3 ms·

> Ultimately the problem is that people are too willing to join the dogpile and/or are unwilling to stand in solidarity against the dogpile. The problem is tha

by ethbr0 4y ago

> Ultimately the problem is that people are too willing to join the dogpile and/or are unwilling to stand in solidarity against the dogpile. The problem is that the effort required to join the dogpile is miniscule and continuing to decrease, but the net effect of many joining is not. This was, pre-internet, kept in balance by requiring people to do something uncomfortable to protest (e.g. leaving the house, marching all day on the street). The quip used to be that Internet anonymity turns everyone into an asshole, but that doesn't ring true these days. Now, the decreased minimum effort required means that 10,000 people can take 5 minutes each to be an asshole, and Facegramchattertok will happily amplify and distribute the result to increase ad revenue.

Gigachad 4y ago
The problem is also the media. Twitter outrage mobs aren’t so effective on their own because average people don’t read twitter. But news sites often pick up these outrage mobs and shun a light on them. Which amplifies the outrage and puts it in places regular people read. And then companies have to act on it because the media sites are reposting tweets claiming the cloudflare CEO wants to see trans people die or whatever the thing of the day is.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Absolutely. I'm sure media was always a retread of an official / inside feed from somewhere, but it feels so much more automatic now. 24/7 to fill with content = {scrape social media trends} -> {generate story} -> {repeat}
- molotovh 4y ago
  Every single day I see "reputable" news sites put out headlines like "Twitter outrage over [X]" and I think this is why journalism is dying. The "man on the street" piece has a time-honored place in journalism, but previous generations understood that the opinions of random strangers are not, in and of themselves, NEWS. They were fluff pieces and human interest bits, not headlines. They constitute opinion at best, and usually closer to gossip most of the time. I don't blame Twitter itself, per se. But it is easier for journalists to find opinions than to find facts, and that has certainly led to a degradation in quality of news stories and a near total loss of understanding of what constitutes bias in journalism.
FunnyBadger 4y ago
This is the central flaw of social media itself. As engineer by training this is positive feedback with a wide bandwidth loop gain which is ALWAYS a recipe of unstable system behavior. Things that could "fix" social media: 1. Slow down the speed of replies - e.g. 24 hours instead of seconds 2. Reduce the gain - limit how many people can see your reply or post to a narrower range of people you know instead of broadcasting to the universe. This is exactly what you do with feedback systems like amplifiers or analog circuits to control their stability and prevent unstable behavior. :-)
- pessimizer 4y ago
  I don't think it has much to do with social media, other than if you were in the same physical space as many online influencers and trying to have a mundane conversation with them, there would be so many behavioral red flags that you would never follow them anywhere. Instead, it's the same effect as "nobody gets fired for buying IBM." If you follow the crowd, you won't get punished even if what you're doing turns out to have horrific consequences. At best, one could argue that echo chambers fool mob participants into overestimating the size of the crowd, but people on twitter are fully aware that there are people who hate them, and that they hate, and the most unhinged of them spend all day following those enemies around lobbing insults at them, and trying to get them fired or hurt. There's a significant and illustrative overlap between public opinion-havers and tv/press pundits: pundits got fired for being right about Iraq, CIA black sites, etc. Everybody who was wrong about those things is still being trotted around as if they were an expert on something. Because this is a game of playing it safe, not a game of truth. If something is dangerous, like deviating from the crowd or the boss, do the other thing. If you see a crowd of wolves surrounding a sheep, be a wolf, not a sheep.

by ethbr0 4y ago

Gigachad 4y ago

The problem is also the media. Twitter outrage mobs aren’t so effective on their own because average people don’t read twitter. But news sites often pick up these outrage mobs and shun a light on them. Which amplifies the outrage and puts it in places regular people read. And then companies have to act on it because the media sites are reposting tweets claiming the cloudflare CEO wants to see trans people die or whatever the thing of the day is.

ethbr0 4y ago
Absolutely. I'm sure media was always a retread of an official / inside feed from somewhere, but it feels so much more automatic now. 24/7 to fill with content = {scrape social media trends} -> {generate story} -> {repeat}
molotovh 4y ago
Every single day I see "reputable" news sites put out headlines like "Twitter outrage over [X]" and I think this is why journalism is dying. The "man on the street" piece has a time-honored place in journalism, but previous generations understood that the opinions of random strangers are not, in and of themselves, NEWS. They were fluff pieces and human interest bits, not headlines. They constitute opinion at best, and usually closer to gossip most of the time. I don't blame Twitter itself, per se. But it is easier for journalists to find opinions than to find facts, and that has certainly led to a degradation in quality of news stories and a near total loss of understanding of what constitutes bias in journalism.

FunnyBadger 4y ago

This is the central flaw of social media itself. As engineer by training this is positive feedback with a wide bandwidth loop gain which is ALWAYS a recipe of unstable system behavior. Things that could "fix" social media: 1. Slow down the speed of replies - e.g. 24 hours instead of seconds 2. Reduce the gain - limit how many people can see your reply or post to a narrower range of people you know instead of broadcasting to the universe. This is exactly what you do with feedback systems like amplifiers or analog circuits to control their stability and prevent unstable behavior. :-)

pessimizer 4y ago
I don't think it has much to do with social media, other than if you were in the same physical space as many online influencers and trying to have a mundane conversation with them, there would be so many behavioral red flags that you would never follow them anywhere. Instead, it's the same effect as "nobody gets fired for buying IBM." If you follow the crowd, you won't get punished even if what you're doing turns out to have horrific consequences. At best, one could argue that echo chambers fool mob participants into overestimating the size of the crowd, but people on twitter are fully aware that there are people who hate them, and that they hate, and the most unhinged of them spend all day following those enemies around lobbing insults at them, and trying to get them fired or hurt. There's a significant and illustrative overlap between public opinion-havers and tv/press pundits: pundits got fired for being right about Iraq, CIA black sites, etc. Everybody who was wrong about those things is still being trotted around as if they were an expert on something. Because this is a game of playing it safe, not a game of truth. If something is dangerous, like deviating from the crowd or the boss, do the other thing. If you see a crowd of wolves surrounding a sheep, be a wolf, not a sheep.