The Silence Is Deafening

I suspect that a lot of the nice behavior on HN is because, for the most part, people value the community, and consider this a &quot;professional&quot; environment, and it&#x27;s not a bad idea to play nice in places where employers&#x2F;ees can see us show our butts.<p>LinkedIn was like that (in fact, sickeningly saccharine), but it&#x27;s starting to fray.<p>Slashdot was good for a while, then CNN and YouTube kicked off their trolls, and they all went to &#x2F;. It&#x27;s now the place to go, if you want swastika ASCII art.<p>StackOverflow manages to be a painful place to participate, even though they are sincerely trying to be decent. I think it&#x27;s way too &quot;gamified,&quot; and competitive.<p>For myself, I&#x27;m an old troll. I admit that I was a right bastard, back in the UseNet days.<p>I am trying to atone.<p>One of the ways that I do that, is make all my info connected with every place I participate. If I am a jerk, you know where to find me. Alternatively, if I make a good impression, you know where to find me.<p>I also pay attention to downvotes. If a post I make gets a couple of rapid downvotes, I nuke it. Sometimes, I understand why; sometimes, not. It&#x27;s just not worth it to me.<p>I am also making an effort not to engage too much. I may have a one-or-two-post back and forth, just to see if we can come to an accommodation, then it&#x27;s &quot;Have a great day!&quot;. Totally OK to let someone else have the last word. I have better uses for my time.

I watched the famous movie 12 Angry Men for the first time recently (I think it holds up well today, BTW).<p>There is a scene where a man goes on a racist tirade. Instead of engaging in argument or ignoring him, they stand up and turn their backs.<p>Here it is: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=TXlHKTPfLVA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=TXlHKTPfLVA</a><p>This is much like the disapproving glare mentioned, but what&#x27;s the online equivalent?<p>I play a few online games but not much multiplayer. Public voice chat made it a much less enjoyable experience. You can mute people of course. But as far as I know, they don&#x27;t get told. What if each time it happened it popped up a message &quot;4 people have muted you today&quot;, &quot;3 out of 8 teammates have muted you&quot;? It could be a useful feedback mechanism.

A big part of in person conversations are about building equity in the relationship. Even from the first encounter, you express what you think about and how you think about it and look for places that your thoughts intersect with others. Those that have a beneficial intersection you&#x27;re likely to explore further, invest more and build more equity.<p>Online, there is little chance that you&#x27;ll establish a new relationship and build equity with other users. You&#x27;ve got hundreds or thousands of followers, so do they and in many cases, the person you respond to may never see your reply, let alone remember your username for more than a few minutes.<p>These exchanges can be so fleeting because you&#x27;re both typically anonymous. Anonymity is antithetical to trust and trust is required for equity. There is little that an anonymous person can do for you, and little you could do for them.<p>Contrast Twitter and LinkedIn. Both have feeds and allow messaging and conversations. But since you know the people you&#x27;re interacting with on LinkedIn, many times personally, you are civil, helpful and courteous because one day they may actually be able to do something to benefit you. You invest in them and building equity in your relationship in expectation that if there is something you can do for them, or they can do for you in the future, it&#x27;s there to leverage.<p>Twitter just feels like, I dunno, looking for love in all the wrong places?<p>People have a multitude of purposes for engaging online anonymously. Learning or trolling, ego support or battling boredom, maybe a better solution would be to target those purposes as independent platforms and structure the dialog to support the purpose.

This article made me realize, part of the quality of the conversation on HN comes from the ability to downvote.<p>I’ve never thought about this before, but one of the effects of Twitter and Facebook only having positive reinforcement is that you don’t get the “disapproving stare.” It’s possible for a person to “like” with some degree of anonymity and no effort, but not possible to do the reverse. Worse, since the Algorithms heavily bias content based on “likes,” there’s no recognition of content that is actually broadly liked versus content that is polar.<p>Also, for individual posters in places with downvoting, the little dopamine hit you get from upvotes is heavily countered by the bad feeling of downvotes.<p>I know that in my own participation on HN I will occasionally think of a snarky thing to say, but usually don’t post it because I know it’ll get downvoted, which I don’t like, and that moment of hesitation is usually enough for me to think “yeah that is actually unhelpful and not worth posting.”<p>This all probably very obvious to most of this crowd, but I honestly haven’t considered it before. How different would the world be if Facebook and Twitter merely had dislike buttons to go along with likes?

There are two services (one built by me) out there which have this in mind, providing an online space for deep public discussions around a topic.<p>Taaalk (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taaalk.co&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taaalk.co&#x2F;</a>) is mine. It is currently less focused around debate, and more around exploring topics:<p>E.g. OCD: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taaalk.co&#x2F;t&#x2F;exploring-obsessive-compulsive-disorder" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taaalk.co&#x2F;t&#x2F;exploring-obsessive-compulsive-disorder</a> Eating disorders: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taaalk.co&#x2F;t&#x2F;discussing-eating-disorders" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taaalk.co&#x2F;t&#x2F;discussing-eating-disorders</a> Bitcoin: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taaalk.co&#x2F;t&#x2F;bitcoin-maxima-other-crypto-things" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taaalk.co&#x2F;t&#x2F;bitcoin-maxima-other-crypto-things</a> Flag design: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taaalk.co&#x2F;t&#x2F;the-power-and-significance-of-flags" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taaalk.co&#x2F;t&#x2F;the-power-and-significance-of-flags</a> Chess: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taaalk.co&#x2F;t&#x2F;how-to-think-about-chess" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taaalk.co&#x2F;t&#x2F;how-to-think-about-chess</a> Psychedelics &amp; Mental Health: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taaalk.co&#x2F;t&#x2F;falling-inward-discussing-the-role-of-psychedelics-in-modern-medicine-and-mental-health" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taaalk.co&#x2F;t&#x2F;falling-inward-discussing-the-role-of-ps...</a><p>Etc...<p>Another alternative that is built by a fellow HNer is Debubble (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;debubble.me&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;debubble.me&#x2F;</a>). It is more focused around debate than Taaalk. There are a fixed number of messages &#x2F; discussion.

Good observation. I have noticed that people very vocal online do not do so well in person. They forget what it&#x27;s like to have people looking at you disapprovingly or to be forced to express your views coherently the first or second attempt, without the chance to craft the perfect 140 char response.<p>Unfortunately, as more and more young people grow up with digital spaces as their primary domain, they are losing the ability to communicate in person. I have a few friends that are high school teachers, and they all notice this trend. Every class discussion involves short sentence answers, low effort, very little passion. But if you let them use a digital space to post opinions (like a class discussion forum) things can become polarised, or at least more passionate than they were in class.

I have a few friends that are trying to &quot;solve this problem&quot; -- ranging from ideas on better, more inclusive social networks, to vetting (news) sources and ideas, to self-governance, to curation-heavy communities.<p>I personally don&#x27;t really think it&#x27;s a &quot;problem&quot; -- people simply, on average, just <i>don&#x27;t care</i> about other opinions (<i>especially</i> opposing ones). This happens on both sides of any debate. Why learn about, study, and discuss the moral implications of abortion and wade through its ethical morass when you can just share some provocative meme? Why actually <i>read</i> the W.E.B DuBois and Booker T. Washington debates when you can just share some celebrity&#x27;s shallow BLM Tweet? Hacker News is a rare gem[1]. Most people aren&#x27;t educated, curious, and willing to accept when&#x2F;if they&#x27;re wrong. This is exacerbated by the re-emergence of yellow journalism in mainstream media (where accountability for misleading or even false headlines is nonexistent) because these days it&#x27;s all about the clicks.<p>So we&#x27;re left with Twitter and Facebook. And people, on average, <i>like</i> their echo chambers. They <i>don&#x27;t</i> want to be challenged or poked or prodded. In 2020, Socrates would be banned from Twitter.<p>[1] Although, perhaps as a sign of the times, even this post is getting downvoted without any discussion.

You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you.<p>It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.<p>The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.<p>-Marcus Aurelius

Wow, this changes how I think about online discourse more than anything I can remember.<p>It actually makes me feel a lot better - rather than feeling like the whole world and all my friends are angry and unreasonable, it reminds me that, no, most of them are just being invisible. And that even the ones who seem unreasonable are just a product of their environment.<p>The funny thing is it could really be solved with a &quot;that&quot; feature on Twitter, to quietly keep track of when others disapprove, and even to anonymously and privately let the tweeter know.

The digital &quot;tut&quot; is perhaps a inter-social-media protocol we could create.<p>Like a downvote, it indicates disapproval and starts trying to, as this article persuasively says, move social nuance online.<p>Twitter, Facebook et al could all have this alongside a like button, on a RESTful interface so it&#x27;s agnostic about the client.<p>Many, many years ago I stumbled across a web page hosted on a white supremacist site but was third in google&#x27;s ranking for Martin Luther King search term. It struck me then that what would be useful was not for me to link to that site (hence adding to its pagerank) but to link to that site with an href attribute that indicated something was wrong about the facts presented.<p>I think overall this is the same problem of short selling - and it&#x27;s not clear how to fix it.

I think the problem I have with this argument is that it assumes &#x27;Angry Alice&#x27; is there to argue in good faith. Unfortunately I&#x27;ve learned that there are many, many &#x27;Angry Alices&#x27; out there that exist solely to rile up people and they get validation out of misleading people or tricking reasonable people.<p>At the dinner party it&#x27;s much harder to pull off this sort of trick because you&#x27;re dealing with very real people face to face. Once you&#x27;ve caused large amounts of friction with people in reality, they&#x27;re less likely to engage with you and will outright avoid you.<p>But when you&#x27;re on the internet, you have an endless supply of people that you can troll. And often it&#x27;s become harder and harder to separate the trolls from what people actually believe.

Love this. One of the most frustrating aspects of social media is the lack of feedback, or maybe more accurately the one-sidedness of the feedback. I personally assume that means no one cares about what I write, but maybe they just don&#x27;t have the energy to tell me off. Either way, this hits the nail right on the head in my opinion

I’ve been trying to have more 1-1 conversations with friends these days about some of the more controversial topics in the news when it comes up, basically an IRL version of a DM, and it’s been interesting to see how people’s opinions align against the Twitter opinion spectrum. About half have been much more moderate than anything I’ve seen online, but the other half actually do align with the more radical and loud voices shouting about whatever it is that’s trending on Twitter at that moment. I always thought that Twitter wasn’t really representative of what most people thought&#x2F;believed but now I’m not so sure. Of course this is just based on personal anecdotes. And to be fair, all of the 1-1 conversations I’ve had have been productive and each time I’ve been able to walk away with some ideas that I haven’t had before.

On top of all this there is an arbiter (social network) that filters and decides what is important enough be shared maximally. Before anybody even hears your conversation it has been filtered to a degree, there is no organic interpretation of the situation by the group like there would be in real life.

It seems like too much work, and not sure if it is a good use of someone&#x27;s time to keep answering and writing long facts to people, or random strangers.<p>It isn&#x27;t realistic to expect everyone, or the majority of people, do this on the internet.

A single bit of disapproval may be too little information. In the southern US last century, &quot;So, when are you inviting me over?&quot; not only conveyed reasonably non-confrontational disapproval, but also the specific message that one shouldn&#x27;t speak too much of one&#x27;s own acquisitions in a wide public. &quot;Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter&quot; is a similar stock phrase to gently suggest online that someone is not preaching to their choir.<p>Someone asked a few days ago on HN what to do about clearly racist rhetoric in the twenty-first century. Maybe we ought to discover a similar stock phrase, such as &quot;All that matters is can the fine horse see&quot; or &quot;Nobody&#x27;s saying they don&#x27;t appreciate what Jenny did&quot; (or perhaps something from Blazing Saddles? &quot;So, when are we stampeding cattle through the Vatican?&quot;).<p>(but, even assuming such a phrase were discovered and originally used in a targeted fashion, how should we avoid the nearly-inevitable Godwin-treadmill flak thereafter?)

Here you go, server is currently giving me 503<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;devonzuegel.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;the-silence-is-deafening" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:https:&#x2F;...</a><p>On a side note, why does Google make it so hard for mobile users to use its cache feature?

Good luck trying to do this with every single participating entity. The &quot;problem&quot;, if there is one to be defined, is not the &quot;silence&quot; of the user, but the default behavior to not surface the access of the data in question to others who are accessing or discussing the data. Basically servers need to divulge all meta data about an endpoint, including access and times.<p>Its a &quot;security flaw&quot; of the Internet and web services, as they are currently defined. If someone would get around to integrating Lightning with the 402 HTTP error code, it might make it a bit better. Then again, someone has to convince all the users to use new browsers and technology, which will take forever.<p>In the meantime, a service which shows who and where the content is being accessed, and a revenue model that fits with that viewing would be interesting.<p>Vote me down, but no discussion is just more of the same meta problem. Users vs. hidden&#x2F;unknown corporate control.

&gt; It gets worse—Angry Alice only sees feedback from extremists, so she doesn&#x27;t receive more nuanced signals that might actually cause her to reflect on her behavior<p>But this works both way. Actually, it works all ways. That is, the person who marginalizes Alice is also marginalized by someone else. And so on and so on. Eventually, everything is binary. There&#x27;s little if any grey area.<p>No doubt a small minority actually deserve to be marginalized. Those existed long before the internet. The internet is different. You don&#x27;t need to work to understand or even engage. Instead, many seek to minimize friction and maximize positive feedback. The validity of the source is irrelevant. Digital love is good regardless of the source.

Best kind of disapproval makes people reflect and change behaviour. That kind of disapproval works best if it comes from people in your in-group or from people you respect.<p>Anonymous downvoting like in big forum is just for moderation that excludes people.

I think he hits the nail in the head. He&#x27;s main observation is this:<p>&quot;...digital spaces generally have no equivalent of a disapproving glare. You&#x27;re stuck choosing between staying silent and entering the fray, with few options in between. If you have little reason to believe that other reasonable people will back you up, you&#x27;re going to stick with the default: silence.&quot;<p>In this permanent work from home situation, I can relate...

I&#x27;ve long thought that the problem with Twitter and Facebook is that there&#x27;s no downvote button. This article is about something different though. What if we had a platform like these but posts had a metric of likes or shares per view displayed on them rather than absolute numbers. I really want to see how that goes actually. Simply displaying views might give a totally different interaction as well.

I think this direct message technique has always been going on.<p>The reason people on Usenet would say &quot;The lurkers support me in email&quot; (until they learned that saying that was taboo) is that the lurkers were supporting them in email.

Well good ideas, but maybe Twitter should have a disapproving glare button and a way to incentivize it&#x27;s use by reasonable people.

Polemics require belief that subjectivity is born out of battle. What has changed is that belief.

A deeper issue is the cultural shift to an overly judgemental culture which has been built thoughout the decades. The media always, always has thrived on creating moral panics, but the public wasn&#x27;t always so gullible to them.<p>There&#x27;s a noticeable shift towards conservativism and a constant preoccupation with their public image among younger generations. It&#x27;s even noticeable in statistics , e.g. disapproval of nudism.

Curious if this is related to the Balaji Srinivasan&#x2F;Taylor Lorenz spat on Twitter.

Arguing online is a complete and total waste of time. Designed to make you spin your wheels. You aren&#x27;t doing _anything_ productive.

DM = Direct Message

Downvoting is one way disapproval is expressed, so the premise is the article is flawed. However, we must also remember that the point of speech is to convey truth, not crowd pleasing, not stirring up conflict for the kicks, not bland milquetoast niceness. What the appropriate tone or style is, or whether engagement makes sense at all, will depend on the situation and here we need prudence (in the classical sense). Feedback can be of help in shaping prudence, but it is not the final arbiter of the correct course is action. It must be examined for validity.<p>So please, do not couch your language. Be clear and direct. Let your yeses be yeses and your noes be noes. Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language. Listen to to your interlocutors, but speaks plainly and honestly. Let the chips fall where they may.

&gt;speak out<p>&gt;get attacked<p>&gt;stay silent<p>&gt;get attacked<p>It used to be that the only way to win a losing game is to not play, but even now that&#x27;s not an option anymore.

But what if Alice is right and silent majority is wrong? I would say silent majority is mostly wrong in recent times.

The linked article suggestions would work on a holiness-neutral topic like emacs vs vi, but I don&#x27;t think the suggested tactics would work against holy virtue signalling.