This has been a basic tenet of the Internet for decades - until Twitter and FB became huge.
Now the regular people don't know or understand this and continue to interact with trolls (retweeting, subtweeting, basically bringing attention to their idiocy). This just feeds the anger cycle and shuts down all attempts at sane discourse.
You don't tell a troll you're not arguing with them, don't block them (that's a win), you just ignore it completely. If everyone would follow this rule, the crazies would be left alone shouting into the emptiness.
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/30662
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/rules-of-the-internet
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As an aside, Godwin's law is why code reviews had to be locked down at one of my previous employers:
That's a good one. Surprised I haven't heard that one before.
Also, sometimes it's not anyone's fault. It can just be down to circumstances.
None of the people were terrible. The company wasn't terrible. No-one was at fault.
Edit: To quote the CTO later on "I could see where the endless review discussions might end up heading so I split the team into product and project before we hit Godwin's law."
To quote the CTO later on "I could see where the endless review discussions might end up heading so I split the team into product and project before we hit Godwin's law."
If they had become vile then someone would have been fired. CTO did a good job and stepped in before that happened.
So it forms part of the why.
(still, I guess one should probably catch himself before violating Godwin's Law in a work environment...)
There certainly is a lot to be analyzed in the power relations of control of the means of production and distribution of information, from the society wide scale to the individual device, but technologists are remarkably bad at doing this.
You should optimize for very different metrics.
Twitter and FB brought a lot of people to the internet who weren't exposed to cultural things like Rule 14 that I feel went a long way to maintaining civility.
They also normalized bringing your identity online. Back in the days i.e. when slashdot would have been HN everyone was anonymous. I feel like it made it easier to focus on ideas instead of the people saying them.
Ah simpler times...
HNs rule if allowing throwaway accounts for discussing sensitive content is a good thing, but I'd prefer some kind of linking to the main account to make it obvious that if you're making a green account you troll it will effect your main account as well.
Real Names polices that have been tried have also proven to do nothing to remove trolls at all, in fact the only thing that remains is shit string trolls and extremist that want to yell at each other after the shit stirring trolls rile them up
It is concerning that I am seeing more and more people push for a resurgence of "Real Names" policies on the internet as a way to curb extremism and/or trolling even after it has been proven to do nothing of the sort
One of the underlying issues is the use of text. Text is a terrible way of conveying conversational meaning. Which I personally think is how many people consume the internet. "oh that is a good idea" can have so many shades of meaning from "that is actually a really terrible idea lets never talk about that again" to "yes I 100 percent agree lets do that right now". In conversation depending on which word gets the inference the meaning changes. In my head I hear it one way. But you read it a different way and the next person reads it in a totally different way.
This is only true if everyone agrees on facts. It is perfectly reasonable for people to get shocked by the other side's views if they do not disagree on the facts. When people are in fundamental disagreement with other viewpoints, I would say their behavior is often one angry message away from the anonymous troll personas. It is a very short fuse.
A good example is the idea of the "cancel culture". Do you think it is a reality? Someone like Stefan Molyneux would say yes. Someone like AoC would say no.
The person who thinks cancel culture is a real thing will say things which just seem completely idiotic to the other side, and vice versa. And they are still using real names.
Using real names in fact becomes a liability if there is actually a cancel culture. So, for example, I am safer making this point anonymously. If I accidentally end up offending you, at least I don't have to worry about losing my job.
That's the point, isn't it? A person can be good or bad, but when you group people together via social media, you find out just how many of them are just terrible human beings. People acting like humans is exactly what you don't want to happen.
The psychologists and drug companies would love that.
On the other hand, unless that's society consensus, you'll just have the crazies screaming, the media picking it up and amplifying it and the politicians acting on it.
Unless we vote on everything in person (or commit to not changing policy), not publicly disagreeing with something is a problem.
I've had this happen (accidentally, there wasn't any malicious intent, I believe) in a community I'm part of. Some people felt that a certain policy was unfair, so they petitioned for its removal. I (and apparently most others) hadn't bothered paying attention to the "Feature Request" forum for policies, so nobody spoke up to point out the side effects of the intended change. The change went through, we suffered the fallout. The side effects weren't "omg the community is broken now" large, otherwise the change would surely have been reverted, but they were significant enough that you could measure it.
That's my main issue with the whole public debate thing. You can either tune out and fatalistically accept whatever happens, or you can tune in and try to stop what you consider to be detrimental. There's no "hey, this works, let's just keep it working, and not spend so much energy on how it could be changed" position. I usually choose fatalism these days because my energy is limited, but of course that means that those who choose to invest their energy into politics instead of contribution are in charge, and I'm not so sure they're the people we want to be in charge.
Incidentally, PHP is a fantastic language and Haskell is hot garbage.
>Incidentally, PHP is a fantastic language and Haskell is hot garbage.
That's NOT Trolling if both of them are fantastic.
Saying stupid things or even outrageous (in your view) things is not trolling unless it's said for the sake of provoking people who hold those views. If you actually believe your stupid points of view, you should not be called a troll, merely an idiot.
Are you implying that there is some other motive to the President's tweeting? I always understood it as simply a way to piss off his opponents (and thus distract them with nonsense while energizing his supporters).
Gleefully annoying people by posting is the very definition of trolling.
That was sort of a rambling comment, but it’s just so odd to me that hate can be amplified so easily now a days. It’s been good to see the fight for equality lately with BLM, equality is a very American value (despite us needing to go so much further in that regard). But we have a President saying there are good racists out there and how we need to preserve the Confederacy. It makes no sense.
Is it? The USA has one of the least egalitarian societies in the developed world.
Assuming you're talking about equality of opportunity: given the ridiculous cost of higher education and healthcare in the USA (as opposed to most developed countries, where it's nearly free to attend even the best universities or get treated in hospital), do you really believe there's a high level of consideration given to equality in American society?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
"the troll in the proper sense is one who speaks to a community and as being part of the community; only he is not part of it, but opposed. And the community has some good in common, and this the troll must know, and what things promote and destroy it: for he seeks to destroy. Hence no one would troll the remotest Mysian, or even know how, but rather a Republican trolls a Democratic blog and a Democrat Republicans."
"... indeed some say that Socrates was a troll, and so that the good man also trolls. ... he told the Athenians to care for their souls, rather than money and honors, and showed that they lacked knowledge. And this is not trolling but the contrary, exhortation and truth-telling— even if the citizens get very annoyed. For annoyance results from many kinds of speech; and the peculiarity [idion] of the troll is not annoyance or controversy in general, but confusion and strife among a community who really agree."
Trump does it precisely for that reason. You can see his trolling spiking when he has to divert attention from bad news. Most of his activity is basically 50/50 between "energize base by creating outrage that feeds into victim narrative" and "define what news media will talk about next".
It's not particularly original, Berlusconi did it too (albeit with more traditional means).
Anyway, riling people up for your own entertainment is both contemptible and far too mainstream at the moment. Rod Liddle has had a newspaper column out of it for decades. As have the Sp!ked magazine lot.
If all trolling means is angrying up the masses, then I guess Mussolini and Juan Perón and Bernie Sanders are all fabulous trolls.
Traditional propaganda wants to be true, it wants to persuade you that what it saying is the truth. It bombards you with consistent messages that, repeated often enough, become true in the collective conscience. That’s the classic XX-century playbook.
Modern techniques are not meant to expose a consistent truth. Statements are often retracted or modified (“i was misinterpreted”). The real aim is to generate an immediate fightback, a virtual altercation, so that your side can claim to be a victim of “the system”; to force opponents into arguments that are based on false premises (and hence “unwinnable”) but that enable dogwhistling your sentiment to people; and to manipulate the media into covering these arguments rather than more substantive issues, effectively performing a DDOS on the capacity of regular people to be informed.
Modern politicians like Trump and Berlusconi thrive on the opposition arguing their proclamations as they were traditional propaganda, because it ends up amplifying the subtexts that establish an emotional bond with their electorate. Truth does not matter (“enough of experts”), not even establishing truth matters; what matters is triggering the response you want out of your opposition, which cascades into positive electoral effects by counterpoint. That’s very troll-like.
Some of these techniques are not entirely new, of course, but they seem to have become the principal instruments of political action now, and that’s novel.
Isn't that just every social media or discussion site? This seems like a nothing statement.
Do you see ads next to this comment? What about on IRC? Mastodon? What if I told you that even many of the youtube series you may like are available on other platforms and you can pay a subscription fee to see them without ads?
There are alternative to "engagement" based networks, they exist now and you can support them and choose to use them over Twitter and Facebook.
https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...
Yelling one-liners at each other is the opposite of a thoughtful discussion.
Like WTF... it’s worse than having a yelling match out in the driveway for neighbors to hear because eventually the neighbors forget.
> This has been a basic tenet of the Internet for decades - until Twitter and FB became huge.
This predates Internet by a long way and it is called "common sense".
Now of course, if you systematically do that, the version of reality that trolls are broadcasting wins. Because no other then trolls voice is to be heard.
And that what happening on the internet for years, where people who were harassed and trolled were expected to shut up and leave the place. And recently, I am equally thankful to historians who do engage with what trolls are saying. Because "smart" people just used to let trolls version of it to stand.
That rule made people who followed it fail and loose. So, people are not following it anymore.
What is complicity through, is to favoring trolls speech. Telling troll victim to shut up or to tell him that what is happening to him is because he was not sufficiently silent.
Sometimes, trolling is crazies. Other times, and quite often, it is tactic to shut up opponents. And it works and used to work. People who ignored trolls are not to be heard, because trolling stopped their speech.
And yet other times, what you call troll is someone espousing genuine opinion, but it is too comfortable and politically beneficial to pretend it does not exists.
A: "Nobody is saying X!" B: "This person here is saying X, I am getting tons of messages to that effect!" A: "These are just trolls! It is all ironical and they dont count!"
If you are invested in people claiming X is not existing or not an issue, then it is comfortable to pretend that anyone who say X is a troll. But often they are not. They are expressing their opinions or are trying push others toward that opinion.
That part of about people who will insist that someone is troll to stop discussion, because they dont like the discussion against said person. It was not meant to be about people who simply do not cared about the whole thing, decided this is not the case where they will join the argument.
I am definitely not saying that everyone must join every single argument or outraged group on the internet.
If you’re interested, the article below gives a great overview on the origin of this concept and different disciplines’ view on the subject (it’s open-access as well).
[1] Bruns, A. (2019). Filter bubble. Internet Policy Review, 8(4). https://www.doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1426
> "..indeed, search and social media users generally appear to encounter a highly centrist media diet that is, if anything, more diverse than that of non-users..."
"Appear to encounter" is a vague. Thst aside, encounter doesn't mean you're open to those ideas. Imagine seeing something in your feed that is close to a polar opposite of your view. The majority of the time that is interpreted as "That's BS. See. I knew I was right." That is, few have the time to pause and ask "what if?" or "did I miss something?" The exposure doesn't open their mind, it backfires and pulls the blinders even more narrow. I missed where this study addresses that boomerang effect.
Who are non-users? Fox News watchers? Or Rachel Maddow devotes? That's a pretty low bar. More diversity than than isn't saying much? Also, diversity in sources isn't necessarily diversity in ideas and perspectives. Most media sources are so worried about readers/viewers and ad revenue that they dare not venture too far from the prevailing narrative. Add in cancel-culture and an endless list of triggers and the reporting deviates further and further from traditional journalisms. Yes, content is delivers, how often would it qualify as intellectual junkfood?
> "Nechushtai and Lewis reported that Google News searchers in the US were directed overwhelmingly to 'longstanding national newspapers and television networks'"
That might be true, but it's not proof that FB or EC don't exist. I don't want to get off topic but most of the major news sources suffer from mono-vision, narrative preservation, parroting "conventional wisdow", and so on. The lack of depth and breadth and the sources is and continues to be a problem.
Furthermore, getting results in a SERP does not mean there was a click-through to read. Again, "exposure" isn't necessarily leading to more diverse ideas.
> "...fragmentation of national mediaspheres..."
IDK. From multiple sources I've read that limited ownership is leading to consolidation. With what data do they make this assumption? Most seem to agree that consolidation of ownership has led to lens that zoom in and stay tightly on message, as opposed to zoom out and look for possible other insights.
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I have to read more later. Hopefully it gets better. I'm not so sure this holds enough water for me. Yes, that's my interpretation. It will be interesting to see how this pov is treated here. Ironic?
> The former is passive, and you have no choice. The latter is human nature. Birds of a feather and such.
Both concepts are closely related to the idea of homophily, the preference to connect or communicate with like-minded individuals (birds of a feather, as you say). In Bruns’ definition, echo chambers mean the preference to connect, while filter bubbles mean the preference to communicate. Both of them are, as you say, human nature at their core. The concepts go further than homophily, though, in that they also exclude individuals or information outside of the chamber or bubble.
> "Appear to encounter" is a vague.
This is from the research abstract summarising recent empirical findings. I think some critical distance is warranted.
> Thst aside, encounter doesn't mean you're open to those ideas. (…) The exposure doesn't open their mind, it backfires and pulls the blinders even more narrow. I missed where this study addresses that boomerang effect.
This effect is addressed as a “oppositional reading stance” in the section “Social and Political Relevance and Impact”.
> Again, "exposure" isn't necessarily leading to more diverse ideas.
You are correct. However, if individuals are encountering information contrary to their bubble’s or chamber’s belief, we would have to conclude that there is no FB or EC at work as it has failed to exclude this information. If the bubble or chamber was as robust as claimed by Pariser and others, this content would not have reached the individual.
> From multiple sources I've read that limited ownership is leading to consolidation.
You are referring to ownership structures. “Fragmentation of national mediaspheres” here refers to the audience, specifically the concern that the increasing number of media offers, especially with the advent of the internet, would fragment the national audience and have adverse effects on discourse and democracy.
> That might be true, but it's not proof that FB or EC don't exist.
It is not epistemologically possible to prove that these effects do not exist. There is limited evidence that they exist in specific contexts, but barely any evidence for a population-wide effect.
But that's perfectly compatible with echo chambers. They will interact with the outside world, but their interpretation of things that happen comes from within the echo chamber. Anti-Vaxxers know that there are people believing in vaccinations, they read about them in the papers, but then they might just post a comment "it's what Bill Gates wants you to believe so he can sell more 5G towers to Huawei". The echo chamber does echo their world view and interpretation of events, and just exposing them to "diverse news" won't change that, or we really wouldn't have a large variety of fringe groups.
However, this is unrelated to the common understanding echo chambers. A big problem with the concept is that there is no robust definition, and the fact that it is used widely in mainstream discussion does not make it easier. The tendency to preferentially connect or communicate with like-minded people (homophily) is nothing new, we encounter it everywhere—think hobby groups, special-interest forums like HN etc. Social media’s affordances especially promote homophily. What the filter bubble/echo chamber concepts add to this preference is an exclusion of outsiders. The above commenter summarised a purported consequence as “you’re sucked into an echo chamber with only news that confirms your views”. In this sense, using diverse news would be incompatible with an echo chamber.
What is especially interesting, then, is that ideological polarisation is very much alive on the internet, despite (or indeed because of) the absence of echo chambers.
I thoroughly recommend the article I linked above. It touches upon these concepts and cites current research that allows you to dig deeper.
It's difficult with academic researchers using terms with significantly different meaning from the public at large. I wonder whether it's more harm- than useful, as it'll typically lead to the public either misunderstanding what they say or dismiss them completely because they're "obviously talking nonsense".
The scientific research into echo chambers seems almost straw-man-y, e.g. "echo chambers are perfectly sealed to the outside, no contact whatsoever is possible", so they check and find "that's not really happening" because people might talk about politics with one group exclusively, but will also talk about sports so they're not in an echo chamber. Does that provide value, when they are in a political echo chamber?
I also get what you mean by “straw-man-y”. I think the issue is that definitions have to be robust and hypotheses falsifiable in order to make them researchable, so they must be kind of stringent. Exactly as you say, someone might be in a political echo chamber, but that is not their entire life. They have peers, family, friends, colleagues that also expose them to political information. By focusing so much on the online, the echo chamber assumption was very limited from the start.
Indeed, this is how the infotainment ecosystem thrives.
That's what radicalizes people. That, and the easy ability to mob folks who don't toe the line on whatever issue. The most disgusting takes on both sides are amplified, not blocked. And even when blocked, still screen-capped. You see the most unreasonable perspectives amplified but the broad middle folk, or those who have legitimate points, either driven off the platform or who just aren't amplified.
EDIT:I know this is usually frowned upon on HN, but I must ask: Why the downvotes?
I'm not sure echo chambers are bad - I like the "warrens and plazas" idea. If ideas really are a market - or more relevantly, policy is a market - we'd never buy anything if we only had half-baked prototypes to choose from.
That said, twitter really makes me appreciate traditional politics.
Party states in their manifesto they value x, y, z Party representative does something that is consistent, or not, with that (individuals get to decide this, even if the media get to present "an angle").
Some "undesirable group" (Neo-nazis, tankies, etc) may vote for that party, but they don't control the message. Or if they do, the party leader has failed.
Twitter politics, by contrast, is built on the fundamental attribution error. If you don't take the most charitable interpretation of my side, and the worst interpretation of theirs, you're my enemy.
What reddit, twitter even youtube get wrong is that mixed up and down votes might mean very engaging but it does not mean good wholesome healthy content, infact it definitely means the opposite. If you just amplify engagement as they do today it might bring more clicks but it hurts society and builds extremists.
You can still refer to the absence of filters, you read people's opinion without the filter of a newspaper editor. But I never thought newspaper editors should be trusted for anything.
There’s a rough road to consensus ahead for human culture as long as there’s this attitude that social media is “good” or “bad” rather than “inevitably chaotic”. if you look beyond the obvious bots you’ll realize these conversations are going to happen eventually with or without highly polarizing platforms designed to be addictive. our social media folks have only greased the tracks into conflict that was going to happen anyway.
Just a few years ago you could find plenty of opinion articles talking about the necessity of “the marketplace of ideas” for political discourse. None of that now....
People filtered in the past by what they cared about and who they spoke to. Now much of that filtering and indeed much of your friends are algorithmic suggestions. We're put into interactions on the internet with people you'd conceivably never meet offline. The fact that wasn't true in the past isn't white supremacy or the patriarchy or manufactured consent, it's logistic. It simply wasn't possible for the average person pre-phone, full-stop. Now people follow the people that they feel epitomize the precepts of the identity they agree with most which means naturally the popular people to follow must either become purer representations of the ideology or become less popular than those who are willing to adopt a more refined tankie, neo-nazi, athletic, techie, or what have you interests based persona.
And many many people still believe strongly in the marketplace of ideas. Just look at the Harper's letter from last week. I doubt the many intellectuals there don't represent a broad base of three population.
But the suggestions are based on what you like (or what the algorithm "thinks" you like), and I don't believe that we're converting communists into libertarians because Twitter says "other people you might like: ".
The process is very similar but has gotten gotten much more efficient, because you're not limited to the people in your immediate vicinity. You don't need to move to a big city to find other people who think like you. The world has become a village, and you can now connect with your ideological doppelgangers around the world from the comfort of your home.
We've seen how accellerated communications create "social" bubbles and outrage, while we know true policy-making will require much more refinement of ideas through representatives that are eager to think beyond their tribe and tend to the greater good. The opposite is happening in later populist movements, and we instead witness corruption at the highest position exploiting outrage and dissent.