I remember one person posting hand drawn graphs without a scale claiming global warming is just a cyclical process. Does it makes sense to report someone for bad science? They probably believe what they posted to be true, and others who read that unrefuted reply may begin to think the same. So I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on Twitter, but as you imagine this was a fools errand.
I gave up and blew up all of my "social" media because they didn't serve any purpose.
Maybe an invite-only platform could have higher signal with:
- multiple "vouches" of others to get an invitation
- frequency/reputation micropayment cost to post
- reputation/karma that isn't apparent or chased, and granted some with the invite
- elimination of pile-on
- multifaceted voting based on specific aspects of relevance, agreement, and insight
- humor voted/tagged and filtered by readers to avoid using dv for that
- dv has moderator-visible reasoning to double-check and prevent spurious dv
- prevention of dv retribution
- reduced anonymity (first name and picture) for higher-quality interactions
- mediation and de-escalation facilities such as pre-comment emotional content scanning (AI-based sarcasm detection would rock), posting delay of 2 hours, and side chats
- login required to view content, no search engine spidering
- operate as a sustainable nonprofit to avoid pressures of corporate profiteering
- servers and legally based in a country the US and EU cannot control
The only thing that matters is the size of community. Beyond a certain scale, it always breaks down. Ultimately, the problem is the people.
It naturally attracts people interested in its themes and subjects, and doesn't try to cater to everyone needs. Hell, it isn't even trying to be beautiful or having any order other than chronological timeline and upvoted posts!
No wonder it hasn't become a toxic wasteland.
It isn't inherently social media or democracy that's the problem, it's the incentives behind it.
/s
It might be bad analogies but the lack of flash a-la Drudge Report (haven't seen it in years) or the old Fry's Electronics (stores and their website). I think it somewhat deters engagement addiction and focuses on content.
It is a toxic wasteland, though, at least sometimes. Also depends on who you are and how you experience the world - HN can be a very ugly place.
HN is no cakewalk. There are lots of very vocal climate deniers, homophobes, Nazis, etc. here. I've been called hateful slurs on HN that nobody has said to me anywhere else. Much of this flies under the radar of the mods and the users are frequently not warned or banned.
HN suffers all the same problems as Twitter or any of the others.
Twitter is the opposite. The most inflammatory comments trigger the most engagement, and so get the most visibility.
> In general, the HN system (tech+mods+community) rewards thoughtful content and penalizes shallow nonsense
I don't see this happening on HN. The shallow nonsense isn't the problem, it's the hateful opinions and "carefully reasoned, smart sounding" racism that is the problem. Calling it shallow nonsense makes it sound like no big deal or low effort hate posts. But that's not what I'm talking about.
People say the worst things here but they use a large vocabulary and so it seems to get a pass. The hate here is very similar to the hate I see elsewhere and often it is much much worse here than on Twitter, in my personal experience.
Can you give an example of a thread that turned out that way? I'm genuinely curious if I've been missing something, or if I've just managed to steer clear of topics that end up like that.
$5 words instead of plain speak is an accessibility problem but anti-intellectualism never solved anything. Maybe inferiority feelings or catastrophizing? Do what I do, subscribe to the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day. :) Go through the GRE prep materials if you want a bigger vocab. Heck, I would get a used unabridged dictionary and make it a point to work from cover-to-cover. Watch those obnubilated smarty-pants shudder in fear. :)
I've never been downvoted for making a controversial point on HN. And, I have ONLY been downvoted for making glib, lazy, or intellectually weak arguments. This is exactly how it should be.
And on twitter I see little outrage and disinformation. Our experiences are so far apart on social media that I'm not sure anecdotes will do much for the conversation here.
Can you point to some example topics I should keep an eye out for?
That's probably because you don't post any opinions that the HN hivemind finds controversial. Stray outside the lines just a bit and expect moderator censure and downvotes/flags.
Sometimes I end up softening or changing someone's position on something, sometimes I soften or change mine or learn a lot of new things, and I have to imagine that happens with some lurkers as well, and I'm not sure what more I could hope for, besides wishing it was easier sometimes.
Compare this to Reddit, where some high-traffic sub-Reddits (/r/atheism cough cough) delete links to scientific evidence showing AA efficacy: https://archive.is/gEXfA Why let facts get in the way of a good social networking rage fest?
PS: Your usage of “smart racism,” “nazis,” “homophobes” etc are strong bayesian evidence (to me) that you’re just looking to guilt-trip people and victimize yourself. The only kind of racism I have seen on HN is the kind I see literally everywhere: people don’t really care about people not in their bubbles. This is better named selfishness than racism, and it’s inherent in human nature. (If you’re curious, I am middle-eastern, and not exactly binary myself; I have been abused when I was younger for being “transgenderish.” Which kind of forced me to adopt more conforming, binary social masks.)
I've also seen anti-religious sentiments and anti-chinese nationalism popping up pretty proeminintely every now and again. Climate change denial is also rarely missing from any longer conversation about climate.
Edit: Here's an example that eventually got flagged, but sparked a long conversation that had a few supporters as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26990070
I'm not sure what you'd like to see changed in this case?
Ideally, when someone claims that they can tell how smart someone is from how they look, that should be downvoted to oblivion and receive overwhelming counter-evidence or no attention at all.
Of course, what happened was quite OK, and much better than many other corners of the internet. But still, it's proof that that there is some explicit racism on HN, not just people not caring about others.
What does this have to do with doing something about the Iranian regime or Chinese regime or any other regime? I barely even discussed homophobia.
And note that you can be anti-fundamentalist without being anti religion, and you can be against the Chinese regime without being anti Chinese people (just like you can be anti Israel without being antisemitic).
That means you can, at best, have a small team of moderators/community managers, likely with the person who has manifested the editorial guidelines at the top. This does not scale, so the community is limited in size.
When I think back to the times of TV channels, professional magazines, radio shows etc., I remember how amazing the quality of that content could be. Reading the same magazines printed back then today confirms that to me.
Curated content wins.
Sure, some TV channels and magazines were terrible instead, but that's just because I did not agree with their curation.
Instead of having one popularity contest, it was like a popularity contest that qualified you for another popularity contest. Theoretically the metamods were "good" posters, but being a "good" poster was ridiculously easy - you could just rack up karma by parroting the hivemind and bashing Microsoft or whatever.
Also, I noticed how most underdog / less socially-acceptable lifestyle/interest forums tend to be pleasant, humorous, and reasonable. The other aspect maybe that marginalized people (without chips on their shoulders resentment) know what it feels like to be othered / not treated well and go out-of-their-way to be friendlier. For example, I can't remember any LGBT+ people who aren't cool, decent, and sociable... and I'm the goofy, straight, ally interloper stealing all the pretty cis girls (or they're stealing me, IDK).
On niche interests-side where it's a small world, I think the cosiness reduced sized and inherent common interests also reinforce, promote better behavior, and friendliness.
Twitter and such definitely throw unbounded numbers of random people at each other, and so the odds of clashing are astronomically-higher. In this alternate (mainstream) universe, the sad part is that social and online ideological Balkanization has cemented echo chambers of memetic civil war; a people divided-and-conquered.
If Twitter/FB were to do this, they'll have 1/5th the customer base but will have more sane content.
I don't have twitter but i check some users(like the pico8 dev) once a week for interesting content. I don't see anything offtopic there and it's very nice and sometimes i learn something even in the replies. Same with certain subreddits. Just consuming in polling mode, helps a lot.
Cool headed, interesting or curious do not generate enough click through as much as controversial, conspiracy theory, outrageous, hateful, etc. It's interesting that there's no ban on political or controversial content in HN but still, you don't see them take over the platform. The incentive is simply not there!
I think twitter really needs a downvote button. But they prefer relying more on their AIs instead of crowdsourced moderation. Probably so they can sell more ads.
On that note: If even HN can't do it, I think some of these topics can't be discussed online at all. Here you've got great moderation, a high SNR, and vanishingly few of the pathologies that infest most web fora. Almost everything else is a step down in quality.
They can be, just not in a any format where anyone can post, let's say, 10 paragraphs of whatever, and then hundreds of people can jam their 40 paragraph rebuttals and threats right underneath it. While convenient for many purposes, the formats where the interactions are this tight and integrated are not the only formats.
You need something more like a weblog-structured community, where people can post their lengthy thoughts at their leisure, and others can post their own rebuttals on their own weblogs, but I think it's actually important that there not be tight integration such that everyone is getting a phone notification every time someone posts some link to them.
I would agree that online platforms that stick everyone into one metaphorical mosh pit have certain topics that simply can't be discussed reasonably, but "metaphorical mosh pit" isn't the only option.
If we can respectfully disagree and see each other's point-of-views without ghosting each other, then we're dialoguin'. Otherwise, we're just talking past each other, seeking karma brownie points, or taking out our frustrations.. and then what point is there to participating if there isn't meaningful communication?
The political differences here are often stark. You also have a fair amount of Independents here which makes this place a bit more tolerable for me. I really can't stand left-wing or right-wing ideologues, much less the extremists.
HN caters to people from all across the US (most of the audience is outside Silicon Valley and the global audience continues to grow based on dangs postings).
You could say it's mostly male, but I've seen more usernames with women's names in them.
There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party, and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently - and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.
Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses.
― Gore Vidal
Maybe it's me, but I don't think about participants' gender or if there's enough/too much of any particular attribute group. I infer your point is that HN extends well-beyond the stereotypical academic, software engineer, or tech entrepreneur: male, Caucasian/Asian/Indian subcontinental, high-income or college student, SF to Milpitas.
The rest of this is pretty spot on, and your assessment of my sentiment was spot on.
Property for me, not for thee...
We need platforms that encourage the good stuff and minimize or discourage the bad. Not the other way around.
I think there's a virtuous spiral when the one (specific platform features, philosophy, and conventions) reinforces the other (people's perceptions, attitudes, and interactions), and people care about excellence.
The for-profit, outrage-seeking, clickbait model of "engagement" is the opposite of that.
We can't fix everything with technology (if there's still people problems) or with good people (if the platform fails them) alone.
I know that scaling moderation is difficult, and can’t imagine how it’s all kept in check here.
How Twitter intend to address that is interesting.
HN started niche and attracted a narrow audience intent on productive communication; mostly college grads and/or positive attitude people (successful attributes, even if a bit rowdy and troublemaking at times), and not many lottery ticket buyers [1]. It is very open, so it could be overwhelmed by less signal crowds over time should it hit mainstream visibility.
Do some platforms need to limit the number of participants and do stack-ranking dismissals? IIRC, the ASW platform culled a bunch of accounts.
There have been studies on social media interactions (I can't recall the links atm, and am almost done posting from the loo :) and "captological" aspects that influence people's online perception, behaviors, and reactions. I think the problems are the people, the power they're given, the presence/lack of fairness they perceive, what they're presented with, and whether or not the community defends itself and its values strongly (I think dang does a Herculean job with this).
[1] Best characterizes the lottery ticket phenomenon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393875
Personal details don't deter it, as shown by the various platforms that were inhabited by the alt-right. There's a cultural lack of responsibility for the truth.
https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2205-there-is-an-inverse-rela...
Twitter is pretty close to that, except it’s default opt-in rather than default opt-out. Meaning everyone can see your content by default, rather than you having to explicitly allow rando’s to see your content and reply to you.
But if you follow people who make high-quality posts, and unfollow, mute, and/or block people who produce all noise and no signal, you’ll have a pretty good professional and personal networking experience.
Most other social media have ways of curating your feed, but you have to proactively do it, can’t just rely on the social media platform to do it for you.
The more I think about those problems the more I'm convinced up- and downvotes are a mistake in general. They can only cause damage and are completely useless as they're not even used for the same thing by different people. For example when someone gets 5 downvotes it's probably for at least 2 different reasons, none of which are communicated to the poster. When I get a random downvote I'd really like to know if it was warranted, but there's no way to find out.
If any kind of rating system had to exist I'd vote for something like tags; with users being able to tag any content with any 1-2 words, and frequent ones are visible without some extra clicks. For one this would give more nuanced information, and at the same time it would make tons of content much easier to find or filter.
- Popularity itself is a very poor metric for quality. It's mostly a metric for ... popularity. Which is to say: broad appeal, simplicity, emotive appeal (or engagement), and brevity. This does however correspond reasonably well to sales and advertising metrics.
- The most critical question the designer of a moderation / rating system needs to ponder is what is the goal? See https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28jfk4/content...
- My own goal tends toward maximised overall quality, with a high favouring of truth value and relevance.
- There's some value to a multi-point rating scale. This is called a "Likert Scale", typically an odd-number of points (3, 5, 7, ...), most commonly encountered as a star-scale system. Amazon and Uber are the most familiar of these today, and highlight failure modes. If users' ratings are rebalanced based on their own average rating, at least some of the issues go away (e.g, a very positive rater giving away 5/5 will have those ratings discounted, a conservative rater offering 3/5 on average would see those uprated). The adjusted average becomes the rebalanced rating.
- Note that a capped cumulative score is not the same as an averaged Likert score. Slashdot's moderating system is an example of the former. It ... kind of works but mostly doesn't. Highly-ranked content tends to be good, but much content deserving higher ratings is utterly ignored.
- Taking number of interactions and applying a logarithmic function tends to give a renormalised popularity score. That is, on a log-log basis, you'll tend to see a linear scaling from "1 person liked this" to "10 billion people liked this" (roughly the range of any current global-scale ratings system). See also: Power Distribution, Zipf Function.
- Unbiased and uncorrupted expertise should rate more strongly. In averaging the inputs of 300 passengers + 2 pilots for an airplane's flight controls, my preferred weighting is roughly 3300*0 and 11. Truth or competence are not popularity games.
- Sometimes a distinct "experts" vs. "everyone" scoring is useful. I've recently seen an argument that film reviews accomplish this, with the expert reviewers' scores setting expectations for "what kind of film is this" and the popular rating for "how well did this film meet established expectations"? There are very good bad films, and very bad good films, as well as very bad bad films.
- "The wisdom of crowds" starts failing rapidly where the crowd is motivated, gamed, bought, or otherwise influenced. Such behaviour must* be severely addressed if overall trust in a ratings system is to remain.
- Areas of excellence ("funny", "informative", "interesting", etc.) are somewhat useful but very often the cost of acquiring that information is excessively high. Indirect measures of attributes may be more useful, and there's some research in this area (Microsoft conducted studies on classification of Usenet threads based on their "shape", in the 2000s. Simply based on the structure of reply chains, there were useful classifications: "dead post", "troll", "flameware", "simple question everybody can answer", "hard question many can guess at but one expert knows the answer", etc.
- Actual engagement with content, even just for a voting or other action is a small fraction of total views. Encouraging more rating behaviour often backfires. Make do with the data that occurs naturally, incentivised contribution skews results.
- Sortition in ratings may be useful. It greatly increases the costs of gaming.
- As is sortition of the presented content. Where it's not certain what is (or isn't) highly-ranked content, presenting different selections to different reader cohorts can help minimise popularity bias effects.
- Admitting that any achieved ratings score is at best a rough guess of the ground truth is tremendously useful. Fuzzing ratings based on the likely error can help balance out low-information states in trying to assess ratings.
Many social media platforms have tried this and failed Even at the lowest level of having to get an invite from someone you know - its never worked:
- Clubhouse - Google+ - ELLO - Mastodon
The paradox here is you need people to generate sustainable communities. When you don't have enough people, users will stop using the platform. Another classic case of this is all the "decentralized" social platforms like Diaspora and others. Great idea, great implementation, but without enough people, its doomed to fail.
That said, the exception is a network created for an extant community. In fact, most of the major successful social media networks have emerged from just such a community, and quite frequently one that's academically oriented.
Email, Usenet, and Facebook all emerged out of academia. Email and Usenet with early Arpanet and major research universities. Facebook was once literally Harvard. Several other early networks such as The WELL and Slashdot were strongly adjacent to these.
Several early BBS systems emerged out of or alongside military service communities. I don't recall if it was AOL, Prodigy, or another early network which was strongly popular among US military personnel and families (a large, reasonably cohesive community, widely distributed, with contacts and ongoing communications in distant locations).
YC's HN would be another example.
But generally, creating an early cohesive community is a challenge, and many of the tricks for short-cutting this process tend also to greatly diminish the long-term value and prospects of the discussion platform.
My own contention is that Google+ actually did have a strong internal-to-the-network (not just Google) community (though one that excluded a great many people). I feel the social network hurt itself by trying to open too quickly (Ello certainly did), as well as by Google's own greatly bifurcated affinity groups: technologists on the one hand, and marketers on the other. Marketing/advertising is toxic to social cohesion, and this showed early in G+ evolution.
Why do you think this is a good thing?
> - servers and legally based in a country the US and EU cannot control
I see two ways that could go: either somewhere that China and/or Russia have control over, or in an unstable third-world dictatorship. Do you have any specific countries where none of the above would apply, or do you prefer one of the latter two to the US and EU?
Somewhere like Iceland or Greenland.
I'm thinking of some kind of ML scheme where the site analyzes your comment and sees if it is similar enough to existing comments.
Or perhaps also analyzes your comments to see if they are similar to older comments you have made already.
The root cause is that platforms like Twitter rely on engagement (and maybe more importantly, growth of said engagement) for their lifeblood.
When that's the case, the incentive will always be to increase engagement at all costs and nothing drives engagement like flamewars and other lowest common denominator garbage.
Additionally, as long as the social currency is "how much other members of the userbase like your posts" you'll wind up with either a single hivemind or multiple warring factions IMO (e.g. conservatives vs. liberals on FB)
HN manages to keep its discourse level fairly high because of this, I believe. HN does not need to grow nor generate revenue directly. A Twitter-alike, curated as strictly as HN, might work. It might even be able to turn a profit, if the goal was sustainable profit and not some impossible dream of unbounded growth concocted by investors wanting the next trillion-dollar hit.
Everyone everywhere on the internet thinks that the "other side" lacks critical thinking skills. I'm not surprised your effort failed, I'm sure if you offered to teach me critical thinking skills I'd wonder who the heck you thought you were.
Frankly your confidence in your own impeccable critical thinking skills cast doubts. The smartest people are those who know they can be deceived. If you don't have the humility to check your own reasoning then you are probably wrong about something.
I also said it was a fools errand - something that had little chance of succeeding against the waves of misinformation on Twitter. And finally, you’re right that knowing you can be wrong and challenging your own beliefs is fundamental to critical thinking.
It's not even about critical thinking skills. The 'other side' is often starting with a completely different set of facts. The only difference being which ones were highlighted and which were omitted.
This doesn't even touch on straight up falsities yet.
Until the sides can agree on some base first principles, it's going to be a hard problem to solve.
This point cannot be emphasized enough. I have encountered people on the opposing side of an issue who have stronger critical thinking skills than people who I agree with (and probably even myself). The differences come about due to a differences in the foundations of our knowledge or on pivotal points where neither side can claim to have an definitive answer.
If one person's POV is that <institution> should help while the other person's is that <institution> can only hurt, then they are never going to agree no matter how many links and memes and snarky comebacks they throw at each other.
You see this a lot on Hacker News too, like when the discussion touches anything related to moderation, community standards/guidelines, censorship, fact-checking, etc. A particularly popular viewpoint around here seems to be that the government (or sometimes, any powerful corporation) cannot possibly be allowed to be involved in determining the validity of any claim, particularly if that claim is controversial, i.e. there are prominent people on both sides who appear to feel strongly about the claim.
If an anonymous stranger comes to me with "Let me tell you that how you think is wrong" - yea, I don't think I'm going to buy that.
(Not that this is ever successful in places like Twitter.)
It is still a matter of trust. Approach me with respect and I'll consider your POF. Approach me with "Your reasoning process is flawed beyond your understanding" and really - who the heck are you? In the anonymity of the internet you could be anyone.
The whole thing is philosophically weird, but practically speaking, one can somewhat know that people saying aliens built the pyramids are the ones lacking critical thinking. For example, I don’t think people promoting the cancel culture lack critical thinking, even though I’d bet on it being a long-term disaster. But most anti-vaccers are pretty obviously lacking some critical thinking skills.
It’s generally the ability to tell your political interests apart from your epistemic knowledge. In simpler terms, the ability to engage less in wishful thinking. While perfection is impossible, I do think it’s possible to improve in this ability. Proving it to others is another challenge; You probably need to predict counterintuitive results consistently for people to somewhat trust in you.
Critical thinking is a skill that is almost useless to most people and can lead to being a net negative. It's the skill of critique. One can be amazing at critical thinking and be absurdly terrible at constructive thinking. Politics in general needs far less critique and far more construction. It's really bad to get people very aware of just how badly they're exploited but then to give them no potential solutions to solve it. That's basically what wokism has done recently. Every solution proposed by them is so unpalatable to the rest of the nation that there is no place for constructing new policies.
The left has this problem especially bad since the radical left makes being really good at critique a whole component of their intellectual tradition:
Only because we're effectively alone in the responsibility.
Hint: lack of research isn't limited to Twitter, folks. It's in your pub, your break room, etc
All of this makes educating people in venues like Twitter (and some of these exist outside of the online world) a very difficult prospect.
Instead of lionizing celebrities, money, infamy, or hyper individualism, maybe it would be worth respecting wisdom, mastery, expertise, monetary-agonistic accomplishment, and insightfulness.
The book The Mirror Effect by Dr. Drew comes to mind.
I wonder if that's ever happened in the history of humanity. I have my doubts.
- Genuine hippie communes (Do kibbutzes count?)
- Amish
- Indigenous tribes where elders are respected
- Rural/suburban Minnesotans because they tend towards hardy dealing with life and climate struggles and unimpressed by immodesty
- In the old days (80's/90's), my grandparents knew most of their neighbors, grocery store cashiers, butcher, hair stylist, and a number of other people well. What ever happened to that? I don't even know any of the neighbors in my apartment complex despite introducing myself, and one (Louis Vuitton-strutting cliché) woman neighbor next door won't even acknowledge my presence with pleasantries in passing. WTH.
It's better to follow creative people. They tend to have much more interesting things to say. Follow people like John Carmack, Simone Giertz, or The Onion instead.
My Twitter experience isn't nearly as good as it was some years ago, to be sure, but I follow fairly few people outside the "friends of friends" perimeter and rarely follow people who are given to performative outrage, even if they are people I generally agree with. While I do block people occasionally, I'm more free with "mute temporarily", "mute forever" and, importantly, "turn off retweets" -- that can have an almost magically cleansing effect on your timeline.
I very much find the Twitter experience is what you make of it. I did it wrong the first time I tried twitter, and I hated and abandoned it, too.
Second time around, I started with a handful of tech people that post interesting content or work in projects I'm involved or interested in, and organically grew from there. I also follow a couple people that post local (to my small city) traffic/news/etc. And within the last year, I follow some people that post COVID stuff about my region, who produce charts and stuff that are 10x more useful than the official government sources (eg: updated and realistic R calculations, include charts with hospitalizations/deaths, etc).
What is absolutely not useful is anything political (the replies to COVID stuff tend to get political, so I also ignore that), or pretty much anything in "trending".
Also don't be afraid to mute or unfollow people, and click "Not interested in this -> show fewer retweets/likes from this person" -- all things that have made it tolerable and even useful. If disinformation/lies or other similar nonsense starts getting in my feed, I do what I need to get rid of it. This has meant sometimes unfollowing someone I otherwise like (eg, they're replying that disinformation and causing fights) but honestly, it's just not worth it to me.
By curating my feed, I'm in general happy with it.
It would be lovely to have a platform/forum where the whole concept was just that the moderation would ban people not only for spreading misinformation or making ad-hominem attacks, but also for applying unsound logic / not citing sources when asked / etc. All the same stuff that'd get a journal paper rejected during peer-review.
(With public records of moderator decisions, and the ability to appeal a decision; but where the "appeals process" just translates to your post going through a Slashdot-like "bunch of regular users given temporary moderation duties approve/deny your post" — which, given the type of user who'd want to be on a platform like this, likely wouldn't be any more friendly to your post than the mods would be.)
It'd sure be a niche platform, but that'd match well with how much work the moderation staff would have to do to keep up with discussion on it. I'd pay to be there!
(Yes, this is what scientific journals were originally supposed to be: heavily-moderated public forums for conversation between scientists. They don't serve this function well any more, as they've been parasitized by the function of serving the needs of academic clout-seekers.)
I work in biotech, and lets pretend I'm an expert on a topic- say immunology. When I get home from work, what would motivate me to sift through countless posts about misinformation and flag them? No amount of money is going to persuade me - but that's just me ofcource.
Turn it around. Make it like Reddit's /new: have moderators able to sift through countless posts about misinformation and approve the good ones. It's not a large difference in what moderators end up doing — they still have to at least skim over all the misinformation. But it's psychologically very different — you can just "walk away" from annoying things that stink of quackery up-front, while "engaging with" only the things that seem good, and eventually "upvoting" the things that still seem good even after you've read them carefully.
Yes, I'm actually suggesting that every post on such a site would go through a moderation queue. (Just one that any user can dip into to look at, if they like, but only moderators can actually vote on.) Or, if not every post, then a good sampling of them; or maybe every post from users with less than N approved posts.
The big effect of that would be that there wouldn't be "countless posts about misinformation." There'd be a couple, mostly by new users with clear signal of that user just being an attacker to the community who doesn't actually want to become part of it (and therefore, can just be banned wholesale.) Noise would drop over time, because crackpots wouldn't even get a short blip of engagement. They'd get none. Their account would die in the crib, never witnessed by anyone but moderators and curious /new viewers.
Combine it with a KYC mechanism (so users can't keep making new accounts) and the moderation load actually becomes reasonable.
That's one practical aspect, the second is, people are often times misinformed themselves and are simply posting something they heard from their buddy or on TV/youtube/etc in good faith - they're not bad-actors looking to attack the community.
Those are just my thoughts, but what do I know, I'm not an expert on these topics :)
The moderators would never be expected to audit "posts" (top-level links to big things that need a long analysis process), just comments.
Or rather — "posts" can be, in some sense, raw evidence/data, not assertions about anything in particular. (Think e.g. a link to a scientific study. Nobody assumes that the poster of such a link is asserting, through the link, that they believe the study's own conclusions to be true — just that they believe the study to be interesting in some way — worth discussing.)
Moderators would be expected to poke their head into a post link for just long-enough to confirm that it's that "artifact to be interpreted" kind of post. If it is, it's allowed to stand.
Whereas "comments" — those that are part of a post alongside the link, or those in reply/reference to a post — are almost always the conclusions drawn from the data, editorialization by the participant user(s). Those are what need moderating.
If you prune only the bad comments, then bad posts no longer matter, because their engagement (which is univerally in the form of bad comments) disappears, and so the post itself is no longer "interesting" according to any kind of social recommendation system.
("Posts" can also be external-to-the-platform editorializations/opinion pieces. I would suggest just banning this type of content altogether. Moderator notices an external link is to an opinion piece? Out it goes. If you want to talk about some externally-written Op/Ed in the forum, you'd have to "import" it into the forum in full text — at which point it would be subject to moderation, and would also be the karmic responsibility of whoever chose to "import" it. You'd be claiming the words of the Op/Ed as your words. Like reading something into evidence in a court room — if it turns out to be faked evidence, that's libel on the part of whichever party introduced it.)
> are good at moderating the posts across various fields
I see what I think you're imagining here, but I never meant to imply that moderators are required to actually verify that statements are true (which requires domain knowledge), only to verify on a syntactic level that the poster is engaging in valid logic to derive conclusions from evidence via syllogisms/induction/etc. (which only requires an understanding of epistemics and rhetoric.) Basically, as long as the poster seems to be behaving in good faith, they're fine. It's up to the userbase themselves to notice whether the logic is sound — built on true assumptions.
In other words, the point of the moderators is to catch the same types of things a judge will notice and subtract points for in a debating society. But instead of points, your post just never shows up because it wasn't approved; and you edge closer to being banned.
> That's one practical aspect, the second is, people are often times misinformed themselves and are simply posting something they heard from their buddy or on TV/youtube/etc in good faith
I mean, that's the main thing I'd want to stop in its tracks: repeating things without first fact-checking them. Yes, preventing people from parroting things they've "heard somewhere" without citing an independent source, would kill 99% of potential discourse on such a platform. Well, good! What'd be left is the gold I want out of the platform in the first place: primary-source posters who can cite their own externally-verifiable data; secondary-source investigative-journalists who will find and cite someone else's externally-verifiable data to go along with their assertions; and people asking questions to those first two groups, making plans, and other types of rhetoric that don't translate to "is" claims about the world. Who cares about anything else?
(Like I said: it'd be a niche platform.)
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101244
Someone must have dug and learned something, for everyone else to blindly follow.
It is so hard to imagine how they just cannot seem to understand why you are right, despite all your trying to teach them.
But then you imagine that they must be thinking the same thing.
I cannot imagine what must’ve gone wrong in their lives that so many lies could be built on one another.
I'm not so sure about that. There are some people who take seriously the fact that they could be wrong. They approach discussion with an open mind, listen to the other, look at evidence with a critical eye, and respond fairly.
Others come to a "discussion" from a totally different headspace. They are bitter, angry, and, to be frank, not very smart. It's not discussion they are after, because they aren't open to the possibility they may be wrong.
My theory is that this is the "rabble" that used to be led by the church, and then by mass media, and now by internet media. The internet is fractured into close-minded echo-chambers, and for many alive today, the classic error-modes of public online communication are new and exciting. The right is enamored with the brutal effectiveness of trolling. The left seems to prefer doxxing and blacklists. And internet companies care about metrics that don't capture any of the externalities of their platforms.
Hopefully they'll all grow out of it.
Plus at some point some people can't be redeemed except for truly massive efforts no one will make.
As for elected officials, I wish they'd just disable replies altogether for them. Nothing good comes from it.
"Never read the comments" is common advice for a reason, and it has nothing to do specifically with Twitter.
Twitter is such a trash, I mean on the IRC at least you can split in groups, kick out and prevent unsignaled readership. On twitter millions can read a random shit without segregation it's awful.
I had to get away from it when the US required foreigners to disclose their twitter accounts upon entry, with all my ISIS "friends"...
If your service's business strategy is "1) acquire hundreds of millions of users and charge them all $0.00 per year for many years, 2) acquire lots of expensive infrastructure and employees to support the service, 3) ???, 4) profit", it's not going to be easy.
I don't think just selling ads is sufficient; especially if it's not a service you can operate at a relatively low cost with a skeleton crew. I think it's probably either that or start charging for something. (Unless your goal isn't to ever make a profit, I suppose.)
Discord seemed to make it work (I think?) by combining an initial semi-skeleton crew approach with a freemium charging approach. They tried a few other things, but I think those efforts flopped.
Discord... definitely different. It's hard for me to believe that Nitro really can be paying for Discord but I guess it's possible?
1 million users * $10/month/user * 12 months/year = $120 million/year
That is close to the cited $130m annual revenue.
I don't know if it's primarily the format, or the different type of user compared to FB, but FB is the winner hands down.
Yeah, this is the kicker. I think SO's primary intended audience is people clicking Google search results.
If I'm Googling something technical and I see Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange results, I always click those first, because I know I'm almost always going to attain the most helpful-information-per-unit-time that way. Even if an answer's many years old, it's usually going to be more helpful than most of the much more recent links, which are often just cookie cutter blogspam.
But the way to built that knowledge base is by answering peoples questions because the questions people ask indicate what is relevant to answer.
I only go to the public one a few times a day now, compared to being wired to it as a beginner :D
I think it's plausible Jack Dorsey maybe genuinely just didn't want to sign that deal with the devil. I know I wouldn't want to if I made Twitter. (I have no idea if that's what happened, of course. Maybe he wanted to but couldn't find a good way to achieve it.)
The irony is, translating to IRL, I apparently discovered I have this semi-employed, "macho" no-shirt neighbor who accused me of being racist for asking if they had an entrance keyfob to prevent tailgating into an access-controlled apartment building. Then they talked about all the (nonexistent) "cameras" around, began recording me (for what, I don't know), using racist slurs, and tried to start a physical fight (they're half my weight, like a yappy chihuahua). I'm wondering if they're schizophrenic and narcissistic, in addition to appearing like a victim-mentality crybully crybaby. My point is perhaps people are taking their online behaviors into the real world.
PS: You should've heard what Latinx gangbangers called me when I was a kid. I never got beaten-up because I was bigger than all of them, but I learned the finer points of swearing in Spanish. :) I understand the tall blade of grass gets clipped so I don't take any of it personally.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
It's supposed to be an all-encompassing term for "Laino" and "Latina," but only serves to divide people further. Like almost every other ethnic rebranding of the last ten years.
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
This is self inflicted. My Twitter feed feels like a really big friend group talking/joking about anime, tech, finance, etc. You are quite literally the company you keep on Twitter.
> Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
You won't get far taking the website this serious.
(I should add that I'm black and so are most of the people I follow so it's possible I'm basing this off a group of people that already have some larger sense of community off the bat)
Compare this to politics where the end is never in sight and the goal posts are eternally moving.
Not totally accurate. I have a highly curated twitter made up of finance and tech yet the suggested trends are HORRIBLE. Wonderful topics such as "Nazis", "RacistSoAndSo", "JimCrow", "UncleTom" etc etc etc.
Its a black hole, pile on of hate. I call it the trending two minutes of hate; and its built in with no way of turning it off.
If I had to guess I’d say it goes off what your following is interacting with/talking about at the moment. I notice they get more negative when my timeline is talking about something more controversial.
What is Twitter but a reflection of our own society? These people really exist and they really have these views. I don't like the idea of banning someone for simply holding a view, or forcing someone to align with an ideology of choice. "Platform X is awful" is actually "People are awful".
>What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
Why not just avoid Twitter ? In any transactional setting you need to give something to get something. Twitter as a commercial entity needs users frequenting their platform and as therefore most comments on any social media platform are low going to be low quality (including HN).
The medium is the message. I firmly believe that the thoughtfulness and value that goes into a communication is directly proportional to its length and indirectly proportional to its age (likely due to survivorship bias). Twitter, occupying the extreme short end of both spectrums, seems to amplify the worst facets of human nature.
Books, especially old books that have remained in print (survivorship bias), seem to have somehow tapped into the better parts of human nature because they represent and stimulate discussion of ideas that have remained relevant across vast shifts in time and space, technology and culture.
The problem we have is that it's difficult to get people to read and especially engage with these old books. Schools have tried this for years with little success. Many (North American) students will gladly tell you how little love they have for Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Hemingway, The Great Gatsby, 1984, etc. Thoughtfulness and the slow burn of classic literature just don't have the same gratification feedback loop that people get from Twitter, I suppose.
Twitter isn't just a reflection, though, it's a feedback loop. It takes a stream of ideas (usually ill-considered) from a ridiculous number of people and sends them directly to the people that it expects will be most emotionally affected by them. Those people then absorb those ideas and either react with anger or support, feeding the system with new material to repeat the cycle.
If Twitter simply reflected society, it would have done no harm. But instead it's amplified the most animalistic part of our collective nature.
A society in which the village idiot gets a megaphone and can cheat his/her way into amplifying that megaphone with no recourse? Or a terrorist disguised as a village idiot can do the same? Then sure yes Twitter is a great personification of our current society(ies).
That is not accurate. The reality is the opposite of what you said. The megaphone is actually due to people voluntarily gathering around the person to listen to what they say. People only interact with content/people they agree with and this is causing social media bubbles.
It's based on inflated numbers derived from false information. Tell me this - if you saw two adjacent town square forums and one person had 10 people listening and another one had 100 people listening to them, what are the odds the 111th person goes to listen to one over the other? The 100 people of course. This is effectively how twitter works, but can be gamed by fake "crowds" of bots.
So, yes people are voluntarily listening to those with influence, but the gatherers are given inaccurate information to make that decision. The distinction is important.
If we all agreed that twitter was trash and we all just stop going, then it's over - that village idiot has no power.
I've stopped. Presumably you stopped too. If you are still going, maybe you're the idiot?
Personification != same thing. I think you missed the point.
> That's not possible with sound waves at the town square.
Huh? I can simply not go into the town square.
> If we all agreed that twitter was trash and we all just stop going, then it's over - that village idiot has no power.
Exactly. but there are enough people benefitting from Twitter that they simply don't care that the village idiot has power (or they are the village idiot themselves).
This is a little shallow of a view, as in it is much more complicated than that. At its simplest, sure you can say Twitter is merely an outlet with no interference on the platform itself. But if you actually use it for any period of time or just follow the various ridiculous outrages it produces, you will quickly see that, just as we shape Twitter with our tweets, it itself shapes us and how we articulate ourselves, the level of discourse we expect. To be specific, Twitter favors short, “smoking gun” style arguments, that can be compressed into 240 characters or divided up into those segments for a thread. This necessarily “compresses” discourse into a series of dramatic accusations as evidence. It is not enough to say that someone made a offensive statement years ago. Instead, it becomes that that person themselves is bad or x-ist. This I think is the net negative to society and I doubt we would arrive at quite this point with Twitter’s “help.”
Twitter is already profitable today, even without this subscription service.
There is a good reason they hid the tweet count, because most of the biggest names on twitter actually have Tweet counts that if you divide them by hours since their join date it would be as high as 0.8 to 1.2 tweets an hour every hour 24 hours a day for 11 years+
Once you learn this it puts those users in a very different perspective and they no longer seem like people you should be listening to.
One recent example, there was a news report that famous short seller Michael Burry had taken a $500 million dollar bet against Tesla. This number came from a basic misreading of Burry’s disclosure, but the news media ran with it and an article with this number showed up on the HN front page. If you followed the right people on Twitter you knew the number was wrong within minutes, while the news media has still not issued a correction. This situation happens all the time.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/05/17/genius-behind-the-...
This is why Twitter should be an open protocol, and people should be able to write their own UserAgents. Users should be in control of the filtering, not the app or the company.
ActivityPub is an open protocol for this kind of thing.
I use twitter as an external brain not that dissimilar to a a Xanadu inspired Memex intermixed with a Zettelkasten.
Too drastic IMO. Some of the best posts I've read on Twitter come in threads, a chain of consecutive tweets by the same author. I would propose instead an option to filter profanity, most of the low value, or plain harmful, tweets use offensive words.
Maybe a warning that your tweet will get a drastically reduced audience for using X or Y words, so the poster can rephrase it before submitting?
Heh funny I had the exact inverse assumption: that maybe they realized single-minded attempts to monetize only engagement exacerbates toxic human behaviour.
I'm thinking the truth is probably somewhere between both.
> What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day.
+1 on this thinking! But more vibing with the idea of imposed scarcity, rather that the hyper-customized view of the world.
Related: I personally feel that more elements of consensus reality should play a role in our digital spaces, not each getting our own view just because we can have it. Just because we can fine-tune our reality to our preferences, that doesn't mean that's good for a system for its actors to do so highly. Imho there's a reason human minds generally all evolved to be mostly on the same page in terms of perceived reality (except for a few subtle knobs on some generally minor axes). And the neurotypes that break theses consensus reality rules are generally perceived as maladapted and tend to be ostracized (e.g. schizophrenia, barring value judgements about their treatment in society). I do believe there's an evolutionary lens to place over that vague shared sensibility (ie. what underlying feature of network dynamics did evolution "learn" and tune into?) and imho this all informs how we might build tech :)
The experiment of directly paid social media is worth trying out, in my opinion. I know paying a few bucks a month won't necessarily get you out of the privacy/ad-tech spiderweb, but if it get us a more robust control over what our social feed looks like, I think that alone makes it worth it.
Hopefully this makes it easier for them to support themselves.
I've long accepted no one cares about how I live my life. A friend of mine spends a ton of their good energy getting upset over the latest 'take' some influencer has. It's like getting upset over an episode of WWE Raw. In any case very very little of what other people do or believe has any direct affect on you.
it's a pity most of twitter seems to be a perpetual shitstorm of low effort brainless buzz
ps: out of the whole internet debasement.. I kinda see something, is that talk has a purpose, if I talk to someone I'd rather have a nice moment, and the ability to debate endlessly with people I don't even (or bots even) is fruitless. a strange kind of lesson on using ones times correctly
Now what you learn is mostly to argue your way around your opinion better, not exactly to change it. But why would you: you change your opinion when looking for insight (reading a book), not when looking for a win (debating on an advertisement platform).
I deleted my Twitter last year and I don't miss it.
Create lists of people (just one if you want the main feed-like experience, several if you want some order and structure). Only look at those lists.
They are chronological, and without the random "suggestions" Twitter likes to put before you.
And then you may come to like tweetdeck.twitter.com, where you can see all those lists side by side, and even have sensible keyboard shortcuts.
(Unfortunately, Tweetdeck may become a paid feature, there have been rumors bout it for quite some time)
My rule when using it is that I only interract with personal photos/stories, or stuff posted publicly.
I completely ignore postings that are not personal and to friend only (not public). Facebook has (or had?) huge potential for people to keep in touch but its bigger issue are private gardens where people can spin up opinions into silliness with no opportunity for anybody from outside their echo chamber to criticize and debunk.
And yes, you can configure twitter + using tweetdeck to only see tweets in chronological order and only from people you follow.
Only if you are looking for deep thoughtful comments. Twitter need not be that place. It could be a place to amplify the voices of the oppressed some of which may sound like noise. This kind of voice has never been available through mainstream media like cable or T.V.
I personally believe that most of this toxicity is induced. I don’t think most humans are toxic by nature.
Can you blame victims of war for their tireless online activism? So what that they turn toxic, can you blame them when they are continuously facing mis/dis-information on a topic they are experiencing first hand? Yet this group can appear as toxic as any on Twitter.
We can criticize but not to the point of unilaterally dismissing these groups as if they are equal. A climate-change denier is not equal to a Gazan teen “journalist but only through tweets”. Both may annoy you with their “perpetual beef” but it’s not really fair to abandon the one good thing this platform has done - give people a voice. We need to just learn to deal with it.
I’m not sure what the impact of this will be, but I hope it won’t be the undermining of grass-roots activism. Even if that activism can border on toxic.
Makes me wonder how much power these state actors have now that cancel culture is a thing. They can just whip up a mob and character-terror anyone they want, without being detected at all.
PS: I am not even saying these are bots. They can just pay people some meager money to do this. It’s an easy job in a country with very high unemployment. Heck, even Amazon does this in a small scale.
I'm not a huge twitter user (~2-5 mins a day, read-only), but I tend to do this manually. If I notice that an account is taking up the majority of my wall space I tend to unfollow. After iterating a few times I ended up with a decently balanced wall.
That's most "engagement" on the internet, lol. Twitter is bad but it's not like all the other social media platforms are that much better. It's just how some people behave socially (anonymous or not, it doesn't seem to matter), at least when they're not meaningfully focusing on some worthwhile goal or pursuit like most of us are here @ HN. And trying to stop it with heavy-handed authoritarian policies only makes it worse as people strive to abuse the policies themselves to troll and gain power over others.
this isn't quite it, but it's a good way to filter out a lot of trash: https://megablock.xyz/
I kinda suspect the notion of most of these services just being free and not resorting to really unpleasant ad systems and dark patterns and such ... just not viable generally.
Twitter is a huge space and your experience comes down to what your bubble on Twitter is. The self development/Indie hacker/Tech/Devs/AI/Product/Life Lessons bubble, while still pretentious, at least is way better than the Celebrity/Cancel culture/Outrage bubble.
EDIT: This mostly only applies to very specific positions (mostly design positions). I'm not insinuating that these companies are literally requiring Twitter. It's a bit more complex than that.
Yes, that could also monetise it so it is only two free post per day and accumulate maximum of 10 before twitter charge them $ per tweet.
And more RSS Reader like features.
I could categorise people into different topics. Today I dont want to see any shit storm on politics, so I wont click on it. I only want to see tech and economics.
Right now moving to list and making them working in harmony with the main feed is a bag of hurt.
I've always felt like HN should display the upvotes/comments ratio rather than raw karma. It would be like the accuracy number in xonotic's insta-gib mode: you shoot carefully and precisely rather than spraying and praying.
Once it blew up and became toxic AF, I unfollowed everybody, started following only specific people, blogs and sites related to my industry (software development) in order to stay up to date with the goings on around me. That was it, since then, its become another basic news feed.
Kind of sad what its become to be honest.
It's kind of like a sweet metaphor for the eternal September.
However, some of my absolute favorite twitter accounts post a lot. To each their own. I don't have to hit the button.
As long as those suckers and their audience still watch your ads, you can.
Then again, I curate who I follow pretty closely and I have a long list of political buzzwords suppressed through the "Muted words" feature.
I don't get notifications that contain those words, and tweets that include them don't show in my timeline.
Facebook seems to be doing just fine
Ultimately, Twitter is a gossip site, so this should be no real surprise.
Take the name for example. Any other platform has a clear written or unwritten rule.
- HN: usernames
- LinkedIn: real names
- Twitter: a mix
On Twitter, you clearly lose out if you put your real name out there. You suddenly get trolled by strange avatars hiding their identity and very little community control.
What's strange is facebook. The fact it's more segregated by close circle make the discussion nastier than on linkedin when you have your company name on top of your mean troll.
Do you post on controversial subjects?
LMAO you're absolutely right! source: me
Mostly kidding, but, well sadly it isn't a joke.
you're soooooooo close to getting it, but so far.
monetizing engagement -creates- toxic communities, because toxicity is engaging.
Google and Facebook intrusively touch into every aspect of your life, to the extent that they can advertise things to you with pinpoint accuracy. They also operate at a scale of users that's at least 1-2 order of magnitude higher than twitter.
Tiktok, Snapchat (weakest case) and YT integrate adverts in a way that forces you to look at the content. Thus increasing engagement even if their user-targeting isn't as exact.
Reddit and twitch use an additional pseudo donation/commision system to keep money coming. Discord straight up charges for a premium package.
The weakest but still relevant case is by Pinterest. People visit the website when they are looking to buy something, so well targeted ads can get high engagement and the form of media is also higher engagement (pictures). ______
Twitter does none of them. From a service standpoint, it has created zero user-flows that involve making advertisements effective or allowing any user-to-user monetary interaction in a way that they can be the middle-man.
Theoretically, Twitter could massively expand its user base, but it has stagnated for 5 years, so I don't have much hope.
Otherwise, they could finally release a product where the content natively produces income (subscriptions, paywalls) and get more revenue out of each user. It's bewildering that Twitter didn't release a substack like product 5 years ago. It was practically staring them in the face. Maybe a YT-subscriptions-like join button on which you can take some commission? They could've served as the front-page-of-world's-news and helped generate revenue for news agencies while taking a cut.
There were so many places they could have gone, but they went nowhere. I dunno what the Product-Dev/PM role in twitter looks like, but I imagine it must be quite boring. Hiring a few competent PMs and giving them free reign for a bit, might not be bad idea for twitter. (as much as HN hates the average MBA PM, technical ones that also get business and product needs are hard to find)
_______
Admittedly, the core product of twitter is not bad at all.
I joined twitter in 2020 with a hyper curated list of sources, mostly politically unaffiliated individuals. I unfollow any account that tweets more than 5-times-a-day or opines of things beyond narrow topics.
It is also amazing for getting the real first sources, that previously would have needed a intermediary media org to get their point through.
It is amazing. But it took work to get there. It's like
Maybe we have progressed less than we thought.
You can argue - almost certainly correctly - that there was a significant portion of society that found the game distasteful, but you can't argue that there was still an even larger slice of the population that considered them so important that they built the coliseum to host them.
So it was rare that they would be made to fight to the death.
Now, slaughtering prisoners in the arena happened just like you are imagining.
I know that there's also good posts and good people on Twitter, but in my opinion it has been a net negative for society for quite a while now.
What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.