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What’s sad is that most people, whether on the left or right, are decent, hardworking people that would never set out to so violently steal someone’s privacy li

What’s sad is that most people, whether on the left or right, are decent, hardworking people that would never set out to so violently steal someone’s privacy like this. There are perfectly rational reasons for people to lean either left or right. But members of the media are stoking the fires of division to satisfy their lust for money and attention. It’s wrong, and I hope that everyone can see these actions for what they are. The NYT and the reporter that wrote the article should be roundly criticized by both sides for what they did here. They should be canceled.

DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
Indeed. Most discussions I've had other than on reddit and similar platforms have tended to be very pleasant and rational. It is possible to discuss something with someone who holds completely different opinions on the topic in such a way that everyone walks out of the discussion understanding it a bit better than before. How this flips around into the mirror-world that is social media, is beyond my understanding. Either people who discuss on large platforms and those that do it offline or in more personal online communities are two distinct groups of people with little overlap, or some magic switch just flips in peoples heads when they put their hands on a keyboard. The media are ultimately just following the market: outrage sells, so they deliver. Sure, we can blame them for abusing their power in cases like these, but more importantly, we should ask the question how they ended up in a position where everyone just blindly trusts what they read in a newspaper.
- ben509 6y ago
  I think a discussion platform is a complicated dynamic system. Social media has various algorithms and even layout decisions (how comments are sorted) that promotes stuff that gets engagement. Then they have a mess of filters that tries to limit some of the worst behavior. I suspect what makes it really hard to understand is there's a training effect as users subconciously learn what things get more attention, and what attention they see as favorable is a moving target depending on their emotional state. So you really have no idea what changing the kind of attention they get will do, and even if you did, when you try to make changes to see what happens, you have to wait on the timescale of human learning to see what the result of those changes are; how the dynamic is settling into a new stable state.

DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago

Indeed. Most discussions I've had other than on reddit and similar platforms have tended to be very pleasant and rational. It is possible to discuss something with someone who holds completely different opinions on the topic in such a way that everyone walks out of the discussion understanding it a bit better than before. How this flips around into the mirror-world that is social media, is beyond my understanding. Either people who discuss on large platforms and those that do it offline or in more personal online communities are two distinct groups of people with little overlap, or some magic switch just flips in peoples heads when they put their hands on a keyboard. The media are ultimately just following the market: outrage sells, so they deliver. Sure, we can blame them for abusing their power in cases like these, but more importantly, we should ask the question how they ended up in a position where everyone just blindly trusts what they read in a newspaper.

ben509 6y ago
I think a discussion platform is a complicated dynamic system. Social media has various algorithms and even layout decisions (how comments are sorted) that promotes stuff that gets engagement. Then they have a mess of filters that tries to limit some of the worst behavior. I suspect what makes it really hard to understand is there's a training effect as users subconciously learn what things get more attention, and what attention they see as favorable is a moving target depending on their emotional state. So you really have no idea what changing the kind of attention they get will do, and even if you did, when you try to make changes to see what happens, you have to wait on the timescale of human learning to see what the result of those changes are; how the dynamic is settling into a new stable state.