>but outlier Wikipedia editors need only be superhumanly obsessive.
Yup. The way the internet works is it privileges the perspectives and opinions of people who have an abundance of time to spend on the internet (either because their jobs are online or because they just have a lot of free time). So you wind up seeing the perspectives of bored office workers overrepresented and manual laborers underrepresented, you see a lot from students but not as much from working parents, etc.
This might be why online discourse is especially toxic around any subject that actually has to overlap with people out in the real world: The people least in touch with it are best positioned to dominate the conversation. And any system that relies on majoritarianism to do curation just amplifies these defects. One of the problems with this has been that it's actually impossible to get a real understanding of what motivates people who disagree with you. Even if you go looking, all you will ever find are the worst representatives of that worldview.
It's definitely true of subjects like politics, but it's also kind of true about things like dating or relationship advice or even restaurant reviews. Even job advice can be spotty. The conversation is always amplifying the voices of people who have strong, poorly thought out opinions. And in cases like politics people aren't even really interested in discussion. John Scalzi characterizes it as "gamified rhetoric" (https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/1025372965754621953) where the whole rhetorical strategy is to frustrate and exhaust you by nitpicking everything you say. The goal isn't to clarify, synthesize, or understand so much as to "disqualify" you and your perspective from consideration.
80% of US workers are in the service sector, 12.6% in manufacturing, 1.5% in agriculture. 60% spend the entire workday sitting.
The notion that manufacturing workers are the real America and desk jobs are held by privileged outliers may have been true at one time, but today it is a myth. The right model for “average working stiff” today works in a hospital, restaurant, or government office building.
I got bored one day and decided to spend an evening going through a full discourse with somebody who was using the gamified rhetoric, essentially making a counter point and dropping a link with a "study" that had a title and synopsis which sounded like it backed up his claim.
I sat down and read every...single...link.
What I discovered was that not only had he clearly not read anything he'd posted but that what is allowed to pass for a publishable study is borderline laughable.
After going through it and then realizing that several "prominent voices" on my assorted feeds use the exact same approach, it became apparent that these folks only goal was to keep a conversation thread going in order to amplify the headline reach of a post. Slightly more sophisticated spamming essentially. The only solution was to realize what was happening and refuse to engage.
Now the only conversations I'll have about topics online are a) off of Facebook and b) logical conversations that can be had without link bombing.
The more conversations I've been involved in, the more I've realized that if it seems like what's being said doesn't add up...there's usually a reason.
Yup. The way the internet works is it privileges the perspectives and opinions of people who have an abundance of time to spend on the internet (either because their jobs are online or because they just have a lot of free time). So you wind up seeing the perspectives of bored office workers overrepresented and manual laborers underrepresented, you see a lot from students but not as much from working parents, etc.
This might be why online discourse is especially toxic around any subject that actually has to overlap with people out in the real world: The people least in touch with it are best positioned to dominate the conversation. And any system that relies on majoritarianism to do curation just amplifies these defects. One of the problems with this has been that it's actually impossible to get a real understanding of what motivates people who disagree with you. Even if you go looking, all you will ever find are the worst representatives of that worldview.
It's definitely true of subjects like politics, but it's also kind of true about things like dating or relationship advice or even restaurant reviews. Even job advice can be spotty. The conversation is always amplifying the voices of people who have strong, poorly thought out opinions. And in cases like politics people aren't even really interested in discussion. John Scalzi characterizes it as "gamified rhetoric" (https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/1025372965754621953) where the whole rhetorical strategy is to frustrate and exhaust you by nitpicking everything you say. The goal isn't to clarify, synthesize, or understand so much as to "disqualify" you and your perspective from consideration.