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> I think what we've lost on the modern Internet from forums is a stable-ish social order. This can't be overemphasized enough. Outside the internet, people si
by boplicity 5y ago
> I think what we've lost on the modern Internet from forums is a stable-ish social order.
This can't be overemphasized enough. Outside the internet, people simply do not have equal ability to garner attention. This is due to a variety of reasons, depending on context. In a room full of people, for example, you have to read the room and demonstrate a certain level of social awareness if you want to be heard.
The same is not true for most social media platforms. Instead, people are given equal opportunity to incite discussion -- and the most inflammatory material typically rises to the top. This is not a stable social order: It's an attention-deficit-seeking social order.
Forums like HN account for this, by placing higher value on longer posts, written with the intent to be a positive contribution to the community. (I suspect, but am not sure, that the length of the post is part of the algorithm here.)
On old-school forums, people valued the identities they created, and worked to protect the reputations of those identities, even if they were anonymous. Strangely, even though people often use their real name in contemporary social media, they often don't attempt to protect their reputations, when engaging online. That is a mystery to me.
- okal 5y ago> Instead, people are given equal opportunity to incite discussion "Equal" how? This seems to suggest that a random person sharing their musings with their social circles on a public account, vs, say, Trump pre-ban don't have *dramatically* different reach and ability to incite discussion. That seems obviously incorrect.
- boplicity 5y agoThat's a good point. I was wrong in the broad sense. However, I was thinking, specifically, of the context of comments on Facebook posts (and Twitter posts), where the playing field is actually level, and the comments that "rise to the top" are, as a rule, the ones that are the most inflammatory.
- okal 5y agoAh, I see what you're saying. That does make sense.
- hundreddaysoff 5y agoHow about this edit: Instead, people are given the illusion that they have equal opportunity to incite discussion Doesn't change OP's point. It's just clearer.
- majormajor 5y agoAlmost every influencer starts out as a "random person." Trump started out as just another random B-lister - a larger audience than a non-celebrity anybody, but hardly the audience he ended up with. Social media, with its broadcasting of things to everybody instead of just to a particular small-to-medium sized group of forum participants, enables them to gain massive audiences. Getting that audience as a forum poster would have been far more difficult. The path looked more like "author at a online magazine" than "now has millions on millions of Twitter followers."
- Iefthandrule 5y agoTrump wasn't some random person though--he had a huge financial and social network before he became notorious in politics on Twitter. It does not follow that every influencer starts out as a random person at all.