"My solution is to close the tab and to read a book."
Exactly. Exchange off-the-cuff zero cost near-anonymous speech with well considered, edited, personally identifiable speech with a significant cost to publish. Without knowing anything about the content of the speech you can still usefully predict that the later will be more dense with meaning and generally more worth your time.
HN is a good place to sift through the former to discover the later. So yeah, you have to put up with both.
There is however value in anonymity. In some situations there are things that should be said or explored that could cause bad consequences for the sayer - women's rights discussed by an Iranian or Saudi for example.
This is a good individual choice, but I was hoping the essay would delve further into the fact that there's a market for speech and engagement farming is highly profitable for both platforms and some skilled farmers - arguably to the general detriment.
"I see a lot of bad speech scrolling through twitter, speech that would not be worth engaging with in any context and speech that is not worth engaging in a context where engagement is a metric the platform optimizes for.
What is my solution to this? To ban this speech? To ban twitter, as a platform that is optimized for anger and hatred? My solution is to close the tab and to read a book.
The most basic decision is not what to say, but what to listen to, since what we say is in some sense a response to that, and we will always respond in kind."
For me, the times when I compulsively engage with something is more akin to a threat-response. The scary things I react to are things like a twitter-mob forming to take someone down, or some policy proposal to enrich billionaires, or a politician offering a feel-good one-liner built on broken math.
I could go read a book, but blissful ignorance only lasts until the torches are burning down my own door. Perhaps it's better to try to engage in hopes of putting out the fires early? The foundation of democracy's is civic engagement.
a) because services like Twitter and Facebook have to show something in the timeline. What they show is this job
b) because in practice, an approach too laissez-faire here has negative impact both on customer adoption (most people don't actually enjoy cesspools, and they leave when they decide a service is one) and regulation (even in countries with broad free-speech protections, some communication is de facto illegal and there are consequences for a service taking no responsibility for keeping their house in order).
It's called a search engineer, and this isn't left to people's own discretion because they don't have the time or inclination to make their own search engines / recommendation engines.
I would feel a lot better about these discussions here if there was any acknowledgement whatsoever from self-described "free-speech absolutists" that large-scale mass propagation of disinformation can be manipulated by the powerful as a destructive force, and that this is a serious problem.
Do I want to ban speech? No. Am I pro-censorship? No! But democracy is in real trouble, and I'd love to be able to talk about possible solutions besides "they should teach critical thinking in schools" or "if you don't like it, read a book".
Honestly, Twitter is fantastic. I don't have to engage with this stuff because when people start posting about it, I just unfollow them. And the only thing I see is two steps from me in my graph, i.e. the things by people I follow and the things that people I follow like.
And some people like to wallow in the filth and then blame the filth. But you can wash yourself clean if you feel like it.
Deciding not to engage with $BAD yourself is great; but then you've shirked your responsibility to decide what $BAD is for the rest of the world!
Just because you have the intelligence and judgement to perceive and avoid $BAD doesn't mean that you can trust your fellow citizens to do the same. They must be shielded from everything that you disagree with so as to protect you!
Seriously; the admission that you can't make decisions about what others should be reading is an embrace of humility that more people should attempt. I'm not sure when "we can agree to disagree" became a Sin but its has.
This line of thinking ignores the power of speech. Speech has real impact and it can be used to infringe on the rights of others. That is why no country fully embraces absolute free speech. We outlaw things like fraud, defamation, distribution of child porn, and all sorts of other speech because that bad speech infringes on the rights of others. When you simply ignore that bad speech, you are allowing that infringement of rights to continue. Apathy to that isn't humility. If anything, it is arrogant to suggest there is a clear line on what speech should and should not be allowed. It is an incredibly complicated issue that requires nuance.
> I'm not sure when "we can agree to disagree" became a Sin but its has.
If you're talking America, around the time Trump was elected after what can plausibly be deduced was a Russian-funded propaganda campaign. A lot of trust of fellow citizens was lost when that happened, and a lot of people began to wonder whether they do bear some responsibility for what others see and hear... Because if they don't grasp that responsibility, propaganda manufacturers were more than willing to grasp it instead. This has led to people looking into why their fellow citizens believe what they do and discovering it's because a lot of their fellow citizens listen to some absolute crap and form strong opinions as a result. As is their right. But "the cure to bad speech is more speech" doesn't exactly work when bad speech is coming from the pulpit and/or funded by billionaires.
I don't think we have good answers to the questions raised yet, but make no mistake: that question is now on the table for a generation that thought the issue pretty settled.
> Deciding not to engage with $BAD yourself is great; but then you've shirked your responsibility to decide what $BAD is for the rest of the world!
There's a reason "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men do nothing" exists as an aphorism. There are clearly variable bindings we can swizzle in that make that statement non-controversial (child pornography is the obvious one). So the operative question becomes whether, and how much, speech binds to $BAD and the notion is still true.
Readit News
Exactly. Exchange off-the-cuff zero cost near-anonymous speech with well considered, edited, personally identifiable speech with a significant cost to publish. Without knowing anything about the content of the speech you can still usefully predict that the later will be more dense with meaning and generally more worth your time.
HN is a good place to sift through the former to discover the later. So yeah, you have to put up with both.
HN is one of the worst places for speech, on the level of Reddit.
What is my solution to this? To ban this speech? To ban twitter, as a platform that is optimized for anger and hatred? My solution is to close the tab and to read a book.
The most basic decision is not what to say, but what to listen to, since what we say is in some sense a response to that, and we will always respond in kind."
This is advice for the layperson.
I could go read a book, but blissful ignorance only lasts until the torches are burning down my own door. Perhaps it's better to try to engage in hopes of putting out the fires early? The foundation of democracy's is civic engagement.
b) because in practice, an approach too laissez-faire here has negative impact both on customer adoption (most people don't actually enjoy cesspools, and they leave when they decide a service is one) and regulation (even in countries with broad free-speech protections, some communication is de facto illegal and there are consequences for a service taking no responsibility for keeping their house in order).
Do I want to ban speech? No. Am I pro-censorship? No! But democracy is in real trouble, and I'd love to be able to talk about possible solutions besides "they should teach critical thinking in schools" or "if you don't like it, read a book".
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
And some people like to wallow in the filth and then blame the filth. But you can wash yourself clean if you feel like it.
Just because you have the intelligence and judgement to perceive and avoid $BAD doesn't mean that you can trust your fellow citizens to do the same. They must be shielded from everything that you disagree with so as to protect you!
Seriously; the admission that you can't make decisions about what others should be reading is an embrace of humility that more people should attempt. I'm not sure when "we can agree to disagree" became a Sin but its has.
People forget we used to throw people in the stocks for gossiping about their neighbors or spreading rumors about priests (even if all true)
If you're talking America, around the time Trump was elected after what can plausibly be deduced was a Russian-funded propaganda campaign. A lot of trust of fellow citizens was lost when that happened, and a lot of people began to wonder whether they do bear some responsibility for what others see and hear... Because if they don't grasp that responsibility, propaganda manufacturers were more than willing to grasp it instead. This has led to people looking into why their fellow citizens believe what they do and discovering it's because a lot of their fellow citizens listen to some absolute crap and form strong opinions as a result. As is their right. But "the cure to bad speech is more speech" doesn't exactly work when bad speech is coming from the pulpit and/or funded by billionaires.
I don't think we have good answers to the questions raised yet, but make no mistake: that question is now on the table for a generation that thought the issue pretty settled.
> Deciding not to engage with $BAD yourself is great; but then you've shirked your responsibility to decide what $BAD is for the rest of the world!
There's a reason "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men do nothing" exists as an aphorism. There are clearly variable bindings we can swizzle in that make that statement non-controversial (child pornography is the obvious one). So the operative question becomes whether, and how much, speech binds to $BAD and the notion is still true.
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