Of course, this completely depends on where you are on both Twitter and Reddit. There are bad and toxic parts of Reddit, and there are good and wholesome parts of twitter.
The one main difference though that's useful to compare between the two is that a post escaping the original audience, with the context collapse and everything else that brings, is a foundational feature of Twitter. It's a lot harder for that to happen on Reddit.
Honestly you just described reddit, too, except of course for the follower count—but the point is that reddit doesn’t have to have that many participants in a discussion thread for it to reach a level of toxicity same as Twitter.
Sure, social media did make information more accessible, but the vision of the internet before Web 2.0 was that it’ll democratize information without the trade off that comes with social media today—because that trade off is exactly what we hated then about the status quo.
It was just that people turned out to value less truth less, than being told they were right. You can fault the engineers who built this for it, but then you are faulting them for thinking too highly of people.
My filter list consist basically of football and religious proselytism, two topics I never want to read about.
During the last world cup, or last euro cup or some event like that I had to filter about 10 groups, and the thing is, it works. I never get any football content in my feed any more.
Now if I could just shake my HN addiction...
Not a terribly subtle bit of commentary itself, but it was a humorous reference to something most of us had experienced. In person, there are reactions to see. The other person/people's humanity is on direct display and most of us have at least some degree of innate empathy that keeps us from being a complete asshole all the time. And even those who don't mind (or relish) being an asshole have to worry about repercussions.
In contrast, if I read something I disagree with, it's a lot easier for me to just fire off a smartass reply without the effect that socialization has on me to consider how appropriate the comment is or what effects it might have. I'm just countering some words that I don't like with some other words I do like.
Large-scale social media just turns into the comment section for the entire internet.
Well, that's my argument against a communist society. It was designed only for perfectly altruistic people, and that's a kind of people I have never found anywhere. If we want something that actually works, we need something designed for the people that actually exist.
It's the same with the Internet. Once the spammers got the gist of it, it has been a constant struggle between spammers and anti-spam people. We have reached some form of equilibrium, but anytime a new person connects, it's a brand-new learning about avoiding potentially bad stuff. It can be very expensive learning.
What general principles can we learn from HN that can be applied elsewhere? Does HN self-select its audience? No profit motive? Great moderation? (Thanks Dang!)
- dang’s moderation and example
- no images
- no intentional sub-cultures
- smaller audience
- topical
- charmingly ugly
- a generally invested community that appreciates this is a special outcome
The interesting thing to me is that Slashdot shares many of these attributes, has a relatively sophisticated moderation feature and is a cesspool. It feels like a ship adrift in the Caribbean and the fourth generation of rats born on the vessel are at war.
The primary difference IMHO is dang. Anytime I think about the overall quality of HN, his efforts bubble to the surface of my mind as the primary causal factor.
It helps that something like HN can be easily duplicated, so there will probably always be a space like HN where interesting and civil discussions happen.
I certainly agree that dang's moderation is excellent and contributes to the uniqueness of HN. But "+5 Funny" on Slashdot was a big driver in the other direction, rewarding the endless hot grits and Cowboy Neal humour, which usually drowned out more sophisticated comments.
Which reminds me of another HN feature that I think is material to its ability to sustain its culture:
- Private vote counts
There are profit motives and Y Combinator is being transparent on this. From the FAQ [1]:
> Another kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. These appear on the front page, but are not stories: they have no vote arrows, points, or comments. They begin part-way down and fall steadily. Only one is on the front page at a time. The rest are listed at jobs.
>
> What's the relationship between YC and HN?
> Y Combinator owns and funds HN. The HN team is editorially independent.
> HN gives three features to YC: job ads (see above) and startup launches get placed on the front page, and YC founder names are displayed to other YC alumni in orange.
But HN seems incentivized to keep the level of quality high and to not interfere too much with content beyond moderation, or people would leave. So it leaves us with good quality contents and discussions.
HN's incentives are well-aligned with serving its users best, and this is probably partly what makes it a good place.
Also, niche tech subreddits tend to have great sources of information, even if some tend to become echo chambers over time.
Sounds like "let's develop a healthier form of crack" to me.
By healthy I would mean physically non addictive and without any negative long term effects. If you used it right it would just give you euphoria, motivation, stimulation and potentially nootropic effects?
But how would something like work? It's the substance's ability to cause euphoria that makes it addictive. You cannot have one without the other. Addiction occurs when one loses the ability to regulate their dopamine-driven activity, causing something akin to an infinite loop. Adderall is basically legal meth, and it's easily the most abused medication in the US.
There's 2 addictions, physical and psychological. Psychological, could yes still happen of course even if you restored the balance of dopamine and other relevant chemicals, but in theory you could at least get rid of withdrawals if you were able to manipulate those chemicals. We don't have a way to do that, and may be we won't have, and maybe we'll invent something completely different first that would make something like this or drugs completely obsolete. But just in theory.
I highly recommend reading the Molecule of More, which does an incredible job of explaining the brain chemistry behind addiction in an accessible way.
I think OP's really onto something here.
Maybe something to reset the brain chemical state in such way that tolerance and addiction could not come up. It surely must be possible in some way.
He ended up finding a handful of papers scattered across the last decades where people had come to the same realisation, but nothing came of it. Now, it's very possible there was something wrong with the idea. He did synthesise the molecule and we both took it, but not for long enough to really assess - even in a Shulgin-like way - whether it was addictive. But he ended up suspecting that the reason nothing came of it is that a non-addictive drug is simply not profitable, and is dominated, in the game-theory sense, by addictive drugs which bring consistent and greater revenue streams.
Also, apropos of:
> reset the brain chemical state in such way that tolerance and addiction could not come up
You may want to look into ibogaine. It doesn't give you both the high and the 'resetting the brain' functions - it only does the latter - but it's a very interesting case in that it has a very successful track record in resetting addiction. Though research is hampered by the fact that its cardiotoxic properties have killed a bunch of people who didn't do proper ECGs etc to check for heart abnormalities before taking it.
That entirely depends where you are. The big frontpage-able/default subreddits are strongly moderated (with at least some pressure on the mods to behave), but other subreddits have ended up as self-reinforcing cesspools, especially when moderators collude to ban any opposing viewpoint (as happens with r/conservative). And then you have the subreddits that were explicitly created for toxic purposes (e.g. T_D, c..ntown, fatpeoplehate, and a boatload of others listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...).
I run a few social sites, nothing as major as Facebook, and this is something I struggle with daily. The problem isn't the tech, it's the people.
They post disinfo? So you put up a little warning saying this is wrong, they get upset and scream censorship, you push too hard and they just go to another platform.
People like being upset, they like having drama.
I have no answers, but I do think a friends-only feed, where you have to expressly opt-in to see posts works best, combined with easy discoverability (hashtags, interest channels and pages etc)
Anyway I too learned from the web and it has benefited me a lot.
All of this was possible before the internet.
If you genuinely believe it was, i suppose you're just incredibly unaware of how gated information was before the internet.
The poster said "easily accessible". The wealth of knowledge and information i have at my fingertips today was before hidden behind public libraries I'd have to plan a trip to, in courses i would have to attend, in the brains of experts i would have to interview in person, i would generally have to dedicate years of my life in order to match what I can today learn in a matter of days just because of the difficult process of sorting through the information and finding what I'm looking for.
Sure, some online information may be “more accessible” but is it necessarily better information?
Sure, and before the invention of the telephone and telegraph you could just write someone a letter, and before the invention of the printing press you could just hire a scribe. Before the automobile you could just ride a horse. Before the cotton gin, just put some slaves in a field. Nothing is new under the sun.
Having all of this information available at one's fingertips and having the ability to communicate and publish globally, and practically for free, has been revolutionary in and of itself.
Finally, I would argue that more, easily accessible information is not necessarily better information.
When it comes to all the toxic things that social media can bring, I think we're slowly learning about them as a society, and maybe that's a good thing? Maybe we can develop healthier forms of social media.
I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me, but I think reddit is basically the anti-twitter, and is a lot less toxic as a result. On twitter you have a one-to-many broadcast system where one person can have hundreds of thousands and even millions of followers that basically encourages flamewars, short inflammatory comments. On reddit, you can get high karma, but everyone basically has an equal shot at writing a popular post, and negative comments tend to get downvoted. Clearly, some patterns lead to more or less toxic and hateful interactions. We should study and learn from them, and use that knowledge to design better social media platforms.