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The Silence Is Deafening (2020)
- cardamomo 5y agohttps://archive.ph/d8nrR https://archive.ph/d8nrR
- hirundo 5y ago"A huge part of the problem is that digital spaces generally have no equivalent of a disapproving glare." That's largely what down votes are, and why it's a problem that YouTube now hides them. We need both smiles and glares to communicate well.
- peakaboo 5y agoYouTube and Google and their attitude is the problem. And that we don't have many popular alternatives. Our tech overlords are the equivalent of Kings now, above the law. And their attitude to humanity stinks.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago>That's largely what down votes are, Has it ever been theorized that in even so pure a place as HN the down vote is abused? At any rate the disapproving glare has been the go to tool of small minded and provincial people throughout history, and is often enshrined as such in media. So I guess I'm not that sure that having one will solve all problems.
- holoduke 5y agoIn real life you communicate on a much higher level. Non verbal communication is so important. That's why I don't believe in pure working from home. At least till we have full 16k VR work environment simulations.
- kkfx 5y agoHonestly I agree only very partially: in some context seeing others in a room, full body is indeed very useful, but that's not the case most of the time. Giving a remote lecture is painful because it's almost impossible to feel the class, discussing serious business is similar, but daily work, at least most of daily works do not really have, or can be designed not to, such needs. The real issue is being really able to separate work and life, or have a local social activity in person, in the physical world, while have a secondary and separated working life in a "virtual" world. This is hard IME, we tend to make friends where we are most active, then it's hard to separate remotes people from work to real physical and human world, for that I still have to find a real solution but meeting each others sometimes while keeping WFH for the rest again suffice in most cases. Having a local physical life separated from the work it's not that hard, at least if we do not live in a desert/very remote areas. The main issue I see in practice are mostly due to the lack of "social interest" in many remote workers who actually prefer to be remote just to avoid working with their colleagues, so they do not interact as needed, they do not try to communicate what's needed etc, the lack of habit and organization where most people simply start from scratch just like child doing their first experience "in the wild" without real experience, but those issues can be solved just with trials and errors in few years: for the system part we need to rediscover really remote work vs working on the shoulders of giants on their platforms, for the human part simply learning to develop a kind of "remote sociability" for work and a healthy local sociability where we physically live. "Remote sociability" is hard, but not that hard IF we learn it, of course we (society) have to really try to learn...
- bambax 5y agoVery insightful post in general. About this: > Bringing it into a private space like DMs is crucial, because it credibly shows that you're not trying to get brownie points from your in-group by bashing them in public. The problem with DMs is that they are too much work for the passive onlooker. Public forums like Twitter, Reddit, etc. should include the possibility of sending private signals: "uncool" badges that take no more than one click, but that are only seen by the original poster.
- agrover 5y agoSo, like YouTube? Where only the creator can see dislikes?
- wkearney99 5y agoThis doesn't work if the author doesn't care. Perhaps a weighted surfacing of the "uncool" numbers. If a certain number of 'considered authentic' users mark it as such that starts to become visible on a post, and on the overall 'karma' of the author's profile. The idea being if the author DOES care, and sees they're getting marked as 'uncool' then they have a chance to self-censor/edit/adapt. But if the authosr doesn't care then the audience still has a chance to see what some sort of 'curated' members have said about the content, and that the author's overall rating has potential to take a hit for it. Any system can be gamed, of course, but the lack of clear options for contributing negatives about content is how we've gotten into this mess. Sole up/down votes are not enough.
- bambax 5y agoI think that would work, yes. Someone should try it...
- moltke 5y agoThis is what happens when you kick everyone with different views off your platforms; you get an echo chamber.
- 1270018080 5y agoI don't think you read the article? How did you get that out of what was written?
- laretluval 5y ago> A huge part of the problem is that digital spaces generally have no equivalent of a disapproving glare. It's interesting to see that people are now arguing in favor of public shaming and peer pressure as ways to control behavior, and lamenting that these are now harder to implement at scale. A generation ago the internet was seen as a way to escape pressure for conformity.
- dang 5y agoDiscussed at the time: The Silence Is Deafening - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23728212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23728212 - July 2020 (225 comments)
- parksy 5y agoPeople just need to be able to speak freely. Likes and dislikes and other scoring systems just encourage echo chambers and are almost purpose-built tools for astroturfing. People are afraid to say their opinion because of the backlash. Not everyone has a well thought out opinion, that doesn't mean they deserve to be punished. The human experiment can only move forward with open displays of ignorance coupled with open-minded discussion and acceptance. It's idealistic to think this could happen easily, but I see no other way for global civilisation to come to terms with our historical cultural differences. We're either going to devolve into systems where nothing matters and everything goes, which frankly we already have with 4chan, or allow certain views to prevail over others, which literally every forum or approval-based channel has these days, or find a different way to share differences and come to terms with them, which I hope somebody invents soon.
- verisimi 5y agoI totally agree with the comment here. I love that you say: > I see no other way for global civilisation to come to terms with our historical cultural differences I agree. But the path we are on is the opposite. 'We' (or whoever is running the show - as I don't think the state we find ourselves in is natural) is not about allowing for diversity of opinions, and building personal resilience and tolerance to diverse thinking via the application of reasoned argumentation. No. Instead we herded into low engagement, preferably simplistic binary positions. We are even moving away from law, into a time of cancel culture driven by corporate policy. We are going into hardcore tyranny of the individual. The reason is (imo) that it is far easier to govern when you treat people as a collective. If you have imprinted thoughts patterns into what might have been individual thinkers, and support that throughout their lives via top-up programming from the media, you can guide this communal thinking. The answer from my perspective is for everyone to be trying achieve maximum individuality. (Everyone thinks they are individual, but they are actually expressing received opinions. I don't even say I am an exception - though I do think I am working on it.) But who's got time for individuality?!? There are mortgages to pay, children to train into the system - er, I mean educate, work takes a lot out of you, and passive engagement with screens is so tempting. Maybe in the next life!
- RockyMcNuts 5y ago
- Animats 5y agoA huge part of the problem is that digital spaces generally have no equivalent of a disapproving glare. Hm. Need to think about that for virtual worlds.
- swivelmaster 5y agoIt’s easy to physically move away in a virtual world. Lots of options: Walk, fly, teleport…
- Animats 5y agoYes. One point I make about virtual worlds is that space keeps everything from being in the same place. The annoyance radius of jerks is limited. In Second Life, it's about 100 meters, and the world is the size of Los Angeles. There's no "retweeting" or "following" or "broadcasting" to amplify jerks. So jerks are a very local problem.
- meredydd 5y agoThis article accurately describes a problem, but while it claims to talk about digital media in general, it is really just talking about Twitter. Here's the giveaway: > A huge part of the problem is that digital spaces generally have no equivalent of a disapproving glare. Every. Single. Platform. has an equivalent to this - except Twitter. Reddit (and HN) have visible downvotes. YouTube's downvotes, invisible though they now are, can at least influence the recommender algorithm. Even Facebook has "frowny emoji" reactions. But on Twitter, the only way to express disapproval is to "join the conversation" - thereby amplifying it, and incurring all the negative consequences Devon explores. It's engagement genius. (Accidental genius, naturally - like most of Twitter's "core game loop", it's an unforseen, emergent phenomenon about which its inventors seem faintly embarrassed). The "grifter" problem Devon mentions exists almost exclusively on Twitter, because it's incentivised by the platform! Normally I wouldn't get so heated about this stuff, but Twitter has attracted a critical mass of the world's journalists, so its incentives flow directly into The National Conversation(TM). This has visibly malign results, prompting many people to look for ways to fix it. This is a noble aim, but won't get anywhere if we regard Twitter's design decisions as immutable and inevitable, rather than a deliberate choice.
- umvi 5y agoFrowny emojis on Facebook aren't anonymous though so people are reluctant to use them
- saurik 5y agoWell they also aren't bad things: they count for two likes and are used to indicate sadness, not disapproval. According to articles on the ranking decisions, Facebook internally calls them "Sorry". You don't want to take a post where someone says something sad and people react with sadness and say "this is bad content".
- underwater 5y agoI think you're confused. Facebook has both a "Sad" reaction and an "Angry" reaction. They can both be used to agree with and disagree with the recipient, depending on context.
- egypturnash 5y agoFrom the footnotes: Imagine a "ಠ_ಠ" button on each tweet. The poster finds out how many people THAT THEY FOLLOW* clicked that button, but can't find out specifically who. They just know that the crowd of people that they respect has a certain air of disapproval.* I love this. This is so much more interesting than a downvote, which could easily come from someone you're disagreeing with or people who share their views. This is your friends giving you the hairy eyeball. I want this.
- whatshisface 5y agoLet's say you're a Nazi and all your friends are too. Then you start wondering if Lebensraum is all that important, but your friends all click ಠ_ಠ: demonstrating why mechanisms that enforce conformity do not enforce correctness or virtue.
- pcl 5y agoI don’t think that the author’s suggestion was meant to enforce correctness or virtue, but rather to provide a means for your friends to nudge you out of extreme behaviors. Now, if one’s friends have opinions that the rest of us find to be terrible, then maybe it’d be better for that person to be able to drift away easier. But I think the thesis here is that most of us aren’t at the extremes / aren’t in bubbles mostly comprised of extremists, and a private-hairy-eyeball would perhaps help many of us from radicalizing our dialogue.
- earleybird 5y agoThere are conversations and then there are conversations. The dinner party conversations are ephemeral, often in a smaller groups than the whole of the attendees. This is discourse in a small group where there is high bandwidth communication and nothing is recorded verbatim for posterity. Opinions can be malleable, folks may change their mind in the course of conversation. Online forums have much smaller bandwidth and much larger pool of participants. Nuance in expression is terribly limited to the ASCII character set. What ever you've written, whether a thoughtful paragraph or two, or just adding a short bit of flavouring to the discussion is now cast in stone for all time. My suspicion is that the size and durability of online forums is antithetical to nuanced discussion.
- grangerg 5y ago^THIS^ ...And what comes when people are under the cloak of anonymity, or otherwise feel there will be no negative consequences to whatever they choose to do.
- bnralt 5y agoI've seen a lot of sentiments like this article, where the author is talking about what methods they can use to make others behave the way they'd like. But I rarely see the opposite - an author talking about being receptive to others trying to change their own behavior. That seems to be a large part of the problem right there. As long as everyone is convinced that the problem is other people and not themselves, it's hard to see how things will improve.
- spoonjim 5y agoThe author makes a good case for why private coaching in DMs is an effective way of improving the Quality of the Discourse(TM) but not why anyone would invest the effort to do this.
- langsoul-com 5y agoThe cost of the authors solution is quite high. It takes a lot fo time to do each person, especially considering time zones. Not to mention, all your time is spent reaching out to people who were rude.