4 ms·

Delete your twitter/facebook/reddit account. Seriously! Go do it now! These sites are built with the goal of pushing people into groups that are always angry a

by swiley 6y ago

Delete your twitter/facebook/reddit account. Seriously! Go do it now! These sites are built with the goal of pushing people into groups that are always angry at each other. Angry polarized groups spend more time on the site and are easier to sell things to. The only thing ignoring this trash will do is make you a happier, more functional person.

zo1 6y ago
On some level yes. But the unfortunate side is that it's seeping into the overall culture and previously-benign and relatively apolitical institutions. That makes it dangerous to "ignore" and hope it goes away due to us all deciding to be reasonable and ignore the hateful and prominent voices that use social-media as a megaphone. Some institutions being actively soaked in identity politics and other divisive elements: Higher education Lower Education United Nations Local government bodies Charity Organizations Sports
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  I do agree with you and I want the constant crawl of IdPol stop, but I can't help but feel this is part of the polarization aspect. The internet is causing the growth of IdPol as well as the growth of the movement against it.
  - swiley 6y ago
    IMO: it's not "the internet." At least, not to the same degree. It's the huge platforms with their own ad networks that are driving it.
  - ForHackernews 6y ago
    https://areomagazine.com/2020/10/27/why-fourteen-critics-of-social-justice-think-you-shouldnt-vote-for-trump/ https://areomagazine.com/2020/10/27/why-fourteen-critics-of-... IMHO, we need a return to "boring" centrist politics.
- auganov 6y ago
  > But the unfortunate side is that it's seeping into the overall culture and previously-benign and relatively apolitical institutions It's very hard to be apolitical. Almost all behavior can be interpreted politically. What has really changed is it's much easier to obtain information about an organization and the individuals involved. In the past you might have simply not known enough to peg someone politically. Hence the impression of neutrality. Today it's just harder to create this illusion.
bogwog 6y ago
Social media might need to be controlled in the same way cigarettes are. At the end of the day, both are drug dealers. One of them sells nicotine, the other sells dopamine. Not sure what that would look like though. Cigarettes have scary labels and enforced age requirements. Maybe social media would have to change the way likes/upvotes/etc work to be less polarizing, in addition to an age limit enforcement?
- op03 6y ago
  Its not complicated. There are dose response curves for everything once you start studying them - https://www.epa.gov/environmental-topics/chemicals-and-toxics-topics https://www.epa.gov/environmental-topics/chemicals-and-toxic... https://www.epa.gov/fera/dose-response-assessment-assessing-health-risks-associated-exposure-hazardous-air-pollutants https://www.epa.gov/fera/dose-response-assessment-assessing-... How did we build these tables? Same process will apply to how much dopamine (and whatever else) you can keep giving a kid or a group of people over time without serious consequences Whether that takes 2 years or 20 years more to tabulate, lots of people will take a hit thanks to their internal reward mechanisms being gamed.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  The various Wars On Drugs do not inspire. According to me, they have at best been ineffectual, and more commonly made a bad thing worse. I think/hope we're in a transitional phase of our civilization where we haven't figured out how to handle these new things yet. Over time, institutions will emerge. They always do, right?
  - ben_w 6y ago
    Yes, but the dynamics may be different. If social network software is banned, and replaced with a ten million small DIY networks that don’t interact with each other, will that be any different than local pubs and clubs? If the networks join up, letting people interact, enabling or encouraging hate between each other, there is an incentive for members of each group to report the illegal networks to the authorities to harm “the other lot”. (This is just an off-the-cuff thought, I’m a long way from understanding sociopolitical dynamics)
Tycho 6y ago
If it wasn’t for Twitter I would have literally no clue about the machinations of the intelligence agencies to undermine the president or the corrupt activities of the Biden family. Unfortunately the mainstream media outlets choose not to report or pursue a lot of stuff, and have an alarming habit of citing dubious statements from “the intelligence community” as legitimate evidence that resolves the matter.
- swiley 6y ago
  twitter is a terrible tool for this. It's heavily censored and biased. You could have heard it here or from a decent journalist.
  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    This site is censored too, and the news media is becoming increasingly partisan an consolidated as well.
  - Tycho 6y ago
    Twitter can only make meagre attempts to censor. They can stop something from “trending” or whatever. But if you want to hear from independent journalists and researchers and analysts, Twitter lets you do that, and short of shutting down the entire service, it’s unstoppable.
    - knaq 6y ago
      Twitter blocked the nation's oldest and 4th-largest newspaper, the New York Post, for 16 days. This was election interference. Twitter's CEO was called to testify about it in front of congress, where he falsely claimed that the New York Post wasn't blocked. Ted Cruz called him out on the matter, pointing out that lying in sworn testimony to congress is a felony, and the New York Post got unblocked an hour later. The numerous little independent journalists rarely get that level of help from a senator. They have no chance against the censorship.
      - 6y ago
laurent92 6y ago
The double problem is, we are isolated, often after various moves due to our studies and first years of work, otherwise because we diverge politically from other ex- or people in our family who, themselves, got polarized the other way. So deleting social networks would be a good thing, but we depend on them for out last human interactions on weekends and evenings. Even worse during confinement.
- _iyig 6y ago
  Computer games with voice chat have helped me weather COVID cabin fever as an alternative to social media. Particularly in PvE MMOs, players are just there to collaborate and have fun, with no room for politics to intrude.
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    Can you recommend some PS4 titles?
    - _iyig 6y ago
      Don’t have a PS4, sorry. World of Warcraft Classic on PC has been fun for me, using Discord for voice chat.
cblconfederate 6y ago
I wish that were true. Social media cringe is just the symptom
- codysan 6y ago
  I'm not so sure that it's the cringe that is the problem. I think it's the notion that these social media platforms are acting as a lens for how a lot of people see the world.
navidfarhadi 6y ago
It’s possible to (mostly) avoid political stuff on those websites if one wants to, instead of refusing to use the sites completely. Just as an example, I rarely visit r/all, but I do visit specific subreddits that I’m subscribed to like r/privacy, r/pihole, and r/thinkpad. On Facebook, I never browse my newsfeed, but I am a member of a group for my apartment complex in the Stockholm area which lists local events and people selling stuff or giving away stuff in the community. My point is that is that it’s possible to filter out a lot of the political garbage on those sites if one wishes, but it does appear to be getting more difficult since political stuff is appearing more and more often in places that I personally wouldn’t expect.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  It is virtually impossible on Twitter, I know because I've used every tool possible (tweet deck, lists, occasionally muting people, changing the feed layout) and it just doesn't work because (a) Twitter is designed to bleed content from one tribe to another (b), because people have one feed where they combine work, private life and politics and (c) the metrics Twitter use are based on designs that agitate and divide.
  - treeman79 6y ago
    Was keeping an eye on Twitter a Few months ago, while watching the downtown being burned. Started seeing tons of tweets from people who decided my area was next. Tons of people going out about how they were going to burn us down. Then watching them as they all started heading our way. Thankfully they found all the exits blocked by police. I don’t own guns. But my area is big on gun rights. Looters vs gun nuts. So yea, well. It’s a pretty screwed up situation. Like one step from civiL war screwed up.
- legulere 6y ago
  How is a subreddit about privacy not political? It might not align to the two political parties in the US, but for sure I expect there to be an echo-chamber of people that value privacy more over other rights than regular people.
- 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ploika 6y ago
"Rivals are alien, unlikable, contemptible" could be a description of feelings in Northern Ireland during its worst days, long before the advent of social media. Poisonous rhetoric definitely made things worse, but the real damage was done by things like gerrymandering, unequal access to jobs and housing, and repressive one-sided policing. From a distance, it looks like some of those same problems are contributing to the USA's polarisation. Fixing them will be much more important, and much harder, than just tuning out obnoxious media.
nabla9 6y ago
People in social media spend several hours per day following politics but almost nobody of them is engaged in any real political work. They are engaging with politics to satisfy our own emotional needs and intellectual curiosities. That’s political hobbyism/consumerism. It's not different from being sports fan. Making noise from the couch but not having no effect in the game and annoying people who don't follow. They have no serious purpose. They are just wasting energy.
- ecocentrik 6y ago
  Keeping informed has been always been a prerequisite of American democracy. "wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government" Thomas Jefferson (https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/60.html https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/60.html) Engaging in the political dialogue is not wasted energy. Low level engagement on social media might be about as impactful as filling a stadium to see a politician speak during a pandemic but high level engagement is really the only way to participate in American democracy right now. If it wasn't valuable, nobody would be training bots to disrupt the process by amplifying division and hate. Sane politicians aren't going door to door these days or standing on crowded street corners. They're interacting on social media.
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    > If it wasn't valuable, nobody would be programming bots to disrupt the process and amplify division and hate. The fact that social media sites are a valuable manipulation target to certain people doesn't make them valuable to you as a consumer. To the contrary.
  - nabla9 6y ago
    > Engaging in the political dialogue is not wasted energy. As it is practised in the internet it's horrible destructive energy in the internet. Actual political work is much better. >Sane politicians Yes. Politicians. They also do actual political work. Public that spends hours in political internet and does not engage outside it goes insane.
netcan 6y ago
How do you see HN fitting into this? I mean, HN is a "single feed" which avoids the belligerent group dynamics... but culture bleeds. The narrative dichotomies and other elements of this belligerence dynamic (I think it's more belligerence than polarisation, btw) exist here and other social media that isn't explicitly structured for it like twitter, reddit or fb. Is massive, many-2-many communication a lost cause?
golergka 6y ago
As if there isn't as much polarization happening right here.
tomohawk 6y ago
Social media has served as an accelerant for identity politics. The two go hand in hand. How does civil society survive if we're just a collection of tribal groups pursuing divided interests and throwing rocks at each other?
ecocentrik 6y ago
Just deleting social media is not a solution. Divisive otherisum is an attack on the social sensibilities of the the last few decades and a lot of it is being promoted by bots. A better solution is to find ways to disrupt the bots creating or amplifying the hate. Why poison the well that opened up global communication and brought us closer together? Why promote anti-globalism and distrust in journalism while disrupting the lines of communication? Are we being primed for war? genocide? mass-depopulation? Whatever it is, the last thing people should do is comply.
agumonkey 6y ago
Please, they're not all made for this. Curating subreddits you follow will make reddit pretty much ok and problem free. Now I still suggest people to reduce online activities as much as possible. It's probably a long term neurological disease.
mc32 6y ago
That helps, but it’s impossible to avoid —even if you avoid partisan sites. Traditional Mainstream media take sides and present one side as orthodox and the other as heterodox. Google is guilty of soft censorship (either deranks, or with autocomplete refuses to autocomplete search phrases that are contrarian to orthodoxy).
Lendal 6y ago
Maybe we should do the opposite. Maybe we should all create thousands of Facebook accounts, with randomized profiles that promote random articles and AI-generated comments. Then that program runs on your machine whenever you're not using it. It would be opt-in, like SETI@Home. It could bring the whole world together in a massive community effort, with the feel-good focus of destroying-Facebook togetherness. I would call it Baseball-and-Apple-Pie@Home. Then we all sit back and enjoy the ensuing utopia of a clean, Facebook-free planet.
intended 6y ago
America had this issue before these sites came up. Ignoring this will make a single individual better, but that will only leave you back at square one - which is being at the mercy of the America news media environment. For an individual this may be the right call, for the scope and scale of the issue being discussed in this article, it doesn’t seem like it.

by swiley 6y ago

zo1 6y ago

On some level yes. But the unfortunate side is that it's seeping into the overall culture and previously-benign and relatively apolitical institutions. That makes it dangerous to "ignore" and hope it goes away due to us all deciding to be reasonable and ignore the hateful and prominent voices that use social-media as a megaphone. Some institutions being actively soaked in identity politics and other divisive elements: Higher education Lower Education United Nations Local government bodies Charity Organizations Sports

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwaway3699 6y ago
I do agree with you and I want the constant crawl of IdPol stop, but I can't help but feel this is part of the polarization aspect. The internet is causing the growth of IdPol as well as the growth of the movement against it.
- swiley 6y ago
  IMO: it's not "the internet." At least, not to the same degree. It's the huge platforms with their own ad networks that are driving it.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  https://areomagazine.com/2020/10/27/why-fourteen-critics-of-social-justice-think-you-shouldnt-vote-for-trump/ https://areomagazine.com/2020/10/27/why-fourteen-critics-of-... IMHO, we need a return to "boring" centrist politics.
auganov 6y ago
> But the unfortunate side is that it's seeping into the overall culture and previously-benign and relatively apolitical institutions It's very hard to be apolitical. Almost all behavior can be interpreted politically. What has really changed is it's much easier to obtain information about an organization and the individuals involved. In the past you might have simply not known enough to peg someone politically. Hence the impression of neutrality. Today it's just harder to create this illusion.

bogwog 6y ago

Social media might need to be controlled in the same way cigarettes are. At the end of the day, both are drug dealers. One of them sells nicotine, the other sells dopamine. Not sure what that would look like though. Cigarettes have scary labels and enforced age requirements. Maybe social media would have to change the way likes/upvotes/etc work to be less polarizing, in addition to an age limit enforcement?

op03 6y ago
Its not complicated. There are dose response curves for everything once you start studying them - https://www.epa.gov/environmental-topics/chemicals-and-toxics-topics https://www.epa.gov/environmental-topics/chemicals-and-toxic... https://www.epa.gov/fera/dose-response-assessment-assessing-health-risks-associated-exposure-hazardous-air-pollutants https://www.epa.gov/fera/dose-response-assessment-assessing-... How did we build these tables? Same process will apply to how much dopamine (and whatever else) you can keep giving a kid or a group of people over time without serious consequences Whether that takes 2 years or 20 years more to tabulate, lots of people will take a hit thanks to their internal reward mechanisms being gamed.
BurningFrog 6y ago
The various Wars On Drugs do not inspire. According to me, they have at best been ineffectual, and more commonly made a bad thing worse. I think/hope we're in a transitional phase of our civilization where we haven't figured out how to handle these new things yet. Over time, institutions will emerge. They always do, right?
- ben_w 6y ago
  Yes, but the dynamics may be different. If social network software is banned, and replaced with a ten million small DIY networks that don’t interact with each other, will that be any different than local pubs and clubs? If the networks join up, letting people interact, enabling or encouraging hate between each other, there is an incentive for members of each group to report the illegal networks to the authorities to harm “the other lot”. (This is just an off-the-cuff thought, I’m a long way from understanding sociopolitical dynamics)

Tycho 6y ago

If it wasn’t for Twitter I would have literally no clue about the machinations of the intelligence agencies to undermine the president or the corrupt activities of the Biden family. Unfortunately the mainstream media outlets choose not to report or pursue a lot of stuff, and have an alarming habit of citing dubious statements from “the intelligence community” as legitimate evidence that resolves the matter.

swiley 6y ago
twitter is a terrible tool for this. It's heavily censored and biased. You could have heard it here or from a decent journalist.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  This site is censored too, and the news media is becoming increasingly partisan an consolidated as well.
- Tycho 6y ago
  Twitter can only make meagre attempts to censor. They can stop something from “trending” or whatever. But if you want to hear from independent journalists and researchers and analysts, Twitter lets you do that, and short of shutting down the entire service, it’s unstoppable.
  - knaq 6y ago
    Twitter blocked the nation's oldest and 4th-largest newspaper, the New York Post, for 16 days. This was election interference. Twitter's CEO was called to testify about it in front of congress, where he falsely claimed that the New York Post wasn't blocked. Ted Cruz called him out on the matter, pointing out that lying in sworn testimony to congress is a felony, and the New York Post got unblocked an hour later. The numerous little independent journalists rarely get that level of help from a senator. They have no chance against the censorship.
    - 6y ago

laurent92 6y ago

The double problem is, we are isolated, often after various moves due to our studies and first years of work, otherwise because we diverge politically from other ex- or people in our family who, themselves, got polarized the other way. So deleting social networks would be a good thing, but we depend on them for out last human interactions on weekends and evenings. Even worse during confinement.

_iyig 6y ago
Computer games with voice chat have helped me weather COVID cabin fever as an alternative to social media. Particularly in PvE MMOs, players are just there to collaborate and have fun, with no room for politics to intrude.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  Can you recommend some PS4 titles?
  - _iyig 6y ago
    Don’t have a PS4, sorry. World of Warcraft Classic on PC has been fun for me, using Discord for voice chat.

cblconfederate 6y ago

I wish that were true. Social media cringe is just the symptom

codysan 6y ago
I'm not so sure that it's the cringe that is the problem. I think it's the notion that these social media platforms are acting as a lens for how a lot of people see the world.

navidfarhadi 6y ago

It’s possible to (mostly) avoid political stuff on those websites if one wants to, instead of refusing to use the sites completely. Just as an example, I rarely visit r/all, but I do visit specific subreddits that I’m subscribed to like r/privacy, r/pihole, and r/thinkpad. On Facebook, I never browse my newsfeed, but I am a member of a group for my apartment complex in the Stockholm area which lists local events and people selling stuff or giving away stuff in the community. My point is that is that it’s possible to filter out a lot of the political garbage on those sites if one wishes, but it does appear to be getting more difficult since political stuff is appearing more and more often in places that I personally wouldn’t expect.

arkitaip 6y ago
It is virtually impossible on Twitter, I know because I've used every tool possible (tweet deck, lists, occasionally muting people, changing the feed layout) and it just doesn't work because (a) Twitter is designed to bleed content from one tribe to another (b), because people have one feed where they combine work, private life and politics and (c) the metrics Twitter use are based on designs that agitate and divide.
- treeman79 6y ago
  Was keeping an eye on Twitter a Few months ago, while watching the downtown being burned. Started seeing tons of tweets from people who decided my area was next. Tons of people going out about how they were going to burn us down. Then watching them as they all started heading our way. Thankfully they found all the exits blocked by police. I don’t own guns. But my area is big on gun rights. Looters vs gun nuts. So yea, well. It’s a pretty screwed up situation. Like one step from civiL war screwed up.
legulere 6y ago
How is a subreddit about privacy not political? It might not align to the two political parties in the US, but for sure I expect there to be an echo-chamber of people that value privacy more over other rights than regular people.
6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ploika 6y ago

"Rivals are alien, unlikable, contemptible" could be a description of feelings in Northern Ireland during its worst days, long before the advent of social media. Poisonous rhetoric definitely made things worse, but the real damage was done by things like gerrymandering, unequal access to jobs and housing, and repressive one-sided policing. From a distance, it looks like some of those same problems are contributing to the USA's polarisation. Fixing them will be much more important, and much harder, than just tuning out obnoxious media.

nabla9 6y ago

People in social media spend several hours per day following politics but almost nobody of them is engaged in any real political work. They are engaging with politics to satisfy our own emotional needs and intellectual curiosities. That’s political hobbyism/consumerism. It's not different from being sports fan. Making noise from the couch but not having no effect in the game and annoying people who don't follow. They have no serious purpose. They are just wasting energy.

ecocentrik 6y ago
Keeping informed has been always been a prerequisite of American democracy. "wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government" Thomas Jefferson (https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/60.html https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/60.html) Engaging in the political dialogue is not wasted energy. Low level engagement on social media might be about as impactful as filling a stadium to see a politician speak during a pandemic but high level engagement is really the only way to participate in American democracy right now. If it wasn't valuable, nobody would be training bots to disrupt the process by amplifying division and hate. Sane politicians aren't going door to door these days or standing on crowded street corners. They're interacting on social media.
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  > If it wasn't valuable, nobody would be programming bots to disrupt the process and amplify division and hate. The fact that social media sites are a valuable manipulation target to certain people doesn't make them valuable to you as a consumer. To the contrary.
- nabla9 6y ago
  > Engaging in the political dialogue is not wasted energy. As it is practised in the internet it's horrible destructive energy in the internet. Actual political work is much better. >Sane politicians Yes. Politicians. They also do actual political work. Public that spends hours in political internet and does not engage outside it goes insane.

netcan 6y ago

How do you see HN fitting into this? I mean, HN is a "single feed" which avoids the belligerent group dynamics... but culture bleeds. The narrative dichotomies and other elements of this belligerence dynamic (I think it's more belligerence than polarisation, btw) exist here and other social media that isn't explicitly structured for it like twitter, reddit or fb. Is massive, many-2-many communication a lost cause?

golergka 6y ago

As if there isn't as much polarization happening right here.

tomohawk 6y ago

Social media has served as an accelerant for identity politics. The two go hand in hand. How does civil society survive if we're just a collection of tribal groups pursuing divided interests and throwing rocks at each other?

ecocentrik 6y ago

Just deleting social media is not a solution. Divisive otherisum is an attack on the social sensibilities of the the last few decades and a lot of it is being promoted by bots. A better solution is to find ways to disrupt the bots creating or amplifying the hate. Why poison the well that opened up global communication and brought us closer together? Why promote anti-globalism and distrust in journalism while disrupting the lines of communication? Are we being primed for war? genocide? mass-depopulation? Whatever it is, the last thing people should do is comply.

agumonkey 6y ago

Please, they're not all made for this. Curating subreddits you follow will make reddit pretty much ok and problem free. Now I still suggest people to reduce online activities as much as possible. It's probably a long term neurological disease.

mc32 6y ago

That helps, but it’s impossible to avoid —even if you avoid partisan sites. Traditional Mainstream media take sides and present one side as orthodox and the other as heterodox. Google is guilty of soft censorship (either deranks, or with autocomplete refuses to autocomplete search phrases that are contrarian to orthodoxy).

Lendal 6y ago

Maybe we should do the opposite. Maybe we should all create thousands of Facebook accounts, with randomized profiles that promote random articles and AI-generated comments. Then that program runs on your machine whenever you're not using it. It would be opt-in, like SETI@Home. It could bring the whole world together in a massive community effort, with the feel-good focus of destroying-Facebook togetherness. I would call it Baseball-and-Apple-Pie@Home. Then we all sit back and enjoy the ensuing utopia of a clean, Facebook-free planet.

intended 6y ago

America had this issue before these sites came up. Ignoring this will make a single individual better, but that will only leave you back at square one - which is being at the mercy of the America news media environment. For an individual this may be the right call, for the scope and scale of the issue being discussed in this article, it doesn’t seem like it.