I dunno. I just feel less like I’m experiencing a fun new tool for communication the last few weeks. The communities here on Beehaw are still great and fantastic and aren’t what I’m bothered by. It’s just when I venture out in the world (which I often do) that I notice conversations are much more argumentative than I remember them being.
How’s everyone else doing? Is this a minor vibez check?
Well… yes.
I have to humbly admit that I just got myself banned on LW, for going berserk in a discussion I shouldn’t even have started. 😓
I’ve recently commented to someone who was making fun of Beehaw’s rules, that they’re not only to have everyone else “be nice” to me, but also to remind myself to “be nice” to others. On some instances, with other rules, it’s just too easy to forget myself and try to “one up” others until shit happens.
I’m afraid as more people join Lemmy, and they get more confident at using the platform, more of the old Reddit bad habits will seep in… except hopefully on Beehaw.
It seems to be both common wisdom and substantiated by some studies I’ve heard of … bad apples really do ruin the bunch … toxic behaviours infect and corrupt.
I think if we care, admitting that we can go too far ourselves (as you did, and as I’ll admit myself too) and then trying to be vigilant in maintaining a culture are the best we can do.
Calling out rude behavior might be a way for us to help govern the kind of behavior we want.
Sometimes I wonder whether an online community made of anonymous individuals who don’t and won’t ever know each other, nor even recognize each other, isn’t a fool’s errand. People are all-too willing to shout carelessly into the mist, as if their words can’t affect real people. At least with irl communities, there is a pressure not to insult each other to one another’s faces.
This isn’t to say social media is all bad, not at all. But I wonder if “community” is really possible in any kind of meaningful way, or in the long term.
All my favorite internet forums held on by being small and having solid rules and moderation, and then as they grow, and more and more strangers join the mix, it slowly falls apart.
If you’ve seen other posts that I have made you might’ve noticed that I’m interested in this exact problem and I have been super focused on research that shows having efficient information networks (i.e. centralized networks, a network where only one or a few voices matter, or fully connected networks, a network where everyone can see everyone else opinions) can lead to much lower collective intelligence for the group and having inefficient information networks (networks that have fewer connections, maybe 4-6, and everyone has an equal amount of connections) can lead to a group being able to solve more complex problems.
So in relation to what you pointed out big online communities actually might be making our collective intelligence weaker even though it makes us more connected.
Link: https://ndg.asc.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Centola_2022_TICS_Network_Science_of_Collective_Intelligence.pdf
Interesting paper. Haven’t read it all yet (saving it for later), but… are lowly connected networks “less efficient” though, or do highly connected networks end up drowning in noise?
As I understand it, each person has a certain limit on input and output transmission speeds (reading is faster than writing, but speaking sits between them both), and communication quality declines with density. So the most efficient network, would be that which has as many connections as possible, up to a threshold of desired communication quality. Different people can have different speeds, and form part of several networks, each with a different threshold for quality.
That suggests an ideally efficient network structure, would be formed by a stack of overlapping networks with different topologies and unequally connected nodes depending on each one’s in/out capacity and quality requirements of the networks they form part of. If we add different data processing quality and capacity at the nodes, each node would have a particular combination of networks with which it would perform ideally, for maximum total performance.
A further problem to solve, would be the evolution of parameters over time, which could require nodes switching to different combinations of networks and a different number of connections on each. Different types of periodic cycling over different configurations could be ideal for distributing information to maximize problem solving… and different types of problems could benefit from different setups of the whole system.
I wonder if instead of trying to run a simplified network version of a static problem on MTurk, it wouldn’t benefit more from a series of initial simulations, and only then run a static or evolving problem with MTurk, adapting the setup based on signals from nodes, networks, and a fit function for the whole system.
Interesting.
I think that the individual’s ability to process information does play a role in how many connections that individual should have but the more important role in having fewer connections is to provide protection from social influence which can hinder the creativity process and help stabilize adoption.
So for example, if I had 50 connections and 4 people adopted a new behavior / shared new information I would still be influenced to not take up the behavior because so many of my other connections aren’t taking part and it could lead to negative feedback from my other connections, but if I had 6 connections instead that behavior/information would be much more appealing allowing for newer ideas/behaviors to spread in a much more stable way.
Similarly with creativity. If you have a lot of connections that are giving you answers to everything you could think of (and they are decent answers) then there is less of a need to find creative solutions to those problems meaning that new ideas are less likely to be thought of or proposed. Alternatively being surrounded by that much external information siloes you to think about finding a new solution within the things that have already worked.
This is something that they have sort of studied but not in the way you have suggested. They have allowed individuals to change their social connections over time and have noticed that the connections become more centralized and/or the connections are to people who are like them in relevant ways (This point isn’t in this paper but it is in some related research). It would be interesting to see what would happen if they actually optimized the network over time to make everyone smarter.
Yes, I find it very interesting too.
Me too. I don’t understand why some people (mostly lemmy.world) are so eager to recruit as much of reddit as possible to join. Smaller is better.
I don’t get why the admins at lemmy.world are like that at all. Then they keep turning around and changing the story when there’s literal logs and evidence to the contrary. It’s one drama after another and seems to keep escalating. Then they come over here and harass and bully us or they mock us from their instance.
Ugh, not where I live, but yeah.
Don’t feel ashamed of getting banned from that shithole. It’s always been a pisshole and people need to stop gravitating toward one single instance anyway.
I don’t get what the issue with be nice is… how far has society fallen that people can’t grasp and follow this one simple rule? Or that they feel the need to make fun of it and others who participate? I’ve noticed any time people come together to make a safe space or community the hateful people definitely seek it out to try and ruin it. It’s infuriating. Even if someone disagrees with being nice for some reason, they could just move along.
And that’s how you know those people are purposely being malicious. They want to ruin it for others because they think its funny to ruin things for other people and there’s no real consequences for their behavior.
Exactly, but I still just can’t begin to wrap my head around how miserable you have to be to live life like that. Yikes.
Yeah, I use to be one of those people and am not anymore. It was a very miserable existence.
I’m glad you were able to overcome that. I don’t know if this is too personal to ask but were you really mad at others or was it something else driving you?
Nope, I was just in a very bad environment and very immature. I enjoyed being a stupid edgelord cause it gains you reactions.
It’s like kids who enjoy getting negative attention. Like the saying, all press is good press. I just wanted any kind of attention and didn’t care how I got it.
Thank god I’m over that lol
As far as I can tell, it stems from it being easier to escalate an argument by not being nice, which means, trying to win at all cost, leads to not being nice, or a bar fight. Some people get so used to it, that they see any attempt to stop it as a personal attack on themselves… which, technically speaking, it is: a safe space is telling them “we want nice people, not chronic bullies like you”… so they react in the way they’re used to: by trying to start a bar fight.
I don’t think society has particularly “fallen”, looking back at history, there are a lot of examples, some much more gruesome than an argument on the internet, of people not being nice to each other. If anything, we’re going through a process of transferring IRL behaviors to more virtual mediums, both good and bad, but the bad ones seem to have come easier.
I think it’s been last millenium that I already wrote, the Internet would end up becoming a reflection of reality, at which point we’d be able to see the real problems and try to fix them. Well, we’re almost there, still like one third of the world population missing from being online… (expect things to get worse before they get better)… but we’re already seeing a lot of what otherwise used to be hidden behind closed doors, or restricted to a small geographic area. Which itself has brought new challenges, but at least it’s making it easier to run sociological analyses, and trying to find some solutions.