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I agree with the author that optimizing for virality as the bottom line is a disaster than can only go on for so long. Its consequences are obvious at this poin

• bilbo0s 6y ago
  This. These outright falsehoods that people take for truths are not taken for truth in a vacuum. As cliché as this may sound, people want to believe these things. So they believe them. I was reading somewhere that people tend to readily assimilate information conforming to their own world view, and have a tendency to block out information that does not conform to their world view. It's claimed that these tendencies pre-date the internet. If that's true, the negative effects of virality were inevitable.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • jl6 6y ago
    Tribalism is as old as humans, and previous successful attempts at “defeating” it have typically involved warring tribes being wholesale eradicated by, or assimilated into, larger tribes, then states, then blocs. Now we have global tribes and nobody bigger left to defeat or assimilate them. The only way out I see is to try to grow the “sensible majority” into a dominant majority that can robustly eject extremists - make a bigger tribe, essentially. But what cluster of issues unites enough people to form a dominant political force, while also rejecting the dark patterns that consume the current political tribes?
    • wincy 6y ago
      I’d guess economics is the only thing that can really unite people across all cultures. I live in an upper middle class Midwestern suburb , and my neighbors are Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Jordanian, Nigerian, Kenyan, and the people we bought our house from had Nepalese names based on a few Google searches. If we just make everyone rich, maybe they won’t want the world to burn?
      • lotsofpulp 6y ago
        Having disposable income is a culture itself, and different levels of wealth/income can be broken down into different tribes as well. Economics is also at the root of tribal disagreements. It’s all about securing assets for your tribe, and that doesn’t just mean money. It could also be the unquantifiable qualities that make up a stable tribe, which are found less frequently in tribes with less security of housing, food, energy, and opportunity. “You are the company you keep” is a popular saying that sort of touches on it.
    • AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      > The only way out I see is to try to grow the “sensible majority” into a dominant majority that can robustly eject extremists - make a bigger tribe, essentially. That's only good if we have the ultimate truth - if we have no entrenched wrong ideas ourselves. I think that's a dubious proposition. If we have an entrenched false idea X, then anyone who denies X is one of those extremists that we eject. But if X is actually false, by ejecting them we destroy the ability of society to figure out that X is in fact false.
  • XorNot 6y ago
    This is also ignoring the other dimension of lying: it's a way to assert dominance. The lie is the point. You saw this when Russia invaded Ukraine: Vladimir Putin and other Russian propaganda efforts spout easily disprovable lies about what's happening, about what was plainly visible in the news (Russian soliders and vehicles crossing the border). Russia wasn't trying to hide the lie, the point of the lie was to make you waste time fact-checking it, and then do the thing they needed anyway - which was you had to repeat the lie and then expend disproportionate rhetorical resources disputing it. And then they can simply turn around and tell another lie. The idea that better fact-checking somehow will solve any problem is ignoring what the point of modern propaganda is - it's about dominance and power.
    • totemandtoken 6y ago
      This should be upvoted more, very well said. I usually frame it in terms of incentives but yes, you are absolutely correct, there is a power play involved.
  • AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    > As cliché as this may sound, people want to believe these things. So they believe them. Right, and there we also see the answer. We need to move people to no longer want to believe the lies. For example, if I believe that it's all a conspiracy by "them", then it's not my fault that I'm a failure. That's comforting. But it also follows that I'm helpless, and that things are never going to get better. That's... not so comforting. If someone shows me that, I may not want to believe that any more. Now, that's a very slow process, and almost requires one-on-one interaction with lots of time. You can't do it in a drive-by post on the internet. Worse, even if you put in the time and effort, it still may not work. But I don't know of anything else that will, and this might work at least some of the time.
    • quesera 6y ago
      Another theory: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/political-lying-as-tribal-signaling https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/political-lying-as-tribal-...
• Roritharr 6y ago
  I have been toying with the idea to create a Wikipedia Cloning Platform that would allow people to basically host their worldview on a subdomain, so they can change and edit wikipedia along their perceived worldview without external edits, and even import "truths" from other fringe worldviews, while maintaining links to the base Wikipedia where they see fit. At first this sounds like the worst idea ever as it would allow even more bifurcation of the global consensus narrative, but I believe having all this in a structured manner would allow for a better discussability of the topics in question and allow for a place to store arguments on topics in a structured long form instead of asinine twitter discussions or spats blogs or comment sections of newspapers. Lawful content moderation while trying to keep an unbiased reputation would probably be a nightmare though.
  • weaksauce 6y ago
    > allow for a better discussability of the topics or give nut jobs more validity than they deserve. it used to be one guy in the corner of a bar spouting off his mouth and that was his sphere of influence... now that guy has a megaphone and the smarter people are mostly doing things and don't have the time or the inclination to say "no that's obvious bullshit because x y z" so the crap rises to the top.
    • XorNot 6y ago
      In most respects, this was distributed fact-checking: the 20 people who heard him, most of them went "that guys crazy" and relayed "I saw a crazy guy at the bar" rather then took a tape-recorder and then played back exactly what they heard to their social group of 20 people (and then repeated it endlessly).
      • throwaway201103 6y ago
        Agree. No guarantees, but I think the most reliable way to expose bad ideas is to actually expose them. Shine the light of critical examination on them. Don't try to stuff them into a closet and lock the door.
• jseliger 6y ago
  Very few people are really interested in epistemology: https://jakeseliger.com/2020/11/10/personal-epistemology-free-speech-and-tech-companies/ https://jakeseliger.com/2020/11/10/personal-epistemology-fre...
• johnchristopher 6y ago
  > (For those unconvinced, I encourage to read about how the most viral and captivating content is often content that purposefully instills anger, fear, outgroup-hatred, schadenfreude, etc) I call this "outrage porn" (not from me).
• yorwba 6y ago
  > the most viral and captivating content is often content that purposefully instills anger, fear, outgroup-hatred, schadenfreude, etc Another aspect is that on social media, virality isn't just based on people actively sharing stuff, but also content being so captivating that the platform amplifies it into virality based on user interaction statistics. (E.g. high click-through rates being used as a feedback signal to show content to more people, thus amplifying clickbait.) I experienced that first-hand with a YouTube channel I started recently: one day I noticed the impression count (i.e. the number of times YouTube showed a video thumbnail to someone) growing exponentially. But view counts didn't grow nearly as much. So my content didn't suddenly get more popular, it had just randomly gotten a boost in the recommendation algorithm, showing it to many more people, most of whom weren't interested. (The boost subsequently disappeared.) I think if social media were just people talking to each other, we'd be mostly fine. But imagine how little time you'd spend e.g. on YouTube if the only way to watch a video were to have someone send you the link. Obviously not enough for the platform. So the search for virality turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy: if the recommendation algorithm thinks something will go viral, it can make it happen simply by pushing it in front of enough eyeballs.
• codegrappler 6y ago
  Totally agree. The other dimension that folks often overlook is the choice of what to fact-check. Droves of fact checkers that only ever check one side of an argument still present a bias.
• totemandtoken 6y ago
  The funny thing is the author acknowledges what a real solution would be - distributed fact checking, in which we can't say one institution or panel of experts has a monopoly on arbitration of the Truth™. If it were done in a way that made the consumer feel as though they were a part of the process, they might be more to allow some moderation even if it goes against their prescribed beliefs. I think that's what wikipedia got right. The deeper issue that the author didn't really address well is how mis-incentivized online engagement is and the opportunities that exist on realigning those incentives. They discussed the marketplace of ideas and linked to how Facebook would lose engagement if they cracked down though, so I can't be too hard on the author. My own solution is newsbetting. Place a wager on the political bias of the source of a de-titled article. Or a similar extension to whether a fact agrees with some established scientific entity. It puts skin in the game and allows consumers to feel engaged.