7 ms·

It's incredible to me how contentious the inauguration of this center/right Democrat is. Truly we live in interesting times.

by jitl 6y ago

aphextron 6y ago
>It's incredible to me how contentious the inauguration of this center/right Democrat is. Social media was a mistake.
- virmundi 6y ago
  I agree. I think, however, it just brought to the fore deeper issues with democracy. We’ve seen this develop since the equal air time rules were removed. I don’t think it scales to 300 million. With a population of that size there are too many minority needs that go under represented. This leads to people feeling disenfranchised. Eventually something has to fill the void. Normally it’s some form of subgroup. It can be BLM, Antifa, Maga cult. By centralizing power into the federal government, which is too remote to deal with needs at the local level, all these groups can’t improve things. Riots and violence occur.
- Someone1234 6y ago
  Hacker News is social media.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - unchocked 6y ago
    HN doesn’t feature an algorithmic feed, mercifully. We all share a single view here. Social media becomes a body politic snatching parasite when it generates unique, algorithmically (engagement-driven!) views for each individual.
    - esja 6y ago
      I agree, but I wish HN would go further and make karma invisible. By all means, use it to rank things, but showing the numbers just triggers the wrong behaviour. Both in terms of creating addiction in the users, but also in terms of poisoning civil discussion and incentivising clever comebacks over good-faith debate.
    - zanmat0 6y ago
      >We all share a single view here. Except for dissenting opinions, obfuscated in light gray.
  - rchaud 6y ago
    HN doesn't have a billion people on it, nor does it let you target advertising to affinity groups. One such group could be community members that voice free speech concerns when racist speech is deplatformed, but refrain from commenting on a story where say, journalistic freedom is curtailed.
- hanniabu 6y ago
  It's not just social media. News has transformed over the past few decades to enable this as well. Anybody remember equal air time rules?
- raiyu 6y ago
  I mean the writing was on the wall. It was the plot of several Bond films. The media tycoon by owning the news can disrupt governments. I don't think that social media alone is to blame, nor do I think it is the main culprit, it is an accelerant, but not the cause. In order for fringe view points to be broadly accepted they need to be "approved"/"verified" by a trusted party. Now that our news channels, like Fox News, and CNN, spend more time talking about their opinions of the news rather than what occurred, every fringe viewpoint has been stamped as "valid" by appearing on these "news" organizations. Social media I think exacerbated this problem by reducing revenues for news media companies so they all had to focus on content that was more emotional, rather than informative. And if they can stir up an emotion people tune in. Then those viewpoints are shared across social media to create a larger audience, again linking back to these "verified" sources, and you get a pretty vicious flywheel effect.
  - camjohnson26 6y ago
    You can even argue social media decelerated. I knew some people who tried to claim the riots were peaceful, until video evidence showed that wasn’t true. It’s a lot harder to brush abuses under the rug when half the people in the crowd have a cell phone
    - raiyu 6y ago
      There's definitely been a less reported but positive side to the proliferation of technology and everyone now having a video camera in their pocket. I would love to see what social media looked like if the news went back to reporting just the news. Like in school, the who, what, when, and that's it. Now when you turn on the news it feels like turning on Inside Edition when I was a kid. Here are the ten things that can kill you in your house hold... tune in after the commercial break to find out. If our news organizations actually followed these practices it would be interesting to see if social media in and of itself may not be as detrimental as it appears to be today.
  - samizdis 6y ago
    > I don't think that social media alone is to blame, nor do I think it is the main culprit, it is an accelerant, but not the cause. There's an opinion piece today in the NYT which argues that the present state of politics, with the rightward and even reactionary shift in certain areas of Republicanism, has been 40 years in the making: Republicans have been fueling the conditions that enabled Mr. Trump’s rise since the 1980s. A growing Southern and Western evangelical base pushed the party to replace its big-tent, bipartisan and moderate Republicanism of the mid-20th century with a more conservative version. Under President Dwight Eisenhower, the party had made peace with New Deal social provisioning and backed large-scale federal spending on infrastructure and education. Even as late as the 1970s, President Richard Nixon passed legislation expanding federal regulatory agencies. Yet when Ronald Reagan moved into the White house in 1981, the Republicans sharply slashed government regulations. They cut taxes for the wealthy and oversaw a hollowing out of the American welfare state. At the same time, the party shored up its heavily evangelical base with tough-on-crime policies, anti-abortion rhetoric and coded racist attacks on “welfare queens.” The full piece is here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/opinion/gop-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/opinion/gop-trump.html
- mFixman 6y ago
  Don't blame social media for the actions of the Republican Party.
  - mattnewton 6y ago
    Lots of long time republicans don’t recognize their party anymore after the tea party and trump waves of populism washed away their platform and moderates. I don’t meant that to say those who kept voting with it anyways aren’t doing so with their eyes open, just that I feel this transformation is bigger than something engineered by party bigwigs; they are surfing to where the votes are.
- camjohnson26 6y ago
  Blaming social media for hate speech is shooting the messenger. The KKK, Jim Crow, lynchings, the Civil War, none of these needed social media and they grew just fine. The problem is and always has been human nature. Trying to solve a social problem technologically is doomed to fail. We know from history that forcing people to think something they don’t want to causes oppression, resentment, and leads to upheaval. We need to invest more in education so that ordinary people can recognize lies, and we need character in our leaders so that they hold bad actors accountable.
  - peeters 6y ago
    I think the difference is that social media acts as a massive amplifier for minority beliefs. In the Civil War, people who lived in the south were already surrounded by other people who lived in the south, so no amplication was needed to fan the flames. But with social media you have these individuals who would normally be surrounded by reasonable people in their social circles, instead being herded together by engagement-optimizing algorithms. Yes, the determined will always find a way to socialize with only like-minded people, but tech companies don't have to optimize for it. They could sacrifice some ad-revenue by optimizing for diverse thought, not echo chambers. And that would be a hell of a lot more aminable to free speech than picking and choosing what opinions belong on their platforms.
  - MrMan 6y ago
    it is hating the gasoline for making the log burn. if you hold a match to a log the match will burnout before the log catches fire. soak the log in gasoline and one match sets it ablaze. that is my attempt at HN "argument by analogy"
  - esja 6y ago
    But technology can make things worse, so it does need review. Give better weapons to warring tribes and watch what happens. Similarly, implement likes and upvotes, and use ML recommenders to push people into echo chambers, and watch what happens.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hanniabu 6y ago
Yeah it really goes to show how much the country has moved to the right. Biden is described as "radical left" but in most other developed countries he'd be considered center-right, or center at the minimum.
- BitwiseFool 6y ago
  I've always disliked this line of thinking. Why does it matter that a politician would be placed somewhere else on the left/right continuum in a foreign country?
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Because the continuum reliably correlates with policy positions on key basics like infrastructure investment, education, and access to health care, and taxation, as well as being linked with support for violence and authoritarianism.
    - ceilingcorner 6y ago
      No, it really doesn’t at all. Many “right wing” parties in Europe have social policies that Americans would consider far left socialist. Different countries have different political situations and there is no such thing as a universal political left-right continuum.
- airza 6y ago
  The country is still pretty left, but structural disenfranchisement went full throttle starting in about 2010.
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  No, in some European countries he would be considered right or center. In much of the developed world, he’d be considered centrist or left. Europe != the ethical measuring stick for the rest of the world.
- chapium 6y ago
  Calling Biden far left is just more ad hominem attacks, much like calling any politician one does not like a communist or hitler.
guscost 6y ago
Using “left” and “right” as if nothing has changed will only lead to the bewilderment you are feeling. There is a great political realignment underway, where the new teams will align roughly with “populist” and “establishment” once it is over.
- hanniabu 6y ago
  Pretty sure the current state is already populist and establishment.
- hackyhacky 6y ago
  Or perhaps "pro-democracy" and "pro-authoritarian."
  - yyyymmddhhmmss 6y ago
    What is pro-democracy about corporate rule?
  - mc32 6y ago
    But even those terms have lost meaning. China believes it’s a republic.
silexia 6y ago
I don't think it is Biden's actual political positions that Trump supporters hate. Trump himself is a pretty far left Republican President who pushed hard on big handouts. The issue is that Trump supporters falsely believe that the election was stolen. This makes them think our democracy has already fallen.
- guscost 6y ago
  If you remove “falsely” your message is stronger. That needless judgement thrown in there is like a slap in the face to anyone who wants to talk about these issues rationally, no matter what they believe.
  - hackyhacky 6y ago
    The issues have been talked about rationally ad nauseum. There is no more "room for rational debate" than there is about climate change or the theory of evolution. The only people who object to the judgment that the election was free and fair are people who aim to disrupt democracy, and they deserve a slap in the face. Edit: spelling
    - guscost 6y ago
      It will escalate to a lot more than slapping, if enough people keep this attitude.
      - MrMan 6y ago
        what you are threatening isn't caused by people arguing against the "stolen election" narrative.
        guscost 6y ago
        Not a threat, just pointing out what is obvious to anyone who has the faintest sense about how many people are upset, and how long they have been upset. The causes go back a long way before any of this, the “stolen election” thing is just the conflict finally bubbling to the surface.
yyyymmddhhmmss 6y ago
It truly is a strange set of phenomena. Historically, big business was always on the side of the fascists, which really begs the question of who is who. Of course, the answer is that this is not a national conflict but a global one. Big business favors the Democrats simply because the Democrats are better for global trade.
hourislate 6y ago
It's hard to understand isn't it. He makes the Trump Administration look like amateurs considering how many people were deported under the Obama Administration and how tough they were on jailing minorities. Even Harris's record shows she was incredibly tough on crime and hard on minorities. Sure they like raising taxes but generally it's to make the rich richer and poor poorer. Bezos, Suckerburg along with all the others worth 10's of billions will be just fine. It's the little guy that is going to get crushed. Anyway, this is all just a distraction to keep you stupid, tired and poor.

It's incredible to me how contentious the inauguration of this center/right Democrat is. Truly we live in interesting times.

by jitl 6y ago

It's incredible to me how contentious the inauguration of this center/right Democrat is. Truly we live in interesting times.

aphextron 6y ago

>It's incredible to me how contentious the inauguration of this center/right Democrat is. Social media was a mistake.

virmundi 6y ago
I agree. I think, however, it just brought to the fore deeper issues with democracy. We’ve seen this develop since the equal air time rules were removed. I don’t think it scales to 300 million. With a population of that size there are too many minority needs that go under represented. This leads to people feeling disenfranchised. Eventually something has to fill the void. Normally it’s some form of subgroup. It can be BLM, Antifa, Maga cult. By centralizing power into the federal government, which is too remote to deal with needs at the local level, all these groups can’t improve things. Riots and violence occur.
Someone1234 6y ago
Hacker News is social media.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- unchocked 6y ago
  HN doesn’t feature an algorithmic feed, mercifully. We all share a single view here. Social media becomes a body politic snatching parasite when it generates unique, algorithmically (engagement-driven!) views for each individual.
  - esja 6y ago
    I agree, but I wish HN would go further and make karma invisible. By all means, use it to rank things, but showing the numbers just triggers the wrong behaviour. Both in terms of creating addiction in the users, but also in terms of poisoning civil discussion and incentivising clever comebacks over good-faith debate.
  - zanmat0 6y ago
    >We all share a single view here. Except for dissenting opinions, obfuscated in light gray.
- rchaud 6y ago
  HN doesn't have a billion people on it, nor does it let you target advertising to affinity groups. One such group could be community members that voice free speech concerns when racist speech is deplatformed, but refrain from commenting on a story where say, journalistic freedom is curtailed.
hanniabu 6y ago
It's not just social media. News has transformed over the past few decades to enable this as well. Anybody remember equal air time rules?
raiyu 6y ago
I mean the writing was on the wall. It was the plot of several Bond films. The media tycoon by owning the news can disrupt governments. I don't think that social media alone is to blame, nor do I think it is the main culprit, it is an accelerant, but not the cause. In order for fringe view points to be broadly accepted they need to be "approved"/"verified" by a trusted party. Now that our news channels, like Fox News, and CNN, spend more time talking about their opinions of the news rather than what occurred, every fringe viewpoint has been stamped as "valid" by appearing on these "news" organizations. Social media I think exacerbated this problem by reducing revenues for news media companies so they all had to focus on content that was more emotional, rather than informative. And if they can stir up an emotion people tune in. Then those viewpoints are shared across social media to create a larger audience, again linking back to these "verified" sources, and you get a pretty vicious flywheel effect.
- camjohnson26 6y ago
  You can even argue social media decelerated. I knew some people who tried to claim the riots were peaceful, until video evidence showed that wasn’t true. It’s a lot harder to brush abuses under the rug when half the people in the crowd have a cell phone
  - raiyu 6y ago
    There's definitely been a less reported but positive side to the proliferation of technology and everyone now having a video camera in their pocket. I would love to see what social media looked like if the news went back to reporting just the news. Like in school, the who, what, when, and that's it. Now when you turn on the news it feels like turning on Inside Edition when I was a kid. Here are the ten things that can kill you in your house hold... tune in after the commercial break to find out. If our news organizations actually followed these practices it would be interesting to see if social media in and of itself may not be as detrimental as it appears to be today.
- samizdis 6y ago
  > I don't think that social media alone is to blame, nor do I think it is the main culprit, it is an accelerant, but not the cause. There's an opinion piece today in the NYT which argues that the present state of politics, with the rightward and even reactionary shift in certain areas of Republicanism, has been 40 years in the making: Republicans have been fueling the conditions that enabled Mr. Trump’s rise since the 1980s. A growing Southern and Western evangelical base pushed the party to replace its big-tent, bipartisan and moderate Republicanism of the mid-20th century with a more conservative version. Under President Dwight Eisenhower, the party had made peace with New Deal social provisioning and backed large-scale federal spending on infrastructure and education. Even as late as the 1970s, President Richard Nixon passed legislation expanding federal regulatory agencies. Yet when Ronald Reagan moved into the White house in 1981, the Republicans sharply slashed government regulations. They cut taxes for the wealthy and oversaw a hollowing out of the American welfare state. At the same time, the party shored up its heavily evangelical base with tough-on-crime policies, anti-abortion rhetoric and coded racist attacks on “welfare queens.” The full piece is here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/opinion/gop-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/opinion/gop-trump.html
mFixman 6y ago
Don't blame social media for the actions of the Republican Party.
- mattnewton 6y ago
  Lots of long time republicans don’t recognize their party anymore after the tea party and trump waves of populism washed away their platform and moderates. I don’t meant that to say those who kept voting with it anyways aren’t doing so with their eyes open, just that I feel this transformation is bigger than something engineered by party bigwigs; they are surfing to where the votes are.
camjohnson26 6y ago
Blaming social media for hate speech is shooting the messenger. The KKK, Jim Crow, lynchings, the Civil War, none of these needed social media and they grew just fine. The problem is and always has been human nature. Trying to solve a social problem technologically is doomed to fail. We know from history that forcing people to think something they don’t want to causes oppression, resentment, and leads to upheaval. We need to invest more in education so that ordinary people can recognize lies, and we need character in our leaders so that they hold bad actors accountable.
- peeters 6y ago
  I think the difference is that social media acts as a massive amplifier for minority beliefs. In the Civil War, people who lived in the south were already surrounded by other people who lived in the south, so no amplication was needed to fan the flames. But with social media you have these individuals who would normally be surrounded by reasonable people in their social circles, instead being herded together by engagement-optimizing algorithms. Yes, the determined will always find a way to socialize with only like-minded people, but tech companies don't have to optimize for it. They could sacrifice some ad-revenue by optimizing for diverse thought, not echo chambers. And that would be a hell of a lot more aminable to free speech than picking and choosing what opinions belong on their platforms.
- MrMan 6y ago
  it is hating the gasoline for making the log burn. if you hold a match to a log the match will burnout before the log catches fire. soak the log in gasoline and one match sets it ablaze. that is my attempt at HN "argument by analogy"
- esja 6y ago
  But technology can make things worse, so it does need review. Give better weapons to warring tribes and watch what happens. Similarly, implement likes and upvotes, and use ML recommenders to push people into echo chambers, and watch what happens.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

hanniabu 6y ago

Yeah it really goes to show how much the country has moved to the right. Biden is described as "radical left" but in most other developed countries he'd be considered center-right, or center at the minimum.

BitwiseFool 6y ago
I've always disliked this line of thinking. Why does it matter that a politician would be placed somewhere else on the left/right continuum in a foreign country?
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Because the continuum reliably correlates with policy positions on key basics like infrastructure investment, education, and access to health care, and taxation, as well as being linked with support for violence and authoritarianism.
  - ceilingcorner 6y ago
    No, it really doesn’t at all. Many “right wing” parties in Europe have social policies that Americans would consider far left socialist. Different countries have different political situations and there is no such thing as a universal political left-right continuum.
airza 6y ago
The country is still pretty left, but structural disenfranchisement went full throttle starting in about 2010.
ceilingcorner 6y ago
No, in some European countries he would be considered right or center. In much of the developed world, he’d be considered centrist or left. Europe != the ethical measuring stick for the rest of the world.
chapium 6y ago
Calling Biden far left is just more ad hominem attacks, much like calling any politician one does not like a communist or hitler.

guscost 6y ago

Using “left” and “right” as if nothing has changed will only lead to the bewilderment you are feeling. There is a great political realignment underway, where the new teams will align roughly with “populist” and “establishment” once it is over.

hanniabu 6y ago
Pretty sure the current state is already populist and establishment.
hackyhacky 6y ago
Or perhaps "pro-democracy" and "pro-authoritarian."
- yyyymmddhhmmss 6y ago
  What is pro-democracy about corporate rule?
- mc32 6y ago
  But even those terms have lost meaning. China believes it’s a republic.

silexia 6y ago

I don't think it is Biden's actual political positions that Trump supporters hate. Trump himself is a pretty far left Republican President who pushed hard on big handouts. The issue is that Trump supporters falsely believe that the election was stolen. This makes them think our democracy has already fallen.

guscost 6y ago
If you remove “falsely” your message is stronger. That needless judgement thrown in there is like a slap in the face to anyone who wants to talk about these issues rationally, no matter what they believe.
- hackyhacky 6y ago
  The issues have been talked about rationally ad nauseum. There is no more "room for rational debate" than there is about climate change or the theory of evolution. The only people who object to the judgment that the election was free and fair are people who aim to disrupt democracy, and they deserve a slap in the face. Edit: spelling
  - guscost 6y ago
    It will escalate to a lot more than slapping, if enough people keep this attitude.
    - MrMan 6y ago
      what you are threatening isn't caused by people arguing against the "stolen election" narrative.
      - guscost 6y ago
        Not a threat, just pointing out what is obvious to anyone who has the faintest sense about how many people are upset, and how long they have been upset. The causes go back a long way before any of this, the “stolen election” thing is just the conflict finally bubbling to the surface.

yyyymmddhhmmss 6y ago

It truly is a strange set of phenomena. Historically, big business was always on the side of the fascists, which really begs the question of who is who. Of course, the answer is that this is not a national conflict but a global one. Big business favors the Democrats simply because the Democrats are better for global trade.

hourislate 6y ago

It's hard to understand isn't it. He makes the Trump Administration look like amateurs considering how many people were deported under the Obama Administration and how tough they were on jailing minorities. Even Harris's record shows she was incredibly tough on crime and hard on minorities. Sure they like raising taxes but generally it's to make the rich richer and poor poorer. Bezos, Suckerburg along with all the others worth 10's of billions will be just fine. It's the little guy that is going to get crushed. Anyway, this is all just a distraction to keep you stupid, tired and poor.