I am more and more convinced that the Internet is a net negative for discourse and human socialisation, and no one is really exploring this possibility. We are all trying to make the social media experiment work and I am horrified by its result. The more we tweak and add to it (upvotes, user moderators, likes, retweets, the Algorithm), the worse it gets.
We're so used to the fast pace of modern science that we forget cultural evolution sometimes takes hundreds of years. What if we are 500 years before enough Internet philosophers have taught us how to behave online?
> I am more and more convinced that the Internet is a net negative for discourse and human socialisation, and no one is really exploring this possibility.
A huge amount has been written and spoken about this.
Apparently, not enough, or not forceful enough for a contingent of people to decide to quit the Internet for good. Where are the modern day anti-Internet luddites? Talking about it on a blog or, worse, posting about it on Twitter doesn't count, sorry.
So that's the rub, the people who realize it is horrible actually quit on it. Lots of people talk about getting of social media, but very few actually delete all of their accounts. I've removed every social account I have around four years ago. I still have a HN account, but that's about it. I talk to my family and friends about how dangerous I think social media is to our society if the topic comes up, but frankly not many people want to hear it. If I really pressed, I'd end up being "that guy" who talks too much about any topic.
I really don't think the majority of folks are going to quit social media even if every day the NYTimes, CNN, Fox News, whoever put out news stories on how horrendous it is.
My compromise is I have Facebook and Twitter accounts, but not the apps, so I have to use a browser on my phone to look at them. This means I can still see content, but no notifications and the friction is high. I'd rather go on Youtube and see what people I subscribe to are making videos about.
The Internet as a infrastructure, I think it's probably a huge net positive. Social networks on the other hand, particularly Twitter and Facebook, I would agree we would be better off without them right now.
The problem Twitter and Facebook have is size. Call it an unproven conjecture, but any network that reaches quasi-global sizes becomes a cesspool of scum and villainy, and it scales exponentially with number of users. Newer generations are discovering that niche, small communities are better, in the face of the idea of an Inter-Net.
While I enjoy HN immensely and have been participating without major issues for a decade, it would be hard for me to say even this place is the gold standard of communication. The upvote system, for example, is the major contributor to echo chamber hive mind mob thinking.
Well it's not just scale. It's also a series of business decisions that hurt civility in various ways:
1. Focus on engagement means a focus on rage inducing, soundbite esque content that provokes anger rather than a reasonable conversation.
2. Algorithmic timelines mean content is often personalised to the user, potentially either leading to an echo chamber or a fight (by showing content from people the user fundamentally disagrees with)
3. Moderation is virtually nonexistent, outsourced to third world support teams or applied unevenly/unfairly, both encouraging bad behaviour and making those affected think the system is against them.
4. Short character limits and mobile focused designs encourage snarky responses and short putdowns over more thoughtful responses.
5. The focus on reply times and posting speed in how comments are shown encourages responding based on the title alone (on sites like Reddit especially)
6. Upvote/downvote system encourages people to see content as good or bad and nothing else, with the definitions of such being heavily based on whether the content agrees with their personal biases.
And many, many other factors. Most social media sites and services are designed to make people act as unreasonably as possible.
Social networks as a concept are also a huge net positive, in my view. Corporate leeches trying to monetize everything about human interaction, we're better off without. Which does include Facebook and increasingly includes Xitter.
I disagree. While corporate interests make social networks worse, regular people are tend to be major asshats on any social network, a concept that was already known in the late 90s and today it is widespread, and crosses any cultural, economical and contextual reason. It is safe to say humans on the internet eventually behave like asshats.
The real difference between social media and real life is that you can get punched in the face for being an asshat, and in general we have a lot of brain power dedicated to making sure we fit into our tribal group and physical context.
Mind you, I did not say the Internet is an absolute negative, but in my view, the enormous benefit of instantaneous communication is negated by the impossibility of measured discourse with more than two dozen strangers.
>you can get punched in the face for being an asshat
So you believe this is right, then? I think that's literally the biggest problem with our species; it all comes down to violence, in the end.
Doesn't matter how much we've progressed society, women's rights, gay right's etc - apparently the rule of law is still "yeah, well, I can punch you in the face!" and so long as the puncher fits into societal norms, everyone will clap and cheer!
Damn we really do just form layers upon layers of tribes, and boy do we still have a lust for tribal warfare.
Ugh.. this is exactly the problem. There are nuances to my argument that your knee jerk reaction just conveniently ignores, and claims that I want violence for any degree of disagreement. "And everybody will clap and cheer!" Seriously?
This is why people cannot have intelligent discourse on the Internet. Instead of giving me the benefit of the doubt and space to elaborate my case, you point to me and say "look at this troglodyte, everybody," and find a way to use the causes and ideologies you believe in (women and gay rights, which have nothing to do with my argument) as a weapon to demonize me and my words.
If you do not see that as terrifying and anti-intellectual, you have been spending too much time on the Internet, because I truly believe that if we were sat in front of each other we would find we are of the same general opinion and would enjoy a pleasant conversation.
Honestly, this is quite tiring, so I have no interest in engaging further. You won. Have a good day.
With the length of your response, you could have actually elaborated your point further, perhaps without the drama (or with it, both is still good. Real emotion is the spicy magic that separates us from LLMs).
Capitol cops might disagree... This country has had a recent armed insurrection and people convicted of seditious conspiracy. Meanwhile the people who organized it see themselves as the victims of weaponized law enforcement and call for violence against law enforcement institutions such as judges, attorney generals, etc. It's not the entire real world, but you've got to admit it isn't just a Twitter bubble that's crazy polarized.
Yeah, a bunch of poor ignorant rednecks invading the capitol was almost an armed insurrection that almost took the power in the most powerful police state of the world.
Have people that believe this stupid bullshit ever thought more than a couple of seconds about it? What are those folks going to do later? Invade the pentagon?
Yes, the USA has become a laughable banana republic with almost Soviet amounts of propaganda. But insurrections don’t work like that. Can’t you fucking see the propaganda?
Had they destroyed the ballots, had they killed Pence, we would have been in uncharted legal and constitutional territory.
It wasn’t the insurgents who would have taken control of the government. It was the man driving them to destruction who would have taken advantage of the chaos to stay in power.
The capitol riot thing was a stalling tactic. The ones trying to take over the government were NOT the people pooping on Nancy Pelosi's desk. We have their notes, talking about how they we submitting false electors. We know Pence called up a friend to ask whether he could come up with a legal theory to justify the process. He only didn't go through with it because he thought the plotters would kill him. A significant portion of the Republican party STILL voted to not confirm Biden as president after it happened.
The real world might be tragic, violent, or worse. But, inhumane conduct on the "metaverse" is much more normalized and common than in the relative considerate society I live in.
I understand the bias here. It might be reason behind this comment. Nevertheless, it's real.
You can also go the other way. There's always going to be the possibility of a chicken/egg type question, but it seems clear that a lot of the insanity and division started to happen about the time people started trying to control (and started caring so much about) what other people say and think. It just feels like there was this sudden flip of a switch where suddenly there was this idea that if you control 'the message', you can control what people think, and a certain group of people vigorously pursued this.
It's not hard to see how this is going to drive people into deeply divided groups. You immediately end up with an in-group and an out-group, both with good reason to avoid the other. And then in this division, both groups characterization of the other drifts further and further from reality, further cementing such divisions. This site [1] demonstrating the scale of the perception gap among various groups is quite telling. I don't think it was like this, at all, not that long ago.
> It just feels like there was this sudden flip of a switch where
suddenly there was this idea that if you control 'the message', you
can control what people think, and a certain group of people
vigorously pursued this.
I locate this moment quite precisely. It was when either Richard Perle
or Donald Rumsfeld responded to a journalist's live TV question about
'the reality' in Iraq II, and said "We control reality". That was
when narrative paradigm took a dark turn in the West and I see the
PNAC as taking internal psyops to a whole new, overt level.
All politicians _know_ this, but you never _say it_ !!
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and company publicly burned
the precious veneer of good faith.
They didn't just want to construct the Iraq War, they needed to rub
our noses in the blatant cheek of it.
That was the birth of "post truth" for me.
After that it naturally followed that every organisation, business, or
individual could legitimately construct their own "narrative reality"
through social media or whatever, without any regard for facts.
On the other hand, people seem to listen to what they like to hear. 'T digs coal' and 'climate change is mostly a hoax', 'we are going to replace <disgrace> with _something much better_'. I don't believe a majority believed it but they acted differently. So my tentative conclusion would be, the public is the problem. Which is sadly even worse than 'platform X is the problem'.
An argument against this is that this is nothing new, yet the new radical divisions are. It happened both relatively recently, and extremely rapidly. If you described the state of society today to an American 25 years ago, I think exactly 100% would think you were borderline out of your mind, because it's all been just such an irrational and illogical trajectory from where we were headed.
If you look at the big divide in the past, slavery, it was on a scale many orders of magnitude worse than anything we could debate on modern times, yet it still took society just under a century to completely collapse over it. And it's not like society was more impassive. In the midst of that century you had things like a vice president killing a Founding Father in a duel, over political disagreements.
Slavery was highly contentious, at all levels, from day 0 of the United States. That's where Thomas Jefferson's "All men are created equal." line came from. In the original draft of the Declaration, he included a lengthy diatribe against slavery, but it was removed in the final draft - presumably under pressure from slave interests. That conflict, over such a meaningful issue, still took near to 100 years to collapse into the Civil War.
Back to modern times, I don't think it's hyperbolic to see secessionary momentum following the election next year, regardless of who wins, as an at least reasonably possible scenario. And if it does, then we're 9/10ths of the way there. And it's not even entirely clear what happened. It's just like things divided hard in an incredibly brief period of time.
What if that is the actual state of the country and Twitter is just reflecting it?