I'm a bit monomaniacal about this, but the current online culture wars (and the previous offline culture wars) make me wish that secession didn't have such a bad name. It is obvious that large groups of people have irreconcilable differences of opinion on matters of free speech, sexuality, gun ownership and so on.
It is a shame that rather than a firm handshake and friendly wave goodbye, we will end up with a totalitarianism of one ideology or another, violence, or both.
I don't know if it will prevail in the end, but I think that Reddit approach by splitting the community in small subgroups/communities has a better chance to last in the long run.
Of course, you'll create feuds between communities but at least it is somewhat confined and not always spilling in the common public space.
Unfortunately it also greatly increases the echo chamber / filter bubble but it seems you can not have a peaceful community without an heavy dose of groupthink.
A long time ago, at the dusk of the XXth century, I used to believe that Internet would usher a new age of Enlightenment since every one would have access to many different opinions and unbiased sources. Arguably that was a pretty naive view, and instead we got new tribes disagreeing on almost everything conceivable.
For those of you old enough to have seen the net hey started, but young enough to have been impressionable by its start:
Remember when we wanted EVERYONE to get online? Remember when we thought how great the world would be if everyone was connected and could read all this great information and research?
HA! One thing we did not understand: the tragedy of the commons.
It is now nothing but a tragedy. Best thing to do is stay deep within your select niches and away from general purpose networks like Facebook or Twitter.
I have been waiting a long time for someone to use lessons learned from recommender systems to build a social media site like reddit, but rather than having users group themselves up, they would be shown posts algorithmically, based on how they have voted in the past. For example, if I vote for a lot of pro EFF posts, maybe I will see more posts about free software or something like that.
This also allows the site to treat votes as merely an expression of preference, not a judgment of quality (which is hard to define). Many sites try to enforce a rule that says "Don't downvote things disagree with." This is an impossible battle to win, there will always be people who downvote things they don't agree with. This behavior needs to be accounted for in the platform.
That sounds horrible. I don't want the internet to become a giant echo chamber. I want to hear differing views from time to time, because I might be wrong.
I would imagine you could also similarly find the things you either stay away from or actively dislike. Sort of a topical noise cancellation. Train it to know your preferences, but to occasionally give material outside the comfort zone. I think you'd really need a substantial map of topics to have a good understanding of where contrasts lie, but we're likely on track with the datasets currently being built in public sites like Reddit.
Really, I'm surprised this feature isn't implemented anywhere, since one of the joys of the Internet is being delighted by a new idea you haven't seen before. I certainly would appreciate filtering of the obvious rubbish like Fry is exasperated with, but having quality dissenting opinions available is precious.
> reddit is a source for what's new and popular on the web -- personalized for you. Your votes train a filter, so let reddit know what you liked and disliked, because you'll begin to be recommended links filtered to your tastes. All of the content on reddit is submitted and voted on by users like you
I think there's probably an upper limit for how big any community can become before it becomes fractured. This size is probably variable, and dependent on the medium and structure of the community to an extent, but I'd posit it exists for any community. See: reddit, Stack Overflow, Facebook, any church, any religion, any politcal party, any country.
Often secession is what happens: new subreddits, new churches, new countries. But as they grow, the same problems return.
One thing I've often thought about is some kind of community-space with a fixed upper-bound on the size of communities, essentially forcing a community to split to add new members, like an old cell.
(Not directly applicable to Twitter, but to online communities in general)
It'd be interesting if you could have two votes: whether you liked what the person posted (which would only be visible to them) and whether you'd personally share it with your friends (which would affect it's ranking only among your friends)
Or put differently, I wonder if it's not possible to create a system that dynamically sorts content, instead of having static groups. Seems like static groups with a label on them inevitably end up arguing about exactly what the label means (grin).
I don't want an echo chamber, and I want to be challenged -- but I don't want a daily rage fest against whomever the internet currently hates either.
> I don't want an echo chamber, and I want to be challenged -- but I don't want a daily rage fest against whomever the internet currently hates either
There is some scaling effect at play.
Let's say in community of 1,000 - 10,000 it is easy to keep a civil discourse by small moderation and self-policing. In the 100,000 - 1,000,000 range it is much much harder.
I have no idea of the size of HN but I believe it is closer to 50,000 and thus still "nice".
The follower system on twitter already sorts content like that, it's just the retweet system amplifies certain types of content so strongly that it drowns out other types. Amongst other glaring problems, like driving an evil feedback loop that makes twitter money by making everyone angry.
Many times online I see a friend who is justifiably upset. Let's say they like to put their dog in a sweater and somebody said it was animal abuse.
Now I could care less about dogs in sweaters, but I like my friend. I hear them and I want them to know that they have been heard. So I "like" the content.
When you've only got 1,000 or so followers, no big deal. But if you're around 50 or 100K? statistically you're going to end up with dozens, maybe hundreds of likes. Some likes are "I agree!" Some likes are "I like you". How could any system distinguish the two? I have difficulties doing this in small groups where people are physically nodding their head.
I know designers don't want to move away from the one-button like/vote/heart/plus/whatever, but hell if I can figure out how you'd make a system work like that without massive feedback noise (which is what's happening).
SRS is the boogeyman of Reddit. It doesn't have nearly the power so many people seem to think. There are plenty of reactionary subreddits on multiple sides of various spectrums.
> Internet would usher a new age of Enlightenment since every one would have access to many different opinions and unbiased sources
Agreed. Seems like what happened is people could find their own opinion bubble to live it and feel empowered without having to deal with other opinions.
The US does this by allowing states to have their own local governments and laws.
Forcing everybody into a single, homogeneous culture dictated by a central authority is a recipe for disaster.
People often point to the chaos that takes place in the US government as a 'failure of Democracy'. I'd argue the opposite, it's a side effect of a successful Democracy that supports a wide variety of subcultures with different beliefs/norms.
It should be extremely difficult to establish a universal consensus.
The danger comes when the central authority makes declarative judgements that affect everybody without working out foing due diligence. Some topics can't be addressed globally and therefore should be defined locally or not at all.
Universal laws work best when they're used to guarantee basic human rights and freedoms. Unfortunately, some groups try to manipulate public opinion and garner support by attaching 'human right' to whatever particular pet cause they're trying to force.
Re. your last paragraph, the "different opinions" is exactly what we get, so it's not "instead" but "consequently". As for unbiased sources, that is a pipe dream as it ever was.
There's two reasons for strong moderation (sometimes called 'censorship' by people who don't like it) on the internet:
Jackasses creating an unsafe space for other parts of the community, and making a space safe for advertisers.
The first reason comes down to having a choice between taking action against jackasses to allow groups like "women" and to have a place on your site. This is pretty damn important, and something that places like twitter and reddit have been horrible at. To the extent that there's less harassment on sites like Instagram, I wonder if it's just that the jackasses have confined themselves to Reddit.
Advertising is a different issue altogether, and pretty much comes down to the Q-Tip corporation not wanting their ads to run on r/penetration. Which, meh, as far as I'm concerned, but companies based on ad revenue need to be able to sell ads.
Both of these become bigger issues, however, as the sites get bigger and have a larger need for advertising dime to keep the lights on, and just have a bigger pool of jackasses to deal with. Reddit seems to have scaled... poorly... in both of these regards, and needs to think hard about both issues.
Another reason for "censorship", particularly on Reddit (where the aim goes against the broader cultural default of the site) is to prevent discussions from being overrun by memes and other "low-effort" posts. Most /r/science posts that make the front page end up with a lot of deleted comments, for example.
We disagree (and I get the impression this is the root of much strife) on the definition of the word "safe" in "safe space".
Safe from what? From having your views challenged? From someone calling you an asshat? From people making non-credible threats (Think navy seal copypasta)? From people making legitimate threats?
Talk to 10 different people and all will have different definitions as to what the meaning is there.
IMHO, the objectionable part of "safe space" is the idea that everywhere needs to be a "safe space", and especially so when only certain favored groups of people gets to be "safe" in that universal "safe space" in accordance with the demands of a very vocal minority.
The right to carve out a space (on the Internet or otherwise) for certain like minded individuals to be "safe" from any of the things you mentioned, as well as any other things they may deem fit, is one that we should generally honor, though.
Agreed, but only if said "carving out" isn't done platform-wide at everyone's expense.
Changing the rules after people have invested their time and effort into being part of a community with certain norms is generally a crappy thing to do. This is the internet, where anyone can start their own community with their own rules in any number of ways. The rights of the people that were there first should be recognized.
Sure. It's incumbent on a platform for a wide variety of communities to provide the tools for those communities to define and enforce their own norms. A big part of the problem at Reddit last year was failing to provide good tools for mods of subreddits.
Why not give mods a knob that auto kills ninety percent of the stuff they end up deleting, to keep them from just getting worn down dealing with this shit?
For my own part, the 'non credible' threats are a huge part of the problem. They stop being non credible if there's enough of them, or if you're getting private messages from people with your home address and a rapid or murder threat. That's the level of unsafe that I'm talking about here. And communities need the tools to stop bullshit before it gets out of hand. I actually think that the sort of over reactionary pc-ness that Steven Fry is concerned about could be a reaction to a lack of such tools.
"A long time ago, I used to believe that Internet would usher a new age of Enlightenment since every one would have access to many different opinions and unbiased sources."
Heh, same here. I think that so many of us simply underestimated the immense power of capitalism to co-opt and commodify everything it touches.
Agreed that Twitter shouldn't be activism-free, but they could try to make it less threatening, e.g. by hiding or slowing down replies that are likely to be part of mobbing.
Twitter could do a million things to improve the platform (when it comes to reducing abuse), sadly they've chosen to introduce only orthogonal features nobody really wants, like "Moments".
Property rights are involuntary for the have-nots. The basis of capitalism isn't 'voluntary exchange', but property rights and the accumulation of capital.
Is there a name for the thing where every discussion online eventually becomes about stridently defending or bashing capitalism?
SOME PUBLIC FIGURE: I'm leaving twitter, too many trolls.
[ 50 pages of discussion ]
AGGRIEVED COMMIE: ACTUALLY, capitalism sucks!
(As it happens, totally agree with the commie stuff though. All the cheery talk about liberty and voluntarism is idiotic since it acts like primitive accumulation and enclosure don't exist, as if everybody starts out with equal capital to manage, like in a board game.)
It wasn't capitalism that co-opted communities, it was the end product of modern politics which strives to play people against each other to maintain the power of those who govern. By subtle and some not so subtle phrasing they can turn people into irrational actors which makes them all the more easy to manipulate. There have been some really good areas for the technically inclined to congregate that were destroyed with politically driven conversations took over.
The problem is twofold: low bar to grabbing torches and pitchforks, and a high bar for recognizing someone else's humanity.
In the old days you might not agree with your neighbor, but you had to live next to them. Now with the flick of a thumb you can denounce someone's entire existence before breakfast.
It seems to me that in the old days, not that long ago, people literally formed a mob, and often the catalyst was about who got to live next door to who.
Even the bad boys of twitter, which goes right up to mobs of people trying to ruin peoples lives with death threats etc doesn't seem quite as bad as bombing someone's church for example.
Sure, I'm not trying to say it was all perfume and roses before, but they had to put some effort into it at least. The problem now is it becomes reflexive and casual—you don't even really need the strength of your convictions to attack someone online.
It seems like it's probably "lower" impact (i.e. no physical bombs) by higher participation (people are more likely to shout on Twitter than actually bomb some place).
Of course, the risks are minimal on twitter. At worst they can write a death threat, but nobody's going to come to your house. They'll spend more time arguing with your defenders. And the attention span is short, by next week your controversy will be gone.
Contrast to getting into an extreme argument with your neighbor could result in a physical fight, destruction of property, or death.
Ultimately, this is why I really don't want to see articles on Internet discourse dominated by "culture wars" topics; So little is at stake. I highly doubt mass tweeting and public shaming will ever have much power over anyone, or change national policy or thought. However, someone once told me though that the most vicious fights are often the pettiest, so I only expect culture wars stuff to be more common in the future.
> I highly doubt mass tweeting and public shaming will ever have much power over anyone, or change national policy or thought.
It only has the power that we give it. Which is to say, right now it has enormous power, because employers fall over themselves to defuse any hint of controversy by firing anyone who becomes the target of a mob. And conferences un-invite people, and et cetera, et cetera.
If, going way back to 2009 or so, employers had stood firm and said "no, we're not going to waste our time policing what our employees say in their off hours, now go away" to the perpetually offended of whatever stripe, none of this would be happening. But they didn't, and it is. We need to reverse this state of affairs before we can afford to sit back and dismiss it as irrelevant bickering.
Federalism was supposed to enable pluralism within a single political entity. Each state could live the way they wanted to and have different rules/laws than their neighbors. The urge to use the federal level of government to impose uniform social rules on all the sub-units undermines the possibility of stable political pluralism. Once rules at the state level are no longer safe, the stakes for controlling the single central point of failure at the federal level rise to the point where political differences become intolerable.
I was about to make the same comment, so I'm glad you did.
I'll add that until we can discuss what a fair process is (as opposed to anecdotes of unfairness), the problem won't get better. Everything, including cash transfers, will be human rights and therefore national issues with no room for diversity of solutions between regions.
I came up with a joke a few years ago, which is becoming less and less funny as time passes:
Everyone's an asshole. It's just that you're usually surrounded by people who are the same kind of asshole as you are. The internet makes it trivially easy for assholes of opposing kinds to get into contact with each other, thus guaranteeing maximum offense.
Personally I don't think there's any such thing as 'irreconcilable differences'. The idea of secession in that instance kinda scares me because it leaves you with a new foriegn nation on your doorstep with the exact same set of 'irreconcilable' differences and nobody to moderate them.
Seemingly irreconcilable differences (e.g. US rep/dem, Israel/Palestine) are created by the narratives we're fed & let fester. Sure, narratives are elusive and sticky, but they're just narratives.
In the past that's sometimes taken a global-scale event; like how the horrors of the Nazis swept away any remaining support for eugenics. Other times it's been smaller; like how Stetson Kennedy undermined support for the KKK by exposing its schoolboy ritualism to ridicule in a radio show.
Change the narrative, maybe starting with your own. Whoever the "other side" are; humanise them, don't demonise them. Be the bigger person. Admit that your own perspective on things isn't 100% bulletproof (because nobody's is).
Of course, if you disagree and want to win the argument you could always bring up Trump... I don't have an answer to that.
Personally I don't think there's any such thing as 'irreconcilable differences'.
How would you reconcile the differences between the Western world and fundamentalist Islam regarding the rights of women? Should we "admit" that our perspective that women should be allowed to go outside with their faces uncovered is possibly wrong?
> How would you reconcile the differences between the Western world and fundamentalist Islam regarding the rights of women?
Your comment reads like you disagree and are raising a counter-example, but the existence of a difference doesn't make that difference irreconcilable.
> Should we "admit" that our perspective... is possibly wrong?
Fundamentalist Islam in the 20th & 21st century seems (as far as I've read) to be largely a reaction against Western powers interference, or to use a tired term 'imperialism', with the natural evolution of Middle East nations... toppling democracies, installing dictators, etc.
To get away from the influences of perceivedly 'evil' Western interference fundamentalists took Islam all the way back to the 7th century. In that context it's hard to see how a Westerner arguing that their views on women are "wrong" is going to bother them much; the opposite perhaps. You're arguing against the narrative.
Should we admit that we're wrong about feminism? No, I think that'd be both dishonest and counter-productive. Should we admit that we have been wrong in the past about other important things? Maybe, perhaps that'd help undermine the imperialism narrative.
I believe the comment that was replied to contains an appropriate response:
"Seemingly irreconcilable differences are created by the narratives we're fed & let fester. Sure, narratives are elusive and sticky, but they're just narratives."
and
"Change the narrative, maybe starting with your own. Whoever the "other side" are; humanise them, don't demonise them. Be the bigger person. "
As an anarchs-capitalist I'd be happy to have a society where anarchs-communists had their communes and lived under their own rules.
This may seem off topic but its directly relevant- we regularly have these debates in the anarchist community.
But at the end of the day, it seems the anarchs-communists don't want to live under their own rules for themselves, they want us to live under their rules too. (Yes, the irony is lost on them.)
For people who are conditioned to believe it-- the others must be forced to live the way they think is appropriate--otherwise things are not "Fair".
Jealousy, fear, all these emotions are easily manipulated by propaganda.
To the detriment of tolerance.
So, while I want to see gay married couples defending their marijuana crops with fully auto machine guns, and saying whatever they want online, because I believe in human rights, I must admit I am surrounded by two groups of people who do not believe in human rights and are increasingly seeing the other group as less than human.
> But at the end of the day, it seems the anarchs-communists don't want to live under their own rules for themselves, they want us to live under their rules too.
The main difference between the libertarian left and right tends to be whether they see property rights as some sort of special exception from the principle of maximising liberty, or a some form of theft because it limits liberty. I don't know many far left libertarians (anarchists or otherwise) who'd give a shit how you choose to live as long as you are not proposing systems that would limit the liberty of others.
The right libertarian ideas that tends to be seen by the left as drastically limiting the liberty of others tends to be right libertarian ideas about strict enforcement of property rights and shared responsibility for externalities.
E.g. if you see property as theft, then someone wanting to wall off land is not a simple matter of you wanting to live differently, but a matter of you wanting to deprive others of liberty.
So from the left libertarian point of view, there is no irony, but the consequence of following the principle of maximizing personal liberty to the end, rather than making large carve-outs for property.
> if you see property as theft, then someone wanting to wall off land is not a simple matter of you wanting to live differently, but a matter of you wanting to deprive others of liberty.
Yes, and the problem with this definition of "liberty" is that it makes it impossible for "liberty" to coexist with peaceful cooperation and trade, since peaceful cooperation and trade require property rights. And without peaceful cooperation and trade, you can't create wealth. So "liberty" as defined by the left libertarian is a recipe for poverty and war. As indeed we see wherever such systems have been tried.
> from the left libertarian point of view, there is no irony, but the consequence of following the principle of maximizing personal liberty to the end
Yes, which also means that "maximizing personal liberty" requires, as I said above, poverty and war. You stated the example in terms of land, but it applies just as well to any kind of property. If you have a house, or a car, or a wallet full of money, and I want it, "maximizing personal liberty" means I can just take it, because, hey, I'm just exercising my liberty. Of course you can also exercise your liberty by shooting me when I try. Good luck trying to have a stable society on that basis.
"But at the end of the day, it seems the anarchs-communists don't want to live under their own rules for themselves, they want us to live under their rules too."
Because generally, you guys insist on living in the community and getting all the benefits of doing so, without following that community's rules. Basically, you're saying that those people do not have the right to govern themselves, because when you live in that community, you have become one of those people.
"So, while I want to see gay married couples defending their marijuana crops with fully auto machine guns, and saying whatever they want online, because I believe in human rights"
I fail to see how fully auto machine guns involved in any way leads to human rights. Those devices only exist to deprive other humans of their right to live.
Firearms actually allow humans to defend their right to life. The reason is that they are the ultimate equalizer. A gun allows the 4'11", 89-pound, 79-year-old female to protect herself when attacked by the 6'4", 240-pound, 27-year-old male (or the 5'11", 160-pound female, etc). Then, after said defense takes place, the law sorts out the consequences: right-makes-right, rather than might-makes-right.
Or, in the absence of law enforcement, (e.g. the American frontier), it at least allows potential victims the potential to defend themselves, and gives potential attackers pause: even if they don't have to worry about being arrested and put on trial, they have to consider that their next victim might be armed.
Conversely, in the absence of firearms, the biggest and strongest wins. And in the presence of law enforcement, by the time the police arrive, it's too late.
For this reason, one of the first steps an oppressive government takes is to disarm the population. Examples of this go all the way back to even feudal Japan. It's kind of amazing that we still haven't learned our lesson. Idealism is great, but human lifetimes are relatively short, and human societies are clearly not a succession of "standing upon the shoulders of giants."
Too simplistic, regional arrangements don't necessarily mean everyone in said community follows the ideology of that group. Moving outside of the realm of abstracted ideological thought experiments is kind of a difficult thing. So how do you handle folks breaking your version of human rights in separate groups? Just ignore it? How's that much different from nation states?
The thing is, the groups of people that have irreconcilable diferences on gun ownership are not the same as the groups of people that have irreconcilable differences on free speech. So now you're talking at least 4 separate countries, right? But worse yet, the people involved don't necessarily admit to themselves what their opinions on free speech are, so they wouldn't necessarily self-segregate properly...
Add to that that there is significant geographical intermixing, and the multistate solution to these problems starts to look like the ethnic situation in the Balkans has at some points: several states with totalitarianisms of some ideology (ethnicity in the case of the Balkans) but also a significant minority of dissenters who are supported by neighboring states. It's not really that happy a situation.
Unilateral secession has to have a bad name or civilization would be impossible. But a peacefully negotiated and mutually agreed upon secession would definitely be a good thing.
It is a shame that rather than a firm handshake and friendly wave goodbye, we will end up with a totalitarianism of one ideology or another, violence, or both.