"..systems that reward outrage only make the problem worse.”
I think this is what a lot of social media has become, particularly as people isolate themselves to only those sources and feeds they agree with.
"..systems that reward outrage only make the problem worse.”
I think this is what a lot of social media has become, particularly as people isolate themselves to only those sources and feeds they agree with.
This is the reason I left the "main" social media and what keeps me from engaging too much with Reddit/HN or any of the other new hotness like Mast, nostr, BlueSky, etc: it's just rage baiting or karma farming
Mastodon is pretty much anti-that. No algorithm. If you don't like something, you just don't follow it. Nothing defaults to the instance/global timeline either and you're free to mute anything.
This hasn't been my observation. Yeah you can mute whatever you want (you can on Twitter and Bluesky also) but the HOA tendencies of Mastodon servers are alive and well. If you're a very online type of person and "live and die" by online social currents then no problem, but for others I'm not sure.
The problem with a lot of social media is that a lot of it allows you to either directly or indirectly monetise engagement. That creates an strong incentive to create outrage.
This has also been discussed in the context of FB's feed where optimising for engagement has inadvertently led to a situation where users are constantly being bombarded with ragebait.
I upvoted you, and at the time I believe that the core of the problem is having ranking and reaction mechanisms.
But don't you have to have some sort of ranking system for discoverability?
That's a self-inflicted wound caused by the need for massive scale. Focused user communities don't need to rely on crowds to assist in moderation.
You really don’t. You discover sites (like this one) and interesting people by word-of-mouth. Within a site (forum or blog), recency, topical categories, sorting and (full-text) searching are sufficient. That’s how the web mostly worked 20+ years ago.
You can have personal rankings, for example people reporting on the most interesting things they’ve recently seen. But these will be individual lists, not aggregated by an algorithm over all user behavior.
You certainly don’t need likes and other reactions, and you also don’t need up- and downvoting of contributions. Those set the wrong incentives and do more harm than good overall, IMO. You do need reporting of problematic content, but only site moderation will see those.
Our children and grandchildren can and should judge us for what we devolved into in our pursuit of Internet Points.
I think outrage is good. I like conflict and debate. It is the systems that supress outrage that are annoying. Really, you just need to supress spam.