"... stay in the small room, merge with others to form a bigger room, or abandon the chat. The moral of the game was that bigger is not always better, and people seemed to get it. 'Much like reddit, it starts small and you can talk to people, then it gets bigger and shittier and noisier,' the top-voted comment read. 'Can confirm,' the next comment read. 'Started with 2 people, was pleasantries. With 16, its a noise chamber.' Wardle told me, 'Very quickly, as eight becomes sixteen becomes thirty-two, you start to see spam, name-calling—all the classic terrible Internet stuff.' Still, he added, most people chose to keep merging: 'There seems to be something compelling about the competition to become the biggest room, even if you know it’s going to be painful.'"
From "Does Wordle Prove That We Can Have Nice Things on the Internet?/Josh Wardle created the viral game as part of his ongoing quest to design online spaces that don’t devolve into spam and swastikas" (The New Yorker).
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14 comments:
We can have nice things until they are sold to the fucking NYT.
Wordle proves that Corporate America cannot resist trying to monetize the internet.
If you could somehow exclude people under 25 I wonder how that would change the dynamic? I think a lot of the internet’s worst behavior was normalized by young people with the anonymity of the internet, the natural cruelty many teens seem to have, the power of saying finally whatever they wanted to the whole world but without the maturity to understand the consequences of it. That encouraged people of all ages to developers to their lowest behaviors or leave the forum.
NYT has def been worth the $4 a month subscription. I'm playing Wordle and sudoku now after not playing any games for years.
Anyway, my experience with blog commenters is that as the numbers shrink the remainers tend to go at each other's throats. But that's a different phenom.
"...online spaces that don’t devolve into spam and swastikas"
Isn't the latter more like bogus accusations of Naziism?
Where are these places with swastikas? I keep hearing they exist all over with people out and proud in displaying them. I guess I don't frequent the same Internet places these people do, and no, I don't want to merge into those places.
"Started with 2 people, was pleasantries. With 16, its a noise chamber"
Same thing happens around the dinner table.
Which two people? That is the question. Plus I'm kind of moody about other commenters. Times I'm looking for good sense, new books, a movie people liked, a joke, a song. Times I want to hear demented, stupid and rant. So I'd want more than two. But how many? I think I'd have people sit on a chair on lazy-susans built into the walls of the chat room and when I got tired of them, I'd spin them out of the room.
That is also my experience. When I have diner parties, one or two other couples (4 or 6 people) is about right. When there are 8 people the whole thing breaks up into two parties -- two groups of 4 people each. And, that's no good.
Internet comment sections were a different world back before smart phones became ubiquitous. I used to frequent many comment sections and also usenet groups like rec.crafts.metalworking. Some of these groups were very large and very active and there was little to no rancor. When web enabled smart phones took over everything changed for the worse. Surely I am not the only one to notice this?
Have been paying the NYT for a long time for the crosswords, even though I've been more into the Guardian (sigh) cryptics the last couple of years. But need to get out of the general charge.
--gpm
Swastikas? No wonder New Yorker readers are so paranoid. Not everything ends up in spam either. Any decent editor would have crossed out that phrase.
When web enabled smart phones took over everything changed for the worse. Surely I am not the only one to notice this?
My experience is that the venom came in long before that. Even in the usenet days political boards were full of garbage. Phones with autocorrect did give us a lot more word choice errors, though.
I frequent a number of comment sections apart from this one, and for the most part they're very civil. Even some of the YouTube channels are fun, but I suspect it's about the kind of content they put out. Publish nasty commentary, get nasty comments. But Watched Walker (walking vids of London), There I Ruined It (funny music mashups), Daniel Thrasher (piano-playing comedy), and Jill Bearup (costumes and swordfighting) attract large numbers of commenters and no rancor.
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