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from the I'm-so-meta-even-this-acronym dept.
jcd writes:
"I'm rather excited to get going with Soylent and to watch it grow. Nay, help it grow. I have lurked in /. for more than a decade (note: I'm not the same username over there, I know, how sneaky), and always wished I could have been involved with the beginning. So this is a great opportunity, and I joined as soon as I saw what Soylent was doing. Not to mention the fact that I felt right at home with the old style. It's very comfortable.
So here's a question for everyone. Are we going to be the same as slashdot? A clone that focuses as entirely as possible on tech related news? Or will we branch out to other topics? I'm interested to see either way. I posted a comment to this effect in one of our two existing polls, and it may be a community-wide assumption, but I do think it merits a discussion."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by lennier on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:15PM
At a surface, technical level, yes. A crowd moderation system is 'self-healing' in that the moderated discussion should (if the system works) accurately reflect the current feeling of that crowd.
But I think the 'forces aligned against us' problem is real. Those forces are deeper than merely technical issues. They're societal and psychological. They're emergent features of a chaotic system that's hurting.
See, we're in a Prisoner's Dilemma situation right now with regards to openness and democracy online: individually we're all making small rational choices to maximise our personal, temporary enjoyment or money. Collectively, however, they add up to social outcomes (forces, if you like) that we indidually DO NOT WANT.
We want personal mobile computers that we control, that respect our privacy, that are inherently secure, that let us publish and curate and share our own collections of interesting data. But we buy iDevices and use social media networks controlled by companies that fight against those freedoms - because there aren't a lot of current better options. Incrementally, we gain a little more freedom by buying these devices rather than boycotting them. But on balance, we lose a lot of future freedom by pouring money and personal information into the likes of Facebook and Google. We're just heavily discounting that future freedom in our buying choices so we don't think it's a big deal. The investors know better.
The forces aligned against user-created, user-supported social media like Soylent are not just the big companies who are carving up and selling off our shared data commons. They really are _doing_ evil, but they're not composed of people who _are_ individually evil. Instead, lots of tiny marginal slightly-good-slightly-evil decisions add up to big social forces - like a flock of butterflies making a hurricane. And it's our own individual acts that empower this evil.
This is what 'the banality of evil' is about. It's ordinary people just doing their jobs, checking out emotionally, distrusting their hearts. It's even people who _are_ passionate heart-followers who even so may be slightly incorrect in their beliefs. All of this adds up to bad stuff that we have to change. We can all be wrong. We probably mostly are. But we need to do our best to try to do the right thing.
And right now, the right thing is to support freedom, openness, privacy and the flame of user-created media online. We have to keep relighting that flame every decade or so, it seems. Otherwise people forget.
Don't be angry. Anger doesn't help. People aren't our enemy. But do be creative. Create alternatives. Create great communities. Support each other. Dream. Pray, if you lean that way. Be proud when we see our dream emerging. Critique the parts of the dream that don't work, and sponsor alternatives.
Eventually, we'll win.
Delenda est Beta