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Social media encourages dogpiling. "Engagement" measures shares, reactions and comments. Shares get more eyeballs on a post and "the algorithm" further promotes

by hnbad 6y ago

Social media encourages dogpiling. "Engagement" measures shares, reactions and comments. Shares get more eyeballs on a post and "the algorithm" further promotes posts already garnering a lot of "engagement", creating a feedback loop. More eyeballs means more people commenting and a greater likelihood of repeating what has already been said, hence more dogpiling. Early online communities were not only much more heavily moderated than even sites like reddit or HN are today, but they also usually had explicit rules prohibiting dogpiling because it made it impossible to have a discussion or actually explain to someone why what they said may have been deemed offensive, inappropriate or wrong. If you spend more time "interacting" on social media, you probably encounter dogpiles more frequently and end up contributing to them more than someone who mostly just consumes social media and doesn't actively participate. This probably also means you face more of the resulting backlash, further polarizing your views of the "others". This seems to generally lead to one of two outcomes: Either you quit, or you embrace the angry surface level discourse and turn lashing out at people online into a hobby. You can see this happen in real time on Twitter because the character limit rewards witty one-liners and comebacks over wordy nuance (even if people try to work around this with threads, but note this doesn't work well for replies and this still requires replying several times in a row and results in notification spam).

hnbad 6y ago
To put it differently: social media is competitive and encourages antagonistic behavior (because people are more likely to "engage" something snappy they disagree with, than something nuanced they agree with). Cyberbullying is just the extreme end of it. If we wanted to avoid this, we would need to encourage cooperation over competition. But even sites explicitly built around cooperation (like Stackoverflow) often end up promoting competitive behavior by introducing rewards and privileges for supposedly cooperative behavior. If you gamify cooperation and reward people for being "good at cooperating", you just create a competition with extra steps and this can still poison the well.

by hnbad 6y ago

hnbad 6y ago

To put it differently: social media is competitive and encourages antagonistic behavior (because people are more likely to "engage" something snappy they disagree with, than something nuanced they agree with). Cyberbullying is just the extreme end of it. If we wanted to avoid this, we would need to encourage cooperation over competition. But even sites explicitly built around cooperation (like Stackoverflow) often end up promoting competitive behavior by introducing rewards and privileges for supposedly cooperative behavior. If you gamify cooperation and reward people for being "good at cooperating", you just create a competition with extra steps and this can still poison the well.