Surveys consistently show that most of us agree on far more than we disagree when questions are phrased in politically neutral terms. People quickly realize when they actually talk to other people that most are fairly reasonable and relatable, even if they have good faith disagreements on particular points, but social media being optimized for maximum engagement with shallow/short-form discussion just results in seeing the most extreme elements of society talk over each other and largely fail to come to a common understanding.
While bringing up a field service group, I had a period of high travel taking me all over the US. I enjoy politics, culture and people and am frequently frustrated with the left - right, very tribal political discourse myself.
So, what I did was find coffee shops and any other events where people might gather and enjoy conversation and had a bunch of chats avoiding labels while also conveying a strong, no judgement, just interested in perspective from different parts of the nation...
Those looked kind of like a two way interview.
Many of those ended up being long, gratifying conversations too.
Based on these, I would submit the following:
People fear judgement.
People fear "that other tribe"
An awful lot of discourse is fear, blame and shame.
eg: teaching "those other people" a lesson
How could anyone tolerate "that other tribe"
You get the idea.
Outside of those conversations, which all told me the US has poor class awareness and with that, equally poor ability to see others as just peers, instead it is all colored in various ways that amplify differences despite the reality being we are all people who run the same basic way, have the same basic needs, struggles.
You mention other events, so perhaps I'm totally wrong here. But I'm curious about the ways that the events you picked may have shaped the conclusions that you drew.
No, it was in line at the market, hanging in the park, the driver on a longer drive in a cab, Lyft, janitor, trades people...
What I did was just be opportunistic. Tried to fill some of the time I had learning more about how to just talk with people and have them feel they can do the same.
I had biases, mostly targeting normies and people who looked like they may have a story, rough or not.
What I can also tell you is I have done this sort of thing in my past. It is a simple pleasure of business travel.
What I did differently was avoid signaling "my camp", and tried to signal seeking more than anything else. If they were inclined to talk at all, I was frank and said I want perspective outside my familiar circles, so what is your take on... and go from there.
Sometimes I did not offer mine at all, content to let them share what they thought a curious person from somewhere else might want to know.
The primary thing I was interested in was arriving at a comfortable dialog state, like when you know it won't come back to bite, or be on the news, that sort of thing.
And the things I put above inhibit reaching that state.
This one surprised me the most, but people are just tired. Like fried.
Many put a brave face on it, but could use a break. If the chat advanced to where one could really relax and just talk, being tired always came up. And many did not express sadness, just fatigue, sometimes frustration.
"Does it all have to be this hard?"
In my past, I do not recall that expressed as much and from more diverse socioeconomic positions. This sentiment may be majority held now. Just a gut take on arguably small and unscientific samples.
"The Reset" The idea of it all not being sustainable. If it went here, people would roll through examples that concerned them. Some would make connections, but the general feeling of impending doom was far more common than I expected. I am sure more people than we know do not believe things will work out.
And one last disturbing one is along the lines of trading safety for liberty. Tons of people could give two shits about the increased surveillance. More people than I expected harbor and will express basic fear when comfortable enough to share it.
Either way, the point is not wether or not you can have a place with discourse with the all good qualities described, it is more so that because those qualities are not quantifiable, it is impossible to know for sure.
It is not impossible to measure quality, once you accept that quality has many definitions and therefore requires many contexts incentivizing different versions of it for different purposes and audiances.
And that diversity would be a very good thing.
We could almost imagine the author himself is vying for attention by pushing the hot buttons known to work. Either that or he is incapable of recognising his own foibles.
I mostly read r/NBA and find the quality very decent. I'm sure there are trolls and racist rants and so on, but unless I expand comment branches, I don't see any of them. I find that the branches being pruned/hidden helps manage how much time I spend on a discussion too. On HN, I often feel like I want to read or skim every comment in a discussion which is rarely a great use of time.
I disagree tying big tech censorship to this.
Yes what you describe is nice and what the audience here (including me) prefer, that's why we're here. Such places with such rules are paradises.
However, I for one accept the risk of freedom over "safety". I acknowledge we humans are "good" and "evil" at the same time, maybe we'll "actualize" at some point in the future as a whole (I doubt it) but we're not there yet. Even if that's a goal, I strongly believe allowing cancel-candidate speech is vital to the progress. Producing questionable speech has its cost already, I actually think the cost is too high already given the mob nature of social media.
Yeah there are "misinformed" people, but isn't that the value of democracy? We disagree but we compromise.
Even for the anti-vaxx case, when the ones who refuse to vaccinate can screw up the whole population, I still don't think you should ban the speech, the law or executive order should be based on action instead.
Even for the GAB case, I don't think the platform should be banned, nor private conversation being snooped on. So how do we protect ourselves against such attacks? I'd say these are just extra protections that I don't want given the tradeoff, the law is there to punish the actions. I'll take that safety risk that's been there since before tech is a thing any day.
Guess the nuance here is the right to speech versus the right to publish given the nature of social media moving the forth pillar of democracy to the public. My take is that the same applies even for publishing. If nonsense sounds more attractive than scientific facts, maybe we educated people should work on our PR skills, or fix the root of the problem, education. Now that's progress.
The problem isn't created simply by allowing people the freedom to express themselves. It's created by highly manipulative middlemen choosing what to promote and what to suppress (in a relative not absolute sense) via algorithms designed to maximize attention to ads.
That is nothing like a simple free speech situation.
I have no problem with free speech, and free speech forums, even if they do sometimes become cess pools.
I have a real problem with the most widely used glorified scrapbook sharing software (Facebook), biasing all our feeds toward content that is likely to pull us into comment flame wars or using provoked anger and tribal identity reinforcement as a user addiction strategies.
Note that Facebook didn't start behaving this way until after the network effect of their social graph had created tremendous lock-in/switching-costs for their users.
Effective policy isn't found using that false Rorschach compass.
Some transcend these "stereotypes" and are for a more redistribution society based upon the insight that these transformations require a reform of policy. They are sadly in the minority - in both ideologies.
Left v Right is about proletariat vs bourgeoise and it originates from French politic during the revolution where the left side of the assembly favored moving power towards the people and the right were Monarchists that wanted King Louis' continued reign.
To equate this to gender is unbelievably ignorant bordering on intellectual dishonesty.
Without systems that promote quality, non-ideological, nuanced, original, tolerant dialogue we will keep running into the false dilemma of unmoderated cess pools or heavy handed moderation.
If we are to avoid this dilemma we need systems that organically promote constructive, tolerant and inclusive communication, and original, nuanced, intelligent, non-ideological ideas, instead of the opposite.
This cannot be done by organizations whose profit incentive is aligned with user attention instead of user satisfaction.
Those organizations benefit from degraded communication until strong moderation is both continually demanded and decried.
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On a side note, I am so disappointed in the constant framing of ideas as right or left. It dumbs society down incredibly to view so much through the filter of two (often arbitrarily correlated, historically shifting) clusters of supposedly disjoint options.
In the real world, communes work well sometimes, markets often work better at scale but not for everything, markets require "social solutions" like non-commercial criminal and civil justice systems, education and health could be explicitly tested and then managed as investments with a pay off of lower taxes (including for the rich) instead of as charities forced on the rich, etc.
The Right/Left and associated ideologies are all self-defeating when believed in isolation and the nuances of their ragged edges, their limitations, and constructive combinations ignored.