The Silence Is Deafening

https://devonzuegel.com/post/the-silence-is-deafening

by pagade • 6 years ago

438 223 6 years ago

ferros• 6 years ago

On top of all this there is an arbiter (social network) that filters and decides what is important enough be shared maximally. Before anybody even hears your conversation it has been filtered to a degree, there is no organic interpretation of the situation by the group like there would be in real life.

dvt• 6 years ago

I have a few friends that are trying to "solve this problem" -- ranging from ideas on better, more inclusive social networks, to vetting (news) sources and ideas, to self-governance, to curation-heavy communities.

I personally don't really think it's a "problem" -- people simply, on average, just don't care about other opinions (especially opposing ones). This happens on both sides of any debate. Why learn about, study, and discuss the moral implications of abortion and wade through its ethical morass when you can just share some provocative meme? Why actually read the W.E.B DuBois and Booker T. Washington debates when you can just share some celebrity's shallow BLM Tweet? Hacker News is a rare gem[1]. Most people aren't educated, curious, and willing to accept when/if they're wrong. This is exacerbated by the re-emergence of yellow journalism in mainstream media (where accountability for misleading or even false headlines is nonexistent) because these days it's all about the clicks.

So we're left with Twitter and Facebook. And people, on average, like their echo chambers. They don't want to be challenged or poked or prodded. In 2020, Socrates would be banned from Twitter.

[1] Although, perhaps as a sign of the times, even this post is getting downvoted without any discussion.

lifeisstillgood2• 6 years ago

I fear you are being over cynical. I think most people don't have the time or energy to care about so many different things. The person we imagine in the conversation will care deeply about family, friends. Possibly about their work and maybe one or two "big" issues - but grief there are a lot of issues being top-of-lungs- screamed right now and ten more to come.

Take our persona abi e and put them on a citizens jury and give them two weeks paid time to get involved in an issue (like Irish did on abortion laws) and we will see nuanced balanced decision making (which we may or may not agree with).

And for the very big issues that become part of the "public conversation" this does happen - I am pretty sure that most people in the UK considered the issues around Brexit as deeply as they wanted to - there was time motivation and information available to all.

So for most issues yes they fly past us all, covered in fake news and attention grabbing antics, and sometimes we get angry but most of the time it's just wallpaper.

I don't like the wallpaper and don't think it's conducive to pleasant conversation but I doubt few people are actually fooled.

pjc504• 6 years ago

Brexit was dominated by misinformation and bad prospectouses far more than any recent election. People voted against things that were not going to happen any time soon, and in favor of things that were never going to be delivered, like the extra NHS money.

fzeroracer• 6 years ago

I think the problem I have with this argument is that it assumes 'Angry Alice' is there to argue in good faith. Unfortunately I've learned that there are many, many 'Angry Alices' out there that exist solely to rile up people and they get validation out of misleading people or tricking reasonable people.

At the dinner party it's much harder to pull off this sort of trick because you're dealing with very real people face to face. Once you've caused large amounts of friction with people in reality, they're less likely to engage with you and will outright avoid you.

But when you're on the internet, you have an endless supply of people that you can troll. And often it's become harder and harder to separate the trolls from what people actually believe.

totemandtoken2• 6 years ago

The author does mention that though, except they call a bad-faith arguer a "grifter" instead of a "troll."

ponker• 6 years ago

The distinction I keep is that trolls do it for fun and grifters do it for money. There is a lot of money in the outrage industry and lots of prospectors looking for gold.

mcguire2• 6 years ago

I suspect that they mean "griefer". A grifter is a conman.

arto• 6 years ago

"The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots." -- H.L. Mencken

pabo2• 6 years ago

I think he hits the nail in the head. He's main observation is this:

"...digital spaces generally have no equivalent of a disapproving glare. You're stuck choosing between staying silent and entering the fray, with few options in between. If you have little reason to believe that other reasonable people will back you up, you're going to stick with the default: silence."

In this permanent work from home situation, I can relate...

apsec112• 6 years ago

FWIW, Devon is a woman:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200524035931/https://devonzueg...

pabo2• 6 years ago

Ohh, thanks for pointing that out.

yummypaint• 6 years ago

Being anonymous seems to be an exception to this. Social barriers are removed and then its just a question of the energy needed to type somethong out. Of course there are all kinds of tradeoffs, but it's striking how much online communication has been de-anonymized over the last 20 years.

totemandtoken2• 6 years ago

Love this. One of the most frustrating aspects of social media is the lack of feedback, or maybe more accurately the one-sidedness of the feedback. I personally assume that means no one cares about what I write, but maybe they just don't have the energy to tell me off. Either way, this hits the nail right on the head in my opinion

lifeisstillgood2• 6 years ago

The digital "tut" is perhaps a inter-social-media protocol we could create.

Like a downvote, it indicates disapproval and starts trying to, as this article persuasively says, move social nuance online.

Twitter, Facebook et al could all have this alongside a like button, on a RESTful interface so it's agnostic about the client.

Many, many years ago I stumbled across a web page hosted on a white supremacist site but was third in google's ranking for Martin Luther King search term. It struck me then that what would be useful was not for me to link to that site (hence adding to its pagerank) but to link to that site with an href attribute that indicated something was wrong about the facts presented.

I think overall this is the same problem of short selling - and it's not clear how to fix it.

chillacy2• 6 years ago

Humans seem to have evolved to live in small-ish societies where being given the "cold shoulder" or being ostracized was a great danger. I'm always mixed though whether abandoning that is good or bad.

On the one hand in liberal societies we're more free to express ourselves than ever, love whomever, etc. On the other hand, it does seem like anyone can find a subculture for whatever they believe in, even if it's destructive.

pferde• 6 years ago

Well, Usenet has its own version of "tut": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plonk_(Usenet)

christiansakai• 6 years ago

It seems like too much work, and not sure if it is a good use of someone's time to keep answering and writing long facts to people, or random strangers.

It isn't realistic to expect everyone, or the majority of people, do this on the internet.

FailMore2• 6 years ago

There are two services (one built by me) out there which have this in mind, providing an online space for deep public discussions around a topic.

Taaalk (https://taaalk.co/) is mine. It is currently less focused around debate, and more around exploring topics:

E.g. OCD: https://taaalk.co/t/exploring-obsessive-compulsive-disorder Eating disorders: https://taaalk.co/t/discussing-eating-disorders Bitcoin: https://taaalk.co/t/bitcoin-maxima-other-crypto-things Flag design: https://taaalk.co/t/the-power-and-significance-of-flags Chess: https://taaalk.co/t/how-to-think-about-chess Psychedelics & Mental Health: https://taaalk.co/t/falling-inward-discussing-the-role-of-ps...

Etc...

Another alternative that is built by a fellow HNer is Debubble (https://debubble.me/). It is more focused around debate than Taaalk. There are a fixed number of messages / discussion.

uhhyeahdude• 6 years ago

Oh, wow... I clicked on one of the topics on your site, a topic of great personal relevance, and I really like what I see so far.

I’m on a quick break, but later on I would like to join the discussion, because it seems like a healthy environment that is oriented around understanding, inclusivity, and mutual aid.

I’m sorry to be so vague with my feedback, but I figure it is still at least a little bit useful, and hopefully even a little encouraging as a small validation of the concept. Thank you!

FailMore2• 6 years ago

No problem, thank you for it.

If you want to email me about anything, my email is in my bio.

sideshowb3• 6 years ago

I quite like the approach of https://www.kialo.com/explore/featured

Discussions in a more visual tree format for easier navigation and reduce duplication of points (I appreciate hn and Reddit are trees already, but this takes a different direction)

eitland• 6 years ago

This was so interesting I posted it to HN now. Often when I do someone has already done so and my posting becomes an upvote, but not this time.

burlesona2• 6 years ago

This article made me realize, part of the quality of the conversation on HN comes from the ability to downvote.

I’ve never thought about this before, but one of the effects of Twitter and Facebook only having positive reinforcement is that you don’t get the “disapproving stare.” It’s possible for a person to “like” with some degree of anonymity and no effort, but not possible to do the reverse. Worse, since the Algorithms heavily bias content based on “likes,” there’s no recognition of content that is actually broadly liked versus content that is polar.

Also, for individual posters in places with downvoting, the little dopamine hit you get from upvotes is heavily countered by the bad feeling of downvotes.

I know that in my own participation on HN I will occasionally think of a snarky thing to say, but usually don’t post it because I know it’ll get downvoted, which I don’t like, and that moment of hesitation is usually enough for me to think “yeah that is actually unhelpful and not worth posting.”

This all probably very obvious to most of this crowd, but I honestly haven’t considered it before. How different would the world be if Facebook and Twitter merely had dislike buttons to go along with likes?

quotemstr• 6 years ago

Reddit has downvotes as well and its conversations are uniformly bad. Slate Star Codex has a creaky old antique of a comment system without voting at all, but its conversations were of the highest quality. So are LWN's. I don't think voting mechanics affect discussion quality as much as you think. What matters a lot more is a sense of mutual respect, shared purpose, and, honestly, a certain level of average intellectual horsepower.

donw• 6 years ago

I'd argue that it's the norms that a community develops.

LWN and SSC had excellent discussion because their respective communities focus on both promoting quality and policing bad behavior -- go off the rails, and you'll get a bunch of folks trying to help you get back on.

It's Peelian policing[1] for internet forums.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

chroem-• 6 years ago

Reddit will ban you if you vote the "wrong" way. (HN has similar mechanisms in place as well.) Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23601595

mundo• 6 years ago

I'm a huge fan of Scott's writing, but the forum discussions at SSC did not seem particularly good (for any value of good - niceness, erudition, signal-to-noise, etc) to me. Certainly they were much worse than HN on average.

commandlinefan• 6 years ago

Slate Star Codex has

Had, sadly. Still deleted.

Chris20487• 6 years ago

I think it's specialism. The topic that defines the community, dictates what kind of people are likely to join.

If youTube only server IT-related videos, it wouldn't be 1/100th as popular, but the comments would probably be much higher quality.

noizejoy• 6 years ago

I respectfully doubt it, since YouToube and many news site comment sections allow up and down voting. And they are still generally dumpster fires.

My vote goes towards quality moderation being the key difference maker in the quality of discourse.

chrisco2552• 6 years ago

The downvote on YouTube comments does nothing.

burlesona2• 6 years ago

That’s a good point, I hadn’t thought of YouTube.

FWIW I also understand how valuable moderation is and I think it is more impactful than downvoting. I just had never considered before that downvoting was, at least potentially, a valuable tool to increase civility.

miles• 6 years ago

This article made me realize, part of the quality of the conversation on HN comes from the ability to downvote.

It also comes from persistent, patient moderation. Here's one example from Dan[1] that recently opened my eyes to just how valuable it can be:

"Please don't post snarky dismissals here. Maybe you don't owe Quora better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it."

His comment proactively dissuaded me from joining in the fray and posting something that wouldn't provide some measure of value for the HN community.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23646883

Taek• 6 years ago

Most high quality communities have active moderation. And many times, the vast majority of moderated activity is as simple as the mod privately telling a member to chill out or adjust their attitude. Don't need bans or downvotes even, most people will happily comply with a mod request simply because the request was made.

ipnon• 6 years ago

This is a striking point. In most "real life" communities, there will be someone who gets the final word on whether something said is acceptable. Think mom or dad at the dinner table, the CEO at a private company, or the principal at a high school. They are effectively the moderators of the public forum they physically inhabit.

We do, however, structure this moderation as a hierarchy and it self organizes. The mom has the final say on acceptability, but in her absence, the older sister takes this role. We rarely see this structure in online communities. Should downvotes be weighted by the karma of the voter?

karl11• 6 years ago

I think this is right, but would add that it is also key that the vast majority of here have a lot of trust in YC + moderators and nearly universally view them as good faith actors. This wouldn’t work on CNN.com.

daenz• 6 years ago

I've come to the opposite conclusion about downvoting. To me, downvoting is the most useful to people with an agenda to push. They can "push" the agenda by both upvoting posts that support it and downvoting posts that are against it, regardless of post quality. Either action is equally beneficial for the narrative. It essentially gives people two upvotes. Normal users, not trying to push an agenda, do not have this "two upvote" advantage, since they are generally not upvoting/downvoting content in a narrative-consistent way.

flyinglizard• 6 years ago

If you take that view, then it appears downvoting is much more potent than upvoting. An upvoted post would at most rise to the top of its tree, but a downvoted post will eventually disappear.

chrisco2552• 6 years ago

What I like about HN's approach is that the comment's score is hidden from the public, so you don't as often get the dogpiling effect.

Chris20487• 6 years ago

You are also encouraged not to give feedback in such cases, as I believe you cannot up/down-vote threads you participate in?

grawprog2• 6 years ago

I think with hn, it's more than just the downvote, it's the subtle greying out of the comment each vote below zero until finally being killed at -4.

This is a bit different than say reddit where downvotes can just keep going on and on and a comment with -120 votes is just as visible as a comment with -1 and only a quick click away from being as visible as positively voted comments.

Hn's comment greying reminds me more of just silently being shut out or ignored and gives you immediate visual feedback as to the relevance, or lack thereof, of what you said.

chiefalchemist2• 6 years ago

I see the value in having a limit to down votes, but that shouldn't elminate the comment. Like every community HN has norms. If you have an opinion that's not popular - valid or not - it can get down voted. That doesn't mean the voice shouldn't be heard.

Mind you, if something is a violation then let the moderators handle it. But there is a difference between unpopular and violation, even on HN.

snazz2• 6 years ago

The default New Reddit experience does hide heavily downvoted comments.

CodeWriter232• 6 years ago

This article made me realize, part of the quality of the conversation on HN comes from the ability to downvote.

It’s a little more nuanced than that. The downvote alone gave rise to the “Bury Brigades” and the ensuing Groupthink that killed Digg. HN used to suffer the same problem, though not fatally so, and I think @dang has made some code mods to curtail that. Plus his awesome efforts as our moderator.

762236• 6 years ago

HN uses downvotes for disagreement, not just because someone is being a jerk. How is that good? The top comment becomes the group-think comment.

mjevans2• 6 years ago

I want to elaborate:

Downvotes are good for BAD COMMENTS. Things which do not add constructively to a discussion.

If someone DISAGREES however, that is what a reply beneath stating the disagreement is for.

buboard3• 6 years ago

I 'd really like to see some research on this. Is there any studies from reddit etc to show whether positive or negative reinforcement works better?

Viliam1234• 6 years ago

quality = min(community, interface)

If the community is bad, it doesn't matter what tools you use, people are going to write and upvote bad stuff, and sometimes downvote good stuff if such option exists, flagging will be misused, etc. There is no way to conjure a good discussion out of bad actors.

On the other hand, any community will contain a few bad actors. If not now, then definitely when the community becomes famous. The good guys may try to stop them, but it depends on user interface how comparatively easy it is to wreak havoc vs police the behavior. If the good members outnumber the bad ones 10:1, but it is 100 times easier to post bad stuff than to remove it, the website is doomed. Ideally, fixing problems should be so easy that moderators won't get tired doing it.

Related problem is that an online community cannot work on pure democracy, because it is simple to create sockpuppet accounts, and also unless the community is huge, it can be easily overrun by hordes of real people coming e.g. from Twitter. Again, a reasonable user interface will assign greater powers to established users over the newcomers. But it needs some metric to do so, for example the total karma gained. Again, if the core members are bad, they will abuse the rules for petty reasons.

When people complain about some features of the interface, typically about downvoting or even karma as such, they usually correctly point out how the feature can be abused, but forget to consider how a lack of the feature could be abused. For example, downvotes can be used to suppress dissent, and karma can lead to hive minds. However, websites without downvotes are easy to spam (whether by literal ads, or just a small group of people pushing their agenda everywhere, upvoting each other). The standard solution to spam is blocking, but then we have gone full circle, because blocking can also be used to suppress dissent, except it is done per user instead of per comment. (A good website needs both mechanisms. Sometimes there is a bad comment from otherwise good user, but also some users consistently post lots of bad stuff.)

Also, ultimately there is no way to build an online community that would make everyone happy, even if we exclude the obvious trolls. People have different opinions, duh. Most people don't like the environments where the opposite opinion is a norm; many dislike even when the opinions are balanced; and for some even hearing the opposite opinion, no matter how small the minority that supports it, is beyond the pale. Deep in our hearts, most of us want to live in a bubble; we just don't want to retreat to the bubble and give up the places we enjoy, we would rather prefer the bubble to grow and swallow the places we enjoy. We all can't have it this way, so someone is going to complain no matter what.

Ghjklov• 6 years ago

speak out
get attacked
stay silent
get attacked

It used to be that the only way to win a losing game is to not play, but even now that's not an option anymore.

danlugo92• 6 years ago

How do you exactly get attacked by staying silent?

commander_k33n2• 6 years ago

A common slogan these days is "Silence is violence.".

jger15• 6 years ago

Curious if this is related to the Balaji Srinivasan/Taylor Lorenz spat on Twitter.

tambourine_man2• 6 years ago

Here you go, server is currently giving me 503

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

On a side note, why does Google make it so hard for mobile users to use its cache feature?

dredmorbius• 6 years ago

IA WBM is a more reliable archive tool:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200703225029/https://devonzueg...

tambourine_man2• 6 years ago

Yes, but it's a bit slower too.

11thEarlOfMar• 6 years ago

A big part of in person conversations are about building equity in the relationship. Even from the first encounter, you express what you think about and how you think about it and look for places that your thoughts intersect with others. Those that have a beneficial intersection you're likely to explore further, invest more and build more equity.

Online, there is little chance that you'll establish a new relationship and build equity with other users. You've got hundreds or thousands of followers, so do they and in many cases, the person you respond to may never see your reply, let alone remember your username for more than a few minutes.

These exchanges can be so fleeting because you're both typically anonymous. Anonymity is antithetical to trust and trust is required for equity. There is little that an anonymous person can do for you, and little you could do for them.

Contrast Twitter and LinkedIn. Both have feeds and allow messaging and conversations. But since you know the people you're interacting with on LinkedIn, many times personally, you are civil, helpful and courteous because one day they may actually be able to do something to benefit you. You invest in them and building equity in your relationship in expectation that if there is something you can do for them, or they can do for you in the future, it's there to leverage.

Twitter just feels like, I dunno, looking for love in all the wrong places?

People have a multitude of purposes for engaging online anonymously. Learning or trolling, ego support or battling boredom, maybe a better solution would be to target those purposes as independent platforms and structure the dialog to support the purpose.

mirimir• 6 years ago

Yeah, friends have occasionally encouraged me to use Twitter, over the years since the mid 00s. But it's never appealed to me, and so I have ~no experience with it, except from following posted links.

But anyway, you say:

Anonymity is antithetical to trust and trust is required for equity. There is little that an anonymous person can do for you, and little you could do for them.

While that's generally so, I have developed many more-or-less long-term anonymous relationships, over the past couple decades. And some of them have led to interesting collaborations, and even paying work.

Reelin2• 6 years ago

I was with you until you pinned the problems on anonymity. Correlation does not imply causation. In this particular case there are (IMO) many counterexamples regarding anonymity, including HN in particular.

A different comment here points out the (effectively unquantifiable) risk that more or less indelible comments can pose in the future if they can be trivially linked back to a permanent identity.

Interestingly, your explanation in terms of equity actually holds up without considering anonymity. If you instead frame it in terms of purpose for visiting the site it makes sense that Twitter would have a disproportionate number of users who exhibited little concern for building equity. This is also consistent with the toxic behavior that often occurs on Facebook, where real names and interacting with people local to your area are by far the norm.

buboard3• 6 years ago

There are a lot of people IRL who blabber on, usually people ignore them/consider them obnoxious. Somehow they haven't developed this ability online

ChrisMarshallNY11• 6 years ago

I suspect that a lot of the nice behavior on HN is because, for the most part, people value the community, and consider this a "professional" environment, and it's not a bad idea to play nice in places where employers/ees can see us show our butts.

LinkedIn was like that (in fact, sickeningly saccharine), but it's starting to fray.

Slashdot was good for a while, then CNN and YouTube kicked off their trolls, and they all went to /. It's now the place to go, if you want swastika ASCII art.

StackOverflow manages to be a painful place to participate, even though they are sincerely trying to be decent. I think it's way too "gamified," and competitive.

For myself, I'm an old troll. I admit that I was a right bastard, back in the UseNet days.

I am trying to atone.

One of the ways that I do that, is make all my info connected with every place I participate. If I am a jerk, you know where to find me. Alternatively, if I make a good impression, you know where to find me.

I also pay attention to downvotes. If a post I make gets a couple of rapid downvotes, I nuke it. Sometimes, I understand why; sometimes, not. It's just not worth it to me.

I am also making an effort not to engage too much. I may have a one-or-two-post back and forth, just to see if we can come to an accommodation, then it's "Have a great day!". Totally OK to let someone else have the last word. I have better uses for my time.

jimbob45• 6 years ago

I agree with you on StackOverflow mostly but their penchant for moving 1v1 arguments into extended chat and then providing a link to said chat for anyone to see is something that I wish was adopted by other sites.

ChrisMarshallNY11• 6 years ago

This is true. It does work, except that whenever they invite me to chat, they ignore what I have to say. It's like the teenage game of "snipe hunt," where they take you out to "catch the snipe," then all go home, leaving you out there, holding the bag.

They have found very polite ways to be rude.

stevedewald• 6 years ago

I'd encourage you to consider NOT nuking a post/comment just because it gets downvotes. We already have too many people afraid to speak for fear of judgement by the mob. You're clearly a thoughtful person, and I believe the silent majority out there would appreciate more diversity of opinions.

ChrisMarshallNY11• 6 years ago

Thanks. I do value this community, and try to be a good citizen.

Like I said, I am trying to make amends. One of the symptoms of that, is that I can come across as "stuffy."

Also, I do want to put out a good image of myself, but that can come across as "self-promotion," something I'm downright awful at. I'm also pretty much terrible at relating (tends to come across as "making it all about me"), so it tends to fall flat, when I try.

caymanjim• 6 years ago

There's also something to be said for owning your disliked comments, for better or worse.

Barrin922• 6 years ago

I honestly feel it would be a good idea to remove them. Just let people upvote. There's something disproportionately mean about downvotes. They're not just a lack of upvotes, they're like beating someone up with a stick.

They're almost never used for their actual purpose anyway, which is to rank down uninformative or just dumb posts, they always end up being utilized in heated discussions as a way to stick it to whoever someone is arguing with.

ghostpepper• 6 years ago

Maybe it's confirmation bias but it seems that it's getting more and more common to see upvoted posts with the top reply something along the lines of "I don't know this was downvoted ..." followed by a restatement of the OP's comment in a slightly different wording.

jjoonathan4• 6 years ago

A comment that draws mob wrath today is likely to retain that ability into the future. Combine this with the increasing popularity of digging up old comments, taking them out of context, stirring a moral panic, and getting someone fired over them, and it becomes pretty clear that unpopular opinions (and adjacent) in the permanent record represent a serious liability that only increases with time and should not be underestimated.

carapace• 6 years ago

There are several places where comments here are archived in near-real-time. Deleting a comment here is a signal, not an actual "no one can ever see it again" deletion.

treis• 6 years ago

I suspect that a lot of the nice behavior on HN is because, for the most part, people value the community, and consider this a "professional" environment, and it's not a bad idea to play nice in places where employers/ees can see us show our butts.

People here also have made it or perceive that they are on the path to making it. They may think that housing costs are too high or the police are too violent or that outsourcing has been bad for the American worker. But we're by and large not without adequate housing, the target of police violence, or in the poor house. It's easier to be less outraged when you're sitting at the top of the heap.

walterbell3• 6 years ago

Downvotes (like "flagging") can be valuable signals that say more about the micro-communities downvoting than the content being voted upon. There are also downvoting brigades. It may be useful to have a "best of downvoted" HN content, like Slashdot meta-moderation.

e.g. threads involving specific companies or topics can have more polarized voters and commenters.

Mizza• 6 years ago

Or, more simply - they give us enough space to express complex thoughts, and there's good moderation.

The problem in the online culture is very, very simple: Twitter. The basic mechanics of the service create an incredibly awful culture. The mentality it has created now pollutes the rest of the internet, as do screenshots of its content. Only narcissists use Twitter. I know a lot of people in my real life - the people I like don't use Twitter, those I don't like do use Twitter. I think we should simply shun people use who use it, and treat them with disgust, as if we found out they get their news from supermarket tabloids or post obnoxious YouTube comments.

Many other internet platforms have risen and fallen before, I don't know why that one still lurches on.

walterbell3• 6 years ago

There are professional communities on Twitter with collaboration and learning. But it takes effort to curate lists.

mjevans2• 6 years ago

I suspect you're judging too quickly. Those you're having low quality interactions with use the platforms in question //recreationally//. Just like with drugs there's responsible use, and limited use for business, and then there's 'pack a day' use.

djhaskin987• 6 years ago

Or, more simply - they give us enough space to express complex thoughts, and there's good moderation.

This is what it boils down to for me. Slashdot was great because of CmdrTaco and when he left it that was about the time when that site went down the tubes. Hacker news is great because of dang. When the moderators leave, the communities often rot.

hyperpape• 6 years ago

It’s late, and I can’t give this the effort it deserves, but there’s really a huge conflict when you’re saying “only narcissists use Twitter” in a discussion about how to be kind and productive on the Internet.

There’s tons of crap on Twitter, but it’s just absurd to say only narcissists use Twitter.

Disclaimer: I use Twitter, I may be biased against the claim that this makes a narcissist.

msla• 6 years ago

I also pay attention to downvotes. If a post I make gets a couple of rapid downvotes, I nuke it. Sometimes, I understand why; sometimes, not. It's just not worth it to me.

I almost wish downvotes meant enough here I could do that in good conscience. As it is, I have absolutely no idea why I get the downvotes I get, when I get downvotes, so they're not a learning process for me. They might as well be handed out at random. (I hesitate to make accusations.)

ezoe• 6 years ago

My thought is it's because how HN was designed. It doesn't display images and videos, not even for the ads. Also the reply notification is minimal. When you got a reply, HN doesn't use a great effort to notify you. When you don't notice reply that much, you wouldn't reply to the troll that much. Replying to the troll doesn't yield any good outcome for you because troll just want to troll and not intended for a good argument.

In old Japanese 2ch forum, there used to be a saying "Ignore trolls" and if a person behaving bad, they were said, "Be ROM(Read-Only-Member) half an year." It was a wise word.

Also, the number of users is quite small compared to... say, Reddit.

flywheel• 6 years ago

I just deleted my reddit account of 13 years.

Reddit has become overly toxic, and the premise of this article is definitely in effect on reddit. The trolls are winning over there.

HN was a sometimes-read for me, but now it's becoming a daily-read replacing reddit, because it's just less toxic here (I hope).

burntoutfire• 6 years ago

I suspect that a lot of the nice behavior on HN is because, for the most part, people value the community, and consider this a "professional" environment, and it's not a bad idea to play nice in places where employers/ees can see us show our butts.

As I work in dysfunctional industry (enterprise software development), being professional would ruin a lot of the fun of being on HN, as I would have to parrot their dysfunctional beliefs... Hence, I always write from anonymous accounts and decomission them often to make sure I'm not doxxed.

bt4u3• 6 years ago

I don't agree with removing posts due to downvotes. If you made a mistake sure, but if not, stand by what you said. It's not virtuous to be weak

ChrisMarshallNY11• 6 years ago

It's not virtuous to be weak

Wow. Just...wow.

billyjobob• 6 years ago

Slashdot was good for a while, then CNN and YouTube kicked off their trolls, and they all went to /. It's now the place to go, if you want swastika ASCII art.

ASCII art trolling is not new. Penis Bird Guy was a hugely famous Slashdot poster back in the 90s. I agree Slashdot doesn’t seem as good now as it was then, but the problem isn’t that.

roland35• 6 years ago

I think most of my downvoted posts are bad jokes, which is pretty similar to real life for me! I used to take it hard when I had a bad reaction but now I realize that you sometimes take a swing and miss, and that's ok!

I do appreciate that HN is definitely not like reddit where the most of the top comments are one-liner jokes or puns.

syshum• 6 years ago

Self censorship is not a way to progress society, most of society progresses by challenging the main stream narrative, the main stream science, etc.

Like wise anonymous speech has a huge and vital role in much of our history prior to the internet. Since the invention of the printing press people have used pseudonyms for their speech for a wide range of valid reasons

Further still the idea that "Real Names" curbs extremism has been clearly proven false, in fact is drives extremism, precisely because is drives out moderate voices and only the very extremes of the mob is left of yell at each other

Moderate voices will "If a post I make gets a couple of rapid downvotes, I nuke it." that is not a model for healthy debate or discourse

ChrisMarshallNY11• 6 years ago

That's a really good point. I'm not sure that it applies to my own situation, though.

This isn't a place for me to challenge stuff. I come here to learn and to contribute.

Actually, let me amend that. I do like to present a "challenge," in that I want to model respectful, considerate behavior. It has been my experience that this is not always received well. I guess that people feel as if I am being "snooty."

I guarantee that it's far preferable to the way I used to interact with others on teh Internets tubes.

"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."

I have a lot of experience. I have often cleared minefields by dancing through them.

One of the things that I enjoy, is being corrected, because I often learn that way. It may sting a bit, but I am constantly pushing boundaries, and learning new stuff. I write a bit about that, in the referenced Medium post[0].

I have been working with...difficult...people for almost 40 years. I have learned that it's not particularly productive to ram stuff down people's throats; especially if they are someone with a history of violence.

Being "wishy-washy" is also almost as unhelpful, so you will see that I do make strong points, in areas in which I have the authority to do so.

There are those that look at any appearance of moderation or self-restraint as "weakness," as you can see, from this very thread (in fact, one person actually came out and said that), and I often encounter people that mistake kindness for weakness.

They don't like me, when I end up calling them on it.

But I am also keenly aware that it isn't a good idea to hurt someone, if I want them to take me seriously. I have often made inadvertent utterances that have offered hurt, where none was meant. I sincerely regret that. In some cases, I sacrificed valuable relationships, because I made snap judgements, or ran off my mouth.

I am a very kind person, but I am not a weak one. I know that it may not seem like it's possible, but it's quite common to be both kind and strong. I have spent my entire adult life around people like that.

I value the people here. Note that I emphasized "people." I think that the modern social media landscape has encouraged us all to think of the folks on the other end of our communications as "not-people."

[0] https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-...

mcv• 6 years ago

When one of my comments get downvoted, I usually reread it trying to figure out why. Quite often, I realise I didn't explain my point very well and add some better explanation. That usually stops the downvotes and adds some upvotes.

On very rare occasions, I make a point that turned out to be just wrong and not salvageable in any way. If it lead to an interesting discussion, I leave it in place because it still provides context to that discussion, and I admit I'm wrong in another comment.

saargrin• 6 years ago

i dont think deleting posts is fair or a good idea better to apologize or correct IMHO

VLM• 6 years ago

The linked article suggestions would work on a holiness-neutral topic like emacs vs vi, but I don't think the suggested tactics would work against holy virtue signalling.

mcguire2• 6 years ago

Can we ditch the "virtue signalling" meme? It comes across as a simple dismissal, which doesn't improve any situation.

SpicyLemonZest2• 6 years ago

The term can be overused. But we need a way to describe the very real underlying phenomenon, of expectations that everyone ought to endorse and actively promote promote a particular moral stance. Trying to talk about modern activism without the term "virtue signaling" would be like trying to talk about churches without the term "religion".

Thorentis• 6 years ago

Good observation. I have noticed that people very vocal online do not do so well in person. They forget what it's like to have people looking at you disapprovingly or to be forced to express your views coherently the first or second attempt, without the chance to craft the perfect 140 char response.

Unfortunately, as more and more young people grow up with digital spaces as their primary domain, they are losing the ability to communicate in person. I have a few friends that are high school teachers, and they all notice this trend. Every class discussion involves short sentence answers, low effort, very little passion. But if you let them use a digital space to post opinions (like a class discussion forum) things can become polarised, or at least more passionate than they were in class.

casefields• 6 years ago

Toastmasters! Public speaking is an incredible valuable skill that you need in all walks of life. People should check out their local chapter: https://www.toastmasters.org/

sinker• 6 years ago

I've come across people mentioning Toastmasters online at least 3 dozen times in separate contexts over the years. Yet no one IRL knows what the hell it is or where to find one. How can something be so commonplace here and completely alien outside of online spaces. I've never been to one or had the word toastmasters ever mentioned in person before. Is this like an alcoholics anonymous, but for public speaking?

perl4ever3• 6 years ago

I think maybe the difference is that a digital space allows you to not focus on the number of people you're addressing, so people act more like they are having a conversation with a representative member of their audience.

I don't think it's fundamentally about the digital aspect so much as writing vs. speaking.

chiefalchemist2• 6 years ago

It gets worse—Angry Alice only sees feedback from extremists, so she doesn't receive more nuanced signals that might actually cause her to reflect on her behavior

But this works both way. Actually, it works all ways. That is, the person who marginalizes Alice is also marginalized by someone else. And so on and so on. Eventually, everything is binary. There's little if any grey area.

No doubt a small minority actually deserve to be marginalized. Those existed long before the internet. The internet is different. You don't need to work to understand or even engage. Instead, many seek to minimize friction and maximize positive feedback. The validity of the source is irrelevant. Digital love is good regardless of the source.

sergiotapia• 6 years ago

Arguing online is a complete and total waste of time. Designed to make you spin your wheels. You aren't doing _anything_ productive.

kordlessagain• 6 years ago

Good luck trying to do this with every single participating entity. The "problem", if there is one to be defined, is not the "silence" of the user, but the default behavior to not surface the access of the data in question to others who are accessing or discussing the data. Basically servers need to divulge all meta data about an endpoint, including access and times.

Its a "security flaw" of the Internet and web services, as they are currently defined. If someone would get around to integrating Lightning with the 402 HTTP error code, it might make it a bit better. Then again, someone has to convince all the users to use new browsers and technology, which will take forever.

In the meantime, a service which shows who and where the content is being accessed, and a revenue model that fits with that viewing would be interesting.

Vote me down, but no discussion is just more of the same meta problem. Users vs. hidden/unknown corporate control.

proc04• 6 years ago

You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you.

It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.

The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.

-Marcus Aurelius

marcusverus• 6 years ago

I'm a big fan of Meditations. Having read both the Gregory Hays translation and the George Long, I have a hard time mapping these very different translations as referring onto the same text. My first impression was, "clearly the George Long translation is a real translation of the text, whereas the Gregory Hays is a contemporary attempt to restate the thesis of each lassage without strict adherence to the original." But without the ability to read the original, this is pure speculation/ignorance on my part. Does anyone have any insight into which translation is the most faithful to the original?

proc04• 6 years ago

Yeah, it would be nice to learn Latin and read the originals.

perl4ever3• 6 years ago

There are things which might be under my control or should be under my control, about which I am in doubt. These are painful to consider; if they aren't truly my failures, then other people might consider them such.

Focusing on things which are obviously not under my control seems like an instinctive displacement mechanism that's fairly generally applicable. It's futile from the perspective of actually changing anything, but serves a purpose.

So I try not to tell other people to fix themselves, because it may be an illusion that they try to escape from through "silly" behavior; I'd question logically/philosophically whether anything can operate on itself.

dualogy• 6 years ago

Just try to escape your own.

I'd tell Marcus:

It’s silly to try to escape

And there's a kicker lurking in that direction: trying to "escape escaping" won't be any smoother ride, just one meagre step closer to infinity.

proc04• 6 years ago

It means you can't control others. People have faults and it's on them.

basicplus2• 6 years ago

DM = Direct Message

ilaksh• 6 years ago

Well good ideas, but maybe Twitter should have a disapproving glare button and a way to incentivize it's use by reasonable people.

rattray2• 6 years ago

Wow, this changes how I think about online discourse more than anything I can remember.

It actually makes me feel a lot better - rather than feeling like the whole world and all my friends are angry and unreasonable, it reminds me that, no, most of them are just being invisible. And that even the ones who seem unreasonable are just a product of their environment.

The funny thing is it could really be solved with a "that" feature on Twitter, to quietly keep track of when others disapprove, and even to anonymously and privately let the tweeter know.

acidburnNSA• 6 years ago

A that feature? Is that a typo?

rattray2• 6 years ago

Sorry, yes, that was autocorrect - I meant "tut", which had been suggested by someone else on the thread

hnick4• 6 years ago

I watched the famous movie 12 Angry Men for the first time recently (I think it holds up well today, BTW).

There is a scene where a man goes on a racist tirade. Instead of engaging in argument or ignoring him, they stand up and turn their backs.

Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXlHKTPfLVA

This is much like the disapproving glare mentioned, but what's the online equivalent?

I play a few online games but not much multiplayer. Public voice chat made it a much less enjoyable experience. You can mute people of course. But as far as I know, they don't get told. What if each time it happened it popped up a message "4 people have muted you today", "3 out of 8 teammates have muted you"? It could be a useful feedback mechanism.

holler3• 6 years ago

that’s an interesting idea.. the analog to real life would be if someone turned around and walked away, effectively muting your speech to their ears. I’m working on a new public chat app sqwok.im, actively thinking about these issues, and may consider this, thank you

anonymousab• 6 years ago

Negative feedback and dislike features can reduce engagement or drive people away, so social media platforms are incentivized to avoid such mechanisms.

hnick4• 6 years ago

And I think they're just chasing local maxima. Over the long term, they devolve and people leave.

pjc504• 6 years ago

Yes, but that is what needs to happen: reduction of negative engagement.

watwut2• 6 years ago

1 person muted you however am bring retaliation toward assumed 1 person.

As in, muting is "safe" in the sense that aggressive person is not getting information and thus can't treat your mute as you being hostile. And abusive people would see mute as unfair hostility and would retaliate.

hnick4• 6 years ago

The assumption is that you can't see who muted you etc, which is already standard.

Those sort of people will get aggressive anyway when someone doesn't reply to their jabs. So you could use that to argue against any sort of mute feature in the first place.

The line has to be drawn somewhere and I think too many assume silence is assent, because many players are reluctant to speak up for fear of being targeted and this makes people feel that they have support for what they say. So have the game do it instead.

sideshowb3• 6 years ago

It needn't be active muting either. What if some sort of engagement metric were shown e.g. Votes divided by views (or some more sophisticated variant thereof)?

thinkingemote• 6 years ago

It's also social pressure on the others to also mute / turn their backs and join in.

That's more difficult online for non engagement.

mjklin• 6 years ago

There was a remake of that movie made in the 90s with Tony Danza, a different take but also worth watching. In that movie the racist tirade is made by a non-white juror who is stopped by the grandfatherly German juror in a calm tone: “You just shut your filthy mouth and don’t open it again.”

082349872349872• 6 years ago

A single bit of disapproval may be too little information. In the southern US last century, "So, when are you inviting me over?" not only conveyed reasonably non-confrontational disapproval, but also the specific message that one shouldn't speak too much of one's own acquisitions in a wide public. "Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter" is a similar stock phrase to gently suggest online that someone is not preaching to their choir.

Someone asked a few days ago on HN what to do about clearly racist rhetoric in the twenty-first century. Maybe we ought to discover a similar stock phrase, such as "All that matters is can the fine horse see" or "Nobody's saying they don't appreciate what Jenny did" (or perhaps something from Blazing Saddles? "So, when are we stampeding cattle through the Vatican?").

(but, even assuming such a phrase were discovered and originally used in a targeted fashion, how should we avoid the nearly-inevitable Godwin-treadmill flak thereafter?)

nabla9• 6 years ago

Best kind of disapproval makes people reflect and change behaviour. That kind of disapproval works best if it comes from people in your in-group or from people you respect.

Anonymous downvoting like in big forum is just for moderation that excludes people.

guerrilla• 6 years ago

I've long thought that the problem with Twitter and Facebook is that there's no downvote button. This article is about something different though. What if we had a platform like these but posts had a metric of likes or shares per view displayed on them rather than absolute numbers. I really want to see how that goes actually. Simply displaying views might give a totally different interaction as well.

mjw1007• 6 years ago

I think this direct message technique has always been going on.

The reason people on Usenet would say "The lurkers support me in email" (until they learned that saying that was taboo) is that the lurkers were supporting them in email.

mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE• 6 years ago

But what if Alice is right and silent majority is wrong? I would say silent majority is mostly wrong in recent times.

bobthechef• 6 years ago

Downvoting is one way disapproval is expressed, so the premise is the article is flawed. However, we must also remember that the point of speech is to convey truth, not crowd pleasing, not stirring up conflict for the kicks, not bland milquetoast niceness. What the appropriate tone or style is, or whether engagement makes sense at all, will depend on the situation and here we need prudence (in the classical sense). Feedback can be of help in shaping prudence, but it is not the final arbiter of the correct course is action. It must be examined for validity.

So please, do not couch your language. Be clear and direct. Let your yeses be yeses and your noes be noes. Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language. Listen to to your interlocutors, but speaks plainly and honestly. Let the chips fall where they may.

curation• 6 years ago

Polemics require belief that subjectivity is born out of battle. What has changed is that belief.

buboard3• 6 years ago

A deeper issue is the cultural shift to an overly judgemental culture which has been built thoughout the decades. The media always, always has thrived on creating moral panics, but the public wasn't always so gullible to them.

There's a noticeable shift towards conservativism and a constant preoccupation with their public image among younger generations. It's even noticeable in statistics , e.g. disapproval of nudism.

bartelby• 6 years ago

I’ve been trying to have more 1-1 conversations with friends these days about some of the more controversial topics in the news when it comes up, basically an IRL version of a DM, and it’s been interesting to see how people’s opinions align against the Twitter opinion spectrum. About half have been much more moderate than anything I’ve seen online, but the other half actually do align with the more radical and loud voices shouting about whatever it is that’s trending on Twitter at that moment. I always thought that Twitter wasn’t really representative of what most people thought/believed but now I’m not so sure. Of course this is just based on personal anecdotes. And to be fair, all of the 1-1 conversations I’ve had have been productive and each time I’ve been able to walk away with some ideas that I haven’t had before.

The Silence Is Deafening

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