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I see it as the opposite: this may be how a technical network is supposed to work, but it's not how a society is supposed to work. The internet has created the

I see it as the opposite: this may be how a technical network is supposed to work, but it's not how a society is supposed to work. The internet has created the ability for any given subculture to discover instant validation and reinforce their beliefs into a tribe, which further solidifies and extremifies those beliefs. It's a psychological power almost equivalent to a nuclear reaction: beliefs and ideas that might have naturally died out pre-internet are instead amplified and spread, and dug deeper into peoples' minds. This is a critical time to be in tech, but not for the growth: for the need to design solutions to that problem. Censorship is a primitive attempt at stopping this psychological nuclear reaction; people are finding ways around it. We need a bigger, better solution to the reaction, lest society destroy itself through unfettered tribalism.

dkdk8283 6y ago
Censoring and filtering ideas will just lead to evasion of the filters. It will never work, we need to embrace free speech and let people believe as they choose.
TravHatesMe 6y ago
Well said! Makes me think about the scope of tribalism before the internet. Without a doubt there was some, perhaps to a lesser degree though? I think certain views/opinions were more privately kept, perhaps shared with family members and close friends but very rarely shared with people outside their inner circle -- everything you said had your name attached to it and thus carried risks. I suppose you could write newspaper columns under a pseudonym, maybe mask your voice/face on radio or TV, but that was likely the most anonymous you could be. The internet is more or less anonymous by default. Should users be allowed to hide behind anonymity? I have to say yes because otherwise it just feels like 1984. I think that it's possible to minimize tribalism by enabling civil discussion that shares many perspectives, with all hostility removed (and perhaps minimal emotions), and most importantly, let the audience form their own opinions. I really think that technology can solve this. Like all ideas, success is entirely dependent on implementation.
- calinet6 6y ago
  Agree. It will be difficult to design such a system. One of the reasons I strongly believe that design—not engineering technology—will be the limiting factor and defining practice for the 2020's.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > I think that it's possible to minimize tribalism by enabling civil discussion that shares many perspectives, with all hostility removed (and perhaps minimal emotions), and most importantly, let the audience form their own opinions. It is unsurprising that HN commentators think that the best discussion forum would be one without any emotion or hostility. I think it is important, however, to guard against the hubris of porting your own model (whether it is American-style democracy or HN-style discussion forums) to every corner of the globe. It might be apparent to us why this model is better, but it might be equally apparent to other, more combative internet commentators, why their model is better. When very smart people on both sides think that a different approach is best, it might be worth treading carefully.
mjfl 6y ago
So what you are recommending is that we prevent people from escaping censorship - is that right?
- Armisael16 6y ago
  The last two sentences say that censorship is not a functional solution to the problem and that we need to find something better, so I’d say very definitely no. I’m not the person you responded to, of course, but I don’t see how you could’ve read their post and thought they were advocating for inescapable censorship.
  - mjfl 6y ago
    "people are finding ways around it" was his main gripe with censorship.
    - calinet6 6y ago
      It's not a gripe, it's a reality. I have no horse in this race other than the systemic outcome. Censorship (or official annotation, let's call it) was an attempt to curb the tribalism or put some controls on the spread of it; I'm certainly saying that it will not work. I can't imagine alternative solutions at this time, but we need to. It will likely be some sort of system we can't yet imagine, and it will likely need to be at the societal level of mutual agreement. Think less of controlling speech, more "wow cars can kill people, we should probably agree to some rules around driving them around." I expect things will get much worse before those types of systems are put in place.
      - whimsicalism 6y ago
        It is concerning that you have "no horse" in a race over whether there should be American censorship. It's as if the centrists have thrown away liberalism, which makes no sense to me given that liberal values are immensely popular among the public.
        6y ago
Kye 6y ago
It's disturbing to think the socio-technological phenomenon that let my fun, happy community grow to multiple 10k+ person conventions and hundreds of smaller ones worldwide also gave actual Nazis and various schools of white supremacy a new life.
overkill28 6y ago
I wonder if instead of it being a technical solution it will be a social one. That maybe in the future we will look at people constantly hooked on their phones and posting on social media the way we now look at smoking. E.g where it was once totally normal to light up a cigarette in the elevator, the subway, the theater, etc, it is now acceptable to spend every moment of down time staring at your phone, scrolling. If there is wider recognition of the negative (mental) health effects of that it will be less acceptable to do it in public, and less acceptable to espouse views or information learned from such a source.
nradov 6y ago
The long term solution might lie in educational technology. Can we find scalable ways to teach children critical thinking, epistemology, and metacognition?
leppr 6y ago
Censorship is the last-resort solution. Ideally, you'd want to have control over people's education and social structures to prevent deviation before any censorship is even needed. It's a real shame, because it seems we had reached a peak with the advent of mandatory state school and television. Now things are going downhill with more and more diverse subcultures allowed to build upon themselves and explore the limits and avenues for improvement in their ideas. There has to be a way to keep people in line with our society's values while still giving them an impression of freedom.
- mjfl 6y ago
  > Ideally, you'd want to have control over people's education and social structures to prevent deviation before any censorship is even needed. Is this satire?
  - leppr 6y ago
    It's trying to explicit and bring grandparent's ideas to their logical conclusion. I dislike slippery slope-type arguments, but I fail to see how one can coherently agree with their comment and not mine.
    - ulzeraj 6y ago
      I appreciate the sarcasm. Some responses in this thread are giving me a bad vibe. This site is full of users thinking they can somewhat engineer society towards what they think its a proper state and that aligns very well with the currant behavior of big social media corporations. I wonder when did we tech people deviated so much towards being aspiring tyrants...
      - calinet6 6y ago
        It makes more sense when you think about the fact that society is already engineered to be in some state, and the power of social media companies appears to be influencing that in the wrong direction. If you're okay with putting society to the whims of its current incentives and the corporations' addictive advertising-optimized technology, you're free to your opinion, but that seems even more dystopian to me than attempting to do better. At the very least I think arguing for sustaining the current complex designed incentivized structured state of society is morally equal to arguing for some different state.
brightball 6y ago
While I agree with that, it all depends on which direction you look at it. For example, how much of this reaction is caused by the earlier amplification of other ideas that would have just as easily died out? I’ve been watching the political machine for a long time and one thing I can say for conservatives is that they are consistent in what they “say” they believe. It hasn’t changed much in years and I can at least respect that. On the other side, there seems to be a new cause every week. Maybe it’s simply better use of technology, but most of what I see on Twitter seems to be messages designed to benefit the left. Whether it’s drawing attention to a subculture that feels marginalized or convincing that same group that everybody on the right hates them, it’s a pattern that’s really hard to deny. IMO Reddit is far worse that Twitter or FB in this respect too. Nobody has the energy, time or capacity for the amount of things the right is supposed to hate. I don’t think a different platform is going to change any of that. I think it’s just going to create a new channel.
stickyricky 6y ago
> The internet has created the ability for any given subculture to discover instant validation and reinforce their beliefs into a tribe, which further solidifies and extremifies those beliefs. I don't believe this is true. I remember "Ye Olde Days" (TM) of the Internet. You went to an independent forum or mailing list that supported your interest (video games, music, politics) and then you argued with everyone in your "tribe" about video games and music and politics regardless of the purpose of the forum (which is hilarious and endearing to me). You had friends and you had frenemies but you didn't have strangers. It was nice. It was a community. Some interest brought you all together but you didn't stay there solely for that interest. You stayed for the people. Now what do we have? Complete corporate domination and centralization. All interests are segmented into hashtags and subreddits but exist in the same super-massive platform. And there conversation is moderated by two entities. Moderators and the mob. There is no community anymore because the community is too fluid and too large (sometimes its everyone on the internet). You don't know the people you argue with. And so argument can never be taken on good faith. You know, I had more stuff written but can't quite complete the thought in words. I think I'll just make an alternative.
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
  The only community you have is your friends, and your friends usually have similar beliefs to you. So the space where you could have people with significantly different political views meet on the same terms is gone.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    The point is that your friends don't always have similar beliefs to you. You don't think rednecks in the south play video games or soup up their cars or listen to rock and roll, the same as a Biden voter from Los Angeles? So if you set up a forum for fans of the Atari, you get all kinds. They get to know each other. And then they talk about whatever. But several things have smashed that all to pieces. The first and main problem is that everything is a single site with millions of people now. You can go over to /r/atari and talk about Atari, but if you try to talk to any of those people about climate change they'll direct you to a different sub, which is full of entirely different people who you don't know or trust. Then the sites that are independent are often operated by the company that makes the product. Sony might host a PlayStation forum, but they're going to boot you out for talking about politics or religion. And then there's the fact that everything has become disposable. What do you do with your broken out of warranty Atari? Get a soldering iron. What do you do with a broken out of warranty iMac? Get a rubbish bin. But then there's nothing to build a community around, because everything is an appliance that you can't improve or repair.
motohagiography 6y ago
The argument that we need to stop tribalism to preserve society is both an un-self-conscious conservativism and a more pernicious appeal to cultural homogenization, which is what the dominance of the platforms caused, and which these innovations are a reaction to. There is no diversity in 140 characters of closely monitored claptrap, and there is no risk and opportunity in trust and safety. There is no culture in a homogenized overton window, and there is no innovation in walled gardens. The very idea that we need to suppress ideas for fear that the ignorant masses may be exposed to them is a fatuous, aspirational elitism that is the very reason the platforms have become stagnant.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  I still vote Democrat, but it is the growth of exactly this attitude that you've identified that is causing me to move increasingly away from considering myself a "Democrat". I can't see how people fail to notice the snobbish elitism underlying "we need to manage the discourse so that people's behavior is under control." It's amazing how cyclical this sort of stuff is. Plato's Republic was enmeshed with a similar logic: that there is a natural way for society to progress, that human society is interfering with this natural way and that is a problem, and that we ought to have philosopher-kings (read: techies & politicians) to shape beliefs and discourse into a more natural (and thus "good") direction. G.A. Cohen's writings on the history of philosophy have a scathing critique of this sort of thinking that I recommend.
  - calinet6 6y ago
    I do not think we need to manage speech or control discourse whatsoever. If you think that's the idea here, you're not thinking deep enough about the nature of the systems that are problematic right now. We've designed communication systems that are optimized for instant gratification, engagement, getting the dopamine hit of seeing things you agree with or angry at, and rapidly moving to the next. That's not speech, that's a designed system of attention seeking, all with the primary objective of getting eyeballs on advertisements and content primarily. We've designed communication platforms that cause us to cease seeing each other as human beings, and instead condensed thoughts and memes that are simply repeated to conform and get reinforced for a quick natural drug. I do not think we should control the discourse or have structural control over what's right or wrong to say or think; that would be absurdly dystopian. I do think we need to change our systems to incentivize human context around that speech, and reinforce our own humanity in how we read and respond to it. I think it's possible to design better platforms that don't bring out the worst in society, and that we should do so.

dkdk8283 6y ago

Censoring and filtering ideas will just lead to evasion of the filters. It will never work, we need to embrace free speech and let people believe as they choose.

TravHatesMe 6y ago

Well said! Makes me think about the scope of tribalism before the internet. Without a doubt there was some, perhaps to a lesser degree though? I think certain views/opinions were more privately kept, perhaps shared with family members and close friends but very rarely shared with people outside their inner circle -- everything you said had your name attached to it and thus carried risks. I suppose you could write newspaper columns under a pseudonym, maybe mask your voice/face on radio or TV, but that was likely the most anonymous you could be. The internet is more or less anonymous by default. Should users be allowed to hide behind anonymity? I have to say yes because otherwise it just feels like 1984. I think that it's possible to minimize tribalism by enabling civil discussion that shares many perspectives, with all hostility removed (and perhaps minimal emotions), and most importantly, let the audience form their own opinions. I really think that technology can solve this. Like all ideas, success is entirely dependent on implementation.

calinet6 6y ago
Agree. It will be difficult to design such a system. One of the reasons I strongly believe that design—not engineering technology—will be the limiting factor and defining practice for the 2020's.
whimsicalism 6y ago
> I think that it's possible to minimize tribalism by enabling civil discussion that shares many perspectives, with all hostility removed (and perhaps minimal emotions), and most importantly, let the audience form their own opinions. It is unsurprising that HN commentators think that the best discussion forum would be one without any emotion or hostility. I think it is important, however, to guard against the hubris of porting your own model (whether it is American-style democracy or HN-style discussion forums) to every corner of the globe. It might be apparent to us why this model is better, but it might be equally apparent to other, more combative internet commentators, why their model is better. When very smart people on both sides think that a different approach is best, it might be worth treading carefully.

mjfl 6y ago

So what you are recommending is that we prevent people from escaping censorship - is that right?

Armisael16 6y ago
The last two sentences say that censorship is not a functional solution to the problem and that we need to find something better, so I’d say very definitely no. I’m not the person you responded to, of course, but I don’t see how you could’ve read their post and thought they were advocating for inescapable censorship.
- mjfl 6y ago
  "people are finding ways around it" was his main gripe with censorship.
  - calinet6 6y ago
    It's not a gripe, it's a reality. I have no horse in this race other than the systemic outcome. Censorship (or official annotation, let's call it) was an attempt to curb the tribalism or put some controls on the spread of it; I'm certainly saying that it will not work. I can't imagine alternative solutions at this time, but we need to. It will likely be some sort of system we can't yet imagine, and it will likely need to be at the societal level of mutual agreement. Think less of controlling speech, more "wow cars can kill people, we should probably agree to some rules around driving them around." I expect things will get much worse before those types of systems are put in place.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      It is concerning that you have "no horse" in a race over whether there should be American censorship. It's as if the centrists have thrown away liberalism, which makes no sense to me given that liberal values are immensely popular among the public.
      - 6y ago

Kye 6y ago

It's disturbing to think the socio-technological phenomenon that let my fun, happy community grow to multiple 10k+ person conventions and hundreds of smaller ones worldwide also gave actual Nazis and various schools of white supremacy a new life.

overkill28 6y ago

I wonder if instead of it being a technical solution it will be a social one. That maybe in the future we will look at people constantly hooked on their phones and posting on social media the way we now look at smoking. E.g where it was once totally normal to light up a cigarette in the elevator, the subway, the theater, etc, it is now acceptable to spend every moment of down time staring at your phone, scrolling. If there is wider recognition of the negative (mental) health effects of that it will be less acceptable to do it in public, and less acceptable to espouse views or information learned from such a source.

nradov 6y ago

The long term solution might lie in educational technology. Can we find scalable ways to teach children critical thinking, epistemology, and metacognition?

leppr 6y ago

Censorship is the last-resort solution. Ideally, you'd want to have control over people's education and social structures to prevent deviation before any censorship is even needed. It's a real shame, because it seems we had reached a peak with the advent of mandatory state school and television. Now things are going downhill with more and more diverse subcultures allowed to build upon themselves and explore the limits and avenues for improvement in their ideas. There has to be a way to keep people in line with our society's values while still giving them an impression of freedom.

mjfl 6y ago
> Ideally, you'd want to have control over people's education and social structures to prevent deviation before any censorship is even needed. Is this satire?
- leppr 6y ago
  It's trying to explicit and bring grandparent's ideas to their logical conclusion. I dislike slippery slope-type arguments, but I fail to see how one can coherently agree with their comment and not mine.
  - ulzeraj 6y ago
    I appreciate the sarcasm. Some responses in this thread are giving me a bad vibe. This site is full of users thinking they can somewhat engineer society towards what they think its a proper state and that aligns very well with the currant behavior of big social media corporations. I wonder when did we tech people deviated so much towards being aspiring tyrants...
    - calinet6 6y ago
      It makes more sense when you think about the fact that society is already engineered to be in some state, and the power of social media companies appears to be influencing that in the wrong direction. If you're okay with putting society to the whims of its current incentives and the corporations' addictive advertising-optimized technology, you're free to your opinion, but that seems even more dystopian to me than attempting to do better. At the very least I think arguing for sustaining the current complex designed incentivized structured state of society is morally equal to arguing for some different state.

brightball 6y ago

While I agree with that, it all depends on which direction you look at it. For example, how much of this reaction is caused by the earlier amplification of other ideas that would have just as easily died out? I’ve been watching the political machine for a long time and one thing I can say for conservatives is that they are consistent in what they “say” they believe. It hasn’t changed much in years and I can at least respect that. On the other side, there seems to be a new cause every week. Maybe it’s simply better use of technology, but most of what I see on Twitter seems to be messages designed to benefit the left. Whether it’s drawing attention to a subculture that feels marginalized or convincing that same group that everybody on the right hates them, it’s a pattern that’s really hard to deny. IMO Reddit is far worse that Twitter or FB in this respect too. Nobody has the energy, time or capacity for the amount of things the right is supposed to hate. I don’t think a different platform is going to change any of that. I think it’s just going to create a new channel.

stickyricky 6y ago

> The internet has created the ability for any given subculture to discover instant validation and reinforce their beliefs into a tribe, which further solidifies and extremifies those beliefs. I don't believe this is true. I remember "Ye Olde Days" (TM) of the Internet. You went to an independent forum or mailing list that supported your interest (video games, music, politics) and then you argued with everyone in your "tribe" about video games and music and politics regardless of the purpose of the forum (which is hilarious and endearing to me). You had friends and you had frenemies but you didn't have strangers. It was nice. It was a community. Some interest brought you all together but you didn't stay there solely for that interest. You stayed for the people. Now what do we have? Complete corporate domination and centralization. All interests are segmented into hashtags and subreddits but exist in the same super-massive platform. And there conversation is moderated by two entities. Moderators and the mob. There is no community anymore because the community is too fluid and too large (sometimes its everyone on the internet). You don't know the people you argue with. And so argument can never be taken on good faith. You know, I had more stuff written but can't quite complete the thought in words. I think I'll just make an alternative.

TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
The only community you have is your friends, and your friends usually have similar beliefs to you. So the space where you could have people with significantly different political views meet on the same terms is gone.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  The point is that your friends don't always have similar beliefs to you. You don't think rednecks in the south play video games or soup up their cars or listen to rock and roll, the same as a Biden voter from Los Angeles? So if you set up a forum for fans of the Atari, you get all kinds. They get to know each other. And then they talk about whatever. But several things have smashed that all to pieces. The first and main problem is that everything is a single site with millions of people now. You can go over to /r/atari and talk about Atari, but if you try to talk to any of those people about climate change they'll direct you to a different sub, which is full of entirely different people who you don't know or trust. Then the sites that are independent are often operated by the company that makes the product. Sony might host a PlayStation forum, but they're going to boot you out for talking about politics or religion. And then there's the fact that everything has become disposable. What do you do with your broken out of warranty Atari? Get a soldering iron. What do you do with a broken out of warranty iMac? Get a rubbish bin. But then there's nothing to build a community around, because everything is an appliance that you can't improve or repair.

motohagiography 6y ago

The argument that we need to stop tribalism to preserve society is both an un-self-conscious conservativism and a more pernicious appeal to cultural homogenization, which is what the dominance of the platforms caused, and which these innovations are a reaction to. There is no diversity in 140 characters of closely monitored claptrap, and there is no risk and opportunity in trust and safety. There is no culture in a homogenized overton window, and there is no innovation in walled gardens. The very idea that we need to suppress ideas for fear that the ignorant masses may be exposed to them is a fatuous, aspirational elitism that is the very reason the platforms have become stagnant.

whimsicalism 6y ago
I still vote Democrat, but it is the growth of exactly this attitude that you've identified that is causing me to move increasingly away from considering myself a "Democrat". I can't see how people fail to notice the snobbish elitism underlying "we need to manage the discourse so that people's behavior is under control." It's amazing how cyclical this sort of stuff is. Plato's Republic was enmeshed with a similar logic: that there is a natural way for society to progress, that human society is interfering with this natural way and that is a problem, and that we ought to have philosopher-kings (read: techies & politicians) to shape beliefs and discourse into a more natural (and thus "good") direction. G.A. Cohen's writings on the history of philosophy have a scathing critique of this sort of thinking that I recommend.
- calinet6 6y ago
  I do not think we need to manage speech or control discourse whatsoever. If you think that's the idea here, you're not thinking deep enough about the nature of the systems that are problematic right now. We've designed communication systems that are optimized for instant gratification, engagement, getting the dopamine hit of seeing things you agree with or angry at, and rapidly moving to the next. That's not speech, that's a designed system of attention seeking, all with the primary objective of getting eyeballs on advertisements and content primarily. We've designed communication platforms that cause us to cease seeing each other as human beings, and instead condensed thoughts and memes that are simply repeated to conform and get reinforced for a quick natural drug. I do not think we should control the discourse or have structural control over what's right or wrong to say or think; that would be absurdly dystopian. I do think we need to change our systems to incentivize human context around that speech, and reinforce our own humanity in how we read and respond to it. I think it's possible to design better platforms that don't bring out the worst in society, and that we should do so.