Re:Our Minds Have Been Hijacked by Our Phones
by incompatible on Sunday August 20, 2017 @01:28AM
(#15057082)
I'm not sure exactly how to quantify it. I think you'd have to look only at public discussions of IT-related topics on other sites, since that's all that's in scope for Hacker News. Facebook suffers with a clunky forum system that doesn't do threading particularly well, so you end up with a "flat" discussion with a lot of duplicate comments. I don't have a lot of confidence in the "like" moderation system either. I hope that's not gratuitous negativity. Example: https://www.facebook.com/arstechnica/posts/10154966971473753
The "avoid gratuitous negativity" policy has helped, but we are still very much in a place of "most negative opinion wins" which pushes some discussions way off of reality. And those are just the ones I know about.
Turns out that sounding smart or righteously indignant (or usually, both) doesn't make something correct. Just a weird rabbit hole of darkly gratifying negativity. I guess I'm waking up to the fact that our flavor of "discussing ideas" might not actually be that more high-minded than Reddit or Facebook.