This reminds me of a short story Kurt Vonnegut mentioned in a novel of his:
>“You know — “ said Eliot, “Kilgore Trout once wrote a whole book about a country that was devoted to fighting odors. That was the national purpose. There wasn’t any disease, and there wasn’t any crime, and there wasn’t any war, so they went after odors.”
“This country,” said Eliot, “had tremendous research projects devoted to fighting odors. They were supported by individual contributions given to mothers who marched on Sundays from door to door. The ideal of the research was to find a specific chemical deodorant for every odor. But then the hero, who was also the country’s dictator, made a wonderful scientific breakthrough, even though he wasn’t a scientist, and they didn’t need the projects any more. He went right to the root of the problem.”
“Uh huh,” said the Senator. He couldn’t stand stories by Kilgore Trout, was embarassed by his son. “He found one chemical that would eliminate all odors?”
“No. As I say, the hero was dictator, and he simply eliminated noses.”
=========
Your solution is somewhat similar. You want to solve the problem of people saying racist things, so you decide to destroy the public square. Going for the root of the problem, I suppose.
> You want to solve the problem of people saying racist things, so you decide to destroy the public square
"Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts. Those thoughts voiced are short lived and can only be broadcast as far as the sound wave will carry them. Social media like twitter allows millions of people to spread their thoughts, commentary and keep them semi-permanently online for a long time, decade or more.
I never stated I was solving the problem of people saying racist things. I'm challenging the assumption that designing a new social media platform should repeat existing designs that have public content with public comments driven by advertisements. In my opinion if someone designs with that premise it will end up the same as the existing social media platforms we have today (with a side effect of new JS frameworks being borne).
Is this the only product design Tech has: public content and sell advertisements?
> "Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts. Those thoughts voiced are short lived and can only be broadcast as far as the sound wave will carry them.
That's very true. Maybe a better Twitter could incorporate actual geographical distance. You would have to choose where you are and could only see messages from people that are actually near you. If you move, you see different messages.
Or the distance could be ideological -- or better, theoretical.
Any user would have to choose a place on a "map" / a set of coordinates. A user can move freely at any time, but
- messages can't move and stay where the user was when they were posted
- messages can only be seen when the user is near them.
Isnt your proposal basically Reddit? Subreddits are nodes that require you to be close to them to see whats going on (via joining the sub), with a public square, /r/popular, artificially built from the top posts on those nodes. For some definition of "top".
Nextdoor is very indicative of where you live. There are often time joyous earnest "here's a pretty picture of a bird" posts, and if you live somewhere nice, typically rural, there's not even the usual dreck.
> ... somewhere nice, "Typically rural"?
It'd be interesting to discuss the evidence for this greater rural niceness, if known. We should be wary of rural mythology, in part because the rural lifestyle is non-representative (in the US and globally), declining, and unsustainable (does not scale, we can't all do it).
To respond to my own challenge, and making no assertions of causality, there are countervailing bits of evidence, based on correlations. The correlation between Trump support and rurality is strong and statistically undeniable. Is this group inherently "nicer" in person or on the internet?
A second random but disturbing example is the "significantly higher risk of femicide and non-domestic homicide victimization in rural counties compared to non-rural counties." https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5...
Interesting. My use of Twitter has waned over the years while my use of Reddit has increased...I guess I'm voting with my time that Reddit is the better model.
I'm 100% positive that reddit is the better model in general -- at least with the old UI that didn't have all the dark patters to force you to stay on. I still quit it over a year ago because I noticed I was very addicted to it.
It's the original design of Facebook. You had to join based on real-world membership in a pre-existing network, in this case a university. You only got to interact with people from your university.
There's something to be said for this. Schools have their problems. Plenty of drama, bullying, harassment, marginalization, extremism. But when it's limited to a school network, it doesn't swing national sentiment, aid and abet genocides, provide an outlet for foreign adversaries to subvert race relations in your country.
But it does mean ad campaigns can't have global reach.
One other benefit of tying online groups to offline groups is that they are able to moderate themselves. Schools aren’t perfect but they can deal with cyber bullying if all parties are students at that school.
I don't know if the limit needs to be geographical. I'd think it could be segmented by interest, ala discussion forums for particular hobbies. Those are private and heavily moderated, there are 'village elders' (mods/heavily active users), people are on good behavior because of this, they always seem to have a section for more controversial/political discussions for those who want it - and they tend to be civil, surprisingly enough, because users have a rep to protect in the more generalized sections and don't want to be a bad citizen. And nothing is indexed by search engines, you have to go to the site and search.
Reddit has this a bit with subreddits but it's far more loose and indexed by search engines, which I think is why it is problematic in certain ways.
Shouting is only 1 form of communication though. Newspapers and pamphlets have been around for centuries and travel farther and last longer than human generated sound waves. So your proposal kind of simulates pre-printing press days and maybe even pre-written language days.
>"Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts.
and if you're a crazy person or verbally abusive or maybe just shouting things that while maybe true are insulting to the public morality then the police come and carry you away.
Or picketed so their speech is drowned out, or even punched in the nose by passers by.
You can argue if this is good or bad, but it’s a fundamental difference between the public square and digital recreations: in the real world, speech can have meaningful consequences. In the Twitter world, you create a new profile.
It feels like a problem of scale. One person shouting and getting carried away, whoever is right or wrong in that scenario, is still one person. Now extend that to everyone shouting at everyone in what has become the de facto public square and the stakes involved in deciding who to carry away feel existential in scale.
> "Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts.
I disagree that it's a fallacy, the issue is that platforms have an interest in claiming themselves to be a public square. But the platform is not the square THE INTERNET, which is to say the open World Wide Web, is the public square. Platforms are the individual bars and pubs and cafes that line the squares and boulevards.
Each cafe and pub has the right to set its own rules for entry and set its own vibe and culture, but when there is an oligopoly of bars who are all megalomaniacs wanting to own the whole thing and keep people locked in their establishments for as long as possible, that does not lend itself to having a healthy community or vibe in any one of them.
Let people self-segregate and affiliate with the communities they want to. The racist shitheads will find their spaces, but they only start to multiply when they're able to wheedle their fearmongering propaganda in front of people who wouldn't otherwise want anything to do with them.
> The racist shitheads will find their spaces, but they only start to multiply when they're able to wheedle their fearmongering propaganda in front of people who wouldn't otherwise want anything to do with them.
The problem with this approach is group polarization [0], the tendency for groups with similar opinions to become more extreme and entrenched over time. The danger posed by bigots is not just from their numbers, but also the degree of violence used to enforce their bigotry. In addition, having pre-established communication makes it easier to organize violence, even with a small proportion of the population.
I don't have a solution to these problems, as much as I wish I did, but wanted to bring them up as issues.
I actually think having large, centralized platforms actually makes the polarization problem worse because they encourage usage habits that keep people only within the milieu they've had curated for them within that platform. A more confederated system, like having multiple independent fora, means most people can dabble in and out of multiple different communities at once and not have their perspective on how the world is skewed in the same sort of systematic way.
Sure some people will go down the rabbit hole anyway, but then they will limit their reach by virtue of being too extreme to appeal to "normal" or moderate people who don't think about this stuff too deeply and are put off by extremism reflexively. When things are more centralized, there's sort of a one-way ratcheting effect where you get exposed to mild versions of the thing enough to start getting into it, and then slowly get pulled into more and more extreme versions. That doesn't happen with forums that each have their own culture and identity, there isn't as much transitional/interstitial space to acclimatize you. You just jump in, read the vibe without being preconditioned, and make your instinctual call on whether you'd like to stay.
Usual argument is that your solution also "works" if you replace racists with, say, abolitionists at the point in history when the general public consensus was that slavery is just fine (except with internet).
Enabling good ideas to spill out of their origin communities into general public discourse is the main point of "public square" and "free speech" concepts.
They can still spill out through activist work, they just can't be as easily astroturfed by troll-farms so people will have to come by their influence honestly, through moral suasion and persuasive powers.
TBH the issue is not that I can't stand to hear racist stuff, it's that there's well understood incentives to fear monger that have tangibly eroded social trust across the board and degraded the actual real life public square in the process. That's not just the heightened threats of terrorism and acrimonious political systems either, those are just the tips of the iceberg and there's a whole host of social maladies, mental health disorders, depression and anxiety symptoms, etc. coming out of this.
Maybe the internet isn’t a good analog of the square.
I’m sure there are taverns near any reader here where one could “say the wrong things” and be asked to leave or maybe roughed up or even worse. Those consequences might be an important part of this not-really-discourse-or-free-speech-but-we-want-to-treat-it-like-free-speech.
Hard to say what the best thing is. Huge parts of our society don’t like consequences for actions.
For one, a real public square isn't anonymous. To add to your example, get thrown out the tavern too many times and they will eventually not let the person come back. This person can't simply create a new account and sneak back in.
You're not required to participate. Nobody is, in fact.
There's something particularly disgusting about the elevated sense of self-importance required to say that because you don't like something, because there is a vanishingly small number of bad actors as there are in every single group above a certain size, it shouldn't exist at all.
Correct. And I'm also not required to believe in the cultural relevance of Twitter at all.
There's no digital analogue to the IRL long stare of death that is elicited when someone is out of line. Downvotes, ratios, and whatever ridiculous thing people invent aren't effective enough because the offender has little concern for being ostracized from a group of people they don't even know. It's all just avatars on a screen yelling at each other. This is why people say scale is the problem. Smaller communities can more effectively enforce norms because they create a localized culture, there is less to moderate, and they can more effectively identify and punish bad actors.
These days I spend time on niche forums where people actively choose to be there and participate. There's no Internet Points to be gamed, no drama of the day, no personal brands to be pushing. It's absolutely refreshing. It moves slower, there's no sense of FOMO, it's not made to suck your attention span dry.
Twitter is rotting: it's why the front page has to tell you it is relevant, and why they started requiring logins to read beyond a thread. It'd be farther gone if journalists didn't prop it up as a way to do their job faster.
A phrase particularly lacking in decency, making you a bad actor on this forum. Especially when you are wrong. It takes an elevated sense of self-importance to say that because you don't like a moderate opinion it is palpably revolting.
Twitter isn't a technical problem, as others have pointed out. It is a social problem. One that leads to behavior just as intolerant and dvisive as Fox News or any of the demagogues making their fortunes by bringing out the worst impulses of the stupidest people. One that leads people like yourself to drag down the discussion with such uncalled for invective.
Trying to discuss the problem invariably brings out dim outbursts, such as your own, meant to stifle discourse. Yes you feel entitled to your own set of rules and care little for the effect it has on others, but the effect of Twitter is destroying the fabric that coddles you, that protects you and allows you to have small selfish views at the expense of everyone else, with no evidence that you understand the consequences.
| You're not required to participate. Nobody is, in fact.
As long as Twitter remains a powerful platform for social influence - even if you explicitly avoid participation - you face the effects. Nobody in the U.S. can escape the grandstanding, the vitriol, the ostracizing, or the influence that the forum represents. The problem extends to many other nations. Something should be done and discussing it freely is a sane approach.
So choke down your bile, bite your tongue and make your points with some dignity. If we all pull together we can get through this, I just know it.
My supposed lack of decency has nothing to do with whether I'm acting in good faith or not.
> a moderate opinion
> > Maybe global public squares don't work for the humans we have.
Tenuous argument that Twitter === "global public square" notwithstanding, saying some people don't warrant a public square is not a moderate opinion. It's borderline fascist, and disgusting is the most civil word I would use to describe it.
> Nobody in the U.S. can escape the grandstanding, the vitriol, the ostracizing, or the influence that the forum represents.
Oh please. If you're not on Twitter what does the ratioing or "ostracizing" do to your day to day? Even if you are, unless you're commonly delving into hot button topics or conversations between people you don't follow, there is very little drama unless you want there to do. I almost exclusively follow people I haven't met in real life, who are doing cool things in the tech space. I can count on one hand the number of times I've been subject to either grandstanding or vitriol, and I'm fairly active on the platform.
> If we all pull together we can get through this, I just know it.
Get through what? Musk buying Twitter isn't some apocalyptic event. Unless you're the type of sad person who gets their entire sense of self worth from having a little blue check mark next to your name, or you think it's generally a bad thing that people have a place to speak their mind, this will almost certainly be a complete non-issue. Have some dignity.
Unfortunately the period from about 2015 to early 2021 made it very clear that even while direct participation is avoidable, the implications of the platform and it's users aren't.
Then again, the solution to the hooligan yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre isn't to close the theatre...
We gotta build things for the humans we have, not the humans we wish to have.
Maybe global public squares don't work for the humans we have. That's ok.
Where is the elevated sense of self importance? Where did OP say it shouldn't exist. You read this with filters.
OP simply stated that we need to build a product which is more aligned with how humans are and NOT how we wish humans were. A rebuttal would be to show that current products solve the problem we have and we do not need to change anything.
But is it. The world is very clearly (more clearly than at any other point in the past) one. It is entirely not obvious that our current level of global communication is sufficient to support this setup.
I can't agree that "global public square don't work for humans" - but even if that were the case, it's still too late to just reverse course. As long it's possible, viable and largely desired, the market will spit out a solution to this need.
Is not too late at all. If you remove the "is not my responsibility what my users publish" for forums beyond X thousand users, every forum will stay under that limit and twitter quickly will become thousands of independent sub-twitters ala reddit. No home page aggregating everything, no suggested tweets, no
country-scale public square
Talk about an appeal to absurdity. The point is made, however, it's a bit hyperbolic.
In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that moderation is absolutely required for any "public square". You can't have society without some agreed-upon rules.
The real question is where are the lines, and how do you police them (and who polices the police, etc etc). It's not like we haven't solved those. It's just that the solutions themselves are imperfect like the world we live in.
>In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that moderation is absolutely required for any "public square".
No. You want moderation, because you don't want people saying The Bad Things™, but it's not an absolute property of all discussion.
Otherwise - you're missing the point that GP wants to destroy twitter in it's current form because we don't need a public square. It's not a matter of where we draw the lines for moderation.
In a real public square, moderation is both official (the police, keeping the peace or enforcing authoritarian oppression, depending on where you are) and organic (a loudmouth nazi sympathizer getting knocked out and nobody-having-seen-anything).
Not that the IRL public square is immune to rule-breaking. In the heat of the moment, a mob can do horrendous things in a flash.
It's a fair question whether 'public' for a person should mean ten people, or three hundred, or three million. In practical terms people can't cope with a public square the size of a million. It's too big. The range of possible 'people I'm sharing my public square with' is too great to manage.
The question of scale is extremely relevant here. It's a well-known phenomenon that as organized/structured entities grow, there are certain thresholds at which they transmute - the structure itself changes to support the new level of scale.
In terms of human groups, we've traditionally dealt with this by means of hierarchies (with all the built-in shortcomings).
Personally, I find a homogenous mob terrifying. Being in agreement with millions of others implies that the subject of the agreement is extremely basic and common (like "we all need air to breathe").
Well how about if the millions determine which are the best tweets to show by default, but do it so that quality or novel content comes through and political snark and misinformation is hidden.
Reminds me another short story i once read, Lexicographicide, by Taban Lo Liyong. The dictator, every year, eliminates certain letters from the alphabet, or was it words from the dictionary - it's decades since i read it. Thereafter none can use the same.
>“You know — “ said Eliot, “Kilgore Trout once wrote a whole book about a country that was devoted to fighting odors. That was the national purpose. There wasn’t any disease, and there wasn’t any crime, and there wasn’t any war, so they went after odors.”
“This country,” said Eliot, “had tremendous research projects devoted to fighting odors. They were supported by individual contributions given to mothers who marched on Sundays from door to door. The ideal of the research was to find a specific chemical deodorant for every odor. But then the hero, who was also the country’s dictator, made a wonderful scientific breakthrough, even though he wasn’t a scientist, and they didn’t need the projects any more. He went right to the root of the problem.”
“Uh huh,” said the Senator. He couldn’t stand stories by Kilgore Trout, was embarassed by his son. “He found one chemical that would eliminate all odors?”
“No. As I say, the hero was dictator, and he simply eliminated noses.”
=========
Your solution is somewhat similar. You want to solve the problem of people saying racist things, so you decide to destroy the public square. Going for the root of the problem, I suppose.