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rm_-rf_slash | 1 year ago

I can’t think of any way where a social media app using bots to discourage wrongthink doesn’t come across as dystopian, and also a little sad.

discuss

order

KaiserPro|1 year ago

> Wrongthink

When a community is formed, an implied set of rules are generated and applied. They evolve and change as time goes on. Sometimes they are the cause of the community dying, sometimes they are the reason is thrives.

Whether its a sports community (woo football is the greatest!) or a specific team (fuck the other team, booo) or cycling. Each community has a set of rules that you need to abide by in order for it to function.

Now, if you go and break those implied rules, you get told off.

A community falls apart when two or more factions form opposing implied rules in the same shared space. For photography, it could be the use of photoshop, digital cameras or, more recently AI. Either the factions learn to get on, or they break away and find somewhere more accepting. That is the natural order.

You could equally present those things as "wrongthink". But more practically its just a regulation mechanism for human interaction.

Now, you'll counter that "big corporations/politics determining what we see is bad", and then reference some time in the 90s where no such system existed. The problem is that the US media was brilliant at self censorship. Sure you could get specialist publications that catered to whatever taboo subject you wanted, just as you can now.

The issue is, online there are no constraints on behaviour. If I shout at 13 year old kid in the street that I'm going to fuck their mum, burn their house down, and generally verbally abuse them, generally someone will intervene and stop me. Thats not wrongthink, thats society. There is not scalable mechanism for doing that on online communities.

Is this AI bit the way to do it? no, its made by insular collegekids who've barely lived in the real world.

brookst|1 year ago

All “wrongthink”? Like if someone expresses suicidal thoughts, the bot should say “whatever, do what you want”?

I disagree. Apps are products with an editorial component. Editorials should be opinionated. It is passive and immature to simply not care how one’s products are used. Oppenheimer and Alfred Nobel have wise words on this topic.