Comment by roland35
5 days ago
It's interesting how this is happening in software engineering YouTube content as well. It seems like things like "go sucks rust is great! Now rust sucks and zig is great!!" get way more views since it is basically clickbait for nerds.
It's too bad that nuanced discussion doesn't do too well on social media.
The incentives with YouTube just seem bad. Whenever I research a product (recent examples: Garmin Watches, DJI drones) I'll find a few great videos with informative and useful content. I hope those channels are doing well! But then my YouTube recommendations related to those will have titles/thumbnails with things like "don't buy until you WATCH this" or "I was wrong!".
It also reminds me how the most upvoted comments on Reddit often reflect the consensus opinion but not necessarily the truth.
How could a voting system anywhere be expected to represent truth rather than consensus?
It probably depends if the audience is intelligent and open-minded, but I agree, it will always be biased towards their preconceptions.
1 reply →
Also, almost always highly emotional if you're on a popular subreddit's post.
I picked a random post on the home page, this one for example:
https://old.reddit.com/r/clevercomebacks/comments/1i1b4tn/i_...
The comments are all
"The oligarchs would never go for it."
or "It’s a cult." and on and on.
I think this is particularly true in rage bait posts on Reddit, which is most of the home page these days.
This is a great line, thanks.
I noticed this as well and it’s been the first real moment where I feel “old” as a dev.
I should acknowledge that our industry has always had some form of this - but it was contained predominantly to mailing lists/forums/blogs and eventually Twitter. It felt like all of these mediums (yes, even Twitter) required some form of proof that you’re an authority or experienced on what you’re writing about. I don’t feel like that’s what’s happening with YouTube/Twitch here; these creators may very well be skilled/experienced/authorities (and I am explicitly not saying they are or aren’t) but I don’t see anywhere near the level of healthy skepticism that I feel like we’ve always had in our industry.
Maybe it’s a generational divide as the window of developers shifts. Maybe it’s just the sheer size of the distribution channels now. I’m open to being wrong.
tl;dr: Something about these mediums turbo charges the information in a way that I’m not sure is healthy.
It seems like there was an era of journalism where the minimum quality was higher : in between the disappearance of the yellow press (WW2 ??) and the rise of social media.
Was that a result of economic consolidation ?
Or am I mistaken and the yellow press never went away ? (And why does it seem like it did for a while ?)
I've similar trends here in regards to new languages, technologies, ... People love to bandwagon.
Nuanced discussion can only happen in good faith. It’s impossible to enforce that so to prevent being turned in to 4chan, social media turns to the most obvious proxy- likes upvote etc.
The logic underpinning this is that if a person is a jerk they will be downvoted- therefore there is an incentive to not be a jerk.
However, because the person on the other side is anonymous and therefore people can’t instinctively presume good faith, upvoting system turn in to a voting system - the goal is not to develop ideas, but to submit ones people will most agree with. When the main danger is apathy, there is no reason from self-moderation. Nerds are not immune.
I don't think it's impossible to enforce, you can probably do it on social media limited to hundred(s) of participants, where moderators (and other users) can get familiar with specific posters.
On most social media people aren't anonymous, they are pseudonymous - this can still have an impact on your behavior when you know that even non-moderators can look up your post history.
But I guess that a lot of posters are still going to feel pseudo-anonymous, because looking up still requires a lot of effort... at least until for a few they become famous enough (dang, pg...) that their pseudo-anonymity is gone.