That was written 14 years ago, effectively before modern social media. This problem has been a long time coming. The problem isn't that we couldn't know. It's that people kept thinking it would magically be different this time.
> It's that people kept thinking it would magically be different this time.
I don't think that's the problem, rather it's that the overwhelming majority of people currently on the internet are completely unaware there was a 'last time'.
I don't think the people who created Usenet were entirely unaware of human social dynamics. And the people who created things like Twitter certainly weren't unaware that Usenet, mailing lists, and web forums existed.
Given Gabriel's theory, that's obvious bunk. And having talked to some online community pioneers, abuse started pretty much from the get go. Look at all the replies I got when I brought it up on Twitter, for example. Story after story of early experiences of trolling, abuse, etc: https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/974847531317211136
There was (and is) a strong strain of technoutopianism, where we take the shiny new possibility and project a perfect future onto it. This goes back at least as far as the introduction of the telegraph, which many thought would bring about world peace: https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Ninetee...
As Neiwart documents, though, many of the terrible people online today are intellectual descendants of the terrible people who were doing their social networking in person and via the mail: https://www.amazon.com/Alt-America-Rise-Radical-Right-Trump/...
Please don't take offence but honestly I think the "uncoolness" is being demonstrated by you in these twitter threads and is an example of behavior that came about post-social media.
You and Rasmus twist Ev's words to somehow be about oppression instead of what he clearly meant: the early internet was inhabited by geeks and he (a geek) liked that. It's also clear that he's talking more about spammers than abusers. Of course with scale both will ramp up.
Secondly we see the presentation of a hard left view as the only valid way of thinking. Pro-gun people showing up to a forum about gun control is in no way abuse, it's the internet fulfilling its promise of giving everyone a voice (even if you don't agree with them).
Yes, there have always been trolls, spammers, jerks, loudmouths... What social media seems to have created is a unique culture of grievance hunting, virtue signalling and a worship of victimhood.
Again, please don't take this as a personal attack, it's just an observation from someone who's been on the internet for a really long time.
If I am "uncool" in your eyes, I promise I was this way before social media. I've been using the Internet since the late 1980s, and before that was a BBS user.
I also think I'm reading Ev just fine. He says "We laid down fundamental architectures that had assumptions that didn’t account for bad behavior." As one of Twitter's first users and a former Twitter employee, I think he's right. But when Twitter started in 2006, people had been behaving badly on the Internet for a long time, and it was far from being a "just nerds" place. The September that Never Ended started 13 years before Twitter, for example.
I also don't believe that my view is "hard left". I'm a gun owner, and am fine with people talking about guns. You're distorting what I said, which is that "rabid pro-gun types turned up to aggressively dominate and/or ruin the [gun control] forum". We were talking about abuse, and this was given as an example of clear forum abuse. Yes, gun owners can participate usefully in gun control forums, but being pro-gun does mean you can't be abusive.
There are consequences though, namely reputational damage.
"Careful what you say online" is a big part of what we teach our kids nowadays. It's a variant of "careful what you say in public", with everything now being public.
Reputation among whom? The internet is the home of many different subcultures with different standards for behavior. Behaviors that are considered damaging to some are considered badges of honor to others. The Troll subculture immediately springs to mind.
Getting a job where? Just like the internet is home to many different subcultures, so is the USA. A political comment that makes you unhireable in Silicon Valley could make you a more attractive hire to a defense contractor.
On a personal note, I once was denied a job based on the fact that I made a one-off comment 5 years previous that I was starting to dislike Object Oriented Programming. That's all it took to convince this company I wasn't fit to work for them.
If a comment that innocuous can be used as a reason not to hire, then you have two choices: never say anything online ever or stop worrying about it. I opt for the latter. So has most of Gen Z. Worrying if expressing utter mundanity online is going to be used against you is no way to live.
I know this is a joke (although only partly), but blocklists are honestly part of the problem.
People got to this ridiculous level of childlike annoyance at the mere existence of dissent through group effects alone, but compounding it by literally removing any form of conflict seems like the worst solution possible.
The solution to people acting terribly on the public square shouldn't be to remove it.
There is a fair bit of scholarship that says this is incorrect. Most commonly, people cute the paradox of tolerance as a starting point[1], but there's lots more.
I don't think he's invoking that. That we must be tolerant of intolerance lest we become intolerant ourselves.
I think he's saying that that the ease of which we can cut out any information that challenges our beliefs does more harm than good.
I'm sure you're a fine, upstanding, rational person who will always consider every viewpoint and come to a reasoned conclusion based on the facts every time and won't let emotions dictate any part of your decision.
However, not everyone is so disciplined. Don't consider the rational actor. Consider the irrational. Consider the flat-earther who can personally silence any sources that provide evidence to the contrary. Just stuck in their little bubble of misinformation. Then when something does sneak through their filter, they'll regard it as the anomaly because everything else they see confirms what they already know.
Now, there is some benefit to being able to silence certain opinions. I for one don't need flat-earthers constantly pushing their narrative that flies in the face of facts. But, then again, they feel the same way. I believe I've considered their evidence and their viewpoint fairly and have come to a conclusion rationally. But so do they. I believe I'm right, I'm fairly certain of it. But so are they.
It comes down to believing that personal abuse should be silenced. If I'm just blatantly attacking you or you're attacking me with no other goal but to be insulting, then being able to block each other seems fine. But to be able to silence information just because you disagree with it seems a bit more dodgy.
People misuse Popper a whole lot. The paradox has more to do with being firm on the application of the rule of law as it pertains to violence than a metapolitical discussion.
A microscopic percentage of social media users have even heard of blocklists, let alone use them, but it's the people who forcefully opt themselves out of pointless Internet arguments that are the problem? That's a ridiculous and telling argument.
A majority percentage of social media users have their content catered such that it agrees with their sensibilities. Whether they've heard of blocklists or not, things they don't like are effectively blocked from appearing before their eyes.
Once again: it is hard to understand the reasonable argument that says that a big problem with social media is that people disengage from arguments with random people too much.
Disengaging from random arguments isn't the problem; the problem is living in a world where nearly every opinion you see more or less aligns with your own views, to the point where we've been conditioned to see dissenting opinions as being hostile to us to the point where we instinctively reach for the unfollow/block/mute button when we see them.
It's not about picking and choosing who you engage with, it's about filtering broad-stroke opinions you disagree with out of your life entirely, such that when one sees any trace of an opinion that runs contrary to their own internal narrative, they reach for the block/unfollow button, instead of engaging to find mutual truth, or even just ignoring it and scrolling past it. Just a few years ago, when someone saw an opinion online that they disagreed with, it didn't fill them with the urge to remove that opinion and any chance of seeing similar opinions from their worldview, but that's how we've been conditioned due to social media being used increasingly politically.
You're still not understanding what I'm saying. There's a huge difference between ignoring/not engaging someone saying something you don't agree with, and filtering them out of your reality via mute/unfollow.
Are you really arguing that you have a right to pick a person at random and coerce them into at least seeing what you have to say before making a decision to ignore you?
You're arguing for the personal right to act a certain way as I understand it.
I'm arguing that such an action has terrible ramifications on a large enough scale.
These are not mutually exclusive. There's no reason that we can't construct places where public discourse of controversial ideas is possible yet people are not forced to engage in such.
It's certainly something we haven't succeeded at yet, and a hard problem altogether, but we do need it otherwise we're doomed to that one dystopia where "nobody is questioned yet nobody is right".
What makes you think it's productive to enable coerced 1:1 political conversations between strangers? That's what it means to lobby against blocklists.
On the contrary, I think there should be far more blocklists.
Opponents of blocklists get themselves wound up over the potential productive conversations that might occur were it not for the overzealous filtering of the lists. But I don't see any positive value in that potential. The overwhelming majority of potential 1:1 political debates never occur, and nobody cares. Why should I then be concerned over potential Twitter debates, which are adversely selected for toxicity?
People who are passionate about the evils of blocklists also have a hard time not coming across like the sea lion from the cartoon.
Yes, the great failure of the internet is that it is lacks of standard mechanisms that exist in polite society to exclude the assholes. Being an asshole is cheap on the web and so you get lots of assholes. IRL being an asshole (at least in some states) has very high consequences and so you get civilization. Fixing the web is just a matter of rediscovering appropriate mechanisms to correct, silence, and ultimately exclude those who have nothing to contribute and no value to add. Google, Facebook and Twitter will inevitably clean up their spaces and new norms will ultimately be enforced. At that point things will mostly return to normal.
Of course the great thing about the web is also that it's so big. We don't need to literally silence the assholes. They should feel free to congregate in various Youtube comment threads and on boards like 4chan and voat.
> the great failure of the internet is that it is lacks of standard mechanisms that exist in polite society to exclude the assholes.
American society no longer has those mechanisms either. They were dismantled in the 50s and 60s under the opinion that they were too restrictive and stifling.
I don't think it's the exclusion of assholes that's the problem.
It's the inclusion.
Before, if you had a really socially unacceptable opinion, you couldn't really voice it without attracting a lot of heat. Now, you can throw your voice into the aether and get back thousands of people across the world who feel the same way you do. Whether if you're into collecting stamps, ancient alien conspiracies, or Nazi furry cosplay.
Everything becomes normalized to a degree. The motto "strength in numbers" becomes the issue.
However, there are some good things that have come from this. Gay people, transgender people, people with various mental illnesses all have a place to come together without having to face the judgment of the people in their communities. It's the largest alcoholics anonymous meeting you could want.
Reddit fitness mods seem to be sponsoring workouts. Instead of doing the methods that work, they are peddling a few select workouts that have questionable effectiveness.
So they ban people for suggesting other plans, which only compounds in resentment. It seems almost daily topics talking about Starting Strength workouts are deleted, but there are too many people that already know about it.
It was the first big webmail provider. Assuming they registered it early on, that email address is old enough to drink now. And very much needs to, I'm sure.
In the late 1980s, I was the first person in my company to seek to add my email address to my business cards. I still have some of those business cards with the old bang-style address format.
It was really easy to be an egalitarian before social media caught on in a big way... Now more and more elections are going the way of populism and truth has taken a back seat.
I currently try to employ mitigation methods 2.3 and 2.4. If you slip on 2.3 you can generally compensate by leaning more heavily on 2.4.
That's funny my flow is in the opposite direction: I use method 2.4 (responsibly and without abuse, and with a different goal in mind) first, which leads to apathy of social media, which results in naturally applying method 2.3. I guess we both reach our intended goals, so it speaks to the effectiveness of the methods! ;-)
100% true.
Another good data point is John Gabriel's Great Internet Fuckwad Theory: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
That was written 14 years ago, effectively before modern social media. This problem has been a long time coming. The problem isn't that we couldn't know. It's that people kept thinking it would magically be different this time.