It's out of control largely because it's arguably what social media is best at facilitating.
Legitimate discussion and debate are drowned out by insane verbal "body-slams" on Twitter, because Twitter doesn't really exist to promote legitimate discussion. And with the endless amounts of content and data we consume daily, we place far more importance in services like Twitter to help us navigate the sea of noise instead of taking the time to dig deeper into issues.
It's far easier to just attack someone on Twitter if you disagree than it is to thoroughly debate why you disagree with them.
Ultimately, one gets the sense that there isn't enough time to have a complete and nuanced conversation about a controversial topic because there are so many other things vying for our attention.
And in less than an hour, this post is flagged and removed from HN first page (with >160 votes). It is very difficult to have any kind of rational discussion if people feel threatened by it.
It is a controversial topic, but that doesn't mean that we should shut up the sides we disagree with.
> And in less than an hour, this post is flagged and removed from HN first page (with >160 votes).
Well, if this is what it takes to stop the outrage cascades from taking over HN too, I'm quite fine with it. It's not like the article was telling us anything we didn't already know - no point in just rehashing the same old stuff over and over.
> I don't like this view that somehow the HN readership is too sensitive to inflammatory/controversial information and must be protected from it.
It's less about protecting the readership from inflammatory information as protecting the community from inflammatory discussion, because it is true that there are a number of people here who are too sensitive about certain topics to be able to discuss them civilly.
Hacker News is fine when discussing technical issues (as long as a certain language doesn't come up) but as soon as you see a topic relating to feminism, political correctness, race, gender, American politics, etc... it seems to be a toss up whether that thread will turn out to be worthwhile or yet another flaming garbage fire of polemic nonsense.
That said, while I can understand why threads like this get flagged, it's worth pointing out that flagging a thread doesn't block the comments in it from appearing on the comments page afaik, while hiding a thread does. So if people just don't want to see the discussion at all it's preferable to hide it and leave it be when it clearly already has some traction.
I'm constantly impressed by the quality of discussion here. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say HackerNews is the best calibre open forum anywhere on the web.
If it can't be discussed on HackerNews, it can't be discussed anywhere. The problem of polemic nonsense (nicely put) is at the scope of society, not HackerNews.
I'm not being flippant. If you can think of another online forum that would do a better job, please name it. Slashdot? Reddit? I don't think so. As far as I can see, the discussion in this thread seems civil and thoughtful.
I second _carl_jung. It just isn't necessary. Beyond that, it's not healthy to deem an important topic to be simply out of bounds to discuss. Is that the route to well-considered positions?
I realise I'm arguing from a position of relative ignorance here though. Perhaps there was a flood of spam and trolling that's been removed.
> Well, if this is what it takes to stop the outrage cascades from taking over HN too, I'm quite fine with it.
I would guess that what it takes to stop outrage cascades is heavy handed moderation of the comments that promote it, either you agree with them or not. E.g. all outrage comments ends as dead either they believe in AGW or not.
With a few exceptions [0] I find it better to hold a reasonable concersation with people I disagree with than making them martyrs.
I personally think it would be extremely much more useful to discuss hot topics openly, remove flagging privilege for people who abuse it to flag honest questions (just look how short time it takes from a poor soul asks an honest question about actual numbers in a climate thread before downvotes and flags pile up because "just asking questions" is always just a tactic.)
Same with a lot of other stuff. Just on my way home I had a very interesting discussion with a former UN soldier who disagrees with me on a topic that interests both of us.
But it was interesting because I'm actually listening to verify if I'm missing something, and I guess it was interesting for that other person as well because even if I objected to a couple of points I did so by pointing to verifiable information that could nuance tjat persons opinion (if they wanted) instead of saying "you are wrong".
[0]: for a good example I personally don't argue with actual nazis - but you might find me trying to talk sense into people who get called nazis but are really just unreasonably worried about immigration or aren't too good with statistics.
Yup - and this gets amplified by the tendency that most social media platforms have, of heavily boosting the visibility of clickbait and repost-bait content. It's, yes, the "Sad!" pattern of conveniently deflecting controversy by attacking one's perceived opponents, plus the increased visibility that this gets you. This is something that social media platforms could very much work on - even some simple sentiment analysis could be useful in stopping these outrage cascades.
Couldn't agree more. It's too god damn easy to tear someone's life apart online. You don't have to see their face, don't have to know how they feel, or worry about physical retaliation.
Social media in its best case is a platform to prove to the world what a creative and good person you are and connect you with others that appreciate you. But it's been twisted to a platform for us to bring down people that we think are lesser than us. We've built a hate generation machine for ad money.
It's just a cheap attention grab, and we are in an attention arms race. Once one person starts doing it, everyone else has to do it in order to keep up.
Is it social media or the news? Is it CNN, Foxnews, NYTimes, BuzzFeed, Huffpo, MSNBC, etc or social media?
Did rolling stone intentionally lying about campus rape cause the problem or social media? Is the media constantly peddling lies like "campus rape crisis", "racist attacks", etc the problem or social media?
I don't remember social media having this level of problem until the news industry forced it's way into social media.
The outrage isn't being driven by social media. It's being driven by the news industry and the media in general. But I guess blaming russia hasn't worked so now we can scapegoat social media.
From UVA to Covington to Mollett and everything else, is it the platform or the journalists, celebrities, etc creating the message.
It's not an either-or problem: both contribute to the outrage crisis. The difference is that media doesn't provide the platforms for individuals to communicate with each other and the world. That responsibility falls on social media.
> I don't remember social media having this level of problem until the news industry forced it's way into social media.
I'd argue that this is largely due to the fact that it took many years for social media companies to onboard large portions of the modern world. You may notice a correlation here, but where's the evidence of causality?
> The outrage isn't being driven by social media. It's being driven by the news industry and the media in general.
I disagree with this. Many social media platforms guide their users to certain types of content automatically using their recommendation engines. As an example, I consume a lot of political content on Youtube, and yet I get recommendations to watch conspiracy theory videos constantly. CNN isn't telling me to watch Q, YouTube is.
I remember Twitter being an instant hit with people in the news biz. I attended an early "Times Open" conference where they were quite shocked that people were live tweeting it.
Not saying that this isn't the case. The person I responded to conflates the rising popularity of social media with the entrance of news organizations into the space, which I believe is an oversimplification.
So what if people communicate with each other? That's the point of the internet and has been forever. That's like blaming telephones for outrage.
What does Q have to do with outrage? Is Q responsible for Smollet and the race baiting by CNN and the rest of the media? Is Q responsible for the russia fearmongering?
Are you really blaming small fringe youtube channels for the current state of affairs? Most people get brainwashed into hysteria by CNN, MSBNC, Foxnews, NYTimes, etc, not fringe youtube channels.
Conspiracy has been on youtube and the internet forever. It's nothing new and it is fringe.
What's new is that the entire media apparatus has decided to shift blame onto social media for the problems they caused. The extremism isn't on youtube, it's on CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, Huffpo, Buzzfeed, TheVerge and all the rest of the media.
They are the ones spreading conspiracies. They are the ones spread lies. They are the ones spreading hate. They are the ones claiming one side are nazis and the other side are commies. They are the ones lying about trump being a putin slave just like 8 years ago some in the media painted obama as a foreign born muslim.
The only ones blaming "Q" are propagandists working for the media or politically affiliated groups. 99% of americans haven't even heard of Q. But 99% of americans have heard the hate-filled divisive propaganda from CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, etc.
Blaming social media for the current outrage is like blaming mortgage borrowers, rather than the multinational banks for the financial crisis. It's absurd.
Also, don't you think it's a bit odd that outrage has increased since youtube, google, facebook, etc shifted their algorithm to favor CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, etc. I wonder why.
And most importantly, much of the outrage is coming from the left, not the fringe Q crowd. You know the people consuming CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, etc. But we can blame "Q" or "4chan" or "russia" or any of the other nonsense the people pretending to be journalists love to spout.
I'm not sure how you can say that when most of the actual murders (shooting up church congregations; shooting up synagogues; shooting up festivals; driving cars into protestors; etc etc) is coming from the right.
You don't get much more outraged than trying to kill someone.
I have looked at the stats. It's very clear that most violence, and the worst violence, is from the right. Have a look at the FBI list of domestic terrorists. These are almost all right wing extremists.
I'm not talking about journalists getting scuffled at rallies. I'm talking about church congregations getting killed. It's disingenuous to suggest there's any equivalence.
> During the past decade we have witnessed dramatic changes in the nature of the terrorist threat. In the 1990s, right-wing extremism overtook left-wing terrorism as the most dangerous domestic terrorist threat to the country. During the past several years, special interest extremism—as characterized by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF)—has emerged as a serious terrorist threat. The FBI estimates that ALF/ELF have committed approximately 600 criminal acts in the United States since 1996, resulting in damages in excess of 42 million dollars.
[...]
> Right-wing groups continue to represent a serious terrorist threat. Two of the seven planned acts of terrorism prevented in 1999 were potentially large-scale, high-casualty attacks being planned by organized right-wing extremist groups.
Here's a relevant quote from the link you've posted:
> During the past decade we have witnessed dramatic changes in the nature of the terrorist threat. In the 1990s, right-wing extremism overtook left-wing terrorism as the most dangerous domestic terrorist threat to the country. During the past several years, special interest extremism—as characterized by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF)—has emerged as a serious terrorist threat. The FBI estimates that ALF/ELF have committed approximately 600 criminal acts in the United States since 1996, resulting in damages in excess of 42 million dollars.
I'm not much into US politics, but aren't the two mentioned "liberation fronts" left?
This is very true. It's also easy to blame this on profit motive and clickbait driven advertising but a lot of these journalists are ideologically motivated in large part due to their ironically upper middle class liberal arts education (read privileged).
I'm not a journalist and I've only ever worked for one news publication in my career, so I obviously can't speak for all journalists. That said, we can't ignore the impact that traffic quotas have had on the industry since the collapse of print media.
I worked for a paper in 2016 on their software team and saw how much of an impact that Trump's name in a headline had on the traffic an article received. Everyone on the outside was screaming about why the media was giving him so much attention while the industry, in the middle of a financial crisis, was less than interested to leave money on the table. In the age of internet journalism, orgs are heavily incentivized to produce what they think the community wants, and that has some really dangerous long-term implications.
People don't realize how bad the financial situation is for newspapers across America, and how desperately print media orgs are trying (and in many cases, failing) to stay afloat.
I think this is where I do my usual comment and observe that print media isn't struggling to stay afloat. There are plenty of publications that are profitable. This is invariably ignored and a 'crisis' generalised to the entire industry because the profitable papers tend to be owned by Rupert Murdoch, and they tend to be profitable because they put up paywalls and charge money for their analysis and opinions rather than give them away for free.
This doesn't jive with the agenda of most journalists, who very much want to "change the world" and "do what is right not what is easy", etc. They see a big part of their job as guiding readers to the correct decisions and protecting them from false ideas, but of course if you throw up a paywall and charge money, you're much less able to do that.
I used to be quite sympathetic to the plight of the news industry - it wasn't their fault that times were changing, that they were now all competing with each other, that Craigslist outdid them on classified ads etc. But then some papers started turning things around financially, I realised nobody forced these papers to put all their content online for free, and I became much more aware of the extent to which journalists try to manipulate their reader base. My sympathy is now gone: newspapers are businesses, and they need to turn a profit by charging for their services. If that means giving up influence, well hey, welcome to the world the rest of us live in.
> There are plenty of publications that are profitable.
Many that do achieve profitability do so at tremendous sacrifice to the service they provide to the community. A perfect example of this is Alden Capital Group, which owns over 100 papers. They're infamous in the industry for reducing the newsroom headcount by up to 50% and replacing them with sales. Not only that, they're now trying to offload their entire new portfolio because this model of profitability actually devalues the papers in the marketplace, largely because they can't serve their communities.[0] The papers they print are essentially worthless because they can't put resources into writing important local stories.
> I realised nobody forced these papers to put all their content online for free
The model of the internet forced them to do this. Had local newspapers held firm and implemented paywalls, a huge number of them would've gone out of business very quickly. Ad platforms by companies like Google were the best way for them to monetize, but in doing so they gave up all control. It was a die quickly or die slowly scenario. Most chose the latter.
Nobody forced them to create websites at all, certainly not "the model of the internet" which can't make anyone do anything. And of those websites, nobody forced them to not implement paywalls. You seem to be claiming that there is some dichotomy between serving a community and charging money for things, but there isn't. Lots of local businesses successfully serve their local community whilst still being financially sustainable.
All the market is telling the news industry is that it's way overstaffed. Too many journalists doing too little work that anyone actually values, too badly managed, often because their idea of an important local story isn't really aligned with what local people think is important.
Your case study of Alden seems to back this up. They're private equity, their purpose in life is to turn around failing businesses and make them sustainable, which they have done. The difficulty selling the resulting business is blamed in the final paragraphs on pension liabilities i.e. the hangover of an era when they were fiscally mismanaged; not on their inability to put resources into writing important local stories. With a 15% profit margin they should be able to easily find a buyer regardless of their perceived journalistic quality, but a huge pensions liability will definitely kill the attractiveness of the businesses.
That's like arguing nobody forced you to create a LinkedIn account in order to get a job. All of the infrastructure to get a job is online and has been for years, as is journalism. Sure, you don't _have_ to create an online professional profile, but you're dramatically limiting your options by doing so. Print media chose move online largely due the explosive growth of the internet. Publications saw the internet as innovative (who didn't?), and chose to jump on. Look at the bubble in the 90's, companies were trying to figure out how to incorporate the web into their business years ago. The armchair argument of "they didn't have to jump on" is weak when you consider they didn't have the benefit of hindsight. Everyone was getting on the web.
> Too many journalists doing too little work that anyone actually values, too badly managed, often because their idea of an important local story isn't really aligned with what local people think is important.
Investigative journalism is dying in the United States because it often takes months or years to investigate a story and can come at an astronomically high cost.[0]
We're approaching an era of journalism where major landmark stories may never see the light of day because the market doesn't care to pay enough for them. Should we be concerned that future investigative scandals (think Catholic Church sex abuse) may not be unearthed in the future because we're not willing to pay people to investigate them? How much money is knowing about such scandals worth to a society that isn't willing to pay for it?
Er, well, yes. I've never used a LinkedIn account to get a job. I've found work via knowing people. (I have one, but almost never update it, rarely check messages and have not obtained any work through it).
How much money is knowing about such scandals worth to a society that isn't willing to pay for it?
I suspect there are models that can pay for deep investigations, but it's probably not daily or weekly newspapers. One problem is that so much investigative journalism is junk that collapses when itself investigated. We focus on the high profile impactful stories and ignore the constant stream of heavily promoted "scandals" that end up being more in the journalists' heads than in reality.
> One problem is that so much investigative journalism is junk that collapses when itself investigated.
There are many reasons why legitimate investigations don't yield results (inability to retrieve financial records and other evidence, lack of cooperation by key players, threats from sponsors, etc.)
From the article above:
> The level of sponsor interference that news directors said they experienced this year was pretty much the same as last year – it exists in more than half of all newsrooms. In all, 17 percent of news directors say that sponsors have discouraged them from pursuing stories (compared to 18 percent last year), and 54 percent have been pressured to cover stories about sponsors, up slightly from 47 percent last year.
This survey was conducted when news media was in a much healthier financial situation than it is today, and back then, over half of news stations received pressure from sponsors in one form or another to either cover or suppress stories.
> We focus on the high profile impactful stories and ignore the constant stream of heavily promoted "scandals" that end up being more in the journalists' heads than in reality.
Can you provide some examples of such "scandals"? Investigative reporting, like most other reporting, typically goes through many layers of approval before being published.
I don't mean investigations that hit dead ends and never get published. I mean investigative journalism that turns out to be wrong or fraudulent.
Claas Relotious is a particularly notorious recent example, but there is plenty of meta-investigative journalism out there, like Glenn Greenwald's writeups of how the media present things that look like investigations of scandals but which are factually wrong. Here's a recent summary he did of 10 such cases:
I myself am a subscriber to a daily newspaper, which I read online, to get access to paywalled content. It's essentially opinion and analysis which I find value, and only rarely investigation of scandals. There are lots of newsrooms and only occasionally do they ever get a genuine Watergate or Snowden style scoop which means I can't really subscribe to get them because I don't know where they'll crop up next. And anyway, any paper I do subscribe to will end up paraphrasing and summarising the original paper's investigations anyway, which for me is fine - there's no particular need to learn about these things quickly or even at all, because I can't do anything with the knowledge usually.
In the end I'm skeptical journalism is the right way to keep powerful institutions in check. There are other ways.
Had local newspapers held firm and implemented paywalls, a huge number of them would've gone out of business very quickly.
I don't think that history bears this out. The Wall Street journal was an early paywall adapter, and they have been successful at it. The San Jose Mercury was one of the first newspapers to go online and originally had a paywall. They subsequently removed their paywall and went into a financial tailspin (I'm not suggesting that that's a cause-and-effect relationship, but removing the paywall certainly did not help them in the long-term.)
Yeah, the pundits always have the same thing to say to the Democrats, which is "move to the right" but they never say the Republicans should "move to the left".
I think it's less "move to the right" and more "admit you've already moved to the right".
Democrat attitudes feel increasingly puritan instead of actually liberal to me (as demonstrated by the continued insistence on everyone aligning to a specific moral framework), while Republican attitudes feel increasingly laissez-faire instead of actually conservative (as demonstrated by the continued insistence on destroying our environment instead of, you know, conserving it).
The reality is that the political spectrum is not one-dimensional, or even two-dimensional.
What one person calls a "lack of spine" might be another person's "being responsible to your constituency".
I was an elected official of a party committee once and I faced issues where I believed one thing that only half of my constituents believed so I slowplayed whenever I could.
To be fair, both Democrats and Republicans claim to have moral high ground over the other. Evangelical Christians tend to vote Republican because that party has successfully sold itself as the party defending traditional Christian morality and American culture.
What is now happening though is that the right is now gaining people who are not religious but are pro-free speech and a host of other related but not religious issues. I used to consider myself pretty far on the left. In the 80s and 90s the Evangelical Christians were the problem. They tried to censor music, video games... Now the censorship and dogma comes from the left. What's very interesting is that those same Christians who I thought were very intolerant of others views (and make no mistake they were and sometimes still are) have accepted people like me. Some of it is that we now have a common enemy but it also feels like they've realized that religion is no longer mainstream and thus have come to accept other less than mainstream opinions even if they don't agree with them.
It's worth keeping in mind that the Republicans and Democrats already once swapped sides on the "left" v. "right" spectrum. It ain't inconceivable to think that it might happen again (and in fact might already be in the early stages of happening again).
I remember the news getting a lot worse in the late 1980s. I think the O.J. Simpson affair was the watershed, but just before that I remember shows like "Hard Copy" moving into the
timeslot between 4pm and 6pm on broadcast TV.
Cable wasn't so important back then.
CNN found its stride which was extreme low-cost programming based on the same talking heads blathering endlessly about the latest "news". For instance, CNN kept talking about MH370 for months despite there being no real developments in the case. On a slow news day when there were not any plane
crashes or school shootings, the CNN anchors might wonder why their ratings are so bad and why people don't take their civic duty of watching CNN seriously.
Trump changed all that. Ever since he started his campaign you never knew what crazy thing would come out of his mouth next. Then he became president and it's been like a terrorist attack every day -- and the best thing is that they can sit on their touches in Atlanta and D.C. and not pile on short notice into an airplane to go visit some school that got shot up in a flyover state or go to Egypt and get beat up by Mubarak's thugs the way Anderson Cooper once did.
Legitimate discussion and debate are drowned out by insane verbal "body-slams" on Twitter, because Twitter doesn't really exist to promote legitimate discussion. And with the endless amounts of content and data we consume daily, we place far more importance in services like Twitter to help us navigate the sea of noise instead of taking the time to dig deeper into issues.
It's far easier to just attack someone on Twitter if you disagree than it is to thoroughly debate why you disagree with them.
Ultimately, one gets the sense that there isn't enough time to have a complete and nuanced conversation about a controversial topic because there are so many other things vying for our attention.