Internet Comments ain't what they used to be

I remember clearly when we Delphinians started going places on the net that only academics had been before. Let's just say we didn't get a loving reception. In fact, it was like a skunk a picnic -- we were curiously poking around seeing what was there. Meanwhile others were waving their arms and screaming bloody murder. The unwashed masses had arrived.

Of course, there are always new unwashed masses to arrive. One suspects somewhere there is an unwashed masses factory, converting groups of rather clean people into horrid wretches. Sure enough, a while later AOL fired up and then hundreds of thousands of regular Joes were dialed in. The net would never be the same.

I love a good conversation, and although I ramble, I am genuinely interested in other people's opinions. Many times I'll hear something that prickles my interests, like "Dogs are people too", or "The world has too many people on it anyway" and while I DO think that it's so much nonsense, I'm always curious that perhaps I missed something somewhere. Perhaps as part of becoming a cranky old fart I missed the Discovery Channel episode where dogs were proven to be human. Or perhaps somebody, somewhere has come up with a formula for the proper number of people on a planet. You never know.

One of the first boards I frequented was the ABC political boards. I'll never forget one poster named SilverEagle59. We could start talking about any topic -- freedom of speech, bears, political campaigns, bears in the woods, the Treaty of Westphalia, what bears do in the woods -- and after a while, he would come back to the same subject: the oppression of Native Americans by the white man. It was like watching a moth to a candle. Whichever way he started the conversation, and no matter his current direction, you always knew we were headed to Wounded Knee.

Another poster had the clever name Hairy Plotter. (This was just after the first Harry Potter book). Hairy was a nit-picker without peer. We were of the same breed, I guess, although he was conservative and I am fiercely libertarian. Old Hairy would take you argument apart piece by piece, asking for links, making historical observations you may have missed, pointing out your flaws in reasoning, and then when you were left, all you had was a "pocket full of mumbles such are promises"

It was more fun when Hairy took your side in an argument.

You might think you could make an offhand comment and escape, but there was no getting away. It was a single board for discussion of the day's events, and if you wanted to wade in and say something like "Well those Nazis, they weren't so bad really, except for the whole genocide thing." you had better be prepared to defend your remarks. People didn't vote comments up or down -- what? Do you want to talk about current events or have a popularity contest? You want to be the man in the arena, or some cowardly chump chewing on a potato chip and exercising your brain cells to the minimum degree necessary to click an up arrow?

We had threads that went on for days, with people coming in and out and making impassioned pleas on all sides of an issue. It was on these boards that I changed a deeply held belief -- the belief that the state should restrict abortion. It took a lot of discussing, but my new position is that it is immoral, it is murder, and it is also outside the reach of the powers of government.

That's not the way things are any more, though. Boards today are not about learning or sharing. They're about echo chambers and drive-by populist rhetoric. We vote things up or down ostensibly because we believe them to be more or less worthy of other people's attention. In reality, people are emotional animals, and the more emotionally charged an article or comment makes you, the more you're going to click that arrow. Your comments won't be of the lone man variety -- they'll be the guy who speaks out in the mob: short, sweet, and guaranteed to get some "hell yes!" results.

This makes an online community a bunch of people who all feel emotionally motivated about the same topics. Challengers to the dogma are punished. We use the word "troll" as shortcut for people who laugh at our common beliefs or prod us without making what we feel to be a coherent argument. (Of course, if they made a coherent argument, we'd pile on and vote them down into the abyss, but that's not the point.)

I've noticed that this leads to a few interesting behaviors.

• Advice by rectal extrusion - You can go anywhere and get advice about anything. In the real world, if I walked up to a stranger and said something like "I'm having some legal issues and was wondering if you'd speculate on them" the stranger would direct you to find a competent attorney.

  Not so on the internet. As a challenge, pick something crazy-hard, like brain surgery. Ten bucks says you can go to Digg or some other board, and if you're a popular vetted member of that community, get dozens if not hundreds of people speculating on brain surgery issues. Competence doesn't come into the picture. I got a keyboard, I'm with the mob -- I didn't even have to sleep at a Holiday Inn last night.

  I was reading News.yc 6-7 weeks ago and there was an article about customs searching laptop computers crossing the border. One commenter, obviously angry about this injustice, said something like "Somebody needs to read the constitution! We are protected against unwarranted search and seizures"

  Well -- yes, but not at the border. Border agents are responsible for controlling the flow of material across the border. You have a free choice whether to cross or not. Your constitutional rights don't come into the discussion at all.

  He made a great comment -- emotionally laden, appropriately tuned to the values of the readers, short, etc. But he knew Jack Squat about what he was talking about.

• The defender of all things X - Which leads me to the most egregious behavior: the fanboys. Whether it's F/OSS, Linux, anti-Microsoft, Democrat, Republican, Liberal, Conservative, we all know these guys. They don't care about learning, only defending X.

  I'll use News.YC as a continuing example. Being a global board, we've got quite a few Russians posting. Whenever Russia does something generally considered bad, like nationalize their oil industry, invade some foreign country, or spout off such paranoid nonsense as should be laughed off the stage, the defenders start up. "You probably just get your information from the western media" one told me, "you should learn more"

  While I would love to take months to learn the root of Russian aggression in Georgia, or the lineage of the Tzar's Okhrana down to present-day Putin, I think there's a bit of fanboy going on here. After all, I'm not that upset at Russia's military and paranoid bent (although I probably should be) It's the other guys who seem so emotional that their favorite country is "misunderstood".

  Perhaps I'm wrong -- perhaps Bill Gates is the devil, Linux is the path to heaven, and Russia will one day save the world for freedom. I'm okay with being wrong -- been wrong before. But there are a LOT of people who are not okay with being wrong. They already know the answer, no matter what the question.

• It's the mood, not the material - Want to make some karma on your favorite board? Follow these easy steps. First, catch a story with an emotional content sure to stir up the body politic. Second, post a short, interesting comment that takes that emotional feeling to its next level. As the article continues to get voted up, your comment will feature prominently on the comments section. People there will be looking for an easy release to their emotions, so the clicks go to you. It's an emotion game, not a rational one.

lifted from xkcd

So I'm done rambling. We need desperately to fix commenting on the net. It should encourage thinking and participation. Instead, the format fights value at every step. I had a pimple-faced CS college kid post a couple of weeks ago "Corporations don't kill people because they're not legally allowed to." My initial thoughts were "where do you even start with idiocy like that?" I mean, this guy simply had a lack of historical and political context. I gave it a good shot, but at the end of the day, I'm not the kid's teacher and the modern internet board is not about learning or sharing. It's hit-and-run tomfoolery. There's no effort at all to learn from each other and come together. I could have spent 3 hours cajoling the kid into thinking and reasoning for himself and in return all I'd get was his buddies -- others who are just as ill-informed and muddle-headed as he was -- voting me down and criticizing my commenting style. Sorry -- I've got better things to do than that.

It looks like we all do.

When's the last time you were consuming internet material and you changed your mind about the way you feel about something important? Ever?

If you are not looking at your life and your beliefs and trying to improve yourself, as far as I'm concerned, you're wasting space on the planet. Why do we go online every day? To challenge yourself and learn, or to pat each other on the back and gossip about our little niche. Good conversations are provocative, respectful, and rational. Every now and then I get a glimmer of such discourse, but the glimmer is quickly gone.

If you're an inventor, I challenge you to figure out some way that we can thoughtfully learn from each other on the net. We desperately need it.