These aren't people making the things "wholesome and funny". They are criminals in teddy bear outfits controlling what people hear. Modern day clowns.
i'm here to tell you that the cutesy shit drives certain people away.
'Funny' isn't some objective quality that things can be neatly sorted into with any level of accuracy, except in cases of the worst most generic/juvenile types of humor that are guaranteed to get a chuckle from 'some idiot' out there.
The parody show 'Ow! My Balls!' in the movie 'Idiocracy' comes to mind.
I believe this was when youtube was growing.
> it's trying to build an experience that doesn't actively turn people away
I believe youtube was growing at this time.
I personally don't remember it being that toxic. But even if it were whose responsibility should it be to deal with the toxicity? The platform's or the content creator's?
There's a saying that's oft repeated "dont read the comments section". That's a strategy in line with the approach I'd endorse. We shouldn't be censoring information just because its "toxic", people need to find ways to withstand or ignore or deal with the criticism that exists in the world.
People develop weak immune systems if they are protected from everything, it's not just a biological thing. The American mind is as coddled as their biological immune system. We should be teaching people how to deal and withstand criticism whether valid or caustic. Otherwise we get this mad world where no one can offend anyone and you can't even tell clinically obese people their body is not healthy.
Wrong way to frame the incentives. "Who benefits if the toxicity is dealt with?" is the relvant question.
(... and the answer is "the platform owner, assuming they attract more viewers with honey than acid." So, a predictable outcome if the premise holds).
But moralistically I'm still at odds with the coddling.
There's a lot of people willing to trade their hard-earned valuables (coin, time, what have you) for a little gentleness and softness. I don't see that as a moral ill.
The world is sharp, cold, apathetic, and dangerous. People know. That doesn't imply people need to live in that part all the time if circumstances do not force them to.
In fact, one could argue most of the last ten-odd-thousand years of building societies has been a slow crawl towards figuring out how to make something less sharp, cold, apathetic, and dangerous for people to spend their days in.
Toxic racists in YouTube comments did not provide any value to anyone, but they did create an environment that encouraged others to behave in toxic ways and they diminished the enjoyment many others derived from the platform.
They made their presence known. Thats valuable in and of itself. If people disagree with them and they are the minority, other commenters can then throw incendiary feedback at them. Others can then watch the debate and learn how to take apart these toxic rascists using nothing but words.
> diminished the enjoyment
Ignorance is bliss, I'll give you that much. Most take the blue pill for a good reason.
Yeah, because arguing with loud racists is a good use of time.
It is, hypothetically, possible that one will find fringe opinions there more often because those on the fringe tend to be detached from other uses of time (i.e. if you're unemployed, you have a lot of time to argue with strangers online, for example).
Then you're probably not remembering it right. Its toxicity levels were off the charts. I'd go out of my way to block the comments just so I couldn't see them when a video would be loading and have them ruin my day.
> But even if it were whose responsibility should it be to deal with the toxicity? The platform's or the content creator's?
Well, as they say, "my house, my rules". It's their house :-)
> People develop weak immune systems if they are protected from everything, it's not just a biological thing.
> We should be teaching people how to deal and withstand criticism whether valid or caustic.
Nobody can withstand internet criticism. We weren't built for this. We were built for a tribe of apes around us, most of which would leave us alone to not disturb the social hierarchy. There's no psyche on this planet that can withstand a torrent of crap thrown onto it from all over the world. See articles about Facebook moderators for more details (those poor souls!).
Most jurisdictions around the world have laws against verbal assault (threatening others with actual harm) or verbal harassment, for this very reason. Verbal interactions can lead to very real effects (people have been driven to suicide, for example).
Some people we interact with are just cuckoo and if we can't get out of there quickly there needs to be a way to keep the situation under control.
We sometimes like to see ourselves as little Sherlock Holmes' - humans on a trajectory of ever more self-improvement and breathtaking intellect. All data is good data, all speech is good speech, because it feeds the ever improving intellect. Misinformation is at worst a temporary blip that more communication will correct. We're little Googles that slurp up data and spit out ever improving judgements.
But we're not that rational, and not that great at filtering information. We have biases that are trivially exploitable at scale, and we're rather good at building machines or even merely memes to exploit those.
We need to start accepting human cognitive weaknesses, and that includes doing a bit of informational gardening - pruning out the weeds before they choke everything we value. You don't feed ML algorithms maliciously distorted training data and hope for them to nevertheless magically converge to something useful, do you? (And no, GAN ML doesn't do that either yet - but please correct me if I'm behind the times - because the detectors aren't really adversarial but rather specific training targets and thus a detector from one GAN can't detect another's fakes - and in any case, it's all still based on trusted training data - which is exactly what humans don't have).
I don't believe this problem is fixable until we recognize that freedom of speech in an era of mass manipulation via social media is intrinsically dangerous. We all understand the upsides and have been well indoctrinated against risks of government ministries for truth, but the reality is that we're all agents in an immensely complex system where we want certain convergence properties, yet are kind of assuming that specific hyper simplistic policies will achieve those goals - and assuming that almost as gospel. I don't buy that that's going work. I don't think it actually _ever_ worked, which is why we have stuff like fraud statutes, and _do_ penalize lying in all kinds of other scenarios. Even more critically, social _norms_ imposed heavy extra-legal punishment on frauds and other informational polluters. We just turned extreme freedom of expression into an article of patriotism to show we were team america; and to distinguish ourselves from team soviet or team monarchy - but that was (fortunately!) merely skin deep because various legal restrictions actually remained and in any case social punishments matter more than legal ones - and being seen as a fraud or liar _used_ to be a quick way to becoming a pariah.
But without speech-restricting social norms against deception, and with a public attitude that sometimes even _embraces_ falsehood as a symbol of pride for ones rights - well, then truth is optional; and quixotically the _whole point_ of freedom of expression disappears, being that it's a tool to discover and disseminate new insights and burn away corruption via transparency. Speech is irrelevant when the only people listening are those that share your opinion anyhow. And where social norms remain, we've pulled their teeth by accepting that employees have no responsibility for a corporation's actions unless they're very directly linked (e.g. I wouldn't blame a facebook employee personally for facebook-spread misinformation, yet I would if they spread it themselves), yet corporations are increasingly everpresent as tools to mediate daily interactions.
Until we face up to the reality that core founding principles we hang some of our identities on are _actively harmful_ in some scenarios, we're not going to be able to consider how to improve ourselves. Instead, we'll tell ourselves comforting bedtime tales of how people can teach themselves to fend these things off, and how team free speech always wins in the end. Until, one day, it doesn't.
> teach themselves to fend these things off, in fact I think its the only thing that works.
“But you are telling me, Susan, that the ‘Society for Humanity’ is right; and that Mankind has lost its own say in its future.”
“It never had any, really. It was always at the mercy of economic and sociological forces it did not understand — at the whims of climate, and the fortunes of war. Now the Machines understand them; and no one can stop them, since the Machines will deal with them as they are dealing with the Society, — having, as they do, the greatest of weapons at their disposal, the absolute control of our economy.”
“How horrible!”
“Perhaps how wonderful! Think, that for all time, all conflicts are finally evitable. Only the Machines, from now on, are inevitable!”
And the fire behind the quartz went out and only a curl of smoke was left to indicate its place.
"""
Asimov, Isaac. "I, Robot". pp. 147-148. Available online: http://ekladata.com/-Byix64G_NtE0xI4A6PA1--o1Hc/Asimov-Isaac...
I get the feeling (and that's fine!) you're uninterested in detailed argumentation whether in support of your position or analysis of mine; I won't try to drag you into a flame war - but I simply don't understand your response. I must have said something that triggered this belief; if you're willing to point out what I said that could be read that way, I'd appreciate it. After all, being misunderstood is a waste everyone's time.
My immediate reaction was "You could... But why do you want to? In what scenario is it going to benefit your fledgling social network to chug toxic waste?"
... apparently, it didn't.
These comics unfortunately both highlight the need for toxicity and dissenting opinions.
In the first, moon landing conspiracists have come out with great suspicious findings including the fact that the "moon rock" given to the dutch is actually just a peice of petrified wood [1]. Given the political need to appear more technologically advanced during the cold war its a very real possibility. I'm not saying the moon landings were fake, but to quash any disagreement if the intent is to be as truthful as possible would be a mistake.
In the second, the user gets valuable feedback that he's a moron, which he would not if he were censored. He would only dive deeper into anger if he found out he was silenced.
I don't let this "toxicity" get to me, but that means I'm not outsourcing a machine to protect me from it. Not only does facing more toxicity build up my own immune system and make me stronger, I'm not dancing with like minded people circle jerking a helicopter into the clouds of confirmation biases. Doesn't matter what the attack is, its actually good to have some of it around. Learning to deal with it makes people more resilient. We shouldn't be trying to get machines to do it for us, we should be making it the standard rhetoric that people should lean into criticisms consuming it to strengthen themselves.
Moron.
It’s a no-win if you demand that comments go largely unmoderated. Because we had that and it made them genuinely useless to the point where creators turned them off and people installed add-ons to remove them.
That's better than one that is useful, but useful for only one affiliation.
Another analogy is that we need to have managed forest fires, instead of trying to quash every little fire at every turn which only results in a catastrophic blaze when one turns up that is out of control.
I find the wholesome and funny comments to be relatively uninteresting and dull 90% of the time, but it’s leaps and bounds better than the unmitigated angry mud slinging that used to be there.