[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).