5 ms·

Remove the Publicly visible Like Count and those kind of conversations and connections are easy. The Like count makes people defensive or aggressive especially

• renewiltord 6y ago
  What. People were acrimonious in the medieval ages. They didn't have like counts. This is such total bullshit.
  • op03 6y ago
    I have seen it with friends busy bashing each other on Twitter/FB but being able to reconcile on a Whatsapp group or a private meeting. Its not that on Whatsapp groups some members of the group aren't entertained by a good fight and goad/encourage both sides. Its that when its private and social status and social signaling is less of a priority and people you trust/respect can step in and cool things down and refocus the conversation on solutions. In the public square there are thousands of retards who will show up to encourage both sides to keep fighting. It benefits the platforms. Conflict is much more engaging than a boring conversation on lets work out the details.
    • intended 6y ago
      Maybe people are now, more often than not, talking to Human nodes in a network, and the network outperforms you in presenting data that will match a confirmation bias. So it would imply that you can reason with an individual who isn’t acting as node.
  • ineedasername 6y ago
    Just because there was a bad thing in the medieval ages doesn't mean it can't be much worse now that it's turned into a point-scoring spectacle sport.
  • monkeycantype 6y ago
    The like button is my performative social stupidity amplified. My stupid is loud enough already. In all those generations of horrendous behaviour there are predictable patterns. At our best we are wonderful curious intelligent and kind, but in the heat of the moment, most of us don't have a lot of emotional self control, so we need to plan ahead to make better behaviour effortless and stupid behaviour effortful. The like button is a mini version of the gun control debate, of course guns don't kill people on their own (actually... says boston robotics in the corner). I have close friend, a well respected law graduate now working in another field who said this week he'd love to have a weapon to wave at people who cut him off in traffic. This is a man who has worked for years to build a life and career, and he lacks the judgement to not escalate a trivial tiff with a stranger to a life or career ending act of stupidity.
  • jkestner 6y ago
    Yeah, but now acrimony’s at webscale.
• DayneRathbone 6y ago
  Shameless plug: this is why my co-founders and I built https://letter.wiki https://letter.wiki
  • stickyricky 6y ago
    Are the author's writing for your site, are you aggregating, or both? Either way, I bookmarked it. Seems like a very interesting product!
  • gilrain 6y ago
    Too fucking soon.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• anigbrowl 6y ago
  People were horrible to each other online long before modern social media, and indeed in print and in person long before that. While some people do indeed pursue likes for their own sake, it's not the root cause of social aggression.
  • taurath 6y ago
    It's not the catalyst, it's the accelerant - when you have 1000 points for your troll post you're sure as heck gonna do more of them.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • neffy 6y ago
      That's the basic problem. All the motivation and encourgement is towards extreme, attention grabbing content.
      • Rebbitor 6y ago
        I am sorry that you are unaware of life before the internet. People have been trolling each other before the internet. A well known troll was sending packages that exploded on people. In fact I think we have gotten a lot more civil lately. Exploding packages sounds a lot worse and uncivil than your comment internet trolling and uncivility.
        • taurath 6y ago
          Thats a fairly extreme statement - you're saying that "because extreme events also used to take place, the internet is not involved, and in fact is a help". So to you, the internet is a completely neutral platform with no side effects? I do not think you will find many people on the planet that will agree with you.
      • taurath 6y ago
        To me it seems like an extremely solvable problem. Facebook could do an A/B test right now of removing all likes and see what happens. You'll get an answer as to some of the effects in a week. The question is what metrics you decide on determines "moderate" as opposed to "extreme". To anyone at facebook - please dissuade me if I'm being naive here - I'm always looking to update my mental model of this.
• akeck 6y ago
  I don't know if Likes are the root of the issue, but they certainly don't help. Newsgroups had no such signaling and they could get really toxic.
• nine_k 6y ago
  I like how Slashdot handles it. Posts and comments do have counts, but the range is reasonably narrow, from -2 to +5. This allows for modding down noise, and modding up the signal, but this excludes the comparative phallometry typical for FB and twitter threads with hundreds and thousands on upvote counters.
  • c54 6y ago
    “comparative phallometry” XD
  • gre 6y ago
    The other cool thing about slashdot moderation is why it's +5, like insightful, funny, and the coveted "+5 Troll"
    • nine_k 6y ago
      Yes, this is a great and well-working feature.
  • pnw_hazor 6y ago
    And not everyone can vote. As a casual but everyday user, I was issued mod points one time in over 20 years. (Though lately I rarely read or comment there anymore.)
• slg 6y ago
  I'm sorry, but this is wildly naive. It isn't "likes" that are causing the problem. It is things like the fact that one side appears to be in the early stages[1] of a UN defined genocide[2]. I'm not going to be friendly to you if you think lower taxes or some other excuse is more important than the human and civil rights abuses that party supports. [1] - https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/09/17/hysterectomies-immigrants-complaint-ice-and-detention-center-irwin-county/3482369001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/09/17/hyster... [2] - https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
  • giantg2 6y ago
    Both sides abuse civil rights when it suits them. Uninformed sterilization has happened in the past in this country too. Look at doctors at some Native American reservations. It's quite abhorrent to stereotype an entire of party based on the sensationalism of an extremely small subset of actors. Also the 'band wagon' effect is a widely documented cognitive bias - so there is merit to the idea that "likes" can create bias.
    • slg 6y ago
      >It's quite abhorrent to stereotype an entire of party based on the sensationalism of an extremely small subset of actors. Meanwhile the president was just on a stage in Minnesota talking about "racehorse theory"[1]. His biographer has previously described it as follows: "The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development. They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring."[2] I don't know where I would get the idea that he is in support of eugenics. [1] - https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1307124621389463553 https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1307124621389463553 [2] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-president-superior-genes-pbs-documentary-eugenics-a7338821.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-tru...
      • giantg2 6y ago
        Again, you are using the statements/actions of an extremely small subset to stereotype an entire party (tens or hundreds of millions of people).
• ejz 6y ago
  This doesn't make sense to me. There absolutely was a "like count". There were votes for decisions and there were citations for opinions. Academia is bitter for that reason. Yet, with the same incentives and much higher stakes they remained friends.
• unabst 6y ago
  Even if the counts are private, counters create an ulterior motive beyond substantive discourse in the desire to collect likes. Their signals constrain speech as posts are authored. Just like the profit motive, the like motive greatly skews reality from beneath the surface of what is being said. And to disagree with someone, you should have to at least open your mouth. That's a conversation. To just be able to dislike or downvote let alone anonymously is harmful for everyone, even the person downvoting. Instead of exercising speech, it's a slap on the wrist response. Removing context removes nuance, and removing nuance removes intellect.
• dang 6y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24523014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24523014.
  • COGlory 6y ago
    Good luck Mr. Dan. I don't envy you right now.
• bnralt 6y ago
  The other problem with most online communities is that there's almost no limit on output. All else being equal, someone with an active offline life is going to have a smaller presence than someone who's terminally online, someone who spends more time listening to others is going to have a smaller presence than someone who spends more time talking, someone who puts more effort into their posts (proofreading, look up evidence) is going to have a smaller presence than someone who haphazardly shoots off comments, and someone who reserves comments for when they have something important to contribute is going to have less of a presence than someone who comments on things they don't know anything about. Things like mods (most people don't have the time commitment), voting (terminally online people will be able to vote earlier and more often, driving the conversation), front page thresholds (a small group of people acting as filters for new submissions), and time limited submissions (the longer you wait to comment the more likely the conversation will have died) just skews things even more. For all the discussion about the low quality of online conversations, there seems to be very little discussion about the environments we've created and what kind of discussion these environments encourage.