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Discussion, bad faith, our goals, and Tildes
Hey all,
There's been a huge amount of response to this post about Hyponotoad's banning that I think merits a lot more consideration than as just a bunch of fractured comment threads.
Some questions that come to mind:
~ What does it mean to have "quality discussion",?
~ How do you distinguish between quality discussion and not quality discussion?
~ What does it mean to act in "bad faith"?
~ How, as a community, do we best achieve tildes' stated goals?
I guess I'll kick off the discussion with a quick rundown of how I would answer these questions:
Personally, I define quality discussion as discussions that are civil and overall stimulating/pleasurable to both participate and read. If nobody is enjoying the discussion on either an emotional or intellectual level, the discussion should probably stop. I personally struggle with this a lot; I rely very heavily on the "disable inbox replies" and "block user" button on reddit because I have trouble stopping a discussion even after I've recognized that I'm getting nothing out of it.
This is where I think good communication comes in; all actors need to act in accord with the general principle that we want, ultimately, to enjoy these conversations. If we try hard to make our conversations enjoyable for each other, rather than for ourselves, then I think we'll all come out happier for it.
I think that, per the wiki article, Bad Faith actors are those who pretend to be interested in civil dIscussion when their ultimate goal is to troll or upset other actors. Playing into the above, I think that the distinction of someone as bad faith is ultimately just a subset of those people who aren't interested in open, honest communication.
I think that as rose-tinted as my viewpoint is, hard facts have to come into play. You can't expect people to naturally become good tilders.
I think that our biggest focus right now should be to bake good tildes behavior into the system itself; I think that tildes borrows a little too heavily from Reddit in this regard, and that we should consider a ton of different incentive and disincentive systems.
ultimately, we should make tildes, mechanically, into the kind of place that encourages non-tildes-believers to leave of their own accord. we don't need to have the most pleasant experience; we only need an experience that's pleasant to the kind of person we want to stay here.
personally, I think our current method of suggesting changes (tildes posts) is too popularity and activity based at the moment; I think that maybe an entirely separate system for making suggestions would be more appropriate to that kind of activity.
If nothing else, I think we're long past due for ~tildes.suggestions
I wholeheartedly agree with your opinions. We need some actual depth and quality in our discussions. Sharing memes on Reddit is fun, but it shouldn't dominate the front page 24/7 on Tildes. If there is ever going to be ~memes or ~memes.meirl or whatever, it's okay for them to be on the front page, but not always leave a mark there like Reddit.
Also, ~tildes.suggestions would definitely be a group I would really like to see.
While I agree with most of what you say, I object to your definition of quality discussion:
Is say those are just "unobjectable" discussions, or acceptable discussions, but your definition is certainly not sufficient to qualify them quality discussions, in my opinion. By your definition a joke thread could be a quality discussion, or a well meaning talk about the weather this weekend, or an exchange about your favorire colors. Those are all good and acceptable, but I wouldn't consider them quality discussions.
For me quality discussion implies that not only it is done in good faith, but that it attempts to reach some kind of objectivity, depth and reasonability. I'm not saying it has to include links to papers for every point made, but the user should be prepared to support their points with reasonable arguments and/or sources, and to attain some level of objectivity.
I mentioned it somewhere else, but I'll repeat it here. Bad faith might not be easy to determine, and good faith alone is not enough to qualify as quality. If you say in good faith (meaning you sincerely believe it and are not trying to just rile up people) that women who have abortions should be jailed, you need to be able to back that up with reasonable arguments (for it to be considered quality and not just emotions) and you have to be open to discuss it (otherwise it's not discussion, it's just throwing opinions and feelings around, a discussion needs interaction). So if someone says "women who have abortions should be jailed" and leaves the thread and doesn't provide any points, or even if they provide some argument but don't enter any discussion with commenters, and doesn't show that they are actually interested in civil discussion, that is bad faith (even if only by omission), or at least lack of good faith and lack of commitment of civil discussion.
TLDR: Good faith and civility are not sufficient to qualify as quality discussion, but it's probably enough to qualify as acceptable participation. Quality discussion should hold itself to higher standards, including willingness to discuss, preparedness to back up claims and consideration of facts. Whipping around opinions just to be heard is not, in my mind, quality discussion at all, even if in a civil way.
For me, the ultimate measure of discussion quality is whether or not I feel comfortable, stimulated, and interested in responding, and to what extent.
I think that there's a lot to go into it, but I don't think objectivity or goof arguments are even close to the most important aspect of quality. I've probably had thousands of arguments on the Reddit and at this point in my life I consider a good discussion one in which I want to hit "reply", and a bad discussion one in which I want to hit "block user".
The elements of quality, to me, in descending order are:
Sincerity
Good intentions
Is pleasurable or stimulating to participate in
Promotes/Prompts for response.
I think that an example might help.
I once had an hour long discussion with my best friend about how she was upset and depressed that I'm going to hell and she isn't. it was an extremely interesting conversation, because we vented our feelings on the matter and we talked a lot about why she felt that way and how I felt about it.
it wasn't exactly an argument; what could be argued? And we weren't really trying to convince each other of anything because we'd long since agreed that we didn't want to have that discussion.
so I think there's a lot of room within the "quality discussion" blanket for stuff that isn't an argument or objective. people love sharing and talking about their experiences. This thread, to me, was pretty interesting to read even though it didn't get a lot of traction. If it were about a subject where more people could have participated then I think that this could have been a good example of a high quality discussion without arguments.
The problem here is that all of those are extremely subjective terms to describe anything. There is no possible way to determine anything using those measures, since every persone will find different things pleasurable, engaging or interesting. And I think defining something with the goal of establishing community rules should be something more objective.
Sincerity (or good faith) is important, but unless there is a true intention to debate or discuss, it's not a measure of quality. A conversation that has the objective to vent, might be pleasurable, relieving or even cathartic, but it doesn't mean it's a quality discussion (except maybe for the persons involved, and very subjectively). Also, having a conversation with a best friend is something very different from discussing something online.
Of course, support groups or other types of groups might have different objectives (giving someone a listening partner or a shoulder to cry, etc.). But I wouldn't consider them objectively quality conversations. Again, I don't have a problem with them in general or with them happening here, I just don't think that they should be labeled as quality content.
In short, we need a measure of quality that doesn't require subjectivity.
Edit: Sorry I apparently sent a half written reply before this one, I have deleted it to avoid confusion
I've said it before and I'll say it again. We have to allow those with opposing opinions (assuming they are making reasonable discussion and not bad faith trolling) to be able to voice their opinions. Not doing this results in echo chambers and that is the exact opposite of productive discussion.
I realize for many that is an uncomfortable thought, to allow discussion that directly contradicts with many fundamental beliefs. But if we are ever to discuss politics, religion, rights, etc. that must be a core value of Tildes. Without it, we aren't discussing anything we are just patting those of us with similar values on the back to feel good.
Now, there are circumstances where Tildes may not want to allow the discussion of topics. These could be topics so far out (lets just throw out killing babies or something) that there is no discussion value from hosting it. We have to be careful even here to not choose topics in order to silence opposite sides, though. But, in certain cases if we block the entire discussion for both sides that can still be a net good. Only in cases where there is no actual value in discussing it, though.
Otherwise, if we allow our prejudices to guide us in censoring opposing sides and uncomfortable opinions we aren't fulfilling the core goal of Tildes which is to facilitate interesting and valuable discourse for the community.
I very much agree. Good conversations can be had from like-minded individuals discussing something they all enjoy, but great ones can come from dissenting ideas and seeing things from new perspectives. This, of course, requires a great deal of respect for essentially people you may never meet, and a willingness to keep an open mind, accepting that you are not here to 'convert' people to your way of thinking so much as to give insight on what and why you hold your position.
I'm glad you agree, though perhaps given my whole point it would be better if someone disagreed. ;) But really, if you don't allow yourself to hear both sides of an issue, you don't truly understand the issue at all. Perspetive is so important, and is the basis of all discussions. Isn't all discussion a transfer of knowledge and opinions from different perspectives? And if we are to be a community that attracts high quality discussions we must accept the uncomfortable to achieve this.
I disagree with you. I don’t care if someone has an honest, good faith belief that gay people are going to hell. I’m completely fine with banning people like that. Whether someone truly believes their hate speech is irrelevant to me.
If creating a forum where hate speech is banned creates an echo chamber, I say bring on the echos echos echos...
I disagree with the uh...disagreement. How the statement is framed is what would make a big difference. Someone making a topic titled "All gay people are going to hell" vs "According to my religion I believe gay people will be condemned" along side an actual reasoning why than I see no reason to ban them. Once they start calling people profanities and saying the gay commenters are going hell well...that's a reason for a ban.
That's basically just Reddit though. All the subs are just walled gardens with like minded individuals.
For me, the problem is the viewpoint, not how it’s presented. I think that politely framed hate speech is more dangerous.
Dangerous how? If someone is willing to present their beliefs in a civil matter that means they're willing to hear the other side. Who knows, maybe the debate will change their mind.
I'm going to have to concur with this statement. If everyone is being civil and engaging in good faith discourse, what's the issue? I believe it is just an uncomfortable prospect that you are identifying as dangerous to welcome opposing opinions. It certainly isn't easy, and is a skill for tolerance that has to be developed. But without it, echo chambers develop.
not only that, but putting ostensible bad ideas in the light means that others can learn what motivates and compels that line of thinking, and provide an opportunity to cultivate stronger arguments against those ideas.
And how far do we take that? Can we not hear both sides of an abortion issue? What about both sides of the healthcare debate? The gun debate? It may start off with good intentions on your part but will quickly spiral out of control and silence all opposing opinions on the basis of if it's not your side, it's not a good side. I realize this is very uncomfortable for you, but try and see it from a discussion perspective. If we aren't discussing both sides, what are we even talking about?
For me, I draw the law at immutable group characteristics. I’m fine with people arguing about abortion, I’m not ok with arguing about whether black people are inferior to white people.
But abortion involves groups does it not? Women, fetuses, doctors, etc.? This sort of subjectivity and grey area cannot be enforced without creating echo chambers. There is no hard objectivity in your statement, just your personal biases unfortunately.
You’re ignoring the “immutable” part of the statement.
Women are always women. Black people are always black. They don’t have control over those characteristics and those characteristics don’t change over time. The characteristics are out of their control and immutable.
And do the fetuses have the ability to control their characteristics and make themselves not fetuses? What about the women getting the abortion? This is a slippery slope to start choosing things that are banned for discussion.
I don’t think discuss re abortion should be banned at all. I wouldn’t even consider someone saying “all women who have had abortions are murderers” hate speech. I would consider people saying “black people have a propensity to commit crimes” hate speech. There is a huge difference.
What about the fact that black people do have a higher propensity to commit crimes? That's a fact, that's not hate speech. It's all about how you use it. The reason is because lower median income individuals typically commit more crimes and being black has a higher correlation with being lower income. Thus, being black has a higher correlation with committing more crimes. So are you saying that facts and statistics are racist?
This is why it's so hard to draw the line based on your feeling, unfortunately.
Black people are not statically more likely to commit crimes, they are statically more likely to be arrested of crimes and convicted of crimes. As someone who has worked in the criminal justice system (I’m a former prosecutor), there is a huge difference. The vast majority of arrest don’t result in conviction and the vast majority of convictions are a result of plea agreements. I’ve committed countless crimes (and likely you have too, most people regularly commit crimes), but I’ve never been arrested or convicted of a crime. Cause I’m an affluent white woman. It’s different for minorities. That’s a fact.
Black people are statistically more likely to be lower income. Those with lower income are statistically more likely to commit crimes. This is all correlation though. I'm sure there are other correlations about arrests but I'm not discussing those right now because this is about what topics Tildes should allow. And I certainly believe based on how we got to the topic now, it will crop up again and should be allowed. There's nothing wrong with objectively discussing it.
You keep saying more likely to commit crimes. That’s not what the statistics say. Everyone uses the FBI stats and those are for arrests. Being arrested does not mean someone committed a crime (unless they are black in which case it does mean that for a lot of people).
And using characteristics of inviduals to extrapolate bad behaviors onto an entire group is racist. No one looks at a white man and thinks they are probably a serial killer or school shooter because they are a white man.
It is - https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf
I'm not extrapolating any values onto anyone I am simply using statistics as an example. Here's a good example of where your biases are leading you to conclusions that haven't been made. This is why we have to have these discussions in a respectful manner without jumping to conclusions and why echo chambers are such a bad thing.
As it stands, this doesn't really relate to the topic at hand of this thread anyway so let's move on.
I realize this is an uncomfortable prospect to welcome opposing opinions. It certainly isn't easy, and tolerance for other opinions is hard to have. But without it, echo chambers develop which I took to believe wasn't the point of Tildes. I thought we wanted good, interesting, and productive discussion here. Not a safe space, right?
I thought this place is specifically “not a free speech zone.” And I am more than ok with that.
Not everything goes, it's pretty evident that is a fact. That's why we are having this discussion in the first place, because it ISN'T a free for all say whatever you want. It's about fostering good discussion.
And do you actually think a discussion about whether black people are predisposed to criminality because of their race is worth having?
Is that a good discussion? Is it even up for debate? My answer is firmly no.
Is it up for debate? Of course not, it's a statistic - those aren't up for debate. Can it come into the course of a conversation as has just now between us? Of course, and I don't see why a mature community can't discuss it objectively.
It’s a racist talking point. I don’t want to be a member of an Internet forum where that flawed statistic is being trotted out.
“Black people are statistically more likely to be arrested” is true. “Black people are statistically more likely to commit crimes” is not.
I’ve never seen any validated studies indicating black people commit more crimes, only they are arrested more.
Most people commit crimes on a daily basis. They just aren’t arrested for them.
Statistics aren't racist. I'm not even making any claims other than more statistics. Here is the data: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf
Most people commit small crimes. I don't think that just everyone is going around committing homicides, I think we can agree on that.
Edit: But anyway this doesn't actually relate to the topic at hand so let's move on to the actual thing we are supposed to be discussing.
Haha! True!
I don't think the issue is silencing opposing yet constructive commentary, I think the issue is where do we draw the line about what conduct is intolerable. "<insert ethnicity> are all trash, they should be exterminated" I mean that's pretty clear cut, ban. It's the more subtle cases, the grey areas, it's not going to be easy drawing the line there.
But it's hard to dispute that some do need to be banned.
There's also the paradox: If you tolerate intolerance then the intolerant flourish and infringe on the well-being of the tolerant.
I think it is better to consider what to ban using criteria such as if it was posted in bad faith it shouldn't be allowed and if it cannot serve as a topic for meaningful discussion it shouldn't be allowed. If those 2 criteria can be objectively enforced we are making strides forward in curating good quality discussions.
One of the issues I've seen crop up is how do you actually determine "bad faith"? There have been some people on tildes utterly convinced that I was posting in bad faith about my opinions on left-wing media outlets perpetrating hoaxes on the american public. They were a minority though and largely disregarded - but what if they were a majority? There's no objective criteria that they used except "this is making me and others upset, and he's using a tone that I don't like".
Similarly for the case of hypnotoad, there's a handful of people who publicly expressed disapproval of the user's actions - but the actions objectively do not convey intent to offend or disrupt from what I can see. If one has a bias against the user, then the actions appear to confirm that bias - but drop that bias and it isn't apparent.
One user in the hypnotoad thread suggested we judge not by intent or by mind-reading, but judge by the effect of the actions on whether they produce the same kind of results that trolling would. To me this implies that any upset group can claim they feel trolled, and therefore the user should be judged to have participated in bad faith.
I don't say all of this to suggest that there aren't cases where it is evident what the intent is - but people do a lot of mind-reading when there are flustered emotions.
I don't really have the answers, and I certainly am not the authority figure on it. I think we need to develop and approve an objective standard for determining this. It certainly cannot be charged my emotions and bias because that is the inherent cause of the problem to begin with.
You might not have all the data to dictamine that they were acting in bad faith. But it is very clear that they were not acting in good faith. They didn't support their arguments in any objective way, there wasn't any attempt at objectivity at all, there were no facts at all in their posts and comments, there wasn't any engagement on their part. These are all clear indications that there was not good faith.
Bad faith might be difficult to measure in some cases, but lack of commitment to civil, constructive, informed and reasoned discussion is easy to spot. Ignorance is not an excuse for absence of good intentions.
The main problem with the theory of opposing opinion = good discussion is that people can frame any disagreement, even legitimate disagreement, as intolerance of their ideas.
In it's worst form, on reddit, the conversion on tolerance/free speech has gotten weird and been used to mask serious problems with toxic, low-information conversations, with people claiming that not engaging with the shallowest elements of T_D amounts to intolerance. In it's more moderate form, it serves to water down conversations by moving one degree of abstraction away from the substance of any given conversation to the meta-question of whether the conversion contains too much agreement. Clearly something has gone wrong here.
There are far more important metrics of a good conversation, especially good political conversation, like responsiveness, depth, engagement with evidence, consciousness of history, and sophistication of theories brought to bear to explain political dynamics.
For conversations with those kinds of moving parts, the question of agreement/disagreement almost doesn't even make sense, because of course there has to be some level of agreement, a lot of it actually, to climb up levels of historical and intellectual context-setting to get to a point where the core conversational details shimmer with all kinds of contextual meaning.
There can be rich, nuanced dialog between people on a shared side of the ideological spectrum that allows people to learn, change, debate, prod, reconfigure beliefs in deep ways, carefully examine new issues unfolding in the news, all in ways that are healthy, informed, and high quality. I think those are the important things, and they are at core questions over substance. Those are the jewels. They get lost in these tests for tolerance of opposing sides, because those tests try to capture the value of multidimensional conversations according to a one-dimensional test of agreement/disagreement.
I'm not saying we have to always have both sides present at the table. If none of us have opposing values then yes we will be sharing a lot of information all from one side of the conversation. But, eventually we are going to have opposing ideologies (we already have actually) and an attempt to silence the other side is an attempt to silence true discussion.
If both sides are attempting to engage in good faith discourse, have an open mind, and want to gain something from it - what's the harm? Just because you disagree with their opinion doesn't mean they shouldn't be allowed to sit with us at the table.
As I said above, there are way more important metrics to a good conversation than whether or not sides are "opposed." The one-dimensional test of agreement/disagreement doesn't capture the important elements that make for good conversation. In the best conversations a good conversation is better analogized to world-building, which involves context-setting and is fundamentally cooperative.
I don't think I said anything about disallowing opinions we disagree with.
I might have misunderstood your intentions then, sorry. I definitely agree that not all conversations are about hearing all sides of an issue. I just don't think we should bar them. But that's not what you're saying - you're saying that good conversations often involve a fundamental cooperation to dig deep into an issue instead of arguing the surface. I absolutely agree with this, and while that wasn't contained in my original points I have to agree that it is another important aspect of any good discussion.
As I see it, any topic could have several discussions going on with various levels of depths thus attracting various sides of all issues. And, I think if all of them are engaging in good faith then whether they are sitting near the top of an issue discussing sides or digging deep with and really focusing on cooperating without making it about "sides" (this is hard to articulate without an example for me right now haha) then that should also be accepted and a part of discussion.
I agree with you that we should allow, and even encourage, discussions about topics we may disagree with.
It's ironic that you should mention killing babies as a topic too far-out to discuss. I've been making the point over in another thread that we should be able to discuss this exact same topic! (With the obligatory disclaimer that I'm not in favour of killing babies.) It's a great gateway topic to some very rich fields of philosophical discussion.
You say that we should "allow discussion that directly contradicts with many fundamental beliefs", but then you immediately contradict yourself by saying that there are some topics you don't want to allow discussion of. Is there any objective way of drawing a line between a topic you disagree with but will discuss and a topic you disagree with but will not discuss?
I don't really want to go too deep into this as I believe that this may be slightly off topic, but I'd like to take a moment to say that panda said nothing about censoring opinions. they specifically said:
I think that an example we could probably all agree on is that there's no point holding a discussion about whether or not sandy hook was a hoax; this topic is just too inflammatory by its very nature that the premise of holding the conversation at all can't be done in good faith.
the point isn't to censor wrong opinions. the point is to ban discussion of topics that have almost no chance of fostering good discussion and that, by the following principle I laid out in my other comment:
shouldn't even start to begin with.
Point taken. I'll replace all occurrences of "opinion" in my comment with "topic".
Killing babies may have been a bad example. I had originally written it without one but tried to come up with something to help aid my point, I must have done a bad job. Thinking on it, killing babies can be tied to abortion which certainly has merits to discussion, so I definitely picked a bad example - my apologies.
What I meant to say was that if Tildes as a whole (likely the admin team with input of the users) decides a topic has no value at all to be discussed, we could ban both sides of the topic. This would not create an echo chamber as we wouldn't allow discussion from either side.
I don't know where we draw the line honestly. Bad faith is certainly a way if we can figure out how to apply it objectively without bias blinding us. I think this is a discussion we should have as a community soon. I'd love more thoughts on this. But, whatever the result I - nor any single individual - should act as the authority figure on what topics should outright be banned. The best system may be a "council" or "vote" or a discussion on it.
But as I said before, maybe we don't outright ban anything at all and see where that takes us
Just a sidenote here that I think is important; Tilde is a non-profit incorporated in Canada, and Canada has laws regarding hate speech especially that limit what Tilde would be legally allowed to carry. So there is content that will absolutely have to be banned here, if we don't wish to have the Canadian secret police mounties coming for us :P
Interesting note, thanks for that. I don't know that hatespeech would really be a big deal, because I don't think USING hatespeech is conducive to discussion. Discussing it objectively is different though, and could be interesting to talk about.
Therein lies the problem. If there's no way to draw the line between topics we will discuss and topics we won't discuss, then it all becomes very subjective and arbitrary.
Majority rules? The majority of people on this website are male (87%) and/or straight (77%) and/or American (61%) (source). What if a South Sudanese woman wants to discuss the problems of rape in her war-riven country? What if a Muslim person wants to discuss the merits of achieving Jannah through martyrdom? What if a trans person wants to discuss the mechanics of gender reassignment surgery? What if a Chinese person wants to discuss the merits of controlling information to keep the populace happy?
I don't have a lot of faith in any process where the majority gets to decide what topics will be and will not be permitted for discussion here.
That seems like the best approach to me.
Like I said, I don't have all the answers. I was just spitballing and I could be way off of what we need to do to decide this. I do believe we will come across topics that literally provide no value in discussing objectively. I don't have any in mind and I don't know when we will find them. But I think keeping an open mind and steamrolling ahead and pushing boundaries is the best way to find out, as long as we keep it all in good faith.
But how do you weigh that against the tactic of “just having a discussion” and “just asking questions” that conspiracy theorists and people with appalling views use to mainstream their viewpoints? “Was Naziism really that bad?” is a completely fair question on its face, but then just bringing it up as a discussion topic encourages people to discuss both sides. In turn that encourages people to think, well, there are some good points on that thread, and maybe Naziism wasn’t all that bad and had some good points. A few more discussions like that, and all of a sudden there are people thinking that the way mainstream society looks at Naziism is way too harsh, and it deserves a fresh look.
Or to put it another way, let’s say someone posts another old chestnut, “Was the Holocaust really that bad?” The answer is unequivocally yes, but conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites love to come out in full force on this one. So a rational person has to decide between monitoring a thread like that and doing everything they can to make sure the accurate and non-hate-filled responses get the attention they deserve, and on the other hand, the possibility that the liars, misleaders, and haters will get the most attention, and recruit a few more people to their cause. Do you want that responsibility? I certainly don’t.
This isn’t speculation, either. “Just asking questions” is common, even beloved, in certain parts of our culture, and it’s a big part of why hatred and racism is making such a comeback. I don’t think ~ should put up with it, and without wanting to speak for @deimos, my sense is that not putting up with crap like that is one reason this site exists in the first place.
That's why I believe that sooner than later we need to come up with some objective ways to discern good faith discussion from simple trolling or baiting. I don't have these answers myself, but banning opposing viewpoints isn't it. We can certainly ban an entire discussion topic altogether, such as the holocaust and Naziism. That means you can't talk about it all. Not historically, not for it, and not against it. That would solve it by not allowing discussion of it at all on the platform thus not barring opposing opinions. But, when you begin to censor different sides is where we fall into the trap of echo chambers.
I consider a quality discussion, a topic in which I leave feeling like a didn't waste my time. I think it's simple as that. Either because I've discovered something new, or I felt that there was a different point of view from mine that is making me reconsider some ideas... or simply that I feel good for having exchanged some personal experience with others or viceversa.
I think the most important thing is that a lot here seems to confuse "high quality" with "detached".
I assure you that a detached, objective, purely logic, exchange of comments, grow boring in a matter of seconds.
Well, it's been already clearly explained but just for the sake of repeating, to me is to just act with a different intent of advertised.
To take Hyponotoad's example, he posted lots of news article in rapid succession but none of them where actually supported by even a comment by him/her in which he was giving some context of why it was worth sharing. Or opening several conflictual topics (something remarkable in a good way imho) but presenting them in an open inflammatory way or divisive approach (us/me vs them).
I don't want to have to browse past tons of these topics. Sure it can happens that a user post something a that fall in this category. You could have a bad day and express yourself harshly, or just writing about a topic that matters quite a lot and get taken away. But it shouldn't be your habit or modus operandi because in that case either you're in 'bad faith' or simply this community is not going to work for you.
To give a practical example. Those lots of news post were not good topics. They were spam. For which reason I don't know, but still spam. News without a pattern to bind them togheter and not even a comment from OP explaining why they were interesting or what they sparkled his/her interest in sharing it with us.
If I want a feed of news I can easily open twitter and subscribe to a news twitter handle or subscribe to an rss feed.
I want to hear other people thoughts here. Not just link. In my mind, this shouldn't be just an aggregator but more of a discussion board.
In this period, by being quite strict on the rules and guidelines we want established. In that @Deimos is doing a good job. I'm sorry if some of the banned deserved maybe a temporary ban but right now we can and should form the core mentality of the community. If done right, it will shape the behaviour of future users because wrong content will not be voted or commented and will just die without causing noise in the voted priority that is what I consider will become the default.
The reason I consider the "most voted" should become the default is because if the community manage to shape its content, the most voted will also be the most high quality as the users will vote only the high quality. Either for the topic itself or the discussions going on inside the topic.
Edit: probably some errors around, went to sleep late and woken up early, forgive me :P
The issue I see with 'most voted' is that like Reddit, on controversial topics, people rarely vote based on anything besides whether or not they agree with the overarching position of the post. Without a wide demographic variety which Tildes certainly doesn't have yet, if ever, this makes the system worse the further out you get from the core majority position on an issue of debate. I don't see this whole idea of lacking downvotes helping significantly because all it really does is replace the bad uses of downvoting discussed in the Tildes docs with no votes.
I'm probably not articulating this well, but what I mean is basically this.
If eg someone made a thread about how best to bolster the tax and welfare systems to support the disadvantaged peoples of the US, I'm sure you'd get a great variety of ideas and arguments within the confines of that topic and the assumptions that go with it, and the truly high quality would be most voted.
If someone made a thread about how ethical or effective these systems are in general, and where the best answers lie within the huge divide between (to simplify) 100% communism and 100% capitalism, I'm sure the most voted would near universally be thoughts for a very particular block of that spectrum. I'm sure Murray Rothbard could rise from the grave to post a novel 2500 word essay and it'd receive a small fraction of the votes of a three sentence post of the sort of platitudes you'd expect from the site's demographics.
Not sure what the solution is, or even whether or not people see this as a thing that needs solving.
What do you think of the upcoming revamped tagging system replacing voting entirely?
(Note: this is just pure speculation and theory-crafting)
For example, I have one tag per post to use (maybe there needs to be more limitations?) and I may tag a post as
insightful, orthought-provoking, ornot-contributing, orhumour, or a few other options (here, I'm torn between having only positive tags, or some positive and some negative tags), as a way to show the actual quality of the post, rather than just vote.I like this idea in general, especially if there would be ways for people to 'weigh' certain tags more than others. For example, if I don't particularly care for humorous posts on some subject, I'd like to be able to adjust it so that the first post I see in a thread is the one with 50 thought-provoking tags rather than 150 humor tags.
But in regards to the issues I mentioned above, I'm skeptical it'll change much. I think it'll just end up being that on these controversial subjects, people will use and withhold positive tags based on whether or not they agree with the overarching position of the post.
Definitely, to me that is the entire point of a tagging/filtering system.
Could that be solved by developing an appropriate site culture that promotes tagging/voting in a way that the community wants to see, rather than just being an
I agreebutton?Not really sure how to do that, other than active curation (by trusted users, whenever that gets implemented) and maybe hiding negative tags to everyone but the tagger.
Yeah, I think if everyone voted/tagged/whatever in 'good faith' then there'd be no issue with any system. But that's the same idea behind the rediquette of up/downvotes, and having used Reddit since its first year, I don't recall a time when the votes were used for the purported purpose regularly.
Curation could be an improvement, though it has its own set of problems. But I could see some more effective system worked out with it as the core.
Another thought I had was having no sort of voting/tagging/anything system at all, or having them have no/little effect on sorting. For example, it could be that threads within a thread are constantly shifting around based on activity, sort of like the front page. Maybe some combination of replies, word count, quality via whatever voting/tagging system. Maybe based on the thread lines as a whole more than the individual posts within them.
That is an interesting idea and might lead to more exposure to the more active posts within a thread. I would definitely like to see if it has any effect on engagement and/or voting habits.
Though, for me, I usually end up just reading everything anyway (maybe that isn't the typical use-case).
I like your idea of tagging replacing voting.
what if, going off your idea, we could have a variety of tags like "agree, disagree, thought provoking, fluff, humor", etc and you can tag one of either "agree" or "disagree" and one of the other tags, like you mentioned.
then you can sort for ascending/descending of any tag you want, like you said. I think that it would be very interesting to be able to sort threads/posts by most #of "disagree" tags.
splitting out the one nonspecific button into many specific buttons may be easier to enforce the trust-system RE: tagging. If you vote "good discussion" and everyone else votes "fluff", your vote might not be worth as much to the trust system.
I think we'll still have problems, but the system could definitely be built to counteract the strong correlation we'll probably see with "disagree" and "not good discussion" or equivalent.
the default sort could then be by "disagree", and that would be an awesome foundation for being NOT reddit 2.0
I like it, it's much more than a one size fits all
votebutton.Though, I wonder, should a user always be able to tag as
agreeordisagree? Or only in conjunction with certain other tags?For example I see a post that I like that is very in-depth, but I don't necessarily agree with it. Ideally, I shouldn't just click
disagreeand move on, I must first give another sort of tag, maybein-depthorhigh quality, then can I unlock thedisagreetag.Perhaps this problem can be solved when we see the roll-out of trust-system enabled curators. So, both a specific user's tags can be weighted based on trust and a trusted curator could apply their own tag as a sort of boost to the other user's tag.
Slashdotter detected.
Guilty as charged, I did use Slashdot in the early aughts and I do think that much of the good discussion was easily visible because of its voting system.
I disagree. I rather liked their voting system, that uninvolved third parties voted on stuff.
I'm sorry, I really don't understand what is being disagreed with.
I apologize, I mis-read your comment. No disagreement intended.
No worries.
Out of curiosity, I opened up ~news to the top-voted posts for the past three days. 29 topics visible on the front page. Half (14) have comments. 6 have comments from the OP (two are the same OP). Only 2 have top-level comments from the OP.
Edit: I took another look at hypnotoad's posting history https://tildes.net/user/Hypnotoad. there is only one post to ~news. So unless they have been deleted, it is factually incorrect that he "posted lots of news article in rapid succession." It is true that he posted a number of submissions in the three days since he began using his account: 3 of his "daily book discussion" posts to ~books, 8 discussion prompts to ~talk (6 of which were titled as questions and all but one of which had various levels of thoughtful discussion), and exactly 1 post to ~news.
edit2: so now, given you wrote around 4 paragraphs about news submissions and how you don't want just a bunch of news spam, does the fact that he only made one news post change your overall opinion on the topic of this particular user or how we ascertain bad faith? If your mechanism for identifying bad faith perceived him has having posted a ton of news posts, when that simply isn't reality, how reliable is that faith-detection mechanism?
They definitely has been deleted. I remember 8 post in rapid succession the morning of the day that he was banned. In one of my comment I even point that, without naming him, and he came up by himself.
Were you perhaps thinking of another user? EightRoundsRapid was quite active in ~news this week.
ack, i got caught up in my own confirmation bias, at the very moment i was trying to identify it in someone else. D:
I wonder if hypnotoad deleted them himself, or if deimos did. Do you remember what they were about?
Hear, hear!
I think that some are trying to treat this like Reddit, posting links to get whatever notoriety they can get, while not caring about the discussion part, which is what (I hope) will make Tildes a bit more unique.
Something that has occurred to me in reviewing that ban discussion is what @Deimos has specifically cited in his goals doc: that is:
The principle of charity entry in wikipedia states:
elsewhere in the entry the principle is summarized as:
This reminds me of Sam Harris' ideas about building a "Steel man" of an opponent's argument, to contrast the idea of a "straw man". In the case of the steel man, it seems to be more about testing one's own arguments to be more effective, but i think generally the principle would have the effect of avoiding injustice and misunderstanding.
It's sort of like that game of trust linked on tildes previously, wherein it is demonstrated that it is better to be forgiving than a vindictive eye-for-an-eye type. Admittedly, the simulation in there lacks any mechanism to account for mistakes on the part of the person perceiving an offense - implying to me forgiveness might very well be more important than even that game suggests if we are all to survive collectively.
I have had the allegation of acting in bad faith leveled against me. I've seen at least one respectable individual accused similarly very recently. In both cases, those alleging bad faith were in the minority, and the majority prevented any serious issues. Knowing how irrational humans generally are though, I must assume this will not always be the case - particularly if the looming issue of echo chambers/filter bubbles remains unresolved.
Were I to post on /r/anarchism for instance expressing disapproval of communism, I would be blasted as a troll - for it should be apparent that any anarchist must be for communism (ancaps they would say are not true anarchists), so to engage in their space as a dissident is a deliberate attempt to provoke an emotional response. I assume most places on tildes will not be so tribal and ideologically consumed, but what of less extreme forms of the same error?
I presently believe that "quality" is functionally synonymous with "utility". What has utility depends on one's goal or aim. If I am looking for some good memes, then what is quality for me is going to differ from someone who wants to promote mutual understanding between peoples, and it will differ from people who want to hear intelligent people explain why X happened.
For me off the top of my head, a quality discussion is one in which contains (but is not necessarily limited to) any of the following:
the above are all useful to me, they're all appealing, and all indicate some level of quality. Balance and diversity of experience are also desirable - too much of one kind of content/discussion is not desirable to me. And sometimes a discussion might even be valued more if there are heated emotions which are transformed into something better - so it is probable that I am not even aware of what all sorts of discussions are actually desirable/quality/useful to me.
I sort of touched on some of your prompts, but I'll go through them here:
I guess what I wrote above basically addresses this. tl;dr: it depends on the goals of the people participating and observing the discussion. I listed a handful of aspects that I find appealing in discussions, but those shouldn't be deemed the only desirable ones, or that if they aren't present or even if their opposite is present that the discussion is necessarily low-quality for me, much less objectively low-quality. It's still an ambiguous term to me, generally speaking.
I think this is just a rephrasing of the same question.
I touched on the topic of assuming good faith above, but to act in bad faith i would say is to act disingenuously, to intentionally deceive or mislead - especially for the purposes of disrupting the functionality of the platform as a medium of discussion, OR for controlling perceptions or steering a conversation to a particular ideology.
I thought about this a little bit and realized that there are documents on a similar topic available: https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
There are probably other such lists indicating bad behavior masquerading as normal behavior.
The tricky thing is that an individual may demonstrate actions which have the same effect as some of these elements, and may still not be acting in bad-faith. I am not certain what is sufficient to convict, and some of these actions may be okay in discrete amounts if we assume good-faith.
This seems like a topic worthy of further thought and research.
I believe an essential component is having discussions like these, especially repeated with opportunities for a diverse amount of people to offer their ideas (rather than just the same people each time).
I think that one thing we might try to do is a kind of democratically edited tildes "reddiquette" document, created by and revised by the community to decide what is and is not good behavior and fair and sensible response to it. If it is edited thoughtfully and honorably and responsibly, the democratic process would grant it tremendous credibility, and if it were done in a way that makes it more compelling to users to abide by than reddiquette is, that might help.
A civil discussion between users. It doesn't necessarily have to be about something "important" either. A civil discussion on why Apples are better than Oranges can be considered "civil". Basically so long as the discussion doesn't turn into nothing but jokes, flaming, and other nonsense it's A-okay to me.
You can more or less tell from the get go. Are the users engaging with the topic? Are the users debating in a calm and civil matter?
I honestly haven't heard anybody use this word in this context until I've joined ~ I don't have much to say on it aside from make posts on things for the intent of discussion. Not the intent of riling people up.
For one I think we need to be a tad more open to people with different views. While nobody is particularly "mean" about it there I occasionally get the "Leave this site!" feeling from some people. I know certain topics make people uncomfortable or emotional but this is something we have to allow on the site. If the entire site end sup leaning towards on political spectrum and all have one beliefs it'll just end up being a website filled with parrots. It'll get to the point where there isn't much to say but "I agree".