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"In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a surprise when the n

"In my estimation, the larger and broader a group is, the more it'll approximate human culture and interaction as a whole. It shouldn't be a surprise when the negative parts of those things (e.g. war, strife, hatred) emerge, just as much as the positive things (peace, fellowship, love)." Yes and no, I think. Physical space has some constraints that counter this in a way online spaces don't. Take a place like NYC, for instance, where there are so many people, from so many parts of the world, that it arguably begins to "approximate human culture and interaction as a whole." What you see here is that people start to subdivide the space and agree on expected behavior -- in public spaces, like the subway, people by and large try to reduce interactions. Then there are public spaces that are pseudo-private, like bars or cafes or restaurants, but each have their own understood rules -- at a bar you can start to talk up a stranger, at a restaurant you don't just walk to a random table and join in a conversation. There are also many private spaces -- apartments, or your own room in an apartment shared with roommates. Contrast that with the typical online space, where it's not just that there are lots of people, but also no constraints. It's the equivalent of going on to a subway and yelling at someone about politics... I don't think the problem with the modern internet is scale so much as a failure to build some constraints into its design. Everything is public at a very loud volume.

Psyladine 7y ago
>Take a place like NYC, for instance, where there are so many people, from so many parts of the world, that it arguably begins to "approximate human culture and interaction as a whole." Except people are a product of context, so putting them into a new context creates a new breed, the new yorker, of which no human being aspires to.
- anyonecancode 7y ago
  Substitute any decently large physical collection of people for NYC. Same overall point I was trying to make applies.
jasode 7y ago
>I don't think the problem with the modern internet is scale so much as a failure to build some constraints into its design. Can you speak more concretely what you mean here? Are you talking about technical "constraints" into protocols such as "http" or "TCPIP"? Or constraints into DNS? Or constraints on HTML markup language? What would an "internet technical architecture designed to prevent negativity" actually look like? Is there an example repo on github or a computer science research paper showing the algorithms that would satisfy this ideal?
- anyonecancode 7y ago
  I'm not sure -- in the physical space, a lot of the constraints are social, but they emerged in the context of physical constraints. You could, for example, walk into a restaurant and start haranguing the people there, but generally people don't. Without even raising the possibility of the police being called, there's a whole set of inputs the would-be haranguer can see and respond to -- the facial expressions and other body language of disapproval by the others in the restaurant, the sudden change in noise patterns in the room as all the private conversations ceased and everyone shifted their attention to the disruption, etc. Such social signals are lacking or extremely muted in non-physical settings. Is there a way to bring similar social signals to the online world? Maybe some equivalent will emerge as we grow accustomed to being online (though, given how poorly people drive despite cars being a thing for several generations, I'm skeptical of our ability to fully adapt our social systems to some kinds of technology). Or to take another example of constraints -- if someone in a bar spreads a false rumor, that misinformation can quickly spread to all the patrons in the bar, but it's reach beyond that bar will be slow. By that time more factual information might also be circulating, and the damage of the false information blunted. Online, by contrast, misinformation spreads so much faster than factual information that it is often nearly impossible to counter. I don't know what the solution exactly is here, but I feel that public spaces need to have more speedbumps. In the same way that people are jerks when they drive and the answer is often "less driving, and slower," I suspect that the answer to bad online social spaces is "less online, and slower," but I'm not sure what that looks like.
  - ryandrake 7y ago
cmsj 7y ago
Usenet somewhat has that division of space, in that it's divided up into thousands of individual newsgroups, each of which is (ostensibly) about a particular topic. It's more like having thousands of parallel NYCs, each one focusing on just a specific subset of the overall culture. To your point, they're still public spaces though where anyone can come in and yell about their thing, that is undeniable (and it happened).
derefr 7y ago
> Contrast that with the typical online space, where it's not just that there are lots of people, but also no constraints. I feel like you're right about some communities, and wrong about others, and it's interesting to distinguish the two, because I don't think this is a distinction anyone usually bothers to make. There are some communities where the same community divides its activity across multiple channels. Your average "same small group of people, different channels" Slack or Discord server is this way. IRC communities also usually end up this way after they grow to sufficient size, forking off channels of #foo-offtopic, #foo-announce, #foo-help, etc. phpBB forums are/were well-known for their structure of forums with subforums (where most forum admins would set up even more subforums than anyone needed, just because they could) but where there were certainly always separate "news" and "chat" and "on-topic" forums. But other "communities" (more like societies, I suppose?) like Reddit, or Usenet, or Twitter, do basically none of this constraint-based splitting. You'll get topic-based splitting, but this doesn't change the tone of the conversation at all. It's less like being in a separate place with its own rules, and more like just having your conversation tagged with a topic so that people can find conversations like that. I find that the only time this type of community/society seems to work, is when it generates entirely coincidental non-connected member subgraphs, i.e. when its members aren't just a random sampling of the larger community/society's membership, but rather mostly their own cultural enclave that happens to use the community/society's social network as a gathering place. Then they can have (probably mostly implicit) rules that are different from the free-for-all of the larger society's. There are also [sub-]communities with specific explicit rules, like Wikipedia, or /r/AskHistorians/. I feel like these aren't really relevant to the question, because the explicit rules often cause a selection effect in the membership who bothers posting, such that it's not much different to just picking those particular people and saying that only they can post. So you can't really use them as an example of how to solve the problem of general Internet discourse being shitty.
floatingatoll 7y ago
The constraint that no one in tech wants to consider is on full-text search. If you want to regain the pseudo-privacy of physical spaces online, put your community’s conversations behind an authentication barrier and disable full text search of conversations. Search engine indexing is what turns a pseudo-private space into a humiliating-public one. It’s okay to let search engines index your forum’s existence, the sub forums it contains, and their descriptions. But do not let them index participants or conversations - either by subject, by participants, or by content. And do not offer full text search of post content to authenticated members. It’s okay to index keyword tags, but that’s it. If you do this, you will regain the semi-anonymity that made the early Internet possible to enjoy. If you don’t, you will continue to suffer the trolls and abuse that full-text search enabled in the mid-90s (see also DejaNews, X-No-Archive: Yes, and Google’s purchase of DejaNews). EDIT: If you truly feel that full-text search is so valuable that it must not be withheld, you have to do a lot of things to defend against abuse attackers - for example: charge money for search credits, deduct credits when they choose to reveal the text of results, warn users that their searches will be monitored for abuse, require users to be in good standing with paid membership and posting activity for at least 90 days, etc. Otherwise trolls will just use stolen cards to perform full content searches to identify users to harass and then report their findings back to a central forum. They may still do that after all the above criteria, but they’ll have to work excruciatingly hard at it. Yeah, they could manually scrape the site, but you can defend against that too (“you’ve participated on 12 days, so you’re allowed to view 12 days of old content” is a good simple test).
- namanyayg 7y ago
  How about not showing any usernames or profile info for any search results? That way you get SEO benefits as well.
  - floatingatoll 7y ago
    Do you want to improve SEO or do you want a safe semi-private public space? If you permit full text search of content, you permit abusers to discover and harass your members, because they can just sign up to find out who posted something once full text search discovers it.

Psyladine 7y ago

>Take a place like NYC, for instance, where there are so many people, from so many parts of the world, that it arguably begins to "approximate human culture and interaction as a whole." Except people are a product of context, so putting them into a new context creates a new breed, the new yorker, of which no human being aspires to.

anyonecancode 7y ago
Substitute any decently large physical collection of people for NYC. Same overall point I was trying to make applies.

jasode 7y ago

>I don't think the problem with the modern internet is scale so much as a failure to build some constraints into its design. Can you speak more concretely what you mean here? Are you talking about technical "constraints" into protocols such as "http" or "TCPIP"? Or constraints into DNS? Or constraints on HTML markup language? What would an "internet technical architecture designed to prevent negativity" actually look like? Is there an example repo on github or a computer science research paper showing the algorithms that would satisfy this ideal?

anyonecancode 7y ago
I'm not sure -- in the physical space, a lot of the constraints are social, but they emerged in the context of physical constraints. You could, for example, walk into a restaurant and start haranguing the people there, but generally people don't. Without even raising the possibility of the police being called, there's a whole set of inputs the would-be haranguer can see and respond to -- the facial expressions and other body language of disapproval by the others in the restaurant, the sudden change in noise patterns in the room as all the private conversations ceased and everyone shifted their attention to the disruption, etc. Such social signals are lacking or extremely muted in non-physical settings. Is there a way to bring similar social signals to the online world? Maybe some equivalent will emerge as we grow accustomed to being online (though, given how poorly people drive despite cars being a thing for several generations, I'm skeptical of our ability to fully adapt our social systems to some kinds of technology). Or to take another example of constraints -- if someone in a bar spreads a false rumor, that misinformation can quickly spread to all the patrons in the bar, but it's reach beyond that bar will be slow. By that time more factual information might also be circulating, and the damage of the false information blunted. Online, by contrast, misinformation spreads so much faster than factual information that it is often nearly impossible to counter. I don't know what the solution exactly is here, but I feel that public spaces need to have more speedbumps. In the same way that people are jerks when they drive and the answer is often "less driving, and slower," I suspect that the answer to bad online social spaces is "less online, and slower," but I'm not sure what that looks like.
- ryandrake 7y ago

cmsj 7y ago

Usenet somewhat has that division of space, in that it's divided up into thousands of individual newsgroups, each of which is (ostensibly) about a particular topic. It's more like having thousands of parallel NYCs, each one focusing on just a specific subset of the overall culture. To your point, they're still public spaces though where anyone can come in and yell about their thing, that is undeniable (and it happened).

derefr 7y ago

> Contrast that with the typical online space, where it's not just that there are lots of people, but also no constraints. I feel like you're right about some communities, and wrong about others, and it's interesting to distinguish the two, because I don't think this is a distinction anyone usually bothers to make. There are some communities where the same community divides its activity across multiple channels. Your average "same small group of people, different channels" Slack or Discord server is this way. IRC communities also usually end up this way after they grow to sufficient size, forking off channels of #foo-offtopic, #foo-announce, #foo-help, etc. phpBB forums are/were well-known for their structure of forums with subforums (where most forum admins would set up even more subforums than anyone needed, just because they could) but where there were certainly always separate "news" and "chat" and "on-topic" forums. But other "communities" (more like societies, I suppose?) like Reddit, or Usenet, or Twitter, do basically none of this constraint-based splitting. You'll get topic-based splitting, but this doesn't change the tone of the conversation at all. It's less like being in a separate place with its own rules, and more like just having your conversation tagged with a topic so that people can find conversations like that. I find that the only time this type of community/society seems to work, is when it generates entirely coincidental non-connected member subgraphs, i.e. when its members aren't just a random sampling of the larger community/society's membership, but rather mostly their own cultural enclave that happens to use the community/society's social network as a gathering place. Then they can have (probably mostly implicit) rules that are different from the free-for-all of the larger society's. There are also [sub-]communities with specific explicit rules, like Wikipedia, or /r/AskHistorians/. I feel like these aren't really relevant to the question, because the explicit rules often cause a selection effect in the membership who bothers posting, such that it's not much different to just picking those particular people and saying that only they can post. So you can't really use them as an example of how to solve the problem of general Internet discourse being shitty.

floatingatoll 7y ago

The constraint that no one in tech wants to consider is on full-text search. If you want to regain the pseudo-privacy of physical spaces online, put your community’s conversations behind an authentication barrier and disable full text search of conversations. Search engine indexing is what turns a pseudo-private space into a humiliating-public one. It’s okay to let search engines index your forum’s existence, the sub forums it contains, and their descriptions. But do not let them index participants or conversations - either by subject, by participants, or by content. And do not offer full text search of post content to authenticated members. It’s okay to index keyword tags, but that’s it. If you do this, you will regain the semi-anonymity that made the early Internet possible to enjoy. If you don’t, you will continue to suffer the trolls and abuse that full-text search enabled in the mid-90s (see also DejaNews, X-No-Archive: Yes, and Google’s purchase of DejaNews). EDIT: If you truly feel that full-text search is so valuable that it must not be withheld, you have to do a lot of things to defend against abuse attackers - for example: charge money for search credits, deduct credits when they choose to reveal the text of results, warn users that their searches will be monitored for abuse, require users to be in good standing with paid membership and posting activity for at least 90 days, etc. Otherwise trolls will just use stolen cards to perform full content searches to identify users to harass and then report their findings back to a central forum. They may still do that after all the above criteria, but they’ll have to work excruciatingly hard at it. Yeah, they could manually scrape the site, but you can defend against that too (“you’ve participated on 12 days, so you’re allowed to view 12 days of old content” is a good simple test).

namanyayg 7y ago
How about not showing any usernames or profile info for any search results? That way you get SEO benefits as well.
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  Do you want to improve SEO or do you want a safe semi-private public space? If you permit full text search of content, you permit abusers to discover and harass your members, because they can just sign up to find out who posted something once full text search discovers it.