Free speech can’t flourish online — Social media is an outrage machine, not a forum for sharing ideas and getting at the truth::Social media is an outrage machine, not a forum for sharing ideas and getting at the truth
It’s amazing how much casually nicer lemmy and the greater fediverse is. You still see some bad habits leaking over from the rest of the web, but then people actually apologizing! and asking others to be nice! And it actually works!
Well outside of some thorny political issues, but that’s just human nature.
it’s more like the old internet or like old reddit.
As an old Reddit user, that’s why I came here. Just gotta get up the wherewithal to start/ recruit some of the niche subs I enjoyed most now.
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Upvotes and downvotes have always been agree and disagree buttons. Reddit trying to pretend they were ever anything else was folly.
Hell, even calling them upvote and downvotes is a misnomer if all you’re trying to do is promote discussion. Even then, it’s silly to think that most up or downvoted to oblivion comments aren’t there for a reason. More often than not it just tells you what that community’s and parent comments biases are lol.
Yeah, I’ve noticed any “capitalism vs communism” comment or post gets a TON of engagement, and it almost always goes down a negative slippery slope. I guess that’s why a lot of people prefer to filter out politics related stuff.
That being said, even the worst arguments I’ve seen here are nothing like I’ve seen on other platforms, where you think it might spill into someone getting hurt in real life.
I’m useing liftoff and blocking sub lemmets still doesn’t work
Don’t leave me hanging bud.
Fewer people, more tightly connected communities… In old Reddit there was a point over which the sub was getting mainstream and then you would get gallowboob and other assorted jerks ruining everything
The downvote button is still abused as a “I don’t agree with your opinion” button though…
“I don’t agree” -> “the content of this comment is false, because it doesn’t agree with what I believe to be true” -> “this comment provides no value, because its content is lies”. There’s no way you can prevent that chain of reasoning, especially since it’s largely unconscious for most people.
That’s unfortunately true 😕
I suppose it’d probably be pretty hard to sell people on lies being good, on the basis of lies being good ground for refutation of those lies, huh?
But then I dunno, I’d take like 30 comments of people all disagreeing with some premise in some similar way, compared to like, a 10 comment long reference getting 30 gorillion upvotes, because everyone has to be god’s gift to comedy.
yeah I don’t really know how we can improve on that
A “I don’t agree with that” button?
What would it do? If it didn’t do anything, people would just use the downvote button
I think lesswrong has an “agree/disagree” vote as well as a “this comment is/is not high quality and relevant button”
You remove the downvote button. Or maybe instead of points you only allow stickers/emoticon reactions.
You should only get so many downvotes to use per day. Maybe 3.
Ironically gets downvoted by people who disagree
Yup, perfect example of the problem. An on-topic comment adding to the discussion. Sure maybe not the ultimate solution but a valid point to consider.
That’s similar to how slashdot modpoints worked, although both upvotes and downvotes were limited. IMO it was one of the better self moderation systems I’ve seen.
I do personally wish people were a bit more thoughtful before downvoting, and making them a limited resource could help with that. It could also encourage sock-puppeting if not implemented very carefully, though.
I was thinking about slashdot modpoints too - it did seem to result in better discussion, but maybe everything was better in those days/in my rose-tinted spectacles. (And at this point I cba going back to check…)
There were some oddnesses - I remember someone’s signature was “The difference between ‘Interesting’ and ‘Insightful’ is whether you agree” which always rang very true to me. Separating upvotes for “funny”, “I agree” and “I find this interesting” is already pretty handy though.
I think there’s no way to prevent people from downvoting what they disagree with - but maybe if you provided downvotes for “this is wrong” and “this is trolling” people could have an option to ignore the “this is wrong” downvotes and get more diverse opinions.
Have you been to slashdot lately? I’d hardly hold it up as a standard for effective moderation. It has long since become the domain of trolls and edgelords.
That’s what people not on reddit say about people on reddit, and probably so on for all sorts of social media.
Less flippantly, bits of reddit definitely are domains of trolls and edgelords, and when slashdot was at its height, being edgy was way more popular across the entire internet. In addition there is a fundamental tension between preventing groupthink and preventing trolls: in a diverse community there will be people who so vehemently disagree with others that they interpret their good-faith comments as trolling and so will use whatever tools are available to suppress it, leading to groupthink. (I mention groupthink in this context because of the point of “sharing ideas and getting at the truth” if that wasn’t obvious.)
So I don’t remember much about the comments the last time I checked in there but I am a bit skeptical.
This is a nice idea that I’ve seen before, but also one that sort of needs a centralized platform to work well
That’s a good point.
There’s a lot more bad content than 3 per day, though. Also, downvotes have essentially no effect, so the whole mechanism is a bit pointless. Better than nothing, still.
Lemmy already has a huge alt/brigade problem. That would just make it worse.
What the hell is “alt/brigade”?? I mean, as a German I know I’m getting old, you don’t have to rub it in…but I don’t think that’s the meaning of this
Totally disagree. If there was a way to disable comments about Elon Musk, Windows and Trump that would be great. I mean yeah I get it. Lemmy users don’t like those topics but it seems like it’s just constantly force fed to you on this platform. At least on Reddit you could filter certain subreddits out but here it seems to be everywhere.
From my perspective, most of the things I am seeing related to those topics seem to be what can pass for news. Many of them are being linked from reputable sources and it is genuinely important to keep up on details regarding the world. Especially when it is shit and going to hell. How else are the patient men going to run out of it? (yes, John Dryden had it right. Beware the fury of the patient man.)
I can say that I am abidingly patient, but I am running out very quickly knowing what the shitlords are doing.
That’s not been my experience. I keep getting baited by ml power users and then banned for daring to question their orthodoxy. It seems intentional.
That reminds me, I once made my first political post on reddit and that got downvoted to oblivion. I would like to see how that exact same post would perform here on Lemmy.
“Free speech can’t flourish online”
Subscribe to unlock this articleLOL. Truth!
With the truth there is a price to pay?
Used to be slowly changing
What happens on social media has nothing to do with free speech. If I can kick Nazis out of my bar , I can kick them off my website.
And either way, a public square where violent fascists are attacking people and screaming over everyone with megaphones isn’t a place where anything important is being discussed anyway.
And either way, a public square where violent fascists are attacking people and screaming over everyone with megaphones isn’t a place where anything important is being discussed anyway.
Screaming over everyone with megaphones about how they’re not allowed to scream over everyone with megaphones, to a crowd that’s 50% mannequins that have been wired up to play pre-recorded cheering.
Unfortunately, the discussion is important. Everybody hangs out in that public square which means everybody is forced to hear the megaphone Mein Kamph. It’s how the far-right procreate now
The right wants to make it so that if you ban Nazis from a website, armed men from the government will come and arrest you. At the same time, they rant about being compelled to use transgender pronouns.
Free speech online doesn’t even seem to be a particularly well-defined concept. Those who extol it the loudest are often looking to have the millionth “good faith discussion” about The Bell Curve, or use slurs as “just a joke”, or promote a “dating and lifestyle coaching” business to teenage boys. If all they want is carte-blanche to say absolutely anything without being censored, I guess they only need to spin up a web server of their own, or run a lemmy instance. But what they actually want is to bypass the moderation rules on widely-used platforms and shit on the social contract. It’s the same reason they don’t show pornography, snuff footage, or other damaging content on television.
What they seem to want is a right to an audience.
If you want a proper civilized discussion, head to pornhub. You’re welcum.
Nothing makes my day more than clicking on a vid, then seeing some really intelligent shit in the comments.
The comments are always 🔥. They’re better than the videos most of the time…
Pornhub comments is where I learned about the existence of and how to make chicken adobo. Shit’s delicious.
Pornhub comments is where I learned about the existence of and how to make chicken adobo. Shit’s delicious.
This is the most _________ comment I’ve ever read on the Internet.
*Can’t think of the proper word to use for this comment, it’s totally blown my mind. Esoteric? Nope. Non-sequitur? Nope. Has the word actually been invented that describes this comment? It’s power is over 9000!
** I have further questions. Where can one get the recipe for chicken adobo? Also, why when you use voice-to-text does the word “internet” always show up in lower case, when it’s a pronoun that is supposed to be in uppercase?
I was gonna type it all out but then I got lazy. Here’s a pretty close approximation from a quick googling.
The recipe I have uses cane sugar vinegar instead of white vinegar, and brown sugar. And since you’re using vinegar, make sure you don’t stir anything with a metal spoon. It gives it a bitter taste.
No paywall: https://archive.ph/2023.11.12-212740/https://www.ft.com/content/8fde56b7-2515-441a-9472-30c8aedcc200
Tbh, the article doesn’t really talk about the headline. Just some history and talk about Elon musk and Twitter. Not a convincing argument about social media in general.Free speech cant flourish under corporate rule
Free speech has nothing to do with corporations? As long as the government doesn’t start a social media platform, the First Amendment has 0 to do with any of them.
Not in this Cyberpunk world
True. I think i mean something different that probably doesn’t even have a term for it.
People tend to reflect and post the outrage media they subscribe to, then look for echo chambers to reinforce those views. Reasonable opponents get exhausted and leave - and yes, IMO that’s what makes them reasonable, the ability to understand what they’re up against and quit a battle that cannot be won.
Also IMO the “gentleman’s agreement” we had, in the US at least, that free speech was somewhat honored most places including your job or online decades ago is dead. It’s quite clear that even the government isn’t too keen on the 1st amendment depending on who is in charge, much less corporations who will terminate people for speech conflicting with corporate agendas, and absolutely not petty or controlling forum moderators.
People that yell “muh freedum of speech!1!1!” the loudest are often the ones doing their best to force some hateful subjects or outright lies into other’s faces, then they get upset and claim they’re being attacked or bring up some other victim complex when they get “cancelled.”
I feel you are pointing in the right direction, but you did miss some stuff that is commonly missed. (I am going to preface that all I am doing is presenting facts, corps can burn in hell for my personal opinion)
- Freedom of Speech only has a bearing on law, government, and the agents thereof. Corporations in the US are not bound by the Constitution, only the government. Corporations and individuals operating a space where the public are able to act are bound by the laws, but as long as they don’t directly violate any if those law, they can restrict speech as much as they like.
- While echo chambers are a major issue, and one we should all be focused on making sure we don’t get trapped in, they are not the largest issue concerning the issue at hand. Humans are more prone to engage with controversial topics, whether that is surging to the protection of something that affirms our biases, or lashing out against things that offend them. Social media platforms only care about so-called “engagement”. Their statistical validity for investors and advertisers are strictly based on sanitized numbers regarding how many users live on their platforms, how often they post, and even more so how often they comment. Polarizing posts see the most commentary, so social media companies are financially incentivized to propagate as much polarizing information as possible, regardless of the content. The advertisers never see what the post info is or how how much hate and vitriol are in the comments, and they don’t care (some are starting to realize). All they want to know is “if I pay you to put my add on peoples posts, how many people will see them?”. It is disgusting, but true. Bad news sells. Tragedy sells. Hate sells. Polarization sells. It makes me long for the days when all we had to worry about being manipulated by marketers with was sex.
I’m thinking that maybe you missed my point, which is exactly what you said.
First point: Free speech only applies to government retaliation, but that’s on thin ice. Like I said. Not sure what needed clarification, maybe my more sarcastic take on it made it less clear.
Second point: The point is that people aren’t really falling into echo chambers and having the lack of awareness to remove themselves from it, the point is they don’t want to leave the safety of their rage-bait fed herd and face criticisms of their narrative and/or worldview. Sure, someone who views a controversial or fringe subject will probably be fed more by algorithms, and the fault not only lies in that algorithm that wants to profit off clicks but the person that actively excludes any factual evidence to the contrary. Nobody thinks they’re the bad guy, and they don’t want to be told so.
Nobody thinks they’re the bad guy, and they don’t want to be told so.
You also should not assume that everyone is the bad guy, either.
And I get you might to push back against what I just said, but take a look at the tone of your comments, they tend to come from a critical point of view that already sees Humanity in a negative light. (No insult is meant.)
Are we not, though? I’m pretty cynical, but even from a pragmatic standpoint we are incredibly destructive despite us telling ourselves how great we are with our technological advancements.
Are we not, though? I’m pretty cynical, but even from a pragmatic standpoint we are incredibly destructive despite us telling ourselves how great we are with our technological advancements.
We’re both, actually. And I would push back on your assertion that you’re holding a pragmatic standpoint.
The fact that you focus on the negatives and do not mention any of the positives bolsters my point…
You also should not assume that everyone is the bad guy, either.
There is no requirement to mention “both sides”. I did not agree to such a condition, that’s your own criteria to make yourself correct. Have at it.
There is no requirement to mention “both sides”.
There is in America. It’s one of the founding parts of the framework of the social fabric of the country.
Reasonable opponents get exhausted and leave - and yes, IMO that’s what makes them reasonable, the ability to understand what they’re up against and quit a battle that cannot be won.
Sometimes though, it’s not about winning or losing the battle, but just pushing back against the messages that’s trying to shape a harmful narrative. To leave both sides of the argument available for third parties to read and consider.
And for that, every reasonable person should be doing some of that, instead of just bailing. Consider it a civic duty.
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Thank you!
Such a better writing than whatever shit was behind that paywall.
Free speech can’t flourish online, says the paywalled article
Well, “social media” and “online” ain’t the same thing, now are they?
Well, mostly they are nowadays. Sure, there’s still old school forums and personal websites around but most people online interact via social media.
The old forums I used to go to don’t exist anymore. One is now a separate entity from the sponsor company because they pivoted from renting game servers ( the old times when you could host your own private server) to telco and it lost all the value to have gamers attached to the image of the company. Also gamers in the meantime assumed another meaning entirely…
The writer here seems confused. Free speech thrives online. There is no freer a place to speak than the Internet.
What they seem to take issue with is that free speech isn’t always the path to truth. This was never a condition of free speech, and the lack of truth online doesn’t make the speech there any less free.
In fact, free speech is the very force that allows people to lie with impunity. Maybe there would be more truth if speech were less free.
God I could kiss you. It’s so weird. People have been just saying what’s on their minds in chatrooms, forums, etc since the beginning of the internet, which was never scrutinized this much over being “factual”. They were just expressing themselves. But now all of sudden we need a PSA to stop it lol
Is this an issue with… social media, or corporate social media? Mastodon technically is social media and it can potentially have the problems of Facebook or Twitter, or not. Depends on the instance owners control. Even then, however they can’t control every little detail when it’s federated but, that’s a good thing for the freedom of ideas.
If you want my actual opinion, places like Lemy and even Reddit are better for independent voices, because you can go into a dedicated community and get what you want specifically. While places like Mastodon, is more like a timeline of, hey I did this thing, or hey Elon musk did a thing today. Lemy is less like that, but it can also be like that.
Lemy or reddit seems to encourage discusion and Lemy seems to do great at it. The best interaction i’ve seen on an opensource social platform even compared to mastodon, dispite mastodon having more users.
I would have agreed with reddit before but the moderators are killing it the other way. Too much power, zero oversight, and quick to delete or even ban without having knowledge of what they’re supposed to be moderating.
It’s one of the reasons I’m here now, hoping for less of that. And I don’t mean “the vaccines are making my 5G reception weak” type of posts. I mean factual information just getting removed of it doesn’t align with the random moderator of the day when someone inevitably reports it. So much information there is scrubbed that’s accurate and what remains is just an echo chamber of outdated or false information. I don’t know how anyone can solve it other than relinquish control to our robot content moderator overlords.
I think we’ve always thrived on outrage.
Before social media we had newspapers. Sure, we had real serious newspapers where the headlines where printed in a serif font, and mostly contained news about share prices and the political ramifications of abandoning the gold standard, but that wasn’t what the masses bought.
We had tabloids. Look at what the BARMY EU want to ban now. Check out what BOFFINS are doing to dogs. Here’s a 16 year old with her tits out. Look at this man on BENEFITS with 10 kids.
The only objective actual reporting in them was the sports pages at the back, and the TV guide in the middle.
We’ve always been like this. I have no answers how to make things better. We’d have to want to be better, and I don’t believe most people do.
There’s also no algorithm taking the most controversial answer and making it the top most comment ala Facebook.
