
Too many people have peed in the pool (2016) - oli5679
http://www.stephenfry.com/2016/02/peedinthepool/
======
Eerie
1\. There is a 4chan meme that goes approximately like this:

Newbie: "Remember the time when 4chan was good?"

Veteran: "4chan was never good."

"4chan" can be easily replaced with "Twitter" or "The Internet" here.

2\. There's a universal tendency for people to reminisce fondly about the good
old days and contrast them with the ostensibly bad present. It has nothing to
do with the truth. It is simply a syndrome of getting old. People were doing
it 3000 years ago.

~~~
wfunction
> 2\. There's a universal tendency for people to reminisce fondly about the
> good old days and contrast them with the ostensibly bad present. It has
> nothing to do with the truth. It is simply a syndrome of getting old.

Nothing to do with the truth? Maybe in your cases, but in others it very much
does. In the good ol' days Democrats and Republicans weren't as hostile and
unwilling to work together as they are now. In the good ol' days it used to
snow _way_ more in some places than it does now. In the good ol' days many
places were less polluted than they are now. In the good ol' days people had
to learn to actually ask each other out instead of swiping right on their
phones. In the good ol' days businesses had longer-lasting relationships with
their employees and didn't view them as disposable goods. Yeah, totally
nothing to do with the truth, just people imagining things.

~~~
snovv_crash
Maybe that's your perspective, but...

LA is way less polluted than it used to be. People used to go to speed dating
events where they have a pool of maybe 15 people who might be compatible.
Democrats and Republicans both used to be racist and sexist. The weather in
New England is much more pleasant in winter than it used to be. These days it
isn't a black mark against your name if you've changed jobs 3 times because
you wanted to try something new.

All about perspective. If you want to reminisce, go ahead, but there are two
sides to the coin.

~~~
wfunction
(a) I didn't say "everywhere", and I wasn't talking about LA. I'm glad you
lived somewhere where that wasn't the case. The world is bigger than LA, or
than the United States for that matter.

(b) My point was _not_ that the good ol' days were paradise and we're all
rotting in hell now. My point was that old people are not necessarily making
$h!1 up in drawing comparisons with the good ol' days, in contrast with what
the parent said. I thought this was obvious but evidently not.

~~~
snovv_crash
Of course they're not making shit up, but they do have a selective memory,
which was GPs point that you seemed to miss.

If things are distributed between bad and good, it doesn't matter how that
distribution changes over time if the bad things from the past are forgotten
in the comparison. It is still dishonest.

~~~
ygaf
You are implying "the bad things from the past" have an objective weight. They
could be insignificant, and in someone's eyes the past is truly "good".

------
jimjimjim
Usenet

Slashdot

twitter

I've been in a lot of "discussion things" over the years and i've seen them go
bad. As they become more well known the worse they get. Initially somewhat-
like-minded people are drawn to something for somewhat-similar reasons. When
things become popular the noise from people of all walks of life drowns out
the signal of like mindedness. In the case of twitter some of the noise
Actively tries to ruin the signal.

The initial users of tv, radio and even cars must have felt a similar despair
(after the initial thrill of their interest becoming used by more people).

It's not nostalgia, things were better "back then" where "back then" is a
point between gaining users and acceptance by the general population.

~~~
Joeri
Yet HN is so far managing the onslaught. Part of that is of course very
tightly controlled moderation where crass behavior is immediately and severely
punished, but maybe requiring civility at all times is the only way to have a
meaningful discussion.

~~~
k__
HN is widely know for being full of self absorbed white tech guys.

Yes it got more civilized in the last years, but while not being offensive
it's still filled with one sided views of the world by <1% of its population.

------
dredmorbius
As someone once put it: "There's a sort of Gresham's Law of trolls: trolls are
willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful
people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it."

[http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html)

I've seen any number of fora over the ages, and the debasement problem is a
significant one. It's not limited to online, as the saga of _The American
Mercury_ illustrates:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Mercury](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Mercury)

My preference, increasingly, is to be acutely aware of the limits of my own
time and attention, to block fuckwits with abandon, and to treasure both the
individuals and fora which actually _do_ deliver quality.

On which, a thank you to HN's mods, dang and scbt, both of whom put in a hell
of a lot of work, much of it gentle, and for which HN is decidedly one of the
better, and longer-lived, discussion platforms on today's Internet.

(Metafilter also seems particularly resilient.)

------
Clubber
>A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-
guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended – worse, to be offended on
behalf of others they do not even know.

That's been the majority of comments / forums since at least 2001. It also
sounds a whole lot like the modern "tabloid" news.

~~~
irrational
I've been on the Internet since the late 1980s (and the WWW since the mid
1990s). It started _long_ before 2001.

~~~
AndrewUnmuted
Online discourse has certainly declined in recent years. But you're right,
people seeking conflict online is nothing new. What I believe HAS changed in
more recent years, however, is the heavy subject matter being invoked today by
these trolls. Flame wars over PC hardware and Linux distros on message boards
is nothing new, but the very aggressive accusations of racism, bigotry,
marginalizing, and sexism that get lobbed at people on social media is a new
form of online viciousness.

~~~
Freak_NL
Its effect on the off-line world is that much greater as well.

------
marze
It is inevitable. Why? Because the paid "influencers" such as PR firms will be
attracted to any popular and/or influential discussion forum to promote the
"point of view" they are paid to promote, or viewpoints they are paid to muddy
or obfuscate.

Once the site/forum reaches a certain level of influence they show up, and to
the casual viewer it appears as added noise.

------
LeoPanthera
Stephen has since returned to Twitter, though he tweets much less than he used
to. I wonder if he is now treating it as a write-only medium.

I'm one of the lucky 50K people he still follows (he used to follow everyone
who followed him, in the very early days of Twitter, but that quickly
stopped), but when you have 12 million followers, I imagine your use of
Twitter is somewhat different to most peoples.

------
mgalka
People have a tendency to forget that famous public figures are people and
feel comfortable saying mean things without thought. I think Few's experience
of Twitter is probably an amplified version of what most of us know.

I still like Twitter. Compared to other online forums, it still has the most
thoughtful discourse I know of (except for HN). Even if it means tolerating a
bunch of unpleasant garbage along the way.

~~~
z1mm32m4n
I think the fact that Twitter made a name for itself by restricting the degree
to which you can actually express your thoughts (by constraining response
length) doomed them.

It's far easier to be snarky and mean in 140 characters than it is to be
rational and respectful.

~~~
fattire
You think, if only they were given more space, the trolls would suddenly find
themselves unspinning their vitriol into coherent, well-expressed and
thoughtful sentiment?

Or would they just shit-talk with more words?

~~~
santoshalper
Or just continue to be terse and shitty. Unless the also implemented a
minimum, I don't see how raising the maximum would help very much. At least
that has been my experience in forums for many years.

------
Tade0
What I dislike about Twitter is how much significance things that happen on it
are given.

With over 300mln active users if something has been retweeted, say, 15,000
times it still can't be reasonably counted as a "storm".

~~~
naturalgradient
There is this interesting phenomenon that in some regions, Twitter activity is
not particularly high (e.g. Germany), so according to an analysis I read a
while ago, a few hundred tweets within a few hours are enough to get a topic
trending in the region.

So there is this effect where a small group of activists (20-30) can easily
coordinate to launch a 100 tweets. They then reach out to online media
outlets, which in turn report that a topic is trending, so it is officially
'news', and thus the cycle begins.

In particular, journalists are disproportionally over-represented on twitter
and thus seem to (somewhat self-importantly) overvalue it as a discussion
medium. At least where I am from, it is almost exclusively activists,
journalists and politicians in their own Twitter bubble talking to each other
and reporting about what they say about each other.

So as they believe in its importance, it becomes important, and thus opens
avenues to manipulation by pr agencies or state actors or political
splintergroups.

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
This has been working exactly the same ever since the invention of the media.
This problem is not specific to Twitter. Actually doing something like this
(creating something out of nothing) is PR 101.

If you are not familiar but interested in learning more. This book is a good
primer: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0074VTHH0/ref=dp-kindle-
redirect?...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0074VTHH0/ref=dp-kindle-
redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

------
r721
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11104006](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11104006)

------
pfarnsworth
Not to Godwin myself, but an example someone once used was that in Nazi
Germany, only a small percentage of Germans actually were firm Nazis. The
moderate majority, however, let the radical minority dictate the agenda for
everyone, and that's how Nazism gained power.

In the same way, I see this phenomenon all over our world. I don't know if
it's because of 24-hr news cycle, Twitter/Facebook or whatever, but we see the
radical, loud minority dictate the agenda. So even Fry says that it's only a
small percentage of trolls that are ruining it for him, but it's enough to
drive him off Twitter, despite all of his fans that want him on Twitter.

In other words, the signal-to-noise ratio is very low, but people are now
taking the noise as signal and reacting to it. It's not a good thing when
trolls and radicals dictate the agenda for the silent, moderate majority. All
the noise from the media and anti-Trump haters is a good example of where
people who listen too closely to the noise end up missing the signal where it
matters, and don't react properly. I think if the Democrats really know how
Middle America was feeling, they would have conducted a much different
campaign, but they listened to the wrong things.

~~~
obstinate
It's fascinating that, in your analogy, folks sharing progressive views on
Twitter are the Nazis, considering that _literal_ white supremacists tend to
favor the other side.

~~~
pfarnsworth
Nope, not what I said at all. I was talking about the trolls on Twitter. My
point is that if you listen to the noise, rather than true signal, you might
take the wrong path or get the wrong idea. In the case of the election,
EVERYONE thought Clinton was going to win in a landslide, and the real signal
was that it was a lot closer than that. But you never would have seen that
from Twitter or the media. And that's the problem. If the Democrats were able
to root out the true signal, they probably could have stopped Trump with
better communication to Middle America, and stopped this debacle that we're
currently in.

~~~
obstinate
The "trolls" Fry is talking about here are progressives. At least, that is the
signal I'm getting from the following: "It doesn’t matter whether they think
they’re defending women, men, transgender people, Muslims, humanists . . .."

He is essentially invoking the "snowflake" meme. And, in what might perhaps be
called an instance of the Law of Snowflakes, it's in a context where he is
whining about discourse not taking the tone he prefers.

(If it seems weird that I'm ignoring 80% of the parent poster's content in his
comment, it is because its initial iteration of that comment only contained
the first two sentences.)

~~~
pfarnsworth
Trolls exist on both sides of the spectrum.

~~~
obstinate
That is no doubt true, although hardly relevant when one particular side is
called out by various signals in the linked blog post, one of which I have
already explained. If he were talking about conservative trolls, this would be
a very different article.

------
mcv
I've never really seen the point in twitter. I know it's popular, and for
Dutch politicians, tweeting seems to be a requirement, but to me it has always
seemed like a medium that's primarily for shouting into the void. And some
people clearly love shouting abuse or inane crap into that void.

In any case, it's not a medium for discussion, and it seems designed to
provide as little context as possible, so it's easy to take things out of
context.

------
perseusprime11
What about Marc Andreesen? He quit Twitter but I see him lurking around liking
things and stuff. Not sure why he went into a read-only mode.

~~~
elliotec
Gave away too many secrets

~~~
perseusprime11
What do you mean?

------
deft
He should come to mastodon. Way nicer place and a better feature set. Not to
mention a WAY better UI. Oh, and no ads.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Sorry but I think mastodon is DOA. The user experience for on-boarding is
atrocious. Think of what the _average user_ would do if you tell them to join
mastodon.

First if you search for it and go to the first page it talks about open source
(no average user knows what that is; _some_ have vague ideas but in my
experience _none_ of them know what it is beyond the very rare person who
heard a report on TV and thinks it's "nerds doing something for free"). Then
it talks about "blah blah blah social should be decentralized blah blah blah
you cannot sign up here because we believe in decentralization!" (paraphrased,
of course)

Now the user, the average user who very likely doesn't understand why this
pure decentralized thing is better than Facebook or Twitter since he or she
can go to one one place, sign up and immediately start posting, has to somehow
find somewhere else to sign up because of some purity stance?

Look I'm all for decentralizing things. But it's _never, ever_ going to see
the growth of average users having this much friction. When you want to take
growth away from highly popular incumbents you need a way to have less
friction than them (at least usually, in my experience). Decentralizing, at
least in this form, adds an order of magnitude more friction.

~~~
icebraining
Why is it DOA just because the average user can't signup? If anything, it
might help with the problem described in the article.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
A social network being accessible only by a specific niche will severely limit
its growth and reach. If that's all the network wants then that's fine but
that's by far NOT how I've seen mastodon marketed.

Regardless, even being accessible by only people who know what's going on
still doesn't guarantee success. There is _still_ significant friction there.
I know HN decentralized everything is pretty popular but when it comes to UX
I've never seen it test well because I haven't seen a good enough UX to just
about any decentralization of a normally centralized service that also lowers
friction of use.

------
throw2016
The Internet is great for information and light-hearted banter but not
necessarily discussion. Most discussions are plagued by trolling,
astroturfing, brigading and gratuitous rudeness.

Anonymity is important but it also allows pointless discussions and arguments
between let's say a child or someone not interested or versed in a subject and
an expert.

The value of discussion remain low and people behave in ways they simply
wouldn't face to face. In the real world these kind of discussions would be a
pointless waste of time for all involved and would simply not happen.

You could try to change this by taking away the anonymity or extremely strong
moderation but as we have seen with Facebook and even here the lack of
anonymity doesn't stop snarky or bad behavior and there are far too many
people who by default assume a tone of authority when they don't really know
what they are talking about.

------
DanBC
More people should read this:

[https://www.joe.co.uk/news/why-gary-lineker-lily-allen-
and-y...](https://www.joe.co.uk/news/why-gary-lineker-lily-allen-and-you-
shouldnt-comment-93236)

------
lyra_comms
You should check out Lyra, a conversation service which isn't designed to
recirculate its own waste.

www.hellolyra.com

------
Mathnerd314
Twitter isn't really suitable for intelligent conversations; 140 characters is
too short.

But it's enough to share links, hence it replaced / is replacing RSS,
trolling, and pingbacks. [http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-killed-rss-
and-thats-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-killed-rss-and-thats-a-
bad-thing-2014-3)

~~~
Eerie
>Twitter isn't really suitable for intelligent conversations; 140 characters
is too short.

A lot of people break that rule by posting images with walls of text.

------
alvah
"A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous" \- clearly Mr Fry
doesn't spend a lot of time looking in the mirror!

~~~
Avshalom
As eevee put it [https://eev.ee/blog/2016/02/15/everyones-offended-these-
days...](https://eev.ee/blog/2016/02/15/everyones-offended-these-days/) :

>I love Stephen Fry, really I do, but this oft-repeated quote is bullshit and
he is perfectly demonstrating why that is. What he’s really saying is this:
everyone else’s feelings don’t matter, but his do, because he frames them as
universal rules of discourse rather than feelings.

>Look at his post again — that’s exactly how he words his point of view. “Too
many people have peed in the pool.” “Now the pool is stagnant, …frothy with
scum.” Fry’s feelings aren’t feelings — they are a universal and objective
standard of behavior, which everyone else is violating. All those angry
people, yelling that Fry has violated a universal and objective standard of
behavior? Ah, they’re just perpetually offended, you see. Totally different.

~~~
coldtea
There at least an order of magnitude more crap and less eloquence and content
in the kind of comments Fry complains about than in the stuff he writes.

The author has seen the average Twitter/Reddit/forum comments, I presume. Do
they look anything like what Fry (or any talented writer for that matter)
posts?

So, yeah, Fry is right, what he complains is people actually breaking
"universal rules of discourse".

~~~
Ferofluid
Give me a break, since when does sophistication count for anything? The most
sophisticated /b/tard in existence could write a magnum opus about how he
dominates you in every conceivable way, it still wouldn't count for anything
based on the verbiage alone.

------
killbrad
Twitter is and always has been a pile of trash. It's the "please limit your
response to 30 seconds" of the internet.

------
wyldfire
Is it still distasteful if you just use it as fire n forget to broadcast your
thoughts?

------
teddyh
TL;DR: Stephen Fry quits Twitter in early 2016.

------
zeroer
> Where Stephen Fry discovers the concept of the Eternal September.

------
gaius
Fry was at the forefront of those who weaponized Twitter, with an army of
sycophants attacking any of his real or imagined foes. He was instrumental in
creating the problem he bemoans.

~~~
SeanDav
> _" Fry was at the forefront of those who weaponized Twitter, with an army of
> sycophants attacking any of his real or imagined foes. He was instrumental
> in creating the problem he bemoans."_

A comment like this absolutely requires sources. OP might be correct, but
without any attempt to justify or corroborate, this just smacks of trolling
and is a perfect example of what is wrong with Twitter.

~~~
watwut
It is kinda unfair to blame twitter for accusatory comment on hacker news.

