Free speech can’t flourish online — Social media is an outrage machine, not a forum for sharing ideas and getting at the truth::Social media is an outrage machine, not a forum for sharing ideas and getting at the truth
It’s amazing how much casually nicer lemmy and the greater fediverse is. You still see some bad habits leaking over from the rest of the web, but then people actually apologizing! and asking others to be nice! And it actually works!
Well outside of some thorny political issues, but that’s just human nature.
it’s more like the old internet or like old reddit.
As an old Reddit user, that’s why I came here. Just gotta get up the wherewithal to start/ recruit some of the niche subs I enjoyed most now.
I mostly agree but with the caveat that it really depends on the topic and the community. Some communities handle (at least what seems like good faith!) disagreement far worse than others.
Even if it’s not yelling at each other, downvotes are quickly becoming a “I disagree” button and not a “this comment provides no value” button. Not limited to politics either.
Upvotes and downvotes have always been agree and disagree buttons. Reddit trying to pretend they were ever anything else was folly.
Hell, even calling them upvote and downvotes is a misnomer if all you’re trying to do is promote discussion. Even then, it’s silly to think that most up or downvoted to oblivion comments aren’t there for a reason. More often than not it just tells you what that community’s and parent comments biases are lol.
Yeah, I’ve noticed any “capitalism vs communism” comment or post gets a TON of engagement, and it almost always goes down a negative slippery slope. I guess that’s why a lot of people prefer to filter out politics related stuff.
That being said, even the worst arguments I’ve seen here are nothing like I’ve seen on other platforms, where you think it might spill into someone getting hurt in real life.
I’m useing liftoff and blocking sub lemmets still doesn’t work
Don’t leave me hanging bud.
Fewer people, more tightly connected communities… In old Reddit there was a point over which the sub was getting mainstream and then you would get gallowboob and other assorted jerks ruining everything
The downvote button is still abused as a “I don’t agree with your opinion” button though…
yeah I don’t really know how we can improve on that
I think lesswrong has an “agree/disagree” vote as well as a “this comment is/is not high quality and relevant button”
A “I don’t agree with that” button?
What would it do? If it didn’t do anything, people would just use the downvote button
You should only get so many downvotes to use per day. Maybe 3.
This is a nice idea that I’ve seen before, but also one that sort of needs a centralized platform to work well
That’s a good point.
That’s similar to how slashdot modpoints worked, although both upvotes and downvotes were limited. IMO it was one of the better self moderation systems I’ve seen.
I do personally wish people were a bit more thoughtful before downvoting, and making them a limited resource could help with that. It could also encourage sock-puppeting if not implemented very carefully, though.
I was thinking about slashdot modpoints too - it did seem to result in better discussion, but maybe everything was better in those days/in my rose-tinted spectacles. (And at this point I cba going back to check…)
There were some oddnesses - I remember someone’s signature was “The difference between ‘Interesting’ and ‘Insightful’ is whether you agree” which always rang very true to me. Separating upvotes for “funny”, “I agree” and “I find this interesting” is already pretty handy though.
I think there’s no way to prevent people from downvoting what they disagree with - but maybe if you provided downvotes for “this is wrong” and “this is trolling” people could have an option to ignore the “this is wrong” downvotes and get more diverse opinions.
There’s a lot more bad content than 3 per day, though. Also, downvotes have essentially no effect, so the whole mechanism is a bit pointless. Better than nothing, still.
Lemmy already has a huge alt/brigade problem. That would just make it worse.
“I don’t agree” -> “the content of this comment is false, because it doesn’t agree with what I believe to be true” -> “this comment provides no value, because its content is lies”. There’s no way you can prevent that chain of reasoning, especially since it’s largely unconscious for most people.
I suppose it’d probably be pretty hard to sell people on lies being good, on the basis of lies being good ground for refutation of those lies, huh?
But then I dunno, I’d take like 30 comments of people all disagreeing with some premise in some similar way, compared to like, a 10 comment long reference getting 30 gorillion upvotes, because everyone has to be god’s gift to comedy.
That’s not been my experience. I keep getting baited by ml power users and then banned for daring to question their orthodoxy. It seems intentional.
That reminds me, I once made my first political post on reddit and that got downvoted to oblivion. I would like to see how that exact same post would perform here on Lemmy.
“Free speech can’t flourish online”
Subscribe to unlock this articleLOL. Truth!
With the truth there is a price to pay?
Used to be slowly changing
What happens on social media has nothing to do with free speech. If I can kick Nazis out of my bar , I can kick them off my website.
And either way, a public square where violent fascists are attacking people and screaming over everyone with megaphones isn’t a place where anything important is being discussed anyway.
And either way, a public square where violent fascists are attacking people and screaming over everyone with megaphones isn’t a place where anything important is being discussed anyway.
Screaming over everyone with megaphones about how they’re not allowed to scream over everyone with megaphones, to a crowd that’s 50% mannequins that have been wired up to play pre-recorded cheering.
Unfortunately, the discussion is important. Everybody hangs out in that public square which means everybody is forced to hear the megaphone Mein Kamph. It’s how the far-right procreate now
The right wants to make it so that if you ban Nazis from a website, armed men from the government will come and arrest you. At the same time, they rant about being compelled to use transgender pronouns.
If you want a proper civilized discussion, head to pornhub. You’re welcum.
Nothing makes my day more than clicking on a vid, then seeing some really intelligent shit in the comments.
The comments are always 🔥. They’re better than the videos most of the time…
Pornhub comments is where I learned about the existence of and how to make chicken adobo. Shit’s delicious.
Pornhub comments is where I learned about the existence of and how to make chicken adobo. Shit’s delicious.
This is the most _________ comment I’ve ever read on the Internet.
*Can’t think of the proper word to use for this comment, it’s totally blown my mind. Esoteric? Nope. Non-sequitur? Nope. Has the word actually been invented that describes this comment? It’s power is over 9000!
** I have further questions. Where can one get the recipe for chicken adobo? Also, why when you use voice-to-text does the word “internet” always show up in lower case, when it’s a pronoun that is supposed to be in uppercase?
I was gonna type it all out but then I got lazy. Here’s a pretty close approximation from a quick googling.
The recipe I have uses cane sugar vinegar instead of white vinegar, and brown sugar. And since you’re using vinegar, make sure you don’t stir anything with a metal spoon. It gives it a bitter taste.
Free speech online doesn’t even seem to be a particularly well-defined concept. Those who extol it the loudest are often looking to have the millionth “good faith discussion” about The Bell Curve, or use slurs as “just a joke”, or promote a “dating and lifestyle coaching” business to teenage boys. If all they want is carte-blanche to say absolutely anything without being censored, I guess they only need to spin up a web server of their own, or run a lemmy instance. But what they actually want is to bypass the moderation rules on widely-used platforms and shit on the social contract. It’s the same reason they don’t show pornography, snuff footage, or other damaging content on television.
No paywall: https://archive.ph/2023.11.12-212740/https://www.ft.com/content/8fde56b7-2515-441a-9472-30c8aedcc200
Tbh, the article doesn’t really talk about the headline. Just some history and talk about Elon musk and Twitter. Not a convincing argument about social media in general.Free speech cant flourish under corporate rule
Multiple US court cases have repeatedly affirmed the concept that money is speech because access to media costs, but if that’s true and explicitly part of how it works, then media will always be dominated by those with the most money to create media.
All media ends up being shitty and awful because it’s a business. It’s always a business. When the Internet got big, businesses showed up and took a framework for cheaply exchanging information across large distances and turned it into Cable 2.0, because cable is inherently more like what they want than a powerful framework that empowers citizens to speak their minds or whatever. You know what people would do if they were really empowered to create their own media, and more importantly, create it on their terms? Nothing that makes businesses happy. They want you strapped in to an emotional manipulation machine that exists to convince you to buy things. They only want you posting because it helps them figure out what to sell to you and how.
Social media is an outrage machine for the exact same reason cable news is filled with horrible and terrifying imagery – it hits your emotional buttons and keeps you coming back. Social media just makes the manipulation even easier and more fine-grained.
Well, “social media” and “online” ain’t the same thing, now are they?
Well, mostly they are nowadays. Sure, there’s still old school forums and personal websites around but most people online interact via social media.
The old forums I used to go to don’t exist anymore. One is now a separate entity from the sponsor company because they pivoted from renting game servers ( the old times when you could host your own private server) to telco and it lost all the value to have gamers attached to the image of the company. Also gamers in the meantime assumed another meaning entirely…
Free speech can’t flourish online, says the paywalled article
Is this an issue with… social media, or corporate social media? Mastodon technically is social media and it can potentially have the problems of Facebook or Twitter, or not. Depends on the instance owners control. Even then, however they can’t control every little detail when it’s federated but, that’s a good thing for the freedom of ideas.
If you want my actual opinion, places like Lemy and even Reddit are better for independent voices, because you can go into a dedicated community and get what you want specifically. While places like Mastodon, is more like a timeline of, hey I did this thing, or hey Elon musk did a thing today. Lemy is less like that, but it can also be like that.
Lemy or reddit seems to encourage discusion and Lemy seems to do great at it. The best interaction i’ve seen on an opensource social platform even compared to mastodon, dispite mastodon having more users.
The writer here seems confused. Free speech thrives online. There is no freer a place to speak than the Internet.
What they seem to take issue with is that free speech isn’t always the path to truth. This was never a condition of free speech, and the lack of truth online doesn’t make the speech there any less free.
In fact, free speech is the very force that allows people to lie with impunity. Maybe there would be more truth if speech were less free.
God I could kiss you. It’s so weird. People have been just saying what’s on their minds in chatrooms, forums, etc since the beginning of the internet, which was never scrutinized this much over being “factual”. They were just expressing themselves. But now all of sudden we need a PSA to stop it lol
I think we’ve always thrived on outrage.
Before social media we had newspapers. Sure, we had real serious newspapers where the headlines where printed in a serif font, and mostly contained news about share prices and the political ramifications of abandoning the gold standard, but that wasn’t what the masses bought.
We had tabloids. Look at what the BARMY EU want to ban now. Check out what BOFFINS are doing to dogs. Here’s a 16 year old with her tits out. Look at this man on BENEFITS with 10 kids.
The only objective actual reporting in them was the sports pages at the back, and the TV guide in the middle.
We’ve always been like this. I have no answers how to make things better. We’d have to want to be better, and I don’t believe most people do.
There’s also no algorithm taking the most controversial answer and making it the top most comment ala Facebook.
This was clearly written by someone who has very little interaction with healthy forums for dialogue. There will always be trolls online and in real life, pretending like idiots and jokers only exist in an online setting is disingenuous or the view of a completely sheltered individual.
