Are a few people ruining the internet for the rest of us?

Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 40 years ago when discussing online forums:

>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.

This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew.

That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people with actual mental illness; think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.

[1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here

> When I scroll through social media, I often leave demoralized, with the sense that the entire world is on fire and people are inflamed with hatred towards one another. Yet, when I step outside into the streets of New York City to grab a coffee or meet a friend for lunch, it feels downright tranquil.

Alternative explanation: The online world is "real" and the real-life interactions are "fake", at least as far as political opinions are concerned.

The social conventions for online and face-to-face interactions are still markedly different (with good reason). When face-to-face, we generally care a lot more about maintaining a pleasant conversational environment and usually avoid things that would insult or hurt the person we are talking with. The focus is also a lot more about everyday issues and a lot less about abstract political topics like it would be online.

All of this means that face-to-face, we will probably talk a lot less about divisive political topics than we would do online.

But it does not mean we have fewer opinions on those topics, only that we won't show them so easily.

So it could be that the online discourse really is a truthful mirror of the political division of society, only that in real life, those divisions are much more hidden behind layers of politeness.

we live in a society where we can't really voice, our opinions or grievances towards specific groups or cultures or issues as it is deemed politically incorrect, so a lot of that has moved online, behind anonymity. Anonymity also plays an amplifying role. Larping as the target group and in many instances it becomes even easier to manipulate this much is true, but this is the price of forcing all of the healthy debates away from the off-line world because we fear offending.

The contrast between the online off-line world that the author in the article alludes to is indicative of this. It's the unspoken role where we all know that speaking out has consequences often that impacts are economic well-being. There would be no way to get farm something for which there is no demand for...

This article is rife with wishful thinking and honestly I don't know if society has ever been as harmonious as I feel like it alleges. As if there was a time where everyone just got along and things were great and you could get an egg cream for a quarter after the sock hop.

I seriously question whether there was ever a time where the masses weren't influenced by "a few people", for better or worse.

The numbers don't move me and can't be the sole arbitrator of truth when the direction of humanity is involved.

So while I'm not surprised that people report feeling less inclined toward inflammatory media after disengaging it, I just don't believe that there is a grand collective that we can return to that is free from the influential few.

The issue is that there are many masses and many fews at odds to find their pair and wont to view the others as the outrageous ones.

People can hardly curate outfits at their own discretion. They're going to defer to people who are deferring to what amounts to a cell of 3-4 guys linked to a larger apparatus of taste to find out what to wear, what to watch and what to think.

That's just the way it is.

The average person is well-meaning and reasonable up unto the this eerie point in their life where they feel existentially threatened and thrust on the stage of public opinion for the criticism of others.

So I think that suggesting that society isn't toxic in it's current form and all it is is that we're just viewing the world through this funhouse lens because of a few bad guys on social media is a conceited perspective because the world as it is indeed is a carnival of ideas surrounding the marketplace and the internet is its pavilion, not its public square.

And to dare to suggest that there is in fact one single true direction for people to choose demands contending against all the goofy ways people are turning and admitting that things are as bad as they appear, in spite of whatever ways we can come up with to assume the good faith of the common man.

The irony is that this same outlet will unapologetically make its bones off the incessant reporting on all the ways that society is under peril. Sometimes obscuring these reports with solicitations to fund this effort.

Ads companies like google and facebook make their core business to put ads on your face. Same as, someone pays them loads of money for them to show you ads, so you can buy things you don't want or need. So when you use any of their "products", you are the product. This is nothing new. I hope that is not new to you. That said, their business spy also is good for spy agencies, so they take care of each other's business.

And please don't ever say "social media" or "social plataforms" because those are not social. Those are indeed anti-social platforms. You can call them that.

Take a look at twitter and what is has become. It was already bad.

I think people forget that the same things happen offline. These arguments that blame anonymity or large groups are flimsy.

Just think about how embarrassing some friends or family can be. Think about why you went online in the first place.

I find it nearly impossible to avoid divisive content online. There are so many cool things in the world, but I can't find them because my timelines are all flooded with culture war. I wish I could find a platform that would listen to me when I say "show fewer posts like this."

The answer is yes, and also yes towards that question for most other media. The fact propaganda is an industry is the issue. As soon as you have a population of people of sufficient mass, it becomes worthwhile to invest in attempting to influence the mindshare in some way towards a profitable end. This will be true for as long as we make use of propaganda for selling products, controlling votes, and how people think and behave. People might think it is only for the masses, but given their individual value you can probably be sure that all influential people in this world are also propagandized into making decisions that benefit other latent interests.

I'm not sure how you get out of the fact that game theory suggests there will always be people operating selfishly like this and reaping benefit from it as such. You see it in ecosystems too. It is a perfectly valid evolutionary strategy to learn to rob a nest vs making your own way. The question is how we balance these realities about our animal selves and even try and counter them for collectively beneficial reasons, that also won't just be subverted for someone else. Especially as technology grows to be more esoteric and powerful in the future.

The author is describing the socially (and physically) destructive percentage of the population who just want to grab power through manipulation and control and the way they express this through social media, I believe (dark triad personality disorders, loosely). The only danger I see is an embrace of passivism in the form of “anyone who objects to things that are happening in passionate terms is the real problem.” Which would be even worse, when that percentage has real power, and real ability to pull levers. Not to say everyone should go around screaming or protesting with every tweet, etc. It's the balance of these things I think is off-kilter, not a simple solution “just act aloof and block the right people, and all will be well in the world, just like it is in Starbucks when I leave my apartment each morning.” In any case, that's my two cents. There's a balance to be struck, that this article doesn't really get at.

> Platforms could easily redesign their algorithms to stop promoting the most outrageous voices and prioritise more representative or nuanced content.

By de-prioritizing "engagement" perhaps?

Possibly a good idea, but the incentives of an advertising-based business model seem to be in direct opposition to doing so.

Link to the paper it's based on (by same author):

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23522...

Assuming the key points are valid (they seem reasonable), I'd argue that we'd probably be in a better position with social media if it weren't for the platforms taking on managing our interactions with others. If people had their own software/agents that would filter according to your own needs, we'd likely see less toxicity - but this comes tumbling down as I suspect the platforms would see a dent in their monetisation, and so naturally they wouldn't be in favour.

I tried smaller internet for discussion like lemmy and mastodon, it’s either boring or equally as toxic. Makes me think we’ve been conditioned to expect a ton of content and get upset easily. Both can be true. Blogs has been more interesting as often seen here.