9 ms·

I think part of the problem today with individuals trying to figure out how to moderate their social media usage is that it's not clear what specifically within

by zzzbra 5y ago

I think part of the problem today with individuals trying to figure out how to moderate their social media usage is that it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm. Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. But what might be lost is a powerful lever for democratic input in terms of content curation and moderation. My vote for what's more harmful is the scroll. I have a web extension that just removes the scroll on my Facebook feed. A few months after setting it up I all but stopped using Facebook, checking in once maybe every two months to visit folks individually. I haven't done this for Twitter or IG, but then the quality of my main feed is such that I don't want to remove it outright and want that aggregation of content, somehow. I think that scrolling in general is harmful as a UX pattern, but the obvious alternative of pagination could create all kinds of complexities around deep-linking and fragmentation of content. All the same I'd love to see more platforms adopt this intentional cap on content associated with a given URL. It turns my engagement with content online from scanning to actual reading.

syshum 5y ago
>>Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Yes. This is what created the validation feedback loop, and what generally causes the social harm The like button, and the variations on it is IMO the biggest problem with social media Forums and other discussion boards did not have these problems and while you could have "flame war" that involved actual argumentation back and forth not 1000's of passive visitors choosing to upvote, or downvote on a post with no argumentation
- godshatter 5y ago
  I would place more emphasis on the downvote button causing most of the harm. If you post something, and it doesn't get up-voted, that's less of a hit than posting something and having it be actively downvoted. One is a statement that no one found it interesting enough to vote up, the other is a way of saying that kind of content isn't desired here. I'm guessing it's the downvotes that cause people to leave, leaving an echo chamber in their wake. Upvotes can lead to karma farming, and the need to see that number of likes go up can be a problem I admit. I just think the echo chamber effect is a worse problem. We've all dealt with fragile egos and boisterous idiots before. I miss the days where you weren't shunned for wrong-think, just argued with constantly if your opinion differed from the norm.
  - kierkegaard7 5y ago
    Twitter doesn't have upvotes and I find it to be more addicting than sites with a upvote/downvote system. In a way, downvoting is still getting a response from a person, maybe that is why
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
The pagination on HN is one of its better UX decisions. Same with turning off auto-loading when you reach the end of the front page of Reddit (but that's not the default).
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  Why does HN display a number next to a submission ?
danans 5y ago
> Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. The way I've started to look at it is that all social media has some harmful and some beneficial aspects, but the nexus of identity-based (vs topic-based like HN) social media with upvote/like functionality is the most problematic for people struggling with identity and self worth. Even as someone established enough not to struggle with self-worth, I avoid that type of social media completely. Topic based social media with clear and enforced guidelines for content seems to have the least bad trade-off between the harmful and the beneficial. Of course no social media property is exclusively one or the other, but the design and operation of the service strongly influences the direction in which it goes.
- tessierashpool 5y ago
  the upvote mechanism is definitely harmful in most use cases, because it prioritizes groupthink over expertise. but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer. the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful there. but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions. and this malicious example is just chosen for clarity. even in a more innocuous context, if there is no absolute correct answer and nobody is testing the answers for accuracy, upvotes often do more harm than good, and upvote sites are almost by definition groupthink factories, when they don't pertain to verifiable claims that are quickly tested (which is what makes upvotes helpful on a site like Stack Overflow).
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    > the upvote mechanism is definitely harmful in most use cases, because it prioritizes groupthink over expertise. > but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer. > the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful there. but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions. The obvious answer to this however is not to remove the very useful upvote button everywhere but to - stop frequenting racist forums, - if they are actually racist, tell law enforcement (where applicable) isn't it?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kkcorps 5y ago
I feel the same is true for me as well. I wasn't aware of this extension though. For now, what I do is if I see myself getting addicted to an app, I just uninstall/block it for 2-3 weeks. After that even if I install it back, the craving is mostly gone. It does come back though in 3-4 months. Facebook was boring for me so never used it again after uninstalling.
nonameiguess 5y ago
I'm not sure it's anything mechanical. Facebook is a wretched hive of scum and villainy for sociocultural inertial reasons. You may as well ask why Detroit is a crappier place to live than Madison. Facebook succumbed early on to echo chambers, disinformation campaigns, and marketing of snake oil and pyramid schemes. Hacker News set rules and followed them consistently, moderating the discussion in accordance with those rules. Maybe for a better example, just look at Reddit. Something like AskHistorians or SilphRoad for Pokemon Go are terrific communities full of great information and productive discussion, whereas many other subs are as bad or worse than Facebook. That is in spite of exactly the same interface technology. The difference is culture. If Facebook has a design problem, it's not having any sort of guiding principles other than engagement. The purely algorithmic curation isn't really curation. It doesn't create a culture at all. It just creates addiction. Infinite scroll is in service of that, but it doesn't create it. In fact, the mobile reader I use for Hacker News has infinite scroll and it doesn't make the site worse.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  Facebook was PAID to carry disinformation campaigns. It's just another sort of advertising to a certain way of thinking, and they probably figured they were acting like a common carrier and waited to see if counter-disinformation campaigns coughed up any money to retort. I don't think it was happy times at Facebook when they figured out what they'd collaborated with, but it put them on the defensive. And Mark Zuckerberg isn't really wired to play defense. He is not a natural diplomat.
suketk 5y ago
The problem is absolutely scrolling (I call them feeds[0], but pedants don't love that.) Feeds encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice. If you can eliminate them, these services magically become tools rather than escapes. [0] https://suketk.com/feeds-considered-harmful https://suketk.com/feeds-considered-harmful
- skinkestek 5y ago
  > The problem is absolutely scrolling (I call them feeds[0], but pedants don't love that.) > Feeds encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice. Isn't the problem more one of open-ended feeds rather than feeds generally? I can live fine with my RSS feed for example: nothing gets in there if I don't actually put it there. My Facebook and Twitter feeds however are full of this person liked this, reshared that and commented there. So full that I cannot finish it ever. Of course my addiction is HN, I frequently forget to visit Facebook for weeks (booooring maybe especially after people stopped posting what they did and started just posting motivational posters and memes) and I only visit Twitter as some kind of duty (it is one of the dumbest ideas that ever got traction IMO so I don't exactly enjoy it).
  - zzzbra 5y ago
    I would argue that there is something about the physical interaction that is scrolling. you can scroll at the same time you are reading--this makes the text more of a moving target, and then your "reading" becomes mere scanning. it's hard to shift out of that shallow level of engagement once your there because it's by definition a distracted state, you're trying to just get the gist of this and move onto the next thing you just know is out there which you will actually want to read.
- zzzbra 5y ago
  thank you for the link! I'm happy to see other people making this point--raises my hopes some future UX designers will bring it to the platforms someday.
starkd 5y ago
I think many definitely get obsessed with the need to like/upvote on here as a means to register their response. It seems to detract from the information you get out of other comments. Although it does help to hone in on which comments are most helpful.
intrasight 5y ago
I find scrolling easy to avoid on FB as I just click on the notifications icon, and there are usually only notifications that are of interest - and a relatively small number. Also I use FBP plugin that let's me filter things out on a very fine-granular level, and I am very aggressive with filtering.
MattKimber 5y ago
I think the problem is not necessarily things such as likes, upvotes, shares or other features but platforms which don't consider Goodhart's law when they introduce them. Large Reddits tend toward bland and repetitive cookie-cutter content not solely because Reddit has a voting mechanism, but because the site's structure allows that mechanism to be highly vulnerable to karma farming. There are many casual users who don't notice the content is low-effort or repetitive, special interest subs make it easy to target posts, and the volume is too high for moderators to handle (and many will have a "we can't delete things which are popular and within the rules, even if we don't like them" policy). Facebook (and YouTube, and to some extent Twitter) are a weird branch of that. The application of Goodhart's law wasn't initially to the users but to the platforms themselves. I have little doubt that initially they started with an altruistic observation that people spent more time on the site if they tended to see content from their most entertaining friends, but then someone realised seeing bad takes from a stranger was even more engaging and so you should see that instead. People realise they get more visibility for being controversial, and again there is no real moderation for this, so we have even more of a tyre fire than the blandness which upvote-driven sites tend toward. (Twitter at least still offer tools to curate and remove algorithmic ranking from your feed, even if they try to nudge users away from them. That doesn't protect more popular users from the "trolling brings me attention" culture elsewhere on the site, though.) I think HN is less affected by karma farming due to having a broader range of topics, active moderation of repetitive content and perhaps most importantly a relatively small community with a strong appreciation that the upvote should be used sparingly for interesting and unique content. Also the text and link based format helps - this might change quickly if e.g. HN allowed posting photos of vintage computer equipment, which could disproportionately gain upvotes compared to insightful long-format articles despite being easier to produce.
- qsort 5y ago
  In my opinion the main differentiator is whether or not the platform's userbase is more or less like the population at large. This is important for two reasons: - If a website is full of normies - sorry for the word, feel free to suggest a more appropriate one - then mainstream cultural references, information sources, opinions and so on are bound to dominate the scene. This makes the community far less interesting, because mainstream sources necessarly aim for the lowest common denominator. Those communities also look very similar to each other, as though they were TV channels. - The community is prone to segment itself along the same lines that divide us in real life. Language, politics, education, etc. As harsh as it sounds, I have come to think that being exclusionary in at least some dimensions is necessary for any kind of community to be interesting. > I think HN is less affected by karma farming A very underrated feature that I have come to really like is how positive scores are hidden for everyone except yourself. That a comment is flagged or at -4 is useful signal (I might disagree with the signal but it's clear that other commenters really disliked that), but on the other hand not knowing whether a comment sits at +1 or +20 forces you to think about what the comment is actually saying.
beckman466 5y ago
> it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm. it's the fact that they're undemocratic black box algorithms that make the participation very one directional (explained below). add to that the centralization and non-interoperability/walled garden aspects, as well as platforms focusing on generating profit instead of helping us make deeper connections, and you've got a big dangerous stew. the most constructive content doesn't actually surface; things that generate 'viralness' do. there are also few tools to individually manage this social data or build any sort of coherent framing/narrative. in other words: profit-seeking social media platforms are a straightjacketed collective stream of consciousness; they are undemocratically 'governed' spaces injected with ads that come with no useful tools to organize and structure information about the world around us. "oh but that's not what social media is designed for!" exactly, the medium is the message. by logging into a third party facebook server to connect with friends and people i want to follow, i am constrained by Zuck's rules and Zuck's black box 'social media' functions. going back to a peer to peer setup by using the ideas of bittorrent's DHTs combined with git's version control, like the holochain framework implements, seems to me to be a way to actually get at the root of this problem: it allows us to see the immense overlaps between today's SV platforms to then be able to quickly decommodify humanity's communication and coordination technology, by publicly sharing and collaboratively improving the underlying functions of our networked apps. although in very early stages, these projects like IPFS, DAT, SSB, and especially holochain [1], which allows for a full distribution of social media functions (and more: http://valueflo.ws http://valueflo.ws), and which has forking and complete distribution mechanics built into it from the start, will allow a powerful new wave of dweb application evolution/experimentation. [1] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applications-d2ac1e4f25ef https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
tait 5y ago
Good points. On the other hand, I couldn’t fit your whole comment on one screen. I did scroll down to tap reply. Please stand by while I go recover.
- zzzbra 5y ago
  lack of infinite scroll != no scrolling.
  - tait 5y ago
    your post didn't specify infinite... ;)
cblconfederate 5y ago
> Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Yes it is, HN pays people to keep things at bay. But that doesn't scale
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  It scales, just not at the price companies are willing to pay. Or, put another way, the main social media platforms aren't spending enough to ensure their service works well.
AussieWog93 5y ago
>Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. But what might be lost is a powerful lever for democratic input in terms of content curation and moderation. I don't think it's the upvote/downvote system itself, but the fact that you can see your own "score" that changes behaviour. It has definitely made me more likely to comment, even when I don't have much to add, and I've noticed my comments getting more and more inflammatory/polarising over the past few months as I start to optimise for engagement. Before I turned on noprocrast, I'd often sit there "babysitting" my comments; checking on them every 10 minutes to see how people have reacted to it. I'd be interested to see if @dang has found similar negative effects associated with giving precise counts and scores.
janpot 5y ago
> I think part of the problem today with individuals trying to figure out how to moderate their social media usage is that it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm. I believe it's advertisement-driven content curation. You're being fooled into thinking that your feed follows your interest, but instead it optimizes around stealing your attention. The feeds control you, not the other way around.
createunderrate 5y ago
> it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm Honestly, I think it's just the fact that it's a website that allows you to constantly be exposed to different things that are interesting and stimulating. You can remove upvotes, scrolling, all you want, but you'll still have the IV drip of novel content. Constant exposure to novelty is harmful, I think. We weren't designed to have our minds blown every 5 minutes. Spend a few hours a day having your brain washed with memes and fascinating articles (or at least the titles), and your brain will re-calibrate to this as the new normal, and anything less stimulating (reading books etc.) will feel boring. Constant novelty makes the world seem unstable and makes me feel flighty and anxious compared to more mundane activities, so the mental health connection is no surprise. Hacker News is less stimulating than other social media because it's text-based, it's about more serious topics, it's well moderated, and it doesn't abuse addictive techniques like infinite scrolling. However, I bet many people here will attest that they sometimes close HN only to open it right back up again. Closing a website only to open it immediately because you are bored is a sign that you subconsciously believe the website is one of the only interesting things you can do. Either your brain is right, and everything besides HN, reddit, Twitter, etc. is actually boring, or these things are just so artificially stimulating that using them causes everything else to feel boring in comparison. I'll let you decide which you think sounds more accurate.
Apofis 5y ago
This guy is making a lot of inferences based on his own experience and I think he may want to consider hiring a therapist to work through these issues: "In reality, we hire social media to distract our minds from our unpleasant, average life. And, by faking photos, to convince others, including ourselves, that our life is amazing while internally we are in pain." If you recognize the pitfalls/dangers of social media, I think you can utilize the platforms if you are mindful without falling for those pitfalls/dangers. Pitfalls such as creating "echo chambers" and "bubbles" with who you follow and further falling for emotional hooks ( Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788 https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788 )

by zzzbra 5y ago

syshum 5y ago

>>Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Yes. This is what created the validation feedback loop, and what generally causes the social harm The like button, and the variations on it is IMO the biggest problem with social media Forums and other discussion boards did not have these problems and while you could have "flame war" that involved actual argumentation back and forth not 1000's of passive visitors choosing to upvote, or downvote on a post with no argumentation

godshatter 5y ago
I would place more emphasis on the downvote button causing most of the harm. If you post something, and it doesn't get up-voted, that's less of a hit than posting something and having it be actively downvoted. One is a statement that no one found it interesting enough to vote up, the other is a way of saying that kind of content isn't desired here. I'm guessing it's the downvotes that cause people to leave, leaving an echo chamber in their wake. Upvotes can lead to karma farming, and the need to see that number of likes go up can be a problem I admit. I just think the echo chamber effect is a worse problem. We've all dealt with fragile egos and boisterous idiots before. I miss the days where you weren't shunned for wrong-think, just argued with constantly if your opinion differed from the norm.
- kierkegaard7 5y ago
  Twitter doesn't have upvotes and I find it to be more addicting than sites with a upvote/downvote system. In a way, downvoting is still getting a response from a person, maybe that is why

BeFlatXIII 5y ago

The pagination on HN is one of its better UX decisions. Same with turning off auto-loading when you reach the end of the front page of Reddit (but that's not the default).

johnchristopher 5y ago
Why does HN display a number next to a submission ?

danans 5y ago

> Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. The way I've started to look at it is that all social media has some harmful and some beneficial aspects, but the nexus of identity-based (vs topic-based like HN) social media with upvote/like functionality is the most problematic for people struggling with identity and self worth. Even as someone established enough not to struggle with self-worth, I avoid that type of social media completely. Topic based social media with clear and enforced guidelines for content seems to have the least bad trade-off between the harmful and the beneficial. Of course no social media property is exclusively one or the other, but the design and operation of the service strongly influences the direction in which it goes.

tessierashpool 5y ago
the upvote mechanism is definitely harmful in most use cases, because it prioritizes groupthink over expertise. but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer. the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful there. but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions. and this malicious example is just chosen for clarity. even in a more innocuous context, if there is no absolute correct answer and nobody is testing the answers for accuracy, upvotes often do more harm than good, and upvote sites are almost by definition groupthink factories, when they don't pertain to verifiable claims that are quickly tested (which is what makes upvotes helpful on a site like Stack Overflow).
- skinkestek 5y ago
  > the upvote mechanism is definitely harmful in most use cases, because it prioritizes groupthink over expertise. > but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer. > the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful there. but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions. The obvious answer to this however is not to remove the very useful upvote button everywhere but to - stop frequenting racist forums, - if they are actually racist, tell law enforcement (where applicable) isn't it?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kkcorps 5y ago

I feel the same is true for me as well. I wasn't aware of this extension though. For now, what I do is if I see myself getting addicted to an app, I just uninstall/block it for 2-3 weeks. After that even if I install it back, the craving is mostly gone. It does come back though in 3-4 months. Facebook was boring for me so never used it again after uninstalling.

nonameiguess 5y ago

I'm not sure it's anything mechanical. Facebook is a wretched hive of scum and villainy for sociocultural inertial reasons. You may as well ask why Detroit is a crappier place to live than Madison. Facebook succumbed early on to echo chambers, disinformation campaigns, and marketing of snake oil and pyramid schemes. Hacker News set rules and followed them consistently, moderating the discussion in accordance with those rules. Maybe for a better example, just look at Reddit. Something like AskHistorians or SilphRoad for Pokemon Go are terrific communities full of great information and productive discussion, whereas many other subs are as bad or worse than Facebook. That is in spite of exactly the same interface technology. The difference is culture. If Facebook has a design problem, it's not having any sort of guiding principles other than engagement. The purely algorithmic curation isn't really curation. It doesn't create a culture at all. It just creates addiction. Infinite scroll is in service of that, but it doesn't create it. In fact, the mobile reader I use for Hacker News has infinite scroll and it doesn't make the site worse.

Applejinx 5y ago
Facebook was PAID to carry disinformation campaigns. It's just another sort of advertising to a certain way of thinking, and they probably figured they were acting like a common carrier and waited to see if counter-disinformation campaigns coughed up any money to retort. I don't think it was happy times at Facebook when they figured out what they'd collaborated with, but it put them on the defensive. And Mark Zuckerberg isn't really wired to play defense. He is not a natural diplomat.

suketk 5y ago

The problem is absolutely scrolling (I call them feeds[0], but pedants don't love that.) Feeds encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice. If you can eliminate them, these services magically become tools rather than escapes. [0] https://suketk.com/feeds-considered-harmful https://suketk.com/feeds-considered-harmful

skinkestek 5y ago
> The problem is absolutely scrolling (I call them feeds[0], but pedants don't love that.) > Feeds encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice. Isn't the problem more one of open-ended feeds rather than feeds generally? I can live fine with my RSS feed for example: nothing gets in there if I don't actually put it there. My Facebook and Twitter feeds however are full of this person liked this, reshared that and commented there. So full that I cannot finish it ever. Of course my addiction is HN, I frequently forget to visit Facebook for weeks (booooring maybe especially after people stopped posting what they did and started just posting motivational posters and memes) and I only visit Twitter as some kind of duty (it is one of the dumbest ideas that ever got traction IMO so I don't exactly enjoy it).
- zzzbra 5y ago
  I would argue that there is something about the physical interaction that is scrolling. you can scroll at the same time you are reading--this makes the text more of a moving target, and then your "reading" becomes mere scanning. it's hard to shift out of that shallow level of engagement once your there because it's by definition a distracted state, you're trying to just get the gist of this and move onto the next thing you just know is out there which you will actually want to read.
zzzbra 5y ago
thank you for the link! I'm happy to see other people making this point--raises my hopes some future UX designers will bring it to the platforms someday.

starkd 5y ago

I think many definitely get obsessed with the need to like/upvote on here as a means to register their response. It seems to detract from the information you get out of other comments. Although it does help to hone in on which comments are most helpful.

intrasight 5y ago

I find scrolling easy to avoid on FB as I just click on the notifications icon, and there are usually only notifications that are of interest - and a relatively small number. Also I use FBP plugin that let's me filter things out on a very fine-granular level, and I am very aggressive with filtering.

MattKimber 5y ago

I think the problem is not necessarily things such as likes, upvotes, shares or other features but platforms which don't consider Goodhart's law when they introduce them. Large Reddits tend toward bland and repetitive cookie-cutter content not solely because Reddit has a voting mechanism, but because the site's structure allows that mechanism to be highly vulnerable to karma farming. There are many casual users who don't notice the content is low-effort or repetitive, special interest subs make it easy to target posts, and the volume is too high for moderators to handle (and many will have a "we can't delete things which are popular and within the rules, even if we don't like them" policy). Facebook (and YouTube, and to some extent Twitter) are a weird branch of that. The application of Goodhart's law wasn't initially to the users but to the platforms themselves. I have little doubt that initially they started with an altruistic observation that people spent more time on the site if they tended to see content from their most entertaining friends, but then someone realised seeing bad takes from a stranger was even more engaging and so you should see that instead. People realise they get more visibility for being controversial, and again there is no real moderation for this, so we have even more of a tyre fire than the blandness which upvote-driven sites tend toward. (Twitter at least still offer tools to curate and remove algorithmic ranking from your feed, even if they try to nudge users away from them. That doesn't protect more popular users from the "trolling brings me attention" culture elsewhere on the site, though.) I think HN is less affected by karma farming due to having a broader range of topics, active moderation of repetitive content and perhaps most importantly a relatively small community with a strong appreciation that the upvote should be used sparingly for interesting and unique content. Also the text and link based format helps - this might change quickly if e.g. HN allowed posting photos of vintage computer equipment, which could disproportionately gain upvotes compared to insightful long-format articles despite being easier to produce.

qsort 5y ago
In my opinion the main differentiator is whether or not the platform's userbase is more or less like the population at large. This is important for two reasons: - If a website is full of normies - sorry for the word, feel free to suggest a more appropriate one - then mainstream cultural references, information sources, opinions and so on are bound to dominate the scene. This makes the community far less interesting, because mainstream sources necessarly aim for the lowest common denominator. Those communities also look very similar to each other, as though they were TV channels. - The community is prone to segment itself along the same lines that divide us in real life. Language, politics, education, etc. As harsh as it sounds, I have come to think that being exclusionary in at least some dimensions is necessary for any kind of community to be interesting. > I think HN is less affected by karma farming A very underrated feature that I have come to really like is how positive scores are hidden for everyone except yourself. That a comment is flagged or at -4 is useful signal (I might disagree with the signal but it's clear that other commenters really disliked that), but on the other hand not knowing whether a comment sits at +1 or +20 forces you to think about what the comment is actually saying.

beckman466 5y ago

> it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm. it's the fact that they're undemocratic black box algorithms that make the participation very one directional (explained below). add to that the centralization and non-interoperability/walled garden aspects, as well as platforms focusing on generating profit instead of helping us make deeper connections, and you've got a big dangerous stew. the most constructive content doesn't actually surface; things that generate 'viralness' do. there are also few tools to individually manage this social data or build any sort of coherent framing/narrative. in other words: profit-seeking social media platforms are a straightjacketed collective stream of consciousness; they are undemocratically 'governed' spaces injected with ads that come with no useful tools to organize and structure information about the world around us. "oh but that's not what social media is designed for!" exactly, the medium is the message. by logging into a third party facebook server to connect with friends and people i want to follow, i am constrained by Zuck's rules and Zuck's black box 'social media' functions. going back to a peer to peer setup by using the ideas of bittorrent's DHTs combined with git's version control, like the holochain framework implements, seems to me to be a way to actually get at the root of this problem: it allows us to see the immense overlaps between today's SV platforms to then be able to quickly decommodify humanity's communication and coordination technology, by publicly sharing and collaboratively improving the underlying functions of our networked apps. although in very early stages, these projects like IPFS, DAT, SSB, and especially holochain [1], which allows for a full distribution of social media functions (and more: http://valueflo.ws http://valueflo.ws), and which has forking and complete distribution mechanics built into it from the start, will allow a powerful new wave of dweb application evolution/experimentation. [1] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applications-d2ac1e4f25ef https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...

tait 5y ago

Good points. On the other hand, I couldn’t fit your whole comment on one screen. I did scroll down to tap reply. Please stand by while I go recover.

zzzbra 5y ago
lack of infinite scroll != no scrolling.
- tait 5y ago
  your post didn't specify infinite... ;)

cblconfederate 5y ago

> Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Yes it is, HN pays people to keep things at bay. But that doesn't scale

TeMPOraL 5y ago
It scales, just not at the price companies are willing to pay. Or, put another way, the main social media platforms aren't spending enough to ensure their service works well.

AussieWog93 5y ago

>Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. But what might be lost is a powerful lever for democratic input in terms of content curation and moderation. I don't think it's the upvote/downvote system itself, but the fact that you can see your own "score" that changes behaviour. It has definitely made me more likely to comment, even when I don't have much to add, and I've noticed my comments getting more and more inflammatory/polarising over the past few months as I start to optimise for engagement. Before I turned on noprocrast, I'd often sit there "babysitting" my comments; checking on them every 10 minutes to see how people have reacted to it. I'd be interested to see if @dang has found similar negative effects associated with giving precise counts and scores.

janpot 5y ago

> I think part of the problem today with individuals trying to figure out how to moderate their social media usage is that it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm. I believe it's advertisement-driven content curation. You're being fooled into thinking that your feed follows your interest, but instead it optimizes around stealing your attention. The feeds control you, not the other way around.

createunderrate 5y ago

> it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm Honestly, I think it's just the fact that it's a website that allows you to constantly be exposed to different things that are interesting and stimulating. You can remove upvotes, scrolling, all you want, but you'll still have the IV drip of novel content. Constant exposure to novelty is harmful, I think. We weren't designed to have our minds blown every 5 minutes. Spend a few hours a day having your brain washed with memes and fascinating articles (or at least the titles), and your brain will re-calibrate to this as the new normal, and anything less stimulating (reading books etc.) will feel boring. Constant novelty makes the world seem unstable and makes me feel flighty and anxious compared to more mundane activities, so the mental health connection is no surprise. Hacker News is less stimulating than other social media because it's text-based, it's about more serious topics, it's well moderated, and it doesn't abuse addictive techniques like infinite scrolling. However, I bet many people here will attest that they sometimes close HN only to open it right back up again. Closing a website only to open it immediately because you are bored is a sign that you subconsciously believe the website is one of the only interesting things you can do. Either your brain is right, and everything besides HN, reddit, Twitter, etc. is actually boring, or these things are just so artificially stimulating that using them causes everything else to feel boring in comparison. I'll let you decide which you think sounds more accurate.

Apofis 5y ago

This guy is making a lot of inferences based on his own experience and I think he may want to consider hiring a therapist to work through these issues: "In reality, we hire social media to distract our minds from our unpleasant, average life. And, by faking photos, to convince others, including ourselves, that our life is amazing while internally we are in pain." If you recognize the pitfalls/dangers of social media, I think you can utilize the platforms if you are mindful without falling for those pitfalls/dangers. Pitfalls such as creating "echo chambers" and "bubbles" with who you follow and further falling for emotional hooks ( Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788 https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788 )