16 ms·

Twitter (and nearly every "social" media platform) is like democracy: a sewer hose of manufactured consent, ignorance, mob stupidity, disinformation, and bot-au

• ttul 5y ago
  … in other words, something that is unlikely to materialize any time soon.
• tqi 5y ago
  Hacker news is social media. Most of your suggestions aren't implemented here. Yet the discourse is generally ok. The only thing that matters is the size of community. Beyond a certain scale, it always breaks down. Ultimately, the problem is the people.
  • anyfoo 5y ago
    And competent moderation, essentially editorial guidelines. (Something that pretty much implies a community that isn’t too big.)
    • tqi 5y ago
      That probably helps here, but I don't think moderation works once you get beyond the point where one moderator can handle everything.
      • airhead969 5y ago
        I guess the issue is keeping moderation consistent (like bar exam grading) coupled with a manageable size of community that handles scaling. I wonder if social media platforms could cluster 10-25 people together into "troops" with a "troop leader" and a "guidance counselor." This way, it's not just a sea of individuals floating along ephemerally disconnected, but brings some tribal belonging and support back that people yearn for.
        • lupire 5y ago
          Slashdot had metamoderation 25 years ago.
          • airhead969 5y ago
            Yes, I was there. :) 23 years ago ;) I meant some sort of mechanism to improve the training/fairness/consistency of moderators rather than merely double-checking them.
          • bombcar 5y ago
            Slashdot died from the incoming content, not the posts, as far as I recall from those days. Digg suffered the same fate. Reddit has so far been kept from it since moderators can only pin a few posts and only have "negative" control of the posts that appear at the top.
          • JohnBooty 5y ago
            Their metamoderation was innovative but ultimately pointless. Instead of having one popularity contest, it was like a popularity contest that qualified you for another popularity contest. Theoretically the metamods were "good" posters, but being a "good" poster was ridiculously easy - you could just rack up karma by parroting the hivemind and bashing Microsoft or whatever.
  • cvwright 5y ago
    True, people will always be the root of the problem. But they are also the best part of everything. We need platforms that encourage the good stuff and minimize or discourage the bad. Not the other way around.
    • airhead969 5y ago
      Absolutely. I think there's a virtuous spiral when the one (specific platform features, philosophy, and conventions) reinforces the other (people's perceptions, attitudes, and interactions), and people care about excellence. The for-profit, outrage-seeking, clickbait model of "engagement" is the opposite of that. We can't fix everything with technology (if there's still people problems) or with good people (if the platform fails them) alone.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    Most subject-specific forums are actually ok. Because posting there demonstrates that you have something worthwhile to care about. Of course one can troll and flamebait on such forums as well but it takes effort and it's not going to seriously rile people up about anything. Twitter is poles apart from that, it's like being in a different universe.
    • airhead969 5y ago
      Yes, that's absolutely right. Also, I noticed how most underdog / less socially-acceptable lifestyle/interest forums tend to be pleasant, humorous, and reasonable. The other aspect maybe that marginalized people (without chips on their shoulders resentment) know what it feels like to be othered / not treated well and go out-of-their-way to be friendlier. For example, I can't remember any LGBT+ people who aren't cool, decent, and sociable... and I'm the goofy, straight, ally interloper stealing all the pretty cis girls (or they're stealing me, IDK). On niche interests-side where it's a small world, I think the cosiness reduced sized and inherent common interests also reinforce, promote better behavior, and friendliness. Twitter and such definitely throw unbounded numbers of random people at each other, and so the odds of clashing are astronomically-higher. In this alternate (mainstream) universe, the sad part is that social and online ideological Balkanization has cemented echo chambers of memetic civil war; a people divided-and-conquered.
  • bosswipe 5y ago
    HN has decently big scale. Somehow it works because of heavy handed moderation, manual, crowdsourced and automated. I think twitter really needs a downvote button. But they prefer relying more on their AIs instead of crowdsourced moderation. Probably so they can sell more ads.
  • airhead969 5y ago
    I think you're partially right. HN started niche and attracted a narrow audience intent on productive communication; mostly college grads and/or positive attitude people (successful attributes, even if a bit rowdy and troublemaking at times), and not many lottery ticket buyers [1]. It is very open, so it could be overwhelmed by less signal crowds over time should it hit mainstream visibility. Do some platforms need to limit the number of participants and do stack-ranking dismissals? IIRC, the ASW platform culled a bunch of accounts. There have been studies on social media interactions (I can't recall the links atm, and am almost done posting from the loo :) and "captological" aspects that influence people's online perception, behaviors, and reactions. I think the problems are the people, the power they're given, the presence/lack of fairness they perceive, what they're presented with, and whether or not the community defends itself and its values strongly (I think dang does a Herculean job with this). [1] Best characterizes the lottery ticket phenomenon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393875
  • paulpauper 5y ago
    HN is not social media. Social media has friends/followers, chats, inboxes, timelines... stuff like that. Social media involves some insularity. This is how so-called fake news spreads, because insular networks do not get outside feedback. .
    • johncessna 5y ago
      The rep meter is what makes the difference. I've caught myself posting something only to spam f5 to see if what I was said was accepted or rejected.
    • croes 5y ago
      Social media just needs the possibility to share media with other people to be called social media. So HN is social media.
  • nasalgoat 5y ago
    HN is a tiny monoculture community catering to a niche audience. Of course the discourse is okay, there's almost no disagreement.
    • edoceo 5y ago
      Wrong!
      • airhead969 5y ago
        OMG, you win the internet for today. Haha. If we can respectfully disagree and see each other's point-of-views without ghosting each other, then we're dialoguin'. Otherwise, we're just talking past each other, seeking karma brownie points, or taking out our frustrations.. and then what point is there to participating if there isn't meaningful communication?
    • Karunamon 5y ago
      Oh my heavens no. There are certain topics that even this site can't discuss in good faith without groupthink, hurt feelings, big egos, and so forth. No, I will not list those topics here to avoid invoking them, but most of them are political. Sometimes they get just as toxic as twitter and reddit, just with less namecalling since that'll get you flagged off with a quickness. On that note: If even HN can't do it, I think some of these topics can't be discussed online at all. Here you've got great moderation, a high SNR, and vanishingly few of the pathologies that infest most web fora. Almost everything else is a step down in quality.
      • jerf 5y ago
        "If even HN can't do it, I think some of these topics can't be discussed online at all." They can be, just not in a any format where anyone can post, let's say, 10 paragraphs of whatever, and then hundreds of people can jam their 40 paragraph rebuttals and threats right underneath it. While convenient for many purposes, the formats where the interactions are this tight and integrated are not the only formats. You need something more like a weblog-structured community, where people can post their lengthy thoughts at their leisure, and others can post their own rebuttals on their own weblogs, but I think it's actually important that there not be tight integration such that everyone is getting a phone notification every time someone posts some link to them. I would agree that online platforms that stick everyone into one metaphorical mosh pit have certain topics that simply can't be discussed reasonably, but "metaphorical mosh pit" isn't the only option.
  • fernandopj 5y ago
    HN is not pursuing 10%/week growth, "engagement" etc. It doesn't care for bots, viral posts, there's a small, definable ruleset and largely enforceable. It naturally attracts people interested in its themes and subjects, and doesn't try to cater to everyone needs. Hell, it isn't even trying to be beautiful or having any order other than chronological timeline and upvoted posts! No wonder it hasn't become a toxic wasteland.
    • airhead969 5y ago
      That's definitely true. Without messing up a good thing (HN), I wonder though how similar community platforms could be constructed incrementally better in terms of reasonableness, fairness, ethical/principled/respectful debate, curiosity, quality people, and signal. It might be bad analogies but the lack of flash a-la Drudge Report (haven't seen it in years) or the old Fry's Electronics (stores and their website). I think it somewhat deters engagement addiction and focuses on content.
    • cryptoz 5y ago
      > No wonder it hasn't become a toxic wasteland. It is a toxic wasteland, though, at least sometimes. Also depends on who you are and how you experience the world - HN can be a very ugly place. HN is no cakewalk. There are lots of very vocal climate deniers, homophobes, Nazis, etc. here. I've been called hateful slurs on HN that nobody has said to me anywhere else. Much of this flies under the radar of the mods and the users are frequently not warned or banned. HN suffers all the same problems as Twitter or any of the others.
      • everdrive 5y ago
        Twitter is dominated by outrage and disinformation. HN very much is not. You may still encounter conversations with people who hold terrible views, but they remain conversations. I've never been downvoted for making a controversial point on HN. And, I have ONLY been downvoted for making glib, lazy, or intellectually weak arguments. This is exactly how it should be.
        • 5y ago
  • geraneum 5y ago
    If they introduce targeted ads or up-votes/interactions could be monetized in HN, even with the the same community, you would start to see the deterioration IMHO. Cool headed, interesting or curious do not generate enough click through as much as controversial, conspiracy theory, outrageous, hateful, etc. It's interesting that there's no ban on political or controversial content in HN but still, you don't see them take over the platform. The incentive is simply not there!
  • xfer 5y ago
    I think the major ingredient for HN is focus on topics that are interesting to "techinical" people. When you focus on particular set of activities it becomes easier to just say no to a lot of other contents. I don't have twitter but i check some users(like the pico8 dev) once a week for interesting content. I don't see anything offtopic there and it's very nice and sometimes i learn something even in the replies. Same with certain subreddits. Just consuming in polling mode, helps a lot.
  • rdiddly 5y ago
    I don't think that's the only thing going on. Twitter has code written and an ML model trained to actively and intentionally surface material of indeterminate quality that is likely to drive engagement. HN has people using moderation and upvoting to surface material of high quality assuming that drives engagement.
  • lostlogin 5y ago
    Maybe money they raise is for purchasing a Dang? I know that scaling moderation is difficult, and can’t imagine how it’s all kept in check here. How Twitter intend to address that is interesting.
  • yumraj 5y ago
    The reason for that is HN is not for direct profit, has a charter, is not afraid to moderate content, via flag, and to bar people, via marking them as dead, and actively hunts spam and trolls. If Twitter/FB were to do this, they'll have 1/5th the customer base but will have more sane content.
• kleer001 5y ago
  An excellent set of wishes for an enforced good faith social network. No idea how it'd fly though.
• SkyMarshal 5y ago
  Any open social media platform where you can choose who you follow and who sees or doesn’t see your content is effectively an invite-only platform. Twitter is pretty close to that, except it’s default opt-in rather than default opt-out. Meaning everyone can see your content by default, rather than you having to explicitly allow rando’s to see your content and reply to you. But if you follow people who make high-quality posts, and unfollow, mute, and/or block people who produce all noise and no signal, you’ll have a pretty good professional and personal networking experience. Most other social media have ways of curating your feed, but you have to proactively do it, can’t just rely on the social media platform to do it for you.
• devwastaken 5y ago
  We have had moderated platforms for discussion, but when people don't like being told they're wrong (especially when they are) they create their own. Personal details don't deter it, as shown by the various platforms that were inhabited by the alt-right. There's a cultural lack of responsibility for the truth.
  • airhead969 5y ago
    Maybe for that subculture, but I meant generally. https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2205-there-is-an-inverse-relationship-between-level-of-anonymity-and-quality-of-conversation https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2205-there-is-an-inverse-rela...
• ansible 5y ago
  > elimination of pile-on I'm thinking of some kind of ML scheme where the site analyzes your comment and sees if it is similar enough to existing comments. Or perhaps also analyzes your comments to see if they are similar to older comments you have made already.
• pupdogg 5y ago
  Is there an accessible list of countries available to host servers that aren't in a treaty with the US, EU, RU and CN?
• addingnumbers 5y ago
  You say "dv" four times like people should already know what it means
  • edgyquant 5y ago
    Downvote
  • airhead969 5y ago
    Sorry! I thought that were obvious by mentioning voting. Mea culpa.
    • dredmorbius 5y ago
      Specifically downvoting (DV).
• josephcsible 5y ago
  > - login required to view content, no search engine spidering Why do you think this is a good thing? > - servers and legally based in a country the US and EU cannot control I see two ways that could go: either somewhere that China and/or Russia have control over, or in an unstable third-world dictatorship. Do you have any specific countries where none of the above would apply, or do you prefer one of the latter two to the US and EU?
  • airhead969 5y ago
    No search engine spidering so discussions aren't monetized or ripped-off, discussions can be freer (half-way to being YC dinners), and potentially greater incentives to apply. Somewhere like Iceland or Greenland.
• JohnBooty 5y ago
  Most of those things are good, but they address symptoms more than root causes I think. The root cause is that platforms like Twitter rely on engagement (and maybe more importantly, growth of said engagement) for their lifeblood. When that's the case, the incentive will always be to increase engagement at all costs and nothing drives engagement like flamewars and other lowest common denominator garbage. Additionally, as long as the social currency is "how much other members of the userbase like your posts" you'll wind up with either a single hivemind or multiple warring factions IMO (e.g. conservatives vs. liberals on FB) HN manages to keep its discourse level fairly high because of this, I believe. HN does not need to grow nor generate revenue directly. A Twitter-alike, curated as strictly as HN, might work. It might even be able to turn a profit, if the goal was sustainable profit and not some impossible dream of unbounded growth concocted by investors wanting the next trillion-dollar hit.
• dredmorbius 5y ago
  "dv"???
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    Self-reply: DV == "downvote", from other responses.
• at-fates-hands 5y ago
  > Maybe an invite-only platform Many social media platforms have tried this and failed Even at the lowest level of having to get an invite from someone you know - its never worked: - Clubhouse - Google+ - ELLO - Mastodon The paradox here is you need people to generate sustainable communities. When you don't have enough people, users will stop using the platform. Another classic case of this is all the "decentralized" social platforms like Diaspora and others. Great idea, great implementation, but without enough people, its doomed to fail.
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    I agree nearly completely with the inherent failur-proneness of invite-only networks, and participated in three of the four you mention. I'd dispute Mastodon as invite-only however. That said, the exception is a network created for an extant community. In fact, most of the major successful social media networks have emerged from just such a community, and quite frequently one that's academically oriented. Email, Usenet, and Facebook all emerged out of academia. Email and Usenet with early Arpanet and major research universities. Facebook was once literally Harvard. Several other early networks such as The WELL and Slashdot were strongly adjacent to these. Several early BBS systems emerged out of or alongside military service communities. I don't recall if it was AOL, Prodigy, or another early network which was strongly popular among US military personnel and families (a large, reasonably cohesive community, widely distributed, with contacts and ongoing communications in distant locations). YC's HN would be another example. But generally, creating an early cohesive community is a challenge, and many of the tricks for short-cutting this process tend also to greatly diminish the long-term value and prospects of the discussion platform. My own contention is that Google+ actually did have a strong internal-to-the-network (not just Google) community (though one that excluded a great many people). I feel the social network hurt itself by trying to open too quickly (Ello certainly did), as well as by Google's own greatly bifurcated affinity groups: technologists on the one hand, and marketers on the other. Marketing/advertising is toxic to social cohesion, and this showed early in G+ evolution.
• alpaca128 5y ago
  > - reputation/karma that isn't apparent or chased The more I think about those problems the more I'm convinced up- and downvotes are a mistake in general. They can only cause damage and are completely useless as they're not even used for the same thing by different people. For example when someone gets 5 downvotes it's probably for at least 2 different reasons, none of which are communicated to the poster. When I get a random downvote I'd really like to know if it was warranted, but there's no way to find out. If any kind of rating system had to exist I'd vote for something like tags; with users being able to tag any content with any 1-2 words, and frequent ones are visible without some extra clicks. For one this would give more nuanced information, and at the same time it would make tons of content much easier to find or filter.
  • velosol 5y ago
    That reminds me of the slashdot moderation system - when a user gets modpoints they get to spend them on posts as they browse and indicate why they spent that modpoint that way (e.g. 'Troll' or 'Flamebait').
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    Having used many broken moderation systems and designed a few (also broken) myself, a few observations. - Popularity itself is a very poor metric for quality. It's mostly a metric for ... popularity. Which is to say: broad appeal, simplicity, emotive appeal (or engagement), and brevity. This does however correspond reasonably well to sales and advertising metrics. - The most critical question the designer of a moderation / rating system needs to ponder is what is the goal? See https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content_rating_moderation_and_ranking_systems/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content... - My own goal tends toward maximised overall quality, with a high favouring of truth value and relevance. - There's some value to a multi-point rating scale. This is called a "Likert Scale", typically an odd-number of points (3, 5, 7, ...), most commonly encountered as a star-scale system. Amazon and Uber are the most familiar of these today, and highlight failure modes. If users' ratings are rebalanced based on their own average rating, at least some of the issues go away (e.g, a very positive rater giving away 5/5 will have those ratings discounted, a conservative rater offering 3/5 on average would see those uprated). The adjusted average becomes the rebalanced rating. - Note that a capped cumulative score is not the same as an averaged Likert score. Slashdot's moderating system is an example of the former. It ... kind of works but mostly doesn't. Highly-ranked content tends to be good, but much content deserving higher ratings is utterly ignored. - Taking number of interactions and applying a logarithmic function tends to give a renormalised popularity score. That is, on a log-log basis, you'll tend to see a linear scaling from "1 person liked this" to "10 billion people liked this" (roughly the range of any current global-scale ratings system). See also: Power Distribution, Zipf Function. - Unbiased and uncorrupted expertise should rate more strongly. In averaging the inputs of 300 passengers + 2 pilots for an airplane's flight controls, my preferred weighting is roughly 3300*0 and 11. Truth or competence are not popularity games. - Sometimes a distinct "experts" vs. "everyone" scoring is useful. I've recently seen an argument that film reviews accomplish this, with the expert reviewers' scores setting expectations for "what kind of film is this" and the popular rating for "how well did this film meet established expectations"? There are very good bad films, and very bad good films, as well as very bad bad films. - "The wisdom of crowds" starts failing rapidly where the crowd is motivated, gamed, bought, or otherwise influenced. Such behaviour must* be severely addressed if overall trust in a ratings system is to remain. - Areas of excellence ("funny", "informative", "interesting", etc.) are somewhat useful but very often the cost of acquiring that information is excessively high. Indirect measures of attributes may be more useful, and there's some research in this area (Microsoft conducted studies on classification of Usenet threads based on their "shape", in the 2000s. Simply based on the structure of reply chains, there were useful classifications: "dead post", "troll", "flameware", "simple question everybody can answer", "hard question many can guess at but one expert knows the answer", etc. - Actual engagement with content, even just for a voting or other action is a small fraction of total views. Encouraging more rating behaviour often backfires. Make do with the data that occurs naturally, incentivised contribution skews results. - Sortition in ratings may be useful. It greatly increases the costs of gaming. - As is sortition of the presented content. Where it's not certain what is (or isn't) highly-ranked content, presenting different selections to different reader cohorts can help minimise popularity bias effects. - Admitting that any achieved ratings score is at best a rough guess of the ground truth is tremendously useful. Fuzzing ratings based on the likely error can help balance out low-information states in trying to assess ratings.