Quote from FMPONEI think that's a bit of a naive view. Every single day there are tons and tons of, "Look what my girlfriend made," or "Look what I saw on my way to work today" posts. Oftentimes these headlines are untrue but these items are upvoted because their content is interesting or humorous, even though the post is in some respects false. The vast majority of these untrue things on a site like Reddit are not challenged and exposed as untrue because their truth or falsehood is tangential to the supposed entertainment value they possess. It'd be like going to "Damn You Autocorrect" and trying to discern real autocorrects versus humorous staged ones.
As another example I went to Reddit and pulled off a headline: "Today I learned about the Officious Website of [An ex-President] which include tips on how to prevent masturbation and what causes these 'impure activities' such as rock and roll music and idealism" The link here is to a political humor site not the official website of that president. However, no one stepped forward in the comments to say, "This is untrue." Stepping in and correcting something that is untrue takes additional effort and means someone has to care enough to spend their time doing that. That person isn't a given. Many places on Reddit drive out "conscientious objector" types, such as /r/Atheism or /r/Politics, because their hivemind mentality is too strong. Echo chambers are a problem everywhere, but the anonymity and the explicit up-down mechanisms of Reddit amplify it even further.
And even whether someone actually corrected this or not is largely irrelevant because finding out the truth in a sea of unreliable sources of information is hard work and human minds are lazy. Almost everyone probably knows the mythical factoid of "Human beings only use 10% of their brains," but that's not even close to true. However it's doubtful anyone knows offhand of any factual debunkings of this myth. Even reading falsehoods that are later corrected impacts your thinking, and not necessarily towards believing the truth. This sort of thing is lazy and deceptive but extremely common, and it's widely used in advertising and politics because human beings are wired to believe things we hear more than we are to disbelieve them (See Thinking, Fast & Slow for more in depth on this one).
There is a big difference between "I told a bunch of people some silly piece of made up trivia" and "XYZ lied to us about [important issue]"
I agree the immediate examples I gave are about unimportant trivia, but it's not limited to that. In fact I'm inclined to say that the examples where there are clear true/false ideas are the trivia, almost all real issues involve shades of uncertainty that are probably not reducible to true/false statements.
I was thinking about your point when I went out earlier tonight and actually one of the prime examples I saw in the last year of the malign influence of social media rearing its head was in a particular criminal investigation that was all over the American news earlier this year. I'm going to avoid going too much into specifics but from my impression this story went viral on sites like Reddit and then started getting attention by national journalists who ran with the story for a few weeks. There has been followup information in the national news media that contradicted a lot of what was initially reported, but at this point the initial impressions of people have already been formed and they've made up their mind on what story they believe. The fact that millions of people still believe an untrue narrative in the face of convincing evidence that the story they believe is wrong doesn't speak a whole lot about the truth-telling value of social media in my eyes.
Quote from FMPONEEverything you said about collective falsehoods is true, but if they're collective falsehoods you don't care about, that's not really going to the nature of what Gabe was speaking. At least not in my opinion. The nature of reddit is that people congregate in areas they're most passionate about, so it's less and less likely to be able to con those people, and if you can't con them, you risk that their knowledge spreads and becomes the mainstream opinion.
Anyways, I think he's fundamentally right. It's harder to con people now than it was in the past, because we have more access to information. Obviously this means less important shit gets cloudier, and there is a lot of low level bullshit, but if something a dedicated subset of people are interested in, it becomes clearer in the sense that you can go to those experts and get a more credible answer or they themselves might take action to inform others.
I'm not so sure. Just to give an example I'm familiar with, and believe is important: In the 1970s it was commonly agreed upon that mankind hadn't undergone any substantial evolutionary adaptation in the last 10,000 years since the invention of agriculture. This was the dominant view for ~30 years among experts in the field. Fast forward to 2010 and we have learned through mapping of genomes of various different groups that not only were the experts in the field wrong, but human evolutionary adaptations actually sped up by orders of magnitude within this time frame. Even though solid data didn't exist at the time, a consensus viewpoint was formed [for nonscientific reasons]. But even today the views of 40 years ago are still depressingly common because consensus opinions are less about factuality than they are about social signalling. These same problems exist on the internet, but social media sites in particular amplify the negative elements by gamifying behaviors into points and attempting to disperse moderation of content onto everyone, which means no one is responsible when things turn into total pap (ie, r/Gaming).
Anyway to veer this back towards on-topic stuff, one of the reasons why I actually trust Valve's judgement is that they are ultimately responsible for their actions. The idea that Valve is authoritarian is kind of silly, since Valve itself is accountable (albeit in indirect means) to its customers. A collective anonymous group of Valve's fanbase is much less so, and these people are more worrying to me than Valve employees, particularly because I've actually played in CS pubs.
@ aaron_da_killa : True that but now that I look at it, I have also used blueish sorta color for windows and that is 3rd color in the scene. Adding one more would be an overkill. 