he thought it would produce a better class of discussion. EDIT: from his interview: 'I tried G+ for a while, because the people on it weren't the mindless usual stuff, but it obviously never went anywhere'
- HNthrow22 8y agoTied to real identity - given the current state of the net one could make a case that the S Korean system of requiring gov ID # for all online signups would be an improvement, of course that opens the door to serious abuse but at this point would it be the lesser of two evils?
- AlexandrB 8y agoThis is the exact opposite of correct. Old school forums were pseudonymous, but managed to do OK on the moderation front because they were often controlled by the community. Tying real world identity to sign-ins just paints a big fat target on those that have the most to lose already, such as minorities. As an example, check out the myriad articles about Google users being outed as trans when Google started integrating Google+ into everything: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/07/google-hangouts-faces-criticism-after-outing-trans-woman https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/07/google-ha...
- trpc 8y agoSocial media ruined the internet forever, even less than a decade ago there were websites, forums of all sorts and for all kinds of interests, now the internet for most people is just these social websites/apps which intentionally lock users inside their services as long as possible to make more money from advertising and promoted posts. Unfortunately unless something big happens to fix this issue, the internet is lost forever.
- smt88 8y agoThose forums exist and are more widely-used than ever. They're just mostly hosted on reddit now.
- mikorym 8y agoI also wanted to point this out, but I guess Reddit does pose a risk that they make some system-wide decision and in the process all those subreddits either vanish or die a slow death. As of March 2019 Reddit seems still quirky and interesting though...
- milquetoastaf 8y agoThe same problem applies to forums. Everyone here is gushing about how great they were and yes i had fun too but so many forums were just one person running phpbb and if they got bored or whatnot the whole forum was shot, just like that. Or a mod or admin would power trip. It's not like the early internet was some freewheeling utopia, it was mostly shit. Just like now. Don't believe me? Go look at those old forums and usenet posts you remember so well
- cirgue 8y ago> As of March 2019 Reddit seems still quirky and interesting though... This can be read as a searing indictment of reddit: it's quirky and interesting, but its value ends there. There's no real discussion to be had and most topic-specific subs are wildly uninformed for most of the things I have any personal experience with. This is certainly not limited to the tiny slice of the world I know well.
- bovermyer 8y agoI feel like he's right, but there's much more to understand here. The broadcast of oversimplified messages through a human network that reacts strongly to those messages, and thus boosts the signal of those messages further, is something that bears careful consideration.
- mc32 8y agoSome of this behavior could be mitigated. Remove likes and resharing. Ban the incentives (economic, internet points, attenuate diffusion with distance from *caster), etc. in other words, semi-anonymize the author, take away virality and remove the economics (likes, views, etc., which incentivize virality).
- HNthrow22 8y agoAgreed, beyond conditioning a generation of addictive consumers the narrative has never been more muddied and easily manipulated. Facts no longer matter and that's terrifying. The world needs to figure out how to “put into place very strict requirements with appropriate consequences that make it unthinkable to violate them.” “Everyone agrees we shouldn’t be doing this yet,” These quotes are from a Bloomberg article* about the Chinese scientist who edited the twins DNA as embryos, found interesting that society is able to recognize the incredible dangers and implications of DNA modifications yet have a huge blind spot for tech, perhaps because it's so useful in our day to day lives. User-engagement, optimizing for addiction and driving individuals into echo chambers and the welcoming arms of extremists looking to recruit, worth it for free email I guess? * https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-13/top-genetics-experts-call-for-ban-on-modifying-dna-of-embryos https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-13/top-genet...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- return0 8y agoi mean yeah, they are literally viral
- aboutruby 8y agoI think he puts Twitter there because he doesn't use it. If you follow the right people it actually promotes intelligent discourse.
- Lordarminius 8y agoSame with Instagram. I don't use it but I concede that it is useful to some people as a platform for promoting businesses. FB on the other hand, deserves to die in a fire.
- Stubb 8y agoI've all but dropped off Facebook but made an Instagram account earlier this year and am enjoying it. The photo-centric nature seems to eliminate 99% of the toxicity of Facebook. I've subscribed to the accounts of friends, architecture/design centers, Archillect, and accounts that post pictures of owls and otters. None of this promotes deep thinking or meaningful discussion, but it's a nice five-minute addition to my day. Plus it gives me a place to post my own photography where friends and others will see it. That said, I'm hardly a Facebook/Zuckerberg fan and will jump ship the moment another platform becomes viable.
- rchaud 8y agoIG is the same IMO. You won't see the blatant bigotry and politics, but you will see a monoculture of self-promoters and brand builders which are similarly exhausting, just in a different way. And I say this as someone who is subscribed to some niche meme pages on IG and enjoy them. It's just that if the page were to disappear tomorrow, I would have forgotten about it within a week. It wouldn't be missed. The value it gives me is very limited. I'd wager it's the same for a lot of other people. Social media's value is geared towards advertisers, not users.
- skilled 8y ago"Intelligent discourse" -- no need to be so generous with your choice of words.
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- jinushaun 8y agoI can’t help but feel like history will look back at this time period and ask themselves: what the fuck were they thinking? A whole generation of smart engineers optimizing addiction.
- smt88 8y agoSmart engineers are optimizing addiction, burning fossil fuels, and many other social ills. But those pursuits make a lot of money, and absent regulation, the labor market will be attracted toward them. The future you're talking about will have to be regulated much more (at, at least, differently) than the present. I doubt it could even be capitalist -- which, to be clear, I see as a good thing.
- ihm 8y agoThis is about what capital funds, not the labor market. Given how unorganized it is, workers mostly just have to work on whatever projects get funded.
- em500 8y agoMoney. People can rationalize a lot given enough money. (see also: workers in the tobacco/casino/opoid industry). The average compensation at the Silicon Valley giants seems roughly 3 to 4 times that of the average American (and I guestimate about twice as high if you control for education level).
- superkuh 8y agoIt's also a problem when people use words with strong, defined meanings like addiction where they aren't appropriate. Often this kind of thing is then turned into bad legislation because 'addiction' carrys such strong connotations.
- skilled 8y agoThe problem is actually far deeper than just social media being mindless. The Internet as such has become a Big Bank, where anyone (and anywhere!) can put in time investment and withdraw money. Well, you could argue that people work on the Internet. It's not a bad argument, but the problem is much deeper than this. Every single major social network is now being used as a storefront where you can promote and advertise your personal brand and/or product. I follow a fair amount of people in Web Design and Web Dev, and over the years, many have completely annihilated any emotional connection with their audience and instead run their pages as an established brand. Look at what happened to Quora, a site that had an incredibly promising start and I personally enjoyed writing hundreds of answers. I enjoyed it because it felt like my answers are being heard, valued, and acted upon. These days, Quora is a hellhole, a dreadful dump of marketing garbage where people are ready to get their pitchforks whenever someone tries to one-up their "best answer". Instagram? Holy crap! Instagram is an absolute marketing godsend. Though, some would argue it's not exactly the most appealing type of marketing. The history books of the future will be like the pornography magazines of today. If this trend continues, then this is certain.
- Juliate 8y ago> and over the years, many have completely annihilated any emotional connection with their audience and instead run their pages as an established brand. This, so much this.
- rchaud 8y agoTrue, browsing the web for fun these days seems increasingly burdensome as I feel that a good chunk of what I read lacks personality and feels extremely scripted. The solution to that is not "make it easier to publish online", as Big Tech will always claim. One way may be to start curating your own list of interesting voices, and consume their content deliberately, instead of having it be passively fed to you (including their likes and RTs, which I personally don't like seeing) via the Feed.
- 0815test 8y ago> Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease' Well, didn't someone at Microsoft call Linux "a cancer" once? I suppose turnabout is fair play... well not exactly, but close enough! More like paying it forward.
- matz1 8y agoThese social media are not for everyone, for some one who are introvert or not a people person or just simply don't like other people then yeah twitter, fb etc are abomination. Social media is also a tools, good or bad, its what you make of it.
- loriverkutya 8y agoThe problem is, it's not a tool for communication, but a tool for selling ads. And it is bad for the average user. It makes people depressed.
- matz1 8y agoIts tool for all kind of purpose. Certainly can be used for communication too as well as selling ads. Even for selling ads it still have some good for some user.
- sproketboy 8y agoHe's right.
- onlydeadheroes 8y agoOh Linus, after sacrificing your reputation and life's work to appease your daughter's politics, now you go and say something that will displease her. You are not great at brown-nosing, bless you man.
- mikorym 8y agoWhat are you saying?
- onlydeadheroes 8y agoLook up what happened when he washed his hands, I mean took his break from kernel development.
- tweetstorm 8y agogood old Linus is back :)
- fb03 8y agoI believe he's right. The whole system is game-ified to maximize time spent. You get nothing but small carefully timed dopamine hits that keep you hooked and your productivity/life balance goes out of the window.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jamesholden 8y agoIs it just me, or does the article kind of suck? It starts with discussing who he is, and then his opinion, and the spends the next half of the article talking about what kind of person he is and how this is 'ironic' coming from _him_ of all people. Just seems weird that they give his opinion, and then we get someone else's opinion on HIM. That doesn't seem very unbiased. Maybe I am overthinking it.
- redleggedfrog 8y agoThat's funny, cause I was about to post starting with "Is it just me..." No only the things you said, but it's written like it's targeted at a middle-schooler. I could barely make myself skim the 2nd half of it. I did, cause, you know, Linus.
- lskopwol 8y agoIt’s business insider
- random878 8y agoIt's a quick, crappy, cut-and-paste, article based on a recent interview with him. It's a complete trash article - standard for internet news now.
- rchaud 8y agoIt's Business Insider, it's the TMZ or Uproxx of "business news". Every once in a while they'll have original content (i.e. sourced from their editorial team), but for the most part it's a content mill of copy-pasted content with a few rushed sentences from an overworked copy writer.
- everdrive 8y agoI too had the same impression. It's a complete equivocation of the problem. Even if you're not fan of Torvalds, and think he's rude, his rudeness is different from the problems of social media.
- masko 8y agoYeah it sucks haha.
- bregma 8y agoBring back the good old days before the eternal September began. I liked the internet then.
- JohnClark1337 8y agoThe internet, like every other social hangout place, was great until all these people showed up.
- kikoreis 8y agoI keep thinking that the simple but fatal decision to mess with the timeline is the deepest sin of social media. If the timeline is purely chronological then there is a much higher barrier to create biases. Social media business models have to respect that or it goes toxic. The rest of social media's problems have mostly to do with it being a cacophony, which you get with any large and horizontally organized group. Loudest speaker wins, shock replicates faster, etc.
- random878 8y agoI agree with him 100%. I also feel like this cancer has spread beyond social media. The internet as a whole feels rotten. I grew up with the internet, so it felt natural to adopt things like social media (early days of FB), cloud storage, YouTube, etc etc. They just seemed to work their way into my life, aided by the adoption of smartphones (essentially a pocket computer). Today, I've become a Free Software and Privacy advocate. I use libreboot+Debian, have a dumbphone, no social media, and aggressively restrict usage of services like Google et al. But I feel this isn't going far enough. The real toxic element is the 90% of the internet which is not designed to bring any positivity or enrichment to my life. I recently made the decision to make my main workstation air-gap/offline and it was the best decision ever. My laptop will be my internet connected machine and I'll probably set-up some sort of whitelist on it. I also find it easier to physically isolate a laptop (e.g. put it in a drawer) outside of work hours and thereby regulate outside intrusion into my personal life. I'm also very sympathetic to the concerns about not triggering the mass bovine herd of professional offense-takers. I work as a Doctor so it's a constant effort to police my opinions and actions on a daily basis. The internet used to be a refuge where I could do daft things like engage in a flame war on a random forum about a random obscure hobby. Today, the risk of inadvertently triggering someone and having it cross into my real life removes any incentive to participate. Even HN feels like that. I've lost count of the number of replies I've typed out, only to delete without posting. I just think there's no point. It's not fun anymore. I'll probably give up HN soon. It's the last of anything resembling social media that I use. I strongly dislike the inability to completely delete an account and past posts. It's not like I post controversial stuff, but I've grown uncomfortable about leaving any trace online.
- parski 8y agoOut of curiosity: what do you do with your disconnected workstation?
- stillbourne 8y agoDon't forget reddit. This is what reddit looked like when I joined: https://web.archive.org/web/20070206145523/http://reddit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070206145523/http://reddit.com... Today you have to dig deep to find anything that is not vapid bullshit. The Donald has leaked into other subreddits and the site has become a disgusting cesspool. I feel like I'm the only person that thinks that the advent of memes as means to communicate seems to have degraded discourse to a level of bite sized concepts that eliminate complex analysis of any given topic. Have an opinion of LGBT rights? Post a meme! Have a political opinion? Post a meme! If you don't agree with my 6 word statement on a silly image I will be a complete asshole to you in the comments section that exposes a market of ideas that has devolved into racist diatribes and AnCap ideology.
- rchaud 8y ago> "The whole 'liking' and 'sharing' model is just garbage. There is no effort and no quality control. In fact, it's all geared to the reverse of quality control, with lowest common denominator targets, and click-bait, and things designed to generate an emotional response, often one of moral outrage," he said. This is the crux of the issue IMO. Once it was possible to gain "fame" via Twitter/FB/IG, it was game over. People become incentivized to maximize their likes and followers instead of having conversations. A big following can get you anything from a distribution deal with a fly-by-night supplements company, all the way to a book deal and appearances on Oprah or Comedy Central. On old-school forums/message boards, you had a community based on a specific shared interest, so people weren't completely anonymous strangers and weren't posting to lobby for attention among the broader community.
- tim333 8y agoThe actual Linus quote (not in the article): Bob: If you had to fix one thing about the networked world, what would it be? Linus: Nothing technical. But, I absolutely detest modern "social media"—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It's a disease. It seems to encourage bad behavior. I think part of it is something that email shares too, and that I've said before: "On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle". When you're not talking to somebody face to face, and you miss all the normal social cues, it's easy to miss humor and sarcasm, but it's also very easy to overlook the reaction of the recipient, so you get things like flame wars, etc., that might not happen as easily with face-to-face interaction. But email still works. You still have to put in the effort to write it, and there's generally some actual content (technical or otherwise). The whole "liking" and "sharing" model is just garbage. There is no effort and no quality control. In fact, it's all geared to the reverse of quality control, with lowest common denominator targets, and click-bait, and things designed to generate an emotional response, often one of moral outrage. Add in anonymity, and it's just disgusting. When you don't even put your real name on your garbage (or the garbage you share or like), it really doesn't help. I'm actually one of those people who thinks that anonymity is overrated. Some people confuse privacy and anonymity and think they go hand in hand, and that protecting privacy means that you need to protect anonymity. I think that's wrong. Anonymity is important if you're a whistle-blower, but if you cannot prove your identity, your crazy rant on some social-media platform shouldn't be visible, and you shouldn't be able to share it or like it. Oh well. Rant over. I'm not on any social media (I tried G+ for a while, because the people on it weren't the mindless usual stuff, but it obviously never went anywhere), but it still annoys me.
- vbuwivbiu 8y ago"On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle" nail on head
- nbabitskiy 8y agoIt's a nice thing of Linus to say. I was thinking just yesterday, that in my friend/relative circle, there are no one people listen to unsarcastically. If we still had someone like Orwell or A.D. Sakharov, and they'd say something like this, it would make a world of difference. I'm drastically losing the battle against fb around me. We should get Joanne Rowling to speak up, if the kids loving Harry Potter know, who's the author (my nieces definitely don't though).
- apexalpha 8y agoAh yes the weekly nostalgia thread. Have we all considered that our beautiful time on forums, IRC and RSS were also the time when 99% of the people who are now online simply weren't? The internet of the old days isn't gone. (Look at this website!). It's just that we are a minority because FB, Instagram and YouTube brought 2 billion more people online.
- craftyguy 8y ago> Have we all considered that our beautiful time on forums, IRC and RSS were also the time when 99% of the people who are now online simply weren't? Looking at the vast majority of content on facebook, twitter, instawhatever, reddit, HN, etc I don't consider that to be a bad thing.
- peterwwillis 8y agoAll these people complaining about social media, on a social network called Hacker News... Every platform you use to communicate with other humans is a social network, they're not new. Slashdot was an early 'modern' social network, after regular old forums, as was Usenet and the BBS. All these networks had very similar properties to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram - they just didn't have pictures, and were restricted mostly to computer nerds. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram is what happens when you open up these services to the whole world, add media, make it easier to share, and more addictive to use. The 'highest upvoted story' is a picture with a quote and a lot of likes. Our old flame wars about text editors and OSes are now caustic rants about vaccinations or politics. The only significant change is the subject matter, and the number of people involved. As a 'disease', FB, Twitter and Insta are just a more evolved form of something that's always been here. They reflect and amplify humanity. You can focus on the bad, or you can notice the good. But it's a mistake to think these products are somehow uniquely different than everything else, or even inherently bad. They're inherently human.
- gargs 8y agoThe one thing that the Internet changed in a very negative manner that ultimately brought us here is -- the expectation that everything is/has to be free. No one wants to pay for anything anymore; people don't want to pay for information; paying for correspondence is just a terrible idea; and so on. You could control who you interact with, only so far. When no one you know reads the newspaper, while depending on 'social media' for all their opinions, you're going to run into a lot of noise. There's just no escaping it, unless you use this same social media landscape to join some nice new group of intellectuals that actually meets offline. We just need to start paying for things.
- orev 8y agoYou can’t blame that on the Internet. TV and radio have been mostly free and ad-supported, and there are/were many free newspapers also supported by ads. I think it’s more accurate to say that people in general prefer their media consumption to be free. Yes, there are some exceptions like cinema, HBO, etc.
- anbop 8y agoLinus doesn’t have any uniquely informed point of view here. Internet giants are much more like media companies than technology companies in the way they interact with society. Linus’ opinion is like a famous actor’s opinion on climate change: not necessarily wrong, but not really newsworthy.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- canidiarus 8y agoHe neglected to mention usenet, where he made his original announcement about his hobby OS. The Usenet alt groups were one of the first examples of what's seen in FB/TWT/IG today. What's changed is who has access and the methods of access - everyone and everywhere.
- newsgremlin 8y agoHe's right, and nothing on these sites feels 'real'. Not even the people you know in real life project themselves as they are, and if they do it's only the happy side of their life that people see which is certainly not healthy to see every day for anyone's mental health or realistic perceptions and expectations of life. Anything different from that people tend to stay clear from, almost to distance their relation to a particular person. Couple that with being bombarded by obvious and not so obvious advertisements through promoted content, viral marketing campaigns, promoters and creators that act (emphasis on act) and galvanize certain lifestyles that appeals to individual wants and needs at a unrealistic level. Just like the old medium of television, everything is manufactured to look a certain way, and consciousness of looks still persists.
- netwanderer3 8y agoFacebook's basic concept is not bad. It's precisely their business model relying on advertising as the main source for revenue that is causing all sorts of interest conflicts. Due to the nature of this business model, Facebook no longer serves its users, instead the platform has been tailored and customized in every possible way to exploit their users for its own profits, by selling their personal data/information to the highest private bidders, very often done behind the scene without much public awareness. Having said that, the frequency of bad news about Facebook that seemingly keeps popping up every day is suspiciously abnormal. There must be an external force that is being dedicated to digging all the shit up at Facebook right now. You literally cannot go through a day without seeing new scandals from them on your news feed. An organization with security measures like Facebook's is incapable of leaking bad news at such rates by itself. Don't want to mention their names here, but are these retaliation actions coming from those who had been previously wrong by Facebook?
- vbuwivbiu 8y agohe's right now how to do I stop ?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Anthony-G 8y agoThis article is based on a recent Linux Journal interview and I found it more enlightening to read the actual source material – submitted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19559970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19559970
- alexmingoia 8y agoLuckily the solution is simple: stop using Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. RSS still works great. I got notified of this article that way. No ads, no algorithms, and no censorship. I listen to people who respect me, the reader. It’s pleasant here in the blogosphere. Come on back, door is always open.