> “If you put a drop of love into Twitter it seems to decay but if you put in a drop of hatred you feel it actually propagates much more strongly. And you wonder: ‘Well is that because of the way that Twitter as a medium has been built?’”
No, it's human nature. Stop blaming companies for the imperfections of the human race. If you put us into large groups, we will inevitably gossip, bicker, argue, and kill each other. We've been doing it literally since we were banging rocks and sticks together.
The delusion that technology feeds us, and it is especially potent in America, is that there is some higher power leading us all to be terrible people online, and that technology should be able to fix the problem.
But technology can't fix the problem. We are the problem. We also evolve incredibly slowly, and we're competing against technology that evolves in a matter of decades. We are too inflexible as a species to be compatible with the social effects of technology.
Why can't technology be created with human nature in mind? Forms of democracy with checks and balances became so dominant because it acknowledged the deficiencies in human nature.
We can certainly blame companies for producing bad/harmful technology just like we can blame forms of government for producing bad outcomes for its citizens.
---
On a side note, based on influence and entrenchment, comparing FAANG companies to governments actually seems more appropriate that I initially thought.
> Forms of democracy with checks and balances became so dominant because it acknowledged the deficiencies in human nature.
And those systems have tons of flaws as well. Have you seen the voter turn out in the U.S.? How many Americans are making informed voting decisions.
You're shifting the blame back to the technology. I get it, as a technologist we'd like to think it must be a mistake in the product. But the reality is that our idealistic notions of how the world should be do not match the capabilities of human nature.
Compare the U.S. government to Feudalism or a similar form of government--not the U.S. government to Utopia. You're not seeing the point.
This is actually the exact opposite of idealism. Try to account for the reality of human nature in systems and they will have much better results for the humans they affect.
There are both human and technological problems at play here.
The human problems, as you stated, have long been well known. These technological communications problems are new.
It seems pretty self-evident that the character limits, the incoherent way conversations are rendered, and how easy it is to take tweets out of context are all detrimental to the quality of discourse and understanding between users.
No, it's human nature. Stop blaming companies for the imperfections of the human race. If you put us into large groups, we will inevitably gossip, bicker, argue, and kill each other. We've been doing it literally since we were banging rocks and sticks together.
The delusion that technology feeds us, and it is especially potent in America, is that there is some higher power leading us all to be terrible people online, and that technology should be able to fix the problem.
But technology can't fix the problem. We are the problem. We also evolve incredibly slowly, and we're competing against technology that evolves in a matter of decades. We are too inflexible as a species to be compatible with the social effects of technology.