It’s amazing how much casually nicer lemmy and the greater fediverse is. You still see some bad habits leaking over from the rest of the web, but then people actually apologizing! and asking others to be nice! And it actually works!

Well outside of some thorny political issues, but that’s just human nature.

Free speech can’t flourish online, says the paywalled article

The writer here seems confused. Free speech thrives online. There is no freer a place to speak than the Internet.

What they seem to take issue with is that free speech isn’t always the path to truth. This was never a condition of free speech, and the lack of truth online doesn’t make the speech there any less free.

In fact, free speech is the very force that allows people to lie with impunity. Maybe there would be more truth if speech were less free.

What happens on social media has nothing to do with free speech. If I can kick Nazis out of my bar , I can kick them off my website.

And either way, a public square where violent fascists are attacking people and screaming over everyone with megaphones isn’t a place where anything important is being discussed anyway.

I think we’ve always thrived on outrage.

Before social media we had newspapers. Sure, we had real serious newspapers where the headlines where printed in a serif font, and mostly contained news about share prices and the political ramifications of abandoning the gold standard, but that wasn’t what the masses bought.

We had tabloids. Look at what the BARMY EU want to ban now. Check out what BOFFINS are doing to dogs. Here’s a 16 year old with her tits out. Look at this man on BENEFITS with 10 kids.

The only objective actual reporting in them was the sports pages at the back, and the TV guide in the middle.

We’ve always been like this. I have no answers how to make things better. We’d have to want to be better, and I don’t believe most people do.

I couldn’t even get to the article. My screen was immediately blurred on the top half, and the bottom half with a full width pop-up talking about “managing cookies”.

(And yes, I know, but I not using my desktop, I’m using my phone.)

Free speech cant flourish under corporate rule

This was clearly written by someone who has very little interaction with healthy forums for dialogue. There will always be trolls online and in real life, pretending like idiots and jokers only exist in an online setting is disingenuous or the view of a completely sheltered individual.

That’s not true. People are just talking about what interests them.

It’s a paywall. “Subscribe to unlock this article”.

I’ve kind of been of the opinion for a while that there are maybe a couple different ideas of “free speech”. If you have total “free speech”, right, everyone is allowed to talk and say whatever they want, much like the public square yadda yadda. You won’t get nazis, you’ll get spam, something which is obviously bad to anyone with half a brain (increasingly a smaller and smaller amount of the population). Spam is “free speech”, technically, as, someone is making the most of their ability to scream at the top of their lungs, maximum volume, they’re taking up all of the airwaves as much as is possible, and since these are usually the people with the most resources, it generally falls into the same kind of capitalist maximum usage of a resource in the most efficient way possible, with the minor caveat that nobody sane ever wanted that resource to be used in that way. Everyone needed a little bit of inefficiency in order to grease the wheels of conversation.

Of course, over time, we realize spam becomes less effective than subtly prodding at the collective consciousness, and running a twitter account with snarky remarks. We basically just have to understand here that it’s still spam, it’s just that the distinction has been moved from maximum volume, to bad faith. Which, is something that isn’t necessarily the role of a corporation, just like spam doesn’t necessarily have to be a corporation. Spam can also be people that are just scammers. Instead of selling products, these sorts of spammers and scammers try to win you over, drive the discourse in a different direction, engage in a bad faith manner. It fills the same role as spam being the maximum volume in the amphitheater, drowning out any other communications, but this is more insidious, harder to catch, and doesn’t necessarily come from a place of malice or like, actual bad faith. If you were an alien listening to the airwaves, you might just hear something resembling a regular discussion, with the distinction that maybe you’d be getting a larger percentage of people getting mad and storming off as they talk to what are basically ideological zombies, or maybe robots.

I can get a bad faith discussion out of taking two people that are temporarily mad, or passionate, invested, about the same thing in different ways, and then controlling the debate in a certain kind of way, say, over a text medium where neither side can communicate effectively. And those are people that should’ve been able to relate over a shared passion, ideally. I can get a bad faith discussion out of two people that do not speak the same language, out of two people that can communicate just well enough that what’s being said sounds sensible, but doesn’t actually translate to either side. And of course, I can get a bad faith discussion out of just simple trolling. I mean, that’s what trolling is, at a basic level, just taking a devil’s advocate nonsense stance super seriously, until other people also do that, basically on the premise that you’re someone to talk to. We sort of approach an event horizon with communication, where the closer two people are to actual communication, the more potential for frustration and misunderstanding there is, sort of like the hedgehog’s dilemma. So of course you get bad actors who lean into that, and who propagate that behavior and their own sorts of separate language and thought terminating cliches, in order to basically be spam, without being spam. They create bad faith conversations.

And then, of course, I kind of fear the role that AI might take in the coming years, with all of this. Especially if analog computing hardware starts taking off again and people have easy access to building their own actually sensible chatbots resembling some mid-level internet discourse, instead of stuff that resembles what are really smart toddler might write. Then we’re gonna see this all play out all over again, with the spam, except in a way that’s much harder to detect, and in a way where you don’t have to recruit human labor to do any of it. Dead internet theory, but real, basically. I dunno of a real way to counteract any of this, en masse.

I think the biggest thing is that people, generally, just have to put more thought into why specifically they want to leave a comment. Who are you doing this for? It can’t really be for the person on the other side of the screen, you know, because the miscommunication is going to be inevitable given enough time, there’s nothing you can do to counteract it. I think, inevitably, we all must realize, that the only reason to post online is, because you wanted to.

And so we all become trolls, in a way. But then, as is the ancient wisdom of the trolls, it becomes boring to just inhabit a shallow perspective, to spout nonsense. It’s like playing a game with all the cheats enabled. It’s fun for a while, probably too long actually, if you’re insecure and have a chip on your shoulder, but it’s not fulfilling long term. You can get plenty of people to do this regularly, clock in and clock out, be passionless, play the game with cheats for 3-4 hours with no real investment and then walk away. But if you’re serious, you have to disable the cheats, to start inhabiting perspectives with real depth, you have to start inhabiting worldviews that aren’t your own, but are still fully internally consistent. Ones that just stem from maybe other starting values. Or maybe they are all the same perspective, just given different easily malleable information landscapes. And if that’s the case, then you’re not really trolling anymore. You’re just doing the socrates shit, where socrates invents a fake guy to challenge himself and others. Was that socrates? I dunno, who gives a fuck.

Tl;dr We are/all must become trolls! Memes are the DNA of the soul!

Multiple US court cases have repeatedly affirmed the concept that money is speech because access to media costs, but if that’s true and explicitly part of how it works, then media will always be dominated by those with the most money to create media.

All media ends up being shitty and awful because it’s a business. It’s always a business. When the Internet got big, businesses showed up and took a framework for cheaply exchanging information across large distances and turned it into Cable 2.0, because cable is inherently more like what they want than a powerful framework that empowers citizens to speak their minds or whatever. You know what people would do if they were really empowered to create their own media, and more importantly, create it on their terms? Nothing that makes businesses happy. They want you strapped in to an emotional manipulation machine that exists to convince you to buy things. They only want you posting because it helps them figure out what to sell to you and how.

Social media is an outrage machine for the exact same reason cable news is filled with horrible and terrifying imagery – it hits your emotional buttons and keeps you coming back. Social media just makes the manipulation even easier and more fine-grained.

Up- and Downvotes should be removed entirely.