A lot of people believe it's their right to disrupt the communities of others. They call it "activism" or "advocacy" or "defending family values" or whatever the justification du jour is. It's all basically trying to stake a claim to the whole service as the territory of your tribe.

I like the idea of reinforcing some separation, but I also fear it may be too late. A lot of people seem to derive joy from attacking the community of others, to the point where that's the focal point of some whole communities. Trying to stop this internecine fighting really is an attack on such communities...

IMHO, the problem is not disruption by outsiders. The worst cesspools I see are entirely in-group.

It seems to me that the in-group echo chamber becomes not a discussion, but a means for all to signal their right-thinking loyal membership of the group. Just over the last couple of days I've seen some awful stuff along these lines on Facebook, regarding the new opening on the Supreme Court. Someone will share a meme that was posted by one of their in-group pages. This turns into a bunch of "me too" replies, but each of them needs to share a comment that includes a non-clever pun based on misspelling an opponent's name, and many of which declare how evil the other side is and deserves whatever they get. (notice I'm not taking sides: I think this applies equally across the board)

The problem here is that from a few cheers that get the ball rolling, any semblance of discussion evaporates. It's like when the neighbor's dog barks in the middle of the night, so your own dog replies, and then another gets into the act, and pretty soon the cacophony has everyone awake - but nobody's any better off from knowing that there are a bunch of dogs in the neighborhood.

I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think that the problem is outsiders being disruptive - it's insiders clambering to signal their tribal membership.

EDIT: missed the "not" in first sentence. BIG difference!

I'd go so far as to say that attacking someone else's tribe and poison their territory is one of the stronger ways to signal tribal membership.

Sure - but the signal can only be heard from within your in-group's discussion. So they'll generally flock together taking potshots at the outgroup from afar. There are of course cases of drive-bys, but that's harder to organize and rarer.

Well, yes, there's no system that's truly value-neutral. (What would that even mean?) But generally speaking, I expect that the large social networks will try not to encourage open conflict between groups that would otherwise keep to themselves, to avoid driving members away. So this is a bias towards peacefulness rather than conflict.

One example of this is how resharing a post on Google+ starts a new comment thread underneath it. This allows posts to cross communities while somewhat discouraging them from mixing it up in the comments. (You can click on the original if you want to.)

The web does this too: a web page can be discussed in any number of forums, independently of each other, without conflict, by sharing the URL. Comments directly on the web page don't work that way, which is why they're so often worse.

If people are deliberately trying to fight, things get even more difficult. Banning people from your feed can sometimes work, but is vulnerable to sock-puppetry and doesn't scale to large groups.

It is almost like humans are tribal and will defend their own tribe and attack other tribes.

And will readily defend the most horrible offenses by members of their own tribe, but be horribly offended over the littlest misstep from members of others.

I agree with your sentiment but it's far too simplistic.

Take for example, a forum on ISIS. Yes, I've just triggered Godwin's law. I'm sorry about that.

Now, the idea is that there should be no challenge to ISIS on some parts of the Internet because they have the same right as anyone else.

However, this fails Karl Popper's criteria, don't tolerate the intolerant.

I support the criticism of any prejudiced and intolerant group in any forum (even the ones that Political Correctness blindly defends). If the goal of a group is truly noble, I will often support it.

  > However, this fails Karl Popper's criteria, don't tolerate the intolerant.

It's worth pointing out what he meant by ‘intolerant’:

  | they are not prepared to meet us on the level
  | of rational argument, but begin by denouncing
  | all argument; they may forbid their followers
  | to listen to rational argument, because it is
  | deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments
  | by the use of their fists or pistols.

‘Intolerance’ here does not mean holding disagreeable opinions; it means intending to suppress rational argument. This is not a call to shout down opponents by calling them ‘intolerant’; it's a call to stop people shouting down opponents.

Thank you, I had no idea that the statement was tempered that way. The quip and the explanation together are a much more powerful and useful idea than the quip alone.

This article (http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/29/the-spirit-of-the-first...) expresses much the same thing, but takes a couple of pages to do it. Having a word ("intolerant" has been diluted, but maybe we can forge a new one) for people who silence arguments instead of answering them seems seems like it would greatly simplify almost all discourse.

You could use 'censors' but that might simply lead into debates over whether shutting down communication between willing parties due to the subject of their speech, in fact, censorship when the government isn't the one doing it.

> "defending family values"

Which is what I hear exclusively regarding Christian activists. They disregard any non-Christians whom have families, or of other value systems.

Yes, that's one funny name for a thing. Another is "social justice" as in SJW.

Which means "twitter/Fb hate". Or more succinct, "social" justice is literally mob justice.

We had mobs before. They hung black people and wore funny hats. Now they don't care what color you are, wear guy fawkes masks, and make you lose your job and residence. Economic murder, rather than real murder.

This is an interesting side topic, social signalling and out of control holiness spirals.

What do you get if you mix the tolerance of a religious inquisition with any side of contemporary politics? You get out of control holiness spirals as each author tries to outdo the previous at being just a little more holy, a little better of a true believer in the real story. Its a perverse game of "telephone".

I propose VLM's law, that any large enough communications system that's not anonymous will devolve into holier than thou signalling warfare. Or rephrased you get three people together, one will slander another to show off to the third how much holier he is. It doesn't matter if we're talking about Jesus, physics, or emacs vs vi, same behavior.

Some of it is a culture of assuming the worst. Because if you've seen what passes for journalism, usually what we see IS the worst.

If you'd like the actual truth on a non-holiness spiral format, the reason why "family values" are described by Christian activists as coincidentally being Christian (well, as they see it, anyway) values is the same propaganda meme as the only opposition to traditional scientific evolution is the binary choice of Evangelical Christian biblical creationism. The same intentional thought process leads to it as a propaganda movement. The point is NOT to debate the issue with 3rd parties, but to assert primate dominance as the leaders of the Christians because they are the ones setting policy. The point isn't that Islam family values are not Christian or only families have values or whatever nonsense when internal doctrine is applied to outsiders who aren't supposed to be part of the conversation anyway, but to very publicly beat chest and tell competitors inside the in-group of Christians to "bring it on" because we are the leaders of the Christians so we decide whats a Christian family value... unless you'd like to argue and try to become top dog of the Christians yourself? Its sort of a misunderstood out of context quote used by outsiders almost as a slur when its really none of their (direct) business who is in charge of the Christian leadership. In a different age the Christians would be slandering each other over translations or various twisted out of context biblical readings, and back then it ALSO had nothing to do with outsiders and they can quite safely butt out and ignore the internal grindings inside the group. Unless you're personally involved in the dominance fight for Christian leadership I can assure you the whole topic is nothing personal, at least not intentionally, and was never meant for your ears.

I'm going to disagree. Any debate about definitions is fundamentally about power. There's no real reason why a word means one thing and not another. It's inconsistent to be frustrated with one group for insisting on a definition ("family values" means heterosexual couples and their progeny) and not be equally frustrated with other groups for doing exactly the same thing ("marriage" includes same-sex couples).

I'm willing to be wrong on this point if someone cares to enlighten me. I find it sad to conclude that power struggles are inevitable. It's better than violence, but still distasteful.

As a person that lives in a country that is being sabotaged by catholic church i have to disagree. They might be mostly fighting internally, but it spills over into actual law.

This is a shibboleth, is it not? A code phrase used by a particular in-group to signal membership of that in-group. (Although frequently they're terms of art to mean certain specific things by that in-group.)

It's not a shibboleth, it's a dog whistle. Shibboleths are for identifying people in one-on-one or small group situations. Aluminium vs. aluminum could be a shibboleth.

Dog whistles generally sound like platitudes to one group (family values, social justice, "let's have an honest conversation about race") and mean something entirely different to a particular demographic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics

In computer science, when we have too much data to process at once, we shard it. We separate it into manageable chunks and we stop looking at every single data point and just at summaries.

I was using this very analogy to explain the advent of CCG "formats" (MTG, Hearthstone) a few days ago and it seems like the same analogy could be used here. There is a point where a discussion/dicussion room contains too much data to be manageable and the only way to fix that is to break it up into chunks.

We see it on Reddit, too, with subreddits becoming "too big" and naturally breaking up into smaller subreddits.

I suspect there's a universal truth hidden in there somewhere.

It's the upper limit on our ability to process information. Whether it's data, or whether it's a social circle. I believe we will (until AI is a thing) be constrained and will fail, simply because of our poor ability to store and process information as humans.

I've often thought the same thing, that the score you see should be based on your own voting history. Either based on you voting specifically, or agreeing / disagreeing with existing votes. Extend it even further by having posts from people that you normally agree with get highlighted even if they haven't had upvotes for the specific post.

Just out of curiosity, how much of that data is available via HN's public API (or other large enough forum)? I'd like to see someone run some analysis on it to see if up/down votes do tend to cluster like this.

I know specifically of one community that tracks these metrics internally (Stack Overflow) and from which there is also a specific term for someone that mostly only downvotes things ("Vampire").

But your defending the problem we have now. People are encouraged to get into feedback loops and not ever see anything that disagrees with them.

If you're a hunter or animal rights activist, it would be much better for you to be reminded that there are people out there that disagree with you.

This is a very interesting question: when does a community become an echo chamber? To use the hunting example: I imagine sometimes the hunters talk about stuff to do with hunting itself; the merits of different rifles, or where to find game, or whatever. And this is a reasonable community discussion for them to have, and it wouldn't help to have activists shouting "hunting is evil" over conversations such as that.

But sometimes the hunters will talk about the politics of hunting: one will say, "those activists are wrong to complain about animals suffering, because <reasons here>", and then another will say "yes, it's so obvious they're wrong, because <reasons> are so obviously right", and the echo chamber is ringing - this is the situation where people ideally would be brought into contact with the opposing view.

Can an online community promote the first type of conversation while challenging the other? How would we set about that?

That's the job of good moderation I think.

Perhaps. But I think it would take a particularly far-sighted and philosophical moderator to down-vote/remove a perfectly civil post whose message he agreed with, _just_ because it was contributing to an echo-chamber effect.

I would think this could be accomplished with just a policy to never, ever discuss the politics of the community's niche, and to remove posts that do.

The problem isn't the occasional disagreement, it's when communities raid each other, since people are much more brazen online than in person. In person, thousands of atheists would never march into a church during mass and start berating members for their beliefs, but that's very common in unmoderated communities. Moderation solves this issue when you can shard your communities (see reddit), but Twitter is just a global blob. Whose going to moderate it?

"communities raid each other"

I love that image and it makes a clear picture for me. Playing on a PvP server of WoW before any expansions there was no formal PvP game. What spontaneously happened though was the raiding and taking over of the other factions town. Making a mess and disrupting otherwise normal play until everyone got tired and went to sleep.

It feels so much more intense (real?) in the social media world though.

I think because it takes so little effort. Even in an MMO, you have to man your character to do anything. On twitter all it takes it for at least one person to be tweeting at a given moment to ruin the other community.

Plus, people on WoW would be paying a subscription, people are much more risk averse when they pay. Social media is free, and there's little to lose for most people.

Back in the times of the meow wars ( http://xahlee.info/Netiquette_dir/_/meow_wars.html ) people were at least aware of exactly what they were doing...

Better for whom? I think that's condescending. People already know that some forums only contain like-minded people - that's the point! Connecting with like-minded people about some specialized interest is one of the great advantages of the Internet. You can get valuable things out of it, without being under any illusion that you're talking with a diverse crowd.

Maybe the issue is that we don't have enough forums for people who want to have that debate? A "hunting versus animal rights" forum, for example. You'd need really good moderators, though. Lots of people wouldn't be interested in participating, but sometimes there might be interesting posts to reshare.

If the average person is completely shielded from any kind of discourse surrounding their beliefs, society will suffer. Echo chambers are the main reason politics in the US have become a complete disaster. When you hear the other side's point of view presented by your side, it's going to be biased and will just reinforce your own beliefs.

As evidence of this, think of how many people think that $other_party wants to "destroy America" in some form. Cue (and possibly queue) commenters saying "but $x really does want that!"

I've found that people who claim to know the other side's motivations are projecting for the most part. I catch myself doing it too. Being more aware of bias does not make one less susceptible to it, unfortunately. If anything, it tends to bring overconfidence regarding it :/

I've realized that Americans are uniquely patriotic, but to wildly different countries whose only common trait are their borders.

It's been obvious for a very long time that up-/downvoting is just a horribly broken mechanism. Much more so, if it's upvoting only. Twitter tries to ameliorate that with the ability to block people, but that's just a crutch.

The solution is laughably simple in theory, but it seems to keep getting ignored: Don't use a simple sum of votes. Instead use some method - any method really - to weight the votes of users depending how much their past voting behaviour correlates with your own.

I've been writing about this over six years ago, for example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095500

If you're thinking along these lines, you'll enjoy reading this post[1] by Venkatesh Rao. Stephen Fry leaving is the exact scenario of "evaporative cooling" expressed there, and you are exactly describing the process of "warrenization" that is required for large-scale online communities to survive and thrive. Obviously Twitter has failed in including these insights into their social architecture, to their detriment[2].

[1] http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/12/07/socratic-fishing-in-lak... [2] http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/10/trying-to-fly-with-broken-w...

What about letting people decide whose votes they want to count for them. You can be as meta as you want to be with this.

I don't want to count the votes of anyone my friend considers an idiot.

I don't want to count the vote of anyone whose tagged as a #foo by anyone tagged as a #bar by such and such a group.

Alternatively you want their vote to count double.

Instead of a single score you have as many scores as you have users and its impossible to interfere much in others affairs.

I think that this could be a very important improvement.

This is off topic (sorry), but I'm an animal rights activist and I have no problem with hunting or hunters. As long as the animal is consumed as food, no problem. Trophy hunters are a different story.