18 ms·

Don't let social media think for you

406 points by hnthrowaway2 5y ago

wonderfulness 5y ago
> These pluralities are unable to exist on social media I broadly agree with the author, but I have a small nit regarding the above sentence. Pluralities definitely are able to exist on social media, it's just that it is far easier to get swept up in sensationalism, outrage and gossip than it is to find and continue seeing sensible and well-thought posts. The initial days of social media enabled the former, but got drowned out when mass popularity was reached. Think early days Twitter and Quora. I say this as a person who has no social media accounts, but uses twitter intermittently without an account. It is possible to find nice things on the internet using a pull-based model, i.e. when you actively search for (not just passively follow!) the good stuff and actively block out all the bad stuff. Problem is that SM companies make it increasingly difficult to do this, plus trusting your reading list to the "recommended" and "trending now" sections of a social media feed causes issues. But knowing for what to search and how yields good results which you would not be able to find if you have a blanket ban on anything social-related.
- js8 5y ago
  I think curation (of said pluralities) would be possible on social media (like it's possible for example on Wikipedia), but the interactions are effectively owned (controlled) by the media owner, and they don't necessarily want the participants to have that power.
spadros 5y ago
Yes I quit social media a couple of years ago and agree with pretty much everything the author says. Social media environments encourage incendiary discussion because it fuels upvotes and general attention. Most people won't take the time to consider a more valid grey opinion because they've jumped to a conclusion and are busy attacking someone, or because it won't get as much attention. The first thing that came back for me after quitting social media was that "slow thinking" brain that tries to empathize with all sides rather than just call out some "evil" and check out intellectually.
- hnthrowaway2 5y ago
  It is a bit like "don't let the truth get in the way of a good story". I have felt the urge to respond with something witty and scathing to a story online, only to realise after a moment's reflection that my response would be irrelevant in several scenarios. The disappointment that follows for wasting a witty response...that takes some resisting.
  - mkr-hn 5y ago
    My struggle is finding something that brings out the wit like a good tweet so I can put it to a more productive purpose. I've written novels worth of tweets because there's just enough good stuff to reply to that it's hard to leave without an alternative.
  - FridayoLeary 5y ago
    The amount of comments here on HN that i never post or delete.... That's largely thanks to HN being quite strictly policed.
- goalieca 5y ago
  I'm on linked-in for obvious reasons but i largely ignore the posts. I don't get how so many people are political on a site largely concerning itself with employment. Other than that, reddit was the last piece of social media that i quit last year. I consider it more of a social media service than an a forum for discussion.
  - TheHypnotist 5y ago
    LinkedIn is chock full of people with bullshit professional titles posting nonsense. Half the time I wonder if they're bots.
    - ta988 5y ago
      They may not be but social media make people act like bots. Humans just optimize for whatever reward they are after (likes, followers...)
throw737858 5y ago
If you click on toxic content, algorithm is going to feed it to you. Twitter is perfectly fine if you unfollow and block toxic influencers. There is propably even keyword based filtering. For news you can watch international news stations from India. Very realistic and refreshing.
- tester34 5y ago
  but what's the point of watching news? why bother?
  - codeulike 5y ago
    Fact x Importance = News https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC4vPR9e9NA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC4vPR9e9NA
  - Broken_Hippo 5y ago
    The point is to let you know a bit about the reality you share with others. The stuff on the news is often things that are affecting others directly (do you want to avoid the area of town with unmasked protesters?) and indirectly (Is your neighbor going to increase racism towards Asian Americans in part because of folks linking a virus to a country?). News doesn't always have the most important things to you, but it clues you in on the world.
    - tester34 5y ago
      It's poor deal, it's not worth. Just because I may learn some small things that probably does not affect me directly and additionally receive some news that make my mood worse due to hearing some yet another negative news about bad stuff / politics / yada yada, what's the point? 80% of the news I read is HN and some programming related websites and whenever I jump into "mainstream" media, then I feel like I'm reading some shit - click baits, tragedies, controversial stuff, drama seeking, celebrities it's irrelevant for me
      - throw737858 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
2malaq 5y ago
Just as important is to not let the mainstream media do your thinking for you either.
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  Ironically, often people who make that claim let highly politicized, biased, and often downright dishonest rags make their decisions for them instead.
pessimizer 5y ago
It's bizarre to use an author who demands 5/5 star reviews and insults personally people who gave her 4/5 star reviews in a take about nuance criticizing the people who criticized her for doing that. Blogs are also social media, this is just additional pile-in. I think this is supposed to be better because it uses too many words, tries to make the personality flaws that it ascribes to reviewers universal, and has a bunch of emotionally performative talk about moved to tears and having your heart broken mixed with talk about trauma. edit: maybe the blog author should spend the time to listen to the life stories of the people who review books. If there were a more traumatic story from one or more of them, expressed well, would they win the sympathy contest?
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  I believe the article's author is not saying that the author was in the right; quite the contrary. Rather, the point is that the author can be in the wrong, and yet one can still sympathize with her situation and difficulty in being dispassionate about having her work rated. Yet, the mechanisms of social media (ranking, instant comments, etc.) push everything in the opposite direction of reflection and sympathy.
- jfengel 5y ago
  Aggravatingly, in a lot of circumstances, 5/5 means "acceptable" and anything less is varying degrees of "unacceptable". That's not good, but it's very real. Uber drivers who fall below 4.6 can lose business, so a 4 rating can literally cost them money. Given that they might as well just go to a thumbs-up/thumbs-down system. There are a number of situations where I'd love to give somebody 4 stars as a way of saying "You did good but I'd prefer X", but I don't want that to be a black mark. I make the same mistake some times. If all other things are equal on a product I'll pick the 4.8 star one over the 4.6 star one, even though I know perfectly well that these are worse than useless. That's no excuse for an author to be a dick about it, but it's a really stupid bind they're caught in.
  - yeahr4579 5y ago
    Same for a lot of colleges! If you don’t have a straight 4.0 you’ve “failed”
cindarin 5y ago
I don't understand these posts. Why must the world at large censor themselves so an author can demand everyone see her work as perfection without hearing any other opinion? Why are the various, discordant voices considered "social media thinking for you", but the demand of absolute acquiescence is not?
- tristor 5y ago
  I don't believe that's an accurate representation of the point the author of the article was trying to make. I believe that their point was that we should not pile on with mobs, believing that popularity or trends of the moment are correct (letting social media think for you) and instead perform our own analysis of available information or better yet avoid contentious situations altogether. Their point wasn't really about the author or the book, or the situation, it was a meta-analysis of the fact that many of the later participants in the mud-slinging online were reacting to the furor on social media, rather than to the original situation. If you analyze this more expansively, it's just an observation of the well understood sociological trend of reactionaries and counter-reactionaries.
  - cindarin 5y ago
    There's no analysis here. There's no detail whatsoever; those are intentionally omitted, supposedly to protect the readers from being bored. Instead, the blogger offers only opinion with no support at best, and falsehoods presented as truth at worst. I choose not to let them think for me. I will not disavow social media simply because some blogger expressed their own irrational, negative opinions of it.
    - jiofih 5y ago
      Very edgy. But you’re not making any sense. The article has a clear message about mob mentality which you’re simply choosing to ignore. It’s an opinion piece, it doesn’t need “truths”. You can disagree if you want, but not discredit it.
      - 5y ago
Growling_owl 5y ago
It's not just social media. Media in general has a heavy bias on negative reporting , that's because humans are wired to have huge spikes in attention when there is a hint of bad news or character assassination. Back in the days it used to be monodirectional stream: from the Newspapers, Radios, TV towards the population. The internet and social media just amped up this phenomenon globally and the person which is the subject of the character assasination du jour has the immediate feedback of millions of people piling in and commenting aganist them. There is no defense mechanism really. The only way is trying to make money having the least amount of interactions as possible and in a position which is not under the spotlight. New York City, Wall Street and the financial sector will benefit from this, also sports betting comes to mind and every domain where the arena is already built and you enter it knowing that it's a zero sum game. Other winners will be a particular demographic which historically always needs to be on the lookout for social unrest and people ganging up against them. They have the most sensitive internal alarms and have timely retreated to finance
- throwkeep 5y ago
  Yes, the news media is a slower and more centralized outrage machine. The upside of social media is that it's harder to manufacture consent (h/t Noam Chomsky) as it consists of millions of voices. Though that's threatened by the coordinated censorship of big tech, as we saw with the lab leak hypotheses and people being silenced on twitter, facebook and youtube for challenging the approved narrative on that. It finally broke though, but it took over a year! Although without social media, maybe that process would have taken decades?
  - Der_Einzige 5y ago
    Idk - I think manufacturing consent may be easier rather than harder these days. The fact that it's now realistic to accuse people of being a bot (GPT-3) means that elites could just deploy large numbers of language models fine tuned and prompted correctly to AstroTurf and manufactur consent "from the ground up".
    - klyrs 5y ago
SamBam 5y ago
The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size. It's the size that makes the mob, and everyone who has ever considered chiming in to add their voice why so-and-so was bad should stop to think about whether the world really needs that additional voice. Each individual voice may be perfectly right. So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did they really do such wrong that the 10,000th voice is needed? I am ashamed to say I've done it myself, back when I was on Twitter. My feed would start lighting up with some really Bad thing that so-and-so said -- and generally it was "Bad" -- and I'd add my voice somewhere to that cacophony. Not necessarily writing to the Bad Person, but chiming in on someone's long thread. Now I look back and see I was another participant in the mob. Look, the author described in the post absolutely did herself no favors. Her book may have been great, but the way she interacted with people on social media was absolutely not. But being the 10,000th person to tell her that is never necessary. That's just wanting to join a mob, because mobs are fun, because you're all justified in this act together. Mobs are scary, because everyone thinks they are justified. A good friend of mine grew up in Kenya and recounted that when he was about nine, he saw a mob catch a thief. Joining in with everyone else, he took a wire and whipped the man. Next thing he knew, the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him on fire. He has never forgotten the guilt he felt.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  > Each individual voice may be perfectly right. So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did they really do such wrong that the 10,000th voice is needed? This is how I felt yesterday reading the repl.it thread.
  - mavsman 5y ago
    If you don't feel like it will perpetuate it, what thread are you talking about?
    - Andrex 5y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195
mattgreenrocks 5y ago
This gets to my biggest issue with social media: the primacy of the collective opinion. As the article states, nuance has no place, nor does the idea that we should evaluate something based on its intrinsic qualities. Instead, the most important thing about everything is what We think about it in this instant. And that is highly mutable: We will change that whenever we wish, and you need to keep up. The very notion that something can be evaluated based on intrinsic qualities (such as a person's character, a thing's aesthetics, the efficacy of a policy) is devalued because they do not serve the ultimate goal of a collective opinion. Science is a meme/religion we trot out to justify our already-formed beliefs. The reason this is such a problem is that you cannot develop any sort of taste if you are constantly out-sourcing it to a constantly-shifting collective opinion. And taste is a requisite for skill.
- poslathian 5y ago
  Interesting comment, I might have thought it was the other way around.
  - mattgreenrocks 5y ago
    That's the impression I get. The opinions are certainly originally formed from some sort of objective-ish basis, but then it seems to be more important to propagate the meme than it is for others to individually assess the subject or the validity of the original judgment. Similar dynamics happen among VC investors ("no one else is investing, it can't be that good"). My issue is that end up people taking the meme propagation as ground truth.
mjparrott 5y ago
Social media is great for finding people with similar interests. I like to cook a certain type of food, and there is a community there of people who share ideas and the dishes they have made. I like it. It's great. If 'hate' is your 'interest', then you can find lots of people with similar hate online.
- throw67456756 5y ago
  I used to approach social media this way but lately it's become miserable. Politics has seeped into every corner, including real life, and everyone seems radicalized to one extreme or another. For example, I like art, most artists are leftists, same thing with writing and writers, and a few other areas. My views do not align to any particular side. Now years ago, this wouldn't have been a problem, most people did not have a problem being friends with people of different views. But now, if I want to participate in any community I have to bite my tongue. I see people getting bullied and ostracized for the most minor stuff. There's a mob waiting around every corner. I have to keep any politics completely out of any accounts (instead I know have one for just politics, which probably makes it sound obsessed, but what else is there to do). In some, like writing, I've stopped participating. Meanwhile the communities just get more and more toxic and political and it sucks all the fun away to even consume them.
giantg2 5y ago
The most powerful propaganda are the ideas that the people believe are their own.
Brendinooo 5y ago
After reading the quote at the beginning, the article didn't go the way I thought it would. I end up seeing a lot more shades of gray because of my experience on Twitter. If you ever ask yourself "how could someone possibly believe...", that someone is on Twitter and probably wants to tell you why. I generally operate under the stance of "the platform is neutral, it's what we make of it that matters". I'm not entirely sure that's true - I am currently on a Twitter hiatus to reset some things mentally - but it's true to an extent. Why are you on the site? Do you want the sensationalism, the absolutism, the drama? Or do you want to hear thoughtful discussion from a range of interesting voices? This post articulates Twitter's pitfalls, but I'm not sure they're inherent or unavoidable.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Personally, I still believe the platform is neutral, and what we make of it matters. But if we make mostly bad things out of it, modifying the platform (or, if the platform's owners will not modify it, choosing voluntarily to leave it) may be a sensible reaction. Leaf-fall and dead trees on the ground are neutral, but if a forest fire is rampaging a dozen miles away, you cut a firebreak through that stuff instead of taking a laissez-faire approach and letting it be fuel to carry the fire to the nearest populated town. And if you live in that town and you notice the local firefighters don't much care about firebreaks (or cannot successfully cut them given the size and frequency of fires), maybe it's time to pack up and move.
- hirundo 5y ago
  > I generally operate under the stance of "the platform is neutral, it's what we make of it that matters". I'm not entirely sure that's true I left the platform when I found that neutrality not to be true. I could tolerate the insanity from other users by simply not following them. But when Twitter itself started to censor direct messages due to links in them to an article they did not approve of, I made of it an exit. I will gladly participate in a neutral forum that includes some of the wonderful voices I used to follow on Twitter. I really hope that one or more emerges that are driven by protocols rather than proprietary platforms.
paxys 5y ago
There are so many comments here blaming Twitter while blissfully unaware that HN fuels the exact same online outrage. Almost every day there's a "<company> did bad thing to me" article on the front page and people immediately pick up their pitchforks and join the mob. You cannot fix the problem without acknowledging that we are all part of it.
- mavsman 5y ago
  These are two really good points. I feel much more innocent attacking a large corporation than I do individuals. > You cannot fix the problem without acknowledging that we are all part of it. I think this one is even more important because it's more far-reaching and applicable. It's easy to point fingers but hard to look inside and cleanse the inner vessel.
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  Crucial distinction: * Individual identities are less important/influential on HN than twitter * The community is much smaller on HN than twitter * The conversation is more nuanced. We have paragraphs vs. 240 characters * We have voting to squelch really low effort or trolling. The informal guidelines of the community discourage downvoting an otherwise decent post because you don't agree. --- This all adds up to a very different kind of "mob action".
  - young_unixer 5y ago
    I don't think those are the important differences. Reddit has most of that, and a significant amount of subs there are just cesspools of hate.
    - unethical_ban 5y ago
      Points 2 and 4. HN is like the equivalent of a small, curated, relatively mature subreddit that avoids being discovered by other reddit users.
      - 5y ago
coldtea 5y ago
It's not that the people who form a twitter mob don't think or "let twitter think for them". It's that they actively enjoy hurting someone as a mob. They get a kick out of it, and it's not discouraged (as would be actually forming a mob out in the streets be). If anything, it's encouraging, and gives them not just the joy of kicking someone who is down, but also "good person" credits (because the one getting kicked is a bad person, of course). In other words, people are not mislead "against their better nature": they are just encouraged to embrace their badness.
- semitones 5y ago
  I was thinking something similar. If a person has the inclination to jump on the bandwagon for any given situation, they are probably actively getting something out of it. I have a theory that it could have something to do with the haves and the have nots. Whenever some relatively public figure (by default, without critical thinking, is usually labeled as a "have"), slips up in some way, no matter how small, the have nots jump on the opportunity to join a crusade of righteousness where they strike down the goliath for abusing their unfairly acquired power.
  - tachyonbeam 5y ago
    It's not necessarily the "have nots" who jump on the bandwagon. Many of these mob inciters are clearly middle class or upper middle class. I've even seen news anchors participate, people who earn several hundreds of thousands a year. In some cases, it may have to do with crab mentality. Wanting to pull someone down who has more than them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality However, if you look at the way James Damore was taken down, or that woman who made a stupid joke at the airport, these people weren't particularly rich compared to their peers. I think that had more to do with wanting to silence dissenting voices and kick someone while they're down, never giving them an opportunity to defend themselves or to have an open discussion.
    - semitones 5y ago
      I agree, it's not necessarily the "have nots" in the typical sense of the term, crab mentality is more accurate. It's just about someone who has more of anything than you - money, power, privilege (loaded term these days), status, etc.
Evenjos 5y ago
I'm active in many writing communities. There is a culture, among writers, to "Never respond to reviews." Those who dare break that taboo are asking for trouble, in the form of twitter mobs and online bullying. Writing is a cut-throat, competitive industry. All of the arts are, once you get beyond hobbyist level and into the realm of professionals. I would not be shocked if a lot of that abuse came from other writers.
root_axis 5y ago
Live by the sword die by the sword. The author in question wanted to share and cash in on her story by selling it to the masses, when someone among the masses reacted with very mild criticism to her work she antagonized them publicly and the masses didn't like that. Oh well, be nice online if you want to harvest the denizens of the internet to make a living.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  Well, there's an old saying: "there's no such thing a bad publicity". Every time you enrage one group on Twitter, you potentially engage another.
aantix 5y ago
I'm always perplexed at how engineers fall into these tribal traps. People that deal with complex nuance all day fully denouncing any idea from specific people. E.g. I've even seen things like "if you follow Uncle Bob Martin I'm unfollowing you".
- kache_ 5y ago
  The hubris on hackernews is appalling. Being an "engineer" doesn't make you immune to what affects all human beings.
- Buldak 5y ago
  Before I switched to computer science, I studied philosophy, and I encountered lots of people who seemed to think that philosophers had some kind of special relationship to critical thinking. That makes sense in a way, but I also imagine that adherents to just about any discipline, whether it's mathematics or history or journalism, tell themselves a story like this.
- barbacoa 5y ago
  It's because tribalism exists on a different domain than logic and intelligence. It occupies the same region of your brain and satiates the same primordial needs that organized religion once did. We used to circle around our priests and their sacred idols for our sense of unity, now we circle around our politicians and made up genders.
  - parafactual 5y ago
    I don't think specifying "made up genders" makes much sense. The progressives and trans people I know, to the extent that they think tribally, do so with respect to ideology like anyone else.
sangnoir 5y ago
> After a cursory glance, and getting through the heated bluster that often clogs up any twitter debate, I had a general understanding of the situation. I'm not sure if this was layered meta-commentary or a lack self-awareness. Either way, I chuckled
nemosaltat 5y ago
Bennie Noakes sits in front of a set tuned to SCANALYZER orbiting on Triptine and saying over and over, "Christ what an imagination I've got!"
kortex 5y ago
Reminds me of the theory that reasoning is a mechanism for persuasion and social cohesion, not truth discovery. The twitter mob isn't trying to anneal to some maximally accurate Goodreads rating of the book. It's "trying to do" (in the anthropogenic agency sense, like how evolution "wants") something else. Something more social and tribal in nature. But the system starts to go highly nonlinear once the crowd gets bigger than some size, and when the crowd is anonymous/pseudonymous handles, not members of your Dunbar's-number-sized-tribe, where reacting hyperbolically has real social consequences. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/people-argue-just-to-win-scholars-assert.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/people-argue-just-to...
solutron 5y ago
We have a choice to make about the work we want to contribute to. Our hands, our minds. What world do you want to live in? Is your work contributing to that in a meaningful way, such that when you're gone those that come after can continue the work because it's worth doing? We only have so much time on this earth.
- aerospace_guy 5y ago
  Thank you for posting this.
KittenInABox 5y ago
I feel like the described events as depicted lack nuance, which is ironic because the essay itself describes nuance. It misses, for example, that Lauren didn't react this way to one Goodreads reviewer, but several, and didn't remove the reviewers' names when blasting people to her many many thousands of followers. I totally and entirely agree that Twitter has too much of a mob mentality from a lack of nuance but I am very against depicting this lack of nuance with a lack of nuance. The backlash against Lauren was utterly ridiculous and indefensible but that is not a reason to sensationalize and flatten facts.
sattoshi 5y ago
It's such an unpleasant experience speaking to someone who has bought into some form of group-think on a topic. One of my college friends, otherwise an extremely bright guy would frustrate me immensely whenever any political topic came up. Not because we disagreed, but rather because I felt I was talking to John Oliver or whatever other pundit he recently listened to on a topic. Same points. Same statements. Same words. Discussing the root of his propositions were impossible, because they weren't his. He didn't think about them, someone else did.
cratermoon 5y ago
Not letting social media think for you applies equally well to HN comment sections.
kwyjibo1230 5y ago
I agree with the sentiments about mob rule on social media being extremely negative. The thing that always amuses me about any sites with ratings is that most people (the site owners, the reviewees, the reviewers) often assume that everyone has the same barometer for 1-5 stars. That's very likely not the case. Take Goodreads as an example. My Personal barometer is * 5 star = I would re-read this multiples because it was so interesting/engaging/life changing. * 4 star = I really liked this book. I probably wouldn't re-read it but it was memorable. * 3 star = Pretty good book. * 2 star = Book had some flaws or it didn't appeal to me for specific reasons. I didn't like it. * 1 star = I did not like this book at all, and I would tell people not to read it. I think there are probably a lot of people that disagree with my barometer :) Maybe their 5 star is anything "pretty good" or above, and their 1 star is "this author should be banned from authorship, that's how much I disliked this book." Curious to see what other folks' barometers are.
- ggggtez 5y ago
  I imagine many people use: 5 stars - I liked it 1 star. - I didn't like it In fact, I imagine many people do this.
beloch 5y ago
"Within five minutes of this decision I became distracted by my phone and started scrolling through twitter. One of the trending topics was "Lauren Hough, Goodreads" and since I was determined to procrastinate on my literary endeavours for as long as possible (what's another five minutes on a five year record?), I decided to have a look. " It sounds like Hough knows how to whip up some social media outrage to generate free press. The author of this piece would never have heard about Hough or her book were it not for a little incendiary language lighting a giant signal fire of hate on the endless pile of fuel that is twitter. The author of this post literally let social media select a book for him/her to read. If you go on to read Hough's book because of this post on HN, you can join the club! It does make you wonder how many awesome books will go completely ignored over the next decade because their authors didn't know how or weren't willing to ride the social media hate wave.
rurabe 5y ago
https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/giants.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/giants.html
Animats 5y ago
"A month ago I decided to try and get out of the reading slump I have been in - slump is a kind description for what has been a half-decade period of me not picking up a book." And he's writing about book reviews?
myfavoritedog 5y ago
Social media interactions are like daily Black Swan events to most people. The scale of the interactions is just not intuitive enough for them to process in a healthy way. I’m optimistic that eventually, society can learn to deal with it, however.
maypop 5y ago
This discussion feels very meta. In the sense that Twitter is the "bad" person, and we are the actors contributing our individual outrage induced take. Why are we so compelled to participate?
aidenn0 5y ago
One of the great social advantages is the outsourcing of thinking; knowing everything about everything is just not possible. There have always been distortions due to this, particularly in small insular communities. Social media seems to amplify the distortions though; you can end up with a large insular community. After all, if dozens of people all agree with X and nobody disagrees with X, how can it be wrong?
philsnow 5y ago
> These pluralities are unable to exist on social media. There must always be objective truth, there must always be a side that wins, a side that loses [...] But neither side "wins". They both just shout louder and louder in their own side's echo chamber, with only a tiny porthole into the other's echo chamber, until it finally blows over. Getting bent out of shape on twitter is like screaming obscenities into a pillow, but there's a public record of what you screamed.
ggggtez 5y ago
This subject was written about as well by the esteemed Jon Ronson, in "So you've been publicly shamed". Reading it today may sound quaint, but it's also interesting to know that he also wrote about Alex Jones several years before 2016.
croes 5y ago
Regardless of the whole Twitter thing. What's wrong with a 4-star rating? It's not a math exam where there are right and wrong answers and you can get 100% = 5stars with the right knowledge. It is always a subjective impression and even the best book ever will not get only 5 stars. >From Lauren's perspective, what on earth could she possibly have done to garner a 5 star review? Been abused more? Once again it is not an exam, there is no sure way to 100%, especially not 100% with 100% of the reviewers. Doesn't this show a similar mentality to the Twitter mob?
MattyRad 5y ago
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/
btheshoe 5y ago
"Don't let social media think for you" I say, as I open the hnews comments section to check what hnews people think before I read the article

406 points by hnthrowaway2 5y ago

> These pluralities are unable to exist on social media I broadly agree with the author, but I have a small nit regarding the above sentence. Pluralities definitely are able to exist on social media, it's just that it is far easier to get swept up in sensationalism, outrage and gossip than it is to find and continue seeing sensible and well-thought posts. The initial days of social media enabled the former, but got drowned out when mass popularity was reached. Think early days Twitter and Quora. I say this as a person who has no social media accounts, but uses twitter intermittently without an account. It is possible to find nice things on the internet using a pull-based model, i.e. when you actively search for (not just passively follow!) the good stuff and actively block out all the bad stuff. Problem is that SM companies make it increasingly difficult to do this, plus trusting your reading list to the "recommended" and "trending now" sections of a social media feed causes issues. But knowing for what to search and how yields good results which you would not be able to find if you have a blanket ban on anything social-related.

js8 5y ago
I think curation (of said pluralities) would be possible on social media (like it's possible for example on Wikipedia), but the interactions are effectively owned (controlled) by the media owner, and they don't necessarily want the participants to have that power.

spadros 5y ago

Yes I quit social media a couple of years ago and agree with pretty much everything the author says. Social media environments encourage incendiary discussion because it fuels upvotes and general attention. Most people won't take the time to consider a more valid grey opinion because they've jumped to a conclusion and are busy attacking someone, or because it won't get as much attention. The first thing that came back for me after quitting social media was that "slow thinking" brain that tries to empathize with all sides rather than just call out some "evil" and check out intellectually.

hnthrowaway2 5y ago
It is a bit like "don't let the truth get in the way of a good story". I have felt the urge to respond with something witty and scathing to a story online, only to realise after a moment's reflection that my response would be irrelevant in several scenarios. The disappointment that follows for wasting a witty response...that takes some resisting.
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  My struggle is finding something that brings out the wit like a good tweet so I can put it to a more productive purpose. I've written novels worth of tweets because there's just enough good stuff to reply to that it's hard to leave without an alternative.
- FridayoLeary 5y ago
  The amount of comments here on HN that i never post or delete.... That's largely thanks to HN being quite strictly policed.
goalieca 5y ago
I'm on linked-in for obvious reasons but i largely ignore the posts. I don't get how so many people are political on a site largely concerning itself with employment. Other than that, reddit was the last piece of social media that i quit last year. I consider it more of a social media service than an a forum for discussion.
- TheHypnotist 5y ago
  LinkedIn is chock full of people with bullshit professional titles posting nonsense. Half the time I wonder if they're bots.
  - ta988 5y ago
    They may not be but social media make people act like bots. Humans just optimize for whatever reward they are after (likes, followers...)

throw737858 5y ago

If you click on toxic content, algorithm is going to feed it to you. Twitter is perfectly fine if you unfollow and block toxic influencers. There is propably even keyword based filtering. For news you can watch international news stations from India. Very realistic and refreshing.

tester34 5y ago
but what's the point of watching news? why bother?
- codeulike 5y ago
  Fact x Importance = News https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC4vPR9e9NA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC4vPR9e9NA
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  The point is to let you know a bit about the reality you share with others. The stuff on the news is often things that are affecting others directly (do you want to avoid the area of town with unmasked protesters?) and indirectly (Is your neighbor going to increase racism towards Asian Americans in part because of folks linking a virus to a country?). News doesn't always have the most important things to you, but it clues you in on the world.
  - tester34 5y ago
    It's poor deal, it's not worth. Just because I may learn some small things that probably does not affect me directly and additionally receive some news that make my mood worse due to hearing some yet another negative news about bad stuff / politics / yada yada, what's the point? 80% of the news I read is HN and some programming related websites and whenever I jump into "mainstream" media, then I feel like I'm reading some shit - click baits, tragedies, controversial stuff, drama seeking, celebrities it's irrelevant for me
    - throw737858 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

2malaq 5y ago

Just as important is to not let the mainstream media do your thinking for you either.

seattle_spring 5y ago
Ironically, often people who make that claim let highly politicized, biased, and often downright dishonest rags make their decisions for them instead.

pessimizer 5y ago

It's bizarre to use an author who demands 5/5 star reviews and insults personally people who gave her 4/5 star reviews in a take about nuance criticizing the people who criticized her for doing that. Blogs are also social media, this is just additional pile-in. I think this is supposed to be better because it uses too many words, tries to make the personality flaws that it ascribes to reviewers universal, and has a bunch of emotionally performative talk about moved to tears and having your heart broken mixed with talk about trauma. edit: maybe the blog author should spend the time to listen to the life stories of the people who review books. If there were a more traumatic story from one or more of them, expressed well, would they win the sympathy contest?

rossdavidh 5y ago
I believe the article's author is not saying that the author was in the right; quite the contrary. Rather, the point is that the author can be in the wrong, and yet one can still sympathize with her situation and difficulty in being dispassionate about having her work rated. Yet, the mechanisms of social media (ranking, instant comments, etc.) push everything in the opposite direction of reflection and sympathy.
jfengel 5y ago
Aggravatingly, in a lot of circumstances, 5/5 means "acceptable" and anything less is varying degrees of "unacceptable". That's not good, but it's very real. Uber drivers who fall below 4.6 can lose business, so a 4 rating can literally cost them money. Given that they might as well just go to a thumbs-up/thumbs-down system. There are a number of situations where I'd love to give somebody 4 stars as a way of saying "You did good but I'd prefer X", but I don't want that to be a black mark. I make the same mistake some times. If all other things are equal on a product I'll pick the 4.8 star one over the 4.6 star one, even though I know perfectly well that these are worse than useless. That's no excuse for an author to be a dick about it, but it's a really stupid bind they're caught in.
- yeahr4579 5y ago
  Same for a lot of colleges! If you don’t have a straight 4.0 you’ve “failed”

cindarin 5y ago

I don't understand these posts. Why must the world at large censor themselves so an author can demand everyone see her work as perfection without hearing any other opinion? Why are the various, discordant voices considered "social media thinking for you", but the demand of absolute acquiescence is not?

tristor 5y ago
I don't believe that's an accurate representation of the point the author of the article was trying to make. I believe that their point was that we should not pile on with mobs, believing that popularity or trends of the moment are correct (letting social media think for you) and instead perform our own analysis of available information or better yet avoid contentious situations altogether. Their point wasn't really about the author or the book, or the situation, it was a meta-analysis of the fact that many of the later participants in the mud-slinging online were reacting to the furor on social media, rather than to the original situation. If you analyze this more expansively, it's just an observation of the well understood sociological trend of reactionaries and counter-reactionaries.
- cindarin 5y ago
  There's no analysis here. There's no detail whatsoever; those are intentionally omitted, supposedly to protect the readers from being bored. Instead, the blogger offers only opinion with no support at best, and falsehoods presented as truth at worst. I choose not to let them think for me. I will not disavow social media simply because some blogger expressed their own irrational, negative opinions of it.
  - jiofih 5y ago
    Very edgy. But you’re not making any sense. The article has a clear message about mob mentality which you’re simply choosing to ignore. It’s an opinion piece, it doesn’t need “truths”. You can disagree if you want, but not discredit it.
    - 5y ago

Growling_owl 5y ago

It's not just social media. Media in general has a heavy bias on negative reporting , that's because humans are wired to have huge spikes in attention when there is a hint of bad news or character assassination. Back in the days it used to be monodirectional stream: from the Newspapers, Radios, TV towards the population. The internet and social media just amped up this phenomenon globally and the person which is the subject of the character assasination du jour has the immediate feedback of millions of people piling in and commenting aganist them. There is no defense mechanism really. The only way is trying to make money having the least amount of interactions as possible and in a position which is not under the spotlight. New York City, Wall Street and the financial sector will benefit from this, also sports betting comes to mind and every domain where the arena is already built and you enter it knowing that it's a zero sum game. Other winners will be a particular demographic which historically always needs to be on the lookout for social unrest and people ganging up against them. They have the most sensitive internal alarms and have timely retreated to finance

throwkeep 5y ago
Yes, the news media is a slower and more centralized outrage machine. The upside of social media is that it's harder to manufacture consent (h/t Noam Chomsky) as it consists of millions of voices. Though that's threatened by the coordinated censorship of big tech, as we saw with the lab leak hypotheses and people being silenced on twitter, facebook and youtube for challenging the approved narrative on that. It finally broke though, but it took over a year! Although without social media, maybe that process would have taken decades?
- Der_Einzige 5y ago
  Idk - I think manufacturing consent may be easier rather than harder these days. The fact that it's now realistic to accuse people of being a bot (GPT-3) means that elites could just deploy large numbers of language models fine tuned and prompted correctly to AstroTurf and manufactur consent "from the ground up".
  - klyrs 5y ago

SamBam 5y ago

The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size. It's the size that makes the mob, and everyone who has ever considered chiming in to add their voice why so-and-so was bad should stop to think about whether the world really needs that additional voice. Each individual voice may be perfectly right. So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did they really do such wrong that the 10,000th voice is needed? I am ashamed to say I've done it myself, back when I was on Twitter. My feed would start lighting up with some really Bad thing that so-and-so said -- and generally it was "Bad" -- and I'd add my voice somewhere to that cacophony. Not necessarily writing to the Bad Person, but chiming in on someone's long thread. Now I look back and see I was another participant in the mob. Look, the author described in the post absolutely did herself no favors. Her book may have been great, but the way she interacted with people on social media was absolutely not. But being the 10,000th person to tell her that is never necessary. That's just wanting to join a mob, because mobs are fun, because you're all justified in this act together. Mobs are scary, because everyone thinks they are justified. A good friend of mine grew up in Kenya and recounted that when he was about nine, he saw a mob catch a thief. Joining in with everyone else, he took a wire and whipped the man. Next thing he knew, the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him on fire. He has never forgotten the guilt he felt.

elliekelly 5y ago
> Each individual voice may be perfectly right. So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did they really do such wrong that the 10,000th voice is needed? This is how I felt yesterday reading the repl.it thread.
- mavsman 5y ago
  If you don't feel like it will perpetuate it, what thread are you talking about?
  - Andrex 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195

mattgreenrocks 5y ago

This gets to my biggest issue with social media: the primacy of the collective opinion. As the article states, nuance has no place, nor does the idea that we should evaluate something based on its intrinsic qualities. Instead, the most important thing about everything is what We think about it in this instant. And that is highly mutable: We will change that whenever we wish, and you need to keep up. The very notion that something can be evaluated based on intrinsic qualities (such as a person's character, a thing's aesthetics, the efficacy of a policy) is devalued because they do not serve the ultimate goal of a collective opinion. Science is a meme/religion we trot out to justify our already-formed beliefs. The reason this is such a problem is that you cannot develop any sort of taste if you are constantly out-sourcing it to a constantly-shifting collective opinion. And taste is a requisite for skill.

poslathian 5y ago
Interesting comment, I might have thought it was the other way around.
- mattgreenrocks 5y ago
  That's the impression I get. The opinions are certainly originally formed from some sort of objective-ish basis, but then it seems to be more important to propagate the meme than it is for others to individually assess the subject or the validity of the original judgment. Similar dynamics happen among VC investors ("no one else is investing, it can't be that good"). My issue is that end up people taking the meme propagation as ground truth.

mjparrott 5y ago

Social media is great for finding people with similar interests. I like to cook a certain type of food, and there is a community there of people who share ideas and the dishes they have made. I like it. It's great. If 'hate' is your 'interest', then you can find lots of people with similar hate online.

throw67456756 5y ago
I used to approach social media this way but lately it's become miserable. Politics has seeped into every corner, including real life, and everyone seems radicalized to one extreme or another. For example, I like art, most artists are leftists, same thing with writing and writers, and a few other areas. My views do not align to any particular side. Now years ago, this wouldn't have been a problem, most people did not have a problem being friends with people of different views. But now, if I want to participate in any community I have to bite my tongue. I see people getting bullied and ostracized for the most minor stuff. There's a mob waiting around every corner. I have to keep any politics completely out of any accounts (instead I know have one for just politics, which probably makes it sound obsessed, but what else is there to do). In some, like writing, I've stopped participating. Meanwhile the communities just get more and more toxic and political and it sucks all the fun away to even consume them.

giantg2 5y ago

The most powerful propaganda are the ideas that the people believe are their own.

Brendinooo 5y ago

After reading the quote at the beginning, the article didn't go the way I thought it would. I end up seeing a lot more shades of gray because of my experience on Twitter. If you ever ask yourself "how could someone possibly believe...", that someone is on Twitter and probably wants to tell you why. I generally operate under the stance of "the platform is neutral, it's what we make of it that matters". I'm not entirely sure that's true - I am currently on a Twitter hiatus to reset some things mentally - but it's true to an extent. Why are you on the site? Do you want the sensationalism, the absolutism, the drama? Or do you want to hear thoughtful discussion from a range of interesting voices? This post articulates Twitter's pitfalls, but I'm not sure they're inherent or unavoidable.

shadowgovt 5y ago
Personally, I still believe the platform is neutral, and what we make of it matters. But if we make mostly bad things out of it, modifying the platform (or, if the platform's owners will not modify it, choosing voluntarily to leave it) may be a sensible reaction. Leaf-fall and dead trees on the ground are neutral, but if a forest fire is rampaging a dozen miles away, you cut a firebreak through that stuff instead of taking a laissez-faire approach and letting it be fuel to carry the fire to the nearest populated town. And if you live in that town and you notice the local firefighters don't much care about firebreaks (or cannot successfully cut them given the size and frequency of fires), maybe it's time to pack up and move.
hirundo 5y ago
> I generally operate under the stance of "the platform is neutral, it's what we make of it that matters". I'm not entirely sure that's true I left the platform when I found that neutrality not to be true. I could tolerate the insanity from other users by simply not following them. But when Twitter itself started to censor direct messages due to links in them to an article they did not approve of, I made of it an exit. I will gladly participate in a neutral forum that includes some of the wonderful voices I used to follow on Twitter. I really hope that one or more emerges that are driven by protocols rather than proprietary platforms.

paxys 5y ago

There are so many comments here blaming Twitter while blissfully unaware that HN fuels the exact same online outrage. Almost every day there's a "<company> did bad thing to me" article on the front page and people immediately pick up their pitchforks and join the mob. You cannot fix the problem without acknowledging that we are all part of it.

mavsman 5y ago
These are two really good points. I feel much more innocent attacking a large corporation than I do individuals. > You cannot fix the problem without acknowledging that we are all part of it. I think this one is even more important because it's more far-reaching and applicable. It's easy to point fingers but hard to look inside and cleanse the inner vessel.
unethical_ban 5y ago
Crucial distinction: * Individual identities are less important/influential on HN than twitter * The community is much smaller on HN than twitter * The conversation is more nuanced. We have paragraphs vs. 240 characters * We have voting to squelch really low effort or trolling. The informal guidelines of the community discourage downvoting an otherwise decent post because you don't agree. --- This all adds up to a very different kind of "mob action".
- young_unixer 5y ago
  I don't think those are the important differences. Reddit has most of that, and a significant amount of subs there are just cesspools of hate.
  - unethical_ban 5y ago
    Points 2 and 4. HN is like the equivalent of a small, curated, relatively mature subreddit that avoids being discovered by other reddit users.
    - 5y ago

coldtea 5y ago

It's not that the people who form a twitter mob don't think or "let twitter think for them". It's that they actively enjoy hurting someone as a mob. They get a kick out of it, and it's not discouraged (as would be actually forming a mob out in the streets be). If anything, it's encouraging, and gives them not just the joy of kicking someone who is down, but also "good person" credits (because the one getting kicked is a bad person, of course). In other words, people are not mislead "against their better nature": they are just encouraged to embrace their badness.

semitones 5y ago
I was thinking something similar. If a person has the inclination to jump on the bandwagon for any given situation, they are probably actively getting something out of it. I have a theory that it could have something to do with the haves and the have nots. Whenever some relatively public figure (by default, without critical thinking, is usually labeled as a "have"), slips up in some way, no matter how small, the have nots jump on the opportunity to join a crusade of righteousness where they strike down the goliath for abusing their unfairly acquired power.
- tachyonbeam 5y ago
  It's not necessarily the "have nots" who jump on the bandwagon. Many of these mob inciters are clearly middle class or upper middle class. I've even seen news anchors participate, people who earn several hundreds of thousands a year. In some cases, it may have to do with crab mentality. Wanting to pull someone down who has more than them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality However, if you look at the way James Damore was taken down, or that woman who made a stupid joke at the airport, these people weren't particularly rich compared to their peers. I think that had more to do with wanting to silence dissenting voices and kick someone while they're down, never giving them an opportunity to defend themselves or to have an open discussion.
  - semitones 5y ago
    I agree, it's not necessarily the "have nots" in the typical sense of the term, crab mentality is more accurate. It's just about someone who has more of anything than you - money, power, privilege (loaded term these days), status, etc.

Evenjos 5y ago

I'm active in many writing communities. There is a culture, among writers, to "Never respond to reviews." Those who dare break that taboo are asking for trouble, in the form of twitter mobs and online bullying. Writing is a cut-throat, competitive industry. All of the arts are, once you get beyond hobbyist level and into the realm of professionals. I would not be shocked if a lot of that abuse came from other writers.

root_axis 5y ago

Live by the sword die by the sword. The author in question wanted to share and cash in on her story by selling it to the masses, when someone among the masses reacted with very mild criticism to her work she antagonized them publicly and the masses didn't like that. Oh well, be nice online if you want to harvest the denizens of the internet to make a living.

commandlinefan 5y ago
Well, there's an old saying: "there's no such thing a bad publicity". Every time you enrage one group on Twitter, you potentially engage another.

aantix 5y ago

I'm always perplexed at how engineers fall into these tribal traps. People that deal with complex nuance all day fully denouncing any idea from specific people. E.g. I've even seen things like "if you follow Uncle Bob Martin I'm unfollowing you".

kache_ 5y ago
The hubris on hackernews is appalling. Being an "engineer" doesn't make you immune to what affects all human beings.
Buldak 5y ago
Before I switched to computer science, I studied philosophy, and I encountered lots of people who seemed to think that philosophers had some kind of special relationship to critical thinking. That makes sense in a way, but I also imagine that adherents to just about any discipline, whether it's mathematics or history or journalism, tell themselves a story like this.
barbacoa 5y ago
It's because tribalism exists on a different domain than logic and intelligence. It occupies the same region of your brain and satiates the same primordial needs that organized religion once did. We used to circle around our priests and their sacred idols for our sense of unity, now we circle around our politicians and made up genders.
- parafactual 5y ago
  I don't think specifying "made up genders" makes much sense. The progressives and trans people I know, to the extent that they think tribally, do so with respect to ideology like anyone else.

sangnoir 5y ago

> After a cursory glance, and getting through the heated bluster that often clogs up any twitter debate, I had a general understanding of the situation. I'm not sure if this was layered meta-commentary or a lack self-awareness. Either way, I chuckled

nemosaltat 5y ago

Bennie Noakes sits in front of a set tuned to SCANALYZER orbiting on Triptine and saying over and over, "Christ what an imagination I've got!"

kortex 5y ago

Reminds me of the theory that reasoning is a mechanism for persuasion and social cohesion, not truth discovery. The twitter mob isn't trying to anneal to some maximally accurate Goodreads rating of the book. It's "trying to do" (in the anthropogenic agency sense, like how evolution "wants") something else. Something more social and tribal in nature. But the system starts to go highly nonlinear once the crowd gets bigger than some size, and when the crowd is anonymous/pseudonymous handles, not members of your Dunbar's-number-sized-tribe, where reacting hyperbolically has real social consequences. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/people-argue-just-to-win-scholars-assert.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/people-argue-just-to...

solutron 5y ago

We have a choice to make about the work we want to contribute to. Our hands, our minds. What world do you want to live in? Is your work contributing to that in a meaningful way, such that when you're gone those that come after can continue the work because it's worth doing? We only have so much time on this earth.

aerospace_guy 5y ago
Thank you for posting this.

KittenInABox 5y ago

I feel like the described events as depicted lack nuance, which is ironic because the essay itself describes nuance. It misses, for example, that Lauren didn't react this way to one Goodreads reviewer, but several, and didn't remove the reviewers' names when blasting people to her many many thousands of followers. I totally and entirely agree that Twitter has too much of a mob mentality from a lack of nuance but I am very against depicting this lack of nuance with a lack of nuance. The backlash against Lauren was utterly ridiculous and indefensible but that is not a reason to sensationalize and flatten facts.

sattoshi 5y ago

It's such an unpleasant experience speaking to someone who has bought into some form of group-think on a topic. One of my college friends, otherwise an extremely bright guy would frustrate me immensely whenever any political topic came up. Not because we disagreed, but rather because I felt I was talking to John Oliver or whatever other pundit he recently listened to on a topic. Same points. Same statements. Same words. Discussing the root of his propositions were impossible, because they weren't his. He didn't think about them, someone else did.

cratermoon 5y ago

Not letting social media think for you applies equally well to HN comment sections.

kwyjibo1230 5y ago

I agree with the sentiments about mob rule on social media being extremely negative. The thing that always amuses me about any sites with ratings is that most people (the site owners, the reviewees, the reviewers) often assume that everyone has the same barometer for 1-5 stars. That's very likely not the case. Take Goodreads as an example. My Personal barometer is * 5 star = I would re-read this multiples because it was so interesting/engaging/life changing. * 4 star = I really liked this book. I probably wouldn't re-read it but it was memorable. * 3 star = Pretty good book. * 2 star = Book had some flaws or it didn't appeal to me for specific reasons. I didn't like it. * 1 star = I did not like this book at all, and I would tell people not to read it. I think there are probably a lot of people that disagree with my barometer :) Maybe their 5 star is anything "pretty good" or above, and their 1 star is "this author should be banned from authorship, that's how much I disliked this book." Curious to see what other folks' barometers are.

ggggtez 5y ago
I imagine many people use: 5 stars - I liked it 1 star. - I didn't like it In fact, I imagine many people do this.

beloch 5y ago

"Within five minutes of this decision I became distracted by my phone and started scrolling through twitter. One of the trending topics was "Lauren Hough, Goodreads" and since I was determined to procrastinate on my literary endeavours for as long as possible (what's another five minutes on a five year record?), I decided to have a look. " It sounds like Hough knows how to whip up some social media outrage to generate free press. The author of this piece would never have heard about Hough or her book were it not for a little incendiary language lighting a giant signal fire of hate on the endless pile of fuel that is twitter. The author of this post literally let social media select a book for him/her to read. If you go on to read Hough's book because of this post on HN, you can join the club! It does make you wonder how many awesome books will go completely ignored over the next decade because their authors didn't know how or weren't willing to ride the social media hate wave.

rurabe 5y ago

https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/giants.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/giants.html

Animats 5y ago

"A month ago I decided to try and get out of the reading slump I have been in - slump is a kind description for what has been a half-decade period of me not picking up a book." And he's writing about book reviews?

myfavoritedog 5y ago

Social media interactions are like daily Black Swan events to most people. The scale of the interactions is just not intuitive enough for them to process in a healthy way. I’m optimistic that eventually, society can learn to deal with it, however.

maypop 5y ago

This discussion feels very meta. In the sense that Twitter is the "bad" person, and we are the actors contributing our individual outrage induced take. Why are we so compelled to participate?

aidenn0 5y ago

One of the great social advantages is the outsourcing of thinking; knowing everything about everything is just not possible. There have always been distortions due to this, particularly in small insular communities. Social media seems to amplify the distortions though; you can end up with a large insular community. After all, if dozens of people all agree with X and nobody disagrees with X, how can it be wrong?

philsnow 5y ago

> These pluralities are unable to exist on social media. There must always be objective truth, there must always be a side that wins, a side that loses [...] But neither side "wins". They both just shout louder and louder in their own side's echo chamber, with only a tiny porthole into the other's echo chamber, until it finally blows over. Getting bent out of shape on twitter is like screaming obscenities into a pillow, but there's a public record of what you screamed.

ggggtez 5y ago

This subject was written about as well by the esteemed Jon Ronson, in "So you've been publicly shamed". Reading it today may sound quaint, but it's also interesting to know that he also wrote about Alex Jones several years before 2016.

croes 5y ago

Regardless of the whole Twitter thing. What's wrong with a 4-star rating? It's not a math exam where there are right and wrong answers and you can get 100% = 5stars with the right knowledge. It is always a subjective impression and even the best book ever will not get only 5 stars. >From Lauren's perspective, what on earth could she possibly have done to garner a 5 star review? Been abused more? Once again it is not an exam, there is no sure way to 100%, especially not 100% with 100% of the reviewers. Doesn't this show a similar mentality to the Twitter mob?

MattyRad 5y ago

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/

btheshoe 5y ago

"Don't let social media think for you" I say, as I open the hnews comments section to check what hnews people think before I read the article