8 ms·

This reminds me of a short story Kurt Vonnegut mentioned in a novel of his: >“You know — “ said Eliot, “Kilgore Trout once wrote a whole book about a country t

This reminds me of a short story Kurt Vonnegut mentioned in a novel of his: >“You know — “ said Eliot, “Kilgore Trout once wrote a whole book about a country that was devoted to fighting odors. That was the national purpose. There wasn’t any disease, and there wasn’t any crime, and there wasn’t any war, so they went after odors.” “This country,” said Eliot, “had tremendous research projects devoted to fighting odors. They were supported by individual contributions given to mothers who marched on Sundays from door to door. The ideal of the research was to find a specific chemical deodorant for every odor. But then the hero, who was also the country’s dictator, made a wonderful scientific breakthrough, even though he wasn’t a scientist, and they didn’t need the projects any more. He went right to the root of the problem.” “Uh huh,” said the Senator. He couldn’t stand stories by Kilgore Trout, was embarassed by his son. “He found one chemical that would eliminate all odors?” “No. As I say, the hero was dictator, and he simply eliminated noses.” ========= Your solution is somewhat similar. You want to solve the problem of people saying racist things, so you decide to destroy the public square. Going for the root of the problem, I suppose.

dimva 4y ago
We gotta build things for the humans we have, not the humans we wish to have. Maybe global public squares don't work for the humans we have. That's ok.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  But is it. The world is very clearly (more clearly than at any other point in the past) one. It is entirely not obvious that our current level of global communication is sufficient to support this setup.
- istinetz 4y ago
  Okay, humble suggestion - remove yourself from the public square, but don't destroy it for me. That way, you get to not hear racist stuff, and I get to not have my morality chosen by random americans.
  - humanrebar 4y ago
    Right. Maybe we're much, much worse without public fora. There are valid concerns about social bubbles, fake news, and alternative facts already.
  - naravara 4y ago
    TBH the issue is not that I can't stand to hear racist stuff, it's that there's well understood incentives to fear monger that have tangibly eroded social trust across the board and degraded the actual real life public square in the process. That's not just the heightened threats of terrorism and acrimonious political systems either, those are just the tips of the iceberg and there's a whole host of social maladies, mental health disorders, depression and anxiety symptoms, etc. coming out of this.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Not hearing the stuff does not prevent someone who does hear the stuff from breaking into your house with a hammer, as Paul Pelosi discovered.
    - 0x445442 4y ago
      Abe Lincoln was assassinated well before the internet.
    - goldenchrome 4y ago
      Do you think if someone hit your 82 year old grandfather on the head with a steel hammer that he would “make a full recovery”?
- pc86 4y ago
  You're not required to participate. Nobody is, in fact. There's something particularly disgusting about the elevated sense of self-importance required to say that because you don't like something, because there is a vanishingly small number of bad actors as there are in every single group above a certain size, it shouldn't exist at all.
  - counters 4y ago
    Unfortunately the period from about 2015 to early 2021 made it very clear that even while direct participation is avoidable, the implications of the platform and it's users aren't. Then again, the solution to the hooligan yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre isn't to close the theatre...
    - naravara 4y ago
      We do enforce fire codes though, including things like occupancy limits.
      - pc86 4y ago
        I would love to hear what you think fire codes and occupancy limits have to do with Twitter and social media.
  - mattgreenrocks 4y ago
    Correct. And I'm also not required to believe in the cultural relevance of Twitter at all. There's no digital analogue to the IRL long stare of death that is elicited when someone is out of line. Downvotes, ratios, and whatever ridiculous thing people invent aren't effective enough because the offender has little concern for being ostracized from a group of people they don't even know. It's all just avatars on a screen yelling at each other. This is why people say scale is the problem. Smaller communities can more effectively enforce norms because they create a localized culture, there is less to moderate, and they can more effectively identify and punish bad actors. These days I spend time on niche forums where people actively choose to be there and participate. There's no Internet Points to be gamed, no drama of the day, no personal brands to be pushing. It's absolutely refreshing. It moves slower, there's no sense of FOMO, it's not made to suck your attention span dry. Twitter is rotting: it's why the front page has to tell you it is relevant, and why they started requiring logins to read beyond a thread. It'd be farther gone if journalists didn't prop it up as a way to do their job faster.
- mavidser 4y ago
  I can't agree that "global public square don't work for humans" - but even if that were the case, it's still too late to just reverse course. As long it's possible, viable and largely desired, the market will spit out a solution to this need.
  - nomdep 4y ago
    Is not too late at all. If you remove the "is not my responsibility what my users publish" for forums beyond X thousand users, every forum will stay under that limit and twitter quickly will become thousands of independent sub-twitters ala reddit. No home page aggregating everything, no suggested tweets, no country-scale public square
- TheCondor 4y ago
  Maybe the internet isn’t a good analog of the square. I’m sure there are taverns near any reader here where one could “say the wrong things” and be asked to leave or maybe roughed up or even worse. Those consequences might be an important part of this not-really-discourse-or-free-speech-but-we-want-to-treat-it-like-free-speech. Hard to say what the best thing is. Huge parts of our society don’t like consequences for actions.
  - matwood 4y ago
    For one, a real public square isn't anonymous. To add to your example, get thrown out the tavern too many times and they will eventually not let the person come back. This person can't simply create a new account and sneak back in.
- uncertain-phr 4y ago
  Marshall McLuhan came up with the concept of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_village https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_village, which may be relevant here.
mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
> You want to solve the problem of people saying racist things, so you decide to destroy the public square "Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts. Those thoughts voiced are short lived and can only be broadcast as far as the sound wave will carry them. Social media like twitter allows millions of people to spread their thoughts, commentary and keep them semi-permanently online for a long time, decade or more. I never stated I was solving the problem of people saying racist things. I'm challenging the assumption that designing a new social media platform should repeat existing designs that have public content with public comments driven by advertisements. In my opinion if someone designs with that premise it will end up the same as the existing social media platforms we have today (with a side effect of new JS frameworks being borne). Is this the only product design Tech has: public content and sell advertisements?
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  >"Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts. and if you're a crazy person or verbally abusive or maybe just shouting things that while maybe true are insulting to the public morality then the police come and carry you away.
  - stinkytaco 4y ago
    It feels like a problem of scale. One person shouting and getting carried away, whoever is right or wrong in that scenario, is still one person. Now extend that to everyone shouting at everyone in what has become the de facto public square and the stakes involved in deciding who to carry away feel existential in scale.
  - bad416f1f5a2 4y ago
    Or picketed so their speech is drowned out, or even punched in the nose by passers by. You can argue if this is good or bad, but it’s a fundamental difference between the public square and digital recreations: in the real world, speech can have meaningful consequences. In the Twitter world, you create a new profile.
throwaway5752 4y ago
Read Mother Night.
Applejinx 4y ago
It's a fair question whether 'public' for a person should mean ten people, or three hundred, or three million. In practical terms people can't cope with a public square the size of a million. It's too big. The range of possible 'people I'm sharing my public square with' is too great to manage.
- dave333 4y ago
  Well how about if the millions determine which are the best tweets to show by default, but do it so that quality or novel content comes through and political snark and misinformation is hidden.
- btbuildem 4y ago
  The question of scale is extremely relevant here. It's a well-known phenomenon that as organized/structured entities grow, there are certain thresholds at which they transmute - the structure itself changes to support the new level of scale. In terms of human groups, we've traditionally dealt with this by means of hierarchies (with all the built-in shortcomings). Personally, I find a homogenous mob terrifying. Being in agreement with millions of others implies that the subject of the agreement is extremely basic and common (like "we all need air to breathe").
r00fus 4y ago
Talk about an appeal to absurdity. The point is made, however, it's a bit hyperbolic. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that moderation is absolutely required for any "public square". You can't have society without some agreed-upon rules. The real question is where are the lines, and how do you police them (and who polices the police, etc etc). It's not like we haven't solved those. It's just that the solutions themselves are imperfect like the world we live in.
- istinetz 4y ago
  >In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that moderation is absolutely required for any "public square". No. You want moderation, because you don't want people saying The Bad Things™, but it's not an absolute property of all discussion. Otherwise - you're missing the point that GP wants to destroy twitter in it's current form because we don't need a public square. It's not a matter of where we draw the lines for moderation.
- btbuildem 4y ago
  In a real public square, moderation is both official (the police, keeping the peace or enforcing authoritarian oppression, depending on where you are) and organic (a loudmouth nazi sympathizer getting knocked out and nobody-having-seen-anything). Not that the IRL public square is immune to rule-breaking. In the heat of the moment, a mob can do horrendous things in a flash.
sdiq 4y ago
Reminds me another short story i once read, Lexicographicide, by Taban Lo Liyong. The dictator, every year, eliminates certain letters from the alphabet, or was it words from the dictionary - it's decades since i read it. Thereafter none can use the same.

dimva 4y ago

We gotta build things for the humans we have, not the humans we wish to have. Maybe global public squares don't work for the humans we have. That's ok.

jstummbillig 4y ago
But is it. The world is very clearly (more clearly than at any other point in the past) one. It is entirely not obvious that our current level of global communication is sufficient to support this setup.
istinetz 4y ago
Okay, humble suggestion - remove yourself from the public square, but don't destroy it for me. That way, you get to not hear racist stuff, and I get to not have my morality chosen by random americans.
- humanrebar 4y ago
  Right. Maybe we're much, much worse without public fora. There are valid concerns about social bubbles, fake news, and alternative facts already.
- naravara 4y ago
  TBH the issue is not that I can't stand to hear racist stuff, it's that there's well understood incentives to fear monger that have tangibly eroded social trust across the board and degraded the actual real life public square in the process. That's not just the heightened threats of terrorism and acrimonious political systems either, those are just the tips of the iceberg and there's a whole host of social maladies, mental health disorders, depression and anxiety symptoms, etc. coming out of this.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Not hearing the stuff does not prevent someone who does hear the stuff from breaking into your house with a hammer, as Paul Pelosi discovered.
  - 0x445442 4y ago
    Abe Lincoln was assassinated well before the internet.
  - goldenchrome 4y ago
    Do you think if someone hit your 82 year old grandfather on the head with a steel hammer that he would “make a full recovery”?
pc86 4y ago
You're not required to participate. Nobody is, in fact. There's something particularly disgusting about the elevated sense of self-importance required to say that because you don't like something, because there is a vanishingly small number of bad actors as there are in every single group above a certain size, it shouldn't exist at all.
- counters 4y ago
  Unfortunately the period from about 2015 to early 2021 made it very clear that even while direct participation is avoidable, the implications of the platform and it's users aren't. Then again, the solution to the hooligan yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre isn't to close the theatre...
  - naravara 4y ago
    We do enforce fire codes though, including things like occupancy limits.
    - pc86 4y ago
      I would love to hear what you think fire codes and occupancy limits have to do with Twitter and social media.
- mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  Correct. And I'm also not required to believe in the cultural relevance of Twitter at all. There's no digital analogue to the IRL long stare of death that is elicited when someone is out of line. Downvotes, ratios, and whatever ridiculous thing people invent aren't effective enough because the offender has little concern for being ostracized from a group of people they don't even know. It's all just avatars on a screen yelling at each other. This is why people say scale is the problem. Smaller communities can more effectively enforce norms because they create a localized culture, there is less to moderate, and they can more effectively identify and punish bad actors. These days I spend time on niche forums where people actively choose to be there and participate. There's no Internet Points to be gamed, no drama of the day, no personal brands to be pushing. It's absolutely refreshing. It moves slower, there's no sense of FOMO, it's not made to suck your attention span dry. Twitter is rotting: it's why the front page has to tell you it is relevant, and why they started requiring logins to read beyond a thread. It'd be farther gone if journalists didn't prop it up as a way to do their job faster.
mavidser 4y ago
I can't agree that "global public square don't work for humans" - but even if that were the case, it's still too late to just reverse course. As long it's possible, viable and largely desired, the market will spit out a solution to this need.
- nomdep 4y ago
  Is not too late at all. If you remove the "is not my responsibility what my users publish" for forums beyond X thousand users, every forum will stay under that limit and twitter quickly will become thousands of independent sub-twitters ala reddit. No home page aggregating everything, no suggested tweets, no country-scale public square
TheCondor 4y ago
Maybe the internet isn’t a good analog of the square. I’m sure there are taverns near any reader here where one could “say the wrong things” and be asked to leave or maybe roughed up or even worse. Those consequences might be an important part of this not-really-discourse-or-free-speech-but-we-want-to-treat-it-like-free-speech. Hard to say what the best thing is. Huge parts of our society don’t like consequences for actions.
- matwood 4y ago
  For one, a real public square isn't anonymous. To add to your example, get thrown out the tavern too many times and they will eventually not let the person come back. This person can't simply create a new account and sneak back in.
uncertain-phr 4y ago
Marshall McLuhan came up with the concept of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_village https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_village, which may be relevant here.

mattbrewsbytes 4y ago

> You want to solve the problem of people saying racist things, so you decide to destroy the public square "Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts. Those thoughts voiced are short lived and can only be broadcast as far as the sound wave will carry them. Social media like twitter allows millions of people to spread their thoughts, commentary and keep them semi-permanently online for a long time, decade or more. I never stated I was solving the problem of people saying racist things. I'm challenging the assumption that designing a new social media platform should repeat existing designs that have public content with public comments driven by advertisements. In my opinion if someone designs with that premise it will end up the same as the existing social media platforms we have today (with a side effect of new JS frameworks being borne). Is this the only product design Tech has: public content and sell advertisements?

bryanrasmussen 4y ago
>"Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts. and if you're a crazy person or verbally abusive or maybe just shouting things that while maybe true are insulting to the public morality then the police come and carry you away.
- stinkytaco 4y ago
  It feels like a problem of scale. One person shouting and getting carried away, whoever is right or wrong in that scenario, is still one person. Now extend that to everyone shouting at everyone in what has become the de facto public square and the stakes involved in deciding who to carry away feel existential in scale.
- bad416f1f5a2 4y ago
  Or picketed so their speech is drowned out, or even punched in the nose by passers by. You can argue if this is good or bad, but it’s a fundamental difference between the public square and digital recreations: in the real world, speech can have meaningful consequences. In the Twitter world, you create a new profile.

throwaway5752 4y ago

Read Mother Night.

Applejinx 4y ago

It's a fair question whether 'public' for a person should mean ten people, or three hundred, or three million. In practical terms people can't cope with a public square the size of a million. It's too big. The range of possible 'people I'm sharing my public square with' is too great to manage.

dave333 4y ago
Well how about if the millions determine which are the best tweets to show by default, but do it so that quality or novel content comes through and political snark and misinformation is hidden.
btbuildem 4y ago
The question of scale is extremely relevant here. It's a well-known phenomenon that as organized/structured entities grow, there are certain thresholds at which they transmute - the structure itself changes to support the new level of scale. In terms of human groups, we've traditionally dealt with this by means of hierarchies (with all the built-in shortcomings). Personally, I find a homogenous mob terrifying. Being in agreement with millions of others implies that the subject of the agreement is extremely basic and common (like "we all need air to breathe").

r00fus 4y ago

Talk about an appeal to absurdity. The point is made, however, it's a bit hyperbolic. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that moderation is absolutely required for any "public square". You can't have society without some agreed-upon rules. The real question is where are the lines, and how do you police them (and who polices the police, etc etc). It's not like we haven't solved those. It's just that the solutions themselves are imperfect like the world we live in.

istinetz 4y ago
>In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that moderation is absolutely required for any "public square". No. You want moderation, because you don't want people saying The Bad Things™, but it's not an absolute property of all discussion. Otherwise - you're missing the point that GP wants to destroy twitter in it's current form because we don't need a public square. It's not a matter of where we draw the lines for moderation.
btbuildem 4y ago
In a real public square, moderation is both official (the police, keeping the peace or enforcing authoritarian oppression, depending on where you are) and organic (a loudmouth nazi sympathizer getting knocked out and nobody-having-seen-anything). Not that the IRL public square is immune to rule-breaking. In the heat of the moment, a mob can do horrendous things in a flash.

sdiq 4y ago

Reminds me another short story i once read, Lexicographicide, by Taban Lo Liyong. The dictator, every year, eliminates certain letters from the alphabet, or was it words from the dictionary - it's decades since i read it. Thereafter none can use the same.