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thank you for your considered response, I really appreciate it. Your observations are of course correct, particularly one of the difference between social plat

thank you for your considered response, I really appreciate it. Your observations are of course correct, particularly one of the difference between social platforms in their tooling and accessibility to researchers on how they work. I do not share your confidence that those 'with a background in technology' are in any better position to handle information / misinformation / disinformation than any other person. It is my observation that we 'succumb' to misinformation unevenly based not on the quality of the deception but whether the purpose of that misinformation aligns with our perceived self interest.

rntn 5y ago
Thank you also for reply, thoughtful communication is something to be treasured. Just as with all other communications media, in the early days of the internet it seemed we were on the verge of a revolution ; until we saw the dynamics of the commercialization and politicization of the internet of course.. I think our current situation in internet based media is similar to the time after the Lehman shock, when vast tranches of commoditized securities were found to be not as secure commodities as they were hyped to be. A simplistic analysis might place the blame on the mortgage industry, and while they are indeed culpable, I think it is the concept of making mortgages into a commodity that is at the core of that crisis.. Now we are on the cusp of a crisis caused by the commoditization of human attention and communication. Sadly, I think the effects of this crisis will run much deeper since at its core we have allowed the vast industry that has so rapidly grown around it to corrode human trust in almost all social institutions that we rely on.. To me, this is the real cost of free services that generate their revenue from algorithmically seeking engagement. In the end, as you correctly point out, these algorithms inevitably pull all communications towards the extreme, and those who use these media, regardless of technical background, ultimately succumb to the bias as it seeks out each users personal engagement triggers.. Everything else is just lost in the noise.
- hunglee2 5y ago
  excellent analysis, to which I could not agree more. We are in the end, evolved biological beings, susceptible to impulses which have generally served us well in the past but not need to overcome if we are to have a future. At the moment, the path to that future is stubbornly unclear. Do you have an idea as to what could / should be done?
  - rntn 5y ago
    Thank you again. As you pointed out, our instincts have served us well, but, from nomadic tribes to nation states, there are assumptions, such as the threat of external others and the inexhaustible commons of nature, which our instincts evolved with and which have set us on a collision course with international and planetary disaster.. From my perspective, we are a bit like a constellation of 'bait balls' harried by sharks and frantically trying to understand the taxonomy of the fishy beliefs that we use to justify our instinctual schooling behaviors. My perspective is probably not ideal for proposing any solution to this problem though as I have always worked the back end as sys/admin for development or dev/ops from the dev side, and, from programming paradigms to political parties, my own instinct is to always keep maximum distance from true believer types.. That said, and with the understanding that my perspective is biased by my choice to work with universities and internationally focused organizations, I think that the traditions of the university system, which were, at least since the age of the European enlightenment, focused on inculcating meritocracy, are our best hope for repairing the respect and involvement problems in western institutions. The earliest (and most beneficial to society) parts of the internet, after it was a DARPA project but before it was the platform for surveillance capitalism, have their origins in university inter-organizational collaboration, from Gopher to the birth of the WWW at CERN, and operated on the understanding that all participants were either PhDs or graduate students.. Without these assumptions, I do not think that the open ideals of the internet would have developed. Now, with those open ideals compromised for profit and political gain, we face the tasks of preservation of what made the internet so beneficial to the dissemination of knowledge in a globally adversarial environment where state level actors vie with transnational corporations.. Again, with the caveats of my personal bias, I cannot see any better way to fix the problems of social media than to continue the nascent examples of online participatory democracy and pull the communication away from the trillionare surveillance capitalists and authoritarian state systems into federations of merit based collaboration fora, with levels of responsibility from general public on up to personal involvement with the specific sponsor organizations.. Of course, this does nothing to address the use case of cable cutters streaming YouTube or friends coffee klatching via Facebook, but, these are areas I have zero interest in so.. Humanity does not distinguish itself by socializing, vocalizing or even by using tools - we have distinguished ourselves (so far uniquely in the universe) by developing written language. The core of the internet, as it is used socially by humans and insofar as it has been deeply beneficial to advancement of society, has been text based. Bringing the platform back to open written collaboration between people who have demonstrated their expertise in the relevant areas of the particular forum seems our best hope.. However, there is no way to monetize or propagandize the internet as it was used by the researchers who developed it, and so, here we are. As a small bit of optimistm to close on, I do feel like we have a kind of proto meritocracy here at HN ;)

rntn 5y ago

Thank you also for reply, thoughtful communication is something to be treasured. Just as with all other communications media, in the early days of the internet it seemed we were on the verge of a revolution ; until we saw the dynamics of the commercialization and politicization of the internet of course.. I think our current situation in internet based media is similar to the time after the Lehman shock, when vast tranches of commoditized securities were found to be not as secure commodities as they were hyped to be. A simplistic analysis might place the blame on the mortgage industry, and while they are indeed culpable, I think it is the concept of making mortgages into a commodity that is at the core of that crisis.. Now we are on the cusp of a crisis caused by the commoditization of human attention and communication. Sadly, I think the effects of this crisis will run much deeper since at its core we have allowed the vast industry that has so rapidly grown around it to corrode human trust in almost all social institutions that we rely on.. To me, this is the real cost of free services that generate their revenue from algorithmically seeking engagement. In the end, as you correctly point out, these algorithms inevitably pull all communications towards the extreme, and those who use these media, regardless of technical background, ultimately succumb to the bias as it seeks out each users personal engagement triggers.. Everything else is just lost in the noise.

hunglee2 5y ago
excellent analysis, to which I could not agree more. We are in the end, evolved biological beings, susceptible to impulses which have generally served us well in the past but not need to overcome if we are to have a future. At the moment, the path to that future is stubbornly unclear. Do you have an idea as to what could / should be done?
- rntn 5y ago
  Thank you again. As you pointed out, our instincts have served us well, but, from nomadic tribes to nation states, there are assumptions, such as the threat of external others and the inexhaustible commons of nature, which our instincts evolved with and which have set us on a collision course with international and planetary disaster.. From my perspective, we are a bit like a constellation of 'bait balls' harried by sharks and frantically trying to understand the taxonomy of the fishy beliefs that we use to justify our instinctual schooling behaviors. My perspective is probably not ideal for proposing any solution to this problem though as I have always worked the back end as sys/admin for development or dev/ops from the dev side, and, from programming paradigms to political parties, my own instinct is to always keep maximum distance from true believer types.. That said, and with the understanding that my perspective is biased by my choice to work with universities and internationally focused organizations, I think that the traditions of the university system, which were, at least since the age of the European enlightenment, focused on inculcating meritocracy, are our best hope for repairing the respect and involvement problems in western institutions. The earliest (and most beneficial to society) parts of the internet, after it was a DARPA project but before it was the platform for surveillance capitalism, have their origins in university inter-organizational collaboration, from Gopher to the birth of the WWW at CERN, and operated on the understanding that all participants were either PhDs or graduate students.. Without these assumptions, I do not think that the open ideals of the internet would have developed. Now, with those open ideals compromised for profit and political gain, we face the tasks of preservation of what made the internet so beneficial to the dissemination of knowledge in a globally adversarial environment where state level actors vie with transnational corporations.. Again, with the caveats of my personal bias, I cannot see any better way to fix the problems of social media than to continue the nascent examples of online participatory democracy and pull the communication away from the trillionare surveillance capitalists and authoritarian state systems into federations of merit based collaboration fora, with levels of responsibility from general public on up to personal involvement with the specific sponsor organizations.. Of course, this does nothing to address the use case of cable cutters streaming YouTube or friends coffee klatching via Facebook, but, these are areas I have zero interest in so.. Humanity does not distinguish itself by socializing, vocalizing or even by using tools - we have distinguished ourselves (so far uniquely in the universe) by developing written language. The core of the internet, as it is used socially by humans and insofar as it has been deeply beneficial to advancement of society, has been text based. Bringing the platform back to open written collaboration between people who have demonstrated their expertise in the relevant areas of the particular forum seems our best hope.. However, there is no way to monetize or propagandize the internet as it was used by the researchers who developed it, and so, here we are. As a small bit of optimistm to close on, I do feel like we have a kind of proto meritocracy here at HN ;)