Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

Users of social media will learn how to deal with righteousness. Until we do, social media will suck big league.

Social Media strongly encourages Hot Takes, because those get clicks. I found myself examining how I comment on reddit, and what people call "The Hivemind".

You can't have nuanced discussions on social media, someone will infer what kind of asshole you exactly are, and that's the end of the discussion.

Some poisoned phrases:

Be Reasonable - "why can't you just be reasonable"

Both Sides - "there are good people on both sides"

Some Responsibility - "she bears some responsibility"

Nuanced Discussion - "you can't have a nuanced discussion on social media"

I'm sure there are some poisoned phrases you react instinctively to.

I think weak arguments are good, actually. You don't need to move someone from the swamp to the mountain, you just need them to get on dry land.

Now I'm sure someone has inferred exactly what kind of asshole I am, and they are correct. This is the kind of asshole I am. The kind that wants reasonable arguments to exist in the real world, even if I have to make them up.

Reddit is horrific because the moderation on the website is so heavily biased towards the current mantra of the US Democrats, regardless of topic and country involved. Why so many of the public ditched forums, where replying to an older comment can continue a conversation for new people to see, with Reddit is a mystery to me as well. Reddit has become a slur in the Indian diaspora for example.

> "Reddit is horrific because the moderation on the website is so heavily biased towards the current mantra of the US Democrats"

Two notes:

1. The moderation on the site is driven by the culture of the people on the site. In sociology and politics you can approach things from the top or the bottom - what does the King say or what does the Populace say. Even a King's powers are not unlimited, they need political support from someone, and those people need political support - you can see this many times in history when a king is de-throned (I'm saying king, but you can substitute any political leader)

2. I don't think it's the moderation or the mantra that make reddit a horrific hellscape. I think it's the feeling of righteousness around certain topics. Righteousness is very useful to leaders. It is very motivating, it gets people to take action and vote or give money to a campaign. It's completely natural to feel righteous about topics of morality.

Social media turns that feeling of righteousness into clicks and interactions. When you have clicks and interactions, you can sell ads. This doesn't even need to be an intentional from the company or platform. People will do it automatically.

Unfortunately, that feeling of righteousness may not be personally or socially rewarding in the long term, and it is very destructive to authentic and meaningful conversations.

So what you're saying is ...? :)

I have often wondered if we can turn gamification on its head, so we can optimize for engaging discussion instead of outrage? There's a lot less money in that, so it'll get way less attention, but I wonder if it's doable?

Of course you're still playing in a game theoretic landscape, so it'll be taken advantage of for sure, but it might still be better than this local minima we're in.

Something as simple as a like button leads to this cascade of odd behaviour. HN seems to do ok with its voting scheme. I'd love to see some folks dive deep in this area.

I think authentic and engaging discussion requires a small audience. I'm reminded of an essay "Do things that don't scale"

Why is a small audience a requirement?

People interpret nuance differently. As the audience size increases, contention about nuance interpretation increases to the point where that overwhelms the original conversation.

Couldn't the conversation simply be between two people?

One person is a small audience.

In other words, yes. The original post was about social media. You can chat on social media platforms, but that's not what most people think of.

> so we can optimize for engaging discussion instead of outrage

The way to do this might be to engage people, who are so interested, in email threads. But that doesn't drive dopamine cycles in the same way.

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