Truth be told, the most practical solution is to stop centralising everything and using these giant social networking sites that force people with nothing in common together. The bigger your audience gets and the less focused on any one topic it is, the harder it is to moderate/keep under the control, and the more drama you'll inevitably have when groups clash there.
Smaller internet forums, subreddits, Discord/Slack groups, etc tend to be a lot more civil than the likes of Twitter or YouTube are.
So a revival of those types of sites and communities will help a lot.
As will returning to the days of multi pseudonyms for different websites. Because people are not one sided. They don't always act the same way in every setting.
No, their behaviour depends on the company they're with. They might act one way with family, another way with friends, another way at work, etc.
That's how society stays together to some degree. People don't know how others act in other settings, and they don't care. Your coworkers likely have a whole mix of political opinions, but since it likely doesn't come up during work, it doesn't really matter.
Social networks seem to be trying to demolish this sense of separation between sides of people's personalities, and that's making society more and more fragile, as one wrong move means someone's entire life gets destroyed by the internet mob.
Oh, and decent moderation too. Unfortunately for Facebook and co, you can't automate moderation and expect it to work well, and you can't outsource it to a bunch of full time employees in a distant office somewhere. It has to be done by people with a real investment in the community, which is again where a well run small community shines.
>As will returning to the days of multi pseudonyms for different websites. Because people are not one sided. They don't always act the same way in every setting.
I never stopped doing this. The problem is, a lot of younger people were never taught to or never learned they should do this and a lot of older people same thing sort of.
I was kind of lucky I suppose, years ago I had a friend say something on a work Facebook page that caused some trouble, I realized Facebook wasn't a place I could have people like that, so since I've kept Facebook or any other social media website with personal information and concersations on it strictly professional or Christmas dinner at grandma's house level. Which pretty much means, no politics, no getting involved in other people's arguments, no posting things I wouldn't want an employer or my grandma seeing, no friends that post ridiculous things on my feed etc.
Then i've got my forum and other online site accounts that lack, for the most part, studd that could easily identify me, though I'm sure someone with lots of time and dedication(dunno why though), could figure it out, that use a different email than my 'real' email, where I can talk about things without worrying that I might randomly piss off someone I know.
If I want to have potentially divisive conversations with people I know in person, I'd rather do it in person or at least not on what might as well be the community billboard.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's as simple as "just go back to smaller groups". For companies, more users = more revenue, there isn't realy much incentive to not try and pull in as many people as possible. And then for most normal users, if they here about some big site, they're inclined to join that so they don't miss out on the the funny tik tok memes/all of their friends being on instagram/etc. For them, what benefit is there to a smaller site where you can't get as many followers or where your friends/favorite celebrity isn't a member.
I agree with you that size is one of the main contributing factors to the problem, I just don't think smaller sites is a practical solution for the public at large. That being said, if you don't care about "fixing" the public problem, then you're right on the money. If you personally don't want to experience toxicity, get off the big sites, it's that easy. I just don't see that being a fix for the average teenager/college student/boomer
...it doesn't need to be a huge company (or company of any kind) to run these things. Back in the early 2000s, a volunteer who knew about computers would set up phpBB on a church's website, or a radio station would allow one IT person to spend half their time maintaining something like this, and that would be it. No need to turn millions in advertising dollars to have an online community.
I do agree with the parent comment, that we may well see a resurgence of small and medium-sized online communities, for the simple reason that more fragmentation could be a good thing. When a community has its eternal september, people can move elsewhere.
I meant more that even a new, small company would have no incentive to not want to become the next big thing/the next facebook. Good point though that we don't need companies/start-ups to feed us online communities, particularly since the users are almost always the ones bringing value to platform like a message board/forum sites.
Just making a smaller Twitter won't change the nature of the Problem. It's less about the size of the community than the amount of topics, I believe. If you have a community that is about trains, and trains only, you may get a heated discussion about some train stuff, but you won't get a brawl about the political issue de jour.
Smaller internet forums, subreddits, Discord/Slack groups, etc tend to be a lot more civil than the likes of Twitter or YouTube are.
So a revival of those types of sites and communities will help a lot.
As will returning to the days of multi pseudonyms for different websites. Because people are not one sided. They don't always act the same way in every setting.
No, their behaviour depends on the company they're with. They might act one way with family, another way with friends, another way at work, etc.
That's how society stays together to some degree. People don't know how others act in other settings, and they don't care. Your coworkers likely have a whole mix of political opinions, but since it likely doesn't come up during work, it doesn't really matter.
Social networks seem to be trying to demolish this sense of separation between sides of people's personalities, and that's making society more and more fragile, as one wrong move means someone's entire life gets destroyed by the internet mob.
Oh, and decent moderation too. Unfortunately for Facebook and co, you can't automate moderation and expect it to work well, and you can't outsource it to a bunch of full time employees in a distant office somewhere. It has to be done by people with a real investment in the community, which is again where a well run small community shines.