9 ms·

Perhaps it’s time to sideline the internet when evaluating collective reality

190 points by Terretta 3y ago

giantg2 3y ago
Vocal minorities in real life hold an outsized influence in all sorts of things. Look at things like primary elections where the turnout is low and the people with the strongest or most extreme opinions turn out to vote.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
escapedmoose 3y ago
It would be nice to see some actual research backing a claim like this.
- SanjayMehta 3y ago
  I’ve seen some papers referencing reddit in particular. You should be able to find them on scholar.google.com
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  The examples provided in the article seem fine. No one actually cared about the Taylor Swift drama despite it being all over social media. Bernie fans were greatly overrepresented online, and white male Bernie fans even more so. This is a real phenomenon, and it doesn't always occur, but it's a good reminder that you shouldn't take twitter discourse too seriously. What kind of data would you want to back it up?
  - vorpalhex 3y ago
    Bernie fans are mostly white men, they are overwhelming young too. The author said "this was shown to be false" but no source is provided.. and the author is wrong. (I suspect the author read a very misleading Vox article that makes the claim the author parroted) So if the author had done research and used sources, they may not have made a bunch of factual errors. [0] https://www.capradio.org/articles/2020/03/09/politifact-california-did-bernie-sanders-win-people-of-color-in-california-and-was-it-not-even-close/ https://www.capradio.org/articles/2020/03/09/politifact-cali... [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-defines-the-sanders-coalition/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-defines-the-sander...
    - zeroCalories 3y ago
      Are you trolling me? Yes Bernie was popular among young white men, but they are one part of a larger coalition. Even the links you provided showed that he had plenty of support from minorities. Sure old black woman favored Biden, but they aren't the only other demographic. Characterizing his movement as mainly bernie bros is pure propaganda.
      - hn92726819 3y ago
        I can't tell who's trolling who now, but how stastics are worded is key here. The comment you replied to doesn't disagree with any of the claims you're making here are implying. From the second linked article: > although it seems Sanders’s base is hardly all white, it’s likely that no matter who wins the nomination ... a clear majority of their votes will probably come from white Democrats This directly contradicts the original article's quote: > there was no evidence to show that young white men made up a majority of Sanders’s supporters Additionally, the article's next sentence: > The movement, in fact, consisted of a diverse coalition of people from marginalized races and genders Appears to be an attempt at proving the majority isn't white, but it doesn't support that claim at all. It can be true that there was a diverse coalition of voters, and white people still make up a majority of votes. Then, of all your three claims, none of them disprove the claim that most Bernie voters are white. Everything you said could be true, but none weaken the claims of the comment you're replying to. I suspect at least someone here doesnt understand that "60% of Latino voters and 30% of white voters" doesn't imply "white is not the majority vote" (since, for example, 60% of 10 is significantly less than 30% of 1000).
        zeroCalories 3y ago
        Yeah, it feels like you're trolling me. White vote, vs white men, is clearly different. America is a majority white country so obviously most votes will come from white people. Saying Bernie's support comes mostly from white men, as was claimed by the post I was referring to and the Bernie Bro narrative, is false.
        3y ago
  - paganel 3y ago
    > No one actually cared about the Taylor Swift drama The Swifties cared. Two close friends of mine, both of them Swifties, went to a The 1975 concert only because Healy had been linked to Taylor Swift. Said two friends live half a world away from the States and hadn't listened to The 1975 at all until all this scandal. They also are totally in the dark when it comes to ct, Adam Friedland or rs.
- wuliwong 3y ago
  I can't help with references for research about this but I was thinking that this is a somewhat related phenomena to statistics like how the majority of the content on wikipedia comes from a surprisingly small number of people. I believe there are some actual hard numbers around that. Not sure if anyone has tried to quantify and study what this article is talking about, though.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  One example that comes to mind for me and is pretty well documented is the defund police movement. The black population in the US overwhelmingly wants more police on the streets in their communities. The movement was popularized by a small minority of the very fringe view. Other people joined thinking they were standing in solidarity with the back community, but we're actually working against it's desires.
consumer451 3y ago
My own anecdotal experience on reddit and HN is that much of the heavy lifting can be done by just a few people "guarding new." This is a good thing sometimes, efficiency is nice, but it can also be manipulated. There seem to be some keywords that trigger a pre-organized group to descend upon a post in New and downvote/report/flag it into oblivion. There was a piece documenting how easily, and cheaply, it is to manipulate reddit a few years ago. I can't seem to find it now. I would like to add that sometimes my posts get flagged, such as a recent one complaining of poor writing, and that's fair enough. meta: hilariously, this piece was flagged while I was writing this comment, so I vouched for it. If someone could give some reasons why TFA is not interesting and deserves flagging, I would love to hear them.
- pokeymcsnatch 3y ago
  I took a look at my profile the other day and realized that I'd somehow inadvertently flagged a bunch of posts and comments. Guessing it was a UI thing, trying to hit 'context' instead of flag.
  - consumer451 3y ago
    Yeah, I have found the same in my profile. This has been discussed recently in various posts. That's why the flagged link is in the profile now. There is a major temporal component to posts, comments, and flagging. I am not sure what good comes from unflagging my mistakenly flagged items when they are usually at least days old by the time I notice. Considering the gravity of that particular mechanic, I would argue that something along the lines of the "are you sure?" prompt used in the delete action would be really helpful.
    - djbusby 3y ago
      I just learned about this from this thread. Checked and I also had some accidental flags. Oops.
      - buu700 3y ago
kome 3y ago
often it's not just a vocal minority, as this article claims, but it's more like manufacturing consent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent with the war in ukraine, for example, i find a huge disconnect about how reality is described in the media and some actions are seen as evident and necessary, and how people in my social circle feel about it...
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  I think the difference is that this is manufactured consent from activists instead of an establishment consensus. A well coordinated movement with charismatic leaders can take over social media with wild takes as long as they can avoid getting banned.
  - throwawawawow 3y ago
    [dead]
- Terretta 3y ago
  Your comment seems like a non-sequitur now that HN mods edited the title of the submission to be the sub-heading of the article. Submitted post title, as it was for the first 100+ upvotes: “Vocal minority sets online discourse, distorting real-life perception” OTOH, if someone reads the article, your comment makes sense, given the section heading: “A vocal minority sets the agenda”
mynameishere 3y ago
Funny how people just get a rough impression of things and then "go with it". Her view of Sanders' 2020 bid was that people like herself were a big part of it--even 80 year old Nepalese grandmas were Sanders boosters, after all! I think what really happened is that Democratic insiders, both in the media and the DNC, did their best to sideline his campaign, possibly even with some hanky-panky in the SC and Super Tuesday elections. The "Bernie Bros" narrative is perhaps part of that, but just as a Red Herring. Why did they engage in this evil plot? Not because they dislike Sanders so much, as because he would have been hopeless in the General. I don't know. But if you want to study the question, you can see something happen similar right now with a very different politician, RFK jr. The average impression of the guy is "kook" but he's pretty sensible. (I mean, in terms of issues, he's shit, but that's completely irrelevant.)
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  > The average impression of the guy is "kook" but he's pretty sensible. (I mean, in terms of issues, he's shit, but that's completely irrelevant.) No. Very much no. We're hiring a politician, not a counselor. His policies are the only thing that's relevant.
  - 1234letshaveatw 3y ago
    sure, who cares about temperament or character? Anyone who parrots the right talking points is fine
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      Temperament and character matter, I'll give you that. But "talking points" and "policy" are miles apart.
  - claytongulick 3y ago
    Take a look at the video he made about his recent trip to the border. The guy seems damn classy to me.
- 3y ago
sickcodebruh 3y ago
I’ve seen and experienced this first-hand. It happens a lot in niche music scenes. The internet will explode with rage about something someone in a band did or didn’t do, it will seem as if the whole world is united in rage or ridicule! …And then they go on tour and nothing is different. Or they post a statement and receive a flood of “This is the first I’ve heard about it.”
- xenospn 3y ago
  See: Rammstein
  - chucksta 3y ago
    what happened there?
    - somedude895 3y ago
      They have after show backstage parties where they invite fans to, well, party. Some girls are accusing mainly the lead singer of behaving badly. The media jumps on it to demonize the band, trying to find new "victims" / people who regret past decisions. Activists protest outside the concert venues. Their fans don't care. Just the usual..
      - gloryjulio 3y ago
        Behaving badly can range from 'have fun with groupies who willingly join the party' to 'rape'. So what exactly happened matters
        somedude895 3y ago
        No charges have been filed by any of the supposed victims and the investigations started by state attorneys were quickly dropped, after which the conversation moved on to feminist talking points of power dynamics and the partiarchy. The point is that the media again hyped up a single person's account turned shitstorm posted online.
zeroCalories 3y ago
From personal experience, I find that playing dumb and dismissive with online discourse that leaks into real life works the best. Most of these things are incredibly unimportant, and even strongly opinionated people start to falter when they find themselves having to explain their dumb culture war stuff to you. Obviously if it's a serious mainstream issue you shouldn't do this.
- tiberious726 3y ago
  It actually works pretty great on those too. "Serious mainstream issues" are exactly the same kind of thing as fabricated internet drama, just fabricated by older and much better funded groups.
  - anyoneamous 3y ago
    "Did you see what those Antifa people are doing now?!?!" "Nah, I'm not really into Pokémon."
  - EatingWithForks 3y ago
    I don't know, I think there are some exceptions to this. It's very difficult to play dumb when a friend confides in you about their concerns getting an IUD in certain political landscapes. During the height of covid, more than one asian friend asked me to be around them in public due to the rise of anti-asian sentiment in my country, and it would've been wildly inappropriate for me to play dumb then. Most recently more than one non-feminine woman friend have asked me for the same due to anti-transgender rhetoric (I've had one confide in me a harrowing experience getting harassed by someone assuming she was transgender... she's just skinny with a short haircut).
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      I vividly remember Muslims in my team coming to concerned for their families when the trump travel ban began. They were confused why they were being singled out and worried about being persecuted at work and school. I couldn’t explain because I honestly never understood, but I could assure them I wouldn’t stand for any such thing at work and assure them I didn’t sympathize with the politics, and I would be their advocate if they needed it. I expressed hope that schools wouldn’t stand for it either and advised them to also reach out to their guidance counselors at school to be sure they were aware of their concerns. Whether these are issues manufactured or not, they translate into real fears that play out across many people, in profound ways. It’s important to be engaged to protect people in fear, whether you share their backgrounds or beliefs - because we all can share an understanding of fear, and hopefully none of us wish it on others.
herdcall 3y ago
The problem is not so much that a minority sets the agenda, but that a majority falls for it. I see outrageous flat-out lies that otherwise intelligent folks consume without questioning.
- tgv 3y ago
  As the article says: journalists take social media for gospel. They're totally addicted to twitter. That's an important source for trends and vox populi for them, and that's where all the commotion about Musk's reign comes from (and from the people that the journalists follow, because they'll lose their influence, and thus power and what comes with it). The majority reads what these journalists write. If it seems reasonable, they'll accept it. When they're browbeaten, they'll also accept it, but with a grudge. But don't forget that there are different political, religous and cultural leanings in all media, so the majority is not uniform. Silent they are, though.
  - dfxm12 3y ago
    When news outlets cut budgets, sites like Twitter/Threads/FB are the only sources they can afford. Whereas before, they might get some time/money to do some real investigation, now they have to submit articles to get paid, and need to write articles on the cheap so they make out ahead. There are some outlets, like The Intercept, that are still doing great investigative work, but they get drowned out among the other options, which isn't surprising when so few people own so much of the most popular new outlets.
  - ogou 3y ago
    Journalists are addicted to attribution. Before Twitter, they had to call people for quotes verifying or denying something. The tradition was 2 sources to verify. There was even a time that anonymous sources were frowned on. If they couldn't get them on the phone, they had to track them down and ask in person. That's why there are multiple scenes in "All the President's Men" where the reporters are knocking on doors at people's houses at night. All that is old school now and replaced by the quick drug-like hit of posting "so-and-so tweeted". It's enough to write about a post of some kind and not actually get comments or context from anybody else, because there always posts for "opponents say" or "advocates say". I was a web developer for a newspaper and knew they were doomed when they started writing articles about their own comments section. Implication and notoriety rule the day.
hoosieree 3y ago
The first comment reacting to a post on HN sets the tone for the entire discussion.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jacquesm 3y ago
And that vocal minority isn't always an organic one either: https://commsrisk.com/250-simboxes-seized-by-ukraine-raids-on-bot-farms/ https://commsrisk.com/250-simboxes-seized-by-ukraine-raids-o...
- 0xDEF 3y ago
  Interesting that Russia needed to base this operation within Ukraine and use Ukrainian SIM cards. Maybe it was targeted at Ukrainians and wanted to appear as being from Ukraine in social media recommendation feeds?
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    That plus that social media companies have gotten a bit more hip to this but have a much easier time banning stuff located in Russia. Much easier to filter by 'source country' than by content... Russian operatives can blend in very easily in Ukraine and Latvia because there is a large chunk of the population that speaks Russian natively. Doing that in say NL or France would be far harder without attracting some kind of scrutiny. And possibly they have other duties besides.
- paganel 3y ago
  Maybe they wanted for the forced abductions of military-aged men to stop, in which case anything goes.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    I can't follow you at all.
    - paganel 3y ago
      I'm saying this could be internal Ukrainian resistance, composed of military-aged men who are sick and tired of being forcefully sent to the front-lines (there are numerous videos of military-aged men being abducted from the streets of Ukraine in order to be sent to said front-lines).
pessimizer 3y ago
This fact is what makes the internet so sensitive to people paid to post. Intelligence services, every huge company, and even medium-sized companies with major PR challenges or opportunities are paying tens or even thousands of people to post. The leverage of 90-9-1 makes them an amazing investment.
anyoneamous 3y ago
The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the second mouse gets the cheese.
frankreyes 3y ago
Vocal minority in Urban Dictionary https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=vocal%20minority https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=vocal%20mino...
- Terretta 3y ago
  Your comment seems like a non-sequitur now that HN mods edited the title of the submission to be the sub-heading of the article. Submitted post title, as it was for the first 100+ upvotes: “Vocal minority sets online discourse, distorting real-life perception”
debacle 3y ago
Things I would like to be able to discuss on HN without it devolving into a field of gray text: - Global warming - Anything about the environment really - Elon Musk - Bitcoin - Energy - PHP - Education The list seems to be continuing to grow over time, and some seem to be intentionally working to trigger HN's flamewar filter in many of the threads.
- pc86 3y ago
  I've often wondered if disabling voting and using contest sorting on contentious threads by default would help with this.
  - solardev 3y ago
    Contest sorting?
    - pc86 3y ago
      I might be misnaming it, but basically top-level responses are in a random order and child comments are auto-hidden (but can still be expanded). I'm sure there would be some tweaks necessary to make it work for HN, and maybe it includes voting or doesn't.
    - throw_m239339 3y ago
      > Contest sorting? This is a thread mode on reddit where answers to a post are hidden by default and scores are masked. I'm not sure how efficient it is at limiting petty internet fights though.
      - solardev 3y ago
        How does that work if voting is disabled?
- paganel 3y ago
  At some point you just have to embrace they gray text. Back to your point, I've seen a change of mind on this forum regarding PHP in the last couple of years, but that could just be me.
TrackerFF 3y ago
What I really hate is the weaponization of victimhood. Most frequently, you will read about this as "cancel culture", but it goes deeper - IMO. You have obsessive (and terminally online) people that will literally trawl through every public post / tweet / statement / etc. a celebrity has made in their lifetime, and check if there's anything that clashes against their own agendas. Then, if they find something, they will start a crusade. The problem is that these people live in echo-chambers that are strictly moderated, and will just end up inciting the other extremists. All of a sudden it sounds like there's a "movement", because these people are spending all day and night sharing links and cross-posting on every relevant forum or social media available. I regularly see this kind of brigading coming from all different kinds of groups - the other day I was reading a local news article regarding the avian flu that's ravaging Europe, and sure enough, a couple of hundred trolls started brigading the comment section with "It's 5G/chemtrails/COVID vaccine/Ukraine/etc." conspiracy takes.
lucasRW 3y ago
[flagged]
kelseyfrog 3y ago
The ROI on content creation and commenting is phenomenal. Anyone with an agenda to push would be dumb to leave that on the table. The barriers to entry for social media are inconsequential compared to mass media. And to boot, contrived social media disputes are often picked up by mass media who are all to happy to present your side as one of two legitimate positions. You can absolutely garner wide reach with a modicum of effort. One of the most powerful tools in the arsenal isn't telling people what to believe; it's teaching them how to believe. One or two strong attractors in hermenutical space can be all it takes to give people the ability to perform the type of self-story and current event exegesis that you want them to. From there, it's a self-reinforcing loop. Dropping an interpretative device that makes people feel smart is one of the easiest ways to get your method of belief-construction to dominate.
- Loquebantur 3y ago
  If "social" media wasn't factually asocial by allowing anonymity, sockpuppet farms at least would have to usurp some real body's identity. The structure of human society being hierarchical in nature (the 90-9-1 rule mentioned in the article) is a given. Lamenting it, implicitly or explicitly, is nonsensical. Society enacts a marketplace of ideas. Attaching those to persons is sort of a fallacy. Maybe due to the assumption, those with one good idea might have another one. Sometimes that's true though. So, if some thinktank or company comes up with a good idea, or "hermenutical attractor" in your parlance, that's just fine? So long as nobody has an actually better idea, what's the problem? The real problem is the lack of discussion space where ideas can be thoroughly compared.
  - teddyh 3y ago
    > If "social" media wasn't factually asocial by allowing anonymity Anonymity is, in fact, a real necessity: <https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22R...>
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
aprentic 3y ago
This is a well known effect and there have been a number of attempts to address it. Slashdot went through a number of iterations. They initially added a points system and ended up adding a meta-moderation layer to try to address biases in the previous layers. https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml Reddit lets viewers choose from a number of sort algorithms that allow them to emphasize posts other than those most heavily upvoted. Lemmy uses a log scale to try to bring more voices to a conversation after the initial "New" votes come in. https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.htm... They're all trying to address the issue by offering sort orders which should show the "best" posts at the top. The fundamental problem with all of these is that they assume that everyone agrees on what is "best" and that small set of sort options will allow the majority of people to choose one which matches their ranking of "best". We've also seen several large companies provide "algorithms" which provide customized ranking lists for individuals. The glaring problem with these approaches is that they rank by what is "best" for the company, not for the individual. We've been missing is a way for people to choose sort lists that reflect their own views of what is "best". Otherwise the best we'll be able to get is some sort order that some plurality agrees on, even if that plurality isn't even a majority.
- flir 3y ago
  We do have lists that are sorted by your own view of what's best - netflix recommendations, for example, try to put stuff you like in front of you. (Although I'm sure they've been tempted to mess with it as an advertising mechanism by now). (Just musing here) I've always wanted to try a simple ordering by time, but with each up/downvote adding an offset to the time. So you get 10 downvotes, you get pushed 10 minutes into the past on the timeline. I think that when people get sick of seeing something at the top of their feed they'll flip their upvotes to downvotes, and away it goes. Probably won't work - automated moderation systems don't generally. I'd still be curious to try it though.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
Was there ever not a time to sideline the internet when evaluating collective reality? There hasn’t been in the 30 years I’ve been here.
- bckr 3y ago
  The internet has never been real life. But sometime in the last couple decades reporters stopped going outside and started reporting on whatever they saw on twitter, thus creating an irreality feedback loop
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    I mean, most of the journalists were fired and replaced with social media "content producers" who have done zero journalism because the industry kinda shrunk by like 90% and can't afford to buy actual journalism.
- dogleash 3y ago
  Nope. The media has been pretending the internet is real life (so they can write lazy articles) for so long that they've forgotten it's not.
meinmissoula 3y ago
Bit of an aside, but the socially acceptable levels of casual-hate when directed at "white men" is sometimes shocking to me. > Post-election analysis would show that the Bernie Bro trope was entirely constructed; there was no evidence to show that young white men made up a majority of Sanders’s supporters. The author just takes it as a non-controversial statement of fact that "white men" are inherently evil and that if they support a political candidate that means the candidate is also bad, and that she needs to distance herself from the whole thing. The story arc isn't that anything changed about Bernie's policy views, history or anything else. The bad thing that happened is a rumor that "young white men" liked him, which was bad, and the good news was that Bernie supporters were actually from the morally good races and genders.
- klyrs 3y ago
  Did we read the same article? > But then repeated news cycles about “toxic Bernie Bros” seemed to drain the movement’s momentum. Mainstream media outlets reported that Sanders’s base was made up of white male cyberbullies. Negative tweets had been amplified, and the words and behaviors of a few Sanders supporters all of a sudden were being portrayed as representative of an entire movement. What I read is a description of how media portrayed Bernie Sander's supporters. Nowhere here does it say that white men are bad. In fact, it's calling out negative stereotyping used by mainstream media. Why do you think the author hates you?
  - brightlancer 3y ago
    > Did we read the same article? Isn't that the point: Different people read/ hear the same thing but interpret it differently based upon their biases. "Mainstream media outlets reported that Sanders’s base was made up of white male cyberbullies. Negative tweets had been amplified, and the words and behaviors of a few Sanders supporters all of a sudden were being portrayed as representative of an entire movement." Why was their skin color and sex relevant? If the issue was that they were "cyberbullies", then why does she follow up with this defense: "Post-election analysis would show that the Bernie Bro trope was entirely constructed; there was no evidence to show that young white men made up a majority of Sanders’s supporters." That is only important if "young white men" are, by definition, A Problem.

190 points by Terretta 3y ago

Vocal minorities in real life hold an outsized influence in all sorts of things. Look at things like primary elections where the turnout is low and the people with the strongest or most extreme opinions turn out to vote.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

escapedmoose 3y ago

It would be nice to see some actual research backing a claim like this.

SanjayMehta 3y ago
I’ve seen some papers referencing reddit in particular. You should be able to find them on scholar.google.com
zeroCalories 3y ago
The examples provided in the article seem fine. No one actually cared about the Taylor Swift drama despite it being all over social media. Bernie fans were greatly overrepresented online, and white male Bernie fans even more so. This is a real phenomenon, and it doesn't always occur, but it's a good reminder that you shouldn't take twitter discourse too seriously. What kind of data would you want to back it up?
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  Bernie fans are mostly white men, they are overwhelming young too. The author said "this was shown to be false" but no source is provided.. and the author is wrong. (I suspect the author read a very misleading Vox article that makes the claim the author parroted) So if the author had done research and used sources, they may not have made a bunch of factual errors. [0] https://www.capradio.org/articles/2020/03/09/politifact-california-did-bernie-sanders-win-people-of-color-in-california-and-was-it-not-even-close/ https://www.capradio.org/articles/2020/03/09/politifact-cali... [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-defines-the-sanders-coalition/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-defines-the-sander...
  - zeroCalories 3y ago
    Are you trolling me? Yes Bernie was popular among young white men, but they are one part of a larger coalition. Even the links you provided showed that he had plenty of support from minorities. Sure old black woman favored Biden, but they aren't the only other demographic. Characterizing his movement as mainly bernie bros is pure propaganda.
    - hn92726819 3y ago
      I can't tell who's trolling who now, but how stastics are worded is key here. The comment you replied to doesn't disagree with any of the claims you're making here are implying. From the second linked article: > although it seems Sanders’s base is hardly all white, it’s likely that no matter who wins the nomination ... a clear majority of their votes will probably come from white Democrats This directly contradicts the original article's quote: > there was no evidence to show that young white men made up a majority of Sanders’s supporters Additionally, the article's next sentence: > The movement, in fact, consisted of a diverse coalition of people from marginalized races and genders Appears to be an attempt at proving the majority isn't white, but it doesn't support that claim at all. It can be true that there was a diverse coalition of voters, and white people still make up a majority of votes. Then, of all your three claims, none of them disprove the claim that most Bernie voters are white. Everything you said could be true, but none weaken the claims of the comment you're replying to. I suspect at least someone here doesnt understand that "60% of Latino voters and 30% of white voters" doesn't imply "white is not the majority vote" (since, for example, 60% of 10 is significantly less than 30% of 1000).
      - zeroCalories 3y ago
        Yeah, it feels like you're trolling me. White vote, vs white men, is clearly different. America is a majority white country so obviously most votes will come from white people. Saying Bernie's support comes mostly from white men, as was claimed by the post I was referring to and the Bernie Bro narrative, is false.
        3y ago
- paganel 3y ago
  > No one actually cared about the Taylor Swift drama The Swifties cared. Two close friends of mine, both of them Swifties, went to a The 1975 concert only because Healy had been linked to Taylor Swift. Said two friends live half a world away from the States and hadn't listened to The 1975 at all until all this scandal. They also are totally in the dark when it comes to ct, Adam Friedland or rs.
wuliwong 3y ago
I can't help with references for research about this but I was thinking that this is a somewhat related phenomena to statistics like how the majority of the content on wikipedia comes from a surprisingly small number of people. I believe there are some actual hard numbers around that. Not sure if anyone has tried to quantify and study what this article is talking about, though.
s1artibartfast 3y ago
One example that comes to mind for me and is pretty well documented is the defund police movement. The black population in the US overwhelmingly wants more police on the streets in their communities. The movement was popularized by a small minority of the very fringe view. Other people joined thinking they were standing in solidarity with the back community, but we're actually working against it's desires.

consumer451 3y ago

My own anecdotal experience on reddit and HN is that much of the heavy lifting can be done by just a few people "guarding new." This is a good thing sometimes, efficiency is nice, but it can also be manipulated. There seem to be some keywords that trigger a pre-organized group to descend upon a post in New and downvote/report/flag it into oblivion. There was a piece documenting how easily, and cheaply, it is to manipulate reddit a few years ago. I can't seem to find it now. I would like to add that sometimes my posts get flagged, such as a recent one complaining of poor writing, and that's fair enough. meta: hilariously, this piece was flagged while I was writing this comment, so I vouched for it. If someone could give some reasons why TFA is not interesting and deserves flagging, I would love to hear them.

pokeymcsnatch 3y ago
I took a look at my profile the other day and realized that I'd somehow inadvertently flagged a bunch of posts and comments. Guessing it was a UI thing, trying to hit 'context' instead of flag.
- consumer451 3y ago
  Yeah, I have found the same in my profile. This has been discussed recently in various posts. That's why the flagged link is in the profile now. There is a major temporal component to posts, comments, and flagging. I am not sure what good comes from unflagging my mistakenly flagged items when they are usually at least days old by the time I notice. Considering the gravity of that particular mechanic, I would argue that something along the lines of the "are you sure?" prompt used in the delete action would be really helpful.
  - djbusby 3y ago
    I just learned about this from this thread. Checked and I also had some accidental flags. Oops.
    - buu700 3y ago

kome 3y ago

often it's not just a vocal minority, as this article claims, but it's more like manufacturing consent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent with the war in ukraine, for example, i find a huge disconnect about how reality is described in the media and some actions are seen as evident and necessary, and how people in my social circle feel about it...

zeroCalories 3y ago
I think the difference is that this is manufactured consent from activists instead of an establishment consensus. A well coordinated movement with charismatic leaders can take over social media with wild takes as long as they can avoid getting banned.
- throwawawawow 3y ago
  [dead]
Terretta 3y ago
Your comment seems like a non-sequitur now that HN mods edited the title of the submission to be the sub-heading of the article. Submitted post title, as it was for the first 100+ upvotes: “Vocal minority sets online discourse, distorting real-life perception” OTOH, if someone reads the article, your comment makes sense, given the section heading: “A vocal minority sets the agenda”

mynameishere 3y ago

Funny how people just get a rough impression of things and then "go with it". Her view of Sanders' 2020 bid was that people like herself were a big part of it--even 80 year old Nepalese grandmas were Sanders boosters, after all! I think what really happened is that Democratic insiders, both in the media and the DNC, did their best to sideline his campaign, possibly even with some hanky-panky in the SC and Super Tuesday elections. The "Bernie Bros" narrative is perhaps part of that, but just as a Red Herring. Why did they engage in this evil plot? Not because they dislike Sanders so much, as because he would have been hopeless in the General. I don't know. But if you want to study the question, you can see something happen similar right now with a very different politician, RFK jr. The average impression of the guy is "kook" but he's pretty sensible. (I mean, in terms of issues, he's shit, but that's completely irrelevant.)

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
> The average impression of the guy is "kook" but he's pretty sensible. (I mean, in terms of issues, he's shit, but that's completely irrelevant.) No. Very much no. We're hiring a politician, not a counselor. His policies are the only thing that's relevant.
- 1234letshaveatw 3y ago
  sure, who cares about temperament or character? Anyone who parrots the right talking points is fine
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Temperament and character matter, I'll give you that. But "talking points" and "policy" are miles apart.
- claytongulick 3y ago
  Take a look at the video he made about his recent trip to the border. The guy seems damn classy to me.
3y ago

sickcodebruh 3y ago

I’ve seen and experienced this first-hand. It happens a lot in niche music scenes. The internet will explode with rage about something someone in a band did or didn’t do, it will seem as if the whole world is united in rage or ridicule! …And then they go on tour and nothing is different. Or they post a statement and receive a flood of “This is the first I’ve heard about it.”

xenospn 3y ago
See: Rammstein
- chucksta 3y ago
  what happened there?
  - somedude895 3y ago
    They have after show backstage parties where they invite fans to, well, party. Some girls are accusing mainly the lead singer of behaving badly. The media jumps on it to demonize the band, trying to find new "victims" / people who regret past decisions. Activists protest outside the concert venues. Their fans don't care. Just the usual..
    - gloryjulio 3y ago
      Behaving badly can range from 'have fun with groupies who willingly join the party' to 'rape'. So what exactly happened matters
      - somedude895 3y ago
        No charges have been filed by any of the supposed victims and the investigations started by state attorneys were quickly dropped, after which the conversation moved on to feminist talking points of power dynamics and the partiarchy. The point is that the media again hyped up a single person's account turned shitstorm posted online.

zeroCalories 3y ago

From personal experience, I find that playing dumb and dismissive with online discourse that leaks into real life works the best. Most of these things are incredibly unimportant, and even strongly opinionated people start to falter when they find themselves having to explain their dumb culture war stuff to you. Obviously if it's a serious mainstream issue you shouldn't do this.

tiberious726 3y ago
It actually works pretty great on those too. "Serious mainstream issues" are exactly the same kind of thing as fabricated internet drama, just fabricated by older and much better funded groups.
- anyoneamous 3y ago
  "Did you see what those Antifa people are doing now?!?!" "Nah, I'm not really into Pokémon."
- EatingWithForks 3y ago
  I don't know, I think there are some exceptions to this. It's very difficult to play dumb when a friend confides in you about their concerns getting an IUD in certain political landscapes. During the height of covid, more than one asian friend asked me to be around them in public due to the rise of anti-asian sentiment in my country, and it would've been wildly inappropriate for me to play dumb then. Most recently more than one non-feminine woman friend have asked me for the same due to anti-transgender rhetoric (I've had one confide in me a harrowing experience getting harassed by someone assuming she was transgender... she's just skinny with a short haircut).
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    I vividly remember Muslims in my team coming to concerned for their families when the trump travel ban began. They were confused why they were being singled out and worried about being persecuted at work and school. I couldn’t explain because I honestly never understood, but I could assure them I wouldn’t stand for any such thing at work and assure them I didn’t sympathize with the politics, and I would be their advocate if they needed it. I expressed hope that schools wouldn’t stand for it either and advised them to also reach out to their guidance counselors at school to be sure they were aware of their concerns. Whether these are issues manufactured or not, they translate into real fears that play out across many people, in profound ways. It’s important to be engaged to protect people in fear, whether you share their backgrounds or beliefs - because we all can share an understanding of fear, and hopefully none of us wish it on others.

herdcall 3y ago

The problem is not so much that a minority sets the agenda, but that a majority falls for it. I see outrageous flat-out lies that otherwise intelligent folks consume without questioning.

tgv 3y ago
As the article says: journalists take social media for gospel. They're totally addicted to twitter. That's an important source for trends and vox populi for them, and that's where all the commotion about Musk's reign comes from (and from the people that the journalists follow, because they'll lose their influence, and thus power and what comes with it). The majority reads what these journalists write. If it seems reasonable, they'll accept it. When they're browbeaten, they'll also accept it, but with a grudge. But don't forget that there are different political, religous and cultural leanings in all media, so the majority is not uniform. Silent they are, though.
- dfxm12 3y ago
  When news outlets cut budgets, sites like Twitter/Threads/FB are the only sources they can afford. Whereas before, they might get some time/money to do some real investigation, now they have to submit articles to get paid, and need to write articles on the cheap so they make out ahead. There are some outlets, like The Intercept, that are still doing great investigative work, but they get drowned out among the other options, which isn't surprising when so few people own so much of the most popular new outlets.
- ogou 3y ago
  Journalists are addicted to attribution. Before Twitter, they had to call people for quotes verifying or denying something. The tradition was 2 sources to verify. There was even a time that anonymous sources were frowned on. If they couldn't get them on the phone, they had to track them down and ask in person. That's why there are multiple scenes in "All the President's Men" where the reporters are knocking on doors at people's houses at night. All that is old school now and replaced by the quick drug-like hit of posting "so-and-so tweeted". It's enough to write about a post of some kind and not actually get comments or context from anybody else, because there always posts for "opponents say" or "advocates say". I was a web developer for a newspaper and knew they were doomed when they started writing articles about their own comments section. Implication and notoriety rule the day.

hoosieree 3y ago

The first comment reacting to a post on HN sets the tone for the entire discussion.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jacquesm 3y ago

And that vocal minority isn't always an organic one either: https://commsrisk.com/250-simboxes-seized-by-ukraine-raids-on-bot-farms/ https://commsrisk.com/250-simboxes-seized-by-ukraine-raids-o...

0xDEF 3y ago
Interesting that Russia needed to base this operation within Ukraine and use Ukrainian SIM cards. Maybe it was targeted at Ukrainians and wanted to appear as being from Ukraine in social media recommendation feeds?
- jacquesm 3y ago
  That plus that social media companies have gotten a bit more hip to this but have a much easier time banning stuff located in Russia. Much easier to filter by 'source country' than by content... Russian operatives can blend in very easily in Ukraine and Latvia because there is a large chunk of the population that speaks Russian natively. Doing that in say NL or France would be far harder without attracting some kind of scrutiny. And possibly they have other duties besides.
paganel 3y ago
Maybe they wanted for the forced abductions of military-aged men to stop, in which case anything goes.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  I can't follow you at all.
  - paganel 3y ago
    I'm saying this could be internal Ukrainian resistance, composed of military-aged men who are sick and tired of being forcefully sent to the front-lines (there are numerous videos of military-aged men being abducted from the streets of Ukraine in order to be sent to said front-lines).

pessimizer 3y ago

This fact is what makes the internet so sensitive to people paid to post. Intelligence services, every huge company, and even medium-sized companies with major PR challenges or opportunities are paying tens or even thousands of people to post. The leverage of 90-9-1 makes them an amazing investment.

anyoneamous 3y ago

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the second mouse gets the cheese.

frankreyes 3y ago

Vocal minority in Urban Dictionary https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=vocal%20minority https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=vocal%20mino...

Terretta 3y ago
Your comment seems like a non-sequitur now that HN mods edited the title of the submission to be the sub-heading of the article. Submitted post title, as it was for the first 100+ upvotes: “Vocal minority sets online discourse, distorting real-life perception”

debacle 3y ago

Things I would like to be able to discuss on HN without it devolving into a field of gray text: - Global warming - Anything about the environment really - Elon Musk - Bitcoin - Energy - PHP - Education The list seems to be continuing to grow over time, and some seem to be intentionally working to trigger HN's flamewar filter in many of the threads.

pc86 3y ago
I've often wondered if disabling voting and using contest sorting on contentious threads by default would help with this.
- solardev 3y ago
  Contest sorting?
  - pc86 3y ago
    I might be misnaming it, but basically top-level responses are in a random order and child comments are auto-hidden (but can still be expanded). I'm sure there would be some tweaks necessary to make it work for HN, and maybe it includes voting or doesn't.
  - throw_m239339 3y ago
    > Contest sorting? This is a thread mode on reddit where answers to a post are hidden by default and scores are masked. I'm not sure how efficient it is at limiting petty internet fights though.
    - solardev 3y ago
      How does that work if voting is disabled?
paganel 3y ago
At some point you just have to embrace they gray text. Back to your point, I've seen a change of mind on this forum regarding PHP in the last couple of years, but that could just be me.

TrackerFF 3y ago

What I really hate is the weaponization of victimhood. Most frequently, you will read about this as "cancel culture", but it goes deeper - IMO. You have obsessive (and terminally online) people that will literally trawl through every public post / tweet / statement / etc. a celebrity has made in their lifetime, and check if there's anything that clashes against their own agendas. Then, if they find something, they will start a crusade. The problem is that these people live in echo-chambers that are strictly moderated, and will just end up inciting the other extremists. All of a sudden it sounds like there's a "movement", because these people are spending all day and night sharing links and cross-posting on every relevant forum or social media available. I regularly see this kind of brigading coming from all different kinds of groups - the other day I was reading a local news article regarding the avian flu that's ravaging Europe, and sure enough, a couple of hundred trolls started brigading the comment section with "It's 5G/chemtrails/COVID vaccine/Ukraine/etc." conspiracy takes.

lucasRW 3y ago

[flagged]

kelseyfrog 3y ago

The ROI on content creation and commenting is phenomenal. Anyone with an agenda to push would be dumb to leave that on the table. The barriers to entry for social media are inconsequential compared to mass media. And to boot, contrived social media disputes are often picked up by mass media who are all to happy to present your side as one of two legitimate positions. You can absolutely garner wide reach with a modicum of effort. One of the most powerful tools in the arsenal isn't telling people what to believe; it's teaching them how to believe. One or two strong attractors in hermenutical space can be all it takes to give people the ability to perform the type of self-story and current event exegesis that you want them to. From there, it's a self-reinforcing loop. Dropping an interpretative device that makes people feel smart is one of the easiest ways to get your method of belief-construction to dominate.

Loquebantur 3y ago
If "social" media wasn't factually asocial by allowing anonymity, sockpuppet farms at least would have to usurp some real body's identity. The structure of human society being hierarchical in nature (the 90-9-1 rule mentioned in the article) is a given. Lamenting it, implicitly or explicitly, is nonsensical. Society enacts a marketplace of ideas. Attaching those to persons is sort of a fallacy. Maybe due to the assumption, those with one good idea might have another one. Sometimes that's true though. So, if some thinktank or company comes up with a good idea, or "hermenutical attractor" in your parlance, that's just fine? So long as nobody has an actually better idea, what's the problem? The real problem is the lack of discussion space where ideas can be thoroughly compared.
- teddyh 3y ago
  > If "social" media wasn't factually asocial by allowing anonymity Anonymity is, in fact, a real necessity: <https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22R...>
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

aprentic 3y ago

This is a well known effect and there have been a number of attempts to address it. Slashdot went through a number of iterations. They initially added a points system and ended up adding a meta-moderation layer to try to address biases in the previous layers. https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml Reddit lets viewers choose from a number of sort algorithms that allow them to emphasize posts other than those most heavily upvoted. Lemmy uses a log scale to try to bring more voices to a conversation after the initial "New" votes come in. https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.htm... They're all trying to address the issue by offering sort orders which should show the "best" posts at the top. The fundamental problem with all of these is that they assume that everyone agrees on what is "best" and that small set of sort options will allow the majority of people to choose one which matches their ranking of "best". We've also seen several large companies provide "algorithms" which provide customized ranking lists for individuals. The glaring problem with these approaches is that they rank by what is "best" for the company, not for the individual. We've been missing is a way for people to choose sort lists that reflect their own views of what is "best". Otherwise the best we'll be able to get is some sort order that some plurality agrees on, even if that plurality isn't even a majority.

flir 3y ago
We do have lists that are sorted by your own view of what's best - netflix recommendations, for example, try to put stuff you like in front of you. (Although I'm sure they've been tempted to mess with it as an advertising mechanism by now). (Just musing here) I've always wanted to try a simple ordering by time, but with each up/downvote adding an offset to the time. So you get 10 downvotes, you get pushed 10 minutes into the past on the timeline. I think that when people get sick of seeing something at the top of their feed they'll flip their upvotes to downvotes, and away it goes. Probably won't work - automated moderation systems don't generally. I'd still be curious to try it though.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

Was there ever not a time to sideline the internet when evaluating collective reality? There hasn’t been in the 30 years I’ve been here.

bckr 3y ago
The internet has never been real life. But sometime in the last couple decades reporters stopped going outside and started reporting on whatever they saw on twitter, thus creating an irreality feedback loop
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  I mean, most of the journalists were fired and replaced with social media "content producers" who have done zero journalism because the industry kinda shrunk by like 90% and can't afford to buy actual journalism.
dogleash 3y ago
Nope. The media has been pretending the internet is real life (so they can write lazy articles) for so long that they've forgotten it's not.

meinmissoula 3y ago

Bit of an aside, but the socially acceptable levels of casual-hate when directed at "white men" is sometimes shocking to me. > Post-election analysis would show that the Bernie Bro trope was entirely constructed; there was no evidence to show that young white men made up a majority of Sanders’s supporters. The author just takes it as a non-controversial statement of fact that "white men" are inherently evil and that if they support a political candidate that means the candidate is also bad, and that she needs to distance herself from the whole thing. The story arc isn't that anything changed about Bernie's policy views, history or anything else. The bad thing that happened is a rumor that "young white men" liked him, which was bad, and the good news was that Bernie supporters were actually from the morally good races and genders.

klyrs 3y ago
Did we read the same article? > But then repeated news cycles about “toxic Bernie Bros” seemed to drain the movement’s momentum. Mainstream media outlets reported that Sanders’s base was made up of white male cyberbullies. Negative tweets had been amplified, and the words and behaviors of a few Sanders supporters all of a sudden were being portrayed as representative of an entire movement. What I read is a description of how media portrayed Bernie Sander's supporters. Nowhere here does it say that white men are bad. In fact, it's calling out negative stereotyping used by mainstream media. Why do you think the author hates you?
- brightlancer 3y ago
  > Did we read the same article? Isn't that the point: Different people read/ hear the same thing but interpret it differently based upon their biases. "Mainstream media outlets reported that Sanders’s base was made up of white male cyberbullies. Negative tweets had been amplified, and the words and behaviors of a few Sanders supporters all of a sudden were being portrayed as representative of an entire movement." Why was their skin color and sex relevant? If the issue was that they were "cyberbullies", then why does she follow up with this defense: "Post-election analysis would show that the Bernie Bro trope was entirely constructed; there was no evidence to show that young white men made up a majority of Sanders’s supporters." That is only important if "young white men" are, by definition, A Problem.