16 ms·

And even the connecting like-minded people turned out to be crappy echo chambers

by mantas 1y ago

TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
It's the ads and the bot farms. And the weaponisation for political ends. There are corners of the Internet where people meet on smaller forums to talk about subjects of mutual interest, and those remain functional and interesting, sometimes even polite.
- m_fayer 1y ago
  Just like in the real world, commercialized social spaces descend into manipulation and hollowness. Social spaces online that aren’t (very) commercial, like this one, can work well enough.
  - closewith 1y ago
    HN is just as much of an echo-chamber as anywhere else. You just like the opinions being echoed.
    - m_fayer 1y ago
      HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong. Sure there are communal pathologies here, like excessive hair splitting (guilty), but on balance we’ve got a good thing going here. If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.
      - diggan 1y ago
        > to me the difference is plain to see. Agreed. HN isn't 100/0 signal/noise or even 100/0 politeness/rudeness, but I get the feeling most people discuss things with a relatively open mind here, and it's not uncommon for people to either be corrected by others and accepting it, or correcting themselves if they've found something out after submitting their comment. Just seeing that happening makes me hopeful overall. It's a huge contrast from basically any mainstream social media, where the only time you'd see something like that is when you're talking with literal friends.
      - closewith 1y ago
        > HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong. That's is due to active moderation, but it's orthogonal to being in a bubble. There are also some very similarly moderated, polite communities on other platforms, even Facebook, but they're still bubbles. People on HN are already self-selecting to an extent, and if you stray to far from the core audience, you'll be downvoted to dead. That's how the forum is designed to work, but it is definitionally a bubble. > If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see. It is no different to the other well-moderated communities on the other commercial platforms. The only difference is that you like this bubble more than the others.
        esafak 1y ago
        Please describe what it would be like if it were not a bubble. If everything is a bubble, the concept is worthless.
        closewith 1y ago
        Old-school fora and mailing lists could avoid being bubbles when moderation allowed dissenting views to surface instead of burying them. Of course, biased moderation could still create bubbles by pruning dissent. Social platforms built on voting, like HN, will almost always drift into bubbles of like-minded posts and comments. The only variation is in which views get upranked. That isn’t necessarily bad. YC clearly prefers HN to filter for a certain entrepreneurial mindset. Bubbles can serve a purpose, but it’s worth recognising that this is a manipulated environment - in many ways hollow - and not a reflection of the broader world.
        awesome_dude 1y ago
        > That's is due to active moderation, Just, FTR, there's always been the problem of how much moderation is required to keep the discourse (in a group) flowing without being so restrictive as to only be about the moderators. See IRC, which (IMO) can be over-moderated, channel ops used to be very much about themselves, vs Usenet, which had no moderation at all (and was "destroyed" by google groups making access trivial for troublemakers), through to current things like Reddit which have some moderators. It's (IMO) exactly like governance IRL - some countries overdo it, and some underdo it.
- awesome_dude 1y ago
  When I first started using Usenet, a couple of decades ago now, I initially thought that everyone was like-minded, and polite, but then discovered that all the political noise that we now see on Social Media. That is, there's not actually anything new in that political discourse (literally, it was all libertarians, gun lovers and free speechers threatening/bullying anyone that disagreed with them then, like it is now) There were even "wars" - the Meow Wars were long dead history when I were a Usenetter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter.
  - RossBencina 1y ago
    I never heard of the Meow Wars, but I do remember antiorp, a net-art mailing list disruption organisation: https://everything2.com/title/antiorp https://everything2.com/title/antiorp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author) EDIT: clarity
  - diggan 1y ago
    > I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter. We still have "flame wars" I think, they're just less intelligent, is more about spamming than insulting, and is often called "brigading" instead, basically one community trying to "overrun" another community one way or another.
    - awesome_dude 1y ago
      > is often called "brigading" instead Yeah, I think that you're right - Reddit is often referred to as being the Usenet of today, which is where I see the term brigading coming up the most.
- 3form 1y ago
  It's sorting by score rather than anything else, in my experience. Makes it largely opinion-forming on the participants.
  - anal_reactor 1y ago
    Once I've seen a website where you couldn't downvote, only upvote. That was actually a great thing, because it promoted posts that at least a significant portion of people agreed with, not just posts that simply everyone agrees with.
    - mantas 1y ago
      So… FB with like and no dislike button?
    - esafak 1y ago
      Youtube does not expose the number of down votes any more. LinkedIn has no dislike button and I find it positively toxic.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 1y ago
  It seems like paid communities might do a little better than the rest by filtering out bots and people who would rather not torch cash and get banned repeatedly each time they misbehave.
  - diggan 1y ago
    > It seems like paid communities Yeah, I've been sadly thinking about similar things. Something like a web-forum where it costs $1 to signup, and your account gets active after a day. Would serve as an automatic "You're 18" since regulations around that seems to be creeping up, and would hopefully lower the amount of abuse as people have to spend actual money to get an account. It just sucks because there are plenty of sub-18 year old folks who are amazing and more grown up than people above 18, not everyone who has access to making internet payments and also not everyone has the means to even spend $1 on something non-essential. Not sure if there is anything in-between "completely open and abuse-friendly" and "closed castle for section of the world population" that reduces the abuse but allow most humans on the planet.
    - latexr 1y ago
      > Would serve as an automatic "You're 18" You don’t need to be 18 to have a bank account, even in the UK (which just introduced age verification laws). https://www.hsbc.co.uk/current-accounts/products/children/ https://www.hsbc.co.uk/current-accounts/products/children/ https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/childrens-bank-account/ https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/childrens-bank-a... And there are banks and fintech companies which give you pre-paid cards which function as credit cards for online payments. You top them up whenever you want and that’s your spending limit. Parents can just hand those to kids for day-to-day operations. In short, being able to pay 1$ online is not sufficient age verification. > It just sucks I agree. One mitigation around that could be the gifting of accounts. People lurk in more than one forum, so if you meet someone which seems to have their head in place and would be interested to join, you gift them the membership. Keep the association between accounts in a database for, say, one year to see how it goes. If someone repeatedly gifts accounts to people who end up being spammers, you revoke their gifting privileges.
neiman 1y ago
I think the small-ish communities, where it's really people who are enthusiastic about the same topic, are often great. It's when they become bigger that the crappy echo chamber begins.
- coffeebeqn 1y ago
  There’s a tipping point in community size where the dynamic changes from personal relationships and actual discussion to parasocial broadcasting of some kind of consensus opinions.

And even the connecting like-minded people turned out to be crappy echo chambers

by mantas 1y ago

And even the connecting like-minded people turned out to be crappy echo chambers

It's the ads and the bot farms. And the weaponisation for political ends. There are corners of the Internet where people meet on smaller forums to talk about subjects of mutual interest, and those remain functional and interesting, sometimes even polite.

m_fayer 1y ago
Just like in the real world, commercialized social spaces descend into manipulation and hollowness. Social spaces online that aren’t (very) commercial, like this one, can work well enough.
- closewith 1y ago
  HN is just as much of an echo-chamber as anywhere else. You just like the opinions being echoed.
  - m_fayer 1y ago
    HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong. Sure there are communal pathologies here, like excessive hair splitting (guilty), but on balance we’ve got a good thing going here. If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see.
    - diggan 1y ago
      > to me the difference is plain to see. Agreed. HN isn't 100/0 signal/noise or even 100/0 politeness/rudeness, but I get the feeling most people discuss things with a relatively open mind here, and it's not uncommon for people to either be corrected by others and accepting it, or correcting themselves if they've found something out after submitting their comment. Just seeing that happening makes me hopeful overall. It's a huge contrast from basically any mainstream social media, where the only time you'd see something like that is when you're talking with literal friends.
    - closewith 1y ago
      > HN is low on ad hominem attacks, excessive straw man arguments, there is a good amount of polite disagreement, and people are often amenable to being wrong. That's is due to active moderation, but it's orthogonal to being in a bubble. There are also some very similarly moderated, polite communities on other platforms, even Facebook, but they're still bubbles. People on HN are already self-selecting to an extent, and if you stray to far from the core audience, you'll be downvoted to dead. That's how the forum is designed to work, but it is definitionally a bubble. > If this seems no different from the big commercial platforms to you, I frankly don’t know what to say, to me the difference is plain to see. It is no different to the other well-moderated communities on the other commercial platforms. The only difference is that you like this bubble more than the others.
      - esafak 1y ago
        Please describe what it would be like if it were not a bubble. If everything is a bubble, the concept is worthless.
        closewith 1y ago
        Old-school fora and mailing lists could avoid being bubbles when moderation allowed dissenting views to surface instead of burying them. Of course, biased moderation could still create bubbles by pruning dissent. Social platforms built on voting, like HN, will almost always drift into bubbles of like-minded posts and comments. The only variation is in which views get upranked. That isn’t necessarily bad. YC clearly prefers HN to filter for a certain entrepreneurial mindset. Bubbles can serve a purpose, but it’s worth recognising that this is a manipulated environment - in many ways hollow - and not a reflection of the broader world.
      - awesome_dude 1y ago
        > That's is due to active moderation, Just, FTR, there's always been the problem of how much moderation is required to keep the discourse (in a group) flowing without being so restrictive as to only be about the moderators. See IRC, which (IMO) can be over-moderated, channel ops used to be very much about themselves, vs Usenet, which had no moderation at all (and was "destroyed" by google groups making access trivial for troublemakers), through to current things like Reddit which have some moderators. It's (IMO) exactly like governance IRL - some countries overdo it, and some underdo it.
awesome_dude 1y ago
When I first started using Usenet, a couple of decades ago now, I initially thought that everyone was like-minded, and polite, but then discovered that all the political noise that we now see on Social Media. That is, there's not actually anything new in that political discourse (literally, it was all libertarians, gun lovers and free speechers threatening/bullying anyone that disagreed with them then, like it is now) There were even "wars" - the Meow Wars were long dead history when I were a Usenetter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter.
- RossBencina 1y ago
  I never heard of the Meow Wars, but I do remember antiorp, a net-art mailing list disruption organisation: https://everything2.com/title/antiorp https://everything2.com/title/antiorp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author) EDIT: clarity
- diggan 1y ago
  > I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter. We still have "flame wars" I think, they're just less intelligent, is more about spamming than insulting, and is often called "brigading" instead, basically one community trying to "overrun" another community one way or another.
  - awesome_dude 1y ago
    > is often called "brigading" instead Yeah, I think that you're right - Reddit is often referred to as being the Usenet of today, which is where I see the term brigading coming up the most.
3form 1y ago
It's sorting by score rather than anything else, in my experience. Makes it largely opinion-forming on the participants.
- anal_reactor 1y ago
  Once I've seen a website where you couldn't downvote, only upvote. That was actually a great thing, because it promoted posts that at least a significant portion of people agreed with, not just posts that simply everyone agrees with.
  - mantas 1y ago
    So… FB with like and no dislike button?
  - esafak 1y ago
    Youtube does not expose the number of down votes any more. LinkedIn has no dislike button and I find it positively toxic.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 1y ago
It seems like paid communities might do a little better than the rest by filtering out bots and people who would rather not torch cash and get banned repeatedly each time they misbehave.
- diggan 1y ago
  > It seems like paid communities Yeah, I've been sadly thinking about similar things. Something like a web-forum where it costs $1 to signup, and your account gets active after a day. Would serve as an automatic "You're 18" since regulations around that seems to be creeping up, and would hopefully lower the amount of abuse as people have to spend actual money to get an account. It just sucks because there are plenty of sub-18 year old folks who are amazing and more grown up than people above 18, not everyone who has access to making internet payments and also not everyone has the means to even spend $1 on something non-essential. Not sure if there is anything in-between "completely open and abuse-friendly" and "closed castle for section of the world population" that reduces the abuse but allow most humans on the planet.
  - latexr 1y ago
    > Would serve as an automatic "You're 18" You don’t need to be 18 to have a bank account, even in the UK (which just introduced age verification laws). https://www.hsbc.co.uk/current-accounts/products/children/ https://www.hsbc.co.uk/current-accounts/products/children/ https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/childrens-bank-account/ https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/childrens-bank-a... And there are banks and fintech companies which give you pre-paid cards which function as credit cards for online payments. You top them up whenever you want and that’s your spending limit. Parents can just hand those to kids for day-to-day operations. In short, being able to pay 1$ online is not sufficient age verification. > It just sucks I agree. One mitigation around that could be the gifting of accounts. People lurk in more than one forum, so if you meet someone which seems to have their head in place and would be interested to join, you gift them the membership. Keep the association between accounts in a database for, say, one year to see how it goes. If someone repeatedly gifts accounts to people who end up being spammers, you revoke their gifting privileges.

neiman 1y ago

I think the small-ish communities, where it's really people who are enthusiastic about the same topic, are often great. It's when they become bigger that the crappy echo chamber begins.

coffeebeqn 1y ago
There’s a tipping point in community size where the dynamic changes from personal relationships and actual discussion to parasocial broadcasting of some kind of consensus opinions.