4 ms·

The way I'd solve it is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377423 Basically, more siloed converations w

The way I'd solve it is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377423 Basically, more siloed converations would ironically create a better "public town square", because it would reduce the need for moderation and allow freer speech. > That’s awful. And I’ve also witnessed the same kind of abuse that goes ignored. Honestly, it wasn't. Maybe due to my temperament (and I certainly received far less hate than high-profile people do) but I could never empathize with the "online bullying" concerns. It's the nature of the internet, and you just develop the mental strength to tune it out, or use it to your advantage as fuel. Even after those experiences I'd still be much happier with Musk's content policies, or Dorsey'd blockchain-free-for-all with users being able to choose the moderation algorithm they want. I have friends who were suspended for BS reasons and that's a far bigger concern to me.

Waterluvian 4y ago
Hmmm. Would you consider that to be similar to the Reddit model of cloistering themes so that unlike-minded people aren’t artificially pushed together?
- concinds 4y ago
  The problem is that reddit clusters based on topic, rather than social group. If I'm a bad state actor who wants to influence America on a mass-scale, I buy a bunch of accounts, and buy upvotes, and can shift the hivemind. Or I just infiltrate the mod team. Obviously you'd need to be relatively sophisticated to not get caught. But Twitter is based on social circles, not topics; those concerns don't apply. Instead of having an entire topic/subreddit be biased one way or another, you'd have small friends groups and small communities, that have social dynamics that are as close to real life as possible. Hence all the scale-related problems don't occur. The radicalization rabbit hole? Doesn't happen with siloes. Harassment? There'll be much less with siloes, where someone needs to "add" you (like on Facebook) to interact with you, rather than a drive-by quote-tweet. Ideological censorship? Again, with siloes, there's less need for moderation, so people who aren't harming any others get to communicate with each other. It's more organic. Obviously implementing that isn't as easy, but there's good ideas for clustering in this thread.
  - tqi 4y ago
    TBH I don't think clustering on social groups is the panacea that you hope. Misinformation spreads insanely fast on WhatsApp, even after limiting Group thread size and # of forwards. We'll never get back to the way things were before the internet became ubiquitous. Back then, we had a limited number of sources, and normal people had very limited reach. But now, it's too easy for individuals to pass information along, and with more sources of it the juiciest / most outrageous information will always go the furthest.
    - concinds 4y ago
      May not be a panacea, but it's the healthiest option. > Misinformation spreads insanely fast on WhatsApp, even after limiting Group thread size and # of forwards. That's true, but it's relatively easier to solve: really viral messages are a minuscule minority, and can set off internal alerts and be reviewed by humans; to prevent hysteria and murderous rhetoric. And the problem also existed with word-of-mouth, centuries ago, before the masses ever startied reading "the press"; rumors could spread across entire nations. Fake stuff will spread, and people will become more skeptical and adapt, as they did before. Skin in the Game makes a related point.¹ The whole problem with censoring "disinformation" is that it removes society's self-healing mechanisms. Public discourse has always been messy. Louis Farrakhan is labelled hateful, but he ran the Million Man March and is credited getting many African-American men to register to vote. Malcolm X would have been considered an extremist and banned. But it would have been wrong; he may have been flawed on the micro level (that's subjective), but he was beneficial and heroic on the macro level. Censorship has huge second order effects, including self-censorship, introducing status-quo bias. It also promotes conspiratorial thinking, since people who think information is being hidden from them are more likely to seek fringe sources. How do you censor real disinformation, without ending up with things like the Hunter Biden story being censored too? It also allows governments to lie with impunity, because accusations that the government is lying are treated as disinformation, while actual government lies (like the intel agency staffers who said the Hunter laptop was a Russian psyop) are spread everywhere.² People need to be able to spread "conspiracies", since while they may be factually incorrect, they may be directionally correct, while the "official" narrative may be total BS. Note I couldn't care less about Hunter or his laptop, but it's a clear recent example. ¹ https://medium.com/incerto/the-facts-are-true-the-news-is-fake-5bf98104cea2 https://medium.com/incerto/the-facts-are-true-the-news-is-fa... ² https://greenwald.substack.com/p/biden-the-media-and-cia-labeled-the https://greenwald.substack.com/p/biden-the-media-and-cia-lab...
- moojd 4y ago
  Fairly moderating a single massive global community is an unsolvable problem for both scale and cultural reasons. The current dominate model for social media will not work in the long run. Breaking down the task into sub-communities that are given moderator power helps with both the scale and cultural problems. Reddit however seems to be moving away from this model by deemphasizing the autonomy and identity of individual communities for a broader, singular reddit community.

Waterluvian 4y ago

Hmmm. Would you consider that to be similar to the Reddit model of cloistering themes so that unlike-minded people aren’t artificially pushed together?

concinds 4y ago
The problem is that reddit clusters based on topic, rather than social group. If I'm a bad state actor who wants to influence America on a mass-scale, I buy a bunch of accounts, and buy upvotes, and can shift the hivemind. Or I just infiltrate the mod team. Obviously you'd need to be relatively sophisticated to not get caught. But Twitter is based on social circles, not topics; those concerns don't apply. Instead of having an entire topic/subreddit be biased one way or another, you'd have small friends groups and small communities, that have social dynamics that are as close to real life as possible. Hence all the scale-related problems don't occur. The radicalization rabbit hole? Doesn't happen with siloes. Harassment? There'll be much less with siloes, where someone needs to "add" you (like on Facebook) to interact with you, rather than a drive-by quote-tweet. Ideological censorship? Again, with siloes, there's less need for moderation, so people who aren't harming any others get to communicate with each other. It's more organic. Obviously implementing that isn't as easy, but there's good ideas for clustering in this thread.
- tqi 4y ago
  TBH I don't think clustering on social groups is the panacea that you hope. Misinformation spreads insanely fast on WhatsApp, even after limiting Group thread size and # of forwards. We'll never get back to the way things were before the internet became ubiquitous. Back then, we had a limited number of sources, and normal people had very limited reach. But now, it's too easy for individuals to pass information along, and with more sources of it the juiciest / most outrageous information will always go the furthest.
  - concinds 4y ago
    May not be a panacea, but it's the healthiest option. > Misinformation spreads insanely fast on WhatsApp, even after limiting Group thread size and # of forwards. That's true, but it's relatively easier to solve: really viral messages are a minuscule minority, and can set off internal alerts and be reviewed by humans; to prevent hysteria and murderous rhetoric. And the problem also existed with word-of-mouth, centuries ago, before the masses ever startied reading "the press"; rumors could spread across entire nations. Fake stuff will spread, and people will become more skeptical and adapt, as they did before. Skin in the Game makes a related point.¹ The whole problem with censoring "disinformation" is that it removes society's self-healing mechanisms. Public discourse has always been messy. Louis Farrakhan is labelled hateful, but he ran the Million Man March and is credited getting many African-American men to register to vote. Malcolm X would have been considered an extremist and banned. But it would have been wrong; he may have been flawed on the micro level (that's subjective), but he was beneficial and heroic on the macro level. Censorship has huge second order effects, including self-censorship, introducing status-quo bias. It also promotes conspiratorial thinking, since people who think information is being hidden from them are more likely to seek fringe sources. How do you censor real disinformation, without ending up with things like the Hunter Biden story being censored too? It also allows governments to lie with impunity, because accusations that the government is lying are treated as disinformation, while actual government lies (like the intel agency staffers who said the Hunter laptop was a Russian psyop) are spread everywhere.² People need to be able to spread "conspiracies", since while they may be factually incorrect, they may be directionally correct, while the "official" narrative may be total BS. Note I couldn't care less about Hunter or his laptop, but it's a clear recent example. ¹ https://medium.com/incerto/the-facts-are-true-the-news-is-fake-5bf98104cea2 https://medium.com/incerto/the-facts-are-true-the-news-is-fa... ² https://greenwald.substack.com/p/biden-the-media-and-cia-labeled-the https://greenwald.substack.com/p/biden-the-media-and-cia-lab...
moojd 4y ago
Fairly moderating a single massive global community is an unsolvable problem for both scale and cultural reasons. The current dominate model for social media will not work in the long run. Breaking down the task into sub-communities that are given moderator power helps with both the scale and cultural problems. Reddit however seems to be moving away from this model by deemphasizing the autonomy and identity of individual communities for a broader, singular reddit community.