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JQuinton comments on Open Thread, May 4 - May 10, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Here's a blog post about how everyone hates each other over politics more than before. Eliezer commented on it on Facebook, hypothesizing that it's a slow-growing effect of the Internet.
I cursed aloud when I read that comment, because I've had that exact idea and an accompanying sick feeling for a while now, and this is the first time I've seen it repeated.
(it's never a good sign when Eliezer Yudkowsky is the one to express your deepest fears about why everything's and everyone's brokenness is unstoppably accelerating)
I wish to read more about the "The Internet Is Why We Can't Have Even The Few Nice Things We Almost Kind Of Once Had" phenomenon — hopefully from someone who thinks there's a way easier than developing Friendly AI to put even one evil back in Pandora's Box, but that's probably wishful thinking, and I want to read about it in any case.
(Note: I'm aware that the entire LW-affiliated rationalist community writes about how things are broken, and desires to teach people to be less broken. But right now I'm looking specifically for things about how the Internet's massive boon to free speech is way more double-edged than was anticipated.)
Anyone have any good links?
Here's my half-baked idea.
Since the world is becoming safer, we have less real threats to prevent general ennui and so petty status games start to take on more importance.
Except that I would say this political hatred has taken off over the last five years, correlating far more with social media than with the world becoming safer. Has the world become safer over the last five years?
Alternative hypothesis: it's about young adults from rich families, seeking status in the muggle world.
In real life, if you are a spoiled rich kid, the best way to enjoy your wealth is to do things that most people don't do. Buy a private helicopter or a yacht, organize a huge party in your mansion, etc. You are invisible to the muggles, and the muggles are invisible to you; that contributes to social peace.
However, this does not work on internet, because on internet the fun is where people are. Imagine that someone would create an alternative "Reddit Platinum" website where you would have to pay $1,000,000 every day to have an account. If you have more money than you can count, you could isolate yourself here from the muggles. The website would be wonderfully designed, and all bugs would be fixed immediately. The only problem is that there would be almost no interesting debates, because there would be not enough various people to bring new ideas.
So even for a spoiled 1% kid, the muggle Reddit would be more fun then the "Reddit Platinum". On the other hand, the muggle Reddit would be frustrating for them, because they wouldn't receive the respect they get in the real life where everyone tries to kiss their assess. Instead, if they tried to pull the status card, people would make fun of them. The natural response would be to use their real-world resources to buy minions, and somehow use those minions as a support in online battles.
And this is a problem that cannot be solved, because the parts of the online world where the rich kids can feel really good become boring as hell for everyone else, so most people move away, and the fun moves away, and the rich kids will try to conquer yet another part of the online world. It is a love-hate relationship towards the arrogant muggles: can't withstand their non-humble behavior, yet can't live online without them.
EDIT: A weak-evidence datapoint: In Slovakia there was a website "booom.sk", something like Facebook for rich kids. You could pay money to get a small subset of Facebook functionality. You also got some extra functionality in real life: you didn't have to create events, invite people and upload photos, because the site owners added all important events and sent there photographers who uploaded the photos; you merely tagged yourself in the photos. When I was teaching at a school for rich kids ten years ago, most students used this website, and they pretty much didn't know anything about the rest of the internet. Now I looked at the website again, out of curiosity, and it still exists, but some sections were not updated since cca 2010. My explanation is that Facebook got widely popular, and the rich kids realized they would ultimately have more fun in the muggle world.
I don't think that playing status games online is reserved t people with parents rich enough to buy a helicopter or a yacht.
I don't think that a community leads to be big to have interesting debates. LW isn't big.