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Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?
422 points by dabockster on Jan 31, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 804 comments
Hey HN, I've noticed a huge uptick in the toxicity online in the last 5-7 years. Before, around 2010-2012, people who disagreed would usually leave it at that and walk away respectfully. Now, it seems like everyone treats everything as an argument or debate to be won at all costs. Even niche sites like HN are not immune.

So how do we fix this? I've heard some talk that upvote systems and algorithms might be at fault. Do we ditch them and go back to a literal timeline? Or is this more of a social problem that code can't solve? Let's hear some input on this, because I can't shake the feeling that tech isn't totally innocent in this mayhem.




Encourage people to participate in physical social gatherings that center around non-political issues, like hobbies.

We need to start emphasizing what we have in common, help people see that ultimately we're really not all that different from each other. The internet lets people hide behind this isolating veneer that makes it too easy to just shout at each other and behave in extreme ways that would never be socially acceptable in the real world. Interacting in real life significantly moderates people's behaviour and when social media and the internet facilitate segregation and amplification of extremes, spending more time in person might really do us a lot of good.

We need to put people in a context where politics is irrelevant and a shared interest has the opportunity to bond people who would otherwise not meet. It's the only way I see of countering Identity Politics that try to be all consuming.

It would also be helpful to encourage people to focus on more positive events. Outrage culture is a thing, only exacerbated by social media, where rage = clicks/views = money. We need to change the economics of this equation. We would really benefit from a culture that gave more attention to people doing good rather than just focusing on the villains in society.


Encourage people to participate in physical social gatherings that center around non-political issues, like hobbies.

I think there is a lot more to this than many people think.

If more people participated in hobbies, then they would spend less time on the internet. The time they do spend would be more targeted and focused instead of mindlessly scrolling and scrolling and getting baited and agitated.

They would also form communities, as you suggest, with common interests and get to know people better. It's basic socialization.

Part of the problem is that for some reason there is a notion that everything has to be a business today. There's a Fidelity Investments TV commercial running right now where a daughter says to her retired mother, "Did you paint this [painting]? You know you can sell these!" And a business is born. Why? Why can't she just enjoy painting for painting's sake. For her own enjoyment? Why is money what decides if something is valid or not?

I encourage people to start hobbies. And be bad at them. Be terrible at reading, stamp collecting, woodworking, gardening, model railroading, brewing, or whatever. Do it because you like it. If you happen to be good at it, great! If all of your carrots die, that's OK, too. You got to spend quality time with yourself, which is more important than all the carrot sales you could possibly make.


I raised the same point about businesses in a comment a few days ago, among other issues https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22025971

[warning, cynic paragraph ahead] We don't have time to socialize, we obviously live to work. We might be stressed as we don't get to disconnect much, but you know, that would be so wasteful! Streets are not for people to socialize, they are for cars and for going somewhere else to do business. Spaces can only be there for money, otherwise they are an inefficiency which we'll have to fix. If you are good at something, you should be earning money from it. We live in a global world. We have so many hobbies! But only so many people fits in an area, so matches are unlikely. Anyway, if you are willing to go out for socialization any hobby is ok. If you are interested in finding interesting people... sorry, they are busy at the moment. That's what interesting people do. Be stressed and busy trying to fix the world from crashing by hitting harder the accelerator. Ah, the beauty of an efficient market. Perfecting time and spaces.


Damn, this is a great idea... I’m going to try woodworking and make the shoddiest set of chairs one can imagine, but they’ll be my chairs. Could take up to a year maybe of practice but who cares!


I hope this leads you to make friends with the other local woodworking nerds :)


As a matter of fact, i picked up woodworking as a hobby last summer and made some really good friends. You don't have to be good at it, just the whole process of going through it is rewarding. Look up "Mr. Chickadee"s channel on YouTube, watching his videos is like a meditating experience.


"... start hobbies. And be bad at them." Love it. The reasoning sounds like Chestertonian "common sense."


Unfortunately the problem is preexisting. The local communities can and have been the most psychotically toxic places.

If something is political is only about the level of agreement and not about sanity, decency, or morality. It may be easier to (not) think about divergence of views but that doesn't solve the particular underlying issue isn't real.


Exactly this.

A few years ago I was at a local community meeting about expanding a school (USA). Let me tell you something, online trolls have nothing on the people who were for or against the expansion.

I left totally shocked with the toxicity, outright lies and innuendo. At one point someone on the board said the school was a front for prostitution. The audience audibly gasped.


Throughout history there has always been a large majority class of people who were suppressed and controlled by the elites just like today. The difference is that today, the suppressed classes are comparatively highly educated and have access to limitless information. Before, this knowledge was accessible mostly by the elites.

Today, the lower classes know what's going on politically and economically better than many of the elites. That's why distrust of institutions is at an all time high. That's why books which label the social order as a fiction like 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' are top sellers. For the first time in history, the correlation between wealth and knowledge has disappeared and is even starting to reverse.

It's difficult for the elite to control a class which knows what's going on better than they do. And BTW, fake news has a purpose. It's a political and economic weapon invented by the lower and middle classes to serve their needs.


Fake news is owned and created by elites though. It's meant to generate outrage to support specific political causes. The greatest deceptions it perpetuates are fear-and-scarcity-based appeals to a binary political system (elites have created a policy-bundled system where campaign finance reform never happens and lobbyism thrives). In reality there is abundance and deep commonality between working class people in America, and uncovering it is one of the information revolution's greatest threats to the control class's divisive attempts. Fake news is a tool of the elite to counteract that effect, as is any erosion of critical thought, any disinformation, any suppression of empirical science.


Agreed wholeheartedly. Some hobbies have become more chic because of the analog "in-person" aspect (like tabletop gaming/role-playing and adult sports leagues), but culture is still losing the fight against isolation.

I optimistically think people are appreciating face-to-face time more, and I hope we think of a lot of new excuses to meet up over the next decade.


I would honestly struggle to do that. When one side of the argument is effectively arguing for my own removal / loss of rights / loss of dignity, I don’t see how I can have a dialogue with them about anything, since they clearly see me as inferior / unworthy.

Brexit effectively ruined a few experiences for me, like pycon UK, and I’m really not looking forward to picking them back up or risk being in that position again, sorry. I respect everyone’s opinion until it starts making me an unperson, there I draw a line.


[flagged]


Please don't take HN threads further into ideological or, god help us, religious flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Oh please, politics are an extremely important part of organized religion, at least in the United States.

Also "chosing not to participate" is not the same as "systematically destroying."


It wasn't just "choosing not to participate." It was activism seeking to exclude religion from public life. The most important of those being the elimination of religion from public schools in the 1960s. (I should caveat the following by pointing out that the below is not an attempt to convince anybody about what policy would be better. Instead, it's an attempt to describe what I see as a fundamental tension in the approach that we have, for better or worse, adopted.)

A key function of most religions is providing people with a specific moral framework. Fundamental to that is almost always the process of socializing children in that moral framework. (Indeed, the UN recognizes that as a fundamental human right.) At the same time, a key function of schools also is socializing children in the values and morals of their community. For most of American history, there was no conflict between these two institutions--America's overwhelmingly Christian communities socialized their children in their religion through public schools.

The Warren Court's decisions in the 1960s broke that process. Parents had to socialize children in their religion "on their own time." Meanwhile, because teaching morality is an indispensable aspect of socializing children, public schools created an alternative, secular moral framework to impart onto children. Under those precedents, even in communities that were overwhelmingly Christian, and where Christian parents wanted their children raised with a Christian moral framework, public schools were required to teach them something else, in competition with whatever religious instruction they might receive on their own time. It's a unique scenario where attempts to vindicate the individual right of being free from unwanted exposure to religion in schools, has the side effect of dramatically curtailing the ability of the majority in the larger community to impose their religious values into their children.

Taxing people, then using that money to create public schools, and then requiring people to send their kids to those schools, and then prohibiting those schools from teaching kids the religion of their parents, very much has the effect of undermining the propagation of religion. It gives the secular teachings of teachers primacy over whatever religious teachings parents may be able to impart during the waking hours when children aren't in school.

Whether this that approach is nonetheless necessary in a multi-cultural society is a different question. I would point out that countries like Sweden seem to be doing fine allowing religious parents to choose to send their kids to publicly funded religious schools. But I think the effect of promoting secularism and undermining religion is hard to deny.


No offense or anything (or maybe offense, I don't know) but it wasn't "The Liberals" who systematically destroyed religion. A whole lot of the downfall of religion (which hasn't fallen, by the way) was predicated on religious institutions eating themselves from the inside out. Think about the excesses of the Christian churches of the west, based on the teachings of a man who taught forgiveness and the moral wrongs of excess. Think about the Bhuddist monasteries in the east who have fallen to, what can only be described as gang wars over the best tithing lands. The Shia and the Suffi try to kill each other over supposed differences in Muhammad's teachings. Churches did a fine job of destroying religion, long before people started blaming Liberals.


While I'm not sure I agree with your point about liberals "destroying" organized religion, I agree that churches (and other place of worship) unite local communities and the members look after one another.

We should really be putting far more effort into building similar non-religious communities. Things like book clubs, hiking clubs, or anything that involves shared interests.


Does it not seem somewhat disingenuous to lay the blame for the dip in religious affiliation and the rise of secularism entirely on liberals? Could the internet and increased access to conflicting information have played a role?

Not to mention the irony of addressing the toxicity and polarization of the internet by adding yet more toxicity and polarization.


Discussions like this are frustrating to me because they always seem to skip over what feels like a crucial element:

Do you know _why_ this uptick has happened? Does anyone?

I get the feeling, in general, when people talk about wanting to "Do Something" about this sort of thing, they are always focused on managing the symptom and never focused on addressing the cause. Frequently, when I try to bring this up, the cause is waved away with "oh they're just stupid/ignorant/angry" or some other such explanation. The current-year favourite is "they just believe fake news", and I'm sure next year there will be a political explanation, and then the year after that we'll loop back to generic ones. (The irony of denouncing other people as causing polarization "because they're just angry and stupid" is lost on most people)

I don't know why this is happening. But I do know that until the why is address, and done so with care and respect, this problem will be papered over at best but never solved.

Also

> Do we ditch them and go back to a literal timeline?

If I got one wish to change the world, but I had to give up a bunch of great things, I would sell out all technological wonder in order to get literal timelines back. As soon as other people decided they knew what I wanted to see better than I did, the problem started. And as soon as they got tired of doing that and made computers do it for them, it got worse


The internet went from subculture to being the mainstream culture, especially for politics. Roughly the point at which everyone started participating in sharing memes on Facebook as the successor to email forwards.

This made it valuable enough to be worth destroying.

So all kinds of bad actors started creating appealing, emotional, and false or misleading content aimed at this kind of sharing.

Polarisation is deliberate. Some of it from the media, some of it from parties, some of it from random bored channers, some of it from the unemployed and upset, and some from intelligence agencies and their contractors.

(This has had even worse effects in countries where democracy and media are young and fragile.)


conspiracy theories about nebulous entities also proliferate after eternal september or october


https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html

This might not be a perfect resource. Among other things, he likes to use a lot of words to explain his point. But he offers up his theories on the Why behind polarization, including several contributors. Even if he doesn't get everything right, I think this is a solid place for someone who's serious about understanding it to start, and find plenty of references to dig into.


I share eqdw's distaste for knee-jerk symptom addressal without adequate understanding of the cause.

I am somewhat disappointed by the other responses to eqdw here because they each immediately proffer or refer to competing interpretations of the cause without also referencing empirical tests of those interpretations. They miss eqdw's excellent point that there's always a hand-waved explanation waiting in the wings. Interpretations (which the other comments are) are not true explanations: they add dimensions to how we think, but not certainty in our conclusions. The historical method is not a valid substitute for the scientific method, as E. H. Carr long ago demonstrated with "What Is History?"

The point I'm making is that there's got to be a higher bar for reasoning about social issues than a preferred interpretation, and that is likely going to be experiment. I'm aware sociological issues are so-called wicked problems, are hard to replicate solutions consistently with, and are difficult to have error bars over in their contribution to the end result. I don't think that means it is not possible to do experiments well enough to make reliable inferences - simulated games and follow-up interviews with participants are an effective research technique in this area, for example.


> Do you know _why_ this uptick has happened? Does anyone?

I think it's because online, each of us is disembodied and anonymous. We're a nobody. And nobody wants that. So the quickest way to become somebody is to join a group -- ideally a group that seems to be a winner, that offers easy compelling answers to hard problems... especially answers that somehow favor you and others like you. That's populism. Populists are fearless and decisive and sure they know what's true and right. They also know that everybody who's not on their team doesn't get it. So the quicker you join them, the sooner you become a somebody, a player. And if everyone else like you joins that team and you don't, you could degenerate into something worse than a nobody... an enemy.

Combine that with where fame (and leadership?) seems to have evolved in our culture -- where becoming famous is the result of doing whatever it takes to attract attention. Even if if you lack any substance at all, if you somehow stand out, now you're no longer a nobody. You can't be ignored any more. And in the echo chambers of today's hollowed-out media and bored internet, that seems to be enough for most folks-who'd-rather-not-think to see you as outstanding, and an opinion leader.

Those two phenomena don't sound like much, but they do help explain how an empty angry bombastic boob could become President of the United States of America and split the country like nothing has since slavery.


Why is Trump in this comment? You talk about dividing the country yet your comment does exactly that.

Further I think you’re wrong in your claims that nobody wants to be anonymous. Some of us are punished for our points of view and very much want to remain anonymous, using it as a place to vent frustrations with no repercussions.

I would go as far as to say that your comment is a prime example of toxicity on the web given you assume (wrongly) that everybody hates Trump and therefore it is ok to step on the thoughts and beliefs of 1/2 of the country


I mean, pro- or anti-Trump, you have to admit that he's at least symptomatic of divisive politics, right? It's probably fair to go one step further and say that he also embraces that divisiveness.

That's without expressing an opinion on the underlying politics.


Did Obama not divide the country to a point where Trump could get elected?


I would say Obama divided the country more than Trump. Trumps approval rating among african americans is now over 40%. That's huge. To US citizens, Trump is less divisive in my opinion, but his character definitely sparks the opposite side into creating a new bread of louder and in your face divisive culture (Antifa, etc).

Altough I believe that to be true during the Bush years as the anti-Bush types were very loud and crazy. Now that many more people are online and are able to spread opinion via Twitter/FB/youtube/etc, the divisiveness from activists has gotten louder. Joe Rogan also observes this in how he describes the 2 minute tv news media culture where 10 people are trying to shout over one another to get their point in, and how that is a sign of a dying medium (being replaced by internet, long form discussion, etc). This seems like further proof that the traditional media is more divisive more than ever...it's the last breaths of a dying medium. Don't think that's true? Just watch local tv news in SF Bay Area and compare to a smaller city outside of a major metro (blue) area.


Do you know _why_ this uptick has happened? Does anyone?

That is obvious. No idea how to solve it, but the cause? Sure.

There's people determined to make it happen. They're called activists. From both sides. They're determined to make anyone in between to choose sides.

Look no further than this post. See comments attributing the problem to the right, the left, old people, young people...


> Do you know _why_ this uptick has happened? Does anyone?

I believe the culprit is expecting the diversity of the world's voices to be able to converse through a single comment widget. Any online article or post has a single comment widget that mixes the voices of everyone together. This causes chaos, as we are all well aware. I believe we need to provide a mechanism for the public to self segregate when they post comments; if they can say "I am posting this to these people" or "this post is of this attitude" and the comments section beneath a post/article were a selection of conversations with different attitudes - things would be different, less heated, and (sub)-culturally richer.


> Do you know _why_ this uptick has happened? Does anyone?

I don't know but my take is that media makes more money if we get angry, and this anger-inducing style is permeating in the population.


> Do you know _why_ this uptick has happened? Does anyone?

Controversy drives engagement, engagement drives profits.


Exactly this. The channels through which people an anonymously communicating (also a part of the problem) are biased towards sensational and controversial content, which sends dialog down this path no matter what.

An important consideration is that many different cultures are experiencing very similar radicalization / polarization trends. The facts on the ground are quite different but the tooling by which these conversations happen is the same.


The centuries-old conflict between egalitarianism and hierarchism, driven by economic and environmental pressures and to which technology is a a revivifying input.


It's been said many times, _you can't change human nature_.

Seems like it's really "inhuman nature" that would need to stop.

In the wider world man's inhumanity to man has always been a prominent factor, and appears to have been on the increase in recent decades as the world grows.

There is also the possibility that this is a destructive reversal.

Regardless, In online areas where polarization/toxicity has not been traditionally represented, mainstream influence would require the web negativity to increase at a faster rate than the mainstream in order to catch up and eventually equalize.

The more the rest of the world catches up with the web, the more the web catches up with the rest of the world.

The web just seems like it's getting worse faster than the rest of the world because it actually is.


I think it is a confluence of factors, but primarily it has become much more visible due to the rise of social media. And by that I specifically mean that social media enabled far more people to actively contribute and communicate online to wider audiences than previously. Most of the people communicating undesirable ideas have not formed them recently. They have held them and repeated them very often, they simply haven't been accessible to others, searchable, indexable, etc. All of the various notions about requiring platforms to regulate speech online and similar will, at most, return us to that situation. That would not necessarily be a positive step. As an example, two sisters from the Westboro Baptist Church have left the organization expressly as the result of one of the sisters having her mostly deeply held beliefs questioned, challenged, and refuted on Twitter. Were that communication not able to flow, that group would still have two more members protesting funerals, spewing irrational hatred, and promoting a harmful ideology.

Human beings have a natural tendency to wish to categorize things in a binary manner, and they deal exceptionally poorly with situations that feature an abundance of both good and bad. They feel compelled, really compelled, to decide to pay attention to only one of the two possibilities and to minimize the other so that the opinion of the matter can be held onto more tightly. I personally think this is a tendency of deep biological origin (down to the actual functioning of the brain level) and it is something we must guard ourselves from buying into.

Another large factor is simply number and breadth of people communicating online. Children, adolescents, and young adults are very active online now. They are learning social skills and as our society totally and utterly abandons them in this regard outside of the Internet, it is the only location in the world where they can even have the possibility of interacting with other people as equals. Beyond the bounds of the Internet, they are treated and spoken of very poorly by all segments of society, and they bring their bitterness over that with them online. Human society has problems, and our desire to hide those problems should be resisted in preference to wishing to see those problems solved. Talking about it, and attempting to find successful means of solving those problems without compulsion but with education should be an actively pursued goal, IMO.


>> Human beings have a natural tendency to wish to categorize things in a binary manner...

Assume you're human too. You've illustrated your point, whilst stating it.

My comment is flippant. Sorry for that. Important thing I wanted to say is: not all humans conform to that pattern. Indeed, many entire cultures do not. Including the majority of people in the place where I live now.

I suggest you get out more. You may find that the world is less fully specified than you imagine.


I suffer no illusions that I am myself immune to any of the common pitfalls of being human. I imagine if you shared where you live now, either your community has learned to resist the tendency I describe (which I am guessing you misunderstood, that may be mostly my fault as I didn't go very deeply into it) or else they simply express it in different areas, perhaps demonizing the microwaves of wifi or the evils of certain chemical compounds and their tendency to give people 'unearned' happiness, etc.

I am curious, though... how is saying that humans have a certain tendency an illustration of categorizing things in a binary manner?

I would suggest you make fewer assumptions about the people you're having discussions with. You don't seem to be skilled at sussing out at least my own background. And of course the world is 'less fully specified than [I] imagine' or how you believe I imagine it. That's one of the reasons I studied philosophy, and why I continue to study different cultures, history, and current events. Even the most primitive cultures center their thinking around categorizing things, and they begin with two categories, then split them from there. It's practically the essence of human reason and even pattern recognition.


> Do you know _why_ this uptick has happened? Does anyone?

Are you asking why polarization has happened? Or why is had gotten worse? The answer to the first is all about control. There's a great book called The Dictator's Handbook that documents this. Throughout history, the ruling class has sought to divide the people they rule over into groups and then cater to the groups that will help them remain in power. See the current situation in the United States where the president won by less than 50% of the vote and the majority party in the Senate represents a minority of Americans. Between the various tools for voter amplification and voter suppression, the goal is to carve out the smallest group of people needed to win, then cater to their base emotions by painting everyone else as the Other, to be feared and attacked.

As for why the uptick, that's due to technology. The Internet, ad placements, etc, have enabled these groups to execute on these strategies en masse.

As the expression goes, there's nothing new under the sun, just a reiteration of the past.


> Frequently, when I try to bring this up, the cause is waved away with "oh they're just stupid/ignorant/angry" or some other such explanation. The current-year favourite is "they just believe fake news", and I'm sure next year there will be a political explanation, and then the year after that we'll loop back to generic ones. (The irony of denouncing other people as causing polarization "because they're just angry and stupid" is lost on most people)

I think what you're describing is attribution bias - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_bias


Just a personal hypothesis, probably colored by my own biases, but I think it has a lot to do with the ad-based economy of the Internet.

The news has evolved to grab attention. It's always done that somewhat, but the Internet and the explosion of options available to people has made it worse than it used to be. Media companies compete for attention by presenting their stories as the most outrageous, most outlandish, most urgent issue ever in the world.

A cute puppy is not just a cute puppy. It's everything you need. It saved me. It is the sole beacon of light and goodness in this cold, heartless world.

Political party X proposing something that a media outlet's demographic dislikes is not just another bill being proposed, it's the enemy trying to destroy everything good in this world. Literally Hitler and so on.

Everything is hyperbolized to the nth degree to try to get it to stand out in the morass of everything else. This trickles down into the way we talk to each other. People don't just disagree, anyone who has a different opinion is literally the greatest villain humanity has ever known and people treat them as such.

The root cause is advertising. Media makes money by attracting eyeballs. They attract eyeballs by standing out with something more urgent than what everyone else is saying. Unless we can provide another way for media to make money that changes their incentives for how they write stories, I expect this will continue.


It's not like the masses aligning with one side or the other is a new invention, it's how politics works and always has worked. So, in a way, what's "causing it" is humanity being stupid and measures against it are attempts at managing stupidity. Nobody wants to hear that. Because everybody is too stupid to drop their ego.

That being said, there's about three articles a week that blame the unchecked spread of stupidity on the internet for the uptick in bizarre fringe ideologies. And they're probably right. One of the best explanations of how this happens I recently found in a comment thread – unfortunately I don't remember where (I assume tildes.net). In short, social media tries to find patterns in what people like and documents/encourages them. Content creators then try to make money from following those trends very quickly, which artificially accelerates and grows them. It used to take a while for some random, weird ideology take over, now it only takes one viral youtube video or tweet, even if people initially just watch it ironically.

It's no different than it always was, it just runs way too fast.


_In the Swarm_ by Byung-Chul Han does a good job explaining why this happened.

In retrospect, it's perhaps more of a miracle that we got a decade or two of relatively low toxicity from the Internet.


> Do you know _why_ this uptick has happened? Does anyone?

Lookup Overton Window Shift.


I believe the reason for the uptick is two-fold.

1.) In general, this is a reactionary movement from the elite class of society(straight, white, cis people) to keep a death grip on the social and systemic power they see being taken from them in the form of diversity, equality, feminism, etc. This has been happening for a long time now, but it got real, real bad after...

2.) ...Trump was elected. Him winning the election was a shot of weapons-grade steroids into the ass of these regressive movements. He validated and emboldened them. He made them feel not only okay about being bigoted, but morally good for it.

That's my thoughts, at least.


> Trump was elected. Him winning the election was a shot of weapons-grade steroids into the ass of these regressive movements.

It’s actually exactly the opposite. We lurched left in a very short time. As recently as 2007, a plurality even of Hispanics said there were “too many immigrants” in the US. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/19/latinos-hav.... Little more than a decade later, every mainstream Democratic candidate is running on providing universal healthcare to people who immigrate illegally.


[flagged]


I'm afraid you've been breaking the site guidelines by using HN for ideological flamewar, personal attacks, and the like. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of which ideology they're for or against, so please stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


There you go, defend the bigots and ban the people fighting them.

You’re fighting the good fight, mister moderator guy


Asking you to follow the rules has zero to do with defending anybody else.


> In general, this is a reactionary movement from the elite class of society(straight, white, cis people) to keep a death grip on the social and systemic power they see being taken from them in the form of diversity, equality, feminism, etc. This has been happening for a long time now, but it got real, real bad after...

Trump's base is decidedly not elite. It's working class people who live outside cities.

The elites live in cities and have graduate degrees. Very few of them voted for Trump.


>Trump's base is decidedly not elite. It's working class people who live outside cities.

Define "city," "elite" and "working class."

Because if Trump's base primarily consisted of people who lived in areas with, let's just say, populations under 10,000 without access to municipal services and who primarily farm and live off the land, then he would never have had enough support to carry the primaries. Clearly a significant number of his supporters live in what most people would consider a "city."

According to these articles, at least[0,1], Trump's primary support was among relatively affluent Republicans. It shouldn't be a surprise, either. Trump is an elite, a billionaire businessman. Obviously, other elites were going to support him.

That said, I would agree with GP in a general sense, that we're seeing a hard right-wing, reactionary shift primarily driven (as right-wing shifts typically are in the West) by white cis Christian males fighting to maintain their cultural power in the face of demographic and progressive change. However, I don't think there's necessarily a strong correlation in this movement to urban/rural or high/middle/low income lines, although I could be convinced by data to the contrary.

[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/0...

[1]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps...


If we're talking about online conversations only, then I personally believe that the reduction in AGE of participants online has had a massive influence.

Teenagers simply do not have the maturity to have mature conversations.


I could find countless examples of why this is completely inaccurate, but i'll submit one: members of Congress.


Not too sure about that. Many of the rudest people I've encountered online are retirees.


It's worse than the Eternal September. It's definitely more toxic than it's ever been, and people are definitely more polarized. The 2016 election news cycle got a lot of otherwise normal people really radicalized and hostile. Sure most of the old-timers among us remember, often fondly, the constructive insanity of usenet. And the younger generation remembers the torrent of pure id that was 4chan in the early days, and 8chan later.

Here's the thing. It's leaking. This stuff used to be contained, kept in a little secret segmented-off piece of your world that was 'the internet'. Now it's invading your real life, your real-world friendships, your workplace, even your family.

Think of the Greater Internet F-ckwad Theory: "Normal Person + Anonymity + an Audience => Total F-ckwad". Now run that function over the entire populace, map/reduce style. Now take that F-ckwad, and remove the Anonymity by requiring them to use their real name. And bingo, now you live in Interesting Times.


>Now it's invading your real life, your real-world friendships, your workplace, even your family.

I fully expect in the future for there to be a segment of the population that chooses to "drop out" of the always-connected digital social life for these reasons. And I don't just mean giving up Facebook, but going back to analog social circles only, as well as ignoring those who are still connected (and hooked) digitally.

I like to compare it to smoking. Imagine everyone got addicted to smoking, but you eventually wanted to quit because you realize how bad and addicting it is. Even if you quit though you'd still be hanging out with other smokers mostly, and breathing in that 2nd hand smoke. The only true way out would be to both quit and only hang out with non-smokers.

This won't be everyone of course. Like smoking, toxicity and polarization are too addictive, but I can see there becoming a counterculture that simply rejects all of it altogether.


I have already started doing this. I use my phone for calling people, listening to music, reading books, and directions when I'm lost. I have given up Facebook. Twitter. Gmail. Google. And a bunch more besides. I hadn't realized how much the Google/Gmail ecosystem was affecting me, how it fed me news based on links and news based on what I'd clicked, and how that affected me. Since I have given these things, particularly the Google filter bubble, up, I am calmer and happier. That's not to say that I am perfect, or perfectly calm, or anything like that. But I am significantly better than I was a year ago.


Don't wait for the future. You can have this life today. Whenever I read about how this Twitter stream is toxic, and that group is using Facebook to harass some person, about Gamergate and 4chan and The_Donald--how glad I am that I don't participate in any of these sites, and therefore have opted out of all of this drama!

This stuff is almost 100% online. It's not invading your real life unless you invite it in. Switch the computer off and disengage, and suddenly you're immune. Someone right now might be badmouthing me on Facebook or Twitter, and I don't care. It doesn't matter because I'm not on these sites.


Counterpoint: people who shoot up churches and the like.


Those people are vanishingly rare. You're vastly more likely to die in a traffic collision than to be shot because somebody doesn't like your church.


They're a lot less rare than they used to be. Likewise, few people die in wars until they're suddenly declared.


We haven't "declared" wars in my parents' lifetimes, yet somehow millions have died at our hands. "Apocalyptic" violence in USA is partly an echo of our crimes overseas, but mostly an obvious result of the constant fear-mongering and dehumanization our media performs in order to justify those crimes.


It used to take some knowledge and effort to fill the Audience portion of that equation. The further back in time you go, the more was required of you to find and maintain it. Now the audience is delivered to you and everyone else via a handy little device we all carry around and reflexively stare at whenever there's a pause in our lives.

EDIT: clarity


"The UVA rape was real" - Rolling Stone

"That ESA guy's shirt is sexist." - Too many to count

"That nobel prize winner made inappropriate jokes because one person said so and should be sacked." - The BBC

"That Covington kid is a nazi and is guilty af." - Too many again, even after contradicting material came out.

"Jussie Smolliez was nearly lynched by MAGA hats!" - A US presidential candidate.

"Zoe Quinn is a credible game developer with no track record of either scams or BPD at all, and certainly no blood on her hands." - The Guardian

None of the people behind these lies were anonymous, in fact they were quite proud they got to broadcast then.

And their audience loved being given permissable targets for their 2 minutes hate.

Almost no one wants to acknowledge that before the right radicalized online, the left radicalized both offline and on and pretended this was civilized.


I think people are over-emphasizing the anonymity aspect of it. If the only think causing someone to behave morally is the idea that they are being watched by other people who know who they are, then their parents/religion/society has failed them.


>If the only think causing someone to behave morally is the idea that they are being watched by other people who know who they are, then their parents/religion/society has failed them.

what do you think the function of parents, religion and society is if not to observe people and watch them? That's what socialization is. Stake in a community and incentive to adjust to social norms, because the consequence of anti-social behaviour is loss of status or punishment.

It's completely rational for individuals to behave selfishly under conditions of anonymity because they face no social consequences. The way humans are conditioned to behave what we perceive to be reasonable is through social interaction and peers, that is to say, to be watched.

The model many people seem to have is that 95% of people under conditions of internet anonymity are good citizens and that the trolls are the aberration. But actually the trolls are just the example of what essentially happens to everyone if they're taken out of what is the natural human condition, which is social interaction including persistent identity and stakeholdership in some community.


That doesn't really explain why many people are not assholes when given anonymity. And whatever those people have, we need to replicate in everyone else. Unless you believe that those people are somehow genetically "nice" and it is impossible to replicate with environmental factors.


To be honest I think that's overstating how many nice people there are on the internet. In purely anonymous communities the discourse is almost always toxic. Even on a small website like HN with people who frequently have their names exposed in their profile discourse is rough.

Look at the amount of moderation the average Reddit community needs. Everybody is meaner on the internet, people are mean even on facebook just because they don't talk face to face. I remember a woman in Germany who posted that someone should set a refugee home on fire under her actual name, several such cases existed. They obviously all lost their jobs but it shows how maladjusted we are if we type into our keyboards.

I think the difference between extreme trolls and regular people is just to what degree you live online. If you have a regular social life you're probably not that bad of a person online, if you spend your entire day online you end up with 4chan. But I think everybody feels the bad consequences of semi-anonymous or virtual communication.


I actually always found 4chan to be more courteous/less toxic than Reddit, even with it's extra level of anonymity - in its own, incredibly offensive way.


Now take that F-ckwad, and remove the Anonymity by requiring them to use their real name. And bingo, now you live in Interesting Times.

https://www.reddit.com/r/insanepeoplefacebook/ would like to disagree.


Ya because one side backs a fascist dictator and the other side doesn't. Too many cowardly people trying to shrug off their obligation as a U.S. citizen to revolt against this garbage. This isn't he-said, she-said. There is objective truth out there, and it's being suppressed by a massive right wing media machine that has broken the collective backs of overall journalism. But we're supposed to be civil? To hell with that.


I don't think anything really changed. Only the scale of things, with platforms like Twitter that can be extremely viral.

Everybody remember the collective insanity of the Covington Catholic school fiasco where journalists and celebrities were publicly wishing for the death of a bunch of kids wearing MAGA hats or at the very least getting them doxxed or hurt all because of a one minute video taken out of context. And those who approached the story in a cautious manner were called out by the rest for being to soft or accused of being part of "the bigots", Ironically, the account that initially twitted the video snippet was banned after a few days.

I don't think the population is more deranged than before though, I mean the 70's were pretty violent politically, more than today.

The solution is to quit social media or join smaller communities free of wedge issues and identity politics. Twitter, Facebook or Reddit aren't going to fix themselves, they make money off outrage and petty divisions.

And finally you don't owe activism on a specific cause or an opinion to anyone. It's OK not to have an opinion or not wanting to get involved in a political debate. Anybody that attacks you for refusing to take a stance on any issue should probably be muted/blocked or removed from your life, that person isn't your friend and will try to make you look bad at the first opportunity just get brownie internet points for themselves.


Polarisation and 'toxicity' are two completely different things.

The fact that people have increasingly divergent views (or rather, are voicing them, they probably always held those views) is just a fact of life. It's not unique to any online community or even any country. It might be simply the fact that too much diversity is inherently destined to collapse.

'Toxicity' is a made-up new meaning for the word, which means anything undesirable from the point of view of the speaker.

Labelling the former as the later is one of the root causes of the feedback loop you're describing.

The first step is for both sides of polarising issues to acknowledge each other, that both think they're doing the right thing, and that neither is 'toxic'. Without that common ground, dialogue can never begin.


>'Toxicity' [...] means anything undesirable from the point of view of the speaker.

I think it's more often the delivery than the message that gets something labeled as "toxic". Merriam Webster describes toxic (when used in this context) as "extremely harsh, malicious, or harmful"

People are generally open to new ideas as long as they're presented in a friendly and factual manner.


"Extremely harsh" is entirely different from "malicious or harmful". Again the conflation of these is one of the root causes of what we're seeing today.

People who use the term 'toxic' like this are people who subscribe to the mindset of "I'm being prosecuted because someone is saying something I don't like".

People seem to have forgotten that having free speech necessarily means tolerating speech you disagree with, speech you find objectionable etc. Blanket labelling anything outside one's bubble as 'toxic' and refusing to engage in any dialogue is exactly how polarisation begins.


I literally just explained to you, in a courteous and civilized manner, that many (in my opinion - most) people don't use the term that way. That includes me.

The irony of you ignoring my comment/experience, doubling down on your claim, and then going on to preach that "refusing to engage in any dialogue is exactly how polarisation begins" would be hilarious if it weren't so depressing.

People seem to have lost the ability to listen. That makes me sad.

Edit: Grammar.


It sounds a bit like you might be feeling prosecuted because I said something you disagree with. I'm not even sure what part of my comment upset you since none of it is harmful, malicious, or personally targeted.

Emotive language like 'preach' has no place in constructive debate.

I'm not at all upset about your viewpoint, I'm happy to debate it on any level you'd like. Keep your comment as a solid example of what I meant for the other readers.


Again, ignoring the substance of my message in order to continue your attack.

>I'm not at all upset about your viewpoint, I'm happy to debate it on any level you'd like.

I told you exactly how I see something, you've yet to acknowledge it, and have twice doubled down and claimed I think the opposite. This is the problem. You aren't interested in listening, you're more interested in being "right".

I'm done here.

"...refusing to engage in any dialogue is exactly how polarisation begins"

-missosoup (while un-ironically refusing to engage in dialogue)


There is nothing to fix, except for the attitude of those who think there is something to be fixed, because essentially it's they who demand something unreasonable: censoring of the free speech. It is unreasonable, because that assumes somebody (the person or group, who "fixes" the problem) can and must decide, what is good and bad in regards of what you are saying. And unless this person is you, you always will be dissatisfied with the results to say the least.

Instead, you should try to accept the truth: free speech is ugly, deal with it. There always are some people, who are nice, but all people are never nice. A lot of different people with different opinions freely voicing their opinions in the public space will always be ugly.

Ok, now let's assume you don't care and get to actually answering your question. In order to remove "ugly" you need to remove some of the elements:

1. Different opinions. People with different opinions are removed from society, everybody in the community must be as similar as possible. There are multiple ways to achieve that to multiple degrees, but the key is closed communities, since banning faster than they appear (or find a way to return, which is relevant for the web) is a hard work.

2. Freely voicing them. Again, multiple ways: good old moderation of the content, make everybody have a stake in what they are saying (reputation systems, goods exchange, game mechanics enforcing cooperation), etc.

3. Public space. Move all discussions to PM, so they still argue, but you don't see it and feel good about yourself and your platform.

4. Speech. Just don't let people communicate. Easiest to achieve on a given platform, and the most effective.


Does free speech include yelling down other speakers? In the physical world this rarely happens. But spamming and vandalizing an intelligent conversation with sock-puppets and intentionally disingenuous posts is trivial and universal on the web.

Consider a parallel phenomenon: I notice there is outrage among gamers when cheating happens. But ironically cheating in conversation causes less active outrage. Both of these behaviors happen easily on the web but are difficult in real life. Maybe because conversation destroying behavior is less well understood or more stealthy. Maybe because it's so unimaginable in real life, people aren't used to dealing with it. Whatever the cause it's absurd that for games the problem is solved more zealously than in conversations that have serious impact.


Because in the "physical world" rarely anybody speaks freely, they always restrain themselves being afraid of reprecussions.


There definitely is something to fix, and it has nothing to do with free speech. Something about text communications makes people much more aggressive than they would be face to face. People wouldn’t say half the things they say online if they had to say them out loud.

PM, public forum, real names on Facebook, it doesn’t matter. Something inherent to text communications makes people more toxic than they would be in person. It’s not a free speech issue.


It's simple; there are few-to-no costs for doing so (at worst, getting banned and making a new account), but the emotional benefit of upsetting someone else, while attenuated, still deliver significant satisfaction to those who seek it.

For simple trolls (as opposed to political actors), the dynamic is simple to model; you spend time and some effort to create accounts and say antagonistic things while people respond with abuse (to which the troll feels immune), and then harvest (via screenshots) examples of the saltiest tears for sharing with ones troll peers for lulz in other forums.

People do the exact same thing in real life, but it's more time-consuming and expensive to establish and maintain physical groups, both in economic terms and direct costs (legal or physical sanctions).


> Something about text communications makes people much more aggressive than they would be face to face. People wouldn’t say half the things they say online if they had to say them out loud.

I do think you have a point, but also remember how public hate can be: slavery, segregation, genocide, Inquisition, witch trials, terrorism, violent crime, etc.

Unfortunately, humans have a history of willingly and publicly spreading hate without hiding behind text.

This is a huge topic with many possible solutions, but one option is to choose how we respond to it and how we let it affect us. Just knowing that someone might be more aggressive through text than in person might help to dampen the impact we let text have on us.


It is unreasonable, because that assumes somebody (the person or group, who "fixes" the problem) can and must decide, what is good and bad in regards of what you are saying.

That is a wholly reasonable assumption; it's the same one that underlies courts and jury trials.


I find such blanket statements against censorship perplexing on a heavily moderated site like this. If someone replied to this post in a very toxic way -- say they got mad at an argument of yours, and posted embarrassing personal info about you to make you look bad, or they very uncharitably and purposefully misinterpreted something in your post to mean that you were a pedophile and then they posted contact info of your co-workers' families so others could warn them -- would you complain if a moderator or even some kind of system on this site applied some degree of censorship so that the reply wouldn't be displayed prominently?

(Yes, I'm counting the fact that this site has a downvote button which lowers/obscures/hides posts as a censorship system. That system exists in the first place not only to raise good posts, but also to try to solve the problem of bad posts by slightly censoring them or more.)


Did anyone deliberately create the situation we see out there? Then the assumption that rolling back requires censorship is, well, just an assumption.

We've created an ecosystem of "engagement" rife with perverse incentives for incivility. Does reconfiguring that ecosystem require censorship? I think not.


Alternatively: culture. If people just feel that proving how evil arbitrary strangers are is just not done, they just won't decide to have such arguments in the first place, and if they disagree they'll tend to do so civilly, and so will be more inclined to listen to their opponents.

So long as a community doesn't grow too quickly, culture is mostly conserved. Ideals of tolerance and productive discussion would probably help, too, but ask a sociologist.


I've been active online since 2000.

There was a theory in 2004, known as GIFT: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad

Guess what? People without anonymity are total fuckwads too - this happens on Facebook, Instagram and Twitch, in an era where you could probably find someone's personal details if you look hard enough.

I think the key is audience. Bullying feels good for a lot of people. Bullies will go for low hanging fruit where they won't be struck back.

You see people acting this way even in once helpful sites like Stack Overflow; downvotes will pull bullies in like a magnet. You see people picking on anti-vax, flat earthers, Justin Bieber, not so much because they do harm, but because they're easy targets to hold down.

Viral algorithms amplify this effect. It highlights bad news that everyone can join in and rage on. It's not a new thing; news channels have done this for decades.

We can't really fix it. I'm more a community nomad these days. It's easy to move on to other new and old communities, away from this effect. I've been happy with HN, Discord, and IRC lately.. IRC has picked up back to 500 people per channel, and it's probably no coincidence.


> You see people picking on anti-vax, flat earthers, Justin Bieber, not so much because they do harm, but because they're easy targets to hold down.

Your other examples were solid, but anti-vax absolutely does cause harm, and it seems inappropriate to dismiss the possibility that in the case of anti-vax people are motivated by genuine fear for our collective safety and that of our children.


The claim wasn't that they're harmless, but that they're easy targets.


The claim was that people were motivated to argue by the ease of the target rather than by the genuine threat of harm. In the case of anti-vax, I don't agree. I think people see a threat to their kids and react accordingly.


It goes beyond hash criticism into gleeful joy making jokes about kids dying.


Anti-vaxxers are only a threat to kids who have another health condition that prevents them from being vaxinated. So, in most cases, it's a threat to somebody else's kids (who isn't even present in the conversation) not a threat to the anti-anti-vaxxer's kids.


This is not true. Vaccinations are not 100% effective. They're usually in the range of 90% to 99% effective. Protection also wanes over time. Because of this, herd immunity protects everyone, not just those who are unable to be vaccinated for health reasons.


I'm not anti-vax, but this is a discussion on toxicity on the internet, and I see plenty of people who take great pleasure in just unloading on anti-vaxxers because they know it's a target nobody will scold them for being cruel to. It's pretty obvious these types don't really care about changing the minds of the anti-vaxxers either, people usually don't have an epiphany about their life just because somebody was mean to them online. If anything, it's an opportunity for anti-vaxxers to band together against people who are cruel to them and probably even more deeply ingrain their beliefs.

This doesn't mean anti-vaxxers should be tolerated as a viable alternative lifestyle, but throwing curses at them online and spamming memes that make them out to be mentally challenged really doesn't do anything but satisfy a bully.


> to dismiss the possibility that in the case of anti-vax people are motivated by genuine fear for our collective safety and that of our children.

People who are genuine in that NEVER bash. For the simple reason that bashing doesn't work. What they do do is respectfully argue with any false data.

But you'll never see someone like that insult people or call them stupid, ignorant, or doubt the love of an anti-vaxxer for their own children.


Even if you don't feel strongly on the topic of vaccination, going out of your way to bash anti-vaxxers is great at signalling how you are scientifically woke. The GP is positing that people who bash anti-vaxxers do so overwhelmingly out of this motivation rather than true pro-vaccine activism.


I understand the GP's take. I think it's both incorrect and uncharitable. People care about their kids more than imaginary internet points.


I disagree. The loudest activists too often tend to be younger people who either don't have kids, or are /r/childfree types who actively disdain the concept.

Of course, by "activists", there's a difference between the genuine voices, versus the Reddit or HN meme-slingers. The latter group seems louder due to style. While they happen to be on the right side (from my POV), they're still quite awful as people.


I also think the lack of consequences makes it very easy for people to post all kinds of shit.

On HN this is greatly reduced by the point system and the opacity of bad posts. A bad post fades away so it doesn't look as important as other posts.

In real life you can get a punch in the face if you say nasty things to someone.

But on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube most trolls wont ever learn because they just can say whatever they want.


> On HN this is greatly reduced by the point system and the opacity of bad posts. A bad post fades away so it doesn't look as important as other posts.

The problem is, this functionality is popularity based. Yes, posts that get downvoted are usually bad posts. However, some are simply disliked by the majority of people who wanted to vote on them and are not actually "bad" by the standards of this discussion. Similarly, I have seen toxic posts (that I have downvoted and flagged) upvoted (at least once) when the target of the toxicity was "acceptable".


Worth considering that this isn't simply mechanical: to make those posts fade away requires humans clicking the downvote button. Which requires some kind of culture that includes clicking the button on "bad" posts, for whatever the definition of "bad" is. If there were downvoting on say, YouTube, I'm not sure that it would produce the same results that it does on HN.


Hacker News is indeed a special place on the internet and it would probably be difficult to reproduce its style of discussion. That being said I think it is worth considering why HN has succeeded and to what extent is this a function of the presentation algorithm (upvotes/downvotes)?

It is worth remembering that the visible part of an internet community is a small part of the total possible community. Following the classic 90-9-1 rule there are a lot more people who could participate than people who do participate. This means that the visible face of an online community has a lot of room to change.


> On HN this is greatly reduced by the point system and the opacity of bad posts. A bad post fades away so it doesn't look as important as other posts.

I really dislike that. But, I have put in CSS so that bad posts don't fade away, and enabled show dead so that all messages can be seen. But at least we have the choice!


I thought this was the case too.

One of the things that surprised me was how people who are horrible online are even worse offline.

I think there are plenty of online consequences. Post a controversial post and someone will verbally slap, share, shame you. Shaming might be far worse than a physical punch to some people.

I think a lot of people who become trolls don't become trolls for the sake of of trolling. They do it because they're trying to enforce consequences upon someone.


I think consequences are an illusory deterrent personally. People thought real name policies would help. Even with people losing jobs over posting the needle didn't move.

In truth consequences can be an incentive for bad actors. To them saying offensive things and getting a burner account banned is boring compared to tricking people into getting banned.


> People without anonymity are total fuckwads too

Hell, go read any "opinion" article from any newspaper since the dawn of the printing press. They were well-written fuckwads, but they were pretty much all fuckwads.


In the old days you only ever saw that embarrassing uncle with the extreme views on Thanksgiving. Now he's on your Facebook/Twitter feed every day.


Read "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman.

You will realize that Social Media is designed in such a way intentionally to draw toxicity from society.

No technology is neutral. Technology gives and technology takes away. Medium is the message. Communication evolved because of the medium. For every evolution, it gives something and it takes away something. From oral communication to the printing press to telegraph to TV to the internet to social media. Every evolution gives birth to something and destroys something.

For example, TV makes everyone reachable (what it gives), but makes everything into entertainment (what it takes), even important topic such as politics, religion, war, poverty, pestilence, etc science becomes pure entertainment, juxtaposed between endless drama, reality show, and ads, coupled with background music and personas that manipulate the minds. The more "entertainer" you are, the better, regardless whether you are a dumb scientist or a dumb lawmaker that will affect many people's lives using your policy.

Social media such as twitter, for example, everyone now has a voice (what it gives), but with its char limit (what it takes) doesn't give critical thinking and rational debate a highlight, therefore it spirals down into madness. The more outrageous you are, the better, because it will go viral and people will react in such a predictable way.

A good example of a person who knows exactly how TV audience and social media audience will behave in a predictable way, and took advantage of that, is President Trump.

You want to design a medium/platform in such a way so that the pros outweigh the cons. But I think the hard part is knowing how will people use the platform. Those social media giants started out with good intentions, and only later and later down the road, and here we are right now, that we discover its true effects.


> Social media such as twitter, for example, everyone now has a voice (what it gives), but with its char limit (what it takes) doesn't give critical thinking and rational debate a highlight, therefore it spirals down into madness.

Twitter has a hard, small limit. Most other platforms either have no limit, or the limit is fairly large.

The problem is, people don't use it.

Worse, those that do use it are ridiculed, or their words are ignored (TL;DR anyone?)...

Thinking about this, I wonder if any of it has to do with people's "inner monologue" that was discussed yesterday here on HN? If you didn't see it, the gist was that there are some people who don't have such a monologue, and it came as a surprise to one person. Similarly, those without such a monologue are often surprised that others have it; one person commented that they often wished that the voiceover of characters in a movie, expressing their inner thoughts, was a real thing - and were shocked to find out that for most people - it is!

Anyhow - does this play into how people write online? Do they tend to write less or smaller messages, because their inner monologue is too loud or constant? Do those without such monologue write more thoughtful and longer posts? Then I think of myself; I have an inner monologue, but I tend to write long things (case in point - this post?) - but I don't find my inner monologue a burden.

But some do - I know I have read of people who either must always have some noise around them to drown out their "inner monologue", or if left in silence, even for small moments, will declare themselves "bored", perhaps because their inner monologue isn't perceived as interesting (whereas I and others have no problems thinking and pondering things, in silence, with no boredom)...?

Does this effect how people compose and type their messages? Does it help or hinder understanding? Does it facilitate or does it block meaningful conversations?

Twitter may have tapped into something that was always there to begin with, and in essence has helped foster that communication style - making it acceptable widely - conversation as "sound bites" - which has perhaps led to our present situation.


Twitter is just an example. If you read that book, the gist is basically Social Media makes it easy to brain dump and leave that brainfeces all over without having to look it back again (paraphrasing mine). Anyone in the world can post anything, without any accountability, without the need to carefully revalidate and be validated/invalidated.

I saw the post about inner monologue but didn't read it. But I believe it could be related.

I highly suggest reading the book because I'm doing a disservice trying to explain about it. It basically explained how oratory, printing press, telegraph/telephone and television really changed society a lot, but in subconscious ways that most of us don't think.


> A good example of a person who knows exactly how TV audience and social media audience will behave in a predictable way, and took advantage of that, is President Trump.

Trump wasn't the first though, and contrast the coverage: Obama's digital strategy was lauded for its tech-savvy genius by the media, whereas Trump's campaign was linked by the same to white supremacists wrt Pepe the Frog etc.


He wasn't. I'm just pointing out he is doing a good job at it. It is no secret for people who work in the media industry that "entertaining" and "outrageousness" is a recipe for success.


Truth be told, the most practical solution is to stop centralising everything and using these giant social networking sites that force people with nothing in common together. The bigger your audience gets and the less focused on any one topic it is, the harder it is to moderate/keep under the control, and the more drama you'll inevitably have when groups clash there.

Smaller internet forums, subreddits, Discord/Slack groups, etc tend to be a lot more civil than the likes of Twitter or YouTube are.

So a revival of those types of sites and communities will help a lot.

As will returning to the days of multi pseudonyms for different websites. Because people are not one sided. They don't always act the same way in every setting.

No, their behaviour depends on the company they're with. They might act one way with family, another way with friends, another way at work, etc.

That's how society stays together to some degree. People don't know how others act in other settings, and they don't care. Your coworkers likely have a whole mix of political opinions, but since it likely doesn't come up during work, it doesn't really matter.

Social networks seem to be trying to demolish this sense of separation between sides of people's personalities, and that's making society more and more fragile, as one wrong move means someone's entire life gets destroyed by the internet mob.

Oh, and decent moderation too. Unfortunately for Facebook and co, you can't automate moderation and expect it to work well, and you can't outsource it to a bunch of full time employees in a distant office somewhere. It has to be done by people with a real investment in the community, which is again where a well run small community shines.


>As will returning to the days of multi pseudonyms for different websites. Because people are not one sided. They don't always act the same way in every setting.

I never stopped doing this. The problem is, a lot of younger people were never taught to or never learned they should do this and a lot of older people same thing sort of.

I was kind of lucky I suppose, years ago I had a friend say something on a work Facebook page that caused some trouble, I realized Facebook wasn't a place I could have people like that, so since I've kept Facebook or any other social media website with personal information and concersations on it strictly professional or Christmas dinner at grandma's house level. Which pretty much means, no politics, no getting involved in other people's arguments, no posting things I wouldn't want an employer or my grandma seeing, no friends that post ridiculous things on my feed etc.

Then i've got my forum and other online site accounts that lack, for the most part, studd that could easily identify me, though I'm sure someone with lots of time and dedication(dunno why though), could figure it out, that use a different email than my 'real' email, where I can talk about things without worrying that I might randomly piss off someone I know.

If I want to have potentially divisive conversations with people I know in person, I'd rather do it in person or at least not on what might as well be the community billboard.


Unfortunately, I don't think it's as simple as "just go back to smaller groups". For companies, more users = more revenue, there isn't realy much incentive to not try and pull in as many people as possible. And then for most normal users, if they here about some big site, they're inclined to join that so they don't miss out on the the funny tik tok memes/all of their friends being on instagram/etc. For them, what benefit is there to a smaller site where you can't get as many followers or where your friends/favorite celebrity isn't a member.

I agree with you that size is one of the main contributing factors to the problem, I just don't think smaller sites is a practical solution for the public at large. That being said, if you don't care about "fixing" the public problem, then you're right on the money. If you personally don't want to experience toxicity, get off the big sites, it's that easy. I just don't see that being a fix for the average teenager/college student/boomer


...it doesn't need to be a huge company (or company of any kind) to run these things. Back in the early 2000s, a volunteer who knew about computers would set up phpBB on a church's website, or a radio station would allow one IT person to spend half their time maintaining something like this, and that would be it. No need to turn millions in advertising dollars to have an online community.

I do agree with the parent comment, that we may well see a resurgence of small and medium-sized online communities, for the simple reason that more fragmentation could be a good thing. When a community has its eternal september, people can move elsewhere.


I meant more that even a new, small company would have no incentive to not want to become the next big thing/the next facebook. Good point though that we don't need companies/start-ups to feed us online communities, particularly since the users are almost always the ones bringing value to platform like a message board/forum sites.


That won't happen because the benefits of network effects accrue to the people across the network as a whole as well as the proprietors/advertisers.


> stop centralising everything

Even federated approaches like mastodon also have big issues with toxicity.


Just making a smaller Twitter won't change the nature of the Problem. It's less about the size of the community than the amount of topics, I believe. If you have a community that is about trains, and trains only, you may get a heated discussion about some train stuff, but you won't get a brawl about the political issue de jour.


Stop responding to it.

No seriously, just stop. This isn't a "complex problem that needs nuanced technical and legislative solutions".

Back in the old day, there was this saying. "Do not feed the trolls". Sadly, we've forgotten that.

Our current approach is, "create rigorous 30 minute point by point take down videos to defeat their point of view". Our urge to debate and correct people who are wrong just fuels them making more content. A troll needs reactions to survive. Just downvote and move along.


We found a lot of lies during the UK election last month. Not difference in opinions, not beliefs about whay may or will happen, easily proven lies, posted across community forums, copied and pasted to other ones, and repeated in an increasing cresendo

People then believe those lies, they repeat them, and even if they don't those lies sink into their subconcious and change their behavior, not necessarily today or tomorrow, but for the next 30 years

Ignoring them doesn't fix the problem.


> Ignoring them doesn't fix the problem.

"The problem". What problem are we talking about again here? Is the problem that people are believing wrong things, or the spread of polarization and toxicity?

I don't care if people believe "wrong things". How's that old song go? "All lies and jests, still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest"? People will always believe whatever they want to, regardless of "evidence", regardless of history, regardless of persuasion. "Post-truth" society is such a ludicrous term. There was never a "truth society" to begin with. Never. If someone doesn't want to change their mind, you're tilting at windmills. Doubly so if this person is an anonymous account.

What I care about is stopping the spread of toxic and divisive stereotypes.

Look at the front page of Reddit. Every other post is a screenshot of an outrageous anonymous tweet, or a picture of a receipt with a nasty note on it, or a text message conversation. Look at how the public receives this: "Who cares if it's real or fake? The point is that it reinforces my stereotype of 'them'. We know 'they' exist, and we must do something about 'them'."

That's what's driving polarization and toxicity. The urge to respond with outrage to anonymous trolls. This is a problem we can fix by down voting and moving on.


> I don't care if people believe "wrong things".

But those beliefs lead to actions, which have negative consequences, which can affect us all.


Indeed, but attacking that with anger, outrage, and witch hunts rather than tact is not only ineffective, it may even create a positive feedback loop.


Actually, it is rather effective. Your immune system doesn't rely on tact once a particular foreign body proves to be hostile or dangerous; rather tt initiates inflammation and countermeasures.


We must be careful when using microbiological metaphors to propose solutions for macro social problems; such language has often been used to justify genocide (i.e.: "hygenic cleansing of parasites"). Besides, what we're talking about here is more akin to autoimmune disfunction, and not healthy immune function.


Besides, what we're talking about here is more akin to autoimmune disfunction, and not healthy immune function.

No it isn't. Responding to toxicity or an external insult is precisely what the immune system does. An autoimmune disorder would be an activation of the immune system against some other bodily system that is healthy and functioning.


An autoimmune disease is a condition arising from an abnormal immune response to a normal body part. People having different opinions is normal.


People having different opinions is normal, but not all opinions are thereby valid. Promoting genocide or child abuse have a deleterious effect on people in the in the respective target groups and so we sanction such opinions because of their demonstrated harms that result from their implementation.


The problem is how people define and extrapolate what constitutes promoting genocide or child abuse is often erroneous.

For instance: some people consider anti-vax sentiment to be child abuse, but dont consider cross-sex hormone injections for young children to be child abuse (and vice versa).

Another example is how many consider the swastika to be a symbol of genocide, but give a free pass to the hammer and sickle -- even though both of these symbols' ideologies have been similarily genocidal.


Honestly that's somewhat nonsense. People don't just believe whatever they want to believe, education and diffusion of information has radically changed humanity over the last few centuries and you're fooling yourself if you think that somehow improved communication and discussions didn't drive that. Schools have improved reading and mathematical literacy of the general population, that isn't just some made up statistic.

Humans are incredibly social beings, they hide in each other, as well as grow in each other. People absolutely can and do change their minds on all sorts of things every single day, and it's a "throw my hands up in the air and quit" to say otherwise.


Yes... and also no.

Yes, people change their minds. But the more passionately they care about something, the less likely they are to change their minds about it. On the big questions that people care deeply about (politics, religion, vi vs. emacs), evidence doesn't seem to change peoples' ideas nearly as much as it should.


> I don't care if people believe "wrong things".

If you are an ethnic minority in a society where xenophobic nationalists believe you should be killed, do you think you'd care if people believed those "wrong things"?


You might find that the people you see posting and repeating these lies see the things that you post and repeat as lies.


They frequently do see things in that way - and they're wrong. In fact, they're worse than wrong, because many people see the dueling assertions of fact and give up on knowing the truth of a situation altogether. This is a classic disinformation technique.

We do have the ability to determine truth from fiction, it just takes more work than cynically throwing up your hands and smugly concluding all sides are lying.


They're not necessarily wrong. For example, one of the big anti-Brexit talking points beloved of both Corbyn and social media users before the election was that a trade deal with the US would mean maggots in orange juice. This also, as I recall, became part of the narrative about Brexit supporters being mislead, with the line being that they were sold all those false dreams and would get maggots instead. It was a complete and utter lie: https://fullfact.org/health/maggot-orange-juice-USA/

And I really do mean a complete lie. This wasn't a dispute over creative redefinitions of terms like Boris' NHS funding claims, or some nitpick about a minor detail. Corbyn and a worryingly large chunk of the press took an example of US food safety regulations being unambiguously stricter than EU ones - of them placing all the same restrictions on food manufacturers that the EU does, plus more - and falsely claimed their regulations were weaker instead, using graphic, emotive, memorable language, and everyone believed and repeated this total inversion of the truth.

The thing that gets me is that on some level, people must've known that US food isn't really unsafe. There's not some big movement of people who refuse to eat US food - by and large, everyone trusts food there as much as they would food here. The other thing is that despite this pretty much the entire press dropped the ball on this lie. (It is not even close to the only prominent anti-Brexit or anti-Tory lie they left unchallenged or outright made themselves.) Even Full Fact did initially - they actually helped spread the false claim themselves, and only came back to it a month or so later after it had spread across the internet multiple times and been used by Corbyn repeatedly in his campaigning.


The desire to "correct" other people who are wrong is the fundamental impulse of authoritarianism.


> The desire to "correct" other people who are wrong is the fundamental impulse of authoritarianism.

Maybe, but it's also the impulse of people who rightly care about the future of our shared world.


> Maybe, but it's also the impulse of people who rightly care about the future of our shared world.

Literally no authoritarian says "i want to suppress people because I'm evil mwahaha." Every single authoritarian says "i need to suppress this evil disinformation because i care about the future of our shared world---unlike you unworthy people who presumably don't care."


Rightly according to your subjective experience.


So... would you consider that an argument against the sanctions levied against, for example, doctors who lie and fake data to stoke fears about vaccines and autism? What about fighting against conspiracy theories about the deep state and pizza parlors?

There's a tendency to wishfully think that people are rational and should be expected to sort out their own information environment with no governmental influence whatsoever, but I don't buy it at all. We're predictably manipulable, emotional creatures, and we can decide rationally to improve our information environment without falling into your implicit slippery slope.


> would you consider that an argument against the sanctions levied against, for example, doctors who lie and fake data to stoke fears about vaccines and autism?

Yes. I never said authoritarianism is bad. In fact, I probably consider myself an authoritarian.


Furthermore, it is rationalism which exists as the first non religious justification of hierarchy. Read Plato.


"People are lying" - "They'd say that you are lying" - "BUT I AM RIGHT".

That's not rationalism, that's just saying "I'm right, they are wrong, end of discussion".


That's because this conversation is occurring in the abstract - surely you can think of examples which don't fall into your supposed pattern (flat earth, pizza parlors, etc.)


But those are super edge cases, the vast super majority of things aren't clear cut at all. "Is that policy going to increase employment? Will it depress wages, and by how much?"

Good luck with judging who's right and who's wrong.


These "super edge cases" are happening monthly. THAT's the problem. The examples given weren't a historical review, they're a sampling of what happened in 2019! If these were in any way rare or outside the norm, I'd feel safe ignoring them, but even in cases of absolute truth and fact (jade in your vagina does not cure anything) we get a netflix series.


> These "super edge cases" are happening monthly.

Yes, in a world with literally billions of people, you have a few millions who believe outlandish things. If that was the extent of the problem with polarization/toxicity on the internet (or public debate in general), I doubt we'd talk about it, and I'd be very happy with the state of the world.

Those people have no large base, no stable membership, no money, no power. Focusing on them is like decrying the fall of science because 6yo Timmy still believes in Santa Clause.


You say "millions of people believe foolish things", and then completely disregard exactly how many there are and how concentrated they become. I disagree with the assertions at the end that "a few million" do not constitute a large following, and allow me to provide a few counterexamples:

* the Flat Earth Society has a very stable membership and patreon. Mark Sagent's youtube channel alone has 58k subscribers. Social media influence is the source of money, and a power all on its own. * Gweneth Paltrow's pseudoscience has a facebook group with 500k members. She has a netflix series and a reliable income from her online storefront. The facebook group came first, then the netflix series. * QAnon is a persistent conspiracy theory with no basis in fact. Regardless, tripcodes (a public hash of the password used for identity verification on 4chan) denote a persistent online identity, so he's got a following... and the following is what causes power.

Power in its purest form is asking someone for something and getting it. This looks different in the modern age than it did previously, but saying that celebrities don't have power belies the entire concept. These are celebrities, either advocating obviously false things, or due to their advocation of obviously false things, and millions of people are taken in.

In contrast, the expected Iowa caucus turnout numbers are going to be around 60,000. Or, in other words: There are more people believing in flat earth than there are democrats caucasing in Iowa. How in the world is this not a problem.


> Or, in other words: There are more people believing in flat earth than there are democrats caucasing in Iowa. How in the world is this not a problem.

I mean, isn't the answer already in these sentences? The world vs Iowa.

It's not that I don't believe pseudoscience and cults are a problem, it's just that they are a small problem on the grand scheme of things. Increasing polarization of society at large is a problem on a different scale. It's something that has very tangible effects for most people, some guy believing that the earth is flat and having 60k people watch his videos really doesn't.


9-11 was a super edge case. Yes, absolutely it's difficult to make firm judgements about many issues, but we should still pay attention to edge cases because even though the people out at the edges of discourse seem nuts doesn't mean they're not serious or motivated or capable.


Sure, sure, but "serious, motivated and capable" still doesn't give them leverage. You will always have individuals committing terrible things, there will always be the next school shooter or terrorist, but those are, while tragic, small events, and if you didn't turn on the TV, you usually wouldn't notice them if you lived a few hundred miles away. Change the policies of a nation and you'll have a much larger effect that can be felt everywhere within its borders.

So sure, paying attention to the edge cases is fine, but focus most of your attention on the big issues.


Changing policies is the point of terrorism. You seem to be assuming it's randomized and atomized rather than itself being networked and (loosely) coordinated.


also puritanism


No, the desire to correct other people who are wrong is the fundamental impulse of pedantry.

The desire to compel others to conform to one’s ideal of correctness is the fundamental impulse of authoritarianism.

...but also libertarianism, for a particular aspect of correctness.


Huh? Can you explain?

My understanding is that the core value / principle of libertarianism is individual liberty.

How do you derive compelling others from that?


Yeah, I agreed until his comment went off the rails there. I have noticed a movement to try to brand libs as 'crypto-republicans' recently for whatever reason. Its okay, and rational to not only think along 2 (or 3 or 5) party lines.


> My understanding is that the core value / principle of libertarianism is individual liberty.

Yes, and libertarians tend to hold that it is right and proper (and even often define “violence” to exclude this use of force) to use any degree of force necessary to get others to observe the individual liberties libertarians see as essential.


> We do have the ability to determine truth from fiction, it just takes more work than cynically throwing up your hands and smugly concluding all sides are lying.

It also takes more work than "But I'm right!"

If you've done the research, if you know that you're correct, it's one thing. (Even then, not everyone who is incorrect is lying.) But it's a real temptation to say "I'm right, they're wrong, they're lying" when you haven't actually done the work to be sure you're right.

I am prone to that temptation. You almost certainly are, too. So be careful. You can be the one in the wrong.


I don't disagree with anything you've said, but I often find myself in situations where I have gone out and tried carefully to understand what's true. When you've done the research, it's very frustrating to be confronted with exactly what you're describing.


Sure. But even then, knowing that in other circumstances it can be you behaving that way can give a bit more empathy for the other person. That doesn't make it less frustrating, but it may help you handle it a bit more gracefully.


I definitely wasn't cynically throwing up my hands and smugly concluding all sides are lying. All I intended to do was demonstrate how cheap it is to call someone a liar on the internet. It costs nothing to the reputations of you or your "lying friend" to call one another a liar and thats why it doesn't mean anything. The sooner people realize this the better off we'll be.


> I definitely wasn't cynically throwing up my hands and smugly concluding all sides are lying.

Apologies, I didn't mean to insinuate that you were. My point was that this is the usual (and often intended) consequence of your argument, as I understood it and have seen it in the world.

Calling someone a liar doesn't help by itself, but if we can bring clear and irrefutable evidence to a discussion, I think we can reasonably reject outright incorrect views.


My prediction is that this is what will, in the end, change; technology will advance far enough to severely de-anonymize online interaction, at which point one's reputation again comes into play and people will find there are consequences for thoughtless shitposting.

It has begun to happen, with phenomena such as people being fired for Facebook or Twitter posts. It doesn't seem impossible to tie a sufficiently-advanced pattern-recognition network to the firehoses of data on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, et. al to automatically tie together the scraps of personal info people accidentally leave behind and severely compromise online anonymity.

Be interesting if it happens.


Economically I think this will be huge. Reputation based economies are incredibly more efficient than regulatory ones. Theres no amount of regulatory compliance that can tell consumers the information they want in the way a 2 star average uber driver review does.

On the social side I can't even imagine how destructive it could be. People (especially on HN) love to lament how restrictive and oppressing the "everyone knows everyone" small town life can be. So now that we have the anonymity online we can escape to, we've all turned around and started building the biggest "small town" imaginable! One with no escape.


Exactly. Mostly because we've discovered that the small town is oppressive, but the Wild West is full of gangsters. ;)


> technology will advance far enough to severely de-anonymize online interaction, at which point one's reputation again comes into play and people will find there are consequences for thoughtless shitposting.

This is naive. Facebook has just as many extremist bigots as any other anonymous platform.


[citation needed]


The biggest problem from the last 10 years is the spread of "everyone's entitled to an opinion". It seems that objective truth no longer exists in the eyes of the population.

This is both a cause and a consequence of the defunding of journalism and the change of the profession from news to views.


Erm... defunding journalism by who?

Private funding is making the situation worse.

Public funding is the instrument of authoritarian regimes- state sponsored media.

I think the root cause is lack of objective, critical thinking skills, and the glorification of "how it makes you feel" being more important than "is this reasonable".

I.e. emotion driving reason, rather than reason driving emotion.


By society. We don't want to fund people to separate fact from fiction, yet we lack the time and ability as a population to do it ourselves, so we latch onto outlets (especially celebrities) that seem to match our world view, and we treat what they say as gospel.


I think the vast majority of humans are simply disinterested in objective truth, except to the extent it's actionable in our day-to-day lives; otherwise, our sense-making is driven largely by the utility of social signaling: https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/

See also: Donald Hoffman's experiments in truth-maximizing vs. fitness-maximizing: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25450


Isn't everyone entitled to an opinion though? What you're hitting on, I think, is that the so-called "toxicity" of the internet is just broad disintermediation. Previously, a few people controlled the public narrative. Now, everyone does. Turns out most people don't very much like the worldview that the media elite pushes.

Journalism is dying because it's become not only useless as a means of information dissemination --- new media is better at that --- but also because journalists have become contemptuous of the public. They have only themselves to blame.


That's not a novel phrase, and it's also at least partially a peace treaty between worldviews with fundamental differences.


And if it's an opinion on things like "should it be legal to have sex before marriage" or whatever that's fine

The problem comes when you have 5 civil engineers saying a bridge is not safe, and 50 random members of the public saying it's safe. If we treat those opinions as equal, we end up with a bridge collapsing.


And one of the sides has to be right. Sometimes the facts are difficult to ascertain, but so many of the lies spread via social media are easily disproved by consulting primary sources.


But the thing is, while facts are objectively true or false, a policy choice can't be objectively right. What you often see is, policy masquerading as facts.

"If you accept X then we need to do Y."

"I don't think we should do Y"

"Then you reject facts."

Something everyone seems to have forgotten is that intelligent, well-informed, people of good will can look at the same facts and come up with different policy prescriptions.


As I've gotten older, I've started to doubt the idea that there are any objective facts at all, or at least if there are, the human brain has a limited capacity to comprehend and communicate them.

(Edit) This doesn't mean I don't believe in truth, right/wrong etc... it means that I'm constantly balancing what's most likely to be trueish - subject to higher quality information at a later time.


a policy choice can't be objectively right

A policy choice is the linkage of a fact to a particular goal; while few policy choices are so simple as to admit of a binary choice, you can certainly rank them on a gradient.

Of course, it helps if your goal is clearly definable and you maintain awareness of consistency. Otherwise, a goal of, say, improving life expectancy might be satisfied by a eugenics policy which made unpersons of those with medical conditions that would lower life expectancy.


But a goal cannot objectively be right or wrong. It could be agreed upon, but it can never be true in the sense that objective facts are true.

To go even further, people may agree on the 'what' of a goal, but disagree on the 'why' of a goal, which very much inform what policy choices they are amenable.


Perhaps the following is obvious, but other possibilities may exist:

- both sides are wrong

- the participants are unwittingly talking past each each other

Etc.


Even more than this- the desire to silence and destroy those who disagree, sometimes physically.

Some have called this increased polarization.

I see it as a slide towards violent authoritarianism.


> but so many of the lies spread via social media are easily disproved by consulting primary sources.

I wish this were true. I used to post snopes links and primary sources to Baby Boomer posts on Facebook, but it's hopeless. They either don't trust the fact-check, can rationalize it away, or just don't care. One of the most shocking realizations of my adult life has been learning that a very large portion of my otherwise high-functioning friends will believe anything, no matter how crazy or self-contradictory, if it reinforces their sense of self-righteousness.


And a whole bunch of people that see the minority or unpopular opinion as more valid because of it.


Why exactly should they trust Snopes in particular, as opposed to Washington Post, Fox News, RT, the North Korean news agency, etc.


Oh, no doubt. Easily disproving something is very different than convincing someone that it's disproven.


>And one of the sides has to be right

Not necessarily. In the US one of our presidents taught us a long time ago that "both may be" wrong, and "one must be" wrong.


In the root, there are people who knowingly lie. Hitler knowingly lied. Stalin knowingly lied. Many many people lie being fully aware they lie.

The hell, average maanger lies.


The problem with lies in politics for me is that every politician needs to do them to stay competitive. Also every party has politicians with different objectives, which makes things even harder. Also a good leader should be well compensated, at the same time people are envious of politicians who make a lot of money legally, which makes corruption for politicians necessary.

The only improvement I see is decentralization, which is a very slow, but powerful process. The Gutemberg printing press showed that it is possible, and Bitcoin is doing the same thing right now, but I think superior technology for organizing people and resources is the only solution.


I don't know if ignoring lies is necessarily a problem. Because what are the realistic chances that anyone responding to non factual information, is responding with factual information? Probably pretty low on the net if we're being honest.

That said, yes, we absolutely cannot ignore the toxicity in its entirety. Ignoring it entirely is how little old ladies at church bible studies wind up dead. There are certainly classes of toxicity that it's just military sense not to ignore. Religious and ethnic extremism, etc. Basically anything that is going to cause issues with physical violence. To my mind, violence is the line.


I have trouble seeing responding as much of a fix, although it depends a bit on the platform. On Reddit, Facebook, and the like, there is a pattern where you have highly upvoted/liked posts, where the top comment is about how the thing is obviously wrong.

Most people just glance at headlines, image, or whatever, and don't read articles or examine comments. Those comments about it being wrong only help inform the subset of people who bother to look at comments.


I think its a fallacy at this point to assume the people pushing toxic or objectively wrong viewpoints are trolls. If it ever was 100% trolls, that time has passed and their target audience is expanding their work in earnest.

We now have people who 100% believe objectively wrong things and have an obsession to spread their belief as fact.

Edit: If there is a solution to this issue, it will depend on the ratio of these people who are willing to change their mind. A real solution might involve a procedure to move people from the more stubborn camp to a more open minded camp.


When someone on the street corner tells you the world is ending you ignore them. You dont need a complex technical or social solution.

When someone tells me that xyz plant oil cures cancer or the earth is flat... I ignore them. If I want to be a troll I may play along or challenge them if its fun.

That's the internet. There have always been nutters- they just found other nutters to talk with and you get a loud feedback loop. You can happily mute them still.


I don't think ignoring the nutters is viable. Enough people are believing anti-vax lies to start bringing back deadly disease which affect more than just themselves. Enough people are believing climate change propaganda which is slowly harming the habitability of our planet for our human race.

What was once contained on the internet is leaking out onto the streets and is already affecting you and I in many ways.


Propaganda has always been there.

During the Golden Age of broadcast TV and Radio (pre-internet), the big networks broadcasted plenty of unchallenged lies. The difference now is that laymen can fact check the content put out by the big players. But the price for this is that every troll or nutter has access to the some of the same tools to spread their own lunacy.

I far prefer the current situation over the previous. While it may have felt more comfortable when people believed that news readers were telling the truth or reporting truth, it never was that way.


Trolls (either human or bots) are way more dangerous that TV propaganda because the act as legitimate actors in the public discourse.

It gives them the ability to hide between other people and manipulate the conversation.


It's interesting that you mention climate change in this, I agree that it's ground zero for demonstrating the phenomenon of expressing things as objective truth, or fact, that are much more complex than a simple binary.


>When someone tells me that xyz plant oil cures cancer... I ignore them.

What happens when you see that same person talking to a cancer patient trying to sell them plant oil?


'The world as we know it is ending and people like crmrc114 are to blame. There s/he goes right now, messing up the world as we know it!. You know what to do people.'

Added as we know it because it's actually quite easy to persuade people that what they like about the world is under dire threat, as opposed to the objective existence of the planet or life thereon. People's individual worlds tend to be quite small and it's easy and socially/politically profitable to market to them with threats rather than inducements to expansion with all the unpredictability that entails.

Now, imagine that you've been identified to or by an angry group as the cause of their dissatisfaction. This is a very different dynamic from 'someone on a street corner' that you can usually safely ignore, and against whom you probably feel you could defend yourself if necessary. I don't think you'd be so dismissive of nutters in groups if you were negatively impacted.


What happens when your child, sibling, friend, parent, or lover is saying those things that they got from the internet?


The problem is when people with such beliefs acquire position of power or influence, which sadly has already happened.


When you ignore them you tacitly endorse their position. Their propaganda is being broadcast uncontested, there will be people who believe it. Those people will spread it to other people. Pretty soon whooping cough is back and people are dying.

The truth can't advocate for itself.


>We now have people who 100% believe objectively wrong things and have an obsession to spread their belief as fact.

That's not remotely a new thing. Ever since bits could be sent over the wire we've had Dale Gribbles trying to spread their weirdass conspiracies using the web. Only difference is that back then it existed in the form of homemade webpages with remarkably bad color theory rather than the poorly punctuated social media posts of today.


I think the difference is that it’s not fringe obsessives but rather everyday people spreading bad info. Stuff like QAnon, white nationalism, anti-vax, GamerGate and so on might be mostly started and kept well alive by fringe obsessives but plenty of normal people are sharing their memes, lies and content in an uncritical manner in a way that’s very different to personal websites. Social networks have made it much easier for these lies to be spread and repeated whitewashing their true origins and becoming accepted.


> We now have people who 100% believe objectively wrong things and have an obsession to spread their belief as fact.

There's usually enough truth behind every lie - enough to make it compelling enough to believe in. I'm sorry but I don't think it's as obvious as you're making it out to be. We all probably believe something that's objectively wrong. The truth is really in the middle, but all I see is people going further towards fringe opinions.


I think it's worth expanding your definitions, eg

trolls: people who say absurd or mean things for lulz fools: people who truly believe absurd or mean things because they are naive or gullible scammers: people who say absurd or mean things for profit, and may present as fools or absurdist trolls when challenged


Part of the problem is that social platforms online are built around heavily optimising for engagement. Content that gets engagement must be better, so it gets promoted more heavily, and algorithms show you personally the content it thinks you're most likely to react to. You can't leave because it's messily wrapped up with your social connections to your friends.

Until this system dies, we won't solve this problem. It's not good enough to instruct people to stop feeding the trolls: there are huge troll-feeding dopamine farms feeding and nurturing trolls by the millions. Until we shut them down the situation will continue to get worse.


You don't have to leave, although I think most people overestimate how much it would hurt their social connections if they did. You just have to refuse to engage with toxic content when you see it, the same way you avoid debating with an obnoxious friend. (Newer social media platforms, unsurprisingly, are designed to make this easier; it's much easier to avoid dumb arguments on Instagram or Tiktok than Facebook or Twitter.)


It's you against a whole bunch of bright, motivated, and very smart people trying to keep you commenting, clicking, and getting involved. It's not that easy.


This is like saying "Just ignore the problem until it goes away," which is cute, but very naive. This is a systematic problem with huge economic incentives pushing things to the extreme. There is massive funding from state and political institutions amplifying and promoting extreme political views. This is come a long way from some lonely dweeb in his basement just looking to get a rise out of someone online.


hmm, I think that in this particular case ignoring it will make it go away.. because in the end, the problem is that people pay attention to it.

suppose nobody paid attention to such content in the first place, would it really be a problem in that case?

I think the tricky part is that if I ignore it, but no one else does, the problem is still there.


Suppose cancer didn't have any negative effects, then getting cancer wouldn't be a big deal.


Not feeding the trolls is good advice for one's personal emotional health, but it has never made the trolls go away. There's too much infrastructure supporting them: they know what works, and they broadcast to everybody. It only takes one response to give them the burst of dopamine they're looking for.

Responding makes it worse for you. It gives them a second chance aggravate you, this time with more precision. Downvote and move along is excellent advice -- especially if you're on a platform that helps you filter them out in the future. But don't fool yourself into believing that they'll go away, or that people aren't listening to their misinformation and incorporating it into their belief system -- even if they know it's false.


I'm only responsible for me. These people won't change, no matter how eloquently I phrase my fact-filled take-down of their arguments. I'll sometimes argue just for the audience, but I can't fix everyone that believes something (I think is) wrong. It's not my place, anyway. People are slowly becoming more "street-wise" on the internet. This is just one of those traps people can only avoid after they've learned their lesson first-hand.


yes, not feeding the trolls is like "don't respond to spam." doesn't really solve either.


I'd agree in some cases, and disagree in others.

In terms of things like 'fake news' and media outlets peddling absolute lies, ignoring it altogether may not be the wisest move. Might in those cases be better to calmly deconstruct the lies and prove the stories are wrong.

In terms of things like personal attacks, political toxicity on Twitter, etc? Ignoring the trolls is 100% the best thing to do. The folks that send threats and mock others online want a reaction, and the more reactions they'll get, the more the person reacting will get targeted by even more of them.


"Don't feed the trolls" has been my strategy for as long as I've been on the web, but what disconcerts me the most these days is the doxing and death threats. A reporter can simply retweet a news article and instantly be flooded with death threats and see their address posted to the web. There's no way I could tell that person "don't feed the trolls". That's a real problem with real life consequences, and I have no clue how you could begin to solve it, aside from total anonymity.


"Stop responding to it."

Then they win elections.


'responding to it' is engagement, and there is a financial incentive for that.

So the algos are boosting controversy, to boost engagement, to boost financials.


Completely off topic, but I love your HN handle!


When you stop responding, AKA reacting, you are not solving the problem, you are making it worse.

In fact I would say that "don't feed the troll" is the root cause of the huge spike in trolling that we have now.

Do not feed the troll meant, from what I understood back then, kill it, not let it grow somewhere else where it's protected.


Exactly. "Don't feed the troll" means report it to the moderator so they can ban them. Letting trolls spew their message unopposed is how you lose your community.


Do not feed the trolls made Kathy Sierra go out of Internet. It blames victims for daring not to be silent. It is like telling bullied kid to "avoid attackers" or "not be shy" or "do what they want".

Ultimately, it rewards trolling behavior.


What's new is the political Echochambers.

Stop feeding partisan BS. You are not Left nor Right!


Even those have been around on the internet since the dawn of the internet.


And the Roman empire.


Some family members that once said "don't believe what you read on the internet" and resistent to the early internet are now some of the biggest sharers of hyperpartisan alarmism online.


Absolutely. I'm afraid to admit how long it took me to figure out that you shouldn't argue with people that aren't willing to change their mind.


+1. These days, if someone tries to steer me into some sort of polarized political discussion, I give my hourly rate and ask to be paid upfront.


Back in the old day, there was this saying. "Do not feed the trolls". Sadly, we've forgotten that.

It has never worked. Put yourself in the position of someone who is being maliciously harassed by trolls and getting no help from anyone else. It's like telling a weak kid that is being bullied to just ignore it; the reality is that bullies are determined and tend to escalate rather than abandon their aggressive behavior. At best they will move on to picking on some other weaker person.


Stop responding is a fools argument. The game has changed a lot since the days of your average internet trolls because the line between internet and reality has become increasingly blurred.

For example, I don't use Facebook. But my parents do. I've had to talk with them on more than one occasion because they would get caught reading objectively wrong things spread on Facebook by bots. Thankfully my parents trust me enough that I can be an authority on those sorts of things, but it's not something I can simply ignore. If I were to let it fester, eventually it could turn into things like 'vaccines contain brainwashing bleach' or 'the government wants to take away your spleen' levels of nonsense.

At a certain point it's a good idea to stop platforming people like anti-vaxxers but it's also irresponsible to say it's possible to just ignore it.


This!!!

There was even a "emoji" of beating a troll back in the days o ubb and vbb


I don't know if I know the solution, but I know one thing that isn't the solution: silencing everyone who disagrees with you.

A lot of the people complaining about "toxicity" on the internet seem to be under the impression that if we "deplatform" the so-called toxic people, that will fix things. But on the contrary, that makes things worse.

If someone says something awful on the internet, and everyone either ignores them or politely presents a counterargument, they either move on because they feel they've been heard, or they engage in a polite discussion. Maybe they change their mind, maybe they don't. If they really can't engage in polite discussion, then they come across as making their ideas look worse, so they aren't really doing much harm.

If someone says something awful on the internet, and everyone rails about how awful it is and gets them banned, then that person is angry, and that anger motivates them to keep posting about it everywhere and spreading their idea. Meanwhile, they will integrate that idea into their identity, which makes it far harder to change their mind. And if you actually manage to get them to go away, they will go to cesspools like Voat, where they are even less likely to be exposed to ideas that change their mind, and where in fact they are likely to be exposed to even worse ideas.

Let's get some perspective: what you're complaining about is people saying things you don't like on the internet. Yes, what they are saying spreads ignorance, but the solution to ignorance isn't silencing the ignorant, it's education.

MLK and Harvey Milk both recognized that the source of the bigotry they fought against was fear borne of ignorance. But the average left-leaning person today doesn't see bigots even as people any more. All it takes nowadays is for someone to say one of a list of banned phrases and they're completely written off as even human. If we're going to bridge the gap here, we on the left have got to consider that we might be the toxic ones.

I've found that when I actually talk to so-called "toxic" people politely, they are willing to listen. It's not them that are causing the polarization.


The data suggests that deplatforming works. Milo; Katie Hopkins; InfoWars et al have all lost their former agenda-setting influence following deplatforming. And studies have shown that banning hate sub-Reddits does _not_ cause that content to “pop up elsewhere”, it causes it to decline overall.

It’s important to remember too there are incentives for people to argue and behave otherwise: FB, Twitter, hate-speech mongers who want easy access to large audiences — All have commercial cause to act in favour of more and more extreme speech.

People like that benefit from more and more extreme speech. They permit or encourage it on their platforms. This in turn causes the white blood cell count of the body politic to spike as it tries to counteract the bile and hate. This angry counter-speech then gets presented as “polarisation”.

The solution to ignorance _can often be_ silencing the ignorant, yes, in order that the educators can be heard.

Would we still have an anti-vax problem if FB banned it across its properties? Really?

Banning disruptive speakers works. Every pub landlord knows it.


> The data suggests that deplatforming works. Milo; Katie Hopkins; InfoWars et al have all lost their former agenda-setting influence following deplatforming. And studies have shown that banning hate sub-Reddits does _not_ cause that content to “pop up elsewhere”, it causes it to decline overall.

This is simply not an accurate representation of history.

Milo Yiannopoulos fell out of popularity because of repeated issues with pedophilia, which even the right doesn't condone.

Katie Hopkins was financially ruined Monroe v. Hopkins[1].

InfoWars still has a larger readership than The Economist or Newsweek[2], so I'm not sure where you get the idea that they have lost influence. It sounds like you might be inside of an echo chamber.

You may be looking at a different study, but the only study[3] I know of on the banning of hate sub-Reddits showed that content didn't pop up elsewhere on Reddit. It doesn't show that the hate didn't just move over to Voat, which is my theory as to what happened. Yes, the study was publicized as "deplatforming works", but only because people didn't know where the people who were deplatformed went.

The rest of your post follows suit with claims that aren't based in reality.

[1] by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_v_Hopkins

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfoWars (top section)

[3] https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits-contro...


Your stat on the reach of InfoWars is based on claims from 2017, before the de-platforming. More recent reports point to considerable slumps, eg: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/technology/alex-jones-inf...

Voat is discussed elsewhere here, too. In short, the point was precisely to get the speech off Reddit because it was poisoning Reddit. People said it wasn’t worth them trying because it would move to other subreddits. It didn’t, it moved offsite entirely.

De-platforming worked for Reddit. OP asked for tech contributions to reducing the amount of polarised speech in online spaces. There is one.


> Your stat on the reach of InfoWars is based on claims from 2017, before the de-platforming. More recent reports point to considerable slumps, eg: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/technology/alex-jones-inf....

Thank you for responding with actual data. I'll have to read the article.

> De-platforming worked for Reddit. OP asked for tech contributions to reducing the amount of polarised speech in online spaces. There is one.

I'm not sure how one can look at Reddit being more consistently liberal, and Voat being... Voat, and see this as "reducing the amount of polarised speech in online spaces".


Reddit also delisted the Chapo Trap House subreddit, it's not exclusively conservatives that are toxic. And Reddit's clean up wasn't about liberal vs conservatives, it was about teen-ogling perverts, overt racism, and threats of violence.


What does "toxic" even mean, if it includes CTH? Oooh, they're socialist nerds! Very scary!


Ask reddit admins, who decide to quarantine it from the rest of reddit.


Even the CTH podcasters themselves quite famously hate the CTH subreddit.


I’m with you on this. After the big Reddit hate sub quarantine a few years back, I started including /pol/ in my list of websites to check when a big geopolitical event is happening because I don’t trust Reddit et al. to give me the “complete” story anymore. If you read with a skeptical eye, it can be surprisingly informative.

I actually find these alternate sites useful for monitoring the latest foreign propaganda because my spouse is from a country with a hostile relationship to the U.S. and consumes most of her news in her native language, which is full of misinformation. I can now more clearly understand where she gets her opinions from sometimes and we can talk it out.


When they ban the "extremists" the "moderates" thrive making youtube/reddit/etc posts about the obvious double standards, and the impossible to pass purity tests created to ban those "extremists". The logical inconsistency of both sides of the current "culture" war parties in the US create a near unending supply of "gotcha" moments, which are just fuel for the fire.

If anything, banning extremists makes these ideologies more palatable to a larger group of people by creating a more gradual on-ramp at the entry level. I believe this is becoming more obvious as we see the middle ground position in the current "culture" conflict (which would still probably get you banned from facebook) rapidly becoming acceptable. The pendulum keeps swinging, and not many people involved seem very interested in stopping the broken cycle and finding a more sustainable solution.


You realize Voat exists right? And Gab? I wrote this about how Voat grew:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/voat-what-went-wrong/

Deplatforming was a big part of that. Deplatforming didn't stop Milo. His base dropped him because he started defending hebeaphiles & pedophile / men being attracted to teens/pre-teens/boys (there's actually something sadder here; with Milo not realizing he was himself abused ... there's an entire tragic story lost there people don't seem to understand or pick up on because they're too busy hating him).

They might leave the platforms you like, but they move over to Voat, Gab or startup their own Pleroma/Mastodon instances (that get banned from everywhere). Deplatforming doesn't really work in the way you thin it does. It literally gives people more drive to stand up for and behind what Capital-T "truth" they think got themselves banned.


Deplatforming doesn't work by silencing people, and the environment that you'd have to create to make it otherwise is not an enticing one. So yes, you can often cause the creation of spaces like Voat as a result of deplatforming.

Sure, something like Voat pops up. But Reddit improves. And Reddit is where all the people are.

There will always be dive bars, there will always be rough online neighbourhoods. But start by cleaning up the civic square.


More and more, as time goes on, people are leaving the MSM including reddit for these off-shoots and it risks creating separate bubbles for every group-think out there. This is what de-platforming and cancel culture does.

It's also not black and white. Sure 99% of us can agree that banning or de-platforming such horrendous stuff like NAMBLA is good. But MSM starts to push out and group non-extremists into the same bucket and ban them all, and you get where we are today, with a good chunk of society that doesn't listen to or trust the MSM.


> And Reddit is where all the people are.

All the people in your echo chamber, that is.


If what you mean to say is that "the subset of spaces that does not include Voat and Gab is an echo chamber", you are probably saying something about your own views that you might not mean to say.


It's blatantly true that Reddit still holds echo chambers though, and the majority are far-left leaning. r/politics is as much of an echo chamber as r/The_Donald (but one is a default sub, with a deceptive name).


That's why I was particular about what I was taking them to be saying. I'm not looking to litigate whether there are echo chambers on Reddit. There clearly are. The question, now tacitly answered, is whether the person I replied to believes any space that excludes Voat and Gab is definitionally an echo chamber.


> The question, now tacitly answered, is whether the person I replied to believes any space that excludes Voat and Gab is definitionally an echo chamber.

If that's what you think I was saying, let me clarify: no, that's not what I was saying.


How so?

To be clear, I definitely don't agree with most of what is said on Voat, and I'm not really familiar with Gab.


You might want to familiarize yourself more with services before making sweeping arguments about what excluding them means for the discourse.


Having complete information before forming any opinion is an impossibly high standard. My opinion is based on what I know, and I've been pretty open about what I don't know. If you feel there's some relevant information I'm missing, I'd be really happy to hear it, but pointing out that I don't know everything is fairly uninformative.

Let's keep the discussion on the topic, not on me.


The standard you're being held to isn't "complete information".


What standard am I being held to? Where am I failing to meet that standard? Do you actually have any disagreement with anything I've said, or are you just going to make snide remarks from the sideline?

You aren't making any concrete statements on where you think I'm wrong, and you are evading any questions I've asked to try to get clarity, so to be honest, I have no idea what you actually think I'm wrong about, or even whether you think I'm wrong.

If it were someone else, I'd just dismiss you as a troll, but I've read and respected your opinions in the past, which makes your current method of arguing a bit disappointing for me. You're well-positioned to change my mind if you ever decide to share what you actually think.


Voat is tiny. Sure there is always going to be a population of die hard edgelords who are determined enough to move to a new site, but in general the vast majority of people are lazy. And most likely it takes the bot / disinformation account owners a while to move all their activity over to a new community


This is akin to an argument that you shouldn't fire your nazi-sympathizing coworker when they discuss their support for an ethnonationalist state because they may join neo-nazi groups and "radicalize" as a result.

Yes, they may. But while they do the workplace where most people interact is a livable place for the rest of us. We shouldn't make it easier to be heard if you have despicable views just because of the implied threat it might get worse.


Yes, and for truly horrendous viewpoints it's ok to ban them outright. But society isn't black and white, and when you start lumping non-extremists into the same bucket and banning them all you end up where we are today: distrust of MSM but a big chunk of society.


You keep talking about "non-extremists" but you are not telling us what you mean by that.


I don't want to get political, but do you think Joe Rogan is an extremist? Jeanine Cummins? What about Ben Shapiro?

These are people that the MSM is trying to cancel quite literally right now.


Haha the idea that incumbent news firms can do anything to Rogan is kind of hilarious. What are they going to do, shut down the internet and UFC? Close all the comedy clubs? He is completely insulated from anything they can do.


"cancel" doesn't really mean anything here.

I don't think Joe Rogan or Ben Shapiro should get fired from the average workplace (I'm not familiar with Jeanine Cummins) unless they insist on trying to impose their views. I don't think they should be banned from presumably neutral platforms (reddit, Facebook, Twitter).

On the other hand, I don't think they should be given a column in other media publications and they're more than fair game for ridicule and criticism. I don't think they have a moral right to publish in any subgroup within ostensibly neutral platforms (Facebook group, subreddit).


Nobody is trying to cancel Joe Rogan. I don't know who Jeanine Cummins is. Ben Shapiro is definitely an extremist.


>>>Nobody is trying to cancel Joe Rogan.

Oh I bet the Woke Twitterati (tm) would if they could, but Joe Rogan is in the same stratosphere as Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle where they are effectively impervious to cancellation barring some Harvey Weinstein/Bill Cosby-level misconduct.

https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/joe-rogan-cancel-culture-sme...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvAc7002eRM


A workplace is pretty different from a public communications platform.

Surely you can tell the difference between talking about odious opinions on the internet, and making decisions as a representative of a company based on those odious opinions.


[flagged]


We can disagree about the wisdom of ethno-nationalist states in general (in my opinion they lead to deciding that some group is a different ethnicity and using that to justify their ouster, see Myanmar, China or recent Indian laws).

Either way advocating for an ethno-nationalist state in the U.S. is akin to supporting the forced removal of at least a third of the population, which is a despicable view to have.


That's OK. People do move to platforms like Gab, but those platforms tend to be echo chambers in their own which has a limiting effect on their popularity in addition to the limiting factor of their initial toxicity.

They're not really good for recruitment (because they're echo chambers that only appeal to people already invested in a point of view), nor do they provide much amusement from baiting other people with very different opinions; these two factors are in stark contrast to mainstream platforms, which provide an abundant supply of both.

Naturally, you get cross-platform raiding where people organize on one platform to attack another and then enjoy the spoils if their attack results in upset, outrage, bans of the target etc. But off-platform raids are relatively easy for platform operators and target populations to monitor, detect, and repel. Likewise, the extremist or highly toxic platforms that people do congregate on function well for a policy of managed containment.


I'd argue that in this case, it deplatforming absolutely worked in the way intended. There are 2 factors at play here. People who are willing to argue in good faith, and people who are simply trying to put forth an agenda regardless of what anyone says.

Those who likely moved to Gab and Voat and 4/8chan are likely persons that fit the latter description. There is no need to even have discussions with people like these on the internet. The best is for them to be deplatformed and continue their self flagellation. They are simply too far gone. If anything, these sites will probably radicalize, but it will also be easier for authorities to keep tabs on particularly dangerous accounts.

The concept of deplatforming is to protect the integrity of good faith discussion. The key idea there is "good faith". Persons like the aforementioned Milo clearly do not engage in any concept of good faith discussion. IMO there is no need for any discussion base like reddit or facebook to protect these types.


Deplatforming can't work- otherwise the world would now be as white-bread homophobic and misogynistic as it was in the 50's when blacks, gays, and women were deplatformed.


That kind of implies those social groups all had full participation on the social platform and were then kicked off it, no? I don't think you've thought this analogy through fully.


This isn't same thing and you know it. Deplatforming someone for being racist, homophobic and sexist is and should continue to be encouraged.

In your example, what they were doing was fundamentally wrong and if you asked any good person today they would tell you as much.


Please tell me you recognize the irony of your comment.

Your last sentence is essentially indistinguishable from the position held 50 years ago by people who also felt they were "morally right" in deplatforming.


> People who are willing to argue in good faith, and people who are simply trying to put forth an agenda regardless of what anyone says.

I think that it would be wise to doubt one's own ability to differentiate between these two groups.

I also think that the purpose of public debate is not to persuade the person you are debating with: that's almost never possible. It's to persuade the audience. Bad faith arguments, if they really are bad faith arguments, are usually pretty easy to shoot down, so I don't think that we have anything to fear from bad-faith arguers.

In fact, deplatforming benefits bad-faith arguers because their bad-faith arguments look more reasonable when nobody confronts them.

At another level, deplatforming is a bad faith argument, by your own definition. Aren't you trying to put forth your agenda, regardless of what anyone says, by deplatforming people? Your agenda may be good, but that doesn't justify bad faith actions to support it.


Deplatforming totally works, it quarantines the toxic people/ideas and doesn't allow them to spread further. Its fine if they move to voat or whatever, voat has orders of magnitude less people who use it casually, so there is a much lower opportunity for their message to spread.


Only the most dedicated move to those platforms. Those willing to leave the mainstream so they can continue to have those sorts of discussions.


What you're describing is "that heap of Nazis over there". It doesn't matter if the deplatformed people pop back up in marginal, poorly connected hate-tolerant sites. That actually helps. They have been successfully "sent to Coventry" in a place where their cultural impact is nil.


So we don't have to worry about Nazis anymore? I'm glad to learn that; somehow I had been misinformed by the newspapers.


I don't know on what basis you think that their cultural impact is nil.


Because they're left in a situation where the only people they're able to talk to are already-committed Nazis.

Some of those have indirect diffusion paths back out into the mainstream culture. But the direct ones are blockaded.


Is the voting booth not direct enough for you?


> The data suggests that deplatforming works

Well of course. That's like a prohibitionist using the reduced alcohol consumption overall as justification. Data often suggests that prohibiting <thing> means less of <thing>.

The question is not whether the goal of the silencing is mostly achieved, the question is whether that goal is worth the precedent. If your goal is to silence at all costs, it will always seem worth it. You'll find the less forceful actions (e.g. ignoring, dissuading, etc), when possible, have less slippery trade offs.


A lot of people are skeptics of "anti-racism" and "feminism". Not everyone thinks that racism is causing black people to be poor (IMO a lot of current anti-racists are like people who see a snake-bite victim, and start screaming out that we have to kill the snake - the snake might have caused the problem but treating a snake bite is not just chasing after snakes), and not everyone thinks that essentially every difference between men and women is part of some vast conspiracy to keep women down (this is reductionist - both because it tries to make everything a stupid "on balance, stuff is worse for women" argument, and because it's reductionist to say biology is not a factor).

If relatively mild critics of these things are shut out of the mainstream media, then they get fans on mainstream social media platforms. If they're banned from mainstream social media, they'll find some other place. These fans haven't all been bitten by reactionary zombies, they often come up with their own doubts about the mainstream left, and look for people discussing the questions they have.

Here's an article suggesting that 'alt lite' speakers or skeptics of social justice aren't necessarily creating some 'rabbit hole' effect, but may actually sap views away from hardline extremists - https://www.wired.com/story/not-youtubes-algorithm-radicaliz...

Even if you think that critics of social justice are wrong, they exist (in large numbers). If you don't want the moderates on mainstream platforms, a number will go to darker corners of the internet where there is a genuine danger they will be radicalised.

I guess maybe that's OK? Extreme right-wing radicals might tend to hurt the right. Maybe the goal is to drive away moderate anti-feminists or moderate anti-social justice types (e.g. Milo who seems to me to be a bit of a jerk, but is hardly radical), and if a few end up becoming alt-right then maybe that's OK (and "it's their fault" anyway).


The overarching issue isn't the snakebite incident, it's the loss caused by having people repeatedly being bitten by snakes. So chasing down snakes is a prescribed if not demanded response.


> The data suggests that deplatforming works.

And how will you feel when whatever you personally have interest in gets deplatformed because someone else finds it to be disagreeable?

If you don't think power will eventually be applied against you, you haven't read enough history.


If you de-platform people they still think the way that they think, you just don't see what they're thinking and have no ability to challenge it.

Then they turn up and vote...


However, what they don’t do is convert loads of other people to their way of thinking.


Not everyone leads hard left/right. Most people are centrists. So say you want to be a progressive left, but on issue "x" you don't stand with the left. You can't vocalize this because doing so will have people call you "not really left" or "a bigot" or "not seeing past your privilege."

You can go two ways. You can not want to leave your political home and double down and go harder left ... or you find dissenting voices. If those voices aren't centrists, they're going to be hard right, and people will start to shift their entire political leanings because they want a political home.

People need to be okay with others believing things they don't agree with. Even controversial things. I've noticed people on the left who refuse to be friends with or hand out with people who have different beliefs about certain things .. and that's insane! How do you learn and grow if you cut off everyone with a different opinion than yourself? We're probably all wrong about something.


I’m generally pretty respectful of the idea that people are entitled to make their views public. This is healthy. I don’t think this means that everybody is entitled to have their views broadcast on every platform. Presumably we could agree there’s a line somewhere, at which point it’s acceptable for me, as a company, to refuse to allow views which I consider to be over that line to be broadcast on my platform?

It’s a position of some security to be able to complain that “people on the left who refuse to be friends with or hand out with people who have different beliefs about certain things .. and that's insane”. I belong to at least one minority group. I’m not even what you’d call “left”, but I’d certainly refuse to be friends either someone whose belief was that a group to which I belong should be denied some rights. I’d probably refuse to be friends with people who had certain other views I find particularly offensive too. Is that strange or unhealthy? I’d find it really weird to be friends with someone who held beliefs I find to be grossly offensive.


> I’m generally pretty respectful of the idea that people are entitled to make their views public. This is healthy. I don’t think this means that everybody is entitled to have their views broadcast on every platform. Presumably we could agree there’s a line somewhere, at which point it’s acceptable for me, as a company, to refuse to allow views which I consider to be over that line to be broadcast on my platform?

"Acceptable" is a pretty vague word. What actions are we talking about here? Lobbying and petitioning companies? Boycotting them? Demanding governments regulate speech on their platforms?

It's my opinion that forcing people to propagate ideas they disagree with is just as bad as preventing people from propagating ideas they do agree with: these are two sides of the same coin: free speech. So at the level of government, I would never support laws that forced platforms to allow any sort of speech on their platform.

However, Reddit/Facebook/etc. respond to the demands of their users, so the question I'm trying to answer is: what should we, as users, be demanding?

I think the correct response to hatred isn't to shut them out: that's just responding to hatred with hatred. I think the correct response to hatred is to respond with love: assuage fears, correct ignorance, and help the hateful person to find a better way.

> I’d probably refuse to be friends with people who had certain other views I find particularly offensive too. Is that strange or unhealthy?

This certainly isn't going to be a popular opinion, but yes, I would say this is unhealthy.

Communication is a two way street. If you want to communicate your ideas into the world, you have to be willing to hear the ideas of others. In this sense, connection is power: people who disconnect themselves from people give up the ability to change those people. And the people who you can change the most are those the most unlike you.

You have to realize that people come to the beliefs they have due, at least partly, to circumstance and education. Maybe there's some degree of nature in it--maybe some people are inherently hateful. But if that is the case, I haven't met any of those people. When I talk to bigoted people at length, I often discover that they have led difficult lives, and based on their experience, blame some other group they don't understand for the difficulties they have experienced. They aren't doing this out of malice: on the contrary, they are usually doing it because they care about their own families and communities. The problem isn't that they are naturally bigoted, it's that they're afraid and ignorant, and both of those things are fixable.

By choosing to cut someone out of your life, you're choosing to treat them not as a normal person with fears and gaps in their experience, but as an inherently bad person. I don't think that is a healthy position to take.


There's no problem with wildly differing views. The problem is dehumanizing speech. Taking reddit as an example, there's a thriving r/Libertarian and r/guns together with Sanders supporting or communist subreddits.

Don't conflate strong disagreements with toxic speech.


Some get woke, others get red-pilled.


What makes you think this?

Do you think that Voat, Fox News, InfoWars, etc are somehow less effective platforms?


Those are also things we should eliminate.


What you're proposing sounds uncomfortably like totalitarianism.


No it doesn’t. I’m just totally comfortable with a world in which people are educated enough to no longer have to consume these industrial lie factories.


Who gets to decide what's true and good and what's not? You?


> Milo; Katie Hopkins; InfoWars et al have all lost their former agenda-setting influence following deplatforming

When did they ever have agenda-setting influence? I need more specific citations for these claims than "the data" and "studies".

> Banning disruptive speakers works. Every pub landlord knows it.

I'm no expert on pubs, but my understanding is that "disruptive speakers" in that context are ones who make it hard for others to speak.


> And studies have shown that banning hate sub-Reddits does _not_ cause that content to “pop up elsewhere”, it causes it to decline overall.

Could you provide a source for this?


Probably this Georgia Tech article: http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf


I'd like to see that data.


On the one hand it is a reality that leftist ideologies gained a comfortable ascendancy in the major cultural engines of America and that is going to be leveraged as political power. Particularly education, the tech industry and Hollywood.

On the other hand, there is the ongoing background corruption of power afoot. Taking power, utilising it and branding anyone who disagrees as 'toxic' is going to cause a great deal of unnecessary suffering, as it has in the past every time a group uses power in an unchecked fashion.

Revolutions are often started by people who were deplatformed, it doesn't help when the situation is serious. If I recall correctly; Hitler, Stalin, Galileo and Gandhi are all people who were deplatformed and imprisoned. Jesus was deplatformed rather violently. Deplatforming is not a tool with a particularly proud history of success and prudent implementation; and its failures tend to be spectacular. Two sides sticking to reasoned debate, explanation, moderation and compromise has a much better track record of not-so-bad outcomes.


Banning speech might fix anti-vax but it also might have caused vaccines to never be legal to begin with.


And then something like Trump or Brexit happens, and the left had no idea it was coming because a lot of people's viewpoints were silenced / deplatformed....


Would we still have a pro-vax problem if FB banned it across its properties?


Yes, obviously. Do you think there aren't any anti-vaxxers with the ability to build a website?


"A website" that can get the reach among parents of FB's newsfeed? Yes, I think there are few anti-vaxxers who can build such a thing.


True, but it doesn't have to have as large a reach, because it's presenting a more consistent anti-vax opinion.

An anti-vax post on a FB newsfeed is quite likely to have counterarguments. An anti-vax website is unlikely to run into such problems.

And going back to the original post: does "vaxxers on FB, anti-vaxxers elsewhere" sound like more polarisation, or less?


Do you think that the average person sharing false stores on Facebook is capable of (a) finding and (b) sharing a website created by some random anti-vaxxer?

The ubiquity of the platform and the ease of sharing massively amplifies the problem.


> Do you think that the average person sharing false stores on Facebook is capable of (a) finding and (b) sharing a website created by some random anti-vaxxer?

Yes. Why would they not be?


You only say that because you don't agree with the agendas of the people you've listed. Would you trust me to choose when to deplatform the people who drive the agendas you agree with?

edited because of grammar


But the average left-leaning person today doesn't see bigots even as people any more.

I spend the bulk of my time studying extremist discourse and communities. Extremist bigots take it as read that people of the wrong ethnic/religious/political group are either not people or at best inferior people, and direct their efforts to promoting those views, planning how to eliminate those they dislike, and normalizing that behavior.

You are, essentially, projecting the characteristics of bad actors onto other actors who are warning and complaining about said bad actors.

I've found that when I actually talk to so-called "toxic" people politely, they are willing to listen. It's not them that are causing the polarization.

That's a tactic known as 'entryism' designed to leverage your nice, conflict-averse personality as a vehicle for normalization and possible future recruitment.


Why is this suddenly a discussion about extremism? Not everyone who is bigoted is an extremist, but maybe it's easier for you to argue as though this is the case.

> Extremist bigots take it as read that people of the wrong [...] group are either not people or at best inferior people, and direct their efforts to promoting those views, planning how to eliminate those they dislike, and normalizing that behavior.

Funny, this is a pretty good description of cancel culture. "Warning" and "complaining" is one thing, but advocating for the complete social and professional ostracization of people for increasingly arbitrary reasons is happening, and has been happening. _That_ sounds like extremism to me.

Assuming constant bad faith on the part of people, _most_ of whom don't have any control over the views they hold, is not how this problem gets solved.


> Not everyone who is bigoted is an extremist, but maybe it's easier for you to argue as though this is the case.

How is "I don't consider you human" not an extreme position?


The trouble is, not everyone is saying that. A few people here and there are, but what about some mode nuance things? For example, what if someone says they're fine with trans-people and think everyone should live their lives whoever they want, but trans M2F shouldn't participate in professional sports because it's not fair.

That's an incredibly polarizing statement, and one who makes it is immediately labeled as a bigot. Some go as far as to say such an individual is "denying trans people exist."

There is a lot to unpack there, and people can have reasonable debates about both sides of that statement. Adam Conover and Joe Rogan have had such a conversation (it's a really good episode of the Rogan podcast), but many people refuse to even listen to it because they consider Rogan a bigot/alt-right-adjacent/etc.

You have to be careful because there is so much room in the details and someone not accepting 100% of x world view doesn't immediately make them a terrible human being.

In the past, controversial views converge over time. Heidegger talked about extreme ideas as a thesis, those trying to keep things as they are as antithesis, and eventually society moves together with some kind of synthesis. All that feels like it's been thrown out the window for extreme left or extreme right ideology.


> That's an incredibly polarizing statement, and one who makes it is immediately labeled as a bigot. Some go as far as to say such an individual is "denying trans people exist."

Great point. A huge part of the problem is language. Subtlety and nuance gets stripped away (especially online), so that everything you disagree with is an unconscionable violation. It's the language of clickbait.

I'm sure the idea is to break through the noise and mobilize people against perceived injustice, but all it does is make the noise that much louder.


"You have to be careful because there is so much room in the details and someone not accepting 100% of x world view doesn't immediately make them a terrible human being."

Like what? What could be the "not a terrible human being" part be about someone who wants the state to disacknowledge someone's humanity?


Who do we trust to be the arbiters of extreme positions? I would consider the dismissal of using biological science to define male and female as an extreme position, and yet I could be banned from Twitter by saying as much.


> How is "I don't consider you human" not an extreme position?

Most bigots do not believe that.


Not all bigotry is "I don't consider you human".


While that's true, I think it's worth pointing out that it is a mirror of your own statement that "the average left-leaning person today doesn't see bigots even as people any more." Neither statement is true. They are the same kind of hyperbolic/uncharitable extrapolation of a group's inner thoughts.


That's true, it is a mirror, which should be disturbing to anyone on the left who doesn't want the left to be a mirror of the right.

> They are the same kind of hyperbolic/uncharitable extrapolation of a group's inner thoughts.

Is it, though? What does saying, "I don't think you deserve to be heard" say about the person saying it?


> That's true, it is a mirror, which should be disturbing to anyone on the left who doesn't want the left to be a mirror of the right.

I mean, sure, but I was meaning to make you think about your own tendency to fall into the same trap.

Also, the left can scarcely avoid being a mirror of the right in many ways, given that both groups are made out of humans. The influence of ideology on social dynamics is overstated.

> What does saying, "I don't think you deserve to be heard" say about the person saying it?

But see, you're putting words in people's mouths here. This saying is far from the average left-leaning position.

Even if we were to look at the subsection of the left that wishes to de-platform certain individuals, they generally wouldn't say something as crude and caricatural as "I don't think you deserve to be heard." This is, perhaps, what you think that they think, but this is uncharitable and dismissive.


Maybe not in those words, but would you agree that that is what you're saying when you demand someone be deplatformed?


Generally, I wouldn't. People may want to deplatform other individuals for a variety of reasons.

A common one is to impede the spread of ideas that they consider dangerous, because they believe that these ideas will cause human suffering down the line. Whether these ideas truly are dangerous, whether their obstruction is effective, or whether it may backfire, that's another debate. The point is that they genuinely believe these ideas to be mind-viruses of sorts, and they genuinely believe that deplatforming is an effective way to impede them. If they are correct on these counts, then their actions are justified.

There are other possible rationales. One would be concern about bandwidth: platforms have limited bandwidth and can only spread a limited number of ideas, and people also have limited bandwidth and can only be aware of a limited number of ideas. The spread of bad ideas may therefore harm us by "clogging" the system (the resurgence of flat Earthism may be the most egregious example of wasted bandwidth).

I don't mean to debate the merits of these reasons. I just mean to point out that the "deplatformers" do have well thought out rationales. And if they are wrong, which is certainly possible, they are not obviously wrong.


Why is this suddenly a discussion about extremism?

Because that is my area of expertise and I wish to contribute to the discussion. While not all bigots are extremists, all extremists are bigots.

"Warning" and "complaining" is one thing, but advocating for the complete social and professional ostracization of people for increasingly arbitrary reasons

I'm not making an argument for cancel culture, which has flaws of its own. When I talk about extremists I have narrow and specific criteria for inclusion in that category, most importantly the advocacy of genocide.

Assuming constant bad faith on the part of people, _most_ of whom don't have any control over the views they hold

You seem to be assuming that most people are mindless, and further that I'm talking about the broad mass of people.


> I'm not making an argument for cancel culture, which has flaws of its own. When I talk about extremists I have narrow and specific criteria for inclusion in that category, most importantly the advocacy of genocide.

No one would disagree with that definition. Your comment's parent made the point that exclusionary language is used in many in-groups, not just bigoted ones.

Your contribution was to say that the parent is talking about left-leaning people like they are - in your words - genocide advocates. I don't know that this is a quality contribution.

> You seem to be assuming that most people are mindless, and further that I'm talking about the broad mass of people.

Are you saying that people generally have control over their opinions and predispositions? I know I can't change my views at will, Lord knows if I could I'd become a bit more woke to fit in better.


The parent to me comment was complaining about the attitude of left-wing people towards bigots. I'm leveraging my knowledge of extremism to explain why left wingers feel such antipathy towards bigotry: because of the genocidal outcomes which are associated with it and nowadays actively promoted by some folk.

Of course, extremism is by no means limited to one particular ideology. I'm not a fan of Maoists, for example.

I believe one can certainly change their views, although it's hard work.


> Extremist bigots take it as read that people of the wrong ethnic/religious/political group are either not people or at best inferior people, and direct their efforts to promoting those views, planning how to eliminate those they dislike, and normalizing that behavior.

Yes, extremist bigots do tend to favor deplatforming: they just want to deplatform a different group.

Surely we can behave better than the bigots?

> You are, essentially, projecting the characteristics of bad actors onto other actors who are warning and complaining about said bad actors.

Yes, but it's not just projection: the shoe fits.

If we behave like them we are no better than them. We on the left can't claim tolerance if we only tolerate people we agree with.

> That's a tactic known as 'entryism' designed to leverage your nice, conflict-averse personality as a vehicle for normalization and possible future recruitment.

LOL at me being conflict-averse. Check out my post history.


Yes, extremist bigots do tend to favor deplatforming: they just want to deplatform a different group.

I'm not talking about deplatforming, I'm talking about the sort of extremist bigots who advocate, organize, or engage in murdering people. You are free to present deplatforming as an equal ill to that if you wish.

If we behave like them we are no better than them. We on the left can't claim tolerance if we only tolerate people we agree with.

Tolerating disagreement and tolerating murder are not really equivalent. You're not obliged to give someone a hug if they're trying to stab you, for example.


> You are free to present deplatforming as an equal ill to that if you wish.

Sigh. Can we not do the obvious straw man arguments?

> Tolerating disagreement and tolerating murder are not really equivalent.

That's true.

Bigots and murderers are also not really equivalent. Nobody is talking about tolerating murderers, so again, let's try to not toss around straw man arguments.


> Yes, extremist bigots do tend to favor deplatforming: they just want to deplatform a different group.

> Surely we can behave better than the bigots?

In a vacuum, I'd agree. As in, in the real world, I would agree. If this were a true human contact based forum, the voice of many regular, busy people will always trump the voice of a few raging bigots. Culturally, we've moved past that; at least in urban centres where this sort of discussion could actually happen.

On the internet, it is different. Posting on the internet is gamified. The rules are simple. To get more influence, you need to be upvoted/favorited/hearted. If your opinion sucks, you are downvoated/blocked/etc.

It's simple, right? But it's also very easily gamed via astroturfing/botting/upvote-downvote farming/influence manipulation. Case in point, any political subreddit prior to the general election in 2016.

Because of this fact, any attempt at good faith discussions in popular forums simply do not exist anymore. Just take a look at how many garbage posts are at the top of any popular subreddit vs actually insightful posts.

Politicians who use these to gain grassroots support have learned to game the system. And enterprising individuals from all over the world are flocking to them. There is big business in upvote/downvote farms, botnets, and influence manipulation via social engineering. Clearly none of these is done in good faith.

Places that have been deplatformed are not always simply people who harbor alternative opinions from the norm. They are places or groups of people who wilfully try debase discussion via the aforementioned methods.

There are bad actors on all sides of any discussion, but it seems to me like organized bad faith is always at the core of the most toxic, polarized places on the internet.

To fix polarization, we must fix the gaming mechanics of these places. More moderation for cheaters is priority number 1.


I think you are right to identify gamification of social media as part of the problem, but I think we need to be careful not to lump in every opinion we disagree with, with people who are using astroturfing/botting/farming/etc. Manipulation of the gamification systems is clearly not in good faith, but there are plenty of real people with odious opinions that they hold due to fear and/or ignorance, but hold in good faith.


>I spend the bulk of my time studying extremist discourse and communities

Do you also study how to reform extremists? Or are you just studying how to identify and silence them?

>planning how to eliminate those they dislike, and normalizing that behavior

This sounds like de-platforming to me.

>That's a tactic known as 'entryism'

What you are doing here is called "vilifying." Where you identify that someone is disagreeable to you and attribute everything they do to bad faith.


Yes, I spend a great deal of time thinking about that. In general, the best antidotes to extremism is getting a girlfriend (most extremists are male and heterosexual), having a kid (more so a daughter), settling down and ageing out. Socioeconomic conditions are a major driver of extremism, which is one reason it tends to flourish in adversity, when there is a large supply of pessimists available for recruitment.

There are of course many other approaches to deradicalization. Personal contact and bridge-building is ideal, but it's slow, expensive, and scales poorly for much the same reasons as why it's not practical to solve all social problems by telling everyone to go to therapy.

>planning how to eliminate those they dislike, and normalizing that behavior

This sounds like de-platforming to me.

When I say 'eliminating' people I specifically mean killing them, and no I don't think that's the same thing as de-platforming people.

What you are doing here is called "vilifying." Where you identify that someone is disagreeable to you and attribute everything they do to bad faith.

It is not. I haven't identified anyone in particular as being disagreeable or practicing entryism, but rather pointed out the existence of such a rhetorical tactic that can be used in bad faith. You seem to be confusing my suggestion that the person I was responding to is a victim of such a tactic with their being a user of it.


> Yes, I spend a great deal of time thinking about that. In general, the best antidotes to extremism is getting a girlfriend (most extremists are male and heterosexual), having a kid (more so a daughter), settling down and ageing out. Socioeconomic conditions are a major driver of extremism, which is one reason it tends to flourish in adversity, when there is a large supply of pessimists available for recruitment.

How are you defining extremism?

> When I say 'eliminating' people I specifically mean killing them, and no I don't think that's the same thing as de-platforming people.

This is a motte-and-bailey argument[1]. You're arguing on a topic about bigots talking on the internet. I'm not arguing that we should allow murder or calling for murder, and I'm not aware of anyone who is arguing that, so you're just presenting your opinion as "I'm against murder" which is not controversial. But in the larger argument you're supporting the deplatforming of a pretty large group of people, and very few of those people are actually calling for murder.

If you're anti-letting-people-call-for-murder, great, we're in agreement on that. But that has literally nothing to do with the overall discussion.

> It is not. I haven't identified anyone in particular as being disagreeable or practicing entryism, but rather pointed out the existence of such a rhetorical tactic that can be used in bad faith. You seem to be confusing my suggestion that the person I was responding to is a victim of such a tactic with their being a user of it.

Are you saying that I'm using entryism?

[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey


> What you are doing here is called "vilifying."

Do you think that it's not appropriate to vilify people who advocate or support genocide?


> Extremist bigots take it as read that people of the wrong ethnic/religious/political group are either not people or at best inferior people, and direct their efforts to promoting those views, planning how to eliminate those they dislike, and normalizing that behavior.

Uh, well, isn't that the same that some leftwing activist advocate for those they disagree with? Deplatforming, censorship, criminalisation?


I don't think it's fair to call this phenomenon "leftwing". My perception is that those who advocate deplatforming/censorship are centrists who call themselves "progressives". They do this mostly in order to support existing power structures that they fear are threatened by free speech. Very few actual leftists in the American context are against free speech.


I wanted to stress that I didn't mean it as a leftwing phenomenon. It's just that the GP seemed to describe it as a peculiarly rightwing one, and I think we've seen instances on the left as well (particularly recently). And while the left is generally much more averse to physical violence than the right, it's also more socially accepted and mainstream, so the outrage storms are more pronounced and the calls for censorship and sometimes criminalisation meet much less resistance.

One example: https://theoutline.com/post/2202/climate-change-denial-shoul...


I didn't agree with your first comment above, as I mostly focus on violent extremism, but you do raise a good point about the general intensity of polarization and how there is certainly support on the left for social sanctions against those we disagree with.

I don't exactly subscribe to the proposals in your example article, but I do think that climate denial is a sort of fraud which has real externalities, and have suggested that people should listening to or engaging with known climate deniers. It seems to me that there's something fundamentally wrong with the idea that it's OK to lie about products or policy for the sake of profit and then assign blame to the victims of predictable externalities for their credulity or lack of preparedness.

One thing we've learned in the age of social media is that false information is considerably more likely to go viral than true information- good news for the entertainment industry, less good in areas like public health or policymaking. It's likely that the ease of transmission is that false information tends to leverage easy prior assumptions over difficult unintuitive ones such that cognitive bias could be said to yield a 'liar surplus' which has an economic value to the deliberate proponent of untruth. It's possible that this will lead to the development of weighting tools for assessing the reliability of information through analysis of the rate and direction of its transmission, but as long as it's profitable to sell false information we will continue to get more of that.


Sorry, I misunderstood you.


I really like your comment, I don't know what the end goal is? Does that mean we should never try to give our opinion? Maybe I don't understand.. I think it would be a good thing if every individual with their beliefs is slowly normalizing others to their feelings and beliefs.


Exactly. Extremists who espouse intolerance count on the tolerance of the opposing groups to get themselves accepted and their extremist viewpoints normalized. When they do get deplatformed, marginalized and discredited, they complain about it, which itself serves to recruit people, especially those who are unfamiliar with such tactics and mistakenly think that their side is being unfair.


My problem with this "intolerance-is-okay-against-the-intolerant" thing is I'm lumped in with some extremist politics because of my religion. I don't feel at all treated as an individual (or even treated fairly) by either the left or the right. Some people who identify as the same religion have been homophobic. Since I was of voting age, I have never been against legalizing gay marriage, or treating homosexuals differently in the law at all. But I get flak for my religion from the tolerant left. They stereotype me every bit as much as the right stereotypes Islam. But they sure think they're being tolerant, by supposedly shunning intolerance.


You say that "some people who identify as the same religion [as me] have been homophobic" but I wonder if that's not minimizing the truth. If you're part of an opt-in demographic that's known for negative characteristic X, even if you yourself don't exhibit that characteristic, you're going to receive some transitive association -- and it's at least somewhat warranted because your participation is voluntary.


It's only known for that, because of a few high-profile examples. It's like saying that Muslims should just expect some transitive association with terror groups. I mean, they choose to still be Muslim, right?


One reason why it is difficult for me to tell is that I personally know a lot of people who say the same thing, i.e. that they are in favor of gay rights, but then they donate thousands of dollars a year to an extremely powerful and wealthy religious corporation that consistently preaches against homosexuality, drives gay teenagers to suicide, and puts their financial and political weight toward preventing gay rights in multiple states.


See also The Good Place, Season 2. I confess I do eat at Chik-fil-a a lot.


The counterpoint to that is that allowing platforms for toxic views to exist and grow (a) "normalizes" these views and (b) makes it very easy for them to recruit new members, since they have a "legitimate" platform to spread their hate from.

Personally I am fine with them isolating themselves in cesspools like Voat. While they are not being exposed to contrary views there, they are also not exposing large amounts of other people to their views.

Another factor is that toxic views are massively amplified by bots (and the bad actors behind them) and not providing these with an easy-to-exploit platform is a good thing in my opinion.


Isolation / segregation / echo chamber (whatever you want to call it) is amplifying toxicity.

We used to socialize in the streets, in the marketplace, in towns. Maybe the town's butcher was known to be a bit of a racist hick, but he was still a decent shopkeeper and his kids went to the same school as yours, so you tolerated his antics. There was the town slut, the town's drunk, the guy who was a known communist sympathizer, etc. People with their flaws, and qualities, and somehow we managed to make it all work.

What happens when those people now each socialize on their own online social network with people exactly like them? That can't be good.


As I mentioned in another comment, what happens today is that they already socialize in their own online social networks with people exactly like them. They do not tolerate one iota of dissent or open discussion, and will ban anyone with contrary views or criticism.

If we allow them space on our open platforms, without demanding that they tolerate our views, that does not result in any kind of real conversation, it just allows them to spread their toxic views around.


Have you ever actually talked to people who are unlike you, or hold extremely different view points? Because this whole "the do not tolerate one iota of dissent or open discussion" is very far from my experience.

It's true, you usually can't engage people when they are pumped up on adrenaline shouting at each other on Twitter, but that's like jumping into the middle of a brawl and saying "those people will never be able to have a conversation" when they don't immediately stop fighting and listen to you. I've talked to people from far left to far right, from vegans to conspiracy theorists, and with very few exceptions, all of them were happy to explain their ideas and viewpoints and were pretty accepting when I expressed a different opinion. They may well believe that I'm wrong, but they didn't mind talking to me after learning where I disagree with them, and they didn't become combative either.

I believe a very important part about "open discussion" is to be honest and compassionate. Don't talk down to people, don't mock them, don't tell them they are scum, or evil, or destroying humanity etc and then say "they don't tolerate dissent" when really they just don't react kindly to hostile behavior.


> I believe a very important part about "open discussion" is to be honest and compassionate. Don't talk down to people, don't mock them, don't tell them they are scum, or evil, or destroying humanity etc and then say "they don't tolerate dissent" when really they just don't react kindly to hostile behavior.

I feel like this is the goal online communities would like to see of their users. Be polite, accept good faith, etc. HN tries to have it in its own guidelines.

The startup that manages to motivate users to, while disagreeing vehemently on a given argument, remain (civil|good faith|each side remembering that the other side IS human) on target without descending into flame wars or otherwise, would stand to make a TON of money.

I feel like perhaps that is an impossible ideal to pursue though.


I don't know whether they'd make a lot of money, but they would provide a valuable service.

I tend to see things in a functional way, and I often think that the people that fight on Twitter are using that as a way to blow off steam. It's not healthy as in "it will make them have a better tomorrow", but it might manage the pressure before they explode. If your life is shitty and constantly screaming isn't socially accepted, screaming silently by telling somebody to fuck off might be the next best thing, similarly to mental health issues and substance abuse.


...with _only_ people exactly like them.


I remember when reddit was the cesspool that trolls banned from digg and slashdot went to. Careful with that line of reasoning, because the social platforms rise and fall all the time. And the ones that tend to free speech, engagement and controversy tend to become popular quickly.


I disagree.

The problem is the loudest groups of people are people with the strongest political opinions. Regular people are busy. They have neither the time nor desire to police internet arguments or play the counter argument game. And even if someone does, regular people don't have time or desire to wade through it.

One thing that I noticed when I had a Facebook account was that apart from a few exceptions most what I would consider well-adjusted people rarely participated in political discussions. Sure, people on average might be apolitical but there is no shortage of political content on Facebook -- it just predominantly seems to be driven by people using pseudonyms or with much less stake in their social identity.

Another issue is that both politcal parties in the US seem to believe that they can achieve their goals by shifting the Overton window and they are incentivized to polarize people and hijack online platforms to do this.

This leads to a huge black-hole of representation for any sort of average political view online which cannot be countered with the above logic.


>silencing everyone who disagrees with you

That is not remotely what is being suggested.

Toxicity is when a site devoted to people mourning a synagogue massacre is overwhelmed by spamming neo-nazis.

Toxicity is annihilating a site's function: a site where climate scientists discuss findings needs to be free of an flood of spam from climate change deniers and paid petroleum sock puppets. Such a site exists for people to do their job not waste every day repeating the same basic information available elsewhere easier to people who came intentionally to disrupt.


> > silencing everyone who disagrees with you

> That is not remotely what is being suggested.

> Toxicity is when a site devoted to people mourning a synagogue massacre is overwhelmed by spamming neo-nazis.

> Toxicity is annihilating a site's function: a site where climate scientists discuss findings needs to be free of an flood of spam from climate change deniers and paid petroleum sock puppets. Such a site exists for people to do their job not waste every day repeating the same basic information available elsewhere easier to people who came intentionally to disrupt.

You only have to look around on this thread to see that "silencing everyone who disagrees with you" is exactly what's being suggested.

Reddit/Facebook/Twitter are being held up as examples of places where deplatforming has worked, and where deplatforming should be more broadly applied. These aren't single-function sites.

Moderation to keep discussions on a topic existed long before deplatforming, and is not the same thing.


> silencing anyone who disagrees with you.

Agreed. Disagreement, tolerance, and diversity are healthy. The opposite is censorship, insecurity, and conformance.


A big problem with giving hate mongers a platform is that they do not return the courtesy.

Try posting a well-written and well-thought-out criticism of Trump on /r/thedonald and see how many seconds it takes before the post is taken down and you are banned. They are not interested in disagreement, tolerance and diversity. They are only interested in having a platform to spew their hate from.


So on the one hand we have a group that wants to have one (1) subreddit for themselves. And on the other we have a group that wants all subreddits for themselves. Seems like two different things entirely.


That is why moderation and balance are important. r/thedonald is an echo chamber lacking balance, and therefore lacking tolerance, diversity, and mutual respect.


well to be fair r/thedonald exists because this exact thing happens to trump supporters in r/politics

people love echo chambers it turns out. It's no surprise that all the big platforms are evolving to provide them. I think the market for well reasoned argument is smaller than OP thinks.


That's a problem with reddit, whose narrow-focused subreddits encourage groupthink. It's not specific to Trump, I'm sure doing the same in pro-Sanders or pro-Warren subreddits will have the same effect. Or indeed pro-Rihanna or pro-Metallica subreddits.

You'll have better luck with 4chan. People will call you a lot of bad words for sure, but they will also debate your point to death.


I remember when /r/politics was full of conservatives, right-wingers, the tea party, what have you. People would ask them to elaborate on their position, ask for references, or point out the flaws in their logic. The response? Moving the goalpost. Or "both sides do it." After a while, I ignored them because it wasn't worth my time to debate them. We won in a way; conservatives eventually stopped bothering to comment in /r/politics and retreated to their safe spaces.


> I don't know if I know the solution, but I know one thing that isn't the solution: silencing everyone who disagrees with you.

I'm not a fan of trying to SILENCE anyone, however as a private entity, no corporation is required to allow anyone to use their platform for (nearly) any reason. Twitter can ban me today because they don't like my shoes. Facebook can ban me because Mark Zuckerberg thinks I look funny. Google can ban me because I prefer my Alexa to Google Home. Youtube can ban Alex Jones because he spews hate. Cloudflare can ban whoever those white supremacists were for being racist. Taking away their right to choose their customers is just as much an affront to free speech as government censorship.

Several years ago Sprint kicked off a small number of customers because they were costing the company lot of resources due to their behavior with the company. I absolutely agreed with them, and that's their right. Same with social media, hosts, etc. Nothing stops these people from finding another way to get their message out, but my company nor anyone else has to help them.


The fact that corporations can silence whoever they want doesn't change that silencing everyone who disagrees with you is a bad solution that won't work, sorry.


Me not helping someone speak is not the same as silencing them.


Agreed.

The rhetoric now is even worse because some people maintain that “words = violence” and real violence is needed to shut down this “wrong think”.

I think some people would be amazed if they realized that it’s OK when people disagree[0] and doubly OK when people have different opinions on how to fix something[1].

Finally it’s become hard or impossible to stand up for the RIGHT of people to express marginalized opinions lest you yourself get accused of having those opinions. Wonder if the ACLU could ever “get away” with defending free speech even for bigoted groups in 2020.

[0] - Some people have genuine and compelling (for them, at least) reasons to be pro life despite society as a whole disagreeing with them.

[1] - Plenty of people agree that global warming is a problem, but disagree with the popular narrative on how (or even how fast) they need to fix it.


If InfoWars says Sandy Hook never happened, and they have millions of followers, ban them. That’s a really low bar for banning. Same with Milo. Not only did he repeatedly lie in a very verifiable way, but he did it with the vigor of a bully. These are toxic people and institutions that don’t care about the facts. They’re after your amygdala, and we are, to some extent, slaves to our amygdala. You can get a PhD and still retain a lot of your most basic instincts, for better or worse.

If we are slaves to our amygdala, how do we have civilization at all? We externalize cognition, just like we’ve done since the dawn of time. Culture is externalized cognition. Standards are externalized cognition. They are ways of protecting us from ourselves. If you let anyone get on the world’s largest platform, with the world’s largest megaphone, and shout whatever they want, what do you expect other than the devolution of society? And why should we throw our hands up and say “we built the platform. We built the megaphone. Anyone can use it.” That’s not a mythological embracement of freedom. That’s stepping back from your responsibility to set standards.


Who decides who's lying and who's telling the truth? Who is the arbitrator of an obvious lie. Declaring something an "obvious lie" has historically been used to keep other people down as well.

This goes down a very dangerous road. Banning speech is not the right way to deal with this. When you do, you give the speaker more energy. When people in the civil rights movement in the US was slapped down, it gave speakers like MLKing a source to inspire his people; to stand tall in the face of adversity.

The line should be violence. Speech is speech. Speech is not violence (unless is specifically advocates violence and that's been defined in US court cases as not-protected speech). Diablo Valley College ethics professor Eric Clanton was basically let off the hook with a slap-on-the-wrist conviction for hitting someone in the head with a bike-lock .. basically because the person he hit was alt-right. That is fucked up and totally not acceptable. All violence, no matter who it is against, should be the hard line .. and it's not, and that's the real issue.


"Who is the arbitrator of an obvious lie[?]" Easy. The final arbitrator is the owner of the platform. It is just one platform. If a platform becomes ban-happy, you can simply walk away, even if you weren't personally banned. Hacker News has plenty of rules and standards, and it will quickly mute and ban someone who violates even a subset of them. That is absolutely not a problem, and the platform is better off for it. It probably has a much larger userbase as a result, so the population of Hacker News users is dynamic, and HN can make decisions that benefit a lot of future users at the expense of a few current users. Why shouldn't HN be viewed negatively for that, but other platforms should? Isn't that arbitrary?

~Thought exercise~: Let's say you were the mayor of a large city. There are multiple areas in the city where you can shout whatever you want during certain hours. Would you let someone hook up an internet-connected megaphone in each area and pipe in hate speech everywhere simultaneously? And what if we were in a future where there were physical bots indistinguishable from humans that crowded into those public spaces, vociferously indicated their agreement, and cheered him on?

That future is now.

In reality, Facebook owns those public spaces. No one actually goes to that spot in the park anymore. Mark Zuckerberg is the mayor. Oh, and it's not just one city, he's everyone's mayor, everywhere. If you don't use Facebook but you're on Whatsapp, you're still in his jurisdiction. As for the "during certain hours" part? Nope, those internet-connected megaphones are blasting 24/7. Those bots are nodding their heads 24/7. Our mayor also collects megaphone usage fees for himself. He gives you dopamine points, likes, and social validation each time you come back for more. Freedom, yeah.


If you're going to argue that truth is relative, fine. Let each person decide their own truth and broadcast it. Let each person decide what to believe and decide what is good and what is evil and let them constantly fight. Constant misery.

Science was a good idea for civilization to adopt as defining truth.

Hey, I did this, and then THAT happened! You try! Wow, it happened again! Let's see if it always happens! It does! Don't believe me? Try it yourself!

Eventually, yes, you have to trust specialists, because there's too much to try on your own. So you vet the specialists, and the specialist specialists. You don't just throw everything away and listen to the first fat idiot who says everything that happens is a lie and paid actors staged Sandy Hook.


Banning speech is not the right way to deal with this. When you do, you give the speaker more energy.

Questionable; long term traffic ranking data doesn't seem to bear out your hypothesis. In the case of Infowars, one might note that people put up with its increasing toxicity for a really long time. You don't seem to give any weight to the impact of the Sandy Hook families of Jones' long-running campaign of calling the entire thing a hoax.

All violence, no matter who it is against, should be the hard line .. and it's not, and that's the real issue.

You seem to be arguing that the law gives left-wing people a pass while not doing the same for the alt-right, but a very similar case with the politics reversed took place around the same time and had a very similar outcome (ie, probation).

https://www.berkeleyside.com/2019/09/24/kyle-based-stickman-...


Agreed. As I have said previously in a similar discussion, I don't think censorship works very well beyond a few specific cases (yelling "Fire!" in a theater and things like that). I would rather racists and misogynists and all sorts of other assholes were free to express their opinions and engage in debate with the rest of us that that they were hiding in some dark web, invite only circle jerks. Because however distasteful I find the prior, I find the later outright scary.


Bad news: Both are happening at the same time, which is colloquially called 'hiding your power level.' See note 11 in the linked article for an example, though you'll want to use Tor or at least Incognito mode. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hide-your-power-level


> I don't know if I know the solution, but I know one thing that isn't the solution: silencing everyone who disagrees with you.

I found that ignoring people on IRC who would sprinkle any conversation with racist or misplaced remarks helped me quite a bit. Of course it only affects me, but even after polite attempts to steer the conversation it never changed. Same on Twitter, at some point there is one of me and many of them, the cost to engage is just too high.


Communicating financial or medical lies can lead to repercussions. The same should be true for communicating false political information.


I don't know, there's still a lot of dialogue about healing crystals and essential oils out there.


That's true, but you don't see too many people raiding oncology forums on behalf of big quartz.


> but I know one thing that isn't the solution: silencing everyone who disagrees with you

this assumes that the people on the internet are arguing in good faith. they aren't in a lot of cases. the problem i have is willful ignorance and the associated culture that promotes the people that spread lies.


I don't think this is that important because there are far more people reading than posting. Even if the person you're responding to isn't arguing in good faith, there are people reading the discussion with an inquisitive mind.

or, see this comic: https://imgur.com/T8egYQl


Good comic!

But isn't the number of people reading a problem per se? The "deniers", those who keep shifting their arguments until they've gone full circle to the starting point, are not trying to convince you- nor you are trying to convince them. They're competing with you for the attention of the reader, trying to fill the space with the illusion of an argument.


the concept is called sea lioning.


What makes you think the people reading are reading in good faith?


That actually doesn't matter.

Remember, the point of debating publicly isn't to persuade the person you are debating, it's to persuade the people reading the debate.


mmm i'll have to disagree with this.

sure, in person i think treating people politely will often allow you to come to some kind of middle ground or the very least help you to understand each other.

the anonymity of the internet makes it impossible. this isn't even taking into account people are actively just trolling or state sponsored/bots/whatever people trying to muddle a discussion.


silencing/deplatforming is a form of signaling to their in-group rather than an action for the greater good. in general , the more people know they are being watched, and the bigger the audience is, people are more likely to choose their actions based on signaling value, not effect


It's scary to read the number of people responding to you with "actually, the solution IS to silence everyone who disagrees with me, we should do that as quickly as possible."

Especially the number of them who don't even seem to have read past your first sentence.


The "toxic" people are trying to be honest about real issues, and they tend to get shouted down for it. Then the real issues persist, decade after decade, but they cannot be talked about, it's too politically incorrect. A few more people try, get shouted down, rinse and repeat the process.

Then people wonder why a segment of the population is extremely cynical and bitter and polarized when it comes to any sort of debate on controversial issues...

>I've found that when I actually talk to so-called "toxic" people politely, they are willing to listen. It's not them that are causing the polarization.

Agree 100%.


Hardly; toxic isn't a word for 'people speaking their minds' or 'speaking up about problems'. It's someone who is abusive, unsupportive, or unhealthy emotionally towards others and in some forms themselves. Or so the dictionaries say.


Or... toxic might be someone who is oversensitive, unable to accept other people have different viewpoints, and retreats to their safe space whenever someone disagrees with their world view...


I have not seen that definition anywhere, or a definition like that for any other specific word.


This might sound mean because it is text, but it isn't, it's just answering your question. But the word (actually term) you're looking for is social justice warrior.


I can't find a good definition from credible sources but WikiPedia and the cited references (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice_warrior) refer to it as a pejorative term for an individual who promotes socially progressive views, not

> someone who is oversensitive, unable to accept other people have different viewpoints, and retreats to their safe space whenever someone disagrees with their world view

But the article does mention:

> they are pursuing personal validation rather than any deep-seated conviction, and engaging in disingenuous arguments

and

> unreasonable, sanctimonious, biased, and self-aggrandizing

which does seen to have plenty overlap with the general definition and notion of someone who would exhibit toxic behaviour.

Ironically, it seems to be a term (SJW as well as 'toxic') that was invented (SJW) or re-applied (toxic) just to have one group of people label another group of people. Which is double-ironic because neither the labeling nor the behaviour validates ones own point or invalidates the other's point, yet doesn't further any conversation or discussion. It's practically just inflammatory filler.

(by the way, no, it didn't sound mean and I do like to review the popular labels and circular discussions from time to time -- much healthier for me than to be in the middle of it all the time)


>>In reply to child post by oneplane

Hey welcome to the culture war :D The trick is not to take it too seriously. Also South park is an amazing resource / commentary on it... :D


If you have so little skin in the game that you can maintain that attitude, you should probably stay out of the discussion.


The world does not operate on definitions.


Communication and language works on shared concepts and wording, which can be collected as a set of definitions. If we were to not do that, language and communication would not work very well, and with that there would be no foundation for sensible discourse. Or at least, that is what I have seen and experienced so far.


> If we were to not do that, language and communication would not work very well, and with that there would be no foundation for sensible discourse.

You're right, but we misunderstand each other and disagree all the time because language can be subjective.

Take your definition of toxicity: "abusive, unsupportive, or unhealthy emotionally towards others and in some forms themselves". All of those words are subjective.

Abusive is in the dictionary as "harsh or insulting". Harsh is defined as "excessively critical". Excessive means "going beyond the usual, necessary, or proper limit". Now define "usual". Language is a circular logic that at some point you just have to know for yourself what you mean.

When someone labels someone else as "toxic", they're using their own subjective interpretation of "normal", "harsh" and "abusive". And in these situations language doesn't work very well like you mention.

What can help is something less subjective like "I felt angry when you did X". It's more vulnerable and takes more responsibility, but it is less subjective than calling someone "toxic" and can't really be argued, which leads to better understanding and better discussions.


Adding personal context in subjective writing does indeed help instead of assuming one's local interpretation is the same as the reader's.


As someone who had a seven year account banned from YC previously for debating against socialism, you're wrong. Regular debate is labeled toxic all the time if you are anywhere to the right of pure Marxism on the political scale.


The "toxic" people are trying to be honest about real issues

Sadly there are lots of reasonable-seeming right-leaning people whose discourse about 'real issues' sooner or later circles around to 'race realism' or 'the jewish question' or some other ideological Pandora's box. It's often later; a common rule of thumb among far-right extremists is that it takes at least 2 years to reliably indoctrinate a person online.

Here is an example of how these persuasion techniques are deployed, albeit a slightly offensive one. This particular example (spread across 3 pages) aims toward recruitment of people for the 'Qanon' conspiracy which is popular among some right-leaning people. While it's orthogonal to other far-right extremist movements, it is a useful example of a developing militant ideology.

https://centipedenation.com/library/red-pilling-a-general-gu...


It makes you wonder what cool stuff we could have done with the time and resources that are currently being put in to that. But I suppose that the people that are putting their time and resources in to that are categorising it internally as 'cool stuff' already.


> Sadly there are lots of reasonable-seeming right-leaning people whose discourse about 'real issues' sooner or later circles around to 'race realism' or 'the jewish question' or some other ideological Pandora's box. It's often later; a common rule of thumb among far-right extremists is that it takes at least 2 years to reliably indoctrinate a person online.

I think an equally large problem is reasonable-seeming left-leaning people who hold some opinions so spectacularly absurd in the name of ideology that it generates very fertile ground for right wing commentary to resonate.


Maybe the part of problem is blaming left wing for right wing actions and opinions, bit never blaming right wing for left wing opinions.

Some peoples actions are excused and excused and explained, others are not.


Haven’t been banned yet, but there is definitely a brigade that will instantly downvote you if you try to explain libertarian/free market ideas. Never thought that would happen, since Silicon Valley was founded with similar ideas.


Just because people mislabel things doesn't mean the meaning of the word suddenly changes. While languages evolve, it's not as simple as having a bunch of people on a website re-declare a word at will.

Regarding debate or YC or socialism: unless people get abusive I find it hard to believe that it would be called toxic. If you could link to it or provide an except of content that would be called 'toxic' without that content being 'abusive' that would be helpful.


I debated against socialism / expanding government in a thread about UBI or something similar. I was told by a mod that my comments were deleted and that they were "tedious" and "idealogical flamebait".

When I complained about his moderation by saying this:

>A moderator just a hair left of your current moderation approach on the authoritarianism scale would "flag and remove" PG's entire recent article about income inequality with a note calling it "tedious ideological posturing."

For that comment, my entire six-year account was banned and I was told to email ycombinator to have it restored.

When I emailed to have my account restored, I was told this:

>We're happy to unban accounts when people give us reason to believe that they won't repeat the things that led us to ban them. In your case it's a little less clear what that reason might be, since you've expressed how much you dislike a bunch of things about HN, our moderation, and me. But if there's something we could do to help you have a change of heart about those things, let me know.

So basically, since I complained about his moderation, he took it personally, and only if I was willing to revoke my criticism of his moderation could I be unbanned..? I was never able to get clarification on what exactly needed to happen for me to get unbanned. The gist was, if you argue consistently in favor of free-market approaches to anything economic, you will be accused of "tedious idealogical flamebait" and eventually be banned.

Take it for what it's worth, but I was never what you would call toxic by any standard definition, and those were my results.


I can't find a recent article on HN containing debates on/against/about/for socialism with banned accounts in them, so it's hard to see the content/context that would then be called toxic, but I do see in your reply that you mention "tedious" and "idealogical flamebait" which is not mutually exclusive to toxic behaviour. I suppose someone could write flamebait or be tedious without being toxic.


How would you know? You can't see any of the comments because the mods generally remove them all..

The reason why YC seems more left-leaning nowadays compared to a few years ago, is exactly what the grandparent of this thread suggested, anyone right-leaning (or libertarian) has been harassed off the site / strongly discouraged from sharing their perspectives.


I wouldn't know in an absolute sense, which is why I wrote "I suppose". To determine if some text could be described as toxic you do have to read it at some point, and without that (if they are deleted as you wrote earlier) it becomes much more theoretical.


I'm surprised you have been here for 7 years and never looked at the 'showdead' flag in your user preferences.


I find this hard to believe to be honest. HN is owned by a Silicon Valley venture capital investment firm. If anything they lean liberal/libertarian (which indeed can be a bit woke on social aspects, but certainly not when it comes to capital).


> As someone who had a seven year account banned from YC previously for debating against socialism...

Did you win?


IMO that probably has more to do with changes in your own reading habits or maturity level vs. 5-7 years ago. As toxic and ridiculous as any sort of electronic forum can get, I don't think it's any different now than it was on Usenet circa 1995.

For example, I started reading Slashdot not long after it started ('96?). I really enjoyed it, read it every day, occasionally posted. Then sometime around 2000 I just got disgusted with the quality of the comments- it seemed like there was a long slow decline, and no longer did the average commenter seem like they were my age or older, my level of experience or greater, my level of knowledge or greater- instead it just seems like a cesspool of pointless, toxic flamewars about stupid things that seemed to exist for their own sake. Reading Slashdot comments started making me feel stupider and angrier, not more informed. So I eventually stopped reading Slashdot.

But then, over the years I would talk to various people younger than me with the same experience- the only thing that changed was which year they thought Slashdot was good, and which year they thought it went so downhill that they just couldn't read it anymore. Like, "Slashdot was awesome circa 2007 but by 2011 all the commenters sounded like toxic teenagers". Which makes me think that what actually happened was Slashdot comments were always terrible, but if you started reading it your larval hacker years you might not know any better. Then you grow up some more and get more knowledgeable and mature, and the same level of commentary seems really inane.


It's too late - the web already "democratized" communication, meaning that not just people with writing skills, credentials, connections or experiences capable of impressing some gatekeeper get to have a voice. People with absolutely nothing worthwhile to say get to talk to everybody now. Sound elitist? Then the desire for "no toxicity" is elitist. (It's basically expressing a bias against Shitty People.)

EDIT: Possibly against my better judgment I'll take the question a bit more at face value. I think it's all about the climate or culture of a place. As an engineer I've tended to dismiss talk of "culture" esp. where a company or workplace is concerned, but in recent years I've changed my mind. For example, one message or pronouncement by the CEO can change people's entire experience of working there. Same thing for a website, which is a virtual place. And what kind of culture do you expect will develop in a place where the incentives, motivations, values etc. of the people running the site are actively hostile to yours? A place where the very premise of being there is already a hostile act against other humans? It's a corrupt and fundamentally dishonest (not just incidentally dishonest, I would argue) place where the social order has already broken down before a word is even said.

Yeah okay, being a surveillance platform that optimizes for dark patterns and "engagement" doesn't guarantee that it'll be full of trolls. But it's not exactly a surprise when it turns out to be that way.

Steve Jobs was obviously pretty shitty in some ways, but at the height of Apple's revolutionizing of the UI (before it turned shitty) it made you feel like there was something noble about it and you felt better and more of a sense of decorum just by being there. Meanwhile Twitter refuses sensible and awesome ideas for UI/UX over and over for years because they get more engagement by keeping it shitty. And shittiness has a way of spreading. If the place is shitty you will act shitty. But if you suddenly get invited to go have lunch with the Queen of England or something, you probably behave better despite yourself, even if you're Johnny Rotten.

We don't "behave better" because, fewer and fewer of us are getting invited to lunch with the Queen, and because we're not the (U)ser whose (X) the ones running the place care about, and because we can tell we're being taken advantage of, and the nearest person available to take out our grievances on, is each other.


> Before, around 2010-2012, people who disagreed would usually leave it at that and walk away respectfully.

I don't know what internet you were using, but this does not match my experience. The internet has been a dickfighting playground since at least the 90s. The biggest difference is that comment threads are the majority of how people create content on the internet now and they weren't before.


The term "flamewar" predates all social networks except Usenet. It was not an isolated occurrence in the early days of the net.


Are you responding to something I said? If so I can't tell what.


> The internet has been a dickfighting playground since at least the 90s

I was just reinforcing your point by pointing out one of the earliest phrases coined on the Internet is about people discussing a topic without civility.


> The biggest difference is that comment threads are the majority of how people create content on the internet now and they weren't before.

Were you not around for newsgroup flame-wars of the early 90s (and probably long before that, if you were among the lucky few that had access)...?


I was. The web went from not most people on it to not most people commenting in threads to now where most people are commenting in threads. Newsgroups fall into the first two categories. So I think you're not really disagreeing with me. I might have missed a word in my statement though?

Anyway my point is mostly to suggest that OP is wrong from ignorance.


Honestly, I think the large-scale nature of communities is a factor.

Moderators now are also more willing to ban accounts that are non-spam. Certain views are "harmful" and apparently people cannot be asked to not react to seeing things, or even ignore people, whether via some tool or just by saying "Oh, it's her again, I'll just skip over that." This places pressure upward on the moderators to make certain people go away.

Folks love gaming the algorithms to decide what will and will not be read and algorithms come into play because of the aforementioned large scales. Face it, the Internet runs on ad money and that can be tight, so everyone gets the bright idea to either let the algorithms do the moderation or to let people who have free time on their hands and the motivation to do it. Usually the motivation is expressed in some seemingly-altruistic manner but it always boils down to pushing their own views. Eventually some views become acceptable, others anathema, and you get that ghastly distillation where more moderate voices are driven off until finally you get a kind of ghost-town.

This is a pretty tough nut to crack from this vantage point.

One of the ways I see out is the admittedly computationally-intensive tack of making the algorithms only affect a user's personal view rather than making it site-wide. You can still run into the echo chamber issue, only in this case it is a bunch of people in their own private speech bubbles in one large chamber.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because I have watched this sort of thing kill communities for the past thirty years now.


Sounds like "Naive Realism" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology...

"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?" - George Carlin.

Funny... but what's even funnier is that EVERYBODY THINKS THIS.

People dont realize that it's not that there are a group of bad drivers out there, but that everyone drives badly sometimes. It's always different people.

The toxicicity online is similar. There's just a lot more people online a lot more hours per day, and everybody is a jerk sometimes.


But this is possibly a kind of a fallacy in itself: it's possible that there is bad behaviour out there, and that it's associated with one particular group as opposed to another; there's points to be scored by pushing a particular position online if it influences reality. In my experience on some forums, mention anything about Brexit and a flood of anti-Brexit comments appears; either there were hundreds of lurkers that just happened to be online and spot the comment, or there was organisation behind it.


There may be groups of bad actors coordinating, maybe. But you remind me of this Alan Moore quote:

"The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless."

The more I learn about probability and complexity, as well as the lack of general knowledge of ergodicity leading us to make fallacious conclusions, the more this rings true.


Right but like...There are organized movements by governments to do horrific things. China is doing it, Nazi Germany did it, America has and is and will do it.

Random quotes from counter-culture writers doesn't negate that bad actors have coordinated, they weren't bothered by sunlight, and when they got enough power they did truly horrific things.


I dont mean to suggest that i dont think people can organize in groups. Or that group efforts can never have negative effects.

Im trying to say that there is an organic ecosystem of groups that severely constrains all groups in unpredictable complex ways, and much more than most people would think.


We're essentially feeling negative effects produced by sorting a list of items. Currently they are sorted based on friend interactions and other criterion; mainly popularity. They sort this way because it increases engagement. What we've also found out is that this is also negatively effecting peoples emotional health.

My personal feeling is that reverse chronological order with maybe throttling your chronic over-sharing friends would probably go a long way to helping blunt some of the negative effects we see today. But it would also lower engagement and lead to revenue losses so they probably haven't earnestly considered it. Kinda like how the cigarette companies don't want you to know that smoking is bad for you, because you might smoke less.


That's exactly how FriendFeed worked, and it was great.


The toxicity is seeping in from real life, and really popular social networks and media treatment of these is creating a feedback loop.

The real problems are:

A) real life sucks unless you are part of the subset of the rich or have good support structures,

B) toxic behaviors helps you get ahead in certain situations in life and people with low or no resources often resort to them,

C) there's no cost to joining certain social networks so it attracts those with no resources and/or the lowest common denominator, including people who have been damaged by life and only know toxic behavior as a norm,

D) people are interesting and useful when doing something productive or creative, but not otherwise.

It's hard to say if the category of people who fall in C is increasing in absolute number or only due to popularity of certain social networks.

Social networks that aren't dedicated toward doing something productive or creative, or who are open to everyone for free, will be overtaken by toxic behavior as a result. They should be avoided, or new ones developed in their place.

Another factor is the downfall of respect for the news media in the US, this makes discussions of news events attract comments from the type of people in C as they think their opinions are more important than they should be.


It helps to realize that much of it is intentional, especially on behalf of companies like Facebook. Once you realize this it has a sort of spell-breaking effect. Ask yourself if you would say the same sort of thing to someone if you were face to face. If the answer is no, think twice about posting it online.


There's no straightforward fix because this behavior is something that emerges from mass psychology, like war. In a sense this is war, with new platforms to amplify and direct weaponized ideas.

If war is politics by other means (Clausewitz), we can turn that around and say that politics is war by other means. See: the Russian concept of hybrid warfare.

What ends war is when enough people in a society are convinced it's not worth it. And that happens when enough people are exposed to the horrors of war, when they see what it does to their own lives and to the lives of people they care about.

Now we're in a period when most people haven't been exposed to that level, so this is unfortunately an upswing.

The way through is for some number of us to keep our humanity toward others (in the positive sense), to act accordingly, to carry that through until conflict blows over, and to rebuild society afterwards.


It has always been a problem, but I agree it has gotten worse. The problem is that it has gotten worse in the real world too. Ive had friends family and strangers yell at me over minor political disagreements, and its not primarily coming from any particular side or group. You would think they were trying to fight about something important like emacs or vim.

But why is this happening recently? I think the rise of smart phones has facilitated way more people engaging on the internet instead of just browsing. This in turn has opened up people to the vast amount of viewpoints in the world, and unfortunately people tend to get angry at people that are different.

Another thing that has become a problem is people being paid to support or attack a cause. These professional rabble rousers are stirring up shit inside of people that would rather just have a sandwhich.


There may be a small number of paid partisans, but I think a bigger problem is people who are paid in internet points. There's some kind of psychological flaw that drives people to get more points. Then the combination of the way web sites are set up, and the people inside of them leads to the extemists "winning" by getting more points. Then the whole mess feeds on itself to get more and more extreme.


> The problem is that it has gotten worse in the real world too. Ive had friends family and strangers yell at me over minor political disagreements, and its not primarily coming from any particular side or group.

I've heard this said quite a bit, but I have yet to experience it, and I live in a major metropolitan area. I hope I'm not just one of the lucky ones, and this stuff is more limited IRL than most people think.


> Before, around 2010-2012

Eh, people were being jerks to each other on usenets and bbs's way before this.

Godwin's law is 30 years old at this point.


I don't think we should try to stop it. I like discussion groups where the only thing moderated is spam. Yes, you'll get a lot of noise - but they can also be the only source of discussion that lies outside the overton window.

I've found it easy to ignore content I don't like, but it is getting harder to find open discussion forums.


>outside the overton window

I feel like what you describe here ... is the noise.


Not everything outside the overton window is noise. It sure isn't all signal, though. It almost certainly has a higher proportion of noise. But it's also where the new directions for society are going to come from, for good or ill.


There's a "outside the overton window" description (and similar descriptions) I hear folks talk about when it comes to the value of internet un-moderated discussions and .... honestly I've found it mostly to be poorly thought out at best, often painfully ignorant as far as the motivations go.

There seems to be some folks who talk about really valuing novel ideas and how they can't show up on moderated discussions but I just see a lot of noise that might not be "overton window" but are mostly pithy garbage.

I find that anything mildly thought out usually fits inside even the heaviest of moderated type discussions.


> I find that anything mildly thought out usually fits inside even the heaviest of moderated type discussions.

Depends on the moderation. Here, if it's well thought out (and expressed in a non-antagonistic way), it usually fits. Not every moderated place will that be true, though. And even here, certain topics may not run afoul of the moderators, but users may still downvote them to oblivion. (For example: There is some suggestion that autism may be caused, in at least some cases, by gut bacteria. But if I were to link that idea to the suggestion that the measles vaccine might, in some cases, cause gut issues, I would expect to be destroyed by downvotes, no matter how good of an argument - or even evidence - I had.)


>Or is this more of a social problem that code can't solve?

Absolutely, because it's wrong to regard the web as a thing that's separate from the real world and it's effects. We're talking about people's identities in the sense of how they see themselves, and that's shaped by their environment (what they see, hear and do), online and offline.

What happened is that people are able to find a tribe, whereas before the web was a thing, finding a tribe was more difficult and often exclusive to cities.

People living in rural areas were likely to adapt to existing "big village tribes", branching off wasn't viable or a matter of circumstances because of a lack of different subcultures within those rural areas.

The web changed that, everybody can socialize and find a tribe online, it's like a big city full of subcultures, and subcultures provide identity.

Early people on the web were often already part of urban tribes I think, and took position of views within those, so if they encountered a rival group online (think about poppers and rockers stereotypes from the 80's) toxicity was almost ensured. So what happ[ens if a mainstream culture that's fed with stereotypes through hollywood etc. is let loose on the web?

The before tribeless population which was forced into a tribe by circumstance is basically discovering the world and is going through their teenage years.

That's my explanation of what's happening.


I'm not sure you were around for the great Gnome vs KDE wars of the 2000's. It was pretty toxic and "win-at-all-costs" back then :-)

When I released my app 8-years ago, I thought support would be my most hated part of releasing a product. To my surprise, it was one of the most rewarding parts, I met some great people via email, some I will visit one day.

But support has its ugly "toxic" side as well. This is particularly prevalent in 1-star reviews for trivial issues. All the reviewer sees is a box to vent their thoughts without considering that there is a real person on the other side. But I'm a real person who cares and some comments do stir bad emotions. This has brought some of my lowest and darkest days of app development.

Sometimes I will make contact with the reviewer and as soon as they get to know me as a real person, they are friendlier and more respectful.

The faceless nature of the internet causes people to treat others poorly. In the real world where we meet people in face-to-face, our initial and natural position is to treat each other with respect.

So here are a few ideas: 1. imagine a person, someones face, not a textbox, website or company - add a persona to him or her. 2. Ask this simple question "Would I treat or talk to someone (my friend) like this in real-life?" 3. Would you be proud of the way you're conversing if people you admire were watching, e.g., respected colleagues, friends, parents.

This will change the way you write.


Like anything else, I think a big part of this is how you are raised.

There are plenty of people that treat others terribly, in real life, without any anonymity whatsoever. Likewise, there are plenty of people that treat other anonymous posters on the internet respectfully.

As with everything, parenting and social norms just need to catch up to technology. We need to instill in our children the idea that being rude to anonymous strangers is a bad thing, just as it is a bad thing to be rude to strangers in real life, just as it is a bad thing to be horrible to people you already know.


Agreed. If you have a bad upbringing and treat people poorly, when you enter a new environment, e.g., a workplace, the new environment would quickly teach the new person the proper way to act.

Likewise, on the internet, we need to encourage people to behave nicely and discourage bad behaviour. And we do, this is what this post is about. I guess we need more of it.


Two acronyms I love are "RTFM" and "TL;DR" - they are short, quick and carry a lot of meaning. I would feel stink if I asked a question and got "RTFM" as a reply, it would highlight my laziness.

I've wondered if an acronym to say "You aren't being nice" or something to that effect would help.


1. Amazon releases MyOneServer, the first AWS product aimed at non-tech end users. M1S is a VM that runs apps (like, from an app store) for server-side use cases like running a blog or hosting a minecraft server.

2. M1S gains traction from hackers who don't want to be part-time sysadmins, but the first widely-used killer app for it is a social media front-end combined with a CDN. Self-hosted files and "publish once, syndicate everywhere" starts to flourish and Facebook begins to lose its position as middle-man to the web's social activity.

3. Bezos buys Keybase with spare change from his couch cushion and integrates it in to M1S; now all server-side apps, and the users thereof, natively have cryptographic identities.

4. Users begin to demand M1S integration from businesses that used to hold (and resell) their data. Widespread adoption from webapps cyclicly drives further adoption by users, making a M1S identity (if not heavy usage) almost ubiquitous.

5. With most client/server use cases sharing a single cryptographic auth network, the last vestiges of anonymity disappear from the web as peoples' username, real name, cryptographic identity, and checking account melt into a blob.

6. With their real identity attached to online activity, online activity becomes "activity", and, while toxicity is not eliminated, it is at least no worse than the real world.

(Crazy? maybe. But I am honestly surprised every day that I wake up and find out that Amazon hasn't made something like step 1 yet...)


I really thought this was going somewhere until I got to the punchline: the expectation that having online identity linked to real identity will reduce toxicity. Real names policies have already been tried by several huge social networks and don't seem to be having any impact.


There's a Bernard Cornwall book where an Arthurian warrior collaborates with the druid Merlin. It takes place in Britain during the Saxon invasion period.

At one point Merlin's in a library. We learn that Druid's are not allowed to write. Once you write something down, it becomes fixed. Fixed on paper. Fixed in your mind. Rigid and unalterable... this is not conducive to magic, which cannot work under such rigidity.

It reminded me of Socrates & Phaedrus' conversation on reading & memory. Words in a book don't work the way words in your head do. Reading about a conversation isn't like discussing a topic in Socrates' garden. When writing replaces memorisation as a method of learning, things are lost as well as gained. The ideas themselves change.

It's particularly interesting as Socrates was famous for his conversational philosophical methods, where allegory and flexible style make the case. His student is famous for his writing, and the more precise, detail-oriented, reductive and uhm... platonic in his method.

Anyway... the internet has made us all writers. We write whatever enters our head. Then it becomes fixed. Then we defend it... like cranky old academics defending pet theories they wrote in their youth.


I’d say the fix then is to remove the words. Ie leave social media or make it too decentralized to attack.


I think you need to acknowledge human nature and profit from it.

Human’s love observing an argument.

Twitter is too concise to form decent arguments.

If there was a website called Dual - where people could register a username - then post on the forum where they were arguing to verify their dual account and then continue the argument on a platform set up for settling written arguments and integrating external references.

People would talk less anonymous smack or have to back up their smack on dual and then write at a level that convinces the masses they know what they are talking about. No swearing on dual. The disagreements would actually educate everyone and the voting and following would tell you what to advertise.

If someone was talking smack on a forum and didn’t register on dual you could assume they were a coward or a troll. If followers could supply duelers with arguments we would get to the truth in an entertaining way very quickly and any misunderstanding would be highlighted and documented.

People often do great thinking in the heat of an argument. We should harness the anonymous arguments. Politicians should accept duels instead of televised debates.

Limit the responses to 300 words and six references or something effective.

I wish I had the money and health to clone twitter and do it but someone should do it. Both sides have to watch the arguments unfold so it brings observers and duelers closer to the truth rather than polarising them.

The trick is in trusted auto verification of anonymous duelers and getting enough duels and spectators to make internet dueling a thing.


This is an intriguing concept. A number of websites have tried this sort of thing with limited success but your idea of making it a forum specifically for challenging people to duel is a superior hook.


Remember back when we used to have concepts like "flamebait" and "flamewars"? When we would openly talk about conversations to not get involved in? Right in direct proximity to those conversations themselves? We'd acknowledge that no-one was above getting hot under the collar, and that while we'd try to avoid it we might have to go bicker at eachother in the corner for a while?

What changed? My rough list is:

1. News bloggers got online and turned flamebait into their business model.

2. Normies got iPhones and started posting online. They never read an netiquette guide. If they had heard of the concept at all they dismissed it as computer nerd nonsense. They don't think about online communication systematically and expect every interaction online to be like talking to customer service: they get to say whatever they want, and only hear a very constrained window of things back. This backfires in all the obvious ways.

3. "Platforms" with KPIs based on engagement are incentivized to enable the largest flamewars possible and put it in as many people's faces right up to the point they start causing bad PR.

4. People with basically zero forethought thought they could fix society by being paternalistic to strangers.


If you're working on this in a for-profit context, I'm a Seattle VC looking to invest in solutions for this particular problem, and my phone/email/etc. are in my profile.

My most recent investment was on this thesis: http://blog.rlucas.net/vc/exchanging-thoughts-on-a-thoughtex...


Several sites I used to enjoy have been ruined by this toxic polarization.

Everything is an echo chamber these days. No one wants to be wrong or look foolish online. People don't want to even read opinions other than their own. There is no more civil discourse.

It's not just online - I'm noticing the same thing in real life.

I don't know how to fix it...but I hope someone does. Whatever the case, we need to treat the cause, not just the symptoms.


Ai is a Skinner box right now. It’s designed to capture attention. It does that by measuring how intensely something makes you feel. Dopamine high = content dependence and an attention reward. If you see people fighting your brain looks. If you see something normal who cares? You’re not forming relationships with people. You’re trying to get likes and shares. Why the hell would you do something boring like find a middle ground? It’s fun because this article from another thread might help people think of ideas on how to fix this. Algorithms are the attention filter right now. They obviously suck and don’t respect autonomy. Personally I liked the days of “content like this” navigation. I used to spend hours just walking around the network of Spotify songs to find new content. Now you can’t do that. The algo suggests stuff and you’re not really free to explore the graph. https://lithub.com/how-we-pay-attention-changes-the-very-sha...


Few weeks ago I read Heinrich Böll's "The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum" [1] which is a literary reflection on how society and media treated RAF [2] sympathizers.

What struck me was how much the described trolling and toxicity resembled what we observe nowadays. The book and the setting is the 70's so the anonymous bullying and hysteria just materialized via letters, newspapers and the phone instead of social media.

Also it has been mentioned on HN several times that society didn't become more toxic - possibly even less. But more and more people gained access since the 90s and take the opportunity for abusing it in such ways. Also there are now troll farms and a single person without a job can spread poison like a gatling gun bullets.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Honour_of_Katharina_B... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction


You really can't.

The only fix is aggressive moderation, and even that isn't great, because you'll be shaped by the ideas of the moderators.

The internet is a wonderful tool. It magnifies reach of all thoughts and facts and opinions. Sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes it's a bad thing, and what each person considers good or bad is different.

We've always had "crazies" with strange ideas. Back in the day they just stood on street corners shouting. Then they passed out leaflets. Then they got on public access cable.

And now they have the internet, where they can reach the whole globe at once.

The one thing I can tell you that won't work is pure democracy. Something I learned at reddit early on is that pure democracy just doesn't work, because the trolls have far more time and patience than everyone else, and they will manipulate the system.

Also, a lot of people just don't want to think for themselves. They will just follow the loudest voice assuming it is correct. This also makes democracy not work well.

But democracy is still the best system we've got.


The answer is heavy handed moderation. You need active moderators who discourage toxic comments and commenting patterns, and give out punishments to repeat offenders. I don't know the the guys at HN do it since there are so few of them, but I like their method of leaving a comment why someone's comment is toxic (usually against guidelines).


Step one is getting people inside Google, Twitter and Facebook to stop ranking toxic and polarizing content so strongly in search, images, videos and recommendations.

They'll say it's the AI, and it's only giving people what they want, but if you ask a kid what he wants to eat he'll become malnourished on an all-sugar diet. A healthy diet means serving up some vegetables even if your kids don't like you as much for it.

In other words, even if it hurts your ad revenue and engagement metrics a little, it's the morally right thing to do. I'm not saying to bury misdeeds or censor anything, but give people some positivity once in a while.

Dumping controversy and callout posts that have barely any backlinks at the top of peoples' results gives it artificial weight and makes people see the world as more and more polarized, which results in them acting accordingly, and we're all the worse for it.


It's a big problem without one simple solution. One thing we can do, though, is not enable it when possible. One big thing I have zeroed in on recently is comments.

When I redesigned my blog/website last year, I intentionally removed Disqus and all commenting ability. In fact, what prompted the redesign was that I wanted to add a box pleading with people to not use comments for tech support for various open source projects I've created and to file Github issues instead.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how bad comments have really gotten. Trolling, bullying, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, abuse, and general mean behavior have become such a rampant problem that "don’t read the comments" has become an Internet meme on par with "don’t feel the trolls." Think about it: when was the last time that you changed your opinion because of a comment you read on a blog or news article? More than likely it just make you mad or made you sad.

I have been low-key nursing this idea for awhile now that the Internet would be better off if a lot of sites killed off comments. When comments become a breeding ground for the worst aspects of human behavior, why should we continue to enable it? Why should we host it and give it a voice? Why should we implicitly endorse it under our brand? Because that is what we do when we host comments.

Commenting should probably still exist on social media sites (Facebook, Reddit, HN, etc.) But most sites would be a lot better off if they just dropped comments entirely and reallocated those resources to more productive uses, and I think their users would be better off for it as well.

Yes, I am just one person with a small blog about programming. But if this is the position that I want to take, I should be the change that I want to see in the world. Thus, the removal of commenting. And I've been pushing this idea a bit in other areas that, just maybe, users don't need to be able to directly comment on things.


Hmm, as someone who's run communities for a while, I'd have to say that the quality of a comments section is very heavily dependent on the topic, audience and how well you moderate it.

Over on YouTube for instance, I've had very few negative comments on my videos, and usually found the comments section under them to be a mostly civil place where I can help out people who had trouble with a walkthrough or guide.

Same goes with the comments on blog articles I wrote in the past too. The comments have generally stayed on topic, were always free of personal attacks, etc.

Comment sections can certainly be hellholes, and for large media outlets they usually are. We all know how bad they are on stuff like the BBC, Daily Mail, Guardian, etc.

But they don't necessarily have to be, and they can be entirely valuable if moderated well and related to a topic people don't treat like its the end of the world.


> I intentionally removed Disqus [...] pleading with people to [...] file Github issues instead

What could the reasons be, that GitHub works better? That people are more polite, there?

> When comments become a breeding ground for the worst aspects of human behavior

For what reasons, do people feel they can be more "toxic", in blog post comments, than at GitHub?

What would you say are the lessons that could be learned, from how things work at GitHub?

(Disclosure: I'm building a commenting system & Q&A forum software. I have a blog post here: ` https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments ` 145 comments, 0% toxic angry comments in my case. )


There are only 2 sane strategies:

- Ignore them and despise people arguing on the web while you build yourself a better life.

- Laugh at them and possibly feed the troll for more fun, but it gets boring and youll get back to strategy 1.

We live in a clown world where too many people spend 90 percent on their screens receiving information from strangers instead of living a normal life. Plus the more opinionated people are on the web, the more they have nothing actually going on in their life.. its like the same fact that all psychologist are people whith poor mental healt who went into this branch hoping they would understand themselves. The louders someone is about a subject......

Do you really want to invest time into policing this clown world ?

If you are not convinced just go in flat earth group on facebook. Youll understand that "dont argue with pigs, youll get dirty and the pig loves it"


Rational thinking, manipulation techniques (you have to know them to be able to detect them), emotional awareness and stuff like that should be taught at every school. Everybody should be conscious of the fact 99% of what you find online (let alone see on TV) is bullshit, designed to troll and manipulate you and absolutely not worth taking serious (and if something really seems important - check the proofs and don't forget to question their legitimacy). I would even call for the governments to fund efforts to educate every person (adults included) this way - this clearly is a matter of national security nowadays.

I believe there is no sane way (an insane way is to deanonymize and watch everyone - China and Russia implement this) to stop the polarization/toxicicity in the first place, all we can do is develop immunity.


Also, it should be noted that foreign governments are actively trying to polarize us.


This polarization isn't mostly a technical problem, but my experience hosting forums at a previous company did give some insights:

- smaller communities are more civil. As forums get more popular and their power to influence grows, assholes want to use that power to get their way

- reasonable people might put in their 2 cents on a discussion, but will not continually argue with the assholes. The assholes know this, so pour lots of energy into turning a discussion into a shitstorm.

I have seen this same thing here at HN: two people go back and forth on a point until the discussion is two words per line on the far right of the screen. Once I see that starting, I usually quit reading the whole topic.

I'm not that familiar with the reputation thing here, but in my previous life I had some ideas about how to rescue our forums. Most of the ideas revolved around limits, like:

- limit the number of posts per userid on a topic. This would require that a person get all his thoughts out on the table and think before posting to do that, rather than going back and forth forever.

- limit the number of posts per userid per day. Then if someone went on a rampage, they couldn't just pollute one topic and go to another to vent (or create new topics to vent). My hope was that if you force a person to cool off for a day, they might not want to get into the same argument the next day.

Once our support forums got popular, they got ugly. We tried everything we could think of, but eventually had to shut them down and went to a model where we anonymously posted questions that users had and posted our responses. Users couldn't post. The support forums were still informative, but all the heat (and a lot of the interest) was gone.

I'd never have forums in another business. They're great in the beginning, but in my experience, impossible to manage when they get popular. HN has done a great job here, but it's also a specialized, highly educated community.


I don't think you can fix it, it's just the nature of the Internet. I was talking to some older coworkers who were adults before the Internet became mainstream, and they said that before the Internet, your social circle was neighbors and co-workers, so being an ass would have direct, and sometimes physically painful, ramifications. They said that on the Internet, there's no real ramifications for being a horrible person, and you'll always find a group of people that agree with what you say, whereas before you'd get ostracized, or worse, for treating your neighbors/co-workers poorly. I think the best you can do is encourage people to interact outside of the Internet, and hope that the manners required to function IRL stick with them when they go online.


It's not just that, it's the fact that most interaction on the net is text based so you miss out on tone and body language. I feel like some discussions escalate too high on the net due to the text based format.


Definitely. I remember one time a manager from another group at work asked me a question about when a project would be done, and I responded along the lines of "I'm working on it, and I don't know when it'll be done." because it was the truth, and there was nothing else to say about it. They interpreted my single sentence reply as rude and dismissive, then complained to my manager about it. When my manager talked to me about it, he said something like "Oh, ok, your reply is fine, dont worry about it."


See also: https://feld.com/archives/2019/10/the-miasma.html


This is not an answer but on a similar note, has anyone watched the latest Joe Rogan Experience with Daryl Davis. He is a black man who convinced Klan Members to leave the KKK. Amazing podcast. Maybe the only way to stop toxicity/polarity is to show real conversations with real people.


Successful persuasion stories are always interesting to me, but at over 2.5 hours I'm unlikely to watch this whole thing. Can you please list some key takeaways? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGTQ0Wj6yIg


Ya this is a good clip.

https://youtu.be/75fGNLFAoIc


This is not an algorithm problem. It's a people problem. Start with yourself: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

An algorithmic solution would be to rigorously hide everything that looks like mere unproductive outrage from public discourse. However, not only would that amount the severe censorship but it'd probably also not be exactly easy to implement.

Besides, platforms such as Twitter or good old-fashioned news thrive on outrage. If you take that from them there's probably not much left, which is why it's not in these platforms' interest to do something against the issue.

So, it's back to square one: Yourself. Keep your identity small and try not to perpetuate outrage on the Internet.


Let's not pretend algorithms optimized for "engagement" don't feed on hate. Is there any other emotion which is so easily evoked, manipulated, and engaging as anger/hate?


CGP Grey: "This Video Will Make You Angry" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc


A bunch of personal rules I try to be conscious of, but usually break: Respond/listen to ideas, not people. Try for a top-level quality comment instead of a reply. If a reply makes better sense, don't direct it at the person. Minimize the use of names, personal pronouns, partisan terms, adjectives, and adverbs.

It's probably already been attempted, but a forum that had some understanding of language structure and could programmatically provide some feedback by adding a "Review" step to posting would be interesting. The system would have full access to the context a post is being made in and checks could be built around it. The less checks that are ignored, the better the rank.


Not all actors are participating in online conversations in good faith. Meaning, a big part of the problem are trolls and propagandist antagonizing and encouraging division. Part of the solution has to be stopping them.


Lots of other comments here say it’s just the old trolls at scale, but I agree with you. There is propaganda at such a scale that it’s hard to miss and some is very hard to spot. I don’t remember people in the US being so likely to repeat Russian propaganda in the past. I routinely have people repeat Russian-twisted, false accounts of historical facts to me! This isn’t the old problems at scale.

Edit-just this morning the news reports Republican senators being afraid for their families well beings if they counter Trump. Unthinkable just 4 years ago.


The trouble with this solution is that not all actors wanting to stop people from participating in online conversations are doing so in good faith, even if they frame it in convincing-sounding language about trolls and propaganda. In fact, I'd say that this is probably a massive magnet to every single bad-faith actor out there, and given the us-vs-them climate it produces there's probably no way of stopping those bad actors.


I'm very late to this, but I wanted to say that partly the fault is on the naive assumption that search engines adopted many years ago that the information found online was mostly true if it had a lot of backlinks.

That's no longer true. If Google or Facebook don't want to censor content, then they need to change the UI and warn that some of the results contain wrong/misleading information, or even complete lies.

This fact-checking wasn't needed long ago because the pages with the most backlinks had almost always factual content.


Disclaimer: I acknowledge that "toxic" is a loosely-defined term that can be thrown around at people that really aren't... I'm mostly meaning people that go out of their way to be negative/harmful in unnecessary ways, harmful forms of trolling, the inability for people to have a discussion without it dissolving into attacks/etc extremely fast... that kind of thing

I think we're looking back at history with rose-tinted glasses here. Toxicity has always been around. Maybe in recent years it has grown, but I think that's just the nature of the technological beast.

It doesn't mean that on a broad scale technology always actively contributes to making things more toxic- but just that it amplifies and contributes to all sorts of things, and that includes the negative. We're more connected than we've ever been, and the unfortunate side-effect is that the degrees of separation between us and those that are toxic have been significantly reduced. Anonymity is maybe a small part, but there are plenty of openly toxic people, both online and off.

Toxic people are just toxic people and I think it's a social issue that is just always going to exist at some level. Maybe there are ways to use technology to assist in fighting against it and maybe not. I think it's just a potentially-unsolvable complex problem that will always arise in society.

I don't know the most effective ways to fight it. However, I'm trying my best not to contribute to it, and maybe personally fighting it within myself will have an outward effect on others. While I wouldn't say I'm mean/toxic/etc online, I do try to stay self-aware of my actions/reactions/emotions and what I post online (and have failed to do this sometimes) because it's very easy to get caught up in negative news/misery and then it's easy to branch off from there into an unhelpful level of anger/negativity.

I try to do my best not to assume the worst of others, to realize there are beings with entire lives unknown to me behind every screen name (if it's not a bot) and to realize it's sometimes difficult to properly infer the tone of what someone is saying online. It's still an internal work-in-progress, but I think I'm far more mindful of my behavior now than in years past.


I don't think OP is claiming toxicity is new, but the extreme polarization of everything is.

Look into the lives of politicians in the 1950's and 1960's. They frequently socialized together and worked together. They were able to find common ground. Every victory for one party wasn't necessarily a loss for the other. How often do you think Mitch McConnell goes out for a drink with Bernie Sanders?

Tribalism, especially in relation to things like sports, is super-old. But it's spread to all parts of our lives. Often it's semi-friendly (are you a vi or emacs person?), but it can get out of control.

So how do you fix it? That's tough, especially when every news story seems to have two equal but opposite sides.


"Look into the lives of politicians in the 1950's and 1960's. They frequently socialized together and worked together. They were able to find common ground. Every victory for one party wasn't necessarily a loss for the other. How often do you think Mitch McConnell goes out for a drink with Bernie Sanders?"

That's the problem with transparency and constant scrutiny. In the 50s and 60s you could hide affairs like Kennedy did. Or you could have a drink with people from the other party, discuss things openly and find a deal without anybody knowing. If McConnell met with Sanders today there would be a huge uproar. There is something to be said for the ability to make backroom deals.


It isn't necessarily about making backroom deals. The tribe mentality is so deep that I'm not sure that Sanders and McConnell would recognize that the other person is trying to do what they think is best for the country. I'm not sure they could sit down and talk about their families or their favorite place to travel.


I just think the tribe mentality got informed by the constant news cycle now. A lot of sane people have probably left congress and now you have a lot of hyperpartisans who like fighting for its own sake.


So, after a day nothing but "this is the way it is" comments I gotta say: this is not acceptable.

I've been pondering this issue for over a decade. I think the general attitude is partially right: we can't do anything about troll postings. But we can create incentives for troll (meaning nonconstructive) comments in online discussions to funnel together while non-troll conversations seeking literally any goal have incentive to maintain their conversations through something similar to the "like" mechanism.

The basic idea is rather than a single comment and reply widget for online articles and posts, the "comment reply" widget has an "attitude indicator" that declares "this post is in this attitude". Others give the post a +/- rating for how well it fits the attitude.

It is a simple mechanism that alters how online discussions are handled. It has to be simple, or it will not be adopted. The change could be significant, enabling a diversity of on-topic conversations. Just pick your attitude, your sub-culture and talk with birds of a feather. Whereas no serious conversations can take place online today without random trolls stomping on everyone's china - all because we have a single reply widget funneling all voices together into a troll happy mess.

Anyone else thinking of possible solutions?


Our voices are nuanced. Our facial expressions are nuanced.

Text is not, unless your a 1% top tier writer.

Would love to see more experiments with video and voice to bring back the subtleties of human communication.


> So how do we fix this?

Do not participate in forums where this type of behavior happens. And participate actively in moderation (flag/upvote/downvote) to keep forums civil and interesting.

I'd say forums aren't well-suited to discuss political issues. But I agree that tech could help. For instance, Stack Exchange Politics is readable but last time I checked, it didn't really provide much value. Mostly, arguing about politics is a waste of time, on a forum or anywhere else.


I think one of the driving issues are filter bubbles. The intersecting areas between different political directions is getting smaller and smaller, there exists nearly nothing that is dedicated to healthy discussion between different school of thoughts. Plattforms like youtube are making this worse, because it's recommendation algorithms are pulling people towards more extreme content instead of pulling them more to commonly agreed stuff.

At some moment we will have to agree that big online plattforms aim to change behaviour, create engagement etc. All of this has side effects and these side effects have tangible political consequences. The tangible political consequences have in turn real hard consequences for single persons and groups of people.

We technicians need to think more about the social impact of the things we build. If it is a nice business idea but is a bad idea in the sense of Kant's categorical imperative, just scrap it and move on. Ideas are cheap.

Also: get away from the screen. Meet and talk. Even wkth people with whom you disagree with. Try to keep your own bubble permeable and aim to do the same for others — you will not win your culture war anyways, so don't try to.

Instead try to widen people's horizon by taking them and their ideas seriously, even if it feels stupid to you.


My theory is that politicians (and religions, and any other group in power) want polarization so that the plebs stay fighting amongst themselves rather than uniting against their overlords. Much better to have us yelling at each other about sexual preferences, sexual identities, religious zealotry, and anything else people get highly charged about, rather than all of us arguing with them. Can't have the plebs be united against the masters...


I recently stumbled across some unlikely part of the web - I think it was Google reviews for a hotel in Nigeria - and people used it as some random web chat. It was very uplifting to see complete strangers just politely saying hello to each other, all from a place where good connectivity still might not be taken for granted.

It reminded me very much of how I first experienced the net in 1995: I was too amazed at talking to some random person from across the world to bother with petty arguments about politics or religion.

Now, novelty has worn off and, perhaps more importantly, for some people it's never been new - they weren't around to consciously and with great curiosity try it out for the first time. Add to this the factor of prevalence, the scale that brings and how centralized things have become.

I used to hang out on different special interest forums and IRC channels and I have to say there was as much drama, cliques, in-fighting and groupthink there as it is now. It was just smaller and more self-contained.

With today's massive community tools like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, where there are no clear boundaries between factions or groups of interest, it's just a free-for-all: there's always someone willing to argue about something, and they're all on the same platform, which they have access to all the time, as opposed to having to deal with the diplomacy of dial-up and a shared family phone line.

If tech is to blame, it is only because it's too cheap and ubiquitous: The Great Invention that was supposed to bring us together finally has, and it turns out that we just fucking love to argue.


A co-worker suggested me to be "blindly optimistic", I scoffed at the suggestion. But it seems to be helping me. Hope it helps others too, so sharing here.


It sounds to me your coworker is pushing a faith based belief system on you.


Improve the economy.

Humans confronted with scarcity (real or imagined) react with rational self-interest. They react more easily and strongly to perceived threats, become selfish for themselves and their in-group, and over-demonstrate their allegiance to that in-group.

Make people feel (economically) safe, that they have opportunities to accumulate wealth, and can generally do what they want. They'll be less fearful, and less afraid to see Others getting ahead as well.


I believe consensus building tools could help a lot to guide toxic conversations in a more civilized direction.

Check these articles for ideas how that might be accomplished:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22203937

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21362182


These articles describe the vTaiwan system, developed in Taiwan to build consensus.

"People compete to bring up the most nuanced statements that can win most people across" different factions.

It includes an iterative process of proposing new statements on a topic, and then voting on the statements. Over time, statements are developer which more and more of the voters agree with.


I can't speak for this site, but for the internet overall: There will always be teenagers and trolls.

Teenagers will always find it amusing to say naughty things and being transgressive. Trolls never bother finding something more interesting to do.

It is like a prank call. You used to call the local pizza joint, and ask for orange chicken, annoying the manager until they flew into a rage. Now you get on a comment section and annoy people.


You can't. The internet has grown in size irreversibly. There is more than eternal september. when you have billion-people "communities" you no longer have community, you have a large mob. In order for discussions to have depth, they need a certain shared framework of understanding and certain level of agreement on the definitions of words; in other words a baseline common culture. The more people are in a community the thinner this common culture gets as only the few common denominators survive. At this point, the discussion can no longer have depth because people will be arguing constantly about definitions and nothing productive will ever occur

The old story about the tower of Babel is true. It seems humanity has faced these moments before. The solution is to separate the bubbles in separate, more cohesive communities. Ideas need such sheltering in order to grow, even if this means they won't blend easily with other ideas.

> Do we ditch them and go back to a literal timeline?

probably doesn't help. look at youtube comments. you can set twitter to timeline it doesnt make a lot of difference


Honestly I don't think we're the people to do it. Software developers are grossly susceptible to the Principle of the Excluded Middle. We spend so, so much time arguing about extremes (see also the post yesterday about Monoliths being the future), while those calling for moderation only see modest amounts of support.

If we want to be those people, the answer is 'personal growth', and lots of it.


Considering how much the overton window has shifted since the 80's, I find your "moderate" position extreme.


Virtually everyone can agree that toxic voices are undesirable, it's the equivalent of saying "evil people should be in jail"

Well, of course, but it's our inability to mutually agree on the terms "bad" and "toxic" that makes this policy fundamentally impractical, and freedom of expression the only workable solution.

These are not new problems, they're old problems in a new suit.


The difference is in being abusive or not, just like freedom is not absolute or in one direction; i.e. in the example of your freedom ending where someone else's freedom begins.


While there is definitely an uptick in polarization, I think the more important and insidious trend is the increasing ubiquity of bullshit. We are flooded with information online, most of which is irrelevant or counterproductive to our interests. Needing to constantly wade through that in triage mode (with a judgmental attitude) has the general effect of wearing down people’s psyche and making them feel exhausted, anxious and on the edge. In that mindset, of course small things are going to set them off — but that is just the symptom, not the root cause. This is also a much harder problem to wrangle with because it is less specific. The causes of this problem are deeply embedded inside the incentives we have set up on the web over the last two decades — to challenge those will require answering some hard questions. At some level, people realize this (hence small efforts like the slow tech movement, digital detox, etc), but they are yet to find the right balance of convenience and sanity (for lack of a better word).


The current state of things is result of

(1) Normie-fication of internet. Regular people who aren't necessarily enthusiats have a tendency to want or expect the internet to mirror their daily life; they're not escaping into something better, they're just using internet as extension of their normal life.

(2) An obsession with the self. Everything on social platforms today is self-promotion. "Showing off," to put it simply. Naturally, when the bulk of your internet activity is focused on self-promotion rather than pursuing an intellectual interest, you are naturally exposed to criticism. Some of that criticism will be harsh or inconsiderate, but frankly, that is just to be expected and it's always been this way.

In terms of practical, "what can we do," there's only one thing I can think of: getting rid of identities. The identity-obsessed, self-promotional social platforms will always be doomed. There is no way to "make people be nice." There is only a means to control the extent to which identity is exposed.


> Before, around 2010-2012, people who disagreed would usually leave it at that and walk away respectfully.

Bruh you have clearly never been to usenet lol


What we calling polarization and toxicity is actually 2 problems. Disagreement and bad manners.

Disagreements are always solved the same way. Either by coming to an agreement or agreeing to disagree.

Bad manners is a much bigger problem that has a variety of solutions that may or may not work, and are totally up to the individual. Bad manners also prevents problem #1 (disagreements) from being resolved.


There are two forms of toxicity. This is vitally important to understand before suggesting any solution.

* single user - evidenced by harassment, trolling, attacks

* group - evidenced by an echo chamber, which is typically present from down votes drastically outnumbering replies or replies suggesting silencing or solicitations for recruitment

Both forms are equally toxic, but they are not equally recognizable or distinguishable. An example a lone attacker is typically repulsive and starts out as a bold violator to most users in a well moderated environment and so they rarely attract supporting attention from other users.

Contrarily, group attacks are typically benign, at first, but misery loves company. The negative attention grows on itself drawing in users with insecurities how tend to fear diversity. While group toxicity may start out benign the toxic nature of it becomes starkly apparent as it is allowed to fester resulting in comments that are direct and hostile attacks claiming justification of group support or agreement to a premise.

Toxic groups do occur on HN, but they are rarely able to grow wildly out of control in any measurable way because downvotes to any contribution are capped at -4. The only evidence of group attacks in an online environment like this are the quantity of down votes and the nature of the reply comments present.

It is my opinion toxic group behavior is a more serious concern and the lone wolf, because the lone wolf flamer is easier to identify. In many cases users have no idea they are contributing to group toxicity as conformance without explanation may feel natural. It's also serious because it is substantially harder to correct.

Either way the nature of toxic behavior is about attention whether it's to draw attention to a single user's contribution or to silence a disagreement.


I largely agree with most of whats already been posted. Many of these things have been true since dial-up BBSs and usenet. We're mostly just seeing them apply to more and more of the population.

But for a moment consider another factor, a broader scope. One of the ways I like to describe the internet, and its effect on the first generations to adopt it, is "we can share notes now".

What I mean by that is: previously a combination of physical barriers, geography, institutions, power structures, and communication constraints made it such that the vast vast majority of us really only got information from, and discussed information with, people within a day's-walk radius of where we lived. On the upside that meant lots of it was face-to-face and rooted in your family and community. On the downside that meant we were all incredibly isolated and living in an almost completely false understanding of the world.

The internet has pierced (or broken) that. I can watch in near realtime as the forest fires drive the people of Sydney from their homes. I can watch the chart of the wuhan flu grow exponentially every day. I have seen high def video of the slums in india, nigeria, and sacramento.

People of the past had far more first-hand experience with suffering than I do, but they hadn't the slightest inclination of the scale that we are all as aware of as we choose to be now.

I think that combination of your brain reeling at the vastness of "the problems" in conjunction with the powerlessness you feel about it leads to a sortof emotional shrieking in horror that plays out as "toxic" posting.

Which is in part to say, I don't think its going to get better anytime soon. As a matter of fact, as the challenges and constraints of climate change add pressure every year, it seems very very likely to get worse.


606 comments... Some good, some not so good.

Human nature will prevail. Guerrilla tactics will continue to be used by organized groups to shame/banish those who do not confirm to their cultural views. High-profile people will continue to be shamed for associating with "bad" people. The era of civility and mutual respect on the Internet died over 20 years ago.


I think it is more of a social problem we can’t solve with code.

As methods of communication get cheaper and more accessible, it opens the world up to see what humanity is, not what humanity wants itself to be.

People that maliciously attack those online are broken people. Broken people exist in reality, thus broken people will exist online.

Google and Facebook can write code to stop harassment, but they can’t do so without marginalizing people who are already on the fringes of society. Plus, their system can be gamed. The output of such changes would mean that it would stop some harassment at the cost of losing accessibility for everyone and a meta game playing in the background that costs the corporations engineering resources.

The best answer right now, in my opinion, is to create tools to fight harassment, but give those tools to the users of the site rather than automated algorithms. A good example of this is a mute feature. Other tools like customized word filters, block lists and safe lists can also help empower users.


I’ve got a solution. Have each domain need to reflect the nation of its authorship. Ie a U.K. vlog has to post to a .uk domain. Really only meant for the big media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, FB, etc. What they would see at the .com site is all of their local content maybe with a trending globally section.


I think the rising sense of division is caused by social networking sites that are increasingly interest-based or focused on small communities. When every interaction is focused around people who already agree with you, it begins to feel like the whole world agrees with you on everything. This is a pretty pleasant feeling. But then when someone wanders in to your sphere with a different point of view, the interactions are vitriolic. This is most notable on social networking sites like Twitter where you mostly follow / interact with people who agree with you, but randos can jump in out of nowhere and stir the pot.

I believe that we, as a society need to engage with one another better. Be less quick to judge. Be less quick to mock. Learn to get along with people that hold views that are antithetical to our own -- just like we have to in the real world. And when someone comes in to your community with the explicit intent of disruption, simply ignore them.


It's far beyond the web, polarization/toxicity is now all over politics, media, outrage mobs, protests, etc. It's growingly reminiscent of cultural revolutions and other negative historical events, which is not a good thing.

To start:

- Stop using social media

- Don't use services that have public digital scorekeeping and other vanity metrics centered around ego and narcissism

- Recall that the 1st Amendment is the first amendment for a very good reason

- Recall that it's perfectly OK to disagree with others, no matter the subject

- Recall that the more difficult a subject often the more nuance is required

- Reject divisive political and social movements

- Reject identity politics

- End outrage mobs

- End PC policing nonsense

- End cancel culture

- Don't engage in 'call out culture' or 'woke' nonsense which incentivizes toxicity, division, and mob behavior both online and offline.

As for future generations, perhaps k8-12 schools should have mandatory studies of inquisitions, mob mentalities, lynchings, witch burnings, and cultural revolutions, and the tremendously negative outcomes associated with those types of behaviors.


> Before, around 2010-2012, people who disagreed would usually leave it at that and walk away respectfully

That's never (even before the internet) been true in unmoderated open online fora, and it's still true in closed and heavily moderated fora that seek that outcome.

Unmoderated open fora have probably become more dominant because effective moderation doesn't scale.


There should be boundaries to what is considered respectable opinions that exclude both the extreme right and the extreme left. If people do not express these off-limits opinions they should be considered respectable and treated as such in discussions. An example of off-limits extreme right opinion is anything promoting racial or ethnic inferiority of one group or another. An example of off-limits extreme left opinion would be attempts to stake all differences in society on discrimination. Anything less extreme than that should be considered fair game in the market of ideas. The extreme left and right ideologies have cost tens of millions of people their lives in the twentieth century and should not be considered respectable. Anything less extreme might, depending on the circumstances, actually be a solution to some problem that is right now occurring somewhere in the world and should at least be considered.


Progressives think that the alt right is toxic, and vice versa.

So then the question is: whose view of toxicity is right? The answer we have so far is: whoever protests the loudest or whoever controls the medium.

Although it's the answer we've got, it's far from obvious that it's the right answer.

Progressives seem to have gained the upper hand at this point.


They're both right. Both positions are often not contingent upon kindness, compassion, and a desire to maintain or increase everyone's wellbeing.


It seems to me that each side is right about the other.


I really doubt that people have overall become more contentious and disrespectful. It's just that, with social media and the Internet generally, it's so much more visible. People ranting about this and that were always there, but you had to go out of your way to hear them.

Back in the day, many Usenet groups were OK during summer, when only professionals were online, and suddenly became toxic in the fall, as students went online. And then, with the first public ISPs, they became toxic all year. That is, Eternal September.

So we can choose where to hang out. If we want interesting discussions, we can frequent highly moderated sites, such as HN and professional subreddits. If we want toxicity, we can frequent the chans or whatever.

Edit: I ought to have said that some "toxic" sites may be useful for finding stuff that's suppressed elsewhere. If for no other reason, to know what's happening.


I agree. There used to be many bars/restaurants/clubs, and you wouldn't naturally bump into the clubs you disagree with. There even used to be a ton of phpBBs/vBulletins out there. Even different subreddits/imageboards mostly keep to themselves (sometimes a bit too much..), raids notwithstanding.

But there's only one Facebook. I guess the network effects give monopolies such strong advantage, we tend to end up with maybe 1 or 2 of each kind of social network (Reddit is the exception, with N subreddits). It forces All Kinds together. If there were real competition, we wouldn't be so often confusing deplatforming with denying speech (IMO; the line gets blurry).

I think HN has mostly dodged this issue for the most part through persistent moderation, niche userbase, & people usually assuming good faith.


I think a "just let it happen" attitude like Google Adsense's with fake clicks problem may be the solution. Google at one point decided instead of fighting bots and publisher's tactics to click on their own ads decided to allow the fake clicks reasoning that if the actual person click on the ad is not going to buy a product the ROI of the ad would drop on that particular publisher's website. Over time the system would correct for itself and just show fewer ads on that site or lower its cost per click for ads shown on it, hence solving the fake click problem in a clever way.

I think if we employ the same tactic and let polarization happen online there will be communities where the ROI of discussions drops exponentially and there will be places where less of that stuff happens for whatever reason and they will be the truly engaging places to hang out online.


I won’t act like I have the answer, but I do have a complaint about the state of our news sources (specifically focused on the USA).

A lot of people like to throw around the term “fake news” when they see an article from the news source that is opposite their side of the aisle. While fake news does exist, CNN and Fox News are not fake news. They produce heavily biased news. There is a major difference. While both news sources have been caught lying before, both of them are usually telling the truth. It may only be half of the truth and purposely mislead the viewer, but that doesn’t mean the information being shared is fake or false.

I’m relatively young so I don’t know if there has ever been anything remotely close to “unbiased news,” but just presenting the public with facts that aren’t tarnished by bias would go a long way to helping people become more informed and, potentially, less worked up.


What you may or may not know is that at one time, there was a doctrine by the FCC known as the "Fairness Doctrine":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

"The fairness doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters."

This doctrine was eliminated in 1987, after a series of lawsuits about it.

Arguably, it's part of what started this whole mess we now find ourselves a part of.


I totally agree with your premise. I'd agree the term "fake news" is not an exact term, but I'll say that everything from Fox News (on the right), to the NYTimes (on the left), and everything in between lie by omission (lack of coverage) and by framing (e.g., "disturbed man" vs "terrorist"; "hungry" vs "looter"; etc). There may not be a term for it, but the phenomenon is real and has caused people to want to drain the system all-together and look for alternate public squares, ones where they have a voice.


Probably fixing the root cause of political divisions would have the biggest effect.

Stuff like ranked choice voting and open/no primaries that would result in more moderate politicians winning and less need for political parties.

Also a UBI might help diminish an “us vs them” mentality. The more good policies we have, the more we ALL benefit.


I think it is a result of the network effect. The same window also marks the rise of social networks. So the toxicity is more in your face and you almost have no way of escaping it. Even if you're not on facebook, your friends are talking about it / hackernews has articles on political issues and so on. It permeates all your 'safe spaces'.

I also think we have non-cs folk entering the internets en masse and are there by changing the rules and norms, which generates mania over things which were just ignored before.

How do we stop it? I don't think we stop it. We build resistance to it. Every generation has its detractor and for us it is the bad effects of this network. Over time, we will start ignoring the noise and use these for what they are actually useful for (or the next detractor takes over).


More moderation. More value judgements (and actions) need to be taken against content that is deemed unsavory. Bans, etc.

Higher barriers of entry. The right to comment and occupy mind space is given away too easily. Penalize new accounts, start with limited capabilities, disallow short comments, etc.

Highlight exemplary content.


> More moderation.

Agreed. However moderation power is something that needs to be considered carefully. I think moderation power should be distributed broadly to the users who have shown good stewardship of the community via their participation, and not to a few chosen individuals.

> Higher barriers of entry.

Yes this is the key. It should take work to occupy mind-space. Your first comments should be shown to very few people, probably experienced users in the community, and their approval or disapproval will determine how much visibility your next comments get.


I saw a recent study that said frequent posters on twitter are likely to be on the extreme left or the extreme right.

I don't have any data on how this has changed over time, but my guess is that social media polarization has increased over time.

People who are in the middle, or have some beliefs on each side, or are willing to seriously consider points from both the left and the right just don't post much anymore. On the rare occasion that they do, they get downvoted to the point that they are invisible.

So yes, when you look at social media you see the extreme left and the extreme right lobbing insults at each other. Or you might catch a glimpse of the extremists working to silence the moderates, if you dig deep enough.

I don't think it used to be as bad as it is now.

The polarization is continuing to get worse and worse.

How do we stop it? I wish I knew.


It's worth reposting the related thought piece from last week https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/


Use user-defined kill-files (although if you want to publish them you can, in case someone wants to copy and modify for their own use, or they might decide not to use it at all if that is their preference). Allow anyone to comment and to reply to anyone but remember someone might set up a kill-file to hide messages from someone who does not want to see your messages (whether or not you are an administrator of the service, or police, or whatever). We need more freedom of speech, not less. But, freedom of speech should not mean to force everyone to listen to you if they do not want to listen. (Kill-files could also be based on whatever criteria you want, not necessarily only based on the author of the message, although that would probably be the most common case.)


Here's the idea that imo needs to reach critical mass in our industry in order to make progress on this issue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance


Tech isn't innocent but you can't blame it all on tech either. Polarization has been a thing for decades upon decades. In the US a major shift occurred around the Civil Rights movement, after which Southern voters basically drifted away from the Democrat Party and coalesced towards the Republican Party. US politics has been polarizing along party lines ever since.

IMHO you won't fix it with technology as it runs much deeper. But you can remove comments to sweep a big part of the toxicity under the rug.

If you'd like a good overview of the longer story, Ezra Klein, who just released a book on the subject, was on Chris Hayes' "Why is this Happening?" podcast earlier this week ("Why we're polarized, with Ezra Klein").


It's a problem IRL, too. I am astonished by how much disinterested people are in each other. I am very good at keeping a conversation going, I become genuinely interested in the person and ask as many follow-up questions as possible. Unless I know what we're talking about falls into my experiences, I'd refrain from talking about myself.

But what I see constantly is that people have gone from a "what about you" mindset to "what about me" mindset. My conversations end as soon as the person is done answering my questions about them. Like, zero reciprocation, which is god awful.

If these people participate online, where they can mainly get away with being a shitty personality, then this toxicity is not that surprising to see.


User experiences are crafted to make the user the center of attention, or gives them the levers to do so (Instagram and Facebook, for example). The result, while depressing (and what you observe), should be of no surprise to anyone.

I have no solution, only a small piece of advice: seek out others with empathy and active interest in others. Avoid narcissists like the plague. Be humble.


A good first start would be to teach the old maxim, "don't believe everything you read," in schools more. Most kids have only heard this phrase a few times in their lives and never really process it in their everyday lives. It would do a lot of good.


When I started my training brand (The Cloud Coach) I wanted to share my knowledge with the world through video training. What I've actually come to understand is I have a deeper desire: I want a community of people I can have a pleasant, on-point discourse with.

I believe others want this too.

To combat my desire for this I'm developing two things: a Discord community for all but with a private section for paying customers. I believe when people pay for access to a community that expects a certain behavour from them they run with it.

Secondly I'm also developing a localised Meetup called Brisbane CloudOps. I want to enable physical meetings and discussions too.

I think the answer, to be honest, is smaller, niche, private communities and not vast open arenas.


Everyone in the anglosphere is always online and can talk to each other now. Meanwhile our culture is pretty polarized. Conversations that could never be had in the time of top down privately owned broadcast & newspaper media are now unavoidable.

I don't think it's a "problem" and I don't think there is or should be a technocratic solution.

This is new normal, where political struggle has evolved into a prolonged people's posting war, and civility is not respected. This is freedom of expression, and it's a reflection of ourselves and society, you can break the mirror if it upsets you but it won't change the underlying truth.

It's probably going to be like this for a while, and that's okay.


Sharply curtail the ability of companies to pour money into politics. Revoke the "Citizens United" decision that means that corporations are "people" whenever it pleases them to be so, especially for purposes like pouring a lot of money into a reactionary politician who stirs up a lot of hate and makes lots of regulatory decisions in the favor of corporations.

Limit how many media outlets any one entity can own. When all the news and all the entertainment is owned by a giant inhuman corporation whose bottom line is solely profit, they can and will act much more in their interest than in the interest of any of the individual humans that make up this corporation, never mind the humans they provide news and entertainent to.

If you have a shitload of tech money, move the fuck out of Expensive Tech City, stop giving your money to landlords, start giving it to organizations and politicians who are working to put back the barriers to this sort of thing that corporations have been relentlessly campaigning against for their entire lifespan. If you run a tech company that's making obscene profits then start sinking some of that into that sort of stuff, fuck "increasing shareholder value", have your accountants figure out creative ways to stiff your VC if you've got that to deal with instead of finding creative ways to pay less taxes. Give money to unions, unions work to make shit better for every worker, and right now part of why people are so easy to stir up is because they are broke and afraid of the fact that they are one financial crisis away from homelessness/death/etc.

Oh also I guess yeah stop trying to make another goddamn Zuckerfortune by relentlessly promoting whatever creates "engagement" in your new social media site and not giving two shits about the fact that nothing gets people to keep coming back to spend time on your hellsite like an intense argument, because all you care is how long they're there looking at the ads you've parasitized all around their human-to-human communications. Social sites are not helping but this shit has been building since before "social media" was even a thing anyone said.


Calling this "toxicity" seems itself to be a polarizing exaggeration.

Dealing with the new users eternal September was a Sisyphean task. I assume that was an earlier stage of fake toxicity. Everyone complained about it then, too, even though there was usually heavier human moderation. No one could agree about how to handle the "problem."

Want to put controls on the damage software can do to society? Regulate. Maybe even force us to be real engineers. I would like to think that software killing people (e.g. 737 Max) would be a bigger factor in that legislation than social networks encouraging meanness. The economics of the two seem to favor the former more, too.


Are you sure this is tech-related? Professor Peter Turchin, writing in 2012 (I saw a rough draft of the book he eventually published) predicted a peak in American polarization in around 2020, based on trends that go back many decades. We certainly see it on the Internet, but there's good evidence it would be happening regardless, because it can be (and was) predicted based on trends which go back well before the Internet. https://www.amazon.com/Ages-Discord-Peter-Turchin/dp/0996139...


The U.S. FCC's fairness doctrine "required licensed radio and television broadcasters to present fair and balanced coverage of controversial issues of interest to their communities, including by devoting equal airtime to opposing points of view." It was mostly repealed in 1987 under Reagan. A few provisions lasted a little longer.

I think some radio shows etc have greater ability to be polarizing with this out of the way, and our respective bubbles freer from outside disturbance.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fairness-Doctrine


YES, UPVOTE SYSTEMS ARE POLARISING.

Reddit, Facebook and this website are some of many with this issue. Leads to echo chambers, inability to see the opposing point of view as it is literally hidden.

As a start point, higher karma should be allocated for highest quantity of votes where total votes plus ones and minus ones total to zero. That way you are swarded karma for posting both sides of an argument, not being just some karma whore mindlessly agreeing with someone else.

Reddit and Hacker News REWARD groupthink, and REWARD brigading. They are the problem.

I enjoy posting counter arguments, but no-one ever sees them because they get downvoted to invisibility quickly.


Make it harder to use, like it was.

Doing things on the internet used to be harder. It used to be a network of loosely interconnected websites. You wanted to have a voice you made a website. You wanted to talk to others you joined a chat room or newsgroup or message board.

Then we invented comments. Now we have apps with SSO. You don’t even need to make a username anymore. The entirety of the internet congealed into 50 or so web properties.

Slashdot is still around. It’s relatively hard to use. Their moderation system brutally punishes trolls and rewards good behavior. It also allows for jokes and sarcasm.


We're evolved to be in a social environment (the physical world) that regulates our social interaction.

The internet abstracts that all away. If there are natural limits on what and how you engage with online they're vastly different.

We need to make the internet closer to what we can cope with.

From my light understanding of "non violent communication" I think the NVC creator would take the view that the internet just amplifies our existing deficiencies. I think it would be worth trying forums that impose NVC patterns; perhaps NLP could be applied to automate this?


Step one - You need to understand the problem (ie. polarization != toxicicity)

Step two - You need to ask the correct question. There are lots of answers here that are both useless and answer you.

Step three - You need to get people to answer the actual question

You need the better answers to rise to the top

You need the answers to be directly actionable.

You preferably need it to be quantifiable

You need to understand how it will work in a marketplace.

As an example, we should try and understand what happened when Twitter doubled it's Tweet size. Did it make it better? Did it hurt their market? How important is message size?


Allow lawsuits against content providers, to be liable for what their users post.

Hear me out: There's another article here about how the EARN IT would attack Big Tech and reduce user freedom by limiting Section 230. Maybe Section 230 has helped the Internet grow into what it is today, but it might also be the reason for a lot of the toxicity.

I'm personally in favor of privacy and digital freedom, but if repealing that law would turn the Internet into a forum for civil intellectual discourse, it might be worth it.


Thanks for asking!

Just wanted to point out to the thread: this is a question that is a great fit for VC3 (https://vc3.club). I started VC3 to try and bring together people to answer questions like this (and others) that pertain to building more meaningful community through the Internet. If you're interested in discussing this, you'd be a great fit! Send us an application and we'll get you in the discussion!


I just got my preordered copy of Ezra Klein's "Why We're Polarized" which professes to study this topic in detail, in particular how it relates to politics in the US https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49930783-why-we-re-polar...

I have a feeling this issue is pretty complex. Looking forward to reading more about it soon.


How is this fixed, truthfully? By censoring or oppressing one side of the argument, so that divergence from the status quo becomes invisible or perhaps illegal.

People disagree; people have always disagreed. The fact that we are now repeatedly being told this is "toxic" is part of an ongoing campaign to suppress dissenting voices.

It seems often to be the case that speech which oppresses people is "free"; while speech which identifies that oppression is "toxic".


> Even niche sites like HN are not immune.

I've not noticed a difference over the years TBH. HackerNews is substantially worse than most other sites IMO as well. Ironic that I'm disagreeing with you! Ha!

I just mean - maybe you're at the part of your life where those extremes are apparent and that a degree of humility, understanding & conversation goes a lot further than most people think.

> Or is this more of a social problem that code can't solve?

More of a social problem I think.


It's far easier to be negative than to be positive. I think people who would normally try to be more positive have just given up trying. Everything has gone downhill; there's virtually no serious journalism anymore (it's all ad-money seeking with link-bait headlines), people who claim to be "leaders" are not setting good examples (they act like bad children!), etc. So people just have accepted this is the way it is.


Responsibility. Because of the inherent remote and anonymous context of on-line dialogs or exchanges, they don't have the same level of personal contact as direct person-to-person exchanges. People say things on-line that they would not, or wouldn't dare to dare to, say in-person. So some of the greatest advantages of the internet, it's anonymity and remote nature, can be turned into it's greatest threats.


Too many people cannot turn off social media. Also, our 'elected' officials and the media continually drive the polarization that you see - they don't want any middle ground, they want to force us into an us or them choice and its working. The solution is finding middle ground where we can agree, we need to come at the problem from a place of mutual respect rather than a desire to obliterate the other side.


The Internet lets people say things you wouldn't say in real life because you can be anonymous.

I myself have some opinions that are controversial and not politically correct and for reference I'm a well-educated software engineer. There are people out there with far more extreme opinions than me, and the Internet gives them the opportunity to share them.

And the reward of angering and fighting with people who disagree, with no real consequences.


The current polarization has been caused by political correctness and the inevitable push-back against expansive redefinition of previously well understood terms such as: racism, sexism, and xenophobia.

Take immigration, people who wish to discuss immigration often end up getting called racist or xenophobic, and the response is then: "f*ck you, I'm not a racist". Thus you have polarized the community.


Not to be pessimist but more realistic of an approach: I do not believe there is any way to stop the polarization now; especially as any attempt to stop the polarization appears to only increase the polarization.

And, well, polarization isn't exactly the end of the world. Polarization has occurred throughout human history and is only occurring once again, and is a seemingly integral part of the human condition.


I think it's a matter of what you choose to engage with, too. You could surround yourself with toxic 'friends' and start wondering why the world seems so angry now. So it is with websites and communities that you consider toxic to your wellbeing.

There are plenty of parts of the web that aren't toxic or polarising; you've just got to find the ones you enjoy interacting with.


Empathy is the one word that I think sums up the solution to this problem. And it is beyond just the web. It is a broad cultural problem in the US.

Speaking generally we've lost our ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes.

This is the result of rampant tribalism and surely several other contributing factors including the gasoline of social media magnifying the issue.

We gotta just start empathizing more!


I was hoping that cannabis legalization was going to mellow people out but that seems to be taking longer than anticipated. In the absence of widespread cannabis use around the world, I'd like to see people getting to know about people unlike themselves and discovering everything they have in common. The easiest way to destroy an enemy is by becoming a friend.


The ability to be an anonymous troll has enabled the microminds that inhabit trollspace. The loss of accountability did it. Since the first days of the web this disease has festered - look at how many people have been harmed and hounded to suicide on FB and similar. Private chat circles where all are know have the inherent ability to defeat this - I belong to a number of them. I have no wish to troll, and I do not, but if I did the admins would soon kick me out. China deals with this with strong reles on ID that limit the true anonymity that enables trolls - does it work over there? I have no direct knowledge as I am not a mamber of any. The ability to create throwaway accounts on FB will make this hard to control. I suppose they could make each person allow new contacts as well as deny offenders would work - it would add a threshing aspect and multiply traffic as these trolls created new logins, begged their way into acceptance by a person, then offended them and got the boot. I think FB thrives on the unhindered traffic, protecting people would reduce their cash flow = will not do it unless large goverment stick used - as in China. I handle it, as I learned, by total non engaging trolls. As they say:- dot not roll in the mud with pigs, you will get dirty and the pig likes it!! No offense to pigs intended,,,;)


You don't. Instead you teach to identify trolls / toxic commenters and ignore them.

Just like bullies, they're a fact of life, and the key to dealing with them is to not take them seriously. A bully's goal is to get a reaction out of you so to win - don't react.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me - this applies online and offline.


A bully's goal is to get a reaction out of you so to win - don't react.

That doesn't work. Bullies target weak people who they perceive as being socially isolated and less likely to retaliate. If they don't get the reaction they want, it's not unusual for verbal bullying to escalate to physical violence. There's abundant academic literature on this topic.


I think, the problem is actually deeper in the society. From what I could observe, once the our basic food/shelter needs are satisfied, we humans have an inherent need for long-term goals. Like slowly progressing one's career, or growing one's small business. Self-actualization, something to put your passion into.

For instance, I myself am running a bootstrapped software business, draw immense positive energy from seeing satisfied customers and feeling that I'm the person that made it possible.

As far as I can see, due to commoditization of most labor (better organization, moving of production offshore), it is becoming harder and harder for people to self-actualize professionally. It's hard to draw personal satisfaction from driving Ubers all day or being a cog in a corporate machine. You perfectly know that one day you can be replaced by a fresh graduate with a minimal training who would do just as fine. You can no longer have a self-identity as "the best baker in town", because most people buy bread from a supermarket. There are certainly artists, video bloggers, etc, but it's a tiny percentage of the population and it pays a fraction of what the soul-crushing corporate jobs do.

So, since people cannot self-actualize professionally, they seek it elsewhere. Since the West has a culture of openness and acceptance to all kinds of minorities and subcultures, many people's self-identity becomes their belonging to a certain social group and their feeling of self-growth comes from having others acknowledge their point of view. Except, this is a zero-sum game: instead of creating value for those who need it, people begin competing for other's attention and alignment.

For instance, if I am selling ice cream and the guy across the road is selling chocolate cakes, we're at peace with each other because whoever wants ice cream will come to me and whoever wants chocolate cakes will come across the road. But if I go on a crusade trying to convince everyone that ice cream is the only correct desert, while my neighbor does the same for chocolate cakes, we quickly become political enemies intolerant of each other.

To sum it up, if you want to fix it for yourself, put your passion into something that creates value rather than aims at redistributing it, and you will feel much better. This would be extremely hard in the current economy though, and yes, it feels sucky because the previous generations sort of had it for granted. I've no idea how to fix it globally.


I think good moderators and a code of conduct that is out front and visible helps.

Back when I first got online there was this idea of internet etiquette. I am not sure where that disappeared to.

It helps if the online communities can meet in person. I remember we did this with the first indiehackers meetup and it was great to see real people and make a connection.


It appears to me that the web is is reflecting the insane level of polarization and toxicity in real life. Unless we can find a way to dial that down, I don't think there's anything effective that can be done about the same thing on the web (without having to engage in actions that are even worse, anyway).


Platforms must be responsible for what they publish. If NBC ran child pornography, it'd be held responsible. Facebook runs it and says, oops in ten years we'll have AI to not show you that.

If you want to be a miserable person online, find an ISP willing to host your garbage until they get held responsible as well.


Another related (possibly identical) question: How do we stop polarization/toxicity (or general negative attitude) IRL?

One possible answer: Disconnect, ignore, and avoid it while at the same gravitate towards positive, solution-oriented actions/people.

Stop banging your head against the wall, it's not going to work.


It's neither new nor fixable. It's why we have elections. Now that unlimited amounts of untraceable cash can easily subdue any and all resistance, well. We're F*cked. There is nothing any of us can do about it but hope we die painlessly before global warming really kicks in.


It has always been like this as far as I can remember.

It's probably more annoying now since:

1) There is a lot more people online now than 10 years ago. We've gone from being in the far west to the industrial phase of the internet.

2) Since the web 2.0 thing there are now comments everywhere. It became even worse with social media.


“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” -Rumi


I think it's simple: money. Take away the financial incentive to create viral/outrage content.


People in 2010 didn't get into arguments online?

I don't think any of that is true, there were tons of arguments on forums and IRC and stuff.

I believe this is purely a "now we see it all" where as before it was hidden behind private invite only communities and hidden/private chat rooms.


I came of age in the late 2000s, but “flame wars” were already a thing then, correct?

I think the big thing that’s changed is that internet access and computing’s audience has increased a lot over the past two deceased and it includes people that would normally be polarized in public.


I told my daughter about the brief respite we had after 9/11. It gave me the impression that if shit really hits the fans we got each other’s back. Now of course history is littered with extreme counterexamples but those don’t help my cynicism go away sooo.


It is so much easier to hold and propagate a false / misleading view.

Anger pushes us to action more than agreement.

Truth us hard to find and difficult to defend.

When the world is right we’re not driven to action, nothing needs fixing.

I don’t know the answers but the odds are stacked against civility and truth right now.


Still on the tech side of things HN is doing quite well, with clever mechanics to downrank incendiary stuff, killing troll comments asap, etc. Combined with excellent, consistent moderation (courtesy dang et al).

With growing awareness + press coverage, those platforms who deliberately implemented bad algorithms to harvest maximum attention (FB, YT, TW) increasingly find it damages their brand image. There is an incentive to (at least marginally) improve their features / biz models.

Then there is digital literacy. We used to have netiquete and that can be taught. If you read the (very entertaining) article The Internet of Beefs [0] you'll see there is a solution by not getting involved in a beef, or extracting yourself if you got baited. Similarly it helps to know how to avoid trolls [1].

It will not be easy to change cultures large-scale. Many people just like to beef (there is a similarity with road rage too; people forget themselves online). Others enjoy starting beef wars for the lolz, or - more sinister - with strategic objectives.

At least we should be able to create more safe harbours, where people thrive from uplifting experiences online. Changing culture bit by bit.

[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/

[1] https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...


I think one of the things with HN compared to FB et al is that HN isn't a for-profit company. It's essentially a public service of YC. They don't make a dime off of this, as far as I can see. Because of that, they don't have to do evil engagement-boosting tricks to try to make more dimes.


>They don't make a dime off of this, as far as I can see.

Maybe not directly, but every YC company advertises themselves and their projects here, and HN is known as the hub for the SV tech and startup scene, which gives YC an automatic amount of "street cred" and visibility in all of the discussions had here. I'm sure Hacker News has made YCombinator more than a few dimes indirectly from all of that.


Well, perhaps. But if you're right, then HN makes them more dimes by not turning into a sewer.

The point is, HN has different incentives from FB. That matters in the culture of the resulting community.


In general internet communities face a trade off between monetization and quality. The more you monetize a community the crappier it becomes. In the long term, the key to running a healthy online community is to find a good balance, which essentially means figuring out how to not make too much money.


All the more reason to keep HN from becoming a cesspit, as the negative costs would be internalised by negative reputation.


It's not your problem to solve. It's likely not a problem at all.

I think it's just a reflection of our nature -- we all claim to seek boring stability, yet actually thrive on drama. People who don't want drama have no trouble avoiding it online.


I think its a few things:

1) Anonymity when its not useful. Many forums are relatively anonymous to the average user but most of the time its not useful. Theres no life or death situation on reddit. Sometimes, it can be useful, but most of the time its not. People post a lot of stuff they would never say in the real world because they have no responsibility to back it up or be associated with it. Just look at what they say on T_D

2) There are objectively a lot of instances of "censorship" of "wrongthink". There just is. Not all opinions are good, important, etc, but the more you shut them down, the more people will intentionally become toxic. This is especially made worse by point 1.

3) Radical moderation of communities. User moderated areas like reddit are shaped by the mods. T_D is largely the way it is due to rabid people shaping what is and is not allowed. Same with twitter.


I think at this point in time the "anonymity makes people assholes" argument is pretty dead - look no further than Facebook during the 2016 election for a fantastic example of real names and faces being exactly zero inhibition to every sort of nasty behavior imaginable. Attacks on anonymity as an inherently flawed concept, only useful in specific niches like dissidents and reporters and inimical to quality discourse, should be ignored like the Facebook "one authentic self" gaslighting propoganda they are.

You also imply that anonymity is somehow "not useful" except in cases of extreme threats to life or liberty at the same time you conflate pseudoanonymity and anonymity on Reddit. If anything, Reddit is a great example of how _insufficient_ anonymity can lead to evaporitively-cooled echo-chambers in short order: karma and rep, coupled with persistent identities, are powerful drivers of conformism.

Why, then, you ask, is HN not quite as bad when it is also pseudoanonymous? I'd say it comes down to local culture. HN isn't as monolithic as it could be because at least some users disagree with expressing disagreement via downvote as long as a point is made in good faith. Similarly, some (almost entirely anonymous) chan boards were actually really good in terms of quality discourse, while others were shitholes. The differentiating factor is the attitude of the community and its moderation philosophy, rather than some simple "how anonymous is this site" bucketing.

That's why I'm convinced that a lot of the problems with modern social media are the result of the creation of an environment where developing that type of site/board culture that can foster discourse is impossible: if you take a global platform where moderation is often outsourced and totally divided from any of the communities it theoretically serves and populate it with people who've not been exposed to the sort of behavioral norms common in earlier Internet communities, you end up with no norms at all - just an infinite vista of shitposting.

If anything, I'd disagree with your third point even more strongly than your first: even though community-local moderation can exacerbate echo-chamber effects, it can also foster productive cultures. In other words, community-driven moderation is necessary but not sufficient for establishing worthwhile norms. Even if the ratio is 10 T_D:1 HN, I'll still take that over the global, no-holds-barred shitfight enabled by platforms like Twitter.


Meaningful political change could make people happier and generate a greater sense of community.

Take for instance climate change. Young people are asking politely for implementing needed solutions. At some point they will stop asking so nicely..


OT: I notice that this Ask HN thread is suddenly revived and timestamps of original comments are reset. My other comment is not 5hrs old but from 2days ago when this item did not reach front page. Just curious how this works..


I am not a believer in things being better back in the day. I think that is nostalgia. Flame wars have existed since the beginning of the internet.

What we can to do make it better is to invest in teaching critical thinking, media literacy, and actual argumentation.

And it is important to know when to walk away. There are a lot of times when I see someone respond to a comment in a way that is shitty or just plain wrong and I would love to try to correct them. However, I try to resist. If it is reddit or something I will look at their post history. If they mostly post on certain subreddits I know that there is no point in my continuing the conversation. Nothing I can write is going to change this person's mind so I stop engaging with that person. I'm not always successful in resisting the urge to tell them how wrong they are but I try.


> is this more of a social problem that code can't solve?

Yes. Any tool for communication can be used both ways. The way to fight negative uses of the tool is to use it positively, not to try to limit the tool.


> So how do we fix this?

I don't believe that polarization or toxicity are endemic to online spaces.

Change the material conditions that cause people to become polarized or toxic and online spaces will reflect that change.


we will have to understand how culture (i.e. original definition of memes: cultural attitudes, bits of knowledge, generalized narratives) is a collective action in which we all participate.

In essence it works by mimicry. we mimic our peers and our peers mimic us. we just gotta be careful about what we mimic.

the tricky part is that this process is largely (but not entirely) subconscious. and also it takes a lot of focus and well applied effort to change previously learned behaviors. specially when "everyone else (within you social circles) does this"


We don't, and we shouldn't. This is natural human behavior.

> Before, around 2010-2012, people who disagreed would usually leave it at that and walk away respectfully

I can tell you've never played Call of Duty.


I feel like there are people who inherently do this in any situation (eg. In person discussion), so for me, this just seems like human behaviour regardless of it being on the web. Sadly.


The most important thing to do is to be aware of yourself and not participate. To not judge others. The best way I have found to practice this is with mindfulness meditation.


The problem with trying to 'fix the problem' is that most people seem to think that the solution to polarization is to silence the 'crazies' that disagree with them, and who are 'causing the polarization'.

In a diverse society it is normal to have a wide spectrum of opinions, and a lot of them are going to seem wrong. Wrong ideas are not a threat, so long as we accept that they are just opinions. What is dangerous is giving a small group the power to decide which ideas are valid and which ones are not, because that small group will be taken over by opportunists who will use the power to control speech to further their own agenda.


Shitfights are what drive engagement and sell ad space. I think the only way it's going to stop if we start moving to a pay model instead of relying on engagement


"We" don't fix it.

This hasn't been going on for 7 years; it has been happening for at least 40.

The rage stems from the wage, which has stagnated for the working class for as long as I have been around to see it. People are trying to telegraph that unpleasant things will be happening soon, if all the people who are constantly dumping on their inferiors don't at least start handing out some umbrellas.

I think the tech has actually been a mitigating factor. Online mobs can't throw real-life firebombs. When people go out to actually do something, there are fewer people in the same physical place to pump each other up.


Based on the way I see some comments on HN voted on in an obviously ideologically way, I'm not so sure HN hasn't jumped the shark in the same way.


I had the exact opposite experience.

People stopped being "all technical" assholes that argued about everything and started to think more about social stuff.


By not perpetuating it.

Thats all we can do. But the most important step.


If enough people don't perpetuate it, that turns down the gain in the echo chambers. That cuts down on the feedback, and the noise becomes a lower fraction of the total.


I think most people would be less toxic if their posts and comments were both (1) public and (2) linked to their real name.

Someone posting anonymously or under a pseudonym has nothing to lose. He might not intend to offend, but he has no reason to guard his tone or consider how his audience will receive him.

Someone who posts under his real name on Facebook but only shouts into an echo chamber filled with like-minded "friends" also has nothing to lose.

Shame is a great motivator. Fear of loss of friends or career prospects is also a great motivator.


The massive amount of toxicity and drama among Twitter users with accounts linked to their real identity is strong counter-evidence to this. When I think of "polarization and toxicity on the web", I think of Twitter arguments that spill over into real life precisely because of this connection between online identity and real identity.


> I think most people would be less toxic if their posts and comments were both (1) public and (2) linked to their real name.

Counterargument:

https://www.facebook.com

Q.E.D.


I think exactly the reverse. Posting anonymously (without a pseudo-identity even) means that you are more likely to speak your mind and less likely to try to win internet points. It also helps with making sure that your community will not become an echo-chamber.


BCI wire that lets you replay a stream of thoughts and emotions the poster had while they were writing the post or recording the video.


Id posit that there is no uptick but that our human nature always think things are getting worse. I think pinker did a book about it.


We can't fix this.

The whole HN narrative around this presumes that this is an unnatural outcome caused by the bad incentives of tech platforms. This is just wrong.

The polarization comes directly from people being able to communicate freely.

The polarization is real. It was there before, but it was controlled by censorship, basically. The polarization isn't caused by the web, it's unleashed by it. We can't stop it without neutering the web, and we don't want that.


This topic was so successful I almost wish we could revisit it either once a month or maybe even once a week here at HN.


Corporate media has done a lot to promote polarization (and even violence). Social media is making corporate media redundant to some degree, but those who run social media are also influenced by the same forces influencing corporate media. And, of course, "woke" ideology hasn't helped given it's similar in some ways to Maoism.

Until the cold war between globalism and nationalism finds some resolution this atmosphere will likely persist.


Tech companies are loathe to hear it, but the only thing that works is ruthless human moderation.

There's a reason that reddit and twitter developed Nazi problems while other old fashioned human moderated forums didn't.


> Before, around 2010-2012, people who disagreed would usually leave it at that and walk away respectfully.

I literally lol'd.


Start with ending the class war in favor of the 99%.

The .000001% is heavily invested in keeping everyone divided and conquered.


it almost doesn't matter whether the content is polarizing or toxic - people form mobs whether their opinions are reasonable or not. Even reasonable criticism gets converted into harassment campaigns, thanks to the dynamics on twitter. (I mean, like 75% of it is awful content too so idk)


Am I the only one who did NOT notice a significant increase in toxicity?

The only incident I can remember was playing a game with chat mode where kids went full scale anti-Semitic etc.

PS: I mostly avoid Facebook, reddit or wherever toxicity normally pops up

Oh I completely forgot the most toxic place on earth: stack overflow, but I completely removed any activity there almost 10 years ago


Stop encouraging it by rewarding those who engage / initiate it.

Stop advertising it as "news"


Solution: K-means clustering of accounts, with long term effect.

Everyone starts out as a “noob”, seeing the unfiltered cesspool, and nobody with significant grouping weight sees their comments (except other noobs, and people who’ve categorized themselves as “noobs” by Liking inflammatory nonsense and Disliking reasoned debate.

In the year or so it takes for your identity to begin to develop weight toward your cluster, you see less and less “noob” content, and more “cluster” content.

If you like one-sided (eg. dismissive statist left/right, or aggrieved libertarian, ...) or perhaps reasoned principled respectful debate — that’s what you’ll see.

Everyone wants to see debate they’re comfortable with. If you want garbage, that’s what you’ll see. If you want understanding of opposition views in a reasoned, respectful environment, that’s what you’ll see.

What you won’t see is — trolls. They’ll all be busy trolling eachother, and we won’t see their garbage.

The idea that we can use single-axis rating to create a universally acceptable online environment is just, well, crazy. And yet, since the mid-80’s, that is what literally every online “social” tool has been trying, vainly, to accomplish! It’s stunning, really.


Birthing into the sewer seems counterproductive.

That fared poorly for physical health, we learned.


You're not going to. There is real incentive to divide people into categories. People in the grey are hard to deal with and hard to manage.

Massive tech companies like google have perfected how you are supposed to move someone from unaware and not caring into the firmly aware caring and loyal brand consumer. They extend that ability to anyone willing to pay for it.

All the twitter ads all the Facebook ads all the Google ads. Doesn't matter if it's for potatoes or Trump, they have the same ability to subtly move you into their camp. Even a basic search engine in reddit or google will constantly feed you the same bs day in and day out based on what you already search for. Take Google news. They aren't going to show you too much out of your region, even in world news as an American you are usually going to see American policy and any topics the engine thinks is important to you based on your previous views.

The whole of Internet technologies is meant to divide and feed you the confirmation bias info you love. Only stuff that already aligns with your views. You take that and couple the fact that ai algorithms are literally designed to take non linear data and plop them into definite categories and you'll get independent/grey thinkers slowly being pushed to one side or another no matter how complex the data.

Unless there is a way to forcefully break the feedback loop, you won't stop it. If you sat day in and day out twirling a butterfly knife or painting or whatever, you would be an expert eventually. That's what is happening now but not with a useful skill, just information aligned with what you already believe. Then after years of programming someone comes along from the other category and tries to break your beliefs, of course you'll get toxicity because it's hard to unlearn how to paint. The brain is not meant to unlearn constantly practiced behavior.


Being zuck-free[1] most of your time should help.

[1] no Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.


I am basing this on nothing but my own opinion. This has been going on for a while. Sometime around 2010-2012 many news sites started removing their comment sections. While most people thought many of these comment sections were "cancer", it was a still way to comment on, add context to, or dispute something posted to a news site. The claim was that "trolls" were causing too many problems. This was around the same time the definition of troll changed to mean anyone who disagreed with the OP or the content of a news article.

Once that happened, more and more opinion pieces started to be passed around as "news" articles. As opinions are biased, those biases got more and more apparent over time. With a lack of a way to respond, people turned to Twitter and other services.

Add to that, a continual redefining of what speech is "appropriate" and what speech is "problematic". This was a further attempt to control the discussion/debate by defining what tools could and could not be used when discussing/debating. This is seen by many who do not consider themselves "liberal" or deeply concerned with social justice issues as another attempt to exert power and control the narrative by silencing any opposition.

That's where it's all coming from. Toxic, problematic, etc. Are just synonyms for those who exert power, namely those few who are given a voice...the self-described journalist's, to label stuff they don't like. They use other terms like racist, mysoginy, Nazi, Alt-right, all synonyms for people who hold ideas contrary to their own.

As soon as we have a level playing field online, where all voices can be heard, not just blue checkmark, then maybe we'll make progress. Until then, things will get so worse and when they have the power to do so, these avenues of expression...FB, Twitter, will just be more places where you can express yourself freely as long as you say what you are allowed to say.


many news sites started removing their comment sections

It's very rare to see a news website that doesn't have a comment section. That claim needs some substantiation.


Join the YangGang. I had a 180 change of attitude towards people.


Recreate USENET and we can put it all back where it came from..


The problem here is people. People are easily prone to fear, anger and hatred. They want their views legitimized. It’s virtue signaling to likeminded people and alleviate anxieties on a changing world.

The problem with the internet is that it’s simply too easy to spread nonsensical views that have no basis in fact, like the anti-vaxxers and White supremacists.

People also want to blame others for what’s wrong with their lives (“[ethnic group X] are stealing our jobs”). Worse, is just as easy for opposing views to do the same. This makes the first group feel like they’re under attack.

These people are easy to manipulate and they are manipulated through the politics of fear. Look no further than Fox News and Donald Trump.

So this Is only an Internet problem in the sense that the barrier to saying stupid unfounded shit is not so low and motion can (and does).


I agree that there's been an uptick in toxicity and polarization. I think it's partially due to more people being on the internet, the decentralized information sources on the internet, combined with human nature and generational and cultural reasons why it's difficult for some people to determine what is factual.

But the single biggest factor that's driving this, in my opinion, is recommendation systems. Every source of information now follows the same pattern to increase engagement: Fill up the screen with as many different links and recommendations as possible, and determine the links shown by a machine learning algorithm to increase engagement.

If you have an app to communicate with friends, don't show them their friend list, show them a "news feed". A video player? Put recommendations on the side, and at the end of the video, and pop up recommendations when they hit pause, and autoplay the next recommendation. Sort all comments and replies based on engagement.

This increases income, but it makes people go crazy. Because what kinds of content increases engagement? For a lot of people, it's crazy inflammatory content. Women insulting all men, men insulting all women, Black Lives Matters, Back the Blue, flat Earth, vaccines, conspiracy theories... eventually the algorithm will find what triggers you to click or stay engaged. And once it figures it out, you're hooked in a crazy polarized hatred cycle.

And it doesn't help that people and companies and Russian troll farms realize this and push inflammatory content for clicks and followers.

How do you stop this? I have no idea. On a personal level, I use uBlock to clean up all recommendations on sites that I visit, and I make an effort not to respond to engage in any of the toxicity. But that doesn't really solve the problem.

Companies don't want to solve it because they'll lose money. Legislation doesn't seem like the solution. Individuals will complain if you took away recommendations. No one really wants it to stop.


This is nothing new. There were flamewars on USENET in 1989.


Remove practically all the tools built to combat "toxicity" and force people to talk to each other and use their words again.

Also: Fire every moderator, everywhere, and never let anyone be a moderator ever again.


I think the only winning move is not to play :/.


By turning it off.


Polarization is the natural response to disorder, so thought goes into categorical, absolute mode and reactions are extreme (reactance). The solution is Relativistic Thought.


be cool in real life. the web is toxic can life can suck. mass media just amplifies it and can make it more annoying.


I was thinking about a solution that could be implemented by big players like Disqus - I've took some ideas from StackOverflow reputation idea - here you can read about it: https://lukaszkups.net/notes/what-disqus-can-learn-from-stac...

&tldr; limit comments per day, require minimum amount of positive reputation to leave a comment, make it customizable per website by its owners.


> require minimum amount of positive reputation to leave a comment

How can one get positive reputation, without first having published a few comments that got upvoted?

Anyway here's a commenting system with a built in trust level system — more similar to the one you'd find in Discourse, than at StackOverflow though: https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments (I'm developing it). There are Like votes = upvotes, neutral Disagree votes, and (for community core members & mods only) the Unwanted vote, which works like downvotes and destroys "karma" (not completely implemented).

From your blog:

> Users should be able to gain reputation through their comments — we are currently able to upvote or downvote each user comment — that should somehow influence user profile reputation

And maybe an upvote or downvote by someone with high rep, could carry more weight, than from a new member?


A thought that's been sitting in my Evernotes for a while:

"I wish I could code because I have an idea for something I think would be valuable. Basically I think debate is a good thing, and especially online debate, where you can meet & talk with so many different people and learn so much you might have otherwise missed (and teach, too).

But the problem with the platforms people debate and converse on (Facebook, reddit, YouTube) is that they're essentially popularity contests. They reward being visible and playing to people who already agree with you, which means many good ideas get steamrolled by enthusiastic trolls.

So I was thinking that maybe instead of relying on the "wisdom" of the mob, I mean crowd, to determine what's noteworthy and important and productive - which inevitably leads to a constant churn of middle school student council-like dynamics - I thought maybe you could flip it.

Don't ask people who are like you if you're making a good point. Ask the people who AREN'T like you. If a bunch of gun owners look at what a gun control advocate has to say and think, "You know, they're onto something," maybe that's more valuable than getting support from other advocates.

So I imagine a debate space where people can talk with each other in a structured fashion. Other people can watch. Somehow we have an idea of the "way" people lean politically, identity-wise, etc., or at least how they compare to others. Isn't this something that NN-driven text analysis would be good at? And at the end, you can rate someone's ideas and performance, and how much your opinion counts is weighted by how you compare to them, and then the system's understanding of who you are is adjusted accordingly. It need not even assign human-readable tags to a given personal value; all we'd know is that this person is very or not very similar to a given other. Maybe this helps to disarm trolls and to push thoughtful, respectful voices to the top. Maybe it allows voices that would usually get drowned out on any given issue to have a say. Maybe it helps us get to the heart of what debate truly gives us, which is understanding and compromise and solidarity."

tl;dr Keep upvotes/downvotes but weight them based on how similar the person voting is to the person being voted on.


A shadow internet for decent people


Do not respond, block, then report.


Take all the people out of it.


Stop the always on web. There is no reason why latency for Twitter or facebook should be any faster than 1h.


Stop using social networks.


That's a highly complex problem, IMHO; since it involves lots of variables and variability. And, quite honestly, I doubt there's ever going to be a proper way to solve it.

But here are some of my observations:

- Everyone's online. Everyone. That includes people a) who had a less than stellar upbringing (whatever that means to which one of us); b) with mental illness (some of them untreated and/or self-diagnosed); c) from other cultural background (which don't necessarily align with western point-of-views); d) who are underaged; e) who are (very) bored (and some find entertainment in provoking chaos); f) who lack proper education; g) who simply do not care about educating themselves and others; and h) who are naturally antagonistic for whatever reason.

- Bots. There are also a good number of botnets out there (the "like" economy comes to mind) or subverted systems (smartphones, routers, PCs, etc) which act without the owner's knowledge;

I'm convinced there's also botnets out there that purposefully amplify certain controversies online (websites' comment sections come to mind). Now, understand, this doesn't apply to every controversy. But I've seen some weird stuff on YouTube, for example. And, quite frankly, it's not that hard to extrapolate that since there are "like" bots there are equally "hate" bots as well. The end game is, in most cases, visibility. In others, it's probably social engineering for whatever reason. Mostly political.

Unfortunately, media outlets have fallen into this scheme as well. I mean, it's not like the concept of clickbait is new. Attractive headlines are as old as newspapers/journalism.

- Highly progressive opinions will always clash with the status quo;

- There's a fundamental and unavoidable loss (or lack) of signal whenever people communicate in short sentences, or when they do not have enough time to fully understand what's being said, or when they communicate with people who they don't know;

If I have a friend who's a prankster/jester I might be used to their shenanigans and tolerate them--a stranger might not find them funny. Maybe the stranger will find it funny after they know my friend, but that would depend on a lot of other variables as well.

- There's also the problem of the person who transmits information not expressing themselves properly (for whatever reason) which will unavoidably lead to miscommunication;

- Social networks are fundamentally designed for engagement--now that everyone is online there will be a clash of ideas. Tribes will organically form (just like offline). And - with few exceptions - what was meant as a benign message ends up in a declaration of war from the other tribe.

So, in sum, I just scratched the surface of the problem. It's very hard to make sense of all the noise and coming up with a proper solution to this problem.

Is it an education problem? Is democracy the root cause? Would a totalitarian (regardless it being Right-Wing or Left-Wing) system work? Is it something fundamentally ingrained into our human condition that makes it impossible to solve this problem? (Look at bees, for instance, they're ruthless and yet highly efficient at what they do.) Is it a fundamental purpose (or lack thereof) that each and everyone of us has defined - through whatever heuristic and for whatever reason - that's to blame for all this chaos? Is it its visibility?

Yeah. It's a hard problem to solve. Maybe lots of compromise would help.

I honestly don't know.

The quote

  "All models are wrong, but some are useful." --George Box
comes to mind.


There are many pervasive, interconnected issues and trends to it, so there's no simple or complete answer:

0. Behavior online doesn't arrive out of a vacuum. If people are miserable because they're working harder, making less and their society is in retreat, they're probably going to take out their frustrations out on the easiest targets.

1. Unplug from social and mainstream media because it doesn't have much value.

2. Stop demonizing, hating on groups of people and falling for the unthinking of mob tribalism, even rhetorically. Hate bad ideas, not people.

3. Realize that we're divided-and-conquered if we're going to let a few rich people and their corporate media keep us set against to each other. Solidarity is the only way.

4. Anonymity is good in small doses, but it's too easy for people to act unreasonably hiding behind it (cyberdisinhibitionism). DHH's company wrote a blog article about improving the quality of discussions with profile pictures and real names.

5. Stop and use every instance of it as a teachable moment, where feasible. It only works though if people have shame and can be brought around to the Golden Rule/empathy... it seems to me most parents these days aren't as involved in active parenting, so their kids run ferrel and so more people grow up to act more brutally and sociopathic. Furthermore, the current prevalence of parasitic vulture capitalism valuing myopic greed and selfishness above all else reinforces a disinterest in the concerns and well-being of others... which is antithetical to community and civilization.

6. There's nothing yet so far to replace the community function filled by religion, and so many people aren't interested in behaving themselves or doing right by their neighbors or strangers if they can get away with it.

7. More people have lost most of their hope about the future. For example, no healthy society has mass shootings/suicides nearly every day that no longer make the news.


I really appreciate the thoughts above, but I have to question point 4:

> improving the quality of discussions with profile pictures and real names

As a counter-point, imagine a discussion forum in an authoritarian country where your picture and real name is placed next to everything you say online. The discussions may end up being very polite, and full of agreement, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the community is well served by that forum.

To some, that concern may seem irrelevant, since most governments wouldn't attempt to control people that way, but I don't think we have to look very far to find examples where people expressing unpopular opinions face social and professional punishments. Perhaps you would agree that anonymity can be helpful in such situations, (checks notes) "anonsivalley652".


Re 3: I wonder if part of it is that many people don't have an identity. So they make a tribe their identity.


I remember being a part of a very early forum called "Plastic" in the mid 2000's and, believe me, there was PLENTY of polarization/toxicity there, so I'm not really buying that this is a new thing.

I remember being VERY active in that forum, but eventually I quit and sent an email to the owner ( I know I know ), his name was Carl I think?...saying that I could no longer deal with the absolute political polarization (anti-Libertarian) I found on the site.

So yes...you "fix" it by being the change you want to see. There is really nothing else one can do.


Tech may not be entirely innocent, but at the end of the day it facilitates both the good and the bad behavior equally well, so users do bear the most of the blame. Helping the users such that they would not behave in such a manner would, of course, be a complex matter mostly outside the realm of technology-based tools, but I do not believe that is any reason to abandon the cause.

One thing we could do, which would not solve the problem but perhaps illuminate a better way forward, would be to work on communications technology. Not simply technology for data transfer, but for actual information and understanding transfer. Technologies and systems which facilitate the good behavior without facilitating the bad nearly as well. By that I mean things such as systems which enable presenting large volumes of nuanced information in ways accessible to more people, and systems which enable both constructing, sharing, and refining complex arguments.

As an increasingly large portion of humanity conducts themselves online, we must keep in mind that there is much of human behavior which is not admirable. The solutions to that behavior are not technological except in the most dystopian and (philosophically to me at least) disgusting scenarios. There has never been, nor ever will be, a happy, prosperous police state. Autonomy and free expression are not luxuries, they are necessary for human health. We must also always be vigilant that the systems we implement are flexible and permit society to change both within and through them. Take a thought experiment I came up with for example. Imagine that tomorrow morning 90% of the population of planet earth awoke to a realization that agitation over nudity was ludicrous. Would it be possible for our existing systems to accommodate this change, or would it actively thwart every single attempt by any individuals to live their life according to this newly adopted principle? Would it result in a global relaxation of pointless anxieties, or would it result in increased anxiety as people felt themselves isolated in their realization, 'judged' by their technology which would filter them, block them, and reject them at every stage?

At no point in history has any society, so far as we know, hit upon "The Correct Ideas" which represent unvarnished truth, eternal and unchanging. And we should be careful to consider that our current social ideas are not unwittingly treated as such, ossifying human culture.

In Eric Schmidt's book "The New Digital Age" he speaks about wishing to play a very active role in exactly this kind of cultural ossification, expressing an extremely elitist view that due to the fact Google is rich, they are Better and should therefore take steps to actively guide and mold society in the ways which Eric Schmidt believes are best. Those just so happen to be the social values of the late 1990s when Google was introduced and which facilitated their wealth-building. That is, to my mind, a dangerous game. Past history would suggest that attempts at "social engineering" which do not rely completely upon broad social consensus and upon society reaching its own conclusions and doing its own enforcement of its own ideals tends to backfire in spectacularly catastrophic and inevitably violent ways.


While driving the marginal cost of communication to zero would seem to bring people together, what it really does is bring similar people together but also exposes significant differences between people.

The essential reason for the toxicity is the contestation of online spaces, which are virtual territory over which proxy wars can be fought as a low-cost substitute for physical violence (although there is a direct nexus to physical violence, and the threat thereof, by both individual and state actors, is a factor in the aforementioned contestation.

There are 3 basic approaches to encroaching toxicity:

  a. ignore it aka 'don't feed the trolls.
  b. implement technical solutions to manage it.
  c. Fight it aka flame wars.
Ignoring it doesn't work. It just tells the most vulnerable members of a community that they don't matter and that if they are repeatedly harassed other community members will sympathize but not really do anything to help.

Technical solutions originate with the California preference for systems thinking, and are reflective of the legislative and administrative technology in which they've been incubated. They are somewhat effective, but any system can be gamed. Most sites opt for a mix of technical means and hands-on moderation by a benevolent* dictatorship which works moderately well but is not responsive or effective against determined attack.

* benevolent in terms of close alignment with the ethos of the forum, whatever that happens to be

dictatorship in terms of being arbitrary rather than mechanistic, semi-transparent, and unilateral

Flame wars are upsetting to everyone, and people in the first 2 camps view as the worst-case outcome because they take over the thread/forum/platform where they occur and are destructive of comity, much like their real-world analogs. However, they can be effective in repelling invasive toxicity - if a sufficient majority of the forum regulars participate cooperatively. If too few participate or forum norms inhibit or punish participation, then toxicity will prevail or advance.

Here's some empirical evidence supporting this based on data collected from raiding behavior on Reddit, which is similar enough to HN to serve as a useful comparison (includes links to papers, slides): https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/

Cross-platform raiding behavior has existed as long as bulletin boards, and has been systematized and refined in line with the systematization and refinement of game and software development strategies. Here's a (somewhat offensive) overview from some years ago of trolling strategies, summarized near the end in a convenient flowchart: https://digitalvomit.wordpress.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-the...

The sophistication of raiding tactics, documentation, and so on has increased significantly since that was published. Ultimately toxicity online is neither a product of technology or the exposure of an inherent flaw of human nature, but the visible manifestation of multilateral information warfare, which is itself preliminary maneuvering and battlespace preparation for more overt forms of conflict like cyberwarfare, open economic warfare, and kinetic warfare.


To my mind, this is a little like people being depressed about The News. The News tends to be negative stuff and it used to be available for an hour or two on the TV. Now, you can access The News 24/7 via TV, internet, radio, etc.

Some folks find that really depressing because they get so much more negativity in their headspace than they used to. A primary approach to not being depressed about The News is to stop letting it take up so much of your time and attention. Actively seek to tune it out and focus on other things.

Similarly, the internet is bigger than it used to be, so some of this is perceptual and/or a numbers game. It's easy to find fightiness and feel like "It's everywhere." It's relatively easy to take good things for granted and underappreciate them.

Some things I find helpful:

1. Actively seek constructive engagement. For me, this involves declining to indulge the knee-jerk reaction to rebut anything and everything that directly disagrees with some comment I made (ie replies to me that tell me "You are wrong!" or similar). This is a bad habit of mine that just makes things worse and no amount of trying to justify to myself why I tend to do this makes it not a bad habit.

2. If I do choose to reply to people who disagree with me or who are being negative, think about what my goal is and what I'm trying to accomplish. Is there particular information I would like to put out as a result of their comment? Can I do it without just going down that path of "No, you!"?

3. Grow a thicker skin. I don't absolutely have to have every single person who replies to me on the internet like me, be nice to me, be my friend, blah blah blah. It's okay for other people to disagree with me and to talk about what they think. I can decline to take it so freaking personally that the entire world doesn't always agree with me.

4. Keep in mind that people are much more likely to reply to you online if they disagree. There isn't a whole lot to say if you agree and HN in particular actively discourages low value replies. So you aren't going to see a lot of vacuous "Me toos" here. That doesn't mean people here hate me.

5. View some of it through the lens of "HN/The Internet is bigger than it used to be. It's a numbers game. Multiple replies disagreeing with me say more about that fact than about me, this opinion, etc."

6. Work on my communication skills. This is an ongoing effort. Some phrases or framings tend to get knee-jerk negative engagement. Learning to say it better helps reduce the nonsense.

At the same time, I try to make my peace with the fact that no amount of effort on my end will ever completely put a stop to other people choosing to do whatever the heck they choose to do. "You can't please all of the people all the time" and that sort of thing.

(This comment is not intended to be comprehensive. It's just an off-the-cuff forum comment, not a PhD thesis.)


Stolen from reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/thelastpsychiatrist/comments/70rbuu...:

> ten years ago Steve 'Asshole' Jobs played a hilarious prank on all the digitally-illiterate 20th century luddites by pick-pocketing their ol' trust, reliable telephones and replaced them with computers instead. Tee-hee! Let's see if they notice the difference! And then he promptly died.

> The result, we see today, is a stratified understanding of "the internet".

> One level consists of everyone who really knows what the internet is. The internet's early adopters were a bunch of nerdy white males out of touch with society, guilty as charged. Annoying athiests and such. The thing is that this group (which I count myself among) knows how communities online function because they've been part of them for decades. They've lived the lifecycle of growth and collapse of forums (platforms) again and again. They see how technology brings people together, but not the people in their immediate life. Rather, safely brings anonymous groups of people who hide behind pseudonyms and avatars together through common interest and lively discussion and debate. [...] They see the new digital medium for what it is: connections between individual users spread across many different forums and platforms which are ever-changing, rising and falling. friends/strangers/communities first, platforms/sites second.

> Another level, the social media level, is what Fruit Juice Jobs foisted onto the unsuspecting public who now think they understand current technology and the state of the art of digital communications. Of course, they don't. They are sold a bill of goods and put all their identities into profiles which are used to sell them shit. And of course now they are vulnerable to a) people who spend hours arguing on the internet and tearing stranger's ideas apart (me right now) and b) actual trolls who love exploiting psychological vulnurabilites to make their victims squirm and squee and cry and through tantrums for the sake of drama (4chan, etc.). This decade-young group has no experience in what the internet actually and take no personal responsibility for their own online safety. For instance, they assume or act like a) Twitter will be around forever and b)Twitter can just block the bad guys and create a peaceful, harmonious online community. They cede all personal responsibility to a corporate hiearchy, like they were customers in a fast-food joint demanding to speak to a manager or some shit. They see and use the old medium in the new one, as McLuhan would say. Like how every town they visit has the same half-dozen franchises, their internet consists of the same top-5 "apps" and Google. Platforms and friends first, strangers/communities second.


Welcome to the Internet. :)


(a) Bigotry is already normalized in the United States. The president is a bigot and almost half the country voted for him. This is another negative effect of deplatforming: if you live in a liberal city and only frequent Reddit/Facebook, you live in an echo chamber where you don't have any visibility into what's normal.

(b) The legitimacy of a platform is based on what is said there, not the other way around. You view Voat as less legitimate than Reddit because you disagree with what is said on Voat more than you disagree with what is said on Reddit. If someone said something bigoted on Reddit, would you view it as more legitimate? No? Then why do you think anyone else sees it that way?


Please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar. Nothing new will come of it and it's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


>The president is a bigot and almost half the country voted for him

That's not entirely true. About half of the pool of eligible voters who participated in the election voted for Trump[0], but they accounted for around 20% of the population[1].

Not that I disagree about bigotry being normalized in the US, it has been since the founding of the country. But I think the evidence of that isn't Trump's election so much as Trump even making it to the primary. His election, arguably, came about due to a system designed to meet the interests of the parties, and not the will of people at large.

[0]https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-eligible-voters-vot...

[1]https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-the-population-vote...


What did he do to call him a bigot? Enforcing immigration laws? Banning travel from countries where we can't vet people properly? Declining to have the military pay for people's sexual reassignment surgeries? Not letting people on welfare earn citizenship? Restricting a refugee system that was being abused?

One of the sources of polarization is that the definition of hate and racism and bigotry seems to be broad and expanding on the left, while on the right it is narrow and static.


Maybe start in this extremely well-sourced article: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/trump-r...


Thanks for the link. The story about the 1975 housing discrimination case does indeed look like Trump Management was racist. I think the question is was this driven by personal racial animus or by competitive business considerations? Also to what degree was Donald Trump setting these policies versus his dad Fred? (Donald was 29 or 30 at the time).

The rest of the article is just stuff that really isn't that clear cut as to whether Trump is actually racist. I think the last quote from the article is a good summary of the divide:

>>>KWAME JACKSON: America’s always trying to find this gotcha moment that shows Donald Trump is racist—you know, let’s find this one big thing. Let’s look for that one time when he burned a cross in someone’s yard so we can now finally say it. People refuse to see the bread crumbs that are already in front of you, leading you to grandma’s house.

If you don't like a guy yeah all you need is bread crumbs to crucify him. If you do, especially given the choice was Trump or Hilary Clinton, then you're going to need more than bread crumbs to convince people he's racist. So the original comment, that Trumps election means 50% of the country is fine with bigotry, is just not true. There are people who support Trump who honestly do not believe they are tolerating bigotry.


I didn’t respond to the original comment, just to this question:

>> What did he do to call him a bigot?

His track record is long, clear and consistent.


[flagged]


You listed the 'very fine people' hoax so I don't think your judgement is very well calibrated here. There's a bunch of quotes with no context and some things that not even the most expansive definition of racism would cover. Tweeting about the squad? Leaving andrew jackson on the $20? Are you saying that land seizures and killing of white farmers don't actually happen in south africa? If the only source is 'the new york times reported' then Im sorry I just dont believe it after the russia nonsense.


[flagged]


Please stop posting flamewar comments to HN. It's not what this site is for, regardless of who you support or oppose, and you've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


There is no whataboutism in my response. Im honestly not sure what you're talking about. Maybe you mean the thing about south africa? The point is: how is it evidence of bigotry to be worried about land seizures in south africa? Thats not whataboutism, that's pointing out a non sequitur. The rest of your post is ad hominem.


[flagged]


Please keep the discussion civil.


Social media platforms are designed to show you content that is more likely to get you to engage with the site by sharing the content, liking it, or commenting on it.

This creates an incentive for people to write provocative and controversial content because it's one of the easiest ways to get attention, because the platform assumes that if you're getting reactions from people, your content deserves to be seen by more eyeballs.

I've thought a lot about this and I think there are many changes, mostly design changes, that would decrease toxicity on social media platforms. I think most platforms wouldn't implement these ideas because they would decrease engagement and ad revenue on their sites.

Here are some of my crazy ideas (in paragraphs because I had trouble formatting bullets):

Allow negative reactions from normal users to make content less visible to others. The advantage of a downvote system is that it takes the burden of content moderation off of moderators and puts it more on the people who consume the content most. The disadvantage of a downvote system is that often, when people are downvoted, they don't learn anything because they often don't know why they were downvoted and they have to guess. Maybe when you downvote someone, you should have to pick a reason and then a breakdown of the downvote reasons should be available transparently for everyone to see.

Content recommendation improvements. YouTube's algorithm is infamous for converting people from moderates to Neo-Nazis. Part of this is that the algorithm that shows you what video you should watch next just shows you what videos keep people watching YouTube. It makes no effort to separate news and facts from opinion and infotainment, so the lines get extremely blurry. If there were separate communities on YouTube for news on different topics, or for opinion and infotainment on various topics, it could shield people who really just want the news from being exposed to three-hour-long alt-right rants, if that is not what they were looking for in the first place.

We need more awareness of emotional manipulation on social media and news content. As an example, if a headline has the word "disturbing" in it, I would call that emotional manipulation because the headline is trying to do your thinking for you, reach conclusions for you, and tell you what to think and feel before you had a chance to read the article and digest it. Too often, we vaguely point to "education" as a way to protect people from sharing toxic content or disinformation online. The fact is that educated people are human too, just as emotional as anyone else, and are not going to be in a fact-checking mindset when they see a social media post with a headline or image that makes them feel sad, angry, or disgusted. We need a platform design that lets ordinary people flag, downvote, or otherwise participate in the fight against emotionally manipulative content.

We need to improve the moderation process so that people trust moderators more, can understand their decisions more, and can contest their decisions if necessary. I think that when a moderator removes a post, it shouldn't disappear. It should be replaced with a list of the rules that were violated for everyone to see. And moderators should be able to hide a post temporarily to give the author a chance to edit it and resubmit it. Also, the first time someone posts in a forum, when they write a comment, they should see sitewide rules and community rules right before they submit, giving them a chance to go back and revise their post. (This mainly applies to a place like Reddit, but I think a platform like Facebook would also be better off with community rules.) These changes would make it so that people understand moderation more, can see a more transparent process, will stop being surprised by moderation, and will overall have a more positive experience with moderators.

On Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, I believe some of the problem is that the platform encourages you to follow people. When you follow personalities instead of topics, it introduces a lot of potential toxicity and content moderation problems. There's no bechmark for civility, nothing you're encouraged to talk about, just opportunities and rewards for creating drama. If these platforms made it harder to make everything oriented around personal brands, and easier to engage in communities that at least have a stated purpose, that would probably help to discourage toxicity, because in a community with a stated purpose, it's easier for a community member to say, "That type of content doesn't belong here, this community is supposed to be about x." Where x is a fairly uncontroversial topic.


>I've noticed a huge uptick in the toxicity online in the last 5-7 years.

You're crazy my dude(tte). I've been on the interbutts since 1991 and Usenet days, and it's exactly as it always was. The big difference is we have reporter ding dongs on Twitter thinking Twitter, aka the comments section they removed from their web presence, is the real world. Also old people on Facebook who never learned the lessons of being on Usenet in the early 1990s, aka arguing on the internet is a lame and addictive hobby.

There are minor accelerants for this; youtube really did have some kind of pathological radicalization rabbit hole in its recommendation engine for a while (now it's just boring and useless and shows you "more of the same" on "blue checked" accounts). And of course, the other media encourages polarization and demonization of the other for dumb short term. That's a purely American phenomenon, and nothing's going to change it until the people pushing this swill on MSNBC, Fox and CNN decide to change it.


I've been on dial-up bulletin boards since 1983, Usenet since around the same 1991.

Though in some ways it's the same, here is the difference: it has become more diverse.

In 1991, the people you might have conversed with on Usenet were a lot similar to you. Of course, if we go to some comp.lang.* newsgroup or whatever, people are similar even today.

But I mean that if you went into any newsgroup whatsoever in 1991, on any topic, everyone there would probably have been some sort of professional in a STEM field, academic or university student. Go to, say, rec.pets.dogs, and it wasn't just any dog lovers from any walk of life, but mostly engineers, programmers and sysadmins who are into dogs.

That's way different from going into Reddit today, where it's now any Tom, Dick and Harry from any walk of life, who only have a certain topic of interest in common and that's it.

People have social interactions online which they wouldn't have in real life. In real life, if you run into someone who is from, say, a "lower" social class, they have it written all over them, and it puts them in their place more effectively than any downvoting system.

For instance, in real life, you would either never argue politics with an obvious "despicable", or else you'd immediately attribute everything they say to the limited scope of their background and just nod your head politely.

Basically, there is no new divisiveness; the quiet divisiveness we already have just comes out when people get together and hide behind aliases and avatars.


Yeah I've been online since ~92 and have been saying approximately the same thing as well. Back then you hop onto IRC and you're generally talking with academics and programmers from around the world. Browse any web directories and it's extremely information-rich.

There was a real technical or situational hurdle to even be present on the net back then, and I think most users had a sense of wonder and perhaps respect for the platform they were privileged to even get a glimpse into and partake in. Maybe? Today the amount of low-effort/low-value thoughtless vitriol makes up a much much larger percentage of the communication and web content than "back in the day". Spend but a few moments and you will encounter some flamebait/sensationalistic noise. It used to be a lot harder to be subjected to such stuff. Tragedy of the internet commons, or something.


> since ~92

Thus you would remember a bit of the tail end of the era before Eternal September.

Normally, September was the time when a crop of new students would get accounts at universities and step into the world of Usenet for the first time, behaving like asses.

In September 1993, AOL connected to Usenet. That became known as Eternal September.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

The online world we have today is basically the continuation of Eternal September, reaching further depths of deterioration.


> In 1991, the people you might have conversed with on Usenet were a lot similar to you.

I'd suggest you missed noticing some of the more divided corners of Usenet back then. Consider (admittedly an extreme example)

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/soc.culture.yugos...


I agree. Big centralized platforms (youtube, Reddit, the chans, HN to some exent) mean that the internet riff raff (i.e. people with no interest in the niche and who may feel like trolling) are free to show up in any given niche area of the platform (e.g. a subreddit or someone's channel) and then shit all over it. A community that would have been perfectly peaceful on a newsgroup, IRC channel or forum now has to contend with literally anyone from anywhere else on the platform. The old 4chan quip about /b/ leaking is now the default state on basically every platform because the platforms are so big even a small trickle of trolls is a full on flood of crap. People are getting fed up. I think there will be some decentralization in our future.


Trolls are a trivial problem, easily dealt with.

The real problem with practically every internet community is its moderation, because the worst people with the least business doing that job inevitably float to the top and are then impossible to dislodge without voting with your feet and creating an entire new community.


The corollary to this that remains unspoken about the OP's thesis is: because of the mass reach of the major platforms, the "toxic" effects now have escaped being an internet-only phenomenon and now are manifesting in meatspace.

It's overly reductionist to attribute Trump and Brexit just to online trolls, but it's folly to ignore their effect at the margins (because both Trump and Brexit were relatively close calls, influencing a 5% middle ground definitely mattered).


On traditional Usenet there is a kind of unspoken rule about never taking online disputes offline. Everyone was supposed to understand that it's just a game.

A good portion of the ragamuffins who are overflowing the online world have not such concept. Everything is personal.


"meatspace" : what an apropos description


I don't think it's that at all. People have always been able to visit different websites. It still happens today. The rise of mega-platforms is concerning, but not for the reason you cite. It's always been possible for "riff-raff" to notice a community.


When reporters on Twitter freak out about the trolls on 4chan like it's some disease infecting our precious wholesome web, I can't help but remember (through my biased lenses of course) when most of the web (that I visited) looked like 4chan. What the folks who think the web is 'degrading' don't seem to realize is how much of a wild west it used to be, and how much corporations have tried to (and somewhat succeeded in) sanitizing it.


> I can't help but remember (through my biased lenses of course) when most of the web (that I visited) looked like 4chan.

Interesting. I don't remember the web (or the pre-web internet) generally looking like 4chan in the earlier days. Pockets of it always did, of course.

But we are both engaging in a statistical error here -- we're using sample sizes of one. Your experience and mine may differ quite a lot simply because we hung out in different parts of the internet.


It really is interesting that our anecdotes can be so different. I'm assuming you're older than me (25) since you mention the pre-web internet, so I'd also guess that by the time you were on the web/pre-web internet you would've had a more developed filter than I.

My introduction to the web progressed roughly with watching my dad use BBS -> playing Neopets and Runescape -> becoming very involved with Runescape forums -> running a Runescape forum (first introduction to moderating user-submitted content at the age of 10. Yeah...) -> getting involved with video game modding communities, which meant I was spending all my free time browsing forums, following every link, completely absorbed by everything the early web's computer game communities churned out.

My experience probably would've been very different if I hadn't been able to get around the parental controls my parents used, or if I had been interested in different hobbies with a more approachable web presence.

I've been nostalgic for the "old web" lately, but I'm also very, very grateful that I haven't clicked on an inconspicuous URL that turned out to be a jumpscare, virus, weird porn, or gore in quite a while.

EDIT: I don't want to imply that the Disturbing Web == Videogame Web; that just happened to be my experience.


> I'm assuming you're older than me (25) since you mention the pre-web internet

This is an excellent point. You're younger than my eldest child, and I was active on the internet from way back when it wasn't available to the general public. That has to color our experiences -- even if only in that what you consider the "old days" and what I consider the "old days" are entirely different eras.


What video game forums compared at all to 4chans /b/?

Every where banned you for gore, child porn, harassment, encouraging suicide.

I really don't think you should be trying to normalize 4chan as thats just the way the internet is.


There is/was also a profound difference between /b/ and most of the rest of 4chan though. Not all of the site is /b/, that's just the most famous. It definitely set some of the culture of the other boards, but not to that same degree.

The video game/tabletop game boards on 4chan were fairly normal for boards at that time, and it's not like everyone who was active on 4chan was there to post or read /b/. You might dip into it for a laugh or dare now and then, but at least when I was younger it was more like the internet equivalent of sneaking into the abandoned house down the street: a "dangerous" thing that felt cool to do.


Good point. I was framing the conversation with 4chan as a whole, not just /b/. Big difference.


We definitely had different experiences, then! I would say most forums, even a lot of the mainstream ones, tolerated some level of 4channess. Facepunch forums ~2009 was the first time I thought "wait, are these guys actually Nazis or just think it's hilarious to act like they are?" Stickpage.com forums ~2005 taught me an important lesson in not clicking URLs from domains I don't trust -- ESPECIALLY if they end in 'hello.jpg'.

Like I said in my original post, that's the lens through which I viewed the internet. It could be different from yours.

I'm not trying to 'normalize' 4chan but, honestly, I've bounced from plenty of Discord servers that are indistinguishable from 4chan. I think it's OK to recognize that at least some part of the non-4chan web is still very 4channy.


People messing around with goatse pics is pretty different then what 4 chan is or was. The internet in general was nothing like the 4chan community.

Discord is very new. I think the point of the post is the current internet has gotten worse. The web wasn't like /b/,its becoming like that though.


I think the web used to be much more diverse, or rather heterogenic. Communities really differed a lot. They still can, but now there's this thing that has shifted from the TV and print media to the web in full: the public opinion.

In the past 10 years the public debate and public consciousness has finally been transfered to internet. Mostly because of social media. And while doing this, the "public" has changed from a moderate and gate-keeping environment of the press and TV networks, to something more wild and "liberated". And it has picked up a lot of traits that we would formerly observe in the more rough pockets of the web.

I don't think those pockets have changed or seized to exist, some of them have become more radical than ever before, it's just that what we consider to be the public space where everyone is grounded to has changed place.


I also have a quite ambivalent memory of the Internet from around 1998 on. Of course the standard content is more readily accessible. But more toxic stuff ranges from weird chat experiences on the IRC for instance to disturbing content. What changed probably is that a lot of stuff moved from various places of the Internet (Usenet, IRC, Torrents, Tor-like networks...) into the Web. Speaking of discussions, now they happen right at the entry doors of the Internet: at the online presences of big news outlets.

In any case, I'm quite happy with normal discussions and normal content though...


>> When reporters on Twitter freak out about the trolls on 4chan like it's some disease infecting our precious wholesome web

Without making excuses for 4chan, perhaps the reporters should freak out about their own behavior first? So much of the news-media has an incredibly narrow focus, almost to be lying by omission. For a minority member of society, reporters are the 4-chan.

One of thousands of examples: https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-harvey-20170829-story.h...


However, this factor is better now then it used to. If anything the previously less represented groups have much more ability to make themselves heard then before. The mass media used to be more uniform before the internet got popular.


This aligns very much with what I remember of the old PHP and BBCode forums in the early 2000s. Things were all over the place, and flamewars ran rampant. Most of them were run by people where modding was not their real job, just a fun hobby, and a fair number ended up going a little Stanford Prison Experiment.


They were right to freak out. Swastikas and the n-word being tolerated as "jokes" for years was a breading ground from which militant fascists emerged.


This is my experience and perception as well. I don’t understand people who think it’s always been some civil gathering.


> I don’t understand people who think it’s always been some civil gathering.

In the early days of social media, the idea was to create engaging communities, which I felt for the most part happened. I was on a LOT of social media platforms in the mid aughts and really got a lot of it with the people I connected with. For me, it was actually quite positive and healthy then.

In the last eight years or so? I had to get off. The overwhelming negativity, the weaponization of the platforms, the "cancel culture" and a rash of other things just make a majority of the platforms completely unusable now. On top of that, you add in the incredibly poor track record these platforms have with user data and privacy, the non-stop tracking, and the thousands of ads in your feeds?

It used to be a joy to use these platforms. Now it's gotten to a point where I'm not sure what the point of social media is anymore.


if most of the web that you visited looked like 4chan, you should have been going to different sites


In other words, except for the scale, and the fact that it's infected the mainstream media, and the accelerants making it even worse, it's the same old thing?

So we can summarize as "there's been a huge uptick in the toxicity online (which was always there)?"


It’s the same old same old. People used to heckle in theatres, because the audience lent them anonymity. Mobs are mobs because in a mob you are the mob. Lift the social contract by granting anonymity and we fairly instantaneously resort to slinging faeces at one another.

I think the GP has nailed it, however - we are reporting theatre hecklers as news, and instead of watching the play, everyone is now watching the punch-up in the aisles, and placing wagers.

The problem is that the theatre is on fire, but that hasn’t quite yet eclipsed the spectacle of a good old fashioned confrontation.


I used to agree fully with what you say. But only a few days ago it occurred to me that in the early days of the web (let's say late '90, early 2000s) I thought that the internet was going to make the world a more peaceful place: everybody would have talked directly with one another, irrespective of distances and languages; we would have understood each other better and disagreements would have been smoothed out.

Well, that didn't happen. What happened instead is that the ongoing discussions seem to stir up even more disagreement; and people are not really talking to each other, they rather signal their belonging to this or that faction. Also, the internet has been weaponised: leaving aside the organised "troll factories", any group that feels strongly about something can try to impose it to everyone else just by occupying as much space as possible. And then, if others express publicly their own ideas, don't you want your idea to be represented too? Then it becomes a shouting match, where each faction tries to fill as much public space as possible by shouting at the top of its lungs.

Part of this is the traditional media's fault. We thought newspapers and tv networks were going to die, drowned in the huge amount of available information sources. Instead, the web is still hierarchical: few media outlets shape the conversation deciding what to report on and how, then everyone else has the choice of closing ranks around the proposed narrative or in opposition to it. The dream of global peer-to-peer conversations didn't really come to be.


Its a war over controlling the narrative. The little people seem clueless about what will, can and probably should happen when the status quo loses their grip on them. If people had half a clue about the prosperity that awaits them the narrative would effortlessly flip 180 degrees. We should all be as mad as General Smedley D. Butler about it.


Anonymity isn’t it, or isn’t all of it. YouTube comments were deanonymized but that didn’t improve discourse. Look at Facebook and some of the “discussions” about politics there. Newspapers tried running comment sections, but either they’re a cesspool, real names or no, or they just gave up having comment sections entirely. Even locale isn’t a help - NextDoor is full of the same, or worse, combative vitriol. Sure, child porn and death threats don’t go unpunished like “back in the day”, so things are infinitesimally better, but we still have a very very long way to go.


Anonymity doesn’t necessarily mean namelessness - it means being a voice in a crowd, it means being seemingly removed enough from your target that you, personally, won’t be the target of retribution. It hearkens back to really primal primate behaviour.

Group dynamics are crazy - you can use them to get people who might be drinking buddies to instead get into tin cans and try to murder each other, because you’re using the ultimate anonymity of a battlefield to let slip the dogs of war.


The deciding factor seems to be if the internet group (as in characteristics defining cohesion) has strong enough mores to demand acceptable conduct. wide-open commenting (anon or not): NO. Neighbourhood FB group: you'd hope so, but not always...


I'm on one forum where the only rules are "leave family other than spouses out of it" and "no n-word". It is a hobby interest forum with a gender homogeneous user base. It's one of the most civil places on the internet if you can get past the fact that any mistake will be remembered and you will be made fun of for it. There are definitely some people who hate each other over ideological differences but they seem to tire of arguing and just ignore each other. I think small enough group size for people to remember each other and no reason for people without the shared interest to stick around matter more than anything else.


> Anonymity isn’t it, or isn’t all of it.

I think people have realized what the real line of what will be tolerated in society. There isn't any repercussion for being a pos in real life or online. I think we're to polite to the people being rude.


For some groups, if they are large enough, powerful enough, or vicious enough, deanonymized is not an issue because they are the majority. For smaller groups, where having an opinion will lead to death threads etc, deanonymization will extinguish their voices.


Well one difference is the scope of participation, which was only slightly mentioned (old people on FB) - even in the lat 90's the internet was still mostly the domain of a relatively homogeneous technical-skewing audience; the composition has probably flipped since then.

Judgement of whether this is good or bad aside, it is definitely easier to maintain peace and harmony when the socio/economic/cultural differences are smaller. Those days are long gone.

I'm finding the only winning move is not to play (i.e. "don't go to the theatre; stay home and read a book")


You’re asserting that it’s worse like that’s a fact. It’s not. It’s much better than the old days now that many accounts are tied to your real name, and since enforcement of community standards became commonplace.

The US political polarization is more widespread, on and offline, but online discourse is still pretty mild compared to the old days of greater anonymity.


I'm not sure that's true. I remember when "netiquette" used to be a bigger thing than it is now. People would lurk for a while before posting to get a feel for the community. Flamewars would happen if someone top-posted instead of bottom-posting. Debate still happened, and some of them would spiral out of control, but I wasn't nearly as afraid to mention my opinion about such a wide range of topics both on the web and in real life as I am now.


What accounts are tied to your real name? I don't use any facebook products so don't know about that, but don't know of any other that are tied to my name.

Enforcement of community standards has backfired in the form of weaponised censorship.


There's Google that uses your name but doesn't enforce its authenticity.

Anyway, I don't comment on any services that use a real name policy. I'd prefer that my name didn't appear on the Internet at all, but don't fight against it when it inevitably happens via some participant lists and whatnot.


Facebook, google, anything tied to your bank accounts, anything you access with your phone or from your home address, if any of those things you access use your email, anything tied to your email - which ends up being just about everything. Even if I might not know your name, there are probably a dozen big data companies that can tie your name to 99% of your web activity.

Even where there's some anonymity by using a user name, there's rarely anonymity from legal authorities, who can easily access your entire internet and location history - and a VPN won't help you, because those aren't secure.


This is all out of context.


The quantity has increased, if the quality is still basically the same. Also, I bet the average education/intelligence of the typical user has shifted as the internet user looked more and more like the typical population.


Also different is the velocity. It's easier than ever before to spread something far and wide.


Bingo. In the 90s, you had to be pretty smart (and wealthy or near a decent school) just to know what the internet was, how to get access, and then do something useful or fun with it. Now, everyone uses it to pay their taxes, order soap, and use facebook. However the quality, while always full of trolls, has dropped imho.


Yes, the internet’s always been toxic, but the audience has changed. It used to be a small subset of the world population that had the money, time, and know-how to get on the internet. Now it’s the entire world, and it seems to me that the average media-consumption sophistication has gone way down. Trolls used to be a smaller fraction of the whole, and easier to ignore. Now, the signal-to-troll ratio is all out of whack.


The actual problem isn't "trolls", it's people who call everyone who disagrees with them a troll.


> It used to be a small subset of the world population that had the money, time, and know-how to get on the internet. Now it’s the entire world

This. It's not that polarization and toxic ideas didn't exist, it was arguably much worse in the past with slavery, genocide, etc.

You had entire countries publicly advocating for violent racism and citing sources that they claimed supported their views. It's pretty harsh to call us post-truth but not them. Their lies led to brutal consequences for millions.

And it used to be the media was a pretty strict funnel (pre-Internet, pre-TV) where you had to be interesting to someone with power like a politician or an editor to get mass exposure for your ideas. Everyone else was relegated to preaching in the park. Now, we have virtual parks (websites) and preaching can reach millions.


But it is the real world now ... People form their beliefs and make decisions in the world based on what they consume online.

I frequently see Twitter memes spoken from people's mouths in person. I mostly abstain from it, but like it or not, Twitter does matter.

I've also been online since 1993, and used Usenet for many years. Back then you could compartmentalize some argument as a bunch of nerds, but now it's just "people".

FWIW I also agree that the wisdom of "don't feed the trolls" has been forgotten. So in that way it's gotten worse too.


Yes. Encountering the Apache Helicopter joke on 4chan is par for the course, but I just really don't want to hear it out loud from a coworker who is senior to me in a meeting room, and have everyone else laugh along with it.


Yikes, if that happened at your workplace I hope you talked to HR about it. That’s a “joke” in the form of a death threat.


But weren't "nerds" always just "people"? It's the interpretation of the culture that's changed as well.


To clarify, in 1993 or even 2000, you could see a bunch of flame wars on Usenet, and you could ignore them because they "meant nothing". You could dismiss it as a nerd argument that's not connected to your life in the real world.

That was usually accurate. (Although I should say there were very intelligent people on Usenet, and that's why I used it. I learned a lot there.)

It's harder to do that now. You can ignore certain channels, but they spill out into the "real world" quite frequently.

To give a different example, UFC fighters pick fights with each other online, often on Instagram or YouTube. So what happens online is critical to the entire sport, which has grown a tremendous amount in the past decade. It determines whether they get paid $100K or $1M. Real life happens online now.

That's a somewhat random example but there are many many subcultures / industries where what happens on social media determines what happens in the real world.


I'm really tired of mainstream articles which are essentially a reporting finding 3 people on twitter who are for/against something and saying "internet is in uproar about whatever"


There’s quite a lot of formulaic pieces written in UK media where the news outlet comment section has more outraged commenters than the original issue.

If you use dailymail.co.uk and search for “outraged” there’s quite a few examples of this formula being used.

I suppose it increases impression time of adverts which means higher price earned for them. I’m not criticising the business accumen.


This pattern happens so often that you’d think people would start to catch on. A story about one person supposedly being “outraged” about something leads to a huge vigorous CJ of folks eager to express their anti-outrage-outrage at the straw man in front of them.


Well, consider the reporter's POV. It's really easy to browse Twitter for 20 minutes and then spend 10 minutes summarizing your findings. Contacting people who have any connection at all to important events and then convincing them to answer your questions about those events might take all day...


Same here. And it's not just based on Twitter posts either. I've seen a depressing number of news articles (especially gaming related ones) which are based on random internet petitions signed by maybe three people.

Anyone can set up an internet petition about anything. The presence of one does not meant there's some gigantic audience clamouring for some game idea/casting idea/etc.


Adding to your point, I'm wondering if OP has ever had a religious group show up at their doorstep. It's the same idea; "Our ideas are right, yours are wrong." There are no laws stopping them from doing this, (short of solicitation statutes) and there's certainly no convincing them they are wrong. Just smile politely and ignore them.

Really, it's the same problem just dressed up differently. Now the issue just has these new buzzwords attached to it like "algorithm" and "data privacy" and whatnot. Nothing will change until people learn to leave their pride on their desktop, but that's not the way of some cultures.


Good analogy, but one can always banish the proselytizers with a simple "Sorry, we're Catholic!" (One doesn't even actually have to be Catholic to say this!)


This is my experience as well. In the early/mid 2000s I mostly browsed sites with a small, dedicated group of regular users. These sites were (mostly) civil and had a "small town" feel where you kind of knew everyone or at least recognized their username. Even back then though, I went on a few sites where the userbase was big enough that you'd be mostly interacting with people who you may never see again on that site, and as a result it was quite a bit less civil than the small sites.

I think the big difference between today vs. back then with respect to toxicity, is now that the web is so centralized, most sites the average person probably visits (twitter, reddit, etc) involves them interacting with strangers who they may never interact with again, so there is less of a feeling like they need to "hold back" like you might when talking to someone you know you'll meet again.

Probably the only exception to this (for me at least) was Facebook, because back when I used it I almost exclusively interacted with people I knew, so there was still that same incentive to not be an asshole because you'd actually meet these people again later. These days a lot of people interact with strangers in the comments of pages/groups for like politics and other stuff, and I feel like that's where most of the nastiness is.


Right, It's not a technology problem.

Not everything can be reduced to a technology problem.

This is an American, and even worldwide problem.

Everyone is writing about polarization right now.

Ezra Klein, who I normally loathe, has been doing the podcasting rounds lately about his new polarization book, which has a pragmatic take on the problem.

He doesn't see a way out right now.

    Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
    Ezra Klein on Politics, Polarization, and Identity
https://pca.st/huei9let

    The Weeds: The road to polarization
https://pca.st/izsley78

According to Ezra, part of the reason we have this now is because our personal identities are now stacked in line with our political identities.

Why this stacking occurs might just be a natural process.

As for the media, It's not only the media's fault.

There was a feedback loop between media and audience.

When media was unbundled from the national model, only slightly more polarized people could be reliable customers and so media had to compete over them, which polarized the media, which polarized the audience etc...


> our personal identities are now stacked in line with our political identities.

Even stronger than that, for many people their political identity IS their personal identity, and those folks can't see anybody else any other way.

I was a child when Clinton was elected. We lived in a conservative neighborhood, and I remember there being disappointment but as far as I can recall everyone resumed their normal lives after that.

Then when GWB was elected, I lived in a more liberal town and there was some angst, maybe a bit of protesting, but by and large everyone went back to their lives.

Trump has been interesting. For many people, if you voted for Trump, you are a Nazi. As far as they're concerned, your political identity IS your personal identity. And let's be fair to both sides, for a lot of Trump supporters, being a MAGA-hat wearer is their personal identity.

We're on the road to something, and it's not good.


>the other media encourages polarization and demonization of the other for dumb short term. That's a purely American phenomenon

Nope, tribalism and divide et impera is a human phenomenon


I remember the AOL instant messenger days and people being super derogatory and vulgar for kicks. Even xbox live of 2007 was just as vulgar as today. I don't think its that the internet is more toxic, its that we are more sensitive (more easily offended).

A strong immune system is the best defense. If it rolls off your back, is it really toxic?


Shitlords don't just "meme". They radicalize themselves and others. I had a friend ask to crash on my couch during GamerGate because a guy on 4chan took a picture of himself with a knife in front of her apartment building and it's the people who aren't shitlords who are the problem here? What's your proposed "immune system" response to that, exactly? Or to an Elliot Rodgers, he who was cheered on by exactly this crowd?

"These people are attempting to incubate a culture where you might get swatted for being vocally not a straight white man, but it is we who are too sensitive." Nah. The problem isn't the people who have the misfortune of being downrange of scumbags, and never is.


That esclated quickly. I think your extreme examples are not really the norm, nor an accurate representation in general. This just makes the radicalization worse.


this whole thread has nothing to do with real world threats of physical violence. online trolling is different than your extreme example.


If 10 people on the internet tell you they want to kill you, how do you tell if 1 of them is serious and is actually going to show up physically?

The answer is that you can't, and there isn't a firm line where all trolling is on one side and harassing/violent behaviour is something different.

Many of us can heuristically decide that trollish behaviour aimed at us won't extend to our person/home/workplace, and doesn't need to be taken seriously. That doesn't mean it's a rule for everyone or an excuse for that behaviour.


>>>If 10 people on the internet tell you they want to kill you, how do you tell if 1 of them is serious and is actually going to show up physically?

All the more reason for everyone to concealed carry. If not a firearm, at least something like a karambit.


Yeah, no, that excuse stopped working around six years ago. “Online trolling” is now part and parcel of political action and can be separated only through naïveté or disingenuity and no, there is no third option. The shitlord who chased my friend from her home was cheered on by that faceless mob of “online trolls” and encouraged other people to do likewise and worse. Similarly, Elliot Rodgers and the like got their book from “online trolls” who happened to also be virulent misogynists who were ecstatic that somebody took what they advocated and put it into action.

What you call “extreme” is the reality for people less privileged than you being subject to these fucks’ weird jollies. What’s your just-ignore-it stuff going to do for them?


Um, yes. A toxic environment is toxic.

Whether someone who isn't as threatened by the toxicity "bucks up" and lets it roll off their back or even participates or not. It's still toxic.

E.g. don't tell me "racism isn't toxic except that you're sensitive and choose to be offended by it."


> toxic environment is toxic.

agree. but online trolling or banter isn't a toxic environment so its not toxic.

you would censor them? now THAT is a toxic environment.


I used to think this way. If I just ignored toxicity and suppressed my reaction, everything would be fine. But the dose makes the poison. Over time, it wears you down. I spent years letting things roll off my back, and all it got me was a bunch of metaphorical back pain that I could have avoided if I'd either moved out of the way or plugged the leak.


What exactly is or was strong immune system response to treatment Kathy Sierra got? Cause weev later became basically folk hero for a while before he managed to be forgotten.

The just roll it off, ignore the trolls collective strategy back amounted to enabling and whitewashing weev.


> Twitter, aka the comments section they removed from their web presence

Oh my, I never thought about it but this is absolutely true


It would be if there weren't a comment section on almost every news story published in mainstream media. As someone who pressed aggressively for exactly that starting back in the 1990s I now view it as a mistake.


> [T]he other media encourages polarization and demonization of the other for dumb short term. That's a purely American phenomenon...

I don't think that's true. The tone of American political news nowadays doesn't seem that different than British newspapers in the 1990s. "It's the Sun wot won it" was an explicit boast about The Sun's polarizing influence... in 1992.

Of course both The Sun and Fox News in the US are part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. But if anything this style of news seems like it arrived in the UK ten or twenty years before it was manifest in the US.


I recently logged into CS:GO to play something familiar and holy cow, the toxicity! Just like the old days. Online gaming has always been extremely toxic, and most internet discussion has been that way since the beginning. It reminded me of just how little of that I see in day to day internet browsing these days. I think the veracity of the toxicity is tamer, but the reach and impact is so much wider.


So basically, people are assholes and always have been.

Something stuck with me a long time ago when I was watching tv a lot, there was a character on Scrubs named "Dr Cox" who said people are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling.


Its true those trolls have been around for some time. Its human nature to rear an ugly face under the auspices of anonymity. Makes me think about the real world vs the internet joke on Red vs Blue https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I0grFFAxySw


I would agree with the gp that it seems no one who lived in the age of Usenet flame wars would see the current state as new. Remember when people would All CAPS each other?

I would also say I’ve never thought of myself as a troll .... but given the number of downvotes I get on hn, I probably am at least troll-ish. So with that in mind, here’s the troll-ish take:

When people post something online it’s often in anticipation of something good coming from it. At this point there’s nothing any system or protocol can do to make this person less impacted if anything less than a unicorn floats pout of the sky dropping little unicorn turds over their one little contribution to discourse. We simply can’t change the super enormous personal expectations that one builds up as a result of commenting.

At the same time there’s this real world trend that is starting to reflect the virtual world. People talking to each other face to face using the same etiquette they would in a virtual setting.

I would suggest it’s not just tribal... it’s that increasingly we are unable to turn off and disconnect from the virtual world... we are literally interacting through a pseudo-real dimension in the mind precisely because we cannot put our phones down.

I recently read through the post about inner monologues and I was surprised a) there were so many people who have entire theoretical conversations in their head and b) that post had so many comments - maybe it was the most comments in a single post ever.

So here’s the deal - humans talk to themselves as a matter of being human. Now, a sizable portion of a humans daily interactions are online where societal norms have been adjusted, there’s simply no way the inner dialogue in the real world isn’t being impacted by this - just look at how teenage life has been decimated over recent years.

As for what to do about it. #1, you personally have responsibility for making sure your inner dialogue is healthy and isn’t 100% from online sources, #2 you have to unplug for much more of the day than you think, #3 a good book wouldn’t hurt, #4 you need to learn more about history than you think — a good book that explores the topic of mob mentality in US politics is Six Frigates by Ian W Toll. You literally won’t believe how the period between the revolutionary war and the war of 1812 mirrors modern day until you read this, #5, have some empathy for other people regardless of their viewpoints, #6 realize that no matter who is in charge, it’s going to be ok.

I can’t tell you how many people I know literally went apeshit when Obama got elected, sold all their stocks, bought gold and prepared for Armageddon. I also can’t tell you many people literally went apeshit when trump got elected, sold all their stock... to both groups, I say how’d that work out for you? Not very well and yet life goes on.

You kind of have to be a little meh about everything...that’s my view anyway...


5 years layer than what you describe but what I remember from the 1995 to 2000 was relatively peaceful, even the newsgroups I visited (mostly technical ones). There were dark corners but you mostly knew if you stepped into one.

Then again I was mostly looking for html tutorials, facts for physics and history projects etc.


Concur with this.

Flamewars have always been with us and a bb or forum flamewar was always something to watch (often annotated with a flame gif on the thread header).

As with everything web, it's just scaled as the web has scaled.


BBS in the early nineties and internet mid-90's.

Always been a toxic element, it's just the echo chamber got louder to the point where it drowns out the normal people.


The severity has grown but the scale of the toxicity's grown in the "human flesh search engine" era.


The solution is the same as it was in 1991 as well: don't feed the trolls.


This was shown repeatedly not to work. The only troll-free forums are those with good moderators.


By what metric was this shown to not work?

I've been on lots of forums where the only rules were "no personal attacks and no porn" and they worked just fine. If the forum has a topic, then moderating to keep on topic is reasonable. Polite disagreement and discussion is the hallmark of a healthy forum.

There is of course more to curating a community than its moderation policy.


In terms of forums, the trolls existed but people knew how to ignore them. They didn't remove the troll, they just didn't feed them.


You may ignore the trolls. Still there is always enough trolls and enough easily baited people for the S/N ratio to drop.

"Just ignore the troll" is a good personal advice it is just not sufficient for the forum as a whole.


Exactly this. On Usenet there were still moderated groups, because there were assholes that were willing to start flame wars. The term "flame war" came from Usenet, as did "trolling". The original meaning of "trolling" was making a post that provoked a huge number of responses, be it good or bad. Now it has morphed to meaning you say something shitty.

> That's a purely American phenomenon

This is wrong. Europe turned nationalistic and right wing much earlier than the US. Look through the last 10 years and it's been something they've struggled with for the entire decade and earlier.


The US has been struggling with it since the very start. KKK, segregation, McCarthyism, the list goes on.


Europe has been categorically worse, considering the scale of antisemitism, ie. the Holocaust.


Someone else being just as bad/worse is not a valid excuse.

My point is that racism and right-wing nationalism isn't something that somehow started in Europe in the last couple of decades and then came to the US. It's been there since the beginning on both sides of the Atlantic, and systematic racism in the US has been a thing since before the founding fathers put ink to paper.

In addition, you can't just say "Europe" as one unit. There are vast cultural differences between even neighboring countries. Europe does not act as one united country, it's a patchwork of localized opinions and cultures.


The OP said it was a "purely American phenomenon." I proved it's not. I don't know what you're arguing, it's not relevant at all.


I can assure you the YouTube rabbit hole is still there. I am constantly recommended right wing, feminist b& type vids


Not for me; it just tries to show me Joe Rogaine videos all day. One damn video did this! I want to punch the guy who sent it to me. Oh wait, guess I've been radicalized.

FWIIW all the chimping in the threads about death threats: these were extremely common in the old days of Usenet too. I've lost track of them; from all kinds of arguably insane people, satanic cults even; more recently lunatic grad students mad I made fun of their field on my blog. So was doxxing. Nothing ever happened, and I have no respect for people who report them like it's news. While it's probably happened by now that someone's internet beef turned into actual violence, the ratio is absurdly low. If you can't abide some idiot being mad at you, stay off the internet I guess.


> I've been on the interbutts since 1991 and Usenet days, and it's exactly as it always was.

Quality-wise maybe but nowhere near the same in numbers. Back in 1990-2005 it took expertise to reach the Usenet. Facebook, Reddit et al. changed the game by essentially giving every village idiot without technical knowledge the "freedom" to troll on FB, Youtube, whatever. Conspiracy theories had their own niche usenet spaces, today there are FB groups for all kinds of utter bollocks with hundreds of thousands of members and absolutely no quality or sanity control.

Additionally, for newsgroups you needed some kind of client, most people could only access them after work, further reducing the user base, and there was nothing remotely similar to "likes" - today, people do everything for likes, with instantaneous feedback and no limits (practically everyone has a smartphone with FB and notifications), driving an ever faster and faster "news" cycle.

> And of course, the other media encourages polarization and demonization of the other for dumb short term. That's a purely American phenomenon, and nothing's going to change it until the people pushing this swill on MSNBC, Fox and CNN decide to change it

No, this is not US-only. It may be most expressed in the US (and amplified by its two-party system), but us Europeans see the same issue. Brexit is the most obvious, but France, Poland, Hungary, Austria and Germany also have problems with polarization and (mostly) the far right using outright lies to further it, with Russian financing / backing suspected and proven everywhere.

The thing that must change is to get rid of Russian money in politics, and to enforce neutrality and fact based reporting in media.


This. The cost of going on Internet used to be quite high, and requires some skills and knowledge. Nowadays anyone can troll, and they get repeated by other trolls, the percentage of it "may" be the same ( although I doubt it ), but the "absolute" number of those are much much higher.

Remember before the iPhone, the internet was a much smaller place, and accessed mostly in front of a computer. With Smartphone you now have 4.5 Billion Internet user all using it at any time of the day. The Internet is also much faster. Creating content is easier. We are may be 10 - 100x more in online content consumption then in the 2000s.

And I agree this is not US only.

So yes it is definitely a social AND psychological problem. Not a technical one, no blockchain, Distributed Social Media, Machine Learning, new AI, Cloud, Servless, (WhatEver)aaS etc will solve it.


FWIW, I find reddit to be one of the more pleasant places to converse. Just stay off of the main subreddits.


> people who disagreed would usually leave it at that and walk away respectfully. Now, it seems like everyone treats everything as an argument or debate to be won at all costs. Even niche sites like HN are not immune.

You seem to be assuming a. that these are real people and not bots and b. that these people are not paid shills etc. - yet we have ample evidence to the contrary on both points. If you ask me, we are in the midst of an information war that is crossing over with a culture war. I wish it would blow over but we seem to be stuck with it until the people behind it either win or become demoralised. The only solution that springs to mind is the complete removal of anonymity online, but that would bring its own problems.


"yet we have ample evidence to the contrary on both points"

People on HN believe that? The web has changed...


? The original poster said 'how do we stop toxicity', and I am saying how can we tell the toxicity isn't at least somewhat down to bots and shills, the presence of either of which is hardly controversial, is it? I mean we've had people trying to convince us for years that it was the Russian bots that put Trump in the White House, unless I've seriously misunderstood.


"I mean we've had people trying to convince us for years that it was the Russian bots that put Trump in the White House"

Just because people have been trying to convince us of that theory, doesn't mean we have to believe it. Ask yourself who is doing the convincing and what might be their motive.

Anybody who has ever used Social Media knows that in general, bots don't simply get access to your timeline. First they would have to get you to follow them, a much harder problem than running thousands or millions of bots.

Likewise for shills - first you have to get people to follow you.

The notion that we would all be happily in love with each other, if it weren't for bots and chills, isn't really worth investigating.

People are angry online because there are fights over real issues. It's not just Mac vs PC anymore, it is about money, land ownership, power, control... People tend to get angry if you try to take away their stuff.

As a simple example: many people like video games. Other people came around claiming video games are sexist, and try to get game makers to change the games. That is some serious meddling with something many people hold dear. Of course that makes them angry.


We don't.

It is a feedback loop. The American ideal of rugged individualism has mutated into anti-neighbor and is exactly the model for echo chambers (not neighbors with diverse opinions but cultural clones!), which are facilitated by technology. The ease at which our culture Balkanizes is backed up by trillion dollar profits from a handful of companies, which then pay politicians to look the other way.

This online toxicity is a reincarnation of the populist hate that has driven wars for millennia. It is a cancer that has been given super-steroids because of the intersection of huge amounts of cash and limitless political control. Not to mention the propaganda that idolizes billionaires and strongmen.

I think the crash and burn of America would be a solution: the collapse of trillion dollar companies and monopolies that own the government. Unfortunately this is infecting other countries where the top 1% want's to be as rich as America's, hence their urgency to imitate what is happening here for their own profit.

There's no cure: the tech monopoly and insatiable greed of the top 0.1% will be the main drivers of global poverty and oppression, and to get there they need to keep us hating each other and divided. They even picked wedge issues like race and religion, which are almost 100% irreconcilable.

I would give the top-tier credit, but I think stimulating base beliefs for profit isn't really that hard, you just need a country-sized platform.


The web mirrors people.

How do you stop people from behaving like they do..? And why would you want to? Who should decide how people should behave (beyond established laws, of course)?

If people don't do something illegal that should be reported, they're being people. You have nice people, assholes, politically correct, politically incorrect, etc.


And mirrors change behaviours. You don't find people preening before blank walls or open spaces. The mirror informs and provides feedback.


This has nothing to do with what I said.


Incorrect.

Media influence society.


I literally have no idea what you're talking about.

Whatever you say, though.


Think of society as a system, and approach the social sxiences as systems sciences -- psychology, sociology, economics, political science. They have state, observation, processing logic, interaction, and some new state -- a basic control loop or OODA loop.

That's the basic premise of Norbert Wiener (Cybernetics https://www.worldcat.org/title/cybernetics-or-control-and-co... and The Human Use of Human Beings https://www.worldcat.org/title/human-use-of-human-beings-cyb... -- horrible title, great book), Alfed Kuhn, The study of society : a multidisciplinary approach https://www.worldcat.org/title/study-of-society-a-multidisci...), Jay Forrester, and others.

Media are the informational element of that loop. Change it, and you change behaviour.

So, no, media don't merely reflect society, any more than a mirror merely reflects a person's image. In the first place, mirrors change behaviour. In the second, media are far more than a mirror -- they adapt, transform, store, play back, transmit (in both space and time), amplify and attenuate, information. They reveal state; they express will, control, and narrative; they create and propogate shared (and novel) models of understanding; any they apply to both human and mechanical systems (as well as, arguably, nonhuman biological systems).

The key point is that if you change the informational component of a system, you change its behaviour fundamentally.

Its range, bandwidth, latency, scale, topology (peer-to-peer, star/broadcast, web/mesh), fidelity, recording and playback capabilities, modalities (symbols, icons, text, pictures, sound, video, data, ...), search, association, fungibility (modifiability / rewritability of content), and more.

That's the basic message of Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Message and Gutenberg's Galaxy), of Elisabeth Eisenstein (The Printing Press as an Agent of Change), and others.


Convince 7 billion people harm reduction should be seen as the ultimate motivation of society.

The web has nothing to do with it.

For a while we thought more people were getting cancer. Turned out cancer detection rates were low and lots of mysterious deaths in history were probably just cancer.

The web has helped illuminate in the US how big the political ideology gap always was. It was papered over by information manipulation of the corporate press for decades, coddling sensibilities of luddites, innumerate, and nesters who preferred to stay home rather than see for themselves. They also made up the biggest voting block for years.

I grew up in Trump country and left two decades ago. Was shocked to find coasties really were convinced it was Leave it to Beaver land while rural folks were convinced urban areas are universally slums. Those are REAL narratives I get from people today. Shocked about how ass backwards the other cohort feels about life. Ridiculously sheltered attitudes on both sides. Complete disinterest in negotiating. As we see in Congress.

Consider that perfect rural life and urban police dramas are common fiction tropes and it’s not hard to see why those emotional descriptions are knee jerk go to for the masses

Free speech doesn’t oblige anyone else to abide the embedded semantics of the speech in question. Emit whatever syntax you want, no one has to put their agency into the behaviors the speaker thinks achieve the outcome they seek with their speech.

Good luck.


I rarely see threats, I do see that dialogue is rarely actually happening, its usually just shit flinging with buzzwords like cuck, biggot, xenophobe, leftist, commie, nazi etc. Rarely do I see people make arguments, and even rarer do I see people actually arguing as in exchanging ideas and answering each others questions.

The more mainstream a site gets, the worse it seems to be. Especially where voting is involved (reddit, facebook etc).

Add to this "grassroots" efforts to "takeover" public internet forums, which has been going on for decades by both far left and right wingers. Applying for moderator roles, not because they want to moderate discussion, but have complete control of it..


Let's argue in a polarized, toxic manner about the polarization and toxicity of the web!


we don't, we just don't


As an intellectual exercise,since you seem so passionate about the subject of anti-vaxxers...

Are all vaccines good? If not, who chooses? The government? What about when Gov. Rick Perry tried to force the HPV vaccine on all teenage girls in TX, even though it was suspected he had financial incentive to do so?

Is it ok for the state to force you or your kids to receive a medical treatment? Even when there are multiple demonstrated cases of drug companies breaking the law and corruption?

My point isn't to fall on either side of the debate.

My point is that it's wrong to silence the debate and to label people who are thinking about these things so simply as "anti-vaxxers" and dismiss them.

Reality is complex. As soon as you're 100% sure you're right, it'll bite you.


"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22203689 and marked it off-topic.


Yes, vaccines proven effective against the spread of disease are good. The current body that judges this is the FDA, which is part of the government. The corruption of the people administering the vaccine have no bearing on the effectiveness of the vaccine. For HPV in particular, it looks like we're going to eliminate new infections next generation thanks to this, which is unquestionably good. I'd have preferred it to be administered to everyone, not simply who the government deems worthy. (EDIT: Sorry, forgot how medical costs were allocated in the states.)

I don't really think it's inaccurate to label anybody against vaccines as "anti-vaccine", since... that's their position. If I wanted to be vitrolic and hyperbolic, I'd call them "pro-disease", "baby-killers", or "complicit in the largest outbreaks of preventable death of children". "Anti-vaccine" is merely a summary of the position.


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I really get why herd immunity is important to you. It's not academic to you; instead, it's life and death.

But, if I understand you correctly, you're saying that you can't get vaccinated, because you have adverse reactions. That is, there are greater than zero persons who have significant negative effects from vaccinations.

And you would be seriously harmed if the state required - forced - vaccinations, at least unless they allowed a medical exception.

Look, claytongulick may in fact have an axe to grind. That doesn't mean that every point he raised is nonsense.


Except no one when talking about mandatory vaccinations is saying people with allergic reactions or medical conditions would be forced into being vaccinated.

Creating a massive strawman in attempt to discredit my argument does not a good argument make, especially as I'm making it from the PoV of someone that has had such an experience in the past. I feel no need to engage with such a point because it has zero bearing in reality.


Accusing someone who is trying to engage with you in good faith of creating strawmen also does not make a good argument.

Not everyone who has an allergic reaction to a vaccination is going to have medical documentation of that. Maybe their parents couldn't afford to take them back to the doctor for confirmation. Maybe they couldn't take the time off work. That happens, especially among the poor.

Or was the "strawman" the idea that people would be forced to be vaccinated? claytongulick said that Gov. Perry did exactly that; you responded by saying that he was lying about his position, but you never actually refuted any of his claims. Did Gov. Perry actually force people to be vaccinated? If so, that's not a strawman. (Requiring people to be vaccinated in order to attend school, when there are truancy laws on the books, counts as "forced" in my book.)

Look, I'm not an anti-vaxxer. I'm vaccinated, and so are my kids. I understand why herd immunity is important - especially so for you, but for everyone else, too. But when you call your opponents liars, it makes your side look bad, especially when they say something that at least appears reasonable. (At least you called him a liar based on his posting history, which gives unbiased observers a place to go to evaluate your claim.)


> Not everyone who has an allergic reaction to a vaccination is going to have medical documentation of that. Maybe their parents couldn't afford to take them back to the doctor for confirmation. Maybe they couldn't take the time off work. That happens, especially among the poor.

This is what allergy testing is for. If you don't have the paperwork, then you can get tested. The fact that people don't have time to get tested is an entirely separate issue relating to the class stratification in the US

And I told you what the strawman was. You were insinuating that people with allergies would be forced against their will to be vaccinated and risk a deadly reaction. You tried to claim that was a reasonable point and I disputed that.

And I said exactly what he was lying about. Which was that specifically he was claiming to not take any sides in this argument, when his post history shows clearly that he has taken a stance. That's lying at the minimum and gaslighting at worst. Which is also why I have trouble believing he came to the table to argue in good faith. This is without mentioning his leading sentence.


You claim that 1) they won't have to be vaccinated because they can get tested, 2) they don't get tested because of class stratification, but 3) you present no solution to class stratification. And then you claim that it isn't a reasonable point to say that they would be forced to be vaccinated!

You... um... rather failed to put together a coherent argument there. Or if you did, I failed to follow it...


Your argument would be similar to the following.

1) Some people don't vaccinate because they have to eat first.

2) Because eating is more important than vaccinations, it would be inhumane to make vaccinations mandatory.

3) Ergo, you cannot make vaccinations mandatory until you solve world hunger.

At that point why do anything at all? Decision paralysis makes things impossible to solve because this arbitrary person I made up doesn't have time for anything so you have to solve this completely irrelevant issue in order to free up time first so that they can then get to the point of order.


No, that is completely unlike what I am saying. But you seem rather clearly to just want to argue, rather than actually trying to understand, so I'm done.


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You've unfortunately been breaking the HN guidelines a lot by posting in the flamewar style, snarking, and being nasty. That's not a legit use of this site. We ban accounts that post that way—we have to, because they poison the well and push the site further down the classic internet forum path to heat death. HN from the beginning has been an experiment in whether we can stave off that perhaps inevitable decline. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

On the other hand, you've also posted some substantive and interesting comments, so I don't want to ban you. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit? The idea is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do. When you know more than someone else, share some of what you know in a respectful way, so we all can learn something. Don't just put others down.


This is a systemic issue to facebook and it starts with decisions made at the top. The best quote I've heard recently is all massacres start with 'a word'. Because Zuckerberg refused to accept responsibility for the power of word, he allowed the genocide of 7,000 Rohingya including children. The UN reported that Facebook was 'instrumental' in disseminating a message by those who spread hate. The solution is moderators, in every language, with impeccable credentials, and if facebook is still refusing to invest even this much then decentralize the whole damn social media space, because Discord self-moderates, Slack self-moderates, Stackoverflow self-moderates. Because no one wants to be stuck in a room with hateful bigots but Zuck has forced it on you.




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