Can we fix the wired?

Gonna be a long post It certainly isn't a question that social media and modern web culture has evolved into something very harmful for conversation. Constantly people are looking for reasons to freak out over anything and go after the careers of whoever posted the wrong opinion on the internet. On top of that, the internet seems to only have binary responses to things. "You are wrong because A" and "I am right because B" and arguments don't really stem beyond that, where the capacity of open-mindedness and looking deeper into matters just doesn't happen. People on social media stop at these very incoherent binary accusations in mass to the point where it can collapse whole lives. It's so much easier to click away and rejoice with others who share your opinion or to surrender and change to those people where there aren't any repercussions or conflicts for your beliefs. I think this phenomena pretty clearly demonstrates how much of the web is more quantity over quality and in someway encourages this harmful herd mentality where change rarely happens. I even think all of us to an extent can be guilty of subconsciously creating echo-chambers for ourselves. Even on imageboards where chaos and anonymity is prevalent, I bet most of us came to Lainchan or /g/ over shared values like FOSS for example and don't often see many going against it. and it's for these reasons that make the internet seem like the worst possible medium for productive conversations that move society forward due to the echo-chambers that are created whether consciously or unconsciously. Unlike going outside and touching grass for instance, you generally don't get to choose the information and content you're met with and need to make do with what you got. You're thrown into situations where you need to make an argument for yourself and really get the other person to understand, unlike social media which ferociously attacks but rarely educates. (pt 1)

>>77033 (pt 2) On the other hand though, spending so much time on the internet in my own experience has exposed me to so many different perspectives of all walks of life. I'm sure many lainons and anons can relate, where on anonymous online forums a diverse set of perspectives can be found. There are the stereotypical imageboard-goers for sure, but there are also genuine chads and high value people in the highest and lowest spots of life from all over the world. A colorful and diverse array of perspectives because of the lack of incentive to blend in with the herd. When you're thrown into an environment with so many perspectives, it feels like the only way to succeed and move forward is to eventually show compassion to everyone and hear them out. It's my belief that going through this has made me much better at dealing with people who have radically different perspectives, and having productive conversations with them. This whole idea has me thinking, how could this be brought over to modern web culture? In the examples I brought up in the beginning, one could definitely see how the internet is harmful for discussion. But in my opinion the latter example showcases a much more healthy use of the internet to gain more perspective and ultimately compassion for all. This being by taking advantage of the diversity and abundance of the internet to have compassion for other perspectives, rather than abusing it to create echo chambers. Surely the internet isn't inherently bad for bridging gaps between people and ideas (ironic right?). And surely there's a way to cultivate this process of compassion for the greater web. What do you think lainon? sorry if this turned out to be a poorly written blog post. I just wanted to get my thoughts out :/

>>77034 I think the 'net has shown me over time, diverse perspectives usually create chaos. This is pretty intangible and hard to explain, but the greater social cohesion of 20-30 years ago was in large part because we all obeyed a web of beliefs handed down by society, whereas nowadays that web of beliefs is kaput, so we just obey our personal feelings on every topic. And yeah, we can see how that's going. Chaos, fragmentation, arguing everywhere. Maybe I'm cynical, but IMO some people have radically different perspectives from you and there's nothing that can bridge this gap. People say diversity is good for discussion, but in my (many wasted) years online, experience says it's totally opposite. Like I'll say something, and the responder just doesn't grasp what I'm saying at a very basic level. For discussion to be fruitful, participants need a very high degree of similarity. Most likely, there's an ideal range where a person is just like you, but with slightly more experience/thought -- like an older man in a tribal village, see? You have 99% agreement on ideas and experiences, but he'll understand juuuust slightly more so you can learn from him. Likewise, the failure of modern parent/child dynamics is partially owed to how rapidly the world is changing. Because the parent can no longer adequately teach. This is all to say, that the main thing you learn from highly fragmented & diverse perspectives, is that learning from these perspectives typically isn't possible. We can have compassion for them, but talking with people very unlike ourselves is just sorta pointless.

>greater social cohesion of 20-30 years ago was in large part because we all obeyed a web of beliefs handed down by society The net started as a bunch of outsiders nerds following their weird hobbies on a platform normal people didn't use nor understand. As such the net couldn't represent society by definition. And it got only bad with adoption by the unwashed masses because commercial interests followed preying on them. Search engines had to be manipulated to generate income so the organic content got washed away as the new influx dominated SEO to improve profit. A bit later followed gov propaganda which now is at a new level with ai chatbots deployed to spread correct opinions.

>>77042 >The net started as a bunch of outsiders nerds Yeah, exactly. What I miss about the old 'net is that, even when I got into super big arguments, it was hard to stay angry because the other dude was just some nerd behind a keyboard like myself, we were mostly the same. Whereas now you're surrounded with people that are genuinely unlike yourself and forced to deal with them. It's a pretty isolating feeling

>>77040 >People say diversity is good for discussion, but in my (many wasted) years online, experience says it's totally opposite. Like I'll say something, and the responder just doesn't grasp what I'm saying at a very basic level. For discussion to be fruitful, participants need a very high degree of similarity. in my experience, it is possible to have productive discussions even with peopleyou disagree with very much, *if* everyone involved has good faith and good humor. When these things are lacking, meaning, when one or more person involved is more interested in *winning* than *being right*, it quickly devolves in to mudflinging. Chaos itself is fine. There can be a cacophany of opinions and beliefs and it all works out fine usually. It's just a problem when conversation becomes a weapon.

>*if* everyone involved has good faith and good humor. One of the more revolting things i ever saw was one imagebaords rules on raiding other boards that tldr to "never admit being wrong even if you know it's wrong, our enemies wont admit fault and so we must neither" meaning these people invade other peoples spaces and intentionally lie to preach their ideology

>>77049 Come on man its a raid. You don't go to war and then give all the enemy combatants jury trials and multiple appeals before killing them, and you don't go on a raid to have a goodnatured debate. You just think raids are bad.

>>77050 >You just think raids are bad. well... they are.

>>77050 Don't see how it helps. Evangelism is a salesman job and if you lie about obvious defects the customer can tell then you lose your chance to sell. Best i can imagine is they had issues with raiding members getting converted when they honestly engaged with people so they made a rule to turn brain off and never engage.

>>77056 >>77053 if you're committing a murder, you kill the guy. Maybe its bad but you do it. If you didn't, it wouldn't be murder. If you're committing fraud, you lie and deceive. Maybe its bad, but you do it. If you didn't, it wouldn't be fraud. If you're doing a raid, I don't know exactly what you should be doing but its surely not sticking around for honest good faith discussions. You should be spamming and screeching and raping and pillaging to the extent that you can. If you don't its not a raid. Sure OK raids are bad, I didn't mean to be implying their not. I don't like murder either but if I saw a booklet explaining how to murder that included a point to kill some guy I'm not going to be especially revolted, I'd chuckle at the fact that they bothered to write it down, and just be revolted at actual murders instead. What I'm saying is just, if you're gonna be revolted at this, be revolted at raids themselves.

>>77050 >You just think raids are bad. Uh, yes? Did you read the OP? A lack of detailed discussion is rusting the value of time spent on the internet out from the inside, and the comment you're replying to says raids are bad because they explicitly intend to avoid detailed discussion. Do you want it explicitly stated that water must be wet because it's a liquid next?

>>77060 Raids are maybe defensible when they are about stupid soykaf that doesn't make sense to debate anyway, if someone has to tell people to plug their ears and say la la la, clearly there's something worse going on than the raid itself, probably tragically earnest political activism.

golly jeepers you guys I am just concerned that the fella is upset at the instructions to be belligerent rather than the belligerence itself

>>77060 original >>77049 poster here >I don't know exactly what you should be doing Raids used to be lets visit the other site and have some silly fun. Sometimes it was just take the most interesting thing you found back to your own place without even posting anything. Raids weren't all bad. Watching these activists turn a fun activity into running lobotomized propaganda operations is disgusting in contrast.

>>77033 >>77034 I think your observations stems from a false impression of communion over general ideas, but you certainly failed to push people with truly different ideas into corners of their own beliefs. Consider that for eons, all human cultures were not varied, all guided by the same rules. The division brought by democracy would be unthought of. All people within the same kingdom or whatever would pass as a nation would share the same values unless they belonged to a collection of nations, an empire, in which case anyway the chances of communicating with others and strangers were null. Which means that the people you talked with shared your values. The communities were sealed so people saw the world the same way, had the same religion, the same cultural references. But today the nations are divided, the populations within these nations have radically opposed views so it is impossible to find a stable long term agreement. All becomes a noise of loud shouting, incomprehension and bickering over the tiniest difference because democracy convinces us that a plethora of choices matter, the more choices the better, and so every single little variation of an idea is worthy of endless talks and aggressiveness if things don't go far enough. People will tire of this and will sooner or later beg for a totalitarian monoculture that will mechanically filter all the chaff and make it redundant, pointless to even consider. Some people are being worried over the broader internet being censored and being reduced to regional nets, but this downsizing will carry advantages. Built from blinders or walls, these smaller nets, deaf to others, will allow more coherent cultural norms to be enforced on smaller geographical unions of nations. Democracy has been a waste of time. The more democracy prevailed, the more people get lost in pointless discussions over topics that they had no proper knowledge of anyway, falsely taught that their views mattered when in reality they were all vain in light of the more elevated directives already settled far in advance. I personally found out that contrary to what you have been seeking, less diversity of views was more preferable. A better environment emerged from this simplification of ideas, the narrowing made things more peaceful as agreements with peers were more often reached, resulting in higher harmony at a faster and safer rate that exponentially reduced the risks of confusion, discord and loss of trust.

>>77045 Gated communities are the solution but their quality is entirely defined by the code the jannitors operate with. There is enough variety of experiences today even with people who share most of the core values on a given set of topcis to make any expansion useless. Discovery may be bound to remain superficial and soon the agree-to-disagree limit is met. The sooner and the more often that limit is met, the clearer it is that you are wandering in a non-friendly zone. I don't really see the point of that. I have a desire to filter things a lot to make life easier.

>>77033 >I even think all of us to an extent can be guilty of subconsciously creating echo-chambers for ourselves. Even on imageboards where chaos and anonymity is prevalent, I bet most of us came to Lainchan or /g/ over shared values like FOSS for example and don't often see many going against it. A place where people with common interests gather is not (necessarily) an echo-chamber. You don't prevent an echo-chamber by turning your site into a free-for-all and shrug your shoulders when people eventually devolve into spam and raiding, like Ruqqus did. You do so by de-escalating and fostering a community culture that shares a common ground but actively prevents grandstanding and activism. There is nothing wrong with a community that likes the same things, it's only when that community becomes full of itself when they deserve a reality check.

>>77033 When you see only or dominantly more content that is close to your world view, you miss out the whole spectrum of opinions, which is balanced and opposing ideas to yours. But when the opposing side is not visible, you might find the more extreme of even toxic opinions on your side less extreme and disturbing than they are. Filter bubbles happen to drive polarization for two reasons : digital media lock people into isolated echo chambers and homogeneous groups lead to extreme opinions, while interactions with opposing ideas or individual leads to political moderation. People who are opposed to minimum wage are likely, after talking to each other, to be sill more opposed; people who tend to support gun control are likely, after discussion, to support gun control with considerable enthusiasm; people who believe that global warming is a serious problem are likely, after discussion, to insist on severe measures to prevent global warming. This phenomenon constitutes a whole threat to democratic systems especially in the era of AI generated content. While a large part of the population is constantly locked in individual and personalized echo chambers, those same echo chambers can be artificially created in such a way that could lead to extremism, radicalization and strong cultural shifts. Speaking now of how we can fix the wired, I personally think that one immediate solution is to isolate a network of like-minded individuals and establish strong barriers to entry (technical and intellectual wise). Thus, there is no point for government agencies and firms to corrupt and gain control over that network since it doesn't try to appeal to the general public.

>>77215 theres like a bazillion and seven small networks gatekept by technical difficulty to access, what they must have is interesting content and persistent usefulness. Many of them lack this and therefore they flounder. The technical problem to make such a place is trivial, the cultural component the sticking point. And if actual prominence or value is present, then normal people and entryists are liable to appear and must be persistently gatekept, most likely in a fashion more aggressive than some simple technical problem that can easily be automatically solved by an app or frontend otherwise. Ive seen the trick used that likeminds think alike, and unwelcome minds are unable to voice positions held by the ingroup, a solution is to require newcommers, or persons under suspicion, to state certain tennants of the group as shibboleth. Seems to work surprisingly well, for certain of these groups and certain ideas.

>>77034 define "high value people"

>>77219 >define high value people not him but people whom I'd work and pay money to meet and spend time with, as opposed to whom I'd work and pay money to avoid and not interact with.

>echo chamber the echo chamber / filter bubble effect after its widespread publication in tech media in the early/mid 2010s became something tech CEOs and media publications became very concerned about, simultaneously however they still needed to turn a profit. the solution was something we were always familiar with. the Engagement Paradigm can be understood as a trajectory between tabloids, exploitation media, clickbait, and the argument-prone site policy of elon musk's most embarassing purchase. it should be noted that monetized shock content (as opposed to unmonetizeable shock content, which may on imageboards be more familiar) is only profitable so long as it is shocking, that is, that there's a sense of normalcy or apropos which can be predictably made vigilant for clicks. >how do we make a better internet? its honestly narrow to think about the best way that users should engage with the net, when it seems like the algorithmically-enhanced agreeability of for instance facebook is just as likely to lead not only to bad experiences, but perhaps be psychologically harmful to users as algorithmic promotion of conflict - both of which externalities, rationales, and emergent behavior beneficial to the strategy of showing you ads, and selling your data. The solution, I feel, is to focus on the algorithms - or perhaps moreso, the platforms that use them. To speakers of English as a first language, the internet largely consists of 5 social media sites - youtube, tiktok, facebook, instagram and X by far being the smallest (~10% the size of Facebook). With different recommendation algorithms and ways of according with United States law, an incredibly diverse away of micro-communities, these all have the same underlying legal and financial responsibilities, and are largely hosted on the same infrastructure. All that is to say, the internet being a lot larger than what it once was saw most of that growth funneled into particular monopolies, socializing its users into particular habits - it is more satisfying to see users not as mindless sheep to be shepherded (as mainstream Internet expects us to be) but rather frustrated, halpless, tormented into engagement and largely *without agency* over the content they're pursuing. I'm saying that the aforementioned executives of this story destroyed virtual communities in a reaction to users' ability to curate their own experience. Fear of the echo chamber transmuted through board room meetings, legislative assemblies, and mass publications into an alignment with pre-existing social anxieties about virtual communities from the early 2000s, which went hand-in-hand with the satanic panic of the 90s. The solution is to give users back their agency.

>>77226 Not intrinsic and human centric at all.

Realistically, the problem of toxic discourse might only be solved with "personalisation" algorithms. For instance, a service could simply hide posts from people with opinions that are different from yours. This already happens to a degree, but take it to a certain extreme, and there will be no discord online. Everyone will happily stay in their own bubble, unaware that other opinions even exist, which is horrifying in its own way. Being completely isolated from other world-views would likely worsen one's reactions to them, thus creating the perfect preventive measure against any new opinions. Considering how much significance the Internet now holds, this could impede the development of society in general. Naturally, the better alternative would be to educate people on the use of dialectic (as opposed to rhetoric or outright rejection), the importance of different opinions, various methods of resolving interpersonal conflicts... But let's be real. That's not happening -- not now, not anytime soon. But real life seems to be better, right? Yes, people don't generally throw insults and make threats the moment they disagree with someone (although sometimes they do), but conversations between people with radically different beliefs are usually unproductive still. Most of the time, neither party listens to the arguments of the other, both parties are offended when the other doesn't agree, authority and popularity are the primary measures of truth... So, how does one cope with all this? Same as ever. In the end, the Internet is not too different from real life. What people do not realise is the scale. If you could talk to this many people at once face-to-face (and you can -- go out into the town square, climb somewhere high, and give the crowd a speech), you will be met with the same situation. The reason it "used to be better" is because the "crowd" was smaller. Just like in real life, the only way to "fix it" is to find a "crowd" that you're more comfortable with, and the only way to avoid echo chambers is to step outside the comfort zone and occasionally look for new "crowds".

>>77034 um I'm not very good at explaining myself and my train of thought but I've realized a while ago that at least 60% of the population doesn't care to be good people, they'll think that they do care but they end up creating themselves echo chambers and fighting every single person who doesn't agree with them. I've seen this study that says that a very large majority of people who claim to be self aware aren't actually self aware, and that explains a lot of whats happening if you get what I mean.. I've been on the internet since a very young age like pretty much almost everyone here I'd assume and I learned to be a very understanding person and I can always sympathize with every side which gets a bit difficult sometimes, and seeing people lacking the trait of understanding frustrates me because they could easily reach a conclusion but they're too far up their own ass to just try and understand what the other side thinks and why. and again I'm just sure that a lot of people are like this because they are simply not self aware :I a year or so ago I've started to feel the same as you, I'm not happy in the internet and it makes me miserable. I've been building on leaving the internet after I move in with my boyfriend but it'll be useless, everything in life is now influenced by the media and you can't escape it and if you do life will just be tiring and it's not going to be worth it, you'll have to relearn life because for the past decade everything and everyone have been so focused on the internet. it'll be difficult to make friendships aswell because a majority of things people connect over are internet things like recent trends and all. point is that escaping the internet is going to be hard and tiresome and I'm not sure if it's going to be actually worth it at the end of the day >Surely the internet isn't inherently bad for bridging gaps between people and ideas (ironic right?). And surely there's a way to cultivate this process of compassion for the greater web. The internet is a great tool and it's so powerful and amazing in theory, but people are good but also pretty horrible and stuff.. so there will obviously be bad stuff on the internet, but I think the whole issue is that people are just not self aware enough to be like you for example, they don't care enough to try and find their compassionate side and that's just how it is, which makes it very difficult to just coexist in peace and it just brings a lot of chaos and anger and all of that anger just radiates into the real world. oh also also corporations are pretty terrible..... I'm not sure where I'm going with this either but I've been thinking the same way as you for a while now and I don't feel like I've ever gotten to properly discuss it anywhere :P, thanks for giving me the chance to just dump everything in one place, I hope I made at least a bit of sense? idk ESL moment etc. stay safe everyone!

>>77228 >The solution is to give users back their agency. Anyone have thoughts on whether/how this can be contributed to with software, or other specific means? To me it seems like the goal of user agency is something companies and their platforms are naturally going to be opposed to. An idea I've been playing around with is to make an expanded, modular RSS client, that also scrapes or otherwise acquires content from various social media, displays it and allows interaction with it. There would be a component that decides what to show to you and how to order it, that could be swapped out, consisting of manual filters or a locally run machine learning thing to guess your preferences. The idea being that if people can choose their own algorithms, maybe that will be better. Also that a lot of the centralization and control these sites exercise is about habits; it's difficult for people to use other platforms because they have a deeply ingrained habit of using a particular website or app and its interface, there isn't a way to fold a new interface into that process without a level of conscious effort that's hard to get past.

>>77323 >Realistically, the problem of toxic discourse might only be solved with "personalisation" algorithms. For instance, a service could simply hide posts from people with opinions that are different from yours. This already happens to a degree, but take it to a certain extreme, and there will be no discord online. Forums (and to a lesser extent, imageboards) used to fill this role and they didn't even need algorithms. These sites group content by topic; if you wanted to talk about your favorite TV show, you'd find a site about it, or failing that, go to a broader site (e.g. one about the genre that show belongs to) and find/start a thread about it there. The only time you really had to hear about politics is if it had to do with the topic at hand. So if that show touched on racism for instance, you'd expect to see a lot of discussion about race. If it didn't, then said discussion would be out-of-place. Now granted, most forums had an off-topic board for stuff that had nothing to do with the forum's focus. And on that board you might run into a thread on politics or some other discussion you don't care about. But even then you can always ignore it. You don't have to open it, you don't have to see everyone's opinions, you can just leave it alone. On imageboards you can even hide it. Compare that to social media (esp. Twitter and Tumblr) where content is grouped not by topic, but by person. There's some limited grouping-by-topic in the form of tags, but it's unreliable since you can tag your posts however you want or not even tag them at all. So the primary way everything is organized is by who posted it. The problem here is that when you follow someone, you see everything they post, not just the stuff you like to see from them. You might follow someone because they post fanart of your favorite show, but then you have to see all the arguments and soapboxing they get into. And it's not just their own posts either, but also the ones they share from others. So the followers get all this shoved in their face, day after day, until eventually they give in and start taking part in the soykafflinging. Fixing this isn't as easy as trying to revive forums. Social media overtook them for a reason, and that reason is that it caters more to lurkers (who make up the vast majority of users) than people who actually discuss and create things. Finding new content on a forum means browsing for stuff you like manually, subforum by subforum, thread by thread. At best you can subscribe to a thread to get notified of new posts. Meanwhile, finding new content on social media simply means pulling up the front page. So the real fix would be a site that: 1. Organizes content by topic (what it's about) rather than by person (who shared it) 2. Appeals to lurkers by letting them access content easily Except there is such a site like this, and it's also a hellhole. That site is Reddit. What makes it a hellhole is that godforsaken upvote system. There's a lot of problems with it, but the relevant one is how it drives people to take on greater and greater extremes in the name of internet points. It's not endemic to Reddit, Twitter has this same problem with likes/retweets/followers instead of upvotes. It's just clearer to see without grouping-by-person. Preaching to the choir isn't enough to keep the points going; you have to make more and more profound takes, you have to post cherrypicked screencaps of bigger and bigger retards from the opposition. Then this becomes all anyone sees. They see these profound takes, think these ideas are normal, and adopt them for themselves. They see the cherrypicked retards on the opposite end and think this strawman is what their enemies are all like. That means there's one more trait for this ideal site: 3. Doesn't have a system that affects visibility based on upvotes/followers/etc, which distorts people's ideas and pushes them to extreme beliefs If such a site existed, then maybe we'd have a chance to start pushing everyone back to sane positions. But that's a huge maybe. At this point it'd all hinge on the mods leaving their biases at the door, which sure as hell isn't going to happen. If it does, then someone'll find a way to make it stop. Infiltrate the mod staff, spam the site with illegal content to get it taken down, associate it with $CURRENT_BOOGEYMAN, whatever.