7 ms·

Interesting project, although in all likelihood vast amounts of people crave toxicity, popularity contests and flamewars. Kinda like how school bullying appears

by klabb3 4y ago

Interesting project, although in all likelihood vast amounts of people crave toxicity, popularity contests and flamewars. Kinda like how school bullying appears everywhere, independent of culture. That doesn’t mean that healthy places cannot exist or thrive, but it means that there will always be demand for the unhealthy. Tech impacts society, but we’re mistaken if we think we can change human nature. I’d expect the outcome of the research to reach a different conclusion than people expect. For instance, I don’t think the typical system of likes and followers will ever be healthy. Beware of early results though, because it always takes a while for a platform to mature enough to see if it withstands the test of millions of users, socially speaking. My WIP theory is: people-oriented public broadcast mediums always deteriorate towards the unhealthy with massive scale. You can have one or the other, but not both. (People oriented means that there is a strong focus on the people, usually with real name and face, or emphasizing the user/display name) Anecdotally, to illustrate the point: - LinkedIn became a cesspool despite having a professional boring focus. My theory: because it’s people-oriented and public. - Group chats have thrived and are very rarely problematic, despite likes and reacts everywhere. My theory: private groups with implicit trust. No need to build your personal brand. - GitHub has not deteriorated (a bit perhaps, but very much usable still), despite having likes, being a public broadcast medium. My take: it’s because it is mostly content oriented.

fanso99 4y ago
I think a big part (if not the most critical one) of this deterioration is the addition of algorithmic feeds. As soon as a company starts prioritizing content, it breaks the natural flow of a conversation we have in real life. This leads to group mixing, polarization, emotionally-charged content prevalence, etc. I have never really used Twitter until very recently. It was shocking to me how much the algorithmic content insertion drives the conversation. E.g. I click on a link to read an individual thread: right in the middle of it, with almost no visual indication Twitter is inserting completely unrelated but "high engagement" content. It's brutal. Edit: imagine group chats sorted by engagement... a pile of responses in a disconnected sequence. Someone said something funny that got 10 likes? Push it to the top for the next 2 hours! (I am tempted to build this as an experiment just to see how awful—or effective?—this would be like.)
- llbeansandrice 4y ago
  This is it. It’s algorithms to drive “engagement”. Anger is easy to generate and match the algorithm to.
  - raffraffraff 4y ago
    And you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist who thinks that the heads of Twitter cynically tuned the algorithm to reward anger. If it's human nature to love a good fight, then unguided ML would generate a black-box model that promoted angry posts.
    - llbeansandrice 4y ago
      I never really got those conspiracy theories. The big secret is they're tuning it to make money. Money in the ad-tech age of the internet means eyes on content and engagement. Anger and clickbait and such are all incredibly easy to tune for. Plus it's not just the algorithms that are tuned for it, people, including the "creators" on any platform, change their behavior to do "better" on the platform. It's just a feedback loop optimized for "engagement" which is the metric these companies are using to make more money from the companies buying ad-space. Occam's razor and all that. It's just about money.
- zztop44 4y ago
  I think I remember Facebook was pretty toxic even before it had an algorithmic newsfeed. Maybe not as wild as now, but people being mean to each other and saying awful things was very much a thing. Same with oldschool forums, too.
  - molasses 4y ago
    People kind of go through a contrarian phase. I read something the other day, probably on Twitter, that to get the answer you want, you deliberately put out the wrong answer. And leach out the bile to get results. I think there are still lots of people that are on-boarding. And over time they simmer down. Much is poor etiquette unwittingly forced, as we have finger fumbling interfaces.
Gigachad 4y ago
Very much agreed. Group chats and instant messaging are the prime social media platforms. You won’t troll in group chats because you’ll be removed and it’s difficult or impossible to get back. Unlike public platforms where you can sign up for 300 new accounts behind vpns. The groups are small and everyone knows everyone so you’ll have a reputation beyond just being banned. There’s also no global admins / thought police. Each group gets to decide on their own what kind of discourse is allowed (illegal content excepted). In a group chat your friends can discuss things which would have you banned from Facebook/etc. The platform won't push your content on others so independent group chats don't ruin the experience for other users.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  Yeah 100%. Small chat rooms have been existing and thriving for years now. It didn't suddenly take the Twitter debacle to make them viable options. I mean, look at the drama spilling out of Twitter right now. There are HN posters posting 10-20 comments per day on every Twitter thread. Mastodon wasn't the beginning of private or small spaces on the net. I'm in dozens of them right now.
- neodymiumphish 4y ago
  This makes me think that maybe Google Plus (God, what a shitty name), could have succeeded. The focus on sharing into circles of users who wanted your content would have made it a system where you pick who should view a given post. This circle-oriented sharing may have led to less self-promotion than the other platforms.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    In practice the issue was few people understood and properly used circles. I mostly just used them to sort kinda a primary and secondary feed. One to keep up with, and one for casual browsing.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    It's still just not as good as group chats. It has no community vibe as each person is posting to a different group of people. If I join a programming group chat, I'll get to know everyone there and the content will almost all be around the topic of the group. If I open something like Google Plus, it's going to be some content probably related to what I might like to see, but it's still just a public forum with no community.
haswell 4y ago
I think the fact that there is a public conversation about what is healthy vs. what is not is a huge step in the right direction, even if human nature means we’ll always be fighting. I strongly believe that in a few decades (probably sooner), the traditional social media platforms will be seen as cigarettes. Some people will still partake, but no one has any misconception about the harm they cause. Healthier alternatives will be important in the long run, even if there is no perfect technical solution. I do like your theories about why certain networks have fared as they have, and hopefully Mozilla comes away with some insights that might lead to something that highlights the good parts.
- Llamamoe 4y ago
  Cigarettes have never been a prerequisite to staying in touch in an increasingly disconnected world, though.
  - haswell 4y ago
    And neither are the most toxic elements of the current big social media platforms. Even just a return to the basics would go a long way: Show me my friends' stuff, in order, and don't show me anything else. Let me stay up to date without getting roped into bullshit promoted on my feed. Highly manipulative algorithmic content promotion is not necessary to stay in touch. At worst, a less toxic iteration of a social media platform is the equivalent of e-cigarettes. Still addictive and not super healthy, still unknown how this mode of consumption will impact humans long term, but less likely to kill you from the obvious kinds of cancer.
    - Llamamoe 4y ago
      Sure, but the corporations have incentives to run things the way they're running them now, and users will aggregate to platforms others use, which will in turn be driven by addictiveness. And you're not going to quit a platform if it means losing touch with your friends and access to your data on it.
trts 4y ago
> vast amounts of people crave toxicity, popularity contests and flamewars If there was a social media network that could exclude these things, then smaller would be fine. I remember Google Reader as a brief, well-balanced example of healthy social media platform. It was mostly text, the selection bias was in favor of users who were savvy enough to understand RSS, generally interested in an array of different things, no engagement algorithms. The blogosphere that drove much of the content at the time was wonkish, (more) independent, often irreverent but also sincere about what a better future for human civilization and politics could be like. Haven't seen another thing like it since.
- sylens 4y ago
  Reader wasn't really a social platform for many of those reasons. It was its integration with Buzz that gave it the ability to share socially with friends
  - trts 4y ago
    I don't think this was the case as I wasn't a Buzz user. And yes, it wasn't _really_ a social platform, but you could share items from your own feed to other mutuals and converse under the thread that you (or they) shared. A couple other readers like Inoreader and TheOldReader later implemented stuff like this, but without the large user base that Gmail had it was pointless. Its limitations were part of what made it thrive.
Retric 4y ago
School bullying is nowhere near universally consistent. It’s twice as common in the US as it is in the Netherlands for example and the difference between schools can be far more extreme.
- rrdharan 4y ago
  Citation? I found: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092217/bullying-in-europe/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092217/bullying-in-euro... https://www.pacer.org/bullying/info/stats.asp https://www.pacer.org/bullying/info/stats.asp Which suggests the rates are comparable between the US and Denmark.
  - Retric 4y ago
    I’ve seen slightly different numbers (11 v 21) for percentage of kids bullied each year, but I can just use your links: Netherlands is 12% far to the right on the top link you just used, and it shows a huge range between countries. The second link you used had 20.2% for the US. PS: Did you think Netherlands and Denmark was the same country or something?
    - PrototypeNM1 4y ago
      Probably mistaking Denmark for "Holland".
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  Not sure why this is getting downvoted. The prevalence of bullying really does vary massively from country to country, school to school and even cohort to cohort. Given how many people were very deeply and very personally affected by it, it's amazing that nobody's discovered how and why it spreads.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mpawelski 4y ago
  I've also read it's non existent (at least violent bullying) in Thailand. But I didn't look for proper research on this.
fyfirhffuug 4y ago
I think the more likely truth is that people crave utility and compelling novelty. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. all either had/have usefulness that their predecessors lacked or packaged themselves in a novel way that was enjoyable. No one cares social media is unhealthy because most people realize that 'unhealthy' in this scenario is more akin to the impact of fashion magazines on young women than the way in which smoking is bad for you. Meanwhile Facebook groups and Facebook market are actually useful, Snapchat is handy for naughty convos, Instagram provided a more streamlined experience for people who actually cared about their wall on Facebook, and TikTok provided a less aggressively progressive video streaming service that offered tools to make content creation easy for Creators while providing Consumers with a wildly better recommendation algorithm than YouTube, mobile first design, and formatting requirements that ensured content is suited to the attention span of people on mobile.
caditinpiscinam 4y ago
You think school bullying is human nature? It might transcend culture, but I think it's a direct consequence of school as an institution. I mean, a school's proposition to students is basically this: "You as a student have to spend most of your time with these strangers that we chose arbitrarily. If a conflict arises, you gotta figure it out on your own. Your parents won't be there to help you. Your friends may or may not be there to help you depending on how we choose (arbitrarily) to split you all up. If someone attacks you and you defend yourself, you'll be punished the same as them. If you refuse to participate in this arrangement, you're a criminal" If I had to design an environment that was optimized to encourage and allow bullying to happen, it would look a lot like a school. Writing the phenomenon off as human nature seems super naive to me.
- berniedurfee 4y ago
  Part of the purpose is to prepare you for the real world, which is far more brutal. Though bullying tends to be more subtle. Grownups have their lunch money taken all the time.
- tayo42 4y ago
  Bullying isn't exclusive to schools though.
  - caditinpiscinam 4y ago
    That's true. I think the other places where it happens often have similar dynamics to schools. For example, in a workplace you might not get to choose who you work with, or be able to leave easily. That's less true of other cases like bullying in teams or clubs though. I just know that, personally, most of the times I experienced bullying in school happened when I was separated from my friends. I think that the natural tendency people have to look out for each other is stronger than any tendency towards bullying, but that schools disrupt the balance.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      People seem to pile in once someone starts, that is how bullying works. If nobody starts then nobody piles in, but at scale with social media lots of people will start, so then the masses pile in a lot.
tayo42 4y ago
I think its just having a comments section. Which basically what twitter replies are or like linked in replies. If books had a comment section they would be toxic. Even this site gets toxic in the comments, there isn't any brand building, no real reason to collect likes. Github can get toxic in pr comments. Toxic behavior gets encouraged by likes and stuff. Ime the worst message boards were the ones with reputation that could be awarded or taken away. Group chats have a social repercussions for being an ass. The internet doesn't for the most part.
- klabb3 4y ago
  Yeah there’s always instances of toxicity on anything large, even group chats like slack for instance. I am talking about overall trends on a large scale, which is hard to measure and subjective – but think of healthy as “producing more oxygen than it consumes” and vice versa for unhealthy. It’s just the least wrong but still general model I’ve been able to come up with. YMMV.
nindalf 4y ago
> Group chats have thrived and are very rarely problematic This is a person who has never seen what WhatsApp groups look like in Brazil or India.
- viraptor 4y ago
  I don't think it's even country specific. There are just groups and groups. One has hundreds of users, most of which you don't know and the other is 5 of your friends that you talk to every week in person. One will be more likely problematic... (but also much easier to leave)
cycomanic 4y ago
Don't discount the damage done by everyone looking for a way to get rich quick. I think something that has driven social online media (in the broadest sense) to become the cesspool it is now, is that people are building their "brand" to profit in some way or the other. This is not to say that previous online communities were not toxic, far from it (lots of epic usenet flamewars to proof the point), however largely people were not trying to "break the system" to somehow make money from it (similar to how spam has almost broken email).
majani 4y ago
What's funny is your solution would end up in something approximating the original version of Facebook
ShredKazoo 4y ago
>there will always be demand for the unhealthy Seems a bit like saying "there will always be demand for cigarettes". Social norms and "nudges" like no-smoking areas can go a long way. People don't set out to have toxic experiences on social media -- they get sucked in and succumb to bad incentives. Hacker News seems pretty good. Youtube comments have gotten better. We're in the early stages here. Only a narrow range of platforms have been tried, and they've mostly been optimized for engagement rather than human wellbeing.
tacker2000 4y ago
The more “focused” a group is, the more civil it is, or if it is too broad it needs extremely strict moderation. A good example is reddit, where the large subs like r/politics and r/worldnews are just cesspools like twitter comments and the more smaller and finely grained ones have serious and useful discussion.
- berniedurfee 4y ago
  It’d be interesting to see what would happen if Twitter copped the Reddit model. Separate forums dedicated to specific topics; moderated and isolated from the hellscape of the public space.
mellosouls 4y ago
Group chats have thrived and are very rarely problematic I've found several group chats to be deeply problematic (though of course I accept the possibility I could be the problem). By definition they encourage group-think, and that, coupled with the lack of requirements for being a moderator (and the attraction of the role to narcissists and control-types) can be a pretty toxic mix.

by klabb3 4y ago

fanso99 4y ago

I think a big part (if not the most critical one) of this deterioration is the addition of algorithmic feeds. As soon as a company starts prioritizing content, it breaks the natural flow of a conversation we have in real life. This leads to group mixing, polarization, emotionally-charged content prevalence, etc. I have never really used Twitter until very recently. It was shocking to me how much the algorithmic content insertion drives the conversation. E.g. I click on a link to read an individual thread: right in the middle of it, with almost no visual indication Twitter is inserting completely unrelated but "high engagement" content. It's brutal. Edit: imagine group chats sorted by engagement... a pile of responses in a disconnected sequence. Someone said something funny that got 10 likes? Push it to the top for the next 2 hours! (I am tempted to build this as an experiment just to see how awful—or effective?—this would be like.)

llbeansandrice 4y ago
This is it. It’s algorithms to drive “engagement”. Anger is easy to generate and match the algorithm to.
- raffraffraff 4y ago
  And you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist who thinks that the heads of Twitter cynically tuned the algorithm to reward anger. If it's human nature to love a good fight, then unguided ML would generate a black-box model that promoted angry posts.
  - llbeansandrice 4y ago
    I never really got those conspiracy theories. The big secret is they're tuning it to make money. Money in the ad-tech age of the internet means eyes on content and engagement. Anger and clickbait and such are all incredibly easy to tune for. Plus it's not just the algorithms that are tuned for it, people, including the "creators" on any platform, change their behavior to do "better" on the platform. It's just a feedback loop optimized for "engagement" which is the metric these companies are using to make more money from the companies buying ad-space. Occam's razor and all that. It's just about money.
zztop44 4y ago
I think I remember Facebook was pretty toxic even before it had an algorithmic newsfeed. Maybe not as wild as now, but people being mean to each other and saying awful things was very much a thing. Same with oldschool forums, too.
- molasses 4y ago
  People kind of go through a contrarian phase. I read something the other day, probably on Twitter, that to get the answer you want, you deliberately put out the wrong answer. And leach out the bile to get results. I think there are still lots of people that are on-boarding. And over time they simmer down. Much is poor etiquette unwittingly forced, as we have finger fumbling interfaces.

Gigachad 4y ago

Very much agreed. Group chats and instant messaging are the prime social media platforms. You won’t troll in group chats because you’ll be removed and it’s difficult or impossible to get back. Unlike public platforms where you can sign up for 300 new accounts behind vpns. The groups are small and everyone knows everyone so you’ll have a reputation beyond just being banned. There’s also no global admins / thought police. Each group gets to decide on their own what kind of discourse is allowed (illegal content excepted). In a group chat your friends can discuss things which would have you banned from Facebook/etc. The platform won't push your content on others so independent group chats don't ruin the experience for other users.

Karrot_Kream 4y ago
Yeah 100%. Small chat rooms have been existing and thriving for years now. It didn't suddenly take the Twitter debacle to make them viable options. I mean, look at the drama spilling out of Twitter right now. There are HN posters posting 10-20 comments per day on every Twitter thread. Mastodon wasn't the beginning of private or small spaces on the net. I'm in dozens of them right now.
neodymiumphish 4y ago
This makes me think that maybe Google Plus (God, what a shitty name), could have succeeded. The focus on sharing into circles of users who wanted your content would have made it a system where you pick who should view a given post. This circle-oriented sharing may have led to less self-promotion than the other platforms.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  In practice the issue was few people understood and properly used circles. I mostly just used them to sort kinda a primary and secondary feed. One to keep up with, and one for casual browsing.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  It's still just not as good as group chats. It has no community vibe as each person is posting to a different group of people. If I join a programming group chat, I'll get to know everyone there and the content will almost all be around the topic of the group. If I open something like Google Plus, it's going to be some content probably related to what I might like to see, but it's still just a public forum with no community.

haswell 4y ago

I think the fact that there is a public conversation about what is healthy vs. what is not is a huge step in the right direction, even if human nature means we’ll always be fighting. I strongly believe that in a few decades (probably sooner), the traditional social media platforms will be seen as cigarettes. Some people will still partake, but no one has any misconception about the harm they cause. Healthier alternatives will be important in the long run, even if there is no perfect technical solution. I do like your theories about why certain networks have fared as they have, and hopefully Mozilla comes away with some insights that might lead to something that highlights the good parts.

Llamamoe 4y ago
Cigarettes have never been a prerequisite to staying in touch in an increasingly disconnected world, though.
- haswell 4y ago
  And neither are the most toxic elements of the current big social media platforms. Even just a return to the basics would go a long way: Show me my friends' stuff, in order, and don't show me anything else. Let me stay up to date without getting roped into bullshit promoted on my feed. Highly manipulative algorithmic content promotion is not necessary to stay in touch. At worst, a less toxic iteration of a social media platform is the equivalent of e-cigarettes. Still addictive and not super healthy, still unknown how this mode of consumption will impact humans long term, but less likely to kill you from the obvious kinds of cancer.
  - Llamamoe 4y ago
    Sure, but the corporations have incentives to run things the way they're running them now, and users will aggregate to platforms others use, which will in turn be driven by addictiveness. And you're not going to quit a platform if it means losing touch with your friends and access to your data on it.

trts 4y ago

> vast amounts of people crave toxicity, popularity contests and flamewars If there was a social media network that could exclude these things, then smaller would be fine. I remember Google Reader as a brief, well-balanced example of healthy social media platform. It was mostly text, the selection bias was in favor of users who were savvy enough to understand RSS, generally interested in an array of different things, no engagement algorithms. The blogosphere that drove much of the content at the time was wonkish, (more) independent, often irreverent but also sincere about what a better future for human civilization and politics could be like. Haven't seen another thing like it since.

sylens 4y ago
Reader wasn't really a social platform for many of those reasons. It was its integration with Buzz that gave it the ability to share socially with friends
- trts 4y ago
  I don't think this was the case as I wasn't a Buzz user. And yes, it wasn't _really_ a social platform, but you could share items from your own feed to other mutuals and converse under the thread that you (or they) shared. A couple other readers like Inoreader and TheOldReader later implemented stuff like this, but without the large user base that Gmail had it was pointless. Its limitations were part of what made it thrive.

Retric 4y ago

School bullying is nowhere near universally consistent. It’s twice as common in the US as it is in the Netherlands for example and the difference between schools can be far more extreme.

rrdharan 4y ago
Citation? I found: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092217/bullying-in-europe/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092217/bullying-in-euro... https://www.pacer.org/bullying/info/stats.asp https://www.pacer.org/bullying/info/stats.asp Which suggests the rates are comparable between the US and Denmark.
- Retric 4y ago
  I’ve seen slightly different numbers (11 v 21) for percentage of kids bullied each year, but I can just use your links: Netherlands is 12% far to the right on the top link you just used, and it shows a huge range between countries. The second link you used had 20.2% for the US. PS: Did you think Netherlands and Denmark was the same country or something?
  - PrototypeNM1 4y ago
    Probably mistaking Denmark for "Holland".
AussieWog93 4y ago
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. The prevalence of bullying really does vary massively from country to country, school to school and even cohort to cohort. Given how many people were very deeply and very personally affected by it, it's amazing that nobody's discovered how and why it spreads.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mpawelski 4y ago
I've also read it's non existent (at least violent bullying) in Thailand. But I didn't look for proper research on this.

fyfirhffuug 4y ago

I think the more likely truth is that people crave utility and compelling novelty. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. all either had/have usefulness that their predecessors lacked or packaged themselves in a novel way that was enjoyable. No one cares social media is unhealthy because most people realize that 'unhealthy' in this scenario is more akin to the impact of fashion magazines on young women than the way in which smoking is bad for you. Meanwhile Facebook groups and Facebook market are actually useful, Snapchat is handy for naughty convos, Instagram provided a more streamlined experience for people who actually cared about their wall on Facebook, and TikTok provided a less aggressively progressive video streaming service that offered tools to make content creation easy for Creators while providing Consumers with a wildly better recommendation algorithm than YouTube, mobile first design, and formatting requirements that ensured content is suited to the attention span of people on mobile.

caditinpiscinam 4y ago

You think school bullying is human nature? It might transcend culture, but I think it's a direct consequence of school as an institution. I mean, a school's proposition to students is basically this: "You as a student have to spend most of your time with these strangers that we chose arbitrarily. If a conflict arises, you gotta figure it out on your own. Your parents won't be there to help you. Your friends may or may not be there to help you depending on how we choose (arbitrarily) to split you all up. If someone attacks you and you defend yourself, you'll be punished the same as them. If you refuse to participate in this arrangement, you're a criminal" If I had to design an environment that was optimized to encourage and allow bullying to happen, it would look a lot like a school. Writing the phenomenon off as human nature seems super naive to me.

berniedurfee 4y ago
Part of the purpose is to prepare you for the real world, which is far more brutal. Though bullying tends to be more subtle. Grownups have their lunch money taken all the time.
tayo42 4y ago
Bullying isn't exclusive to schools though.
- caditinpiscinam 4y ago
  That's true. I think the other places where it happens often have similar dynamics to schools. For example, in a workplace you might not get to choose who you work with, or be able to leave easily. That's less true of other cases like bullying in teams or clubs though. I just know that, personally, most of the times I experienced bullying in school happened when I was separated from my friends. I think that the natural tendency people have to look out for each other is stronger than any tendency towards bullying, but that schools disrupt the balance.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    People seem to pile in once someone starts, that is how bullying works. If nobody starts then nobody piles in, but at scale with social media lots of people will start, so then the masses pile in a lot.

tayo42 4y ago

I think its just having a comments section. Which basically what twitter replies are or like linked in replies. If books had a comment section they would be toxic. Even this site gets toxic in the comments, there isn't any brand building, no real reason to collect likes. Github can get toxic in pr comments. Toxic behavior gets encouraged by likes and stuff. Ime the worst message boards were the ones with reputation that could be awarded or taken away. Group chats have a social repercussions for being an ass. The internet doesn't for the most part.

klabb3 4y ago
Yeah there’s always instances of toxicity on anything large, even group chats like slack for instance. I am talking about overall trends on a large scale, which is hard to measure and subjective – but think of healthy as “producing more oxygen than it consumes” and vice versa for unhealthy. It’s just the least wrong but still general model I’ve been able to come up with. YMMV.

nindalf 4y ago

> Group chats have thrived and are very rarely problematic This is a person who has never seen what WhatsApp groups look like in Brazil or India.

viraptor 4y ago
I don't think it's even country specific. There are just groups and groups. One has hundreds of users, most of which you don't know and the other is 5 of your friends that you talk to every week in person. One will be more likely problematic... (but also much easier to leave)

cycomanic 4y ago

Don't discount the damage done by everyone looking for a way to get rich quick. I think something that has driven social online media (in the broadest sense) to become the cesspool it is now, is that people are building their "brand" to profit in some way or the other. This is not to say that previous online communities were not toxic, far from it (lots of epic usenet flamewars to proof the point), however largely people were not trying to "break the system" to somehow make money from it (similar to how spam has almost broken email).

majani 4y ago

What's funny is your solution would end up in something approximating the original version of Facebook

ShredKazoo 4y ago

>there will always be demand for the unhealthy Seems a bit like saying "there will always be demand for cigarettes". Social norms and "nudges" like no-smoking areas can go a long way. People don't set out to have toxic experiences on social media -- they get sucked in and succumb to bad incentives. Hacker News seems pretty good. Youtube comments have gotten better. We're in the early stages here. Only a narrow range of platforms have been tried, and they've mostly been optimized for engagement rather than human wellbeing.

tacker2000 4y ago

The more “focused” a group is, the more civil it is, or if it is too broad it needs extremely strict moderation. A good example is reddit, where the large subs like r/politics and r/worldnews are just cesspools like twitter comments and the more smaller and finely grained ones have serious and useful discussion.

berniedurfee 4y ago
It’d be interesting to see what would happen if Twitter copped the Reddit model. Separate forums dedicated to specific topics; moderated and isolated from the hellscape of the public space.

mellosouls 4y ago

Group chats have thrived and are very rarely problematic I've found several group chats to be deeply problematic (though of course I accept the possibility I could be the problem). By definition they encourage group-think, and that, coupled with the lack of requirements for being a moderator (and the attraction of the role to narcissists and control-types) can be a pretty toxic mix.