9 ms·

I feel like all of this debate is painfully missing the point. The problem is not some content moderation policy, the problem is that social media has changed s

by creato 6y ago

I feel like all of this debate is painfully missing the point. The problem is not some content moderation policy, the problem is that social media has changed social conversations from small local interactions into monstrous virtual fight clubs between millions of people simultaneously, and where the most extreme opinions are rewarded with the most attention. Boring level headed opinions used to at least have a chance of rising above the noise. Not anymore.

dr_dshiv 6y ago
Amen. The thing that's funny is it seems relatively straightforward to measure the positive and negative interactions and promote appropriately and transparently.
planb 6y ago
This is so right. But are you aware of any ideas what to do about this? It seems like everyone has just accepted that‘s the way it is now.
- paulgb 6y ago
  Unfortunately this doesn't work unless a massive group of people does it, but: stop sharing things that make you angry. They make you angry so that you share them. So much toxicity is rooted in exploiting this dynamic.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  I'm not sure what your whole list of requirements is for a solution, but: how about simply not using Facebook at all?
- airstrike 6y ago
  Favor moderated communities over "free" communities Push for ad-free social networks (probably not free to users, then)
koheripbal 6y ago
It's more than just the toxicity of the conversations. These vapid online brawls have engaged millions more people to vote who never would have voted in the past. Hence, introducing an easily swayed group of uneducated voters into the pool, and debasing politics to their level. If democracy represents the intelligence of the average voter, then engaging literally tens of millions of uneducated/emotional/immature people to vote significantly diminishes the ability of our government to make decisions and/or speak about problems honestly.
- untog 6y ago
  I don’t really see anything very different there. Voters have always been easily manipulated: by newspapers, TV, whatever. Though I suppose one key difference is that the source of that manipulation has been hidden: you used to know what newspaper pushed what, now actors hide behind sockpuppet accounts and promoted ads.
- marcoperaza 6y ago
  This is nothing new in kind. The founders were fearful of mass democracy too and sought to avoid creating one. For better or for worse, they failed.
  - r3trohack3r 6y ago
    Reference? I don't see us as having created a representative democracy to protect democracy from the masses. I like to think we are a representative democracy because the masses are supposed to have better things to do than keep the lights of government on.
    - Izkata 6y ago
      One of the authors of the Constitution, James Madison. https://billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/primary-source-documents/the-federalist-papers/federalist-papers-no-51/ https://billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/primary...
    - bhupy 6y ago
Nextgrid 6y ago
The other problem is that the business model of social media is based on generating "engagement" at all costs, so the platforms are built to encourage outrage as it generates lots of engagement, among other addictive behaviors (the infinite "algorithmic" feed for example). Social media was supposed to be a tool that serves people but its current business model encourages it to work against people. There were plenty of other technologies that could've been used to organize large-scale virtual fight clubs (forums, BBSes, chatrooms, maybe even the telephone) but this didn't happen because nobody actually wanted to foster such toxic behavior.
- dvt 6y ago
  > nobody actually wanted to foster such toxic behavior I think no one realized you could make disgusting amounts of money by fostering it. There have been plenty of flame wars on BBSes and forums, but the tension between "engagement" and "quality" always favored the latter in small, private communities (HN is a good example). However, when it comes to Facebook and Twitter, the former is always favored (due to market forces, shareholder interests, etc.).
  - jerf 6y ago
    "BBSes and forums" Observe flamewars on BBSs and forums tended to drive people away, thus tending to confine them through natural mechanisms. Our current systems encourage and fan them, and by profiting from them, create a system that sustains them indefinitely instead of naturally isolating them to just the people who actively want to participate. As someone who has a low-grade hobby of kind of keeping track of this sort of thing, I think one of the major challenges of trying to structure communities is all the most powerful drivers of what is going to happen occurs in these low-level decisions that create persistent second-order effects on the community's nature, and this is one of the somewhat unusual cases where the second-order effects utterly dominate the first-order effects. In this case, you can read "first-order effects" as "the things the developers intended to happen", which I think are dominated by the structural effects of decisions that aren't intentional. If you create a community that literally profits from conflict and flamewar, you'll never be able to fix them by any number of systems you try to add to fix that via first-order effects. The underlying structure is too powerful. Facebook can't be fixed with any amount of "moderation"; the entire structure, from the very foundation, is incapable of supporting a friendly community at scale. Until Facebook stops profiting from engagement, they will never be able to fix their problems with toxicity, no matter how many resources they pour into naively fighting it via direct fixups. (Now, I have questions about whether a friendly community of the scale of Facebook is even possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20146868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20146868 . But the fact it may not even be possible does not mean that Facebook is still obviously not that solution.)
thebigspacefuck 6y ago
"The only winning move is not to play."
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dvt 6y ago
> I feel like all of this debate is painfully missing the point. Your point also applies to news -- articles these days miss the point by design. You get more clicks by being provocative and hyperbolic. And yellow journalism isn't really new, but its comeback has been triumphant.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  That's hardly surprising. Both social media and regular media are now part of the same competition to get more clicks. The whole model of online ad-driven content is rotten and creates the worst incentives.
  - analyte123 6y ago
    It's not so simple: social media is how regular media get most of their clicks. Not that I'm a huge fan of social media companies, but the constant push by regular media companies for social media companies to promote "authoritative sources" (i.e. regular media) and the accompanying hit pieces make a lot more sense in this context. To me, these articles are being honest in their criticism when they call for less social media in general, not just more control of the existing social media. This is one of the latter.
- wott 6y ago
  Along the last few weeks, Bing's news feed, the one that appears directly on the main page of bing.com, turned into a tabloid cesspool (at least in its French version). Gradually but very quickly, it turned from something reasonable, rather faithful to the range of important events (there could be one 'people' entry here and there, but why not, after all, as long as it remains very minor) into pure clickbait. The titles are clickbait ('incredible', 'exceptional', etc.) and the content behind is crap. It is possible that they put first, the ones that already get more clicks. If I translate the first entries titles right now: * Amazing confidences -> an actress * Big controversy -> a female singer * Corruption suspicion -> OK, a politician * Accused of lying -> an actor's wife * a few trivialities and filler items * Finally calm -> a dead singer's wife * Turkish activities -> OK, international news * from the previous item on, it is only now that you have a regular mix of normally interesting/important news items. You had to click once or twice on the Next arrow to get there, everything or almost everything on what I'd call the front page was clickbait crap. So, that's a feed, but the content comes from actual newspapers, and if I go to my local newspaper, half of the top content is also oftennational/international 'people' crap.
tsieling 6y ago
The policy and the design of the interface is inextricably linked to that change in interactions. A hands-off policy is still a policy for a site that rewarded more inflammatory content in pursuit of certain metrics.
vkou 6y ago
> Boring level headed opinions used to at least have a chance of rising above the noise. ... Because they were heavily promoted by the people who owned the media platforms. It wasn't because of any of their particular virtues. Consider your bias when making this claim. What makes an opinion boring and level-headed? That it is squarely in the middle of the Overton window? Who sets the Overton window, in the pre-social-network world where the overwhelming majority of media is state/corporate-sponsored? It's not some natural evolutionary process that caused boring, level-headed opinions to rise to the top. It was self-serving opinions rising to the top, that, because of their ubiquity, are believed to be boring and level-headed. When viewed from a different cultural lens, many of those boring and level-headed opinions appear completely batshit insane. For example, the current American model for healthcare seems, for the most part (Everyone has a few minor tweaks they want to make - but setting that aside), boring and level-headed and reasonable to ~half the country. To the rest of the world, it appears completely insane, and anyone proposing switching to it would be a complete lunatic. In the US, however, the converse holds - switching away from it is considered by many to be absolutely crazy. Which of those opinions is the reasonable, level-headed one? It depends on your current social setting, not on the virtues or drawbacks of the expressed idea.
iamacyborg 6y ago
> where the most extreme opinions are rewarded with the most attention Which is amusing given that even here we have to deal with an upvote mechanism that boosts posts from strong extreme opinions.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Personally, I think the retweet model is slightly more problematic than the upvote model. For one, upvotes have an equivalent downvote (usually), which a retweet doesn't. If a famous account upvotes a post, and a I downvote a post, they basically cancel each other. If a famous account on retweets a post, then millions more will see it thanks to that one button click, and nothing I can do balanced that. Facebook also thrives on a similar "re-share" model, which leads to the most toxic content spreading extremely quickly and bouncing to new audiences, whereas no matter how many times I upvote this thread, only a few % of the world browses HN.
- hodgesrm 6y ago
  It seems to me HN rewards views that are "interesting" but the most highly rated comments seem to be pretty mainstream nerd stuff. Do you see evidence to the contrary?
rainyMammoth 6y ago
This is exactly the point I'm trying to explain to my friends that are outraged that Facebook didn't censor Trump's post. I think Facebook is one of the worst companies out there, but for other reasons. The issue with Facebook is not about censoring the post that we don't like, it's about removing that polarization that comes with a platform that wants to get you hooked so they can sell you more ads. Facebook and other social media are making us HATE each other because that's what they make money on. The debate should be around how can you build an ethical social platform that values your time and opinions.
- foofoo4u 6y ago
  I do agree that the ad-based business model is designed to have us hate each other because that is what drives engagement. So I'd like to get your thoughts on this thought experiment. What if it was illegal for social media platforms to base their revenue stream on advertising? Instead, it is mandated by law that their primary revenue is based on a subscription model? "Want to use Facebook? You'll need to pay $4 a month to use it." What do you suppose the nature of Facebook would be like then and, to an extent, its impact to society at large? Perhaps better? It has been my impression so far that services that require paid subscriptions over free usage tend to respect privacy better, have higher quality content, and are less addicting in usage.
maps7 6y ago
I am developing a site where the landing page only shows news about topics from sources you have chosen to see. There will be some limited interaction with those news stories. On a shared page, everything is brought together and you'll see what news sources other people are reading. I am hoping this allows people to get the news they want, interact with it and see what news other people are interacting with... without the flame wars and hate brigades that Twitter and FB prompt
- floatrock 6y ago
  sounds like Reddit. Or Digg before that. Or RSS feeds before that.
  - jks 6y ago
    Google Reader had a limited kind of social networking where you could comment on the articles and your friends saw the comments if they were subscribed to the same feed, but there were no replies to comments and they never got outside your contacts. No popularity contests with Like buttons or similar.
  - maps7 6y ago
    Yeah, not too different. No user submitted links though and no comment system (at least when I first make it live). To be honest, I'll probably be the only user!
sbussard 6y ago
How can I upvote this twice?
aSplash0fDerp 6y ago
If you want to stand out from the crowd... Don`t stand in crowds... BLHO`s are nowhere to be found.... Because they have already left the building. "Die looted" is not referencing the information quality/concentration, but BLHO types know better.
kbenson 6y ago
I don't think it's painfully missing the point, it's just studiously ignoring that they've let the cat out of the bag and focusing on ways to mitigate the problem. Social media is a natural consequence of increased communication of larger groups, and as an emergent phenomenon based on everything else you aren't going to get rid of it. So instead we focus on how to mitigate the problems and live with it, because even if you shut down every single social network today, there would be new popular ones used by almost everyone a year from now.
bhntr3 6y ago
Yes, I think some people are becoming uncomfortable with unfettered free speech because the distribution model has changed in ways that are difficult to control and which are elevating what some people view as the "wrong" messages. Prior to this era in which we're constantly online and connected, for a message to be heard it usually had to go through a professional editor at a newspaper, radio station, publishing company, or TV station. If you had an opinion you wanted to share, you had free speech but you probably didn't have a platform. Now messages are global, immediate, viral, and permanent. Max Wang's video makes a strong case that Facebook's content policy and Zuckerberg's concern with adherence to it is a stringent ideology which lacks the flexibility to address clear cases that it should cover but doesn't. In other words it lacks good judgement. I think it's going to be a long time before an automated system can exercise good judgement. Obviously having a professional editor review every tweet is impossible. So in the meantime, I think we will see a continual elevation of tension between people who value free speech at any cost and people who think that certain messages shouldn't be given a platform.
StevePerkins 6y ago
Indeed. I have a theory, that many of the high-profile "advertiser boycotts" recently aren't really about content moderation. I suspect that companies simply don't want to promote their body wash in the middle of a constant screaming match about wearing masks. Being on Facebook bums me out. It makes me dislike my extended family, and old colleagues or people I knew from school. I've been unable to completely wean myself off it (the "engagement" hooks are strong), but I genuinely feel dirty and unhappy with myself after browsing the site. It certainly doesn't foster a positive view toward brands that I see advertising there. I wonder if: (1) that perspective is common, (2) large advertisers have figured it out, and (3) their "boycott over hate speech" is really just a clever way to get social-trend-extra-credit for a move they'd like to make anyway?
Nasrudith 6y ago
Satanic ritual panic and several other deeply moral panics say hello. Loud and extreme opinions and bullshit have always been rewarded with more attention because the adherents are more passionate.
zarkov99 6y ago
You are right, that is the central point. We have not been able to scale the small scale interactions our species evolved with to include thousands, let alone millions of people. Perhaps its impossible to do this, with brains such as ours. Nevertheless, the toxic result we get when we do try to do it is incredibly engaging, which is all that is required for the brokers to make money. This is not very different from a drug addiction. In both cases the victims are compelled, despite themselves, to engage in something that is harmful while the drug-dealers have absolutely no incentive to reduce or eliminate the damage.
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
One of the canned responses we have observed Zuckerberg make to the media in response has been something along the lines of "Facebook gives people who would not otherwise have a voice a chance to be heard" (words are mine, not theirs). The web already did that. By advocating that the world use only a single website to "speak", we allowed a single website owner to create a business by charging its users for the opportunity to publish their "speech" to segments of the website's audience. The reason most of those millions of people "joined" Facebook was not to voice their opinions to an audience. It was to communicate with family and friends. A new mode of communication. If those people who wanted to voice their opinions to audiences had their own websites, who would visit them? Would they have an audience of millions? (The term "millions" is used here as an expression for "many", not as an accurate estimate of the numbers in question) I have heard that there is talk in the US media of doing away with the US Postal Service. AKA Ye Olde Mode of Communication. It is unsettling how far things have come in eroding the American's right to be free from commercial or ideological pandering. There used to be a legally recognised principle that an American could say "No more", and then the pandering must stop. Try that with Facebook or any other "tech" company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_Form_1500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_Form_1500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_v._United_States_Post_Office_Department https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_v._United_States_Post_Of...
RikNieu 6y ago
I wonder how social networks would work without sharing and liking mechanism.
joshspankit 6y ago
I would argue that the problem started with the introduction of “youth marketing”. Marketers saw “getting them early” as a way to have a customer for life and therefore make more money overall, and they dove in. This resulted in prioritizing those things that younger people are drawn to, such as novelty and attention. Imo, this resulted in a huge cultural shift that has now resulted in “boring level headed opinions [based on years of experience]” being lost in the sea of people fighting for more attention through more novelty. The internet just threw rocket fuel on the problem.

by creato 6y ago

dr_dshiv 6y ago

Amen. The thing that's funny is it seems relatively straightforward to measure the positive and negative interactions and promote appropriately and transparently.

planb 6y ago

This is so right. But are you aware of any ideas what to do about this? It seems like everyone has just accepted that‘s the way it is now.

paulgb 6y ago
Unfortunately this doesn't work unless a massive group of people does it, but: stop sharing things that make you angry. They make you angry so that you share them. So much toxicity is rooted in exploiting this dynamic.
DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
I'm not sure what your whole list of requirements is for a solution, but: how about simply not using Facebook at all?
airstrike 6y ago
Favor moderated communities over "free" communities Push for ad-free social networks (probably not free to users, then)

koheripbal 6y ago

It's more than just the toxicity of the conversations. These vapid online brawls have engaged millions more people to vote who never would have voted in the past. Hence, introducing an easily swayed group of uneducated voters into the pool, and debasing politics to their level. If democracy represents the intelligence of the average voter, then engaging literally tens of millions of uneducated/emotional/immature people to vote significantly diminishes the ability of our government to make decisions and/or speak about problems honestly.

untog 6y ago
I don’t really see anything very different there. Voters have always been easily manipulated: by newspapers, TV, whatever. Though I suppose one key difference is that the source of that manipulation has been hidden: you used to know what newspaper pushed what, now actors hide behind sockpuppet accounts and promoted ads.
marcoperaza 6y ago
This is nothing new in kind. The founders were fearful of mass democracy too and sought to avoid creating one. For better or for worse, they failed.
- r3trohack3r 6y ago
  Reference? I don't see us as having created a representative democracy to protect democracy from the masses. I like to think we are a representative democracy because the masses are supposed to have better things to do than keep the lights of government on.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    One of the authors of the Constitution, James Madison. https://billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/primary-source-documents/the-federalist-papers/federalist-papers-no-51/ https://billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/primary...
  - bhupy 6y ago

Nextgrid 6y ago

The other problem is that the business model of social media is based on generating "engagement" at all costs, so the platforms are built to encourage outrage as it generates lots of engagement, among other addictive behaviors (the infinite "algorithmic" feed for example). Social media was supposed to be a tool that serves people but its current business model encourages it to work against people. There were plenty of other technologies that could've been used to organize large-scale virtual fight clubs (forums, BBSes, chatrooms, maybe even the telephone) but this didn't happen because nobody actually wanted to foster such toxic behavior.

dvt 6y ago
> nobody actually wanted to foster such toxic behavior I think no one realized you could make disgusting amounts of money by fostering it. There have been plenty of flame wars on BBSes and forums, but the tension between "engagement" and "quality" always favored the latter in small, private communities (HN is a good example). However, when it comes to Facebook and Twitter, the former is always favored (due to market forces, shareholder interests, etc.).
- jerf 6y ago
  "BBSes and forums" Observe flamewars on BBSs and forums tended to drive people away, thus tending to confine them through natural mechanisms. Our current systems encourage and fan them, and by profiting from them, create a system that sustains them indefinitely instead of naturally isolating them to just the people who actively want to participate. As someone who has a low-grade hobby of kind of keeping track of this sort of thing, I think one of the major challenges of trying to structure communities is all the most powerful drivers of what is going to happen occurs in these low-level decisions that create persistent second-order effects on the community's nature, and this is one of the somewhat unusual cases where the second-order effects utterly dominate the first-order effects. In this case, you can read "first-order effects" as "the things the developers intended to happen", which I think are dominated by the structural effects of decisions that aren't intentional. If you create a community that literally profits from conflict and flamewar, you'll never be able to fix them by any number of systems you try to add to fix that via first-order effects. The underlying structure is too powerful. Facebook can't be fixed with any amount of "moderation"; the entire structure, from the very foundation, is incapable of supporting a friendly community at scale. Until Facebook stops profiting from engagement, they will never be able to fix their problems with toxicity, no matter how many resources they pour into naively fighting it via direct fixups. (Now, I have questions about whether a friendly community of the scale of Facebook is even possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20146868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20146868 . But the fact it may not even be possible does not mean that Facebook is still obviously not that solution.)

thebigspacefuck 6y ago

"The only winning move is not to play."

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

dvt 6y ago

> I feel like all of this debate is painfully missing the point. Your point also applies to news -- articles these days miss the point by design. You get more clicks by being provocative and hyperbolic. And yellow journalism isn't really new, but its comeback has been triumphant.

AlexandrB 6y ago
That's hardly surprising. Both social media and regular media are now part of the same competition to get more clicks. The whole model of online ad-driven content is rotten and creates the worst incentives.
- analyte123 6y ago
  It's not so simple: social media is how regular media get most of their clicks. Not that I'm a huge fan of social media companies, but the constant push by regular media companies for social media companies to promote "authoritative sources" (i.e. regular media) and the accompanying hit pieces make a lot more sense in this context. To me, these articles are being honest in their criticism when they call for less social media in general, not just more control of the existing social media. This is one of the latter.
wott 6y ago
Along the last few weeks, Bing's news feed, the one that appears directly on the main page of bing.com, turned into a tabloid cesspool (at least in its French version). Gradually but very quickly, it turned from something reasonable, rather faithful to the range of important events (there could be one 'people' entry here and there, but why not, after all, as long as it remains very minor) into pure clickbait. The titles are clickbait ('incredible', 'exceptional', etc.) and the content behind is crap. It is possible that they put first, the ones that already get more clicks. If I translate the first entries titles right now: * Amazing confidences -> an actress * Big controversy -> a female singer * Corruption suspicion -> OK, a politician * Accused of lying -> an actor's wife * a few trivialities and filler items * Finally calm -> a dead singer's wife * Turkish activities -> OK, international news * from the previous item on, it is only now that you have a regular mix of normally interesting/important news items. You had to click once or twice on the Next arrow to get there, everything or almost everything on what I'd call the front page was clickbait crap. So, that's a feed, but the content comes from actual newspapers, and if I go to my local newspaper, half of the top content is also oftennational/international 'people' crap.

tsieling 6y ago

The policy and the design of the interface is inextricably linked to that change in interactions. A hands-off policy is still a policy for a site that rewarded more inflammatory content in pursuit of certain metrics.

vkou 6y ago

> Boring level headed opinions used to at least have a chance of rising above the noise. ... Because they were heavily promoted by the people who owned the media platforms. It wasn't because of any of their particular virtues. Consider your bias when making this claim. What makes an opinion boring and level-headed? That it is squarely in the middle of the Overton window? Who sets the Overton window, in the pre-social-network world where the overwhelming majority of media is state/corporate-sponsored? It's not some natural evolutionary process that caused boring, level-headed opinions to rise to the top. It was self-serving opinions rising to the top, that, because of their ubiquity, are believed to be boring and level-headed. When viewed from a different cultural lens, many of those boring and level-headed opinions appear completely batshit insane. For example, the current American model for healthcare seems, for the most part (Everyone has a few minor tweaks they want to make - but setting that aside), boring and level-headed and reasonable to ~half the country. To the rest of the world, it appears completely insane, and anyone proposing switching to it would be a complete lunatic. In the US, however, the converse holds - switching away from it is considered by many to be absolutely crazy. Which of those opinions is the reasonable, level-headed one? It depends on your current social setting, not on the virtues or drawbacks of the expressed idea.

iamacyborg 6y ago

> where the most extreme opinions are rewarded with the most attention Which is amusing given that even here we have to deal with an upvote mechanism that boosts posts from strong extreme opinions.

ehsankia 6y ago
Personally, I think the retweet model is slightly more problematic than the upvote model. For one, upvotes have an equivalent downvote (usually), which a retweet doesn't. If a famous account upvotes a post, and a I downvote a post, they basically cancel each other. If a famous account on retweets a post, then millions more will see it thanks to that one button click, and nothing I can do balanced that. Facebook also thrives on a similar "re-share" model, which leads to the most toxic content spreading extremely quickly and bouncing to new audiences, whereas no matter how many times I upvote this thread, only a few % of the world browses HN.
hodgesrm 6y ago
It seems to me HN rewards views that are "interesting" but the most highly rated comments seem to be pretty mainstream nerd stuff. Do you see evidence to the contrary?

rainyMammoth 6y ago

This is exactly the point I'm trying to explain to my friends that are outraged that Facebook didn't censor Trump's post. I think Facebook is one of the worst companies out there, but for other reasons. The issue with Facebook is not about censoring the post that we don't like, it's about removing that polarization that comes with a platform that wants to get you hooked so they can sell you more ads. Facebook and other social media are making us HATE each other because that's what they make money on. The debate should be around how can you build an ethical social platform that values your time and opinions.

foofoo4u 6y ago
I do agree that the ad-based business model is designed to have us hate each other because that is what drives engagement. So I'd like to get your thoughts on this thought experiment. What if it was illegal for social media platforms to base their revenue stream on advertising? Instead, it is mandated by law that their primary revenue is based on a subscription model? "Want to use Facebook? You'll need to pay $4 a month to use it." What do you suppose the nature of Facebook would be like then and, to an extent, its impact to society at large? Perhaps better? It has been my impression so far that services that require paid subscriptions over free usage tend to respect privacy better, have higher quality content, and are less addicting in usage.

maps7 6y ago

I am developing a site where the landing page only shows news about topics from sources you have chosen to see. There will be some limited interaction with those news stories. On a shared page, everything is brought together and you'll see what news sources other people are reading. I am hoping this allows people to get the news they want, interact with it and see what news other people are interacting with... without the flame wars and hate brigades that Twitter and FB prompt

floatrock 6y ago
sounds like Reddit. Or Digg before that. Or RSS feeds before that.
- jks 6y ago
  Google Reader had a limited kind of social networking where you could comment on the articles and your friends saw the comments if they were subscribed to the same feed, but there were no replies to comments and they never got outside your contacts. No popularity contests with Like buttons or similar.
- maps7 6y ago
  Yeah, not too different. No user submitted links though and no comment system (at least when I first make it live). To be honest, I'll probably be the only user!

sbussard 6y ago

How can I upvote this twice?

aSplash0fDerp 6y ago

If you want to stand out from the crowd... Don`t stand in crowds... BLHO`s are nowhere to be found.... Because they have already left the building. "Die looted" is not referencing the information quality/concentration, but BLHO types know better.

kbenson 6y ago

I don't think it's painfully missing the point, it's just studiously ignoring that they've let the cat out of the bag and focusing on ways to mitigate the problem. Social media is a natural consequence of increased communication of larger groups, and as an emergent phenomenon based on everything else you aren't going to get rid of it. So instead we focus on how to mitigate the problems and live with it, because even if you shut down every single social network today, there would be new popular ones used by almost everyone a year from now.

bhntr3 6y ago

Yes, I think some people are becoming uncomfortable with unfettered free speech because the distribution model has changed in ways that are difficult to control and which are elevating what some people view as the "wrong" messages. Prior to this era in which we're constantly online and connected, for a message to be heard it usually had to go through a professional editor at a newspaper, radio station, publishing company, or TV station. If you had an opinion you wanted to share, you had free speech but you probably didn't have a platform. Now messages are global, immediate, viral, and permanent. Max Wang's video makes a strong case that Facebook's content policy and Zuckerberg's concern with adherence to it is a stringent ideology which lacks the flexibility to address clear cases that it should cover but doesn't. In other words it lacks good judgement. I think it's going to be a long time before an automated system can exercise good judgement. Obviously having a professional editor review every tweet is impossible. So in the meantime, I think we will see a continual elevation of tension between people who value free speech at any cost and people who think that certain messages shouldn't be given a platform.

StevePerkins 6y ago

Indeed. I have a theory, that many of the high-profile "advertiser boycotts" recently aren't really about content moderation. I suspect that companies simply don't want to promote their body wash in the middle of a constant screaming match about wearing masks. Being on Facebook bums me out. It makes me dislike my extended family, and old colleagues or people I knew from school. I've been unable to completely wean myself off it (the "engagement" hooks are strong), but I genuinely feel dirty and unhappy with myself after browsing the site. It certainly doesn't foster a positive view toward brands that I see advertising there. I wonder if: (1) that perspective is common, (2) large advertisers have figured it out, and (3) their "boycott over hate speech" is really just a clever way to get social-trend-extra-credit for a move they'd like to make anyway?

Nasrudith 6y ago

Satanic ritual panic and several other deeply moral panics say hello. Loud and extreme opinions and bullshit have always been rewarded with more attention because the adherents are more passionate.

zarkov99 6y ago

You are right, that is the central point. We have not been able to scale the small scale interactions our species evolved with to include thousands, let alone millions of people. Perhaps its impossible to do this, with brains such as ours. Nevertheless, the toxic result we get when we do try to do it is incredibly engaging, which is all that is required for the brokers to make money. This is not very different from a drug addiction. In both cases the victims are compelled, despite themselves, to engage in something that is harmful while the drug-dealers have absolutely no incentive to reduce or eliminate the damage.

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

One of the canned responses we have observed Zuckerberg make to the media in response has been something along the lines of "Facebook gives people who would not otherwise have a voice a chance to be heard" (words are mine, not theirs). The web already did that. By advocating that the world use only a single website to "speak", we allowed a single website owner to create a business by charging its users for the opportunity to publish their "speech" to segments of the website's audience. The reason most of those millions of people "joined" Facebook was not to voice their opinions to an audience. It was to communicate with family and friends. A new mode of communication. If those people who wanted to voice their opinions to audiences had their own websites, who would visit them? Would they have an audience of millions? (The term "millions" is used here as an expression for "many", not as an accurate estimate of the numbers in question) I have heard that there is talk in the US media of doing away with the US Postal Service. AKA Ye Olde Mode of Communication. It is unsettling how far things have come in eroding the American's right to be free from commercial or ideological pandering. There used to be a legally recognised principle that an American could say "No more", and then the pandering must stop. Try that with Facebook or any other "tech" company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_Form_1500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_Form_1500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_v._United_States_Post_Office_Department https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_v._United_States_Post_Of...

RikNieu 6y ago

I wonder how social networks would work without sharing and liking mechanism.

joshspankit 6y ago

I would argue that the problem started with the introduction of “youth marketing”. Marketers saw “getting them early” as a way to have a customer for life and therefore make more money overall, and they dove in. This resulted in prioritizing those things that younger people are drawn to, such as novelty and attention. Imo, this resulted in a huge cultural shift that has now resulted in “boring level headed opinions [based on years of experience]” being lost in the sea of people fighting for more attention through more novelty. The internet just threw rocket fuel on the problem.