Facebook/Reddit/Twitter/etc promote a regression towards the mean understanding... viral content reflects and amplifies the "average user's" sentiment and values. Acceptable for entertainment, but inherently prone to misinformation, propaganda, and demagoguery. Education requires valuing subject matter experts. Opinions which may not be widely held, or even popular, but supported by people who are vetted as being knowledgeable on the subject.

Traditional media could be regulated because they were largely centralized, but centralization also creates an establishment that regulated counter-culture ideas. In contrast, the internet is anarchic. Online anonymity impairs delegation of trust... any idea can be published so every individual must rationally evaluate what they consume. Attempting to regulate away undesirable behavior on the anarchic internet is just cat-herding. At best, you create a walled garden for a select few.

As I see it, the paths forward are either:

* public education, emphasizing civics/rationality, to support distributed self-regulation

* centralizing with state regulations

I want the former but the latter seems most likely, considering how the underlying networks are consolidating, and increasing awareness of how amplified public ignorance creates political/economic instability that hurts those with power.

That's great but it's a slow cultural change. Well-educated countries can still fall into extremism, which is driven by emotional and atavistic factors as well as economic and political ones, and can't simply be dispelled with doses of Rationality (tm). Arguably, the failure of rational utilitarianism to engage with this aspect of humanity and to simply dismiss everything that can't be quantified as irrationality exacerbates the growth of toxicity.

On a more practical level, the US is a country where part of the population rejects the theory of evolution on religious grounds, historical narratives are intensely contested, and political life is objectively and increasingly polarized. Educational change happens over generational timescales, and if it were as simple as making it available all our social ills would have been dispelled long ago.

Of course education and critical thinking skills are essential for a healthy social body, but when I see people saying 'we just need better education' I feel like I'm on a bus that's headed towards a cliff edge and well-meaning people are suggesting that the solution to this is better driving lessons.

There may not be a solution that preserves the open internet, if this system is fundamentally incompatible with social realities.

I agree 100% as long as you put me, or people of my worldview, in charge of the curriculum and personnel.

While thought-policing media, schools, churches, and any other possible venue of "indoctrination" may "work" to a superficial extent, it mostly just completely destroys the credibility of your authority and leads to stunning implosion and destabilization. See: the Soviet Union.

Like it or not, you can't just beat "undesirable" views out of people, either with schools or social media moderation.

Education teaches critical thinking, science, history, numerical literacy, and the general skill and toolset to differentiate fact from falsehood, rhetoric, and manipulation-- regardless of where it is coming from.

Education is an immune system for the mind. Generally it is the manipulators who don't like an educated populace, because it decreases their power. They tend to be the ones labeling education as "indoctrination".

Right, in principle, it's agreed that "education" is "good knowledge" and "indoctrination" is "bad knowledge" and/or "fake news".

As long as you think that the inoculations being administered in the school system are valid, you'll call it education. Once you stop thinking that, you'll call it indoctrination.

So you're not really arguing anything. Every side calls training that biases you toward their preferred narrative "education" and training that biases in the opposite way "indoctrination". Is your point that "sometimes people disagree"?

This tends to last until someone realizes that an educational system is a wonderful indoctrination tool to advance their goals. Often enough this is followed by enacting that.

This isn't new. "Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man."

That quality is also known as adaptability and it's crucial to successful survival and prosperity, for exactly the same reason that it's useful in mathematics: global optima are generally difficult to deduce, if they can be conclusively and authoritatively determined at all.

Saying Side X is "not being logical" or "can't think critically" is virtually always just a cop-out. It says you either a) don't understand or b) don't want to admit the validity of some of their concerns.

Most of the time when the other side's argument is understood, the disagreements are a matter of priority and/or credibility, not nonsensical thinking. And those priorities are usually determined intrinsically; values as such can't really be programmed or taught. They're the result of the years of experience each individual has endured in the real world.

A good example of this is that many engineers are known for a just-the-facts, no-frills approach. This is because engineers tend to prioritize facts and correctness over aesthetic and emotional value. Other people who don't do this aren't objectively wrong -- they just put different weights on the considerations, leading them to different conclusions.

Another example is outlet credibility. Your average Fox News viewer may believe that MSNBC is propaganda secretly dictated by the shadowy figures in the background, and vice versa. If you believe this, the logical conclusion is to dismiss or at least discount the perspective of the propagandist.

You cannot "prove" that one side is propaganda and the other side isn't, because it is impossible to definitely deduce the intentions and motives of other people. Reports that say reports from MSNBC were more frequently errant are of no value because you can just say "Oh yeah, says who? The same shadowy figures?" to that.

It is important to understand that humans hold a variety of totally non-falsifiable beliefs -- things that cannot be definitively proven one way or the other, even if you try, like the state of mind of the speakers we're around. These have to be approached from the subterranean to be understood, let alone addressed.

All we can do is understand that our own perspective is not the default or de-facto correct one, and that other people are entitled to their own assumptions and unfalsifiable opinions just as we are. They're entitled to their own credibility heuristics and decisions about who is worth trusting. People are free to make their own decisions and conclusions, whether we agree with them or not.

Understanding that is critical to learning that it's OK to disagree with people, without having to pretend that they're insane just to preserve your own ego and self-worth.

For opinions, perhaps. There are also people who reject facts. I don’t consider rejection of evolution or young-earth views as legitimate. Thus, those who cling to these views are empirically wrong.

Most people don't reject facts, they reject certain interpretations of facts.

For example, some people believed epilepsy came from evil spirits. They didn't deny that the person was shaking on the ground. They just had a different explanation for it than we do now.

When you build a runway for a plane or a long bridge, you do.

A model is not necessarily useful in all contexts. People still use the flat earth model in useful ways because it's simpler to assume the earth is flat in some situations. Of course, once you go beyond the capabilities of the flat earth model your numbers will wildly diverge into the realm of useless while the round or spherical models provide useful numbers for longer.

And yet engineers are over-represented (compared to people with other degrees) amongst Creationists and conspiracy theorists and, I would guess, terrorists. I think engineers value simplicity and direct causation more than facts or correctness.

Appreciate the multiple snide attacks, though.

Is there not such a thing as conspiracy fact? Aren't some conspiracies, in fact, real? It seems both sides of the political aisle have pet conspiracy theories these days, so it's really hard for this to hold water anymore.

> people who don't understand facts

As another commenter said, people will usually agree on the clear and present facts, e.g., Donald Trump won the presidency. Where you'll find more disagreement is on rationale: either he won because he gave a voice to the discontented American working class, or he won because he worked in cahoots with Vladimir Putin to subvert American democracy.

People don't refuse to acknowledge the obvious state of affairs. They have different interpretations, based on different values and credibility heuristics, of the likely impetus for that state of affairs.

>people who are highly opinionated about things they don't understand, etc.

aka virtually everyone. How many of us know enough to hold our own with the experts in something that we're "highly opinionated" on? If we can in anything, it's very narrow. Are all of our other opinions invalid now? Humans use credibility heuristics to try to determine who is right about something, and then they follow based on that.

> are not behaving logically

I dunno, it sounds logical to me, at least in the practical sense. If we pretend we live in a world of infinite resources and time, you might be right, but considering the constraints of reality, the logical approach seems to be to have and express opinions in the moment according to one's best judgment, since everyone else is going to be doing that too. Just gotta try not to be too haughty about it.

> They can have valid concerns and still be behaving irrationally. You clearly think these are mutually exclusive but they aren't.

I agree someone can have a valid concern and also behave irrationally. I don't agree this is what you started out saying, though.

>Appreciate the multiple snide attacks, though.

No offense intended. Edit deadline is passed, but I wasn't thinking I put any such things in. My apologies if you felt I was being condescending or passive-aggressive.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CBTS_Stream/

These 20,000 odd people unequivocally lack the type of critical thinking skills GP is referring to. I find it hard to believe that they are all under professional care. These people are straight out of The DaVinci Code, or National Treasure. They truly believe that they have uncovered a massive conspiracy to over throw the current American government, and they are organizing to stop it. Many subreddits choose a sort of mascot that defines their subredditors. For instance, people who subscribe to the tongue in cheek /r/evilbuildings are "6509 villains plotting", where they post pictures of buildings that have a nefarious apperance, no conspiracy in the comments. /r/CBTS_Stream has "21,333 Operators". As in mercenaries/militiamen. These people are rabid Trump supporters, seem to have a strong fundamentalist Christian bent, and appear to be extremely gullible and susceptible to any sort of theory that involves revenge upon the previous administration. They even have their own prophet, "Q". Everything from occult references, to nazis, to big pharma killing off holistic doctors, to arranging Trumps tweets into an 11x11 grid, and then playing word search to reveal a secret message. These people swear that Donald Trump's televised rallies are chock full of encoded messages and symbolism, both in what Trump is saying, and the clothes/posters of supporters in the background. These people buy toothpaste from Alex Jones, because it doesn't contain flouride. These people believe that all mainstream American history since the American Civil War is a lie created by the perpetrators of this current hoax these people have uncovered. They also believe that Trump has already secretly met with Kim Jong Un, and will soon unveil a world saving peace treaty, and that will "make the libs heads explode".

The truly sad part of this is that a lot of these people are also members of other subreddits dedicated to people who have escaped Mormonism, or Jehovah's Witnesses, or similar groups. So these people have already thrown off the shackles of psychological warfare once. But they believe now that they are "woke", and seem completely beyond talking down.

Good luck explaining to these people that they are being radicalized by Russians, or whoever. Good luck getting any of these people to not believe that any censorship is obvious proof that the sleuths are hot on the case, and that the global elite are silencing them.

Oh please, you think the average person has sufficient critical thinking skills to read the newspaper and pick out the parts that are "stretching the truth", use specious reasoning or various other logical fallacies, etc? You must roll with a different crew than I.

> Your average Fox News viewer may believe that MSNBC is propaganda secretly dictated by the shadowy figures in the background, and vice versa.

If they had critical thinking skills, wouldn't they be able to get a pretty decent handle on the degree to which they are propagandists?

It sounds to me like what you're saying is, most things within this realm are not knowable, except for the parts that are. The world is complex and confusing, but I don't think it's that confusing.

I don't know, I don't think we have actively tried yet.

You absolutely can. An example: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2012/sep/22...

Religion sucks, but Soviet Communism's anti-religious nature doesn't excuse its foibles.

People like you scare me.

I have a feeling a lot of people would have issues with this approach though.

Of course this doesn't work when politics is taboo.

Take the same comment or opinion and air it among three friends in person (or a very tight social network). You only need to convince two or three people who likely trust and respect you already, and who are not inclined to want to spend an infinite number of hours debating such trivia across all time zones.

Not every conversation has to become a burned bridges and salt the earth affair. If the other person is just trying to "win" then disengage from the argument. If the other person is arguing with you in good faith then maybe you're wrong or have something to learn from a new perspective.

There is the perception that "the entire world" is watching you on the web, criticizing your every move, but that's not a fact.

Logical fallacies would be one place to start, you can see examples of this all day long on reddit for example.

I've been hearing claims of the need to teach "critical thinking" since I was in high school. To me it always came across as one of those things that can't easily be taught, particularly in a traditional academic setting. Everyone agrees it should be taught, but if there were a clear way of doing it, we would.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_logic

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-classical/

https://distancelearning.ubc.ca/courses-and-programs/distanc...

> If it's not being taught, then we'd need to do something differently.

When reading the news, forums, or overhearing conversations, do you not regularly encounter people who obviously have no significant skills in critical thinking?

Right. I took a logic class for my undergraduate degree. It's actually the source of the "modus" in my username. I guess to me that's a far cry from what people refer to as "critical thinking." Being able to identify textbook logical fallacies isn't the same thing as rationally and objectively forming a judgment about something.

It's certainly a helpful part, but I doubt most would remember it any better than geometry or 1800s history.

> When reading the news, forums, or overhearing conversations, do you not regularly encounter people who obviously have no significant skills in critical thinking?

I do, but it's rarely a clear-cut example of misunderstanding a logical fallacy. More often than not, it's the blind acceptance of supporting evidence while rejecting opposing evidence. Or assigning way too much value to a poorly-sourced news story. Or approaching the issue with a different worldview / values. Or any number of other biases that affect decision-making.

To be clear, though: I agree it's clearly not being taught. I'm just not convinced you can take a bunch of high schoolers, put them in a room, and after X weeks of doing something, they'll be critical thinkers. I agree you could probably teach them logical fallacies well enough to pass a test on them, but that's not the same thing.

If not, if critical thinking doesn't work, what could we do to improve this situation?

Of course not.

> If not, if critical thinking doesn't work, what could we do to improve this situation?

I'm not sure "well-informed" and "critical thinking" are even relevant to each other, but putting that aside, I genuinely don't know. That's why I asked how you teach critical thinking.

It's possible people are bound to retreat to their biases and it's a futile effort. I'm just not convinced attempting to teach people "critical thinking" will work, because it hasn't.

Implying it's been tried, and failed.

Where has widespread teaching of critical thinking been tried?

> Public school teachers and administrators will tell you that one of the mandates of public education is to develop critical thinking skills in students. They believe that curricula are designed, at least in part, with this goal in mind. [1]

> Common Core, the federal curriculum guidelines adopted by the vast majority of states, describes itself as “developing the critical-thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills students will need to be successful.” [2]

> Many teachers say they strive to teach their students to be critical thinkers. They even pride themselves on it; after all, who wants children to just take in knowledge passively? [3]

Are you willing to acknowledge educators / curricula commonly claim to teach critical thinking? To me it's always come across as something claimed to be taught pretty much everywhere. Yet we both seem to agree it's not working.

We could try teaching critical thinking differently and potentially meet some success, but that doesn't change how it's been claimed to have been taught for some time with poor results.

[1] http://argumentninja.com/public-schools-were-never-designed-...

[2] http://www.newsweek.com/youre-100-percent-wrong-about-critic...

[3] http://theconversation.com/lets-stop-trying-to-teach-student...

> Are you willing to acknowledge educators / curricula commonly claim to teach critical thinking?

I'm not in denial of some sort ffs, I'm frustrated at watching our society coming apart at the seams because the vast majority of the population seems to be incapable of intelligently reading a newspaper article, and will fall for seemingly any trick in the book.

Of the examples of "critical thinking education" listed above, do any remotely approach the critical thinking specific education I'm talking about here?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16572861

People are absolutely inundated with propaganda nowadays, like no other time in history, with social media being the most powerful weapon by far. We are graduating our children and sending them intellectually defenseless into this new world, I don't know if the average human mind can be brought to a level sufficient to cope with the propaganda created by the world class experts in persuasion who are working for a variety of deep pocketed entities, but at least we could try.

Well no, but my claim wasn't that your suggestion has been tried. It's that other people have been claiming they've been teaching critical thinking for some time, and it's not working.

I agree it's a problem--I just don't think a class in logic will do it. I'm not sure it's teachable at all, and even if it is, I'm not sure those same skills won't be ignored the moment the argument questions one's identity or becomes emotional.

Is it worth trying? It's easy for me to say "sure," but it's not on me to implement, and I'm certainly not sure how to assess whether it'd be successful.

But to be fair, the longer we get into the current era of politics, the harder it is to distinguish between earnestness and satire. Young people who watch the movie Network today don't see Howard Beale as satirical, because there are too many people like him today who are deadly serious.

What country are you writing from, and could you give some specific examples?

Comparing the experience in a niche subreddit, vs. a default subreddit, it's clear that the real problem is allowing causals in. If people have to go out of their way to participate, you wind up with only the ones who care to do so. And they have, in their reputation, something they don't want to lose.

But if people are allowed to participate by default, you get the enormous masses of people who, collectively, by virtue of their shifting roster, are immune to moderation. And you get people who set out that morning to share as many opinions as possible, instead of the people who set out to participate in that community exclusively.

On the subreddits I manage, I allow broad participation with no barriers. But they aren’t popular enough to have enough trolling to break me down and add hoops.

Facebook, Reddit, twitter, Snapchat have all started for entertainment and switched to catchbyte reaction/outrage culture news and normal news has turned into a mess as well.

I say regulations wiping trending news feed off Facebook, twitter and Snapchat is a start. Perhaps funding to any group that meets set in stone criteria regardless of political affiliation gets some federal funding to make up for the cost of making real journalism. That journalism must be fact checked and we hold them accountable.

People are desensitized to everything now and when shocking news is made every 15 minutes and the world is so connected we become numb to so much and that is incredibly dangerous

The restoration of the Fairness Doctrine would also help stymie some of the biggest promulgators like Fox News *

* you can search for "fox news viewers misinformed" and encounter studies and results like http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/

Similarily, there are still excellent news sources. The Economist is often cited in these discussions, and the New York Times is also vigilant in their reporting and the correction of errors when they occur[0].

What we’ve seen is a breakdown in trust of institutions, largely disconnected from actual mistakes on their part. People will quickly demand proof and invoke conspiracy theories when, for example, the there-letter agencies accuse Eussia of interfering in elections. They have learned to invoke “appeal to authority fallacy”too well, without offering an alternative. Because you cannot evaluate a new story without in some way deferring to the reputation of the publisher.

The Economist and the New York Times may have good practices in regard to errors, but there is a clear difference in their reporting to independent fact checking sites. To make matters worse, even those examples of "excellent" news papers tend to have a clear and open political alignment. With increased political polarization this then result in a rather natural distrust of news institutions, even those that are vigilant in correcting errors after they have occurred.

Re: trust and appeal to authority; your example made me realize people are drawn to grand conspiracies because unverifiable theories are infallible... Luring in people unfamiliar with probabilistic reasoning and consilience.

Sure McDonalds is not good, but there is also plenty of organic that equally bad (or worse).

That depends. Sometimes European organic veg is preferable to Chinese industrially farmed veg when your local supermarket offers only those two choices. This is definitely true of garlic: Chinese garlic tends to be notoriously bitter and lack juice, but Spanish organic garlic is very sweet, pungent, and juicy. Now, the fact that the European organic choice was made according to the limitations of organic farming may well be irrelevant to its goodness, but there is a strong enough correlation with quality to guide consumers, and it was likely chosen by your supermarket as an alternative to the Chinese imported product precisely because they wanted to cover the organic segment.

Although this distrust does have negative impacts to our society, I view this distrust as an overall good thing.

nope, this won't work.

People will always need a place to voice their vile comments in a cowardly manner

Forum communities with actual strong moderation, eg. Something Awful, ResetEra have near zero issues with hate speech, Nazis and other things that reddit has let fester.

One of the major factors that keeps it relatively clean is that user registration costs $10. That's a strong financial disincentive against trolling, bots, etc.

I really believe that successful online communities of the future will have paid signups.

I'd totally pay $10 for a less shitty reddit clone.

When I use Facebook I am the product, not the customer. This means the platform is optimized to put my eyeballs on advertisements or provide data about me to marketers. It is not optimized to provide high quality conversation.

No wonder you got banned so quickly there...

Having a toxic community that internally declines to moderate is not strong moderation.

1) Namespace of subreddits. The subreddit which snags the most obvious name for a topic has a much better chance of becoming canonical for that topic that competitors with worse names.

2) Cross-subreddit identity and supporting tooling. For example, i can easily search for all recent posts made by a particular user, but i can't easily search for all posts made by a particular user within one specific subreddit. This sort of thing promotes "cultural leakage" across reddits and makes people think of all of Reddit as one community with one culture.

Related: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16573842 which summarizes a study that finds cultural leakage across subreddits.

Real identities would require verification, which sites like FB only do after the fact.

I fear that a huge repercussion of the election issues is that we will get there. A real ID may be required for you to post comments in all websites. And i'm not sure how I feel about that. Reality is that it would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identify was viewable and searchable by all you know. But at what cost?

I really do wonder what is the root of trolling. What makes a "normal" person take an alter-ego/view/counter view, solely based on lack of face to face interaction...

I mean, you get toxic behavior even on something like Nextdoor, where you pretty much know it's the neighbors across the street. Technology has just made things more convenient -- social media removes any curation, and technology also has made some means of harassment much easier to execute.

Myself, personally, I avoid social media that encourages toxic behavior (which usually means, smaller, special interest type sites; social circles that you know; etc.). This involves some degree of moderation or self-selection.

I don't see a good way around limited moderation for Reddit either, which is unfortunate in that it is hard to moderate something that size well (it's usually inconsistent and often arbitrary-ish).

That is not at all clear, especially as a percentage of comments. There are plenty of sociopaths who are perfectly willing to troll under their real name. Meanwhile, more reasonable people may quite rationally be worried that expressing any opinion on a controversial issue will lead to online mobs trying to get them fired from their jobs, kicked out of school, or otherwise ostracized. Not to mention scenarios like being a gay teenager in a very socially conservative environment.

I don't think it would. Lots of people post horribly objectionable material under their own names on a regular basis, depending on their level of financial security, peer group, and social milieu.

What makes a "normal" person take an alter-ego/view/counter view, solely based on lack of face to face interaction...

Some people are horrible, and are just as unpleasant in real life as they are online.

Is this true? I've seen various studies saying that the opposite is actually true, but I can't currently find any of those studies. Does anyone have any sources?

EDIT: some sources, though I don't know the strength of their validity:

  - https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence-that-real-name-policies-fail-to-improve-comments/

  - http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/07/17/google_plus_finally_ditches_its_ineffective_dangerous_real_name_policy.html

The cost is that it would prevent people from anonymously reporting abuses, which means that fear of retaliation will have a chilling effect. We've already seen this where people get death threats, houses burned down, etc, when they do things like report sexual assault.

I can see at the cost of making stolen identities worth even more.

As it is websites completely suck at keeping our 'anonymous' identity secure. Our email and passwords are hacked so commonly there are websites dedicated to tracking it. Now you're just adding 'real identities' to the brokered data. Any real trolls will be able to use this data from the dark net pretending to be you. Even worse, since real names are required, any employers will look for you on the internet, they will see your "I'm an anti-gay right wing pro-russian" profiles online and say "you are not a cultural fit for our company". You will have to take the time and effort to clean up what is said about you. Since it's a real identity, it's not going to change, and they already have all the information they need on you.

Good luck in that terrible future.

Those who post offensive content and do care, find it completely trivial to get a fake name. FB’s enforcement of their policy is basically nonexistent. This is the second-biggest group of users.

I honestly don't think this will ever be the case. Because there is a lot of profit from an unmoderated comment store. Also because it'd be monumentally hard to actually make all sites compliant.

4chan also exists and it works and is marvelously non-toxic once you realize that any insults hurled at you are impersonal because they can only attack what you have immediately posted previously. Your attack surface is tiny, assuming basic information hygiene.

Post history On: You get to follow a users comment history. If you read an insightful comment by them, and want to read more, then having a history is nice. Users are people

Post history partially On: e.g. comments could decay to anon after some period. (Cue the sites that collect all post data and match to users) Slightly increases the cost of doing a deep dive on a users history. Users are people, fading to ideas

Post history Off: Lowered attack surface for people who are actively trying to find an argument with you. Less pressure to have a persona consistent with the typical one of any particular community. Users are ideas

For example you can make multiple identities easier. I make use of that here via firefox containers, it is quite nice.

You can make anonymous the default and track the user under the hood, allowing them to claim a post at a later point if they feel confident enough to attach their name to it.

You could limit who can see the user identity. Or only display something more vague than a specific identity, a profile-lite behind a one-time ID.

The only way i see to save reddit is to set a maximum size for a subreddit, and shut down or otherwise isolate every subreddit that grows bigger than the maximum threshold.

This is why I'm quite pessimistic about the current situation: the current in-vogue business model of surveillance/advertising capitalism demands massive size beyond what can be moderated, and thus makes this problem inevitable. And it only gets worse when the most toxic users are the most profitable, viz. Twitter's refusal to ban Donald, even though by any reasonable interpretation of their TOS, he breaks it every other day.

Cheap, if you ask me.

The most common form anarchic moderation (i.e. no moderation). When a forum's small, unwritten social rules keep things under control. However, as forum grows, that breaks down, and things become more chaotic.

Metafilter essentially has an authoritarian moderation culture, the rules of discussion are both made and enforced (selectively or not) by the same group on another subject group. There's a wall to keep outsiders out (the paywall). It avoids chaos, but its failure mode is ossification, devolution into an echo chamber, and eventually desertion; as public forum behavior comes to more-or-less rigidly reflect the opinions and preferences of the moderators.

Reddit's somewhere in the middle of the above two forms. There are anarchic hordes in the less moderated reaches, and little authoritarian kingdoms without the walls to keep the hordes out.

I don't think anyone's tried real democracy in a forum (with elections, politics, checks and balances, and the time investment that all entails). It'd be interesting to see how such a forum would fare, and if it could avoid chaos without become an echo chamber. Democracy isn't the public-opinion-style voting we see in forum's today, but instead actual accountability of the moderators to the users.

Not claiming this is a novel insight, but it's new to me.

In the end, the wizards published "LambdaMOO Takes Another Direction" and took back control, concluding:

> Over the course of the past three and a half years, it has become obvious that this [refraining from making social decisions] was an impossible ideal: The line between 'technical' and 'social' is not a clear one, and never can be.

A great deal has been written about this experiment (and a Web search will find much analysis, along with full text of LTAND and LTAND2), and there are a wide variety of perspectives on why LTAND failed, but one conclusion that nearly everybody seems to reach is that attempting to give a community democracy with no higher guidance is almost guaranteed to be a recipe for disaster.

Reflecting on all of this, I have no idea how the US founders managed to get something that worked at all, much less as well as it does. (And notice that it took them several tries to get it right.)

I think maybe a good solution would be to (1) pay mods and (2) make everything they do transparent. This will give you better mods to start out with but also gives users the power to notice mod overreach before it spirals out of control.

I mean, yeah, it’s structured mostly around links, and you can certainly use it as a source of Interesting Links. But there’s conversation and community there if you look around a little.

Staying relatively on topic is an unrelated aspiration and one that we mostly let flex a lot depending on the specific thread and context.

- Incentives

The real-world has that figured out long ago. If you find something that is truly useful & timely, you would be willing to pay real money for it.

Google Answers (answers.google.com) had tried an approach wherein a price can be put on a question and any legit reply which answers that q can claim it. 'Reputation' definitely still plays a role in this, but the system is flexible enough to allow a new comer to attempt answering a question & stake a claim to the funds.

The real-world has many of these aspects sorted out, like calling a plumber or a carpenter from your neighborhood to get your work done. The problem is we have embarked on creating a 'global' network (aka FB) without first having adequately understood how to create strong family & community network, before we go global with our social networking..

Secondly, I notice no mention of deliberate, paid propagandizing, i.e. professionally divisive sock-puppets employed by sock-puppet firms.

Any serious discussion of threats to a healthy public discourse must address deliberate attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the common voice.

An echo chamber is arguably more when we actively suppress dissident viewpoints. Reddit is infamous for moderators doing that simply by deleting comments under some pretext of 'spirit of the subreddit' or such. With Facebook there's a first-and-last-name-and-picture-visible shaming that can be scary and damaging, repulsing the opposite viewpoints. At a more extreme, you can help foster an echo chamber by organizing a large group of people to scream and picket and threaten a speaker that has the wrong views, reminding all the others of what happens.

HN to me is an oasis. Even if I get downvoted when I have a minority view. I still feel as if intelligent arguments are considered.

With Reddit, how many intelligent comments are there? The English grammar alone is awful, full of shortcuts, cliches and new millennial-speak. But worse: the responses are short. One-liners. And even worse: argumentation is ad-hominem and emotive.

In summary, I think Reddit is about emotional expression, and HN is about (an attempt of) rigor and rationality.

Downvotes are not only for inflammatory language; a comment can be a negative contribution to the signal-to-noise ratio, and even violate the commenting guidelines, without using inflammatory language.

I avoid poking the moderator lions (I used to post political articles maybe a year or more ago), but I do wish HN would have another view of that particular topic. It's rather unavoidable that adults (and we are adults), highly-educated ones at that, would sometimes slip into politics when science or tech news (or legal news about tech or science) is discussed.

But yes, you're generally right about that.

I think emotive political discussion is useless, but rational policy discussions aren't useless.

Where HN has been falling short (lately, in my observation) is where discussions about the ethics of certain business models get lost via the "buried" option or killed off completely.

You cannot come to HN to discuss the potentially-negative ecological or economical impact of a YC company. The voting rings will literally send your comment or post to the void: buried or killed off completely. HN does still post lots of interesting links, but for truly interesting discussion that isn't (for lack of a better word), tainted by bias, I prefer Reddit these days.

- discussing the risks of psychoactive drugs.

- pointing out flaws in overhyped press releases about the next wonder drug/treatment

I guess you're right that you can avoid getting downvoted by being exceptionally polite and spending about 15 minutes crafting a response saying "crap science, uncontrolled trial, possible placebo effect", but sometimes I just don't have the time and energy for that. I'd prefer it if people here didn't automatically assume I'm full of shit when I point out a flaw in an argument without writing my response absolutely perfectly the first time.

People say negative things on HN about YC companies all the time. We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC-funded startup is at issue. That doesn't mean we don't moderate it at all—that would leave too much of a loophole—but we do moderate it less. This is literally the first principle that we tell everyone who moderates Hacker News. You can find many posts I've written about this over the years via https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

What I meant, is that one cannot start a discussion of such things without being willing to lose lots of points and karma. Observations that AirBnB might be doing more harm than good to cities having "housing crisis" issues, and the fact that Uber and Lyft are actually harming public transportation rider numbers and putting more automobiles on the roads (creating congestion).

Two issues I've seen brought up here that get downvoted into oblivion. Why risk that? It's far easier for people to jump on the "attack the poster" bandwagon... as they have done to me in this thread.

Granted, I've been reading HN for over 11 years now, and the site is not the same as it used to be. A lot of interesting posters have left. Probably I need to lower my expectations for what to see when I come here.

Plenty of comments arguing that Airbnb/Uber might be doing more harm than good routinely get heavily upvoted, so I'd question your overall generalization.

Something might be totally off topic or funny, but if I made me laugh do I down vote it?

Slashdot's model of tagging posts was a pretty good idea I think and allowed one to filter out the 'funny' or 'offtopic' comments.

So, upvotes and respond.

If it's a net positive contribution, you shouldn't be downvoting.

> Slashdot's model of tagging posts was a pretty good idea

Its a good model for a customizable user experience, and a bad model for a community. Those two goals are often opposed.

Dragon, you commented and downvoted on something that you are doing right now which is commenting on a comment system. No? At least you had the decency to reply, which most Redditors don't. Which makes Reddit Toxic.

I reserve downvotes for when a comment is being needlessly toxic, doesn't contribute to the discussion or otherwise not helpful for an open discussion.

I think the best cure for "downvote to disagree" is to firmly hold to the principle that the opposing side of the argument has the best intentions to the extend of their knowledge and that at the end of the discussion, all participants should have learned something. You should also always be willing to change your mind on what you argue about.

Always.

Voting on HN barely has an effect, and I suspect that the average votes per comment on HN has gone way down year over year. People just don't vote on posts as often as you'd think, not anymore. A related problem is that commentary doesn't go on for very long. In the usenet days you could have a good thread that would last for months and months that would continue to spawn good and interesting commentary, a flash in the pan thread might only last a few days. On HN the window of commentary for a post is rarely more than a day and typically only a matter of hours. It's just people strafing comments into the void and then disengaging. Long comments typically don't get read, and don't get upvoted, don't get commented on, etc, for example.

OK, I'll bite! A cursory look at the data shows a clear increase in average votes on comments from 2007 until 2012, which is the only year with a dip, followed by steady growth until the present all-time high.

Of course, there are lots of "all else being equal" implicit assumptions there. First, if the population doubles but stories move off the frontpage in 0.7x the time, then you'd only get 1.4x as many votes—and this is one of InclinedPlane's points. Second, the newer crowd could be significantly more, or significantly less, active. To control for these two things, the measure you might use instead is "votes per comment per pageview", or "votes per comment per second a user spends on the page". Third, there might be more comments posted—well, duh, it would be weird if the new users never posted any comments.

Fourth—and I think this another thing InclinedPlane wants to focus on—comment quality could have changed. Comment sorting is relevant too, because I'm sure lots of users don't read everything. If we suppose that, due to an increase in population, we get 2x as many comments but they have the same quality distribution, and if we suppose the best comments always go to the top, then the average quality of the top n comments should increase; you can see something like this in extremely popular Reddit threads, where the top several highly upvoted comments are clearly optimized for something (often clever jokes). If we suppose a decent population of users only read the top n comments, and always use the same function that maps "quality of a comment" to "probability of upvoting", then, when the set of comments doubles and (by assumption) the best rise to the top, we'd expect these users to generate more upvotes overall, and hence "average votes per comment viewed" should go up. (It's also possible that people's standards would rise. But I think people's changing standards would lag behind the changes in what they're viewing.) That said, for the comments that aren't in the top n, the fraction of people that view them (and consequently might comment on them) would go down.

The question of how long threads sit on the frontpage is relevant, both for comment exposure and for InclinedPlane's point about conversation longevity. (There are also pages like "new" and the no-longer-linked-at-the-top "best".) I wonder how best to quantify that... perhaps "the frontpage tenure of the thread with the longest tenure of all threads on that day".

After reading a few discussions over the last few days, I was thinking to my self that HN was better than ever, and very good (with one serious shortcoming). Even the echo chamber is much better than I remember.

EDIT: The shortcoming, IMHO, is the abandonment of politics. HN is the ideal place to solve that problem, with s sophisticated audience open to and interested in experimentation and in problem solving. The goal of propagandists is not to persuade you, but to paralyze you; to shut down real discussion and debate. HN is, unwittingly, capitulating and cooperating with them. HN is another success for them.

No, it's really not, as HN demonstrates most of the time it interacts with politics.

That's an illusion, for reasons I attempted to describe here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16443431

> That's an illusion, for reasons I attempted to describe here

That implies that it's an unsolvable problem, if I understand correctly. There's no reason to think this problem is any more difficult than all the other 'unsolvable' ones and this one is particularly, I would even say 'extremely' valuable to work on.

I don't believe we simply could introduce political topics and it would work due to some HN magic. It would take serious work and experimentation to find a solution, but I think HN is better suited than other places to do that work. And a solution could change discourse in the country and the world, at a time when discourse on the Internet problems SV has invented has become a very dangerous weapon for some, and is tearing society apart.

I realize that "we" means you and sctb more than anyone, and so it's a request and encouragement. I still think it's the most valuable thing HN could do, potentially world-changing. Previous generations had books and leaders that changed the course of history; this time it might be software or a software-based technique that turns the tide. I hope that at least you will keep it in mind.

Our first responsibility is to take care of what we have. The way to take care of a complex system is to be sensitive to feedback and adapt. We can apply that principle here. Look at what happens when the political taps get opened beyond a notch or two. Discussion becomes nasty, brutish, long, and predictable. That's what we want less of, so opening the taps all the way is not an option. For similar reasons, closing them all the way isn't an option either.

I don't disagree completely. I think there's a chance HN can slowly develop greater capacity in this area. But it would need to be very slow and not something we try directly to control. Anything as complex and fragile as HN needs a light touch.

But I'm not sure that they should be eliminated. The alternative is to leave moderation as the only way to deal with bad (abusive, off-topic, trolling, unintelligible) posts. I'm not sure that having people flag every bad post they think they see, and letting the moderators sort it out, is really the optimal way to do things.

That's a common misconception. Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

I think people have the wrong idea about HN downvotes because they think Reddit rules apply to HN. It's a bit like how in Canada we think we have Miranda rights because we've seen it on American TV.

The problem with your argument is that it doesn't reckon with just how lousy bad internet comments are, or how many of them there are, or how completely they take over if allowed to. To a first approximation, bad internet comments are the entire problem of this site.

It's easy to imagine an HN that would be just like the current HN, only with some negative X (e.g. bad downvotes) removed. Most of these ideas are fantasies, because the thing you'd have to do to remove X would have massive side effects. You can't hold the rest of the site constant and do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

Bad != disagree. I think we all agree that it should be ok to downvote and hide "bad" comments. However the problem is that many good comments are downvoted simply because people disagree with them.

I think it might be better to remove the downvote and replace it with "flag", so people can flag bad comments (spam, abusive, pointless, etc). At least that way people would need to think a little before the comment gets flagged, which would hopefully result in fewer minority viewpoint comments getting hidden.

I think you have more success if you ask everyone else to upvote unfairly downvoted comments.

Some subreddits do have strong moderation; some subreddits think they have strong moderation but they have fucking idiot mods who call down trolls; and there are some subreddits that have permissive moderation and those subreddits leak.

> However if you create consequences or a cost to commenting you'd eliminate toxic comments and trolling.

You genuinely don't. There are forums where you have to pay real money to be able to read and post, and where acting like a jerk will get you banned. They haven't eliminated the jerks. About the only advantage is paid mods which ensures some consistency.

https://doxa.network/

While I can't come to a conclusion on it (whether or not it's a good/bad idea) - I wonder what others in the HN community think about it. I apologize in advance if this is a bad place to comment, I've been mostly a lurker thus far!

In addition to all that, I still fail to see how a blockchain would solve any of these fundamental issues.

There's nobody watching the watchmen, essentially. That leads to a lot of frustration, anger, mistrust, and abuse.

This means there was a "gold rush" in the early days and if some shitter is sitting on prime real estate (like brand names of products) there's nothing you can do about it. If they decide to close the subreddit by making it private, nothing you can do about it. If they go inactive and are still squatting on prime digital real-estate, nothing you can do about it... if they later get hacked but are still inactive, doubly nothing you can do about it.

That's how NextDoor works and it seems to work reasonably well.

There are some big communities that seen relatively healthy to me. For example, Instagram is easily my favorite social network. I see photos that my friends take and that's about it. I pull it up and am done with it in a minute or two.

In the long run push media is always going to be troll-ier and offend more people than pull media.

HN seems to be doing a great job in that regard (in my opinion) and it is a model with which other websites can learn from.

More karma, more posting; less karma, less posting. Everyone starts every month/week/day with only so much, no roll-over per timeframe. Modify it so that 'popular' threads cost more to post in. You can give karma to others too via the upvote and take it away with a downvote, but still no roll-over. Troll/shill accounts would still get upped around en masse, but less so and it would be 'easier' for mods to tell. (I'm sure you can model this without too much effort vis a vi prisoner's dilemma). You'd have to pick and choose which to comment in. Posting content would work similarly, but a slight mod to the cost to posting.

If you're curious: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-01/the-nra-h...

I had the same idea at first but I don't think it would work in practice

Twitter actually does this but only for some types of accounts. Every see the "see more" button under replies? That's where people of low quality go. Twitter has a sort of rating for figuring out if someone is of low quality or not and they usually get hidden. Even their likes and retweets get hidden.

Hasn't to help overall on Twitter though I have noticed I get less assholes replying to me.

Remember that Reddit ultimately only imparts one vote per person regardless of whether you're an admin or moderator or whatever. End that system. We've already established that these systems are not libertarian - the leadership has an opinion (in /r/Science the opinion is that you must post good science) and we want to empower them to enforce it.

Not only that, but provide negative feedback. If you endorse a terrible person, make it impact your credibility.

I'll agree that reddit doesn't seem to expose easy to use moderating tools, though.

If googling myself found comments I'd make on "platform X," you can be sure I'd carefully consider my comments on that platform.

Having anonymous commenting is important, but if you want a less toxic platform for mainstream comments, real identities + indexing is a good start.

The real WTF moment for online discussion is yet to come. When ML chatbots are able to comment indistinguishably from human comments, purely as a measure of capacity of time/scale, comment threads are eventually going to just become chatbots arguing with chatbots, drowning out actual discussion by humans.

Naaah. Gotta monetize every inch of everyone’s life. It’s the American way.

My hypothesis is that Nextdoor primarily appeals to those who already have that kind of territorial "they're all out to get us" mindset since territoriality is literally what the app is about. It's the angry "get off my lawn" old man of social networks and it attracts exactly those kinds of people. Mix in some Internet depersonalization effects and you get something pretty nasty.

My neighborhood is 50%+ non English Speaking Chinese. There are posts almost everyday that say things like..

"Some people in this neighborhood need to OPEN THEIR EYES and stop hitting the gate with their cars. I'll post this in the appropriate languages so everyone and the community can appreciate the significance of my message. Ching-Chang Chow... Bang Bong, Bing bong bing."

Imagine a blank graph. Randomly place 1 million circles on it. No two with identical boundaries. This is our hypothetical Venn diagram of people's preferences for how communication happens online. Drop another million circles to represent how those people will actually act online.

It doesn't matter what points on the graph are labeled "toxicity," "echo chamber," "uncomfortably friendly," or "sparse comments, experts only." It only matter's that the circles are not all identical.

I don’t know an easy way to scale that model.

It would also help reddit monetize.

Real real identities (i.e. government issued digital id) have never been done. I am sure they will come eventually. The political process is just very slow compared to the pace of technology.

Compare the outcomes of totally anonymous reputation-based forums such as HN, reddit or 4chan with near-real identity forums such as Facebook or Linkedin.

There is a very open flow of ideas and debate on 4chan and other reputation-based forums. There is at least as much hate speech and trolling going on at Facebook as on HN, yet Facebook has near-real identities. Linkedin have at least as much spam and criminal phishing posts going on as HN, yet Linked in has near-real identities.

HN would not be a better forum if everyone had to register with their government ID. The main benefit would be to make it easier to ban one person from accessing the forum, and silence that individual.

My vote is for reputation-based forums.

I disagree, There IS a solution, but no one likes it.

Segway: Football aka Soccer had a problem back in the day. Games became (more?) boring because teams would go up a goal, and just play "kick the ball to the goalie". Goalie'd pick up the ball, bounce it, pass to a player who kicked it back to the goalie, rinse and repeat. Then they instituted the back pass rule - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-pass_rule - where basically, pass back to the keeper and he can't use his hands, only his feet. A generation of goalies had to learn to play with the ball at their feet, and the bit people enjoyed happened more often.

Rugby Union has had a similar evolution, although more intense. Rugby's goal is to have a game that can be played by people of all shapes and sizes, and they mostly succeed. George Gregan was a great player at 5'9", and most second rowers are over 200cm/6'7". But rugby always gets boring, because the coaches start to playing boring rugby (lot of kicks, lots of positional play, less running). So rugby, every few years, overhauls the rules. For a year or two, the game is exciting again, IMHO the best sport in the world, then it is boring all over again as coaches play safe. We then get another overhaul.

I think the Soccer back-pass rule and rugby's ever-changing-rules are models of how changes in rules can dramatically affect the quality of an activity, I don't think they are doable for online sites at scale. Instead, the only solution I can see working is to constantly change to new platforms.

I started in SEO in circa 2001, and there were heaps of forums run on phpBB et al. They had all recently started, so they were figuring themselves out. The forums all interacted, but they all had their own feel and their own rules. Over a few years, they developed "personalities", and everyone could find a place that suited them. This "personality" then morphed into a kind of group think, and the forums grew into echo chambers where the rules where strictly enforced to keep out the others, and each forum became hostile to all the evil others, and they devolved from fun places to hang out to the same old same old.

SM then came along, with sites like FB, Digg and reddit being born, and this process started again. A new place, no real rules yet, and it was the same exciting process of discovery. Over time, the bad parts set in, and these places became stale echo chambers filled with all the bad bits everyone talks about.

That's why I think the only real solution is to tear it all down and start afresh, because this process has repeated several times now. I think that partly explains why SnapChat and the other platforms exist, and why, IMHO, SnapChat et al will grow to a point then fail to grow anymore, as the "freshness" fades, and all the nastiness intrudes. Unless sites can figure out a way to change this process, which after almost 2 decades of this process is either unlikely (pessimistic), or it is too soon to tell (optimistic).

TL;DR when a platform gets entrenched, it starts to exhibit more nasty traits, and a new platform started afresh is the only solution.

We've tried:

- Real identities (Facebook comments)

- Voting and self moderation (Reddit, HN, etc.)

- Strong moderation (Reddit, HN)

All within the context of rampant financialisation, land policies returning us to feudalism and continuous lying about the banking bailout including removing the one candidate who was going to take on the banks (Bernie).

Maybe it's not "the internet" that's the problem. Maybe the dissemination of information as we slide into this rentier hellpit is causing people to be pretty pissed off?

- European feudalism was an unusual system in that the government had no taxing power. The lord who owned land held the taxing power ("feudal dues") over that land, and the king funded himself by collecting feudal dues from land he owned personally, rather than e.g. by taxing the dukes. This might contrast with a more advanced state of civilization in which the caliph / emperor / whatever collected taxes directly from everywhere by virtue of being the supreme ruler, and paid a salary to his lower administrative functionaries. Or it might contrast with a system where the use of land wasn't much of a source of taxes. Or both of those latter things might be true simultaneously.

The US system of property taxes has a lot in common with the system I've described above, and some obvious differences. Similarities:

- The federal government ("king") can't assess property taxes. Only the states ("local lords") can do that.

- People other than the government cannot own land outright, but must pay the property tax ("feudal dues") for its use every year.

Of course, rather than the federal government receiving tax income based on federally owned land, it instead double-taxes the citizens of the states. (But on mercantile revenue rather than on land.) This is arguably worse than the feudal system.

Night and day.

"Devolved local state" is slightly more accurate than "private landlord", because unlike a landlord in a more commercialized society, a feudal lord was not legally able to sell the land he owned. He was legally able to govern it.

https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-va...

Judicial system engages in determining whether someone is guilty based on the evidence that it itself filters.

What about more complex things? Like what if I say "P = NP"? Is that a lie?

And then, do you want a trial for every comment? That will not work even for a fraction of comments.

That can't be determined to be a lie unless someone solves the problem. It's only a conjecture or assertion until then.

>And then, do you want a trial for every comment? That will not work even for a fraction of comments.

Only really has to apply to political statements made by the most powerful office holders, and only when contested, and only when there is a imminent intent to deceive and impact policy.

It's not really an all-or-nothing situation. It's just a matter of how much can be achieved within a reasonable cost.