What I find rampant these days is the rather extreme way of thinking “If you are not with me, you are against me.” And I think social media amplifies this, not only by algorithms, but also because text doesn’t provide good context (intonation, stance, emotional transference) , I mean we literally read other people’s thought in our own head, also those whose thoughts we are not congruent with.

HNs rules are great in this sense, to continuously seek out curious conversations instead of the rather solipsist tendency to soapbox.

Now with politics and politicians this a much harder pill to swallow, because their literal job these days is to stand on a soapbox, and we as the public have gotten rather used to it, and voting in those who do the soapbox act the best. This is also because in general it’s hard to choose politicians beyond the local who we can relate to, and be invested in beyond retoric.

I agree that much of the design of social media can contribute to this.

As much as I love this:

> HNs rules are great in this sense, to continuously seek out curious conversations instead of the rather solipsist tendency to soapbox.

I also just thought how HN may contribute to this through design. I'm replying to your post right now and I can only see your post on my screen. While I can click "parent" in the menu to see the chain of replies or "context" to see your post in the context of all the replies, I'm not able to see both a reply box and the context before your post on the same page.

So, it requires me to either keep in working memory what the parent said, and what the grandparent said and great grandparent, or maybe to have a multitabbed approach. Conversely, something like Discourse allows me to scroll up and down to see the previous posts while maintaining a compose window open.

Maybe this isn't the place for such a comment, I guess I just felt frustrated in another thread and worried I'd give a reply that either repeated what someone said before or didn't encapsulate the conversation.

I think these little details really matter in communication and how we often overlook them or discount them.

I agree, what seem like small design decisions can have great impact. I wonder if studies are being done on this. Something like About Face on interaction design, but then specifically on effective communication and discourse.

Ah, I imagine there are, as I remember back in 2006 or so at college, people started studying impacts of chats and such, however, I'm not specifically familiar with any research on it. If you come across it, I'd love to hear of it! Or if you do research and want some ideas / wanna partner on something, I'm also open to that. I don't have professional research background yet have worked on emotions and communications for almost 10 years now, and studied intercultural communication in college after switching from electrical engineering, so I'm quite fascinated by the intersection of computer-mediated communication and how it impacts us emotionally.

edit: Also, I'm not sure what you meant by "About Face," will you explain it more?

edit2: I think you meant this: https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/about-face-essenti...

“The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally – not a 20 percent traitor.”

— Ronald Reagan