[jerf]

As I've mentioned before, one of the interesting things I like to study in a casual way is the effect of social community structures on behavior. At this point it is not terribly controversial that modern social media systems encourage shame storms, via things like easy "viral" sharing, the existence of moderation systems that can be used to nuke any attempt to defend oneself out of existence, and the way modern social media encourages cheap virtue signalling by its nature (if nothing else, because there isn't really a way to demonstrate an expensive commitment to anything, everything is cheap words).

So, as an interesting constructive exercise rather than just bemoaning the situation, how could a social system be engineered in a way that it might address the staggering ease with which this sort of shame storm arises, feeds itself, and flings itself against individuals? You can either start from an existing system and try to tame it, or start from scratch.

It's worth thinking about both because it's fun, and because the people who may actually someday fix it may well be here.

[zestyping]

It's weird to me that almost all posting/commenting platforms are about the same. You get a series of small boxes with text in them and a small box to type into, usually too small to fit more than a couple of sentences, perhaps a button to promote, a button to reshare, and that's it. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Medium, Disqus... all the same.

We've explored so little of the design space.

If I had to hazard in extrapolating from only a few data points, it seems that shame-storming behaviour correlates with (a) how easily you can reshare without thinking and (b) how easily you can reshare without context.

It would be fun to brainstorm all the possibilities for how we could be communicating online differently. Here are a few stupid ideas I've thought of; I'm sure there are millions more and I'd love to hear yours:

* You have to wait at least 30 seconds before you can hit the reply or reshare button.

* Short or low-information comments are discouraged; if your comment is short or an exact duplicate of something previously written (e.g. a common insult), it's blocked or you have to wait longer before posting it.

* You must listen to your comment read back to you aloud before you can post it.

* Even when reshared, your comment is always presented together with, and close to, the content of the original source article so it's hard to ignore the source.

* You have to correctly answer a simple question about the article before posting a comment on it. A Norwegian newspaper tried this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14883842).

* After you've gone back and forth a couple of times with the same person, the only option presented to you is to make a voice call directly to that person. You can't just type text at them any more.

* Variant: after a thread gets long enough, you can't type text any more. You must record yourself speaking.

* Every comment must be approved by its parent. (If you never approve replies, then your threads aren't interesting to read, and maybe you get a reputation for never approving, so no one will bother to reply to you.)

[gambler]

About a decade ago I've been thinking about how to design a good discussion platform, and the ideas I came up with have a lot of similarities with what you posted. I think that encouraging long-form communication where quickness of replies is not an inherent advantage and where there are costs to posting (as opposed to not posting) would be great for improving communication quality.

I also think that visual design cues matter much more than people think. Simply having large text fields to type in and clean design where large posts are readable really changes the tone of dicussions. I've seen this on many websites.

Another, newer, idea I have is that there should be some cost to finding/reading new content. It's probably not what you imagined right now. Here is an example. Let's say you have a popular YouTube video when someone plays Overwatch. Instead of the garbled toxic mess we have right now, comments could be split into different tabs/topic. There could be one tab where people discuss the strategy of the player, while in another tab people could discuss balance of the game as a whole. The "cost" of reading comments would be reading the titles of all tabs and clicking on one. It's not much, but I am 99% sure it would do miracles for decreasing toxicity.

People behave much better when they feel they are interacting in a social "space" with a defined (if open) group of other people. Information overflow destroys this feeling in an instant, no matter what other social features you add.

[NathanKP]

> We've explored so little of the design space.

The design space that we are willing to explore is limited by the fundamental evolutionary drive of social media platforms to hold your attention as long as possible by feeding you little hits of dopamine for minimal effort. Social media platforms thrive on size and activity and neither can be established by raising the bar, only by lowering it to new depths.

[apatters]

On the other hand, Mastodon doesn't have this drive. Facebook, Twitter et al are designed to be addictive because higher engagement translates to higher ad revenue. But Mastodon is ad free and the cost of operating the service is defrayed over thousands of inexpensive, federated instances, so there's less pressure to generate revenue of any kind.

Unfortunately Mastodon chose to clone Twitter's design and the Tweetdeck UI, so the tendency toward short-form, low information comments is carried over from Twitter. I too believe that these design patterns encourage toxic behavior. A simple experiment for any short-form social platform would be to lift any post character limit, make longer posts more readable, and prioritize longer comments in the ranking algorithm, and see what influence that has on the toxicity of the overall experience.

I mean if ten thousand people have responded to something, I would really rather read a few responses where someone made the effort to type out a few hundred words and what they wrote became popular. This doesn't guarantee it will be sane, cogent, etc. but it's better than staring at a wall of one line haters and trolls, which Twitter harassment victims always reference as one of the most traumatic parts of the experience.

[zestyping]

I think (at least a few) people are starting to realize that this is what's happening. There may be a window of opportunity opening up to try new and different things. I suspect there are a fair number of folks who are looking for alternatives to Facebook/Twitter/etc. and would be intrigued by novelty.

Bumble is an example of a platform that was all about changing the rules of engagement, and it seems to be doing all right so far. Perhaps there's hope?

[hnuser1234]

It's doing alright as in not failing, but remains to be seen if any of their paradigms measurably improve anything.

[nyolfen]

this is the first time i’ve heard someone mention bumble in about two years

[cabalamat]

> Social media platforms thrive on size

Yes. This means federated social networks might long-term have the edge, since someone can launch a new one, and by being part of the federation it automatically starts with lots of users.

[petra]

We've seen similar limited designs in forum systems. And they aren't necessary driven by the social media economics.

So why are they so similar?

[woolvalley]

I like your list of ideas, but I just want to bring up one point:

Sometimes the only way to get an insight to the thought processes of the busy & insightful people of the world is through something like twitter, because they don't have time for anything else. Certain subcultures of twitter can be fairly positive despite the lack of moderation tools because the community is small and not a current political hot potato.

That is something I wouldn't want to lose.

[tivert]

> * You have to wait at least 30 seconds before you can hit the reply or reshare button.

I think there should be more and longer delays:

* a one minute delay before you can enter text into the reply box.

* a half-hour (or longer) delay before any comment/post/reply goes online. During that time you're free to edit or delete (but there must be at least a 5 minute delay after your last edit).

The idea is try to let any initial impulse of outrage pass before anything can be said, to force people to put more time into what they say, and lower velocity to keep things from snowballing out of control.

[randallsquared]

The majority of these suggestions raise the level of effort to make (and display) posts and comments. As someone who currently rarely blogs or tweets, I'd prefer something that lowered the effort to make good posts. I freely admit that I have no obviously good ideas for that at the moment.

One of these suggestions, though:

> Even when reshared, your comment is always presented together with, and close to, the content of the original source article so it's hard to ignore the source.

...is interesting because the most prominent example of that workflow is Tumblr, which is widely expected to be near death. I like the idea in principle, but I notice that when I share an image or post from Tumblr with someone I am very likely to do it by sharing a screenshot, precisely to avoid having the bit I'm calling attention to overshadowed by its context...

[gred]

> Every comment must be approved by its parent.

Design twist: every comment must be approved by the commenter's parent -- father or mother.

[zestyping]

Hahahaha! >_<

[Izkata]

> Short or low-information comments are discouraged; if your comment is short or an exact duplicate of something previously written (e.g. a common insult), it's blocked or you have to wait longer before posting it.

I am for this one in particular, if for no other reason than to see more Shakespearean insults due to people being forced to get creative.

[dejawu]

> Short or low-information comments are discouraged; if your comment is short or an exact duplicate of something previously written (e.g. a common insult), it's blocked or you have to wait longer before posting it.

4chan tried this based on a script called Robot9000 (by Randall Munroe). Not to imply causation (since there are a ton of cultural factors as well), but that board is now known as the breeding ground of the incel and redpill movements.

I do think the R9K script itself is a good idea though.

[cabalamat]

> Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Medium, Disqus... all the same.

Of the ones I've used I like Reddit the most. It allows long posts, uses Markdown, and is threaded.

> We've explored so little of the design space.

I've recently started writing a federated blogging platform which will use the ActivityPub protocol. One nice advantage of federated platforms, is they can share each others' messages meaning it's easier for them to get lots of users (you can piggyback on the rest of the federation), so there can be more experiments on doing things different ways.

> You have to wait at least 30 seconds before you can hit the reply or reshare button.

Or the message isn't sent until a cooling down period.

> Short or low-information comments are discouraged; if your comment is short or an exact duplicate of something previously written (e.g. a common insult), it's blocked or you have to wait longer before posting it.

Sometimes a post can be short because a short post is all that is needed. E.g someone might ask me a question that the answer might simply be "yes". I would find it annoying to have to artificially pad the length.

But longer posts should always be possible and the user interface shouldn't discourage them.

> You must listen to your comment read back to you aloud before you can post it.

That's an interesting one. The way I'm going is posts will be edited in Markdown and will then appear as marked-up text.

> Even when reshared, your comment is always presented together with, and close to, the content of the original source article so it's hard to ignore the source.

What I call the "context" of a post is the post its a reply to and that post's context. This could all be stored in a data-structure (such as JSON) when the post is transferred across the network, so the context would always be there. Also the id of a post could be a hash of its contents, making it tamper-evident.

[PavlovsCat]

> Sometimes a post can be short because a short post is all that is needed. E.g someone might ask me a question that the answer might simply be "yes". I would find it annoying to have to artificially pad the length.

> But longer posts should always be possible and the user interface shouldn't discourage them.

Yeah! For example, this is a node with two subnodes, one of which has a title and description and everything, the other just a body, so it gets a little permalink thingy:

https://i.imgur.com/tESzN5O.png

These are posts in a CMS and not comments, but the principle is the same. Just don't display gigantic things inline by default and there is no reason for big and small posts can't coexist.

[leereeves]

Reddit is no better.

The majority of posts on /r/popular are shaming, harassment, mocking, etc. Whole subs are devoted to that.

[cabalamat]

This depends entirely on what subreddits you read.

[leereeves]

Of course. That's true anywhere. I'm just pointing out that even when a platform allows people to write long essays, what most people really want to do is make fun of other people.

[philsnow]

> You must listen to your comment read back to you aloud before you can post it.

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/youtube-adds-read-comment-alo...

[zestyping]

Ha! I think I thought of this independently from Randall Munroe, but who knows.

Anyway, we should do this experiment, and others! What's to lose?

[nostrademons]

You couldn't engineer one such social system, you'd have to arrange for multiple social systems, all with their own rules. Communities where people are nice to each other tend to be a.) small, so that you can't just find someone else to piss off b.) have lots of repeated interactions, so you're invested in maintaining good relations and c.) have freedom of exit, so when someone's values don't mesh with the community they leave rather than get perpetually shamed by the other community members.

Many parts of the Internet actually do meet these conditions, but they tend to be small niche hobby sites that are either overlooked or private, not the massive media/FB/Reddit/4chan/Twitterverse where shame storms propagate.

Failing that, the best alternative is sharp boundaries between you and the public sphere of discourse. This is how cities work - you have dense groups of people with diverse opinions and many casual interactions, but most people learn to mind their own business, so it really functions as a group of small interlocking communities rather than one mass of people. It's also how to stay mentally healthy on the Internet - when everybody hates you, unplug.

[tsumnia]

The more I hear of these new social rules I have to follow [retroactively, mind you] to ensure I'm not "shamed", the more lower income rougher occupations sound grand.

No one probably gives a damn about the sexist wielder or the extreme right/leftist garbage collector because no one wants those jobs and are just happy someone is willing to do it.

[dejawu]

Reddit's robin [0] experiment did this - the communities grew until they decided not to anymore. The stakes were a bit higher, you had to vote quickly or fall apart, but I think this could've made for a really novel way of organically growing healthy communities, and I wish they'd explored the idea more. Someday I'll revisit it and maybe implement my own, and see how it does.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/joinrobin/comments/6398yp/what_was_...

[DanielBMarkham]

I've been considering this for a while as well.

I don't think there's anything wrong with social media. It's just pointless and irrelevant. The only thing that's wrong is that we rely on it to do something it could never do. As experience on HN showed me and others years ago, with a big enough crowd? You can't say anything. People misunderstand. People disagree with points you never made. A term you use in one way can be construed another way. You're foced either to write 10K word essays on supercillious topics like "I like ice cream" or accpeting the feedback as not worth responding to.

I think there are two things that are required for useful social forums: curated participation and a creed (not a set of standards). You need to have a group of 3-30ish people that you've curated that all subscribe to a small set of beliefs. (Beliefs might be something like "the primary reason for our existence on this planet is to care for and help others", or "Building a strong AI is more important than anything else we can do")

Both the number of members and the number of items in the creed have to be manageable. They both have to be visible at all times.

At that point -- I think -- you can start sharing content and opinions, speculating on interesting and complex social topics.

Just not with the world at large. Big groups don't work that way. Big groups where everybody tries to be kind to one another, and isn't that the point, norm downward to the weakest member. We can't both emotionally-reassure a mentally-challenged victim of gang rape while simultaneously discussing something like sexual harassment legislation. This is stuff we all know innately if we're in a room with a thousand people but somehow completely forget when we're typing stuff into a little box on a screen. Important conversations about tough topics don't happen like that. There's nothing wrong with Twitter, it's just not the tool for having any kind of interesting/difficult conversations.

[jf-]

It can’t be engineered, it can only be enforced. There have to be rules against these kinds of storms and those rules have to have some sort of effect. Social media platforms have to be actively moderated. There is no alternative to this. Having rules and enforcers is how we deal with negative behaviour everywhere, because that is the only thing that works. People’s lives are meaningfully impacted by these things to the degree that they, if perpetrated by an individual, would be considered a crime. Something will have to be done to temper the crowd.

Of course I’m willing to be proved wrong about that if anyone has an example of people collectively being good and self-moderating.

[nardi]

You can’t have a rule against a storm, only a raindrop. Rules have to be enforced against individuals. And what rule would you make that could be enforced?

That isn’t to say you couldn’t have a storm response policy. But then how would you keep the storm from happening first?

[jf-]

Pretty simple: Disallow posts about the subject of the storm. Do so with the explanation that it is a moral good to prevent this kind of dogpiling and that those taking part should be ashamed of themselves.

[hnuser1234]

And how do you prevent the moderators from being corrupted by any influence and stay perfectly objective? You say every forum needs a moderator, I say every moderator is, or quickly becomes, unacceptably corrupt.

Maybe we could come up with some really basic rules for these popular sites, and implement them algorithmically, but good luck dealing with that PR shitstorm.

[jf-]

What’s your point, that we can’t ensure perfect rules so let’s not have any? By extension we can’t ensure perfect government or laws so let’s not bother? I’m looking for a more charitable interpretation but there isn’t one.

Maybe some level of democratisation or at least community engagement, but there will always be people who are dissatisfied.

[hnuser1234]

The only hard rule I'll agree to is no direct threats of violence.

Shame storms would be most effectively fought with better education, not moderators. Don't make judgements based on hearsay. Internet moderators don't help when a shame storm grows larger than the internet.

Bit from the article:

The solution, then, is not to try to make shame storms well targeted, but to make it so they happen as infrequently as possible. Editors should refuse to run stories that have no value except humiliation, and readers should refuse to click on them. It is, after all, the moral equivalent of contributing your rock to a public stoning. We should all develop a robust sense of what is and is not any of our business. Shame can be useful—and even necessary—but it is toxic unless a relationship exists between two people first. A Twitter mob is no more a basis for salutary shaming than an actual mob is for reasoned discussion. That would be true even if the shaming’s relics were not preserved forever by Google, making any kind of rehabilitation impossible.

[all2]

One does not simply 'engineer' a moral foundation. While the law of the land hints at what the morality of a people is, the people themselves are responsible for their behavior.

While systems can amplify or dampen certain behaviors, they cannot, without brutal authoritarianism, enforce behavior.

[jerf]

"While systems can amplify or dampen certain behaviors"

That is the topic I'm opening, yes. We're clearly amplifying it right now. How can that be changed?

[all2]

HN lacks some features that allow (and focus) conversations in a single medium.

At the very least, we could take notes from this interface for social interaction: things like 1) lack of notifications, for anything, 2) lack of PMs, 3) lack of any sort of 'personalized' stream of information. We have to pick and choose what we consume, rather than being spoon fed.

Coming from the other side: what allows these storms to form? I think part of the root cause is the ease of sharing information. It is very easy to re-blog/tweet/share on many platforms. In some cases (like Twitter or Facebook) a person doesn't even have to interact with the stuff they're passing on. The act is nearly passive.

I think my thesis is this: things are better here (in part) because it is more difficult to interact with content and people.

A partial solution could then be: add friction to things you don't want to see (or disallow them outright, like HN). Alternatively, make the stuff you want to see very easy.

[zestyping]

I agree to some extent with your thesis. I think another factor is how many other words you have to see. This could even be a quantifiable metric.

In order to post a comment on Hacker News, you simply cannot avoid seeing hundreds of other words around it, dozens of comments. It is much harder to read and reply to a single comment out of context.

[zozbot123]

Come on. The Reddit user interface used to be quite similar to HN (it is obviously less so now), and Reddit has certainly seen its own share of detrimental "human flesh search engine" dynamics, if not outright shaming behavior - remember the whole "We Did It Reddit!" fiasco in connection with the Boston bombing?

[leetcrew]

I suspect that social media is trying to be too much. at the beginning of Facebook, I remember people basically only interacting with people they knew in real life. it certainly didn't feel good if your whole high school class singled you out for public shame, but it wasn't much worse than what they could do face to face when the teacher wasn't looking.

today, I notice that people are mainly sharing posts from prominent figures with tens of thousands of comments on them. there's simply no way to have a productive conversation when everyone's contribution is immediately buried. all you can really do is agree or disagree emphatically. the result is that now any person with a bunch of followers can say "fuck this guy" and thousands of people will pile on in an instant.

aside from stuff like deliberately curating all the most inflammatory content for our feeds, I think one of the biggest issues with current communities is just scale. if you could only talk to people by joining a small group focused on a locality/hobby/occupation, I bet the experience would be a lot better.

[blattimwind]

> While systems can amplify or dampen certain behaviors, they cannot, without brutal authoritarianism, enforce behavior.

"Social" media managed to amplify detrimental behaviours by unquantifiable factors. The idea being that maybe you can also built it in a way that doesn't happen or perhaps even in a way that amplifies positive behaviours and dampens detrimental behaviours? Neither is the case currently; with social media being a marked negative influence across the board (except for shareholders).

[Memosyne]

I believe these tendencies exist because of a strong emotional attachment to personal identity. If you engineered a social system where people devalued personal identity, then I doubt these problems would be so invasive.

[nostrademons]

That would be 4chan, and it seems to have the opposite effect.

[tomatotomato37]

Granted a large part of that is due to the Laissez-faire/incompetent moderation of the site

Actually I'm surprised there hasn't been an anonymous website with strict rules and actually decent moderation; every single spin-off of the site also takes a freeform approach to everything

[nostrademons]

A site where everybody is invited to submit content anonymously but it's heavily censored & moderated becomes a mouthpiece for the moderators. It's basically Yelp, or the Op-Ed section of a newspaper.

[fromthestart]

Or Reddit.

[tomatotomato37]

Interesting comparisons, but I would have to say those places still have a sense of identity, even if it's one cooked up 30 seconds ago with a 10minuteemail address.

I'm more curious about a site with the "enforced" lack of identity present on those imageboards, except with the ruleset of Twitter or Facebook.

[Izkata]

How so? Channers are all anonymous, so there isn't a public persona to shame in the first place.

[nostrademons]

Rather, 4channers are very adept at heaping shame on other people. They might avoid the return fire by virtue of being anonymous, but it doesn't actually solve the problem of shame storms, just turns it into asymmetric warfare.

[Memosyne]

4chan (and other such networking media) attract individuals who have developed in an existing social environment. My understanding was that jerf wanted us to engineer a new type of social structure that could be taught to children during their formative years of development.

[jf-]

You want to teach them that they don’t have identities?

[nostrademons]

It's not as crazy as it sounds. PG wrote an essay about this once [1], and many East Asian cultures have much weaker conceptions of personal identities (separate from a family or larger society) than American and Western European culture does.

The challenge is that this is not an evolutionarily-stable-strategy from a game theoretic perception. When a person from a culture with a weak conception of personal identity meets a person from a culture with a strong conception of personal identity, the former tends to subordinate their desires to the latter, because that's what it means to have a weak conception of identity. As a result, the sphere of public discourse gets dominated by all those individuals with strong identities, even if the majority of people on earth do not have one. (Growing up half-Asian, this was a major source of angst for me, and still something I struggle with.)

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

[jf-]

I think it likely you’d just be replacing one set of neuroses with another.

I’m not even sure what “keeping your identity small” entails, other than assigning more of your merits/demerits to extrinsic factors, or in the Asian case to family or national affiliation. I’m not sure that either of those would help in the case of the online mass bullying that we’re discussing here.

Regarding the essay, I think PG was more right when he said politics and religion were topics which could not be decided upon, so everyone just lets loose. That echoes what Nietzsche said about modern (moral) debate being meaningless, because there are no objective grounds on which to judge anything, so people just shout at each other impotently. It’s an old one but a good one.

[aswanson]

Do you think this weaker conception of personal identity is one of the causes of lower crime rates in Asian nations? It would seem an ethos more invested in the whole would exhibit this, along with a lower level of materialism in general.

[CM30]

Having the system be private with separate groups seems to work pretty well at stopping shaming, or at least minimising its visibility. Don't hear much of this stuff going on in Discord groups or Slack chats or what not, and for many people now, those are their form of social media.

In fact, that may be why such private setups are on the rise. Being private means only your friends/allies/community can hear your thoughts, and it limits your posts' exposure to people who might otherwise try and stir up a mob/cause a media frenzy. I suspect a lot of ex Reddit users joined for that (after seeing how the media likes to dig into subreddits and find controversial posts to mock/mention in articles).

[b_tterc_p]

I would take a more pessimistic view. The platform enables and encourages toxic behavior, but at the end of the day, is plagued by toxic people who feel very insecure and thus need to show virtue signaling in its strongest form; who have little self control over their own emotions; and who have a strong desire to assert themselves. A large proportion of people get their opinions from garbage news and don’t care to think critically. Putting opposing groups of these people in a large scale forum of any variety will result in trouble.

[darkerside]

Ability to communicate or downvote could be rate-limited, perhaps by the character, to encourage conciseness and quality of thought.

[jstewartmobile]

We used to have a simple system for this--duelling.

Having all of these people on Twitter and cable news draw on each other at high-noon...

[tlb]

I know you're being facetious, but dueling wasn't such a great thing for society. It gave tough people an advantage in life over smart or conscientious people. You wouldn't like living in a society where toughness won. It was one of Queen Victoria's great contributions to make dueling socially unacceptable.

[jstewartmobile]

Not joking. That, and it doesn't require toughness so much as good aim:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Hudson#Duel_and_disast...

I'd much rather roll the dice with duelling again than introduce some new, elaborate, and untested form of social engineering.

[gknoy]

Dueling implies that someone who is _better at one thing_ (hurting others) is inherently Right. It also means that someone who is sufficiently good at such things can act as a bully.

Dueling introduces personal risk for libelous claims, but it _also_ introduces the same risk for those who are making true claims. People already fear the people that hurt them; giving them a legally supported way of hurting them even more (as a legal "defense") would make people even less likely to report others' bad behavior.

Would you challenge someone to a duel, knowing that you're likely to die, even though that person wronged you? Few would take that risk.

[gowld]

#1 The challenge, demand satisfaction. If they apologize, no need for further action

#3 Have your seconds meet face to face, negotiate a peace or negotiate a time and place. This is commonplace, ‘specially ‘tween recruits. Most disputes die and no one shoots.

#8 Your last chance to negotiate. Send in your seconds, see if they can set the record straight.

[jstewartmobile]

> Dueling implies that someone who is _better at one thing_ (hurting others) is inherently Right

I don't think it does. Revisit the story of Jeffrey Hudson, and how winning a duel changed his life. What it does imply is some personal risk in making unsubstantiated claims against people.

Try looking at the glass as half-full. Under the present system, true claims are suppressed well enough by the pay-to-play nature of mass media. Re-introducing some aspect of personal risk--one that couldn't be mitigated by mere cash--would, hopefully, let the air out of entire industries of manufactured controversy, which fuel everything from needless wars to societal decay.

As for the challenge, there are worse things than death.

[watwut]

From all I know about past press, it was full of manufactured controversies. It also fuelled wars.

The notion of journalistic objectivity was not even popular.

[commandlinefan]

> good aim

Andrew Jackson (I believe it was) was challenged to a duel once - he turned around, let his opponent shoot him, and then took his time aiming to make sure that his shot would be fatal whereas his opponents wasn't.

[beat]

You should read Steven Pinker, then, if you think going back to a Golden Age of murder over social slights is a good idea.

[jerf]

You've also fixed declining television revenue in one fell swoop too. Impressive. Perhaps a smidge impractical, but impressive.