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I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe

I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect. Specifically, and more importantly, combined with the human inability to actively decide to not pay attention when things are inconsequential or not yet worth arguing about. Sometimes, just shutting up about an issue and not discussing it is the best thing for a group to do. Not more advocacy or argument. Time heals many things. No app is going to help you take that approach -- and that's not what technology is going to help solve (or is incentivized to solve). Just like telling a TV station that's on 24 hours to not cover a small house fire when there's no other news. People are not good at disengaging from something when that's the right thing to calm the situation. And Facebook somehow tapped into that human behavior and (inadvertently or purposefully) fueled so many things that have caused our country (and others) to get derailed from actual progress. There is no vaccine yet for this. And not to dump on the Facebook train, since others would have come to do it instead. But they sure made a science and business of it.

edgarvaldes 6y ago
>Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect. Maybe FB do it better, but it is the same in every online "forum" where you get notifications about comments.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  Maybe FB do it better, but it is the same in every online "forum" where you get notifications about comments. Facebook influences what you see to a far greater extent than a tradition forum did.
austincheney 6y ago
> There is no vaccine yet for this. If you realize it’s a dumpster fire then delete your account and move on with life. If that line of thinking is a challenge in absolutely any way the problem is addiction. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction
- dade_ 6y ago
  It's been 5 years now. Facebook ads used be creepy, but polite: "Come back to Facebook" But not anymore, black text one white background: "Go To Facebook" next ad: "See What You've Missed From Friends And Family" Kill it with fire! The only advice I have about the company and it's products.
empath75 6y ago
I actually really enjoy having a good argument with random people online, but I don't as much enjoy arguing with my friends and family. 1) I don't like being mad at or contemptious of people I'm close to and 2) they're usually not worth the effort of arguing with because they're just cutting and pasting stupid shit they found elsewhere and it's _exhausting_ to continuously correct the record when they put zero effort into copy and pasting it to begin with. I first purged everyone that posted that stuff from my feed, and then eventually quite facebook altogether.
maest 6y ago
That's an interesting thought, for sure. I should point out that this doesn't only apply to facebook, but other large discussion forums as well: reddit, 4chan, tumblr, twitter etc.
- gimboland 6y ago
  And Hacker News! > some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect I've said it before, I'll probably say it again: this place is chock full of people just itching to tell you you're wrong and why. Don't get me wrong: obviously there's also a hell of a lot of great discussion and insightful technical knowhow being shared by real experts — but in my experience I also do have to wade through quite a lot of what feels like knee-jerk pedantry and point-scoring.
  - mac01021 6y ago
    I, for one, wouldn't have it any other way! When I'm wrong I want it explained to me why. Even when I'm right about something controversial, I want to see the best arguments to the contrary. I don't want people to be less argumentative. I just want a higher intellectual caliber than what's generally available on facebook or twitter, and HN fits the bill reasonably well.
    - downerending 6y ago
      It's tricky. One has to learn how to disagree without being disagreeable. Or, get your fuck-you billions and people will start agreeing with you a lot. :-)
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    When people here tell you that you're wrong, they tend to do it with style. One time I made a comment about how dividends affect stock price and someone spent like 2 hours writing a program in R to do some analysis just to prove me wrong.
derg 6y ago
In general and not necessarily related to just facebook, but one of the best things I've come to learn about myself and the world around me is that sometimes the absolute _best_ thing you can do for yourself is to just shut up and walk away, even if you know in your heart of hearts that you are correct.
- brewdad 6y ago
  I've gotten better, over time, at typing my heated, emotional response to someone online and then hitting Cancel or the back button and not posting. Sometimes I do hit the Reply button though. I still have room for self-improvement. :-)
  - ok_coo 6y ago
    This is the point I got to when I realized I should no longer have an account and I just went ahead and deleted it. For about 6 months after, I thought I would reactivate and jump back in but it's been years now and I'm 100% sure it was a life improvement.
  - SNosTrAnDbLe 6y ago
    This! It always helps me to take time out and paste what you have on a different notepad and come back to it. Only hit send if it still makes sense.
  - accountinhn 6y ago
    I do this a lot, especially in Reddit. Trick I learned is I use my notepad now to type the reply, then wait for an hour and post it. This helped with few things: 1. Slowly improving in checking for typos 2. Reading something after a break helps framing my point better and helps remove the heated emotion from the text 3. I also don't save the comment, so I have to spend time searching for it. This further helps in filtering the topics that I don't care about 4. Using services while not logged in, basically be a lurker
  - specialist 6y ago
    Not gonna like. u/dang has had to scold me a few times. Improvement takes time. We certainly need more and better role models.
Barrin92 6y ago
> And Facebook somehow tapped into that human behavior and (inadvertently or purposefully) It's not just that they tapped into it, it's the entire mission statement in a sense. 'to connect the world' if you want to treat it like a sort of network science basically means to lower the distance between individuals so much that you've reduced the whole world to a small world network. There's no inhibition in this system, it's like an organism on every stimulant you can imagine. Everything spreads too fast and there's no authority to shut anything down that breaks, so the result is pretty much unmitigated chaos. The vaccine is the thing people complain about all the time, the much maligned 'filter bubbles', which is really just to say splitting these networks into groups that can actually work productively together and keeping them away from others that make them want to bash their heads in.
CarelessExpert 6y ago
> I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect. Funny, years ago, around the Aurora shooting in Colorado, it was Facebook that made me recognize this behaviour in myself. It's why I left the platform. Also, obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/
staysaasy 6y ago
"Time heals many things" Extremely true, also relevant for work disagreements between people who have existing positive relationships. A surprising number of disagreements disappear if left on their own for a time. I find that many people with engineering backgrounds (myself included) can struggle letting conflicts sit unresolved. I suspect that instincts learned debugging code get ported over to interpersonal issues, as code bugs almost never disappear if simply left to rest.
deleted 6y ago
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danlugo92 6y ago
It's always alien when I read stuff like this. Most of my facebook feed is just memes and selfies. (I'm venezuelan) When facebook as new/trending up years ago there were some political discussions but people quickly figured out it was worthless, how come USAians haven't?
- vharuck 6y ago
  Being angry over politics is a pastime in the USA. Not sure why this happens in some countries and less so in others.
  - razzimatazz 6y ago
    In NZ, we follow along behind the USA in most things, so getting angry over politics is growing and growing. I see it as a hobby, growing in popularity. But also a hobby you can discourage those you know from getting into, and if the social momentum pulls us away from it then the hobby doesn't take hold.
- mrmonkeyman 6y ago
  Perhaps you guys should be more engaged with politics..
LordHumungous 6y ago
Yeah. There's a lot of relief in letting go, accepting that other people are outside of your power to control, and just practicing acceptance no matter how wrong or annoying or stupid you think people are being.
wfbarks 6y ago
wish that I could actively decide not to pay attention to this comment, but I am unable.
ErikAugust 6y ago
I think it’s important to note that Facebook didn’t invent any of this. They just built the biggest mainstream distribution channel to do so. Nothing they ever did in terms of facilitating pointless arguments has been all that original either. People have been doing this forever, and even on the Web much, much longer than Facebook has existed. Now that said, they know what they have on their hands and how it makes them the money. They aren’t going to fix it. It is a big feature of their product.
- cryptoz 6y ago
  > I think it’s important to note that Facebook didn’t invent any of this. I don't agree with that. I very strongly think that Facebook did invent a lot of this. > They just built the biggest mainstream distribution channel to do so Scale does matter though. There is a lot in life that is legal or moral at small scale but illegal or immoral at large scale. Doing things at scale does change the nature of what you are doing. There's no 'just' to be had there. > Nothing they ever did in terms of facilitating pointless arguments has been all that original either. I don't agree with that either. They have even published scientific papers, peer-reviewed, to explain their new and novel methods of creating emotionally manipulative content and algorithms. > People have been doing this forever, and even on the Web much, much longer than Facebook has existed. I also don't agree with this. Facebook has spent 10+ years inventing new ways to rile people up. This stuff is new. Yes I know newspapers publish things that are twisted up etc, but that's different, clearly. The readers of the paper are not shouting at each other as they read it. I think it's super dangerous to take this new kind of mass-surveillance and mass-scale manipulation and say, welp, nothing new here, who cares? I think that's extremely dangerous. It opens populations to apathy and lets corporations do illegal and immoral things to gain unfair and illegal power. Facebook should not be legally allowed to do all the things they are doing. It's invasive, immoral, and novel, the way they deceive and manipulate society at large.
  - visarga 6y ago
    > Doing things at scale does change the nature of what you are doing. "Quantity has a quality of its own"
Vysero 6y ago
Close your eyes, hold your breath and hope the situation resolves itself, that's your solution? I don't believe in a: "hidden human need/instinct to argue with people". There is nothing hidden about human conflict. It is as natural as any conflict; as natural as space and time. In fact, without conflict evolution can not exist. Obviously, a good portion of the arguments being had have the potential of bearing no fruit, but I would argue that just as many of them not only should but NEED to be had, and are quite productive on the whole.
- mark-r 6y ago
  There is definitely such a need, which is why this cartoon is one of my favorites of all time: https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/
  - ShellfishMeme 6y ago
    I always have to think about that one when I had just been spending 20 minutes trying to formulate an elaborate response to someone's comment, just to proceed to sigh and close the thing without posting it. Probably most of the time it was for the better too.
    - specialist 6y ago
      I'm self culling a lot more too. I'd argue those unposted drafts are still valuable, if only to help oneself flesh out ideas.
      - ShellfishMeme 6y ago
        I completely agree. Often I don't proceed because the point I wanted to make is just not properly defendable at that point. But the ideas written down in the process don't disappear and at the same time I got a better appreciation of the other side's point of view. I'd rather hold on to those ideas and evolve them further than to get too attached and be forced into a situation where I eventually defend my opinions because I moved myself into a position where I feel like this is a deep personal belief rather than a well defined objective-ish argument I tried to make.
HenryBemis 6y ago
In my line of work, we need to dig deep and find the root cause on anything we 'touch'. I have noticed (since day 1 in this line of work) that elaborate, complex truths tire the audience, they want something snappy and 'sexy'. I remember a French C-suite telling me "make it sexy, you will lose them". Facebook managed to get this just right: lightweight, sexy (in the sense of attractive), easy to believe, easy to understand, easy to spread. The word "true" is completely absent on the above statement. That generates clicks. That keeps users logged in more. That increases "engagement". That increases as revenue. Game over. The masterminds/communications brilliant minds could never get so many eyeballs and ears tuned-in with such a low cost before. I've mentioned before that FB = cancer It gives 1 (ability to communicate) and it takes 100.
ckastner 6y ago
> I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect. Hidden human need/instinct to argue, period. These arguments aren't intellectual debates, it's people getting pissed off at something, and venting their rage towards the other side. It's odd how addictive rage can be. But that's not a new phenomenon. Tabloids have been exploiting this for decades before Facebook.
abdullahkhalids 6y ago
> some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect This is perhaps a form of "folk activism" [1]: > In early human tribes, there were few enough people in each social structure such that anyone could change policy. If you didn’t like how the buffalo meat got divvied up, you could propose an alternative, build a coalition around it, and actually make it happen. Success required the agreement of tens of allies — yet those same instincts now drive our actions when success requires the agreement of tens of millions. When we read in the evening paper that we’re footing the bill for another bailout, we react by complaining to our friends, suggesting alternatives, and trying to build coalitions for reform. This primal behavior is as good a guide for how to effectively reform modern political systems as our instinctive taste for sugar and fat is for how to eat nutritiously. Facebook is a collection of your friends or your "tribe", so repeated arguments with your tribe members is what our unconscious brain pushes us towards. That coupled with the dopamine hit of validation via likes (which is common to other online discussion platforms). [1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/06/patri-friedman/beyond-folk-activism https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/06/patri-friedman/beyon... I don't agree with a lot said here. Only linking the definition of folk activism
specialist 6y ago
"There is no vaccine yet for this." What would that look like? Given our current (social) media ecosystem, converting outrage into profit (per Chomsky, McLuhan, Postman, and many, many others), what does a non-outrage maximizing strategy look like? I currently favor a slower, calmer discourse. A la both Kahnemann's thinking fast vs slow, and McLuhan's hot vs cold metaphors. That means breaking or slowing the feedback loops, removing some of the urgency and heat of convos. Some possible implementation details: - emphasis on manual moderation, like metafilter, and dang here on HN - waiting periods for replies. or continuing allowing the submissions but delay their publication. or treat all posts as drafts with a hold period. or HN style throttling. or...? - only friends can reply publicly. - hide "likes" - do something about bots. allow aliases, but all accounts need verified real names or ownership. Sorry, these are just some of misc the proposals I remember. I should probably have been cataloguing them.
- prawn 6y ago
  I can't see that working for anything other than niche networks. A social network will make less money doing this, so what's their incentive? The bulk of people will stick with a network that gives them constant and instant feeding of their addiction. I think the "vaccine" would need to be broader to be effective or major networks would need to grow a serious conscience.
  - specialist 6y ago
    Belated response, sorry. I'm very curious about niche networks. I have hunch that ravelry.com has something to teach us. I bookmark any niche networks I hear about, like pray.com. Hope to someday do a survey, feature comparison, and whatnot. I hosted a very niche BBS network. Think The Well for CAD and computer graphics. True, there was no business model, but it was awesome and fairly long-lived. Facebook is now fairly long-lived. All of its predecessors eventually perished. Some day Facebook will too. I'm curious what the successors will look like.
devmunchies 6y ago
I call this the "outrage economy". There are several companies (facebook, twitter, reddit, youtube, etc) that grew based on user activity of varying types. The more bickering and polarization, the bigger X Company gets and need to hire more employees and get more funding, and that feeds into more growth. There is also a secondary economy built on or used by these original companies (software tooling, ad software, legal, clickbait, etc). We now have a big chunk of the economy feeding pointless bickering.
- deleted 6y ago
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toohotatopic 6y ago
They tapped into that human behaviour 'as somehow as' hn doesn't have an orangered envelope when somebody replies to your messages. It's by design and not by coincidence. There are plenty of vaccines for this, but not in the sense that you can apply it to people by force, like you can apply a vaccine to babies. Meditation, yoga, religions, sports - there are many ways to calm the mind.
zachware 6y ago
This is quite possibly the most elegant summary of what's wrong with how we engage with information through the media/social landscape. We didn't evolve as a species to process this much information, or as Yuval Noah Harari calls it in Sapiens, gossip.
Animats 6y ago
Sometimes, just shutting up about an issue and not discussing it is the best thing for a group to do. Then the terrorists win. That used to be the conventional wisdom on trolls, but there are now so many of them. Worse, about half are bots.[1] (Both NPR and Fox News have that story, so it's probably correct.) [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/carnegie-mellon-covid-19-twitter-bots-research_n_5ec9e47bc5b64085c39ba7d0 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/carnegie-mellon-covid-19-twit...
SherlockeHolmes 6y ago
Disclaimer: I don't agree with your conclusions regarding general needs and instincts (of human) and that a human possess abosolute/built-in/DNA-engrained inabilities (therefore, I do believe a human can fly). I also don't agree that Facebook is to share much of the blame for the chaotic human zeitgeist present today. I do believe a human is highly malleable and impressionable, and that these qualities have been exploited historically at various scales for various reasons. "There is no vaccine yet for this." There may not be any vaccine, but there may be a cure. If we change the language used to communicate within a setting/platform such as Facebook, possibly by using a subset of the language previously used or by adopting a more Formal construct. But Facebook is a virtual neighborhood, with greatly increased bandwidth and range. It is difficult or impossible to achieve it in their settings.
maxerickson 6y ago
How does your postulation map to say, anti-vax?
- bentcorner 6y ago
  I don't personally think it's productive for me to engage with these kind of people but I will definitely support and cheer on others doing so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q65aYK0AoMc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q65aYK0AoMc (NSFW content) (Personally I get too wound up in internet arguments and it's just not a healthy space for my head to be in)
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    Sure, I don't spend much time yelling at idiots. The point of my question is that activists tend to talk about things, so "shutting up about an issue and not discussing it is the best thing for a group to do." won't ever actually happen.
tbabb 6y ago
I really don't like the "it can't be helped" attitude about what Facebook has become. They made a choice to throw gasoline on the flames of these aspects of human behavior. Few people seem to realize that Facebook could have been a force for good, if they had made different choices or had more integrity when it comes to the design and vision of their platform. The way that things happened is not they only possible way they could have happened, and resigning to the current state as "inevitable", to me, reeks of an incredible lack of imagination.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  I am not sure I can agree. Facebook did not change in any significant way. It still serves as a platform to boost your message. It is, at best, simply a reflection of the human condition. The previous example was the internet and some of the revelations it brought about us as a species. FB just focused it as much as it could. Force for good. I do not want to sound like this, but how, in your vision, that would look like? This is a real question.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tbabb 6y ago
    It could have been a platform that enlightens, informs, and uplifts people instead of exploiting attention and anger, and profiting from misinformation. You can make money by making people feel good instead of bad. You can be rotten.com, or you can be Pixar. You have a choice. An organization with integrity will look at not just how much money they're immediately making, but whether they're pushing the world towards better or worse. A hands-off attitude of "it's not my problem that people like this sh*t" is not integrity, it's a rationalization for greed. You can make choices that result in making less than the absolute maximum amount of cash you can get your hands on, in service of building a product/experience/brand with value and goodwill of its own. There are countless examples of this in other places— just look at any company that builds its reputation based on quality. Each of these brands could make their products for cheaper and lower quality, and make more immediate profit, at the (much larger) long-term cost of destroying the brand, the customer goodwill, and the market advantage. Defending against such short-term greediness is uphill work, but it's both the enlightened and profitable thing to do. Instead of actively amplifying memes and misinformation, they could have chosen to build features supporting community and/or expert moderation. They built an algorithm that optimizes purely for attention, but they could have made something that accounts for quality; paying attention to patterns in good and bad sources of information, and reliable/unreliable discriminating tastes in the community. The emphasis on quality and reliability of content was the pitch for Quora, for example, and they did much better at that task than Facebook. Which is not surprising, because Facebook seems to clearly not be trying to optimize for this at all. Wikipedia and StackOverflow are also two huge success stories of community/expert moderation. It works if you actually prioritize it. They could have chosen to hire journalists, editors, and artists to produce and vet high-quality content to drive people to the platform, and step responsibly and effectively into the media void that was created when newspapers began to collapse. An analogy for this would be the way that Netflix, Amazon, HBO, and friends have created a new boom and golden age of content creation to fill the void left by the dying medium of broadcast TV. There could have been something like this for print, and Facebook was well positioned for it. [Jaron Lanier](https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake_the_internet?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake...) has lots of ideas about how to make an internet that isn't hostile toward its own users. One of his revolutionary ideas: Charge people money for services instead of siphoning their data and their attention in ways that hurt them. There are a zillion directions they could have gone.
Causality1 6y ago
People do go on Facebook and argue with others, but that's not the core of the divisiveness. Rather, people sort themselves into opposing groups and spend most of their time talking amongst themselves about how good they are and how horrible the other group is.
munificent 6y ago
> I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect. I think everyone has a natural human need to feel that they have agency in their community. The need to feel that they participate in the culture that surrounds them and that they can have some affect on the groups that they are members in. The alternative is being a powerless pawn subject to the whims of the herd. In the US, I think most people lost this feeling with the rise of suburbia, broadcast television, and consumer culture. There are almost no public spheres in the US, no real commons where people come together and participate. The only groups many people are "part" of are really just shows and products that they consume. Social media tapped into that void. It gave them a place to not just hear but to speak. Or, at least, it gave them the illusion of it. But, really, since everyone wants to feel they have more agency, everyone is trying to change everyone else but no one wants to be changed. And all of this is mostly decoupled from any real mechanism for actual societal change, so it's become just angry shouting into the void.
Kaze404 6y ago
I had the same realization recently, and deleted my Twitter account in favor of a new one where I only follow people I know in real life. That worked great for a couple of weeks, but now I log on Twitter and half of my feed is tweets of people I don't know or follow, with the worst, most infuriatingly stupid hot takes. No wonder they have literally hundreds of thousands of likes. The platform is built around this "content".
mistermann 6y ago
> There is no vaccine yet for this. There is a fair amount of anecdotal evidence suggesting that psychedelics can have a significant impact when used correctly.
razzimatazz 6y ago
You are on to something. I interpret it as it is fantastic fun/addictive/dopamine-short-term-win to argue or discuss with someone. Especially if you can afford the hangover that outrage might lead to. Face to face with people I know or at least recognize as human, not a bot, educated or at least not cartoon-hick-personality - Arguments can be great, because of the ability to see when to pull back and stop something from escalating. We are all human after all. In internet-powered discussion, where numbers of people observing can be huge, and every username can feel inhuman or maybe even just trolling in an attempt to create a stupid argument - that Argument gets painful. But the dopamine hit is still there...
enchiridion 6y ago
A lot of people here are saying they will write responses then wait before posting. Could this be part of the solution? If a discussion is getting particularly heated, put responses on a time delay. Maybe even put the account on a general delay for engaging with heated subjects, so the outrage doesn't crop up elsewhere. Of course this would decreased engagement. It might even push users to more permissive platforms.
Gene_Parmesan 6y ago
I am a progressive, so liberal I verge on socialist, and I think one of the "Left's" great flaws in the US is its inability to walk away, to just ignore. Engaging vociferously is seen almost as a moral imperative; "we must fight evil wherever we find it" sort of thing. But all that does is bring attention and a form of validation to the more lunatic attempts to enrage them. They aren't accomplishing a single thing by getting so righteously angry over statements the speakers probably aren't even making in good faith. You can even see in the memes. It's the right that loves "trolling libs," and the left that's taking the bait. I think it's telling that the stereotype hardly ever seems to go the other way; you almost never see people talk about liberals "trolling reps." You really don't need to engage with everything in order to be a good activist. In fact, I believe taking time and emotional energy to do so is actually being a bad activist. You're just wasting effort, nothing you say or do will change anyone's minds because mostly, the whole reason they're saying whatever it is is specifically to make you upset. To trap you into unwinnable arguments just to laugh at how heated you get. Really we all need to be better at just walking away from crazy, whatever side of whatever spectrum we find it. By regularly surrounding yourself with such conflicts and by regularly basting yourself in such a soup of intense negativity, you are quite literally doing nothing more than causing physical harm to your body and mind via the morass of cortisol, etc. you are unleashing. You are accomplishing nothing. I agree that Facebook makes this painfully easy, although Twitter and Reddit are right there as well.

edgarvaldes 6y ago

>Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect. Maybe FB do it better, but it is the same in every online "forum" where you get notifications about comments.

goatinaboat 6y ago
Maybe FB do it better, but it is the same in every online "forum" where you get notifications about comments. Facebook influences what you see to a far greater extent than a tradition forum did.

austincheney 6y ago

> There is no vaccine yet for this. If you realize it’s a dumpster fire then delete your account and move on with life. If that line of thinking is a challenge in absolutely any way the problem is addiction. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction

dade_ 6y ago
It's been 5 years now. Facebook ads used be creepy, but polite: "Come back to Facebook" But not anymore, black text one white background: "Go To Facebook" next ad: "See What You've Missed From Friends And Family" Kill it with fire! The only advice I have about the company and it's products.

empath75 6y ago

I actually really enjoy having a good argument with random people online, but I don't as much enjoy arguing with my friends and family. 1) I don't like being mad at or contemptious of people I'm close to and 2) they're usually not worth the effort of arguing with because they're just cutting and pasting stupid shit they found elsewhere and it's _exhausting_ to continuously correct the record when they put zero effort into copy and pasting it to begin with. I first purged everyone that posted that stuff from my feed, and then eventually quite facebook altogether.

maest 6y ago

That's an interesting thought, for sure. I should point out that this doesn't only apply to facebook, but other large discussion forums as well: reddit, 4chan, tumblr, twitter etc.

gimboland 6y ago
And Hacker News! > some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect I've said it before, I'll probably say it again: this place is chock full of people just itching to tell you you're wrong and why. Don't get me wrong: obviously there's also a hell of a lot of great discussion and insightful technical knowhow being shared by real experts — but in my experience I also do have to wade through quite a lot of what feels like knee-jerk pedantry and point-scoring.
- mac01021 6y ago
  I, for one, wouldn't have it any other way! When I'm wrong I want it explained to me why. Even when I'm right about something controversial, I want to see the best arguments to the contrary. I don't want people to be less argumentative. I just want a higher intellectual caliber than what's generally available on facebook or twitter, and HN fits the bill reasonably well.
  - downerending 6y ago
    It's tricky. One has to learn how to disagree without being disagreeable. Or, get your fuck-you billions and people will start agreeing with you a lot. :-)
- mywittyname 6y ago
  When people here tell you that you're wrong, they tend to do it with style. One time I made a comment about how dividends affect stock price and someone spent like 2 hours writing a program in R to do some analysis just to prove me wrong.

derg 6y ago

In general and not necessarily related to just facebook, but one of the best things I've come to learn about myself and the world around me is that sometimes the absolute _best_ thing you can do for yourself is to just shut up and walk away, even if you know in your heart of hearts that you are correct.

brewdad 6y ago
I've gotten better, over time, at typing my heated, emotional response to someone online and then hitting Cancel or the back button and not posting. Sometimes I do hit the Reply button though. I still have room for self-improvement. :-)
- ok_coo 6y ago
  This is the point I got to when I realized I should no longer have an account and I just went ahead and deleted it. For about 6 months after, I thought I would reactivate and jump back in but it's been years now and I'm 100% sure it was a life improvement.
- SNosTrAnDbLe 6y ago
  This! It always helps me to take time out and paste what you have on a different notepad and come back to it. Only hit send if it still makes sense.
- accountinhn 6y ago
  I do this a lot, especially in Reddit. Trick I learned is I use my notepad now to type the reply, then wait for an hour and post it. This helped with few things: 1. Slowly improving in checking for typos 2. Reading something after a break helps framing my point better and helps remove the heated emotion from the text 3. I also don't save the comment, so I have to spend time searching for it. This further helps in filtering the topics that I don't care about 4. Using services while not logged in, basically be a lurker
- specialist 6y ago
  Not gonna like. u/dang has had to scold me a few times. Improvement takes time. We certainly need more and better role models.

Barrin92 6y ago

> And Facebook somehow tapped into that human behavior and (inadvertently or purposefully) It's not just that they tapped into it, it's the entire mission statement in a sense. 'to connect the world' if you want to treat it like a sort of network science basically means to lower the distance between individuals so much that you've reduced the whole world to a small world network. There's no inhibition in this system, it's like an organism on every stimulant you can imagine. Everything spreads too fast and there's no authority to shut anything down that breaks, so the result is pretty much unmitigated chaos. The vaccine is the thing people complain about all the time, the much maligned 'filter bubbles', which is really just to say splitting these networks into groups that can actually work productively together and keeping them away from others that make them want to bash their heads in.

CarelessExpert 6y ago

> I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect. Funny, years ago, around the Aurora shooting in Colorado, it was Facebook that made me recognize this behaviour in myself. It's why I left the platform. Also, obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/

staysaasy 6y ago

"Time heals many things" Extremely true, also relevant for work disagreements between people who have existing positive relationships. A surprising number of disagreements disappear if left on their own for a time. I find that many people with engineering backgrounds (myself included) can struggle letting conflicts sit unresolved. I suspect that instincts learned debugging code get ported over to interpersonal issues, as code bugs almost never disappear if simply left to rest.

deleted 6y ago

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danlugo92 6y ago

It's always alien when I read stuff like this. Most of my facebook feed is just memes and selfies. (I'm venezuelan) When facebook as new/trending up years ago there were some political discussions but people quickly figured out it was worthless, how come USAians haven't?

vharuck 6y ago
Being angry over politics is a pastime in the USA. Not sure why this happens in some countries and less so in others.
- razzimatazz 6y ago
  In NZ, we follow along behind the USA in most things, so getting angry over politics is growing and growing. I see it as a hobby, growing in popularity. But also a hobby you can discourage those you know from getting into, and if the social momentum pulls us away from it then the hobby doesn't take hold.
mrmonkeyman 6y ago
Perhaps you guys should be more engaged with politics..

LordHumungous 6y ago

Yeah. There's a lot of relief in letting go, accepting that other people are outside of your power to control, and just practicing acceptance no matter how wrong or annoying or stupid you think people are being.

wfbarks 6y ago

wish that I could actively decide not to pay attention to this comment, but I am unable.

ErikAugust 6y ago

I think it’s important to note that Facebook didn’t invent any of this. They just built the biggest mainstream distribution channel to do so. Nothing they ever did in terms of facilitating pointless arguments has been all that original either. People have been doing this forever, and even on the Web much, much longer than Facebook has existed. Now that said, they know what they have on their hands and how it makes them the money. They aren’t going to fix it. It is a big feature of their product.

cryptoz 6y ago
> I think it’s important to note that Facebook didn’t invent any of this. I don't agree with that. I very strongly think that Facebook did invent a lot of this. > They just built the biggest mainstream distribution channel to do so Scale does matter though. There is a lot in life that is legal or moral at small scale but illegal or immoral at large scale. Doing things at scale does change the nature of what you are doing. There's no 'just' to be had there. > Nothing they ever did in terms of facilitating pointless arguments has been all that original either. I don't agree with that either. They have even published scientific papers, peer-reviewed, to explain their new and novel methods of creating emotionally manipulative content and algorithms. > People have been doing this forever, and even on the Web much, much longer than Facebook has existed. I also don't agree with this. Facebook has spent 10+ years inventing new ways to rile people up. This stuff is new. Yes I know newspapers publish things that are twisted up etc, but that's different, clearly. The readers of the paper are not shouting at each other as they read it. I think it's super dangerous to take this new kind of mass-surveillance and mass-scale manipulation and say, welp, nothing new here, who cares? I think that's extremely dangerous. It opens populations to apathy and lets corporations do illegal and immoral things to gain unfair and illegal power. Facebook should not be legally allowed to do all the things they are doing. It's invasive, immoral, and novel, the way they deceive and manipulate society at large.
- visarga 6y ago
  > Doing things at scale does change the nature of what you are doing. "Quantity has a quality of its own"

Vysero 6y ago

Close your eyes, hold your breath and hope the situation resolves itself, that's your solution? I don't believe in a: "hidden human need/instinct to argue with people". There is nothing hidden about human conflict. It is as natural as any conflict; as natural as space and time. In fact, without conflict evolution can not exist. Obviously, a good portion of the arguments being had have the potential of bearing no fruit, but I would argue that just as many of them not only should but NEED to be had, and are quite productive on the whole.

mark-r 6y ago
There is definitely such a need, which is why this cartoon is one of my favorites of all time: https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/
- ShellfishMeme 6y ago
  I always have to think about that one when I had just been spending 20 minutes trying to formulate an elaborate response to someone's comment, just to proceed to sigh and close the thing without posting it. Probably most of the time it was for the better too.
  - specialist 6y ago
    I'm self culling a lot more too. I'd argue those unposted drafts are still valuable, if only to help oneself flesh out ideas.
    - ShellfishMeme 6y ago
      I completely agree. Often I don't proceed because the point I wanted to make is just not properly defendable at that point. But the ideas written down in the process don't disappear and at the same time I got a better appreciation of the other side's point of view. I'd rather hold on to those ideas and evolve them further than to get too attached and be forced into a situation where I eventually defend my opinions because I moved myself into a position where I feel like this is a deep personal belief rather than a well defined objective-ish argument I tried to make.

HenryBemis 6y ago

In my line of work, we need to dig deep and find the root cause on anything we 'touch'. I have noticed (since day 1 in this line of work) that elaborate, complex truths tire the audience, they want something snappy and 'sexy'. I remember a French C-suite telling me "make it sexy, you will lose them". Facebook managed to get this just right: lightweight, sexy (in the sense of attractive), easy to believe, easy to understand, easy to spread. The word "true" is completely absent on the above statement. That generates clicks. That keeps users logged in more. That increases "engagement". That increases as revenue. Game over. The masterminds/communications brilliant minds could never get so many eyeballs and ears tuned-in with such a low cost before. I've mentioned before that FB = cancer It gives 1 (ability to communicate) and it takes 100.

ckastner 6y ago

> I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect. Hidden human need/instinct to argue, period. These arguments aren't intellectual debates, it's people getting pissed off at something, and venting their rage towards the other side. It's odd how addictive rage can be. But that's not a new phenomenon. Tabloids have been exploiting this for decades before Facebook.

abdullahkhalids 6y ago

> some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect This is perhaps a form of "folk activism" [1]: > In early human tribes, there were few enough people in each social structure such that anyone could change policy. If you didn’t like how the buffalo meat got divvied up, you could propose an alternative, build a coalition around it, and actually make it happen. Success required the agreement of tens of allies — yet those same instincts now drive our actions when success requires the agreement of tens of millions. When we read in the evening paper that we’re footing the bill for another bailout, we react by complaining to our friends, suggesting alternatives, and trying to build coalitions for reform. This primal behavior is as good a guide for how to effectively reform modern political systems as our instinctive taste for sugar and fat is for how to eat nutritiously. Facebook is a collection of your friends or your "tribe", so repeated arguments with your tribe members is what our unconscious brain pushes us towards. That coupled with the dopamine hit of validation via likes (which is common to other online discussion platforms). [1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/06/patri-friedman/beyond-folk-activism https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/06/patri-friedman/beyon... I don't agree with a lot said here. Only linking the definition of folk activism

specialist 6y ago

"There is no vaccine yet for this." What would that look like? Given our current (social) media ecosystem, converting outrage into profit (per Chomsky, McLuhan, Postman, and many, many others), what does a non-outrage maximizing strategy look like? I currently favor a slower, calmer discourse. A la both Kahnemann's thinking fast vs slow, and McLuhan's hot vs cold metaphors. That means breaking or slowing the feedback loops, removing some of the urgency and heat of convos. Some possible implementation details: - emphasis on manual moderation, like metafilter, and dang here on HN - waiting periods for replies. or continuing allowing the submissions but delay their publication. or treat all posts as drafts with a hold period. or HN style throttling. or...? - only friends can reply publicly. - hide "likes" - do something about bots. allow aliases, but all accounts need verified real names or ownership. Sorry, these are just some of misc the proposals I remember. I should probably have been cataloguing them.

prawn 6y ago
I can't see that working for anything other than niche networks. A social network will make less money doing this, so what's their incentive? The bulk of people will stick with a network that gives them constant and instant feeding of their addiction. I think the "vaccine" would need to be broader to be effective or major networks would need to grow a serious conscience.
- specialist 6y ago
  Belated response, sorry. I'm very curious about niche networks. I have hunch that ravelry.com has something to teach us. I bookmark any niche networks I hear about, like pray.com. Hope to someday do a survey, feature comparison, and whatnot. I hosted a very niche BBS network. Think The Well for CAD and computer graphics. True, there was no business model, but it was awesome and fairly long-lived. Facebook is now fairly long-lived. All of its predecessors eventually perished. Some day Facebook will too. I'm curious what the successors will look like.

devmunchies 6y ago

I call this the "outrage economy". There are several companies (facebook, twitter, reddit, youtube, etc) that grew based on user activity of varying types. The more bickering and polarization, the bigger X Company gets and need to hire more employees and get more funding, and that feeds into more growth. There is also a secondary economy built on or used by these original companies (software tooling, ad software, legal, clickbait, etc). We now have a big chunk of the economy feeding pointless bickering.

deleted 6y ago
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toohotatopic 6y ago

They tapped into that human behaviour 'as somehow as' hn doesn't have an orangered envelope when somebody replies to your messages. It's by design and not by coincidence. There are plenty of vaccines for this, but not in the sense that you can apply it to people by force, like you can apply a vaccine to babies. Meditation, yoga, religions, sports - there are many ways to calm the mind.

zachware 6y ago

This is quite possibly the most elegant summary of what's wrong with how we engage with information through the media/social landscape. We didn't evolve as a species to process this much information, or as Yuval Noah Harari calls it in Sapiens, gossip.

Animats 6y ago

Sometimes, just shutting up about an issue and not discussing it is the best thing for a group to do. Then the terrorists win. That used to be the conventional wisdom on trolls, but there are now so many of them. Worse, about half are bots.[1] (Both NPR and Fox News have that story, so it's probably correct.) [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/carnegie-mellon-covid-19-twitter-bots-research_n_5ec9e47bc5b64085c39ba7d0 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/carnegie-mellon-covid-19-twit...

SherlockeHolmes 6y ago

Disclaimer: I don't agree with your conclusions regarding general needs and instincts (of human) and that a human possess abosolute/built-in/DNA-engrained inabilities (therefore, I do believe a human can fly). I also don't agree that Facebook is to share much of the blame for the chaotic human zeitgeist present today. I do believe a human is highly malleable and impressionable, and that these qualities have been exploited historically at various scales for various reasons. "There is no vaccine yet for this." There may not be any vaccine, but there may be a cure. If we change the language used to communicate within a setting/platform such as Facebook, possibly by using a subset of the language previously used or by adopting a more Formal construct. But Facebook is a virtual neighborhood, with greatly increased bandwidth and range. It is difficult or impossible to achieve it in their settings.

maxerickson 6y ago

How does your postulation map to say, anti-vax?

bentcorner 6y ago
I don't personally think it's productive for me to engage with these kind of people but I will definitely support and cheer on others doing so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q65aYK0AoMc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q65aYK0AoMc (NSFW content) (Personally I get too wound up in internet arguments and it's just not a healthy space for my head to be in)
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Sure, I don't spend much time yelling at idiots. The point of my question is that activists tend to talk about things, so "shutting up about an issue and not discussing it is the best thing for a group to do." won't ever actually happen.

tbabb 6y ago

I really don't like the "it can't be helped" attitude about what Facebook has become. They made a choice to throw gasoline on the flames of these aspects of human behavior. Few people seem to realize that Facebook could have been a force for good, if they had made different choices or had more integrity when it comes to the design and vision of their platform. The way that things happened is not they only possible way they could have happened, and resigning to the current state as "inevitable", to me, reeks of an incredible lack of imagination.

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
I am not sure I can agree. Facebook did not change in any significant way. It still serves as a platform to boost your message. It is, at best, simply a reflection of the human condition. The previous example was the internet and some of the revelations it brought about us as a species. FB just focused it as much as it could. Force for good. I do not want to sound like this, but how, in your vision, that would look like? This is a real question.
- deleted 6y ago
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- tbabb 6y ago
  It could have been a platform that enlightens, informs, and uplifts people instead of exploiting attention and anger, and profiting from misinformation. You can make money by making people feel good instead of bad. You can be rotten.com, or you can be Pixar. You have a choice. An organization with integrity will look at not just how much money they're immediately making, but whether they're pushing the world towards better or worse. A hands-off attitude of "it's not my problem that people like this sh*t" is not integrity, it's a rationalization for greed. You can make choices that result in making less than the absolute maximum amount of cash you can get your hands on, in service of building a product/experience/brand with value and goodwill of its own. There are countless examples of this in other places— just look at any company that builds its reputation based on quality. Each of these brands could make their products for cheaper and lower quality, and make more immediate profit, at the (much larger) long-term cost of destroying the brand, the customer goodwill, and the market advantage. Defending against such short-term greediness is uphill work, but it's both the enlightened and profitable thing to do. Instead of actively amplifying memes and misinformation, they could have chosen to build features supporting community and/or expert moderation. They built an algorithm that optimizes purely for attention, but they could have made something that accounts for quality; paying attention to patterns in good and bad sources of information, and reliable/unreliable discriminating tastes in the community. The emphasis on quality and reliability of content was the pitch for Quora, for example, and they did much better at that task than Facebook. Which is not surprising, because Facebook seems to clearly not be trying to optimize for this at all. Wikipedia and StackOverflow are also two huge success stories of community/expert moderation. It works if you actually prioritize it. They could have chosen to hire journalists, editors, and artists to produce and vet high-quality content to drive people to the platform, and step responsibly and effectively into the media void that was created when newspapers began to collapse. An analogy for this would be the way that Netflix, Amazon, HBO, and friends have created a new boom and golden age of content creation to fill the void left by the dying medium of broadcast TV. There could have been something like this for print, and Facebook was well positioned for it. [Jaron Lanier](https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake_the_internet?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake...) has lots of ideas about how to make an internet that isn't hostile toward its own users. One of his revolutionary ideas: Charge people money for services instead of siphoning their data and their attention in ways that hurt them. There are a zillion directions they could have gone.

Causality1 6y ago

People do go on Facebook and argue with others, but that's not the core of the divisiveness. Rather, people sort themselves into opposing groups and spend most of their time talking amongst themselves about how good they are and how horrible the other group is.

munificent 6y ago

> I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect. I think everyone has a natural human need to feel that they have agency in their community. The need to feel that they participate in the culture that surrounds them and that they can have some affect on the groups that they are members in. The alternative is being a powerless pawn subject to the whims of the herd. In the US, I think most people lost this feeling with the rise of suburbia, broadcast television, and consumer culture. There are almost no public spheres in the US, no real commons where people come together and participate. The only groups many people are "part" of are really just shows and products that they consume. Social media tapped into that void. It gave them a place to not just hear but to speak. Or, at least, it gave them the illusion of it. But, really, since everyone wants to feel they have more agency, everyone is trying to change everyone else but no one wants to be changed. And all of this is mostly decoupled from any real mechanism for actual societal change, so it's become just angry shouting into the void.

Kaze404 6y ago

I had the same realization recently, and deleted my Twitter account in favor of a new one where I only follow people I know in real life. That worked great for a couple of weeks, but now I log on Twitter and half of my feed is tweets of people I don't know or follow, with the worst, most infuriatingly stupid hot takes. No wonder they have literally hundreds of thousands of likes. The platform is built around this "content".

mistermann 6y ago

> There is no vaccine yet for this. There is a fair amount of anecdotal evidence suggesting that psychedelics can have a significant impact when used correctly.

razzimatazz 6y ago

You are on to something. I interpret it as it is fantastic fun/addictive/dopamine-short-term-win to argue or discuss with someone. Especially if you can afford the hangover that outrage might lead to. Face to face with people I know or at least recognize as human, not a bot, educated or at least not cartoon-hick-personality - Arguments can be great, because of the ability to see when to pull back and stop something from escalating. We are all human after all. In internet-powered discussion, where numbers of people observing can be huge, and every username can feel inhuman or maybe even just trolling in an attempt to create a stupid argument - that Argument gets painful. But the dopamine hit is still there...

enchiridion 6y ago

A lot of people here are saying they will write responses then wait before posting. Could this be part of the solution? If a discussion is getting particularly heated, put responses on a time delay. Maybe even put the account on a general delay for engaging with heated subjects, so the outrage doesn't crop up elsewhere. Of course this would decreased engagement. It might even push users to more permissive platforms.

Gene_Parmesan 6y ago

I am a progressive, so liberal I verge on socialist, and I think one of the "Left's" great flaws in the US is its inability to walk away, to just ignore. Engaging vociferously is seen almost as a moral imperative; "we must fight evil wherever we find it" sort of thing. But all that does is bring attention and a form of validation to the more lunatic attempts to enrage them. They aren't accomplishing a single thing by getting so righteously angry over statements the speakers probably aren't even making in good faith. You can even see in the memes. It's the right that loves "trolling libs," and the left that's taking the bait. I think it's telling that the stereotype hardly ever seems to go the other way; you almost never see people talk about liberals "trolling reps." You really don't need to engage with everything in order to be a good activist. In fact, I believe taking time and emotional energy to do so is actually being a bad activist. You're just wasting effort, nothing you say or do will change anyone's minds because mostly, the whole reason they're saying whatever it is is specifically to make you upset. To trap you into unwinnable arguments just to laugh at how heated you get. Really we all need to be better at just walking away from crazy, whatever side of whatever spectrum we find it. By regularly surrounding yourself with such conflicts and by regularly basting yourself in such a soup of intense negativity, you are quite literally doing nothing more than causing physical harm to your body and mind via the morass of cortisol, etc. you are unleashing. You are accomplishing nothing. I agree that Facebook makes this painfully easy, although Twitter and Reddit are right there as well.