Don't let social media think for you

Don't let social media think for you(disgustinglyoptimistic.com)

406 points by hnthrowaway2 5 years ago | 255 comments

SamBam 5 years ago |

The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size. It's the size that makes the mob, and everyone who has ever considered chiming in to add their voice why so-and-so was bad should stop to think about whether the world really needs that additional voice. Each individual voice may be perfectly right. So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did they really do such wrong that the 10,000th voice is needed?

I am ashamed to say I've done it myself, back when I was on Twitter. My feed would start lighting up with some really Bad thing that so-and-so said -- and generally it was "Bad" -- and I'd add my voice somewhere to that cacophony. Not necessarily writing to the Bad Person, but chiming in on someone's long thread.

Now I look back and see I was another participant in the mob.

Look, the author described in the post absolutely did herself no favors. Her book may have been great, but the way she interacted with people on social media was absolutely not. But being the 10,000th person to tell her that is never necessary. That's just wanting to join a mob, because mobs are fun, because you're all justified in this act together.

Mobs are scary, because everyone thinks they are justified. A good friend of mine grew up in Kenya and recounted that when he was about nine, he saw a mob catch a thief. Joining in with everyone else, he took a wire and whipped the man. Next thing he knew, the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him on fire. He has never forgotten the guilt he felt.

cableshaft 5 years ago | |

Also, if you end up having to announce your take on every "bad" thing that happens, your feed becomes nothing but commentary on the bad takes, almost always identical to everyone else, and you dillute or lose what makes you interesting in the process.

I've seen this in my own feed. Any time some "bad" person is exposed, I'm almost guaranteed to scroll past 30 almost identical takes on it by the same 30 people on my friends list. I click them, and 80% of their feed is just their takes on the daily outrage du jour. I don't really know who they actually are as people anymore, unless this is the entirety of their being now.

So now as a general rule I don't post anything about current events on social media, and stick with things actually about myself. I might make a comment on someone else's post sometimes, but not post about it myself.

I will probably make an exception here or there about climate change, because in my opinion that subject is being way too glossed over by society as a whole and is a much larger and more imminent threat than "this person did a bad thing and we must shun them now".

jrmg 5 years ago | | |

The meme of "if you don't speak up, you're complicit" is part of this.

I appreciate the sentiment, but there are just too many (terrible!) inequities in the world to live by this and not have it be a full time preoccupation.

colechristensen 5 years ago | | |

I have been thinking about this and related things for a long time now, while I haven't quite got the hang of putting it all together into words, this is my take on the current subject:

Humans have a need for a certain kind of emotional high, that in whatever way, people find a source. Some people find it in competition, drugs, sex, music, art, creation, fear, ... there's probably a whole taxonomy in there.

One of the ways people find it is in social displays of moral superiority. People hated this about organized religions and left in droves, and yet here we are with the exact same behavior.

There probably was a very valid evolutionary reason why this is so prevalent in humans, but like most things that make us feel good, uncontrolled they get taken to terrible extremes.

The point is recognizing that this behavior is a need finding a source of stimulation. If you want to fix it you have to find better sources for that feeling and recognize what is happening... and distribute that recognition into the public consciousness.

BeFlatXIII 5 years ago | | |

That’s why I quit Twitter. I use to have four topic-specific accounts. However, it eventually ended up that I was seeing the same outrage du jour on all four and that’s when it was time for me to leave.

Fogest 5 years ago | | |

I've "muted" quite a few people on various social media apps who essentially just are reposting some quote or post from someone else who is outraged about xyz current woke topic. Almost daily these people will share some new thing to be outraged about.

Of course do they actually ever do anything beyond sharing a post and acting like a good person? Nope. I don't see these people volunteer, donate, or do anything except share crap. So when they are someone I know in some way I just mute them instead of unfollowing.

throwkeep 5 years ago | |

Twitter is a particularly well refined mob machine. No room for nuance, distribution at the speed of light directly into your feed and/or Trending, participants immediately rewarded for generating and spreading outrage.

I get that a lot of this was unintentional, but the dynamic has now been known for a decade and has only gotten worse. Why has Twitter the company and its employees not taken action to deal with this? Instead spending their time creating tools and methods to censor non-mob participants? (e.g. those who were exploring the lab leak hypothesis) Why isn't the mob a top priority?

qsort 5 years ago | | |

> Why isn't the mob a top priority?

Part of that is the incentives going in the opposite direction, as other commenters have noted.

Even assuming they are in good faith, though, I believe it is an extremely difficult problem. Building and maintaining large scale communities is next to impossible, you can't just turn off a switch and make the mob go away, a mob is, by definition, out of control.

Historically, we have solved this problem by effectively limiting access to large scale communication, with small elites acting as gatekeepers. Social media tore down the metaphorical wall, allowing any random person to talk to anybody who will listen.

This is, by and large, a good thing. However, those elites did play a role, because they could keep each other in check and enforce standards of behavior that would prevent the worst abuses.

So the question is not how we go back to the 70s or something (yet again, the change is overall in the right direction), but how we can replace the missing piece. Needless to say, I don't even know where to start.

vlunkr 5 years ago | | |

What could be changed about twitter to make this better? The entire design feeds right into this. I've heard it said that it was intended to be a place for good discussion, but I really don't believe that. Good discussion isn't had 140 characters at a time. The whole point of the site is to give everyone a megaphone.

jonfromsf 5 years ago | | |

because it makes money. Why would they want to stop it? People have a weird mental model where they think private companies are the government. They're just a group of people getting paid to make money for investors.

slightwinder 5 years ago | | |

> Why has Twitter the company and its employees not taken action to deal with this?

They did. They tried many things, still do. But it's hard to fix without wasting the whole platform and becoming another reddit. What makes Twitter great is also what makes it aweful.

anigbrowl 5 years ago | | |

Twitter is largely a platform for self-promotion. This Hough lady wanted to promote her snarky attitude and encourage her followers to dunk on people who leave book reviews on GoodReads. it's a good example of 'be careful what you ask for'; if you cultivate attention in order to be toxic, you can't really complain when that rebounds upon you.

It's often not the case that people see a mob forming and jump in, in most cases. What people see is someone they know quote-tweeting an obnoxious person, or someone they already follow saying something obnoxious, and they condemn the obnoxious behavior. The more engagement an original tweet gets the more likely other people are to see it in their feed, regardless of whether it's obnoxious, funny, or whatever.

One time I replied to a sanctimonious statement from a politician with a mildly critical but also mildly witty reply, read a few other tweets and went on with my day. I don't get notifications from Twitter and was astonished to find the next day that my tweet had blown up and been quoted in a national publication. In fact all of my 'high performing' tweets over the years have been casual witticisms, but I've never seen one take off in real time because I only look at it intermittently. I suggest that rather than an angry mob, what you're seeing is simply the aggregation of multiple similar reactions. Few to none of those were necessarily invested with enormous significance by the people making them, unlike a real world mob.

This is not to say, of course, that theren't people who like going around condemning others, and Twitter does have a habit of showing you multiples of people posting about the same thing, as opposed to showing The Thing once and observing that 10 people you follow have left comments about it.

Syonyk 5 years ago | | |

> Why has Twitter the company and its employees not taken action to deal with this?

Because it's not their job to moderate this stuff.

Angry, pissed off, outraged users are, from the perspective of social media companies, the best users. They refresh constantly (so more ad views), they come back constantly, and if they've gone away for too long, you can just figure out what's likely to piss them off the most, send them a notification, and they're right back into the ad delivery mill, engaged and outraged.

And all that means more money for the company. Which is their interest.

YouTube's guiding goal (at least some years back, as I heard it) was to increase hours watched. Period. Hours watched was the metric they optimized for, above all else. And it showed in the various recommendations that looked very broken from the outside world, but those tended to add hours watched.

I don't think the algorithms were nearly smart enough to know that they were recommending some conspiracy theorist gateway video, or extreme political content, or such. They simply knew, "If we get people to watch this video, they will then spend a lot more time on YouTube." So, the more people that watch that video one way or another, the more hours watched, problem improved! It's very "paperclip maximizer" seeming sort of algorithm.

Given that it's been known for years how to "drive your users nuts to keep them coming back" and social media companies have refined this to near perfection (it's Vegas in your pocket, without any of the regulations and rules Vegas casinos have to abide by), I'm in favor of some regulation on this sort of stuff, but I'm not at all sure it will actually matter. :/

corndoge 5 years ago | | |

Engagement

acituan 5 years ago | |

> The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size.

There can be no mob without twitter's involvement.

There are always two parts to social media; social media the people at scale and social media the recommendation engine with impulse driven features that actively rank orders and promotes what content meets what eyes. By definition internet brings the scale, i.e. the size. But size in itself does not create a mob. You could walk around in a crowded square and mumble all the controversial things to yourself; people will at most give a bad stare, but mostly ignore you, a mob will not form after you.

It would take a shit-stirrer to actively salience the thing you said to the people in that crowd who would be most motivated to come after you.

Twitter et al are the shit-stirrers that makes money every time they can make a person engage with a content, regardless of the thoughtfulness or the sentiment of the engagement.

ourmandave 5 years ago | |

The twitter mob can come for you too.

If you're mis-identified and doxxed then your life can be in danger.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/what-its-like-to-get...

And the consequences for the accuser are nothing.

anigbrowl 5 years ago | | |

I think there should be a bit less focus on the 'the mob' and a bit more on the platform.

“We are seeking the public’s assistance in identifying the below individual in reference to an assault that took place this morning on the Capital Crescent trail. Please contact Det. Lopez with any information,” read a tweet sent June 2 from the department and shared more than 55,000 times.

But the Park Police had made an error. “Correction, the incident occurred yesterday morning, 6/1/2020,” they wrote in a follow up tweet. As with most such clarifications, it had only a fraction of the reach: a mere 2,000 shares.

[...]

On Twitter, Maryland attorney general Brian Frosh [...] had asked all of Twitter for help finding the man in the video. “If anyone can identify this man, please let me know,” he said, and nearly 50,000 people retweeted him.

[...] He sent a tweet confirming that there was a suspect and “it is not Mr. Weinberg.” (228 retweets.)

Relying on people to amplify accuracy and context is doomed to failure because people react to sensation. You show a video of a person doing something awful, naturally there will be a big reaction. The follow up tweet specifying some overlooked but important detail is simply not emotionally activating the same way.

However, it is within Twitter's capability to automatically propagate that additional context/correction to everyone who interacted with the original tweet. Indeed, it's within Twitter's capability to force them to look at the update and not proceed with using Twitter until they've acknowledged it.

Another approach could be that when a public figure (especially an authority figure) makes a mistake like this, they should be billed for the cost of advertising the correction to an equivalently large audience.

throwkeep 5 years ago | | |

> And the consequences for the accuser are nothing.

That's a great point. Accusers are not only incentivized to whip up a mob, but have virtually no downside. No skin in the game if they're wrong. That asymmetry needs to be resolved somehow.

elliekelly 5 years ago | |

> Each individual voice may be perfectly right. So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did they really do such wrong that the 10,000th voice is needed?

This is how I felt yesterday reading the repl.it thread.

mavsman 5 years ago | | |

If you don't feel like it will perpetuate it, what thread are you talking about?

agumonkey 5 years ago | |

There's a weird biological thing at play here. As if we have a reflex to clean what too many people agree on.

But so many time it ends up being entirely wrong I really wonder why it's still at play.

We kinda had to invent justice structures to avoid blunt reactions.

Also who thinks internet focuses too much on endless debates and abnormal relations. Did we spend so much time arguing before ? I'm so jaded I just want sharing chitchat jokes and food and nothing more. And I kinda believe that it's a more balanced approach to society. But i'm kinda digressing (an proving the opposite of my point partly)

jrm4 5 years ago | |

But of course -- compared to what?

Twitter sounds awful in a vacuum if described like this, and indeed it does have lots of problems. But, if we are going to have very huge and influential corporate sources of information, Twitter is MUCH more defensible than e.g. MSNBC/CNN/Fox, in that its significantly more "little d" democratic. The thousands of voices available there are far better than the tiny few coming from many other sources, and because the platform is generally "open" in that we can see what others post.

I think Twitter is actually doing an excellent job, given the incredible difficulties involved with what it does, especially as compared to a Facebook, etc.

ph2082 5 years ago | |

Most of trends have less than 10k comments/likes/.... Etc. That means only 0.00014 percent people of the planet. Rest don't know or don't care. That realisation made me not to bother about latest outrage.

Whole Twitter experience become so much better when you only keep to people you like. Don't think twice to unfollow someone.

akomtu 5 years ago | | |

Listening to only people you like sounds like a privilege to me. I bet, a few years down the road Twitter will stuff the feed of such purists with a more diverse set of viewpoints.

textgel 5 years ago | |

Meh; the situation was pointed out to people like you at the time. All the drawing of parallels with events in history, all the calls for reason and rationality and all the highlighting of holes in logic didn't do anything to stop the problem.

Your words now will make as much impact on the people you hope it will as they would have had at the time on you.

nszceta 5 years ago | |

> Next thing he knew, the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him on fire.

Ah, yes. Necklacing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necklacing

brailsafe 5 years ago | | |

This is some liveleak shit I'm maybe glad I didn't see.

slightwinder 5 years ago | |

> But did they really do such wrong that the 10,000th voice is needed?

Size is power, and size comes from Engagment. Each voice gives more attention to the problem and prevents it from sinking in the ocean of meaninglessness of twitter. At least for the moment the topic is trending.

> I am ashamed to say I've done it myself, back when I was on Twitter. My feed would start lighting up with some really Bad thing that so-and-so said -- and generally it was "Bad" -- and I'd add my voice somewhere to that cacophony. Not necessarily writing to the Bad Person, but chiming in on someone's long thread.

And now you are here; is this not the same?

> Mobs are scary, because everyone thinks they are justified.

Who says they are not? It's just one little voice. One of many, but still one.

Whether it's justified is more a matter of perspective. In the end it's just people talking and gossiping, they have no real power. But people are giving them power by listening to them. But it's also questionable how many are doing this. At the end the mob is still a single voice of many, maybe moving something, maybe not.

> A good friend of mine grew up in Kenya and recounted that when he was about nine, he saw a mob catch a thief. Joining in with everyone else, he took a wire and whipped the man. Next thing he knew, the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him on fire. He has never forgotten the guilt he felt.

Ok, that's definitly a different dimension than Twitter. That's not your typical cybermob. Though, there is also this insanity spreading from Virtual Places to real world. But this is not limited to Twitter. Reddit has their dark history in that area, as also facebook, discord, even ancient IRC and usenet had this crap.

SamBam 5 years ago | | |

> And now you are here; is this not the same?

...no, because I'm not participating in a mob here?

dataviz1000 5 years ago | |

Remember Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" from secondary school? [0] Fundamentally these coordinated social media attacks are witch hunts. When the 'good feminists' viciously attacked Margret Atwood accusing her of being a 'bad feminist' as she strongly supported due process defending a male professor being accused of sexually impropriety is the moment when these modern witch hunts went too far. More so than when Reddit misidentified the Boston Bomber or other instances. The moment they attacked Margret Atwood they attacked the very idea of due process which she strongly warned women about in her book "The Handmaid's Tale". Nonetheless, it is part of the human condition how we organize into social structures whether being a small town in New England or a capitalist economy to join groups attacking someone else since it prevents the focus of the attack being on ourselves.

The only way out is through due process and supporting it even for the worst of the worst.

(EDIT: Weak downvoting this comment without responding with a counter comment.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crucible

0x737368 5 years ago | | |

I can't speak for the people who downvoted you, but I'll bet you a USB stick that the reason you got downvoted is because of "When the 'good feminists' viciously attacked Margret Atwood accusing her of being a 'bad feminist'".

Some people have reached a point where not even disagreeing with them, but simply mentioning someone they don't like in a positive light or mentioning someone they do like in a negative light, no matter how factual the statement is, will get you downvoted.

They can't even articulate it, hence why you didn't get any responses - they just got used to being in their echo chamber where their opinions are always echoed and fervently applauded. After a while, whatever the echo chamber promulgates becomes that person's ground reality. As soon as they see something that disagrees with this reality - it is an offense to them and their whole worldivew, but they can't argue for their beholden view or against the offending view, so they have an emotional outburst.

I've met a few people who proclaimed themselves to be very politically educated individuals, but as soon as it came to a debate they'd get frustrated by failing to answer basic questions about their opinions and excuse themselves. No wonder, who wants their whole paradigm to be crashed in one evening?

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5 years ago | |

HANGMAN: Now, you're wanted for murder.

For the sake of my analogy, let's just assume that you did it.

Now, John Ruth wants to take you back to Red Rock to stand trial for murder.

And if you're found guilty, the people of Red Rock will hang you in the town square.

And, as the hangman, I will perform the execution.

And if all those things end up taking place, that's what civilized society calls justice.

However, if the relatives and the loved ones of the person you murdered were outside that door right now, and after busting down that door, they drug you out into the snow and hung you up by the neck, that would be frontier justice.

Now, the good part about frontier justice is it's very thirst-quenching.

The bad part is it's apt to be wrong as right.

Well, not in your case.

In your case, you'd have it coming.

But other people, maybe not so much.

OSWALDO: But ultimately, what's the real difference between the two?

HANGMAN: The real difference is me.

The hangman.

To me, it doesn't matter what you did.

When I hang you, I'll get no satisfaction from your death.

It's my job.

I hang you in Red Rock.

I move on to the next town.

I hang someone else there.

The man who pulls the lever that breaks your neck will be a dispassionate man.

And that dispassion is the very essence of justice.

For justice delivered without dispassion is always in danger of not being justice.

aeturnum 5 years ago | | |

>The man who pulls the lever that breaks your neck will be a dispassionate man.

>And that dispassion is the very essence of justice.

>For justice delivered without dispassion is always in danger of not being justice.

Based on the reporting I've read on the internal cultures of police departments and the wider "law enforcement" community (federal law enforcement, prison administration, etc) I am pretty skeptical that "justice" is dispassionate. Instead, I think these groups wrap themselves in a myth of dispassion while they place thumbs (and larger things) on the scale in a way that reflects their personal beliefs and biases.

unholythree 5 years ago | | |

I’ve noticed a unfortunate conflation of word lynching with racism motivated homocide lately. Even from authorities (newspapers, lawyers, some state ACLU) that have to know they aren’t always the same.

I think the nuance of these specific injustices is important because the solutions are different. A killing could even be lawful but racist and therefor unjust, but that’s a distinct (albeit important) problem from mob violence or murder.

rdudekul 5 years ago | |

"the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him on fire".

A single person brave enough to think against crowds could have STOPped this atrocity from happening.

Reminds me of how Mahatma Gandhi was attacked in South Africa by a group of predominantly white-males, was literally being beaten to death, when just one white-female STOPped this atrocity from happening (source: Gandhi the Man - https://www.amazon.com/Gandhi-Man-Changed-Himself-Change/dp/...).

Most of us are too afraid to stop atrocities (Ex: Recently Muslims getting killed in Delhi while Modi was adulating Trump). But a few who do could may help save humanity.

anigbrowl 5 years ago | | |

No, not necessarily. A single person can sometimes make a difference but in real life such people are frequently just pushed aside. It is more a matter of luck than morality about where they happen to be in the crowd, whether they can make themselves heard at a critical moment and so on.

I mean sure, if you see an injustice taking place in front of you, you should certainly attempt to intervene. But there is absolutely not guarantee your intervention will be effective.

dionidium 5 years ago | |

When the mob can literally set you on fire, then you should be worried about the mob, but, crucially, the mob on social media can't actually hurt you; they can only convince other people to hurt you. It's those other people, the people who hold positions of responsibility and authority -- your boss, your dean, anybody with the power to hire or fire you -- who are really responsible here. The shame of cancel culture is entirely theirs.

SamBam 5 years ago | | |

No. 10,000 voices braying your name as an evil-doer itself does harm. This isn't a kid being told on a playground that "words will never hurt you," that's always been a lie.

Here is a case [1] of a man being falsely doxxed for the assault on two kids on a bike path last summer. The voices calling for him to be brought to justice, calling him a racist, etc, numbered in the tens of thousands. The retractions from people who realized they had made a mistake for calling for the blood of the wrong person numbered in the tens.

Beyond the psychological damage this may have caused, will this man ever feel safe submitting a resume for a job again? When he does so, does he need to attach a note saying "When you Google my name, all those mentions of me being a racist are false." If he does that, does he already subconsciously look distasteful in the recruiter's eyes?

1. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/what-its-like-to-get...

abnry 5 years ago | | |

And what drives these decision makers to act so shamefully is the reputational economy. Yes, sometimes a boycott will damage the bottom line, but most often it is the damage to one's status within the wider society that is being protected by the decision to fire someone. If you personally want to avoid this, reduce your dependence on reputation.

betwixthewires 5 years ago | | |

I see your point. I'd like to ask you just out of curiosity, what do you think of "cyber bullying?" Is it real? Are participants culpable?

coldtea 5 years ago |

It's not that the people who form a twitter mob don't think or "let twitter think for them".

It's that they actively enjoy hurting someone as a mob. They get a kick out of it, and it's not discouraged (as would be actually forming a mob out in the streets be). If anything, it's encouraging, and gives them not just the joy of kicking someone who is down, but also "good person" credits (because the one getting kicked is a bad person, of course).

In other words, people are not mislead "against their better nature": they are just encouraged to embrace their badness.

paxys 5 years ago |

There are so many comments here blaming Twitter while blissfully unaware that HN fuels the exact same online outrage. Almost every day there's a "<company> did bad thing to me" article on the front page and people immediately pick up their pitchforks and join the mob. You cannot fix the problem without acknowledging that we are all part of it.

spadros 5 years ago |

Yes I quit social media a couple of years ago and agree with pretty much everything the author says. Social media environments encourage incendiary discussion because it fuels upvotes and general attention. Most people won't take the time to consider a more valid grey opinion because they've jumped to a conclusion and are busy attacking someone, or because it won't get as much attention. The first thing that came back for me after quitting social media was that "slow thinking" brain that tries to empathize with all sides rather than just call out some "evil" and check out intellectually.

Brendinooo 5 years ago |

After reading the quote at the beginning, the article didn't go the way I thought it would.

I end up seeing a lot more shades of gray because of my experience on Twitter. If you ever ask yourself "how could someone possibly believe...", that someone is on Twitter and probably wants to tell you why.

I generally operate under the stance of "the platform is neutral, it's what we make of it that matters". I'm not entirely sure that's true - I am currently on a Twitter hiatus to reset some things mentally - but it's true to an extent.

Why are you on the site? Do you want the sensationalism, the absolutism, the drama? Or do you want to hear thoughtful discussion from a range of interesting voices?

This post articulates Twitter's pitfalls, but I'm not sure they're inherent or unavoidable.

shadowgovt 5 years ago | |

Personally, I still believe the platform is neutral, and what we make of it matters. But if we make mostly bad things out of it, modifying the platform (or, if the platform's owners will not modify it, choosing voluntarily to leave it) may be a sensible reaction.

Leaf-fall and dead trees on the ground are neutral, but if a forest fire is rampaging a dozen miles away, you cut a firebreak through that stuff instead of taking a laissez-faire approach and letting it be fuel to carry the fire to the nearest populated town. And if you live in that town and you notice the local firefighters don't much care about firebreaks (or cannot successfully cut them given the size and frequency of fires), maybe it's time to pack up and move.

hirundo 5 years ago | |

> I generally operate under the stance of "the platform is neutral, it's what we make of it that matters". I'm not entirely sure that's true

I left the platform when I found that neutrality not to be true. I could tolerate the insanity from other users by simply not following them. But when Twitter itself started to censor direct messages due to links in them to an article they did not approve of, I made of it an exit.

I will gladly participate in a neutral forum that includes some of the wonderful voices I used to follow on Twitter. I really hope that one or more emerges that are driven by protocols rather than proprietary platforms.

wonderfulness 5 years ago |

> These pluralities are unable to exist on social media

I broadly agree with the author, but I have a small nit regarding the above sentence. Pluralities definitely are able to exist on social media, it's just that it is far easier to get swept up in sensationalism, outrage and gossip than it is to find and continue seeing sensible and well-thought posts. The initial days of social media enabled the former, but got drowned out when mass popularity was reached. Think early days Twitter and Quora.

I say this as a person who has no social media accounts, but uses twitter intermittently without an account. It is possible to find nice things on the internet using a pull-based model, i.e. when you actively search for (not just passively follow!) the good stuff and actively block out all the bad stuff. Problem is that SM companies make it increasingly difficult to do this, plus trusting your reading list to the "recommended" and "trending now" sections of a social media feed causes issues. But knowing for what to search and how yields good results which you would not be able to find if you have a blanket ban on anything social-related.

js8 5 years ago | |

I think curation (of said pluralities) would be possible on social media (like it's possible for example on Wikipedia), but the interactions are effectively owned (controlled) by the media owner, and they don't necessarily want the participants to have that power.

mattgreenrocks 5 years ago |

This gets to my biggest issue with social media: the primacy of the collective opinion.

As the article states, nuance has no place, nor does the idea that we should evaluate something based on its intrinsic qualities. Instead, the most important thing about everything is what We think about it in this instant. And that is highly mutable: We will change that whenever we wish, and you need to keep up.

The very notion that something can be evaluated based on intrinsic qualities (such as a person's character, a thing's aesthetics, the efficacy of a policy) is devalued because they do not serve the ultimate goal of a collective opinion. Science is a meme/religion we trot out to justify our already-formed beliefs.

The reason this is such a problem is that you cannot develop any sort of taste if you are constantly out-sourcing it to a constantly-shifting collective opinion. And taste is a requisite for skill.

poslathian 5 years ago | |

Interesting comment, I might have thought it was the other way around.

mattgreenrocks 5 years ago | | |

That's the impression I get. The opinions are certainly originally formed from some sort of objective-ish basis, but then it seems to be more important to propagate the meme than it is for others to individually assess the subject or the validity of the original judgment.

Similar dynamics happen among VC investors ("no one else is investing, it can't be that good"). My issue is that end up people taking the meme propagation as ground truth.

kwyjibo1230 5 years ago |

I agree with the sentiments about mob rule on social media being extremely negative.

The thing that always amuses me about any sites with ratings is that most people (the site owners, the reviewees, the reviewers) often assume that everyone has the same barometer for 1-5 stars. That's very likely not the case.

Take Goodreads as an example. My Personal barometer is

* 5 star = I would re-read this multiples because it was so interesting/engaging/life changing.

* 4 star = I really liked this book. I probably wouldn't re-read it but it was memorable.

* 3 star = Pretty good book.

* 2 star = Book had some flaws or it didn't appeal to me for specific reasons. I didn't like it.

* 1 star = I did not like this book at all, and I would tell people not to read it.

I think there are probably a lot of people that disagree with my barometer :) Maybe their 5 star is anything "pretty good" or above, and their 1 star is "this author should be banned from authorship, that's how much I disliked this book."

Curious to see what other folks' barometers are.

ggggtez 5 years ago | |

I imagine many people use:

5 stars - I liked it

1 star. - I didn't like it

In fact, I imagine many people do this.

kortex 5 years ago |

Reminds me of the theory that reasoning is a mechanism for persuasion and social cohesion, not truth discovery.

The twitter mob isn't trying to anneal to some maximally accurate Goodreads rating of the book. It's "trying to do" (in the anthropogenic agency sense, like how evolution "wants") something else. Something more social and tribal in nature. But the system starts to go highly nonlinear once the crowd gets bigger than some size, and when the crowd is anonymous/pseudonymous handles, not members of your Dunbar's-number-sized-tribe, where reacting hyperbolically has real social consequences.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/people-argue-just-to...

arrozconcosas 5 years ago |

Social media is great for finding people with similar interests. I like to cook a certain type of food, and there is a community there of people who share ideas and the dishes they have made. I like it. It's great.

If 'hate' is your 'interest', then you can find lots of people with similar hate online.

throw67456756 5 years ago | |

I used to approach social media this way but lately it's become miserable. Politics has seeped into every corner, including real life, and everyone seems radicalized to one extreme or another. For example, I like art, most artists are leftists, same thing with writing and writers, and a few other areas. My views do not align to any particular side. Now years ago, this wouldn't have been a problem, most people did not have a problem being friends with people of different views. But now, if I want to participate in any community I have to bite my tongue. I see people getting bullied and ostracized for the most minor stuff. There's a mob waiting around every corner. I have to keep any politics completely out of any accounts (instead I know have one for just politics, which probably makes it sound obsessed, but what else is there to do). In some, like writing, I've stopped participating. Meanwhile the communities just get more and more toxic and political and it sucks all the fun away to even consume them.

2malaq 5 years ago |

Just as important is to not let the mainstream media do your thinking for you either.

seattle_spring 5 years ago | |

Ironically, often people who make that claim let highly politicized, biased, and often downright dishonest rags make their decisions for them instead.

sangnoir 5 years ago |

> After a cursory glance, and getting through the heated bluster that often clogs up any twitter debate, I had a general understanding of the situation.

I'm not sure if this was layered meta-commentary or a lack self-awareness. Either way, I chuckled

beloch 5 years ago |

"Within five minutes of this decision I became distracted by my phone and started scrolling through twitter. One of the trending topics was "Lauren Hough, Goodreads" and since I was determined to procrastinate on my literary endeavours for as long as possible (what's another five minutes on a five year record?), I decided to have a look. "

It sounds like Hough knows how to whip up some social media outrage to generate free press. The author of this piece would never have heard about Hough or her book were it not for a little incendiary language lighting a giant signal fire of hate on the endless pile of fuel that is twitter. The author of this post literally let social media select a book for him/her to read. If you go on to read Hough's book because of this post on HN, you can join the club!

It does make you wonder how many awesome books will go completely ignored over the next decade because their authors didn't know how or weren't willing to ride the social media hate wave.

root_axis 5 years ago |

Live by the sword die by the sword. The author in question wanted to share and cash in on her story by selling it to the masses, when someone among the masses reacted with very mild criticism to her work she antagonized them publicly and the masses didn't like that. Oh well, be nice online if you want to harvest the denizens of the internet to make a living.

commandlinefan 5 years ago | |

Well, there's an old saying: "there's no such thing a bad publicity". Every time you enrage one group on Twitter, you potentially engage another.

KittenInABox 5 years ago |

I feel like the described events as depicted lack nuance, which is ironic because the essay itself describes nuance. It misses, for example, that Lauren didn't react this way to one Goodreads reviewer, but several, and didn't remove the reviewers' names when blasting people to her many many thousands of followers.

I totally and entirely agree that Twitter has too much of a mob mentality from a lack of nuance but I am very against depicting this lack of nuance with a lack of nuance. The backlash against Lauren was utterly ridiculous and indefensible but that is not a reason to sensationalize and flatten facts.

btheshoe 5 years ago |

"Don't let social media think for you" I say, as I open the hnews comments section to check what hnews people think before I read the article

Evenjos 5 years ago |

I'm active in many writing communities. There is a culture, among writers, to "Never respond to reviews." Those who dare break that taboo are asking for trouble, in the form of twitter mobs and online bullying.

Writing is a cut-throat, competitive industry. All of the arts are, once you get beyond hobbyist level and into the realm of professionals.

I would not be shocked if a lot of that abuse came from other writers.

solutron 5 years ago |

We have a choice to make about the work we want to contribute to. Our hands, our minds. What world do you want to live in? Is your work contributing to that in a meaningful way, such that when you're gone those that come after can continue the work because it's worth doing? We only have so much time on this earth.

aerospace_guy 5 years ago | |

Thank you for posting this.

ggggtez 5 years ago |

This subject was written about as well by the esteemed Jon Ronson, in "So you've been publicly shamed". Reading it today may sound quaint, but it's also interesting to know that he also wrote about Alex Jones several years before 2016.

aantix 5 years ago |

I'm always perplexed at how engineers fall into these tribal traps. People that deal with complex nuance all day fully denouncing any idea from specific people.

E.g. I've even seen things like "if you follow Uncle Bob Martin I'm unfollowing you".

barbacoa 5 years ago | |

It's because tribalism exists on a different domain than logic and intelligence. It occupies the same region of your brain and satiates the same primordial needs that organized religion once did. We used to circle around our priests and their sacred idols for our sense of unity, now we circle around our politicians and made up genders.

parafactual 5 years ago | | |

I don't think specifying "made up genders" makes much sense. The progressives and trans people I know, to the extent that they think tribally, do so with respect to ideology like anyone else.

Buldak 5 years ago | |

Before I switched to computer science, I studied philosophy, and I encountered lots of people who seemed to think that philosophers had some kind of special relationship to critical thinking. That makes sense in a way, but I also imagine that adherents to just about any discipline, whether it's mathematics or history or journalism, tell themselves a story like this.

kache_ 5 years ago | |

The hubris on hackernews is appalling. Being an "engineer" doesn't make you immune to what affects all human beings.

giantg2 5 years ago |

The most powerful propaganda are the ideas that the people believe are their own.

croes 5 years ago |

Regardless of the whole Twitter thing. What's wrong with a 4-star rating? It's not a math exam where there are right and wrong answers and you can get 100% = 5stars with the right knowledge. It is always a subjective impression and even the best book ever will not get only 5 stars.

>From Lauren's perspective, what on earth could she possibly have done to garner a 5 star review? Been abused more?

Once again it is not an exam, there is no sure way to 100%, especially not 100% with 100% of the reviewers. Doesn't this show a similar mentality to the Twitter mob?

philsnow 5 years ago |

> These pluralities are unable to exist on social media. There must always be objective truth, there must always be a side that wins, a side that loses [...]

But neither side "wins". They both just shout louder and louder in their own side's echo chamber, with only a tiny porthole into the other's echo chamber, until it finally blows over.

Getting bent out of shape on twitter is like screaming obscenities into a pillow, but there's a public record of what you screamed.

aidenn0 5 years ago |

One of the great social advantages is the outsourcing of thinking; knowing everything about everything is just not possible.

There have always been distortions due to this, particularly in small insular communities. Social media seems to amplify the distortions though; you can end up with a large insular community. After all, if dozens of people all agree with X and nobody disagrees with X, how can it be wrong?

sattoshi 5 years ago |

It's such an unpleasant experience speaking to someone who has bought into some form of group-think on a topic. One of my college friends, otherwise an extremely bright guy would frustrate me immensely whenever any political topic came up.

Not because we disagreed, but rather because I felt I was talking to John Oliver or whatever other pundit he recently listened to on a topic. Same points. Same statements. Same words.

Discussing the root of his propositions were impossible, because they weren't his. He didn't think about them, someone else did.

Animats 5 years ago |

"A month ago I decided to try and get out of the reading slump I have been in - slump is a kind description for what has been a half-decade period of me not picking up a book."

And he's writing about book reviews?

MattyRad 5 years ago |

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/

maypop 5 years ago |

This discussion feels very meta. In the sense that Twitter is the "bad" person, and we are the actors contributing our individual outrage induced take.

Why are we so compelled to participate?

rurabe 5 years ago |

https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/giants.html

nemosaltat 5 years ago |

Bennie Noakes sits in front of a set tuned to SCANALYZER orbiting on Triptine and saying over and over, "Christ what an imagination I've got!"

cratermoon 5 years ago |

Not letting social media think for you applies equally well to HN comment sections.

Growling_owl 5 years ago |

It's not just social media.

Media in general has a heavy bias on negative reporting , that's because humans are wired to have huge spikes in attention when there is a hint of bad news or character assassination.

Back in the days it used to be monodirectional stream: from the Newspapers, Radios, TV towards the population. The internet and social media just amped up this phenomenon globally and the person which is the subject of the character assasination du jour has the immediate feedback of millions of people piling in and commenting aganist them.

There is no defense mechanism really. The only way is trying to make money having the least amount of interactions as possible and in a position which is not under the spotlight.

New York City, Wall Street and the financial sector will benefit from this, also sports betting comes to mind and every domain where the arena is already built and you enter it knowing that it's a zero sum game. Other winners will be a particular demographic which historically always needs to be on the lookout for social unrest and people ganging up against them. They have the most sensitive internal alarms and have timely retreated to finance

throwkeep 5 years ago | |

Yes, the news media is a slower and more centralized outrage machine. The upside of social media is that it's harder to manufacture consent (h/t Noam Chomsky) as it consists of millions of voices. Though that's threatened by the coordinated censorship of big tech, as we saw with the lab leak hypotheses and people being silenced on twitter, facebook and youtube for challenging the approved narrative on that. It finally broke though, but it took over a year! Although without social media, maybe that process would have taken decades?

Der_Einzige 5 years ago | | |

Idk - I think manufacturing consent may be easier rather than harder these days. The fact that it's now realistic to accuse people of being a bot (GPT-3) means that elites could just deploy large numbers of language models fine tuned and prompted correctly to AstroTurf and manufactur consent "from the ground up".

throw737858 5 years ago |

If you click on toxic content, algorithm is going to feed it to you. Twitter is perfectly fine if you unfollow and block toxic influencers. There is propably even keyword based filtering.

For news you can watch international news stations from India. Very realistic and refreshing.

pjerem 5 years ago | |

> Twitter is perfectly fine if you unfollow and block toxic influencers.

Not my experience tbh. I quit Twitter after having tried to follow only accounts that interested me.

But once Twitter starts to be unable to create a sufficiently dense "infinite feed", its algorithm starts to artificially fill your feed and shows you the likes and answers (and not only tweets & RTs) of the people you follow or the hottest tweets of people followed by people you follow.

I was totally unable to protect myself from the "Twitter's today shitstorm". So I quit.

KittenInABox 5 years ago | | |

I use Tweak New Twitter, which removes 'trending', reblogs, etc. from my feed.

https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter/

hnthrowaway2 5 years ago | |

> For news you can watch international news stations from India. Very realistic and refreshing.

Did you mean "if you are in India you can watch international news channels to get a better perspective"? If yes, I would agree with you.

throw737858 5 years ago | | |

No, I am in Europe and watch indian news about US politics etc.

tester34 5 years ago | |

but what's the point of watching news? why bother?

Broken_Hippo 5 years ago | | |

The point is to let you know a bit about the reality you share with others. The stuff on the news is often things that are affecting others directly (do you want to avoid the area of town with unmasked protesters?) and indirectly (Is your neighbor going to increase racism towards Asian Americans in part because of folks linking a virus to a country?).

News doesn't always have the most important things to you, but it clues you in on the world.

codeulike 5 years ago | | |

Fact x Importance = News

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC4vPR9e9NA

myfavoritedog 5 years ago |

Social media interactions are like daily Black Swan events to most people. The scale of the interactions is just not intuitive enough for them to process in a healthy way.

I’m optimistic that eventually, society can learn to deal with it, however.

pessimizer 5 years ago |

It's bizarre to use an author who demands 5/5 star reviews and insults personally people who gave her 4/5 star reviews in a take about nuance criticizing the people who criticized her for doing that.

Blogs are also social media, this is just additional pile-in. I think this is supposed to be better because it uses too many words, tries to make the personality flaws that it ascribes to reviewers universal, and has a bunch of emotionally performative talk about moved to tears and having your heart broken mixed with talk about trauma.

edit: maybe the blog author should spend the time to listen to the life stories of the people who review books. If there were a more traumatic story from one or more of them, expressed well, would they win the sympathy contest?

cindarin 5 years ago |

I don't understand these posts.

Why must the world at large censor themselves so an author can demand everyone see her work as perfection without hearing any other opinion? Why are the various, discordant voices considered "social media thinking for you", but the demand of absolute acquiescence is not?

tristor 5 years ago | |

I don't believe that's an accurate representation of the point the author of the article was trying to make. I believe that their point was that we should not pile on with mobs, believing that popularity or trends of the moment are correct (letting social media think for you) and instead perform our own analysis of available information or better yet avoid contentious situations altogether.

Their point wasn't really about the author or the book, or the situation, it was a meta-analysis of the fact that many of the later participants in the mud-slinging online were reacting to the furor on social media, rather than to the original situation. If you analyze this more expansively, it's just an observation of the well understood sociological trend of reactionaries and counter-reactionaries.

cindarin 5 years ago | | |

There's no analysis here. There's no detail whatsoever; those are intentionally omitted, supposedly to protect the readers from being bored. Instead, the blogger offers only opinion with no support at best, and falsehoods presented as truth at worst.

I choose not to let them think for me. I will not disavow social media simply because some blogger expressed their own irrational, negative opinions of it.