Social Media: An Apology

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-elders-social-media-apology/?include_text=1

by xuande • 8 years ago

79 50 8 years ago

datatracker.ietf.org

mewse-hn• 8 years ago

The elders of the internet use a hotmail address??

giancarlostoro• 8 years ago

That's how old they are. :)

mattl• 8 years ago

Hotmail was mid 90s. What did they use for the ~20 years prior to that?

stilley2• 8 years ago

That was probably my favorite part.

wpietri4• 8 years ago

It was the first big webmail provider. Assuming they registered it early on, that email address is old enough to drink now. And very much needs to, I'm sure.

wpietri4• 8 years ago

In retrospect, we should have known; USENET was a pretty clear warning.

100% true.

Another good data point is John Gabriel's Great Internet Fuckwad Theory: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

That was written 14 years ago, effectively before modern social media. This problem has been a long time coming. The problem isn't that we couldn't know. It's that people kept thinking it would magically be different this time.

cirgue• 8 years ago

It's that people kept thinking it would magically be different this time.

I don't think that's the problem, rather it's that the overwhelming majority of people currently on the internet are completely unaware there was a 'last time'.

mfoy_2• 8 years ago

the overwhelming majority of people currently on the internet are completely unaware

Generally just this.

wpietri4• 8 years ago

I don't think the people who created Usenet were entirely unaware of human social dynamics. And the people who created things like Twitter certainly weren't unaware that Usenet, mailing lists, and web forums existed.

But at best, they had an incredibly rosy view of what was going on. E.g., looking back, a Twitter founder claims that in 2006 everyone "was cool": https://twitter.com/rasmus_kleis/status/974552443789836288

Given Gabriel's theory, that's obvious bunk. And having talked to some online community pioneers, abuse started pretty much from the get go. Look at all the replies I got when I brought it up on Twitter, for example. Story after story of early experiences of trolling, abuse, etc: https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/974847531317211136

There was (and is) a strong strain of technoutopianism, where we take the shiny new possibility and project a perfect future onto it. This goes back at least as far as the introduction of the telegraph, which many thought would bring about world peace: https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Ninetee...

As Neiwart documents, though, many of the terrible people online today are intellectual descendants of the terrible people who were doing their social networking in person and via the mail: https://www.amazon.com/Alt-America-Rise-Radical-Right-Trump/...

kleff• 8 years ago

John Gabriel's Great Internet Fuckwad Theory

I think facebook has easily proven that the anonymity part of that equation is _very_ optional.

WorkLobster• 8 years ago

A few years later, after some discussion, they revisited it as "normal person minus consequences plus audience equals total fuckwad".[1]

The post is worth the quick read; I like the suggestion that the solution is more clearly implicit this way.

[1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/18/the-coroll...

cryptonector3• 8 years ago

The next sentence is:

We will do better.

Yeah, I don't think so.

FLUX-YOU• 8 years ago

There's not really much you can respond with, so I'm just gonna type some words so I'm not just leaving a one word post on HN:

"Okay"

mfoy_2• 8 years ago

It was really easy to be an egalitarian before social media caught on in a big way... Now more and more elections are going the way of populism and truth has taken a back seat.

I currently try to employ mitigation methods 2.3 and 2.4. If you slip on 2.3 you can generally compensate by leaning more heavily on 2.4.

mxuribe• 8 years ago

That's funny my flow is in the opposite direction: I use method 2.4 (responsibly and without abuse, and with a different goal in mind) first, which leads to apathy of social media, which results in naturally applying method 2.3. I guess we both reach our intended goals, so it speaks to the effectiveness of the methods! ;-)

IGI-1113• 8 years ago

I know this is a joke (although only partly), but blocklists are honestly part of the problem.

People got to this ridiculous level of childlike annoyance at the mere existence of dissent through group effects alone, but compounding it by literally removing any form of conflict seems like the worst solution possible.

The solution to people acting terribly on the public square shouldn't be to remove it.

TheIronYuppie• 8 years ago

There is a fair bit of scholarship that says this is incorrect. Most commonly, people cute the paradox of tolerance as a starting point[1], but there's lots more.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

bena2• 8 years ago

I don't think he's invoking that. That we must be tolerant of intolerance lest we become intolerant ourselves.

I think he's saying that that the ease of which we can cut out any information that challenges our beliefs does more harm than good.

I'm sure you're a fine, upstanding, rational person who will always consider every viewpoint and come to a reasoned conclusion based on the facts every time and won't let emotions dictate any part of your decision.

However, not everyone is so disciplined. Don't consider the rational actor. Consider the irrational. Consider the flat-earther who can personally silence any sources that provide evidence to the contrary. Just stuck in their little bubble of misinformation. Then when something does sneak through their filter, they'll regard it as the anomaly because everything else they see confirms what they already know.

Now, there is some benefit to being able to silence certain opinions. I for one don't need flat-earthers constantly pushing their narrative that flies in the face of facts. But, then again, they feel the same way. I believe I've considered their evidence and their viewpoint fairly and have come to a conclusion rationally. But so do they. I believe I'm right, I'm fairly certain of it. But so are they.

It comes down to believing that personal abuse should be silenced. If I'm just blatantly attacking you or you're attacking me with no other goal but to be insulting, then being able to block each other seems fine. But to be able to silence information just because you disagree with it seems a bit more dodgy.

IGI-1113• 8 years ago

People misuse Popper a whole lot. The paradox has more to do with being firm on the application of the rule of law as it pertains to violence than a metapolitical discussion.

mkirklions• 8 years ago

I can see this too.

Reddit fitness mods seem to be sponsoring workouts. Instead of doing the methods that work, they are peddling a few select workouts that have questionable effectiveness.

So they ban people for suggesting other plans, which only compounds in resentment. It seems almost daily topics talking about Starting Strength workouts are deleted, but there are too many people that already know about it.

Talk about a weird community to be part of..

Gargoyle• 8 years ago

I get where you're coming from, and the point is valid in many ways.

But I'm relentless in cutting consistently negative people from my social media feeds, and its made my personal experience so much better.

While appreciate the principles you're discussing, I just don't need the constant negativity.

dnomad• 8 years ago

Yes, the great failure of the internet is that it is lacks of standard mechanisms that exist in polite society to exclude the assholes. Being an asshole is cheap on the web and so you get lots of assholes. IRL being an asshole (at least in some states) has very high consequences and so you get civilization. Fixing the web is just a matter of rediscovering appropriate mechanisms to correct, silence, and ultimately exclude those who have nothing to contribute and no value to add. Google, Facebook and Twitter will inevitably clean up their spaces and new norms will ultimately be enforced. At that point things will mostly return to normal.

Of course the great thing about the web is also that it's so big. We don't need to literally silence the assholes. They should feel free to congregate in various Youtube comment threads and on boards like 4chan and voat.

tptacek6• 8 years ago

A microscopic percentage of social media users have even heard of blocklists, let alone use them, but it's the people who forcefully opt themselves out of pointless Internet arguments that are the problem? That's a ridiculous and telling argument.

ilikehurdles• 8 years ago

A majority percentage of social media users have their content catered such that it agrees with their sensibilities. Whether they've heard of blocklists or not, things they don't like are effectively blocked from appearing before their eyes.

IGI-1113• 8 years ago

You're arguing for the personal right to act a certain way as I understand it.

I'm arguing that such an action has terrible ramifications on a large enough scale.

These are not mutually exclusive. There's no reason that we can't construct places where public discourse of controversial ideas is possible yet people are not forced to engage in such.

It's certainly something we haven't succeeded at yet, and a hard problem altogether, but we do need it otherwise we're doomed to that one dystopia where "nobody is questioned yet nobody is right".

mikro2nd2• 8 years ago

Note:

    2.4.  Whisky
          For those unable to leave social media or otherwise curtail their use.

With the caveat that while imbibing Whisky (or Whiskey, if you prefer) social media SHOULD be configured as a read-only medium.

koolba• 8 years ago

I think it's more effective if it's still read-write but the output is redirected to /dev/null.

mikro2nd2• 8 years ago

I'd dispute with you, but I'm drinking Whisky!

smacktoward• 8 years ago

The Edlers of the Internet note with sorrow the passing of our former member, Stephen Hawking, aka "The Hawk." You will be missed.

Apparently the Elders of the Internet are too old to know about spell-check :-D

lainga• 8 years ago

No, the Internet was founded in Austria-Hungary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edler

peterkelly• 8 years ago

Origin of the "Elders of the Internet" term, for the uninitiated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg

swanlyk• 8 years ago

“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community"

Umberto Eco

Social Media: An Apology

Related Stories