The news surrounding Elon Musk’s desire to occupy complete control of Twitter has emerged and with that comes some interesting statements from Reddit’s former CEO about how the Tesla owner may not realize what he is getting himself into.
Yishan Wong did not shy away from shedding light upon how many social media trends have evolved over the years and there just might be an alarming rise in toxicity now, more than ever.
He quoted how Musk could potentially be unaware of how the internet culture seen in 2004 was not what you’re going to witness today.
Wong then delved deep down into Silicon Valley and the bias it surrounds. In particular, he mentioned how the real fun begins with its coding stuff and how it works in a similar fashion to journalism.
But that would often lead to great mistakes that most people fail to identify at first. After all, no one in a leading position would ever choose to get news trends out as fast as possible.
Critics claim Wong appears to be more focused on policing users online about how they should steer clear of negativity and flame wars. But that isn’t as fun as leading execs concentrating on bettering apps and platforms.
However, the fact that Wong has the experience of running a giant community-based platform like Reddit certainly says a lot. Hence, that’s where the topic of Battle Royales came into play during the discussion.
So many of us try to spend more time igniting flames than we probably should not. And while we’re making battles like these where a single false move ends up producing detrimental consequences, we’re actually promoting negativity all around.
Remember, we may behave differently on social media than how we behave in real life. As Thomas Hobbes says, the real tooth and claws come out at a later point in life.
Let’s take for example a platform where there are no moderators. Hence, there’s no check and balance of what’s really going on there. Before you know it, a few people would end up making it miserable for so many others.
The end result is positive people making their way out of the scary mess, and you’re left with only negative users with ill intentions. And just in case you didn’t realize, that makes things so much worse.
If you really read Wong’s thread in detail, he shows how Musk is far behind in this approach. Users from Gen X have been raised in a totally different manner than the rest, or perhaps it's best to look at it from a softer approach.
Musk may assume that free speech is the call of the day and it means avoiding bans that irk the religious police. And while Wong says he used to think like that at the start too, his experience with Reddit showed a new meaning to the internet.
Today’s reality is that the old internet is gone, sadly, and the new vicious one is here to stay. Hence, we’ve got to wake up and smell the roses because the web battles fought in the past are very different from those of today.
Read next: New Study Shows Most People Don’t Know How Big Tech Uses Their Private Data
Yishan Wong did not shy away from shedding light upon how many social media trends have evolved over the years and there just might be an alarming rise in toxicity now, more than ever.
He quoted how Musk could potentially be unaware of how the internet culture seen in 2004 was not what you’re going to witness today.
Wong then delved deep down into Silicon Valley and the bias it surrounds. In particular, he mentioned how the real fun begins with its coding stuff and how it works in a similar fashion to journalism.
But that would often lead to great mistakes that most people fail to identify at first. After all, no one in a leading position would ever choose to get news trends out as fast as possible.
It means that upholding free speech means you're not standing up against some religious conservatives lobbying to remove Judy Blume books from the library, it means you're standing up against EVERYONE, because every side is trying to take away the speech rights of the other side.
— Yishan (@yishan) April 15, 2022
Critics claim Wong appears to be more focused on policing users online about how they should steer clear of negativity and flame wars. But that isn’t as fun as leading execs concentrating on bettering apps and platforms.
However, the fact that Wong has the experience of running a giant community-based platform like Reddit certainly says a lot. Hence, that’s where the topic of Battle Royales came into play during the discussion.
So many of us try to spend more time igniting flames than we probably should not. And while we’re making battles like these where a single false move ends up producing detrimental consequences, we’re actually promoting negativity all around.
Remember, we may behave differently on social media than how we behave in real life. As Thomas Hobbes says, the real tooth and claws come out at a later point in life.
Let’s take for example a platform where there are no moderators. Hence, there’s no check and balance of what’s really going on there. Before you know it, a few people would end up making it miserable for so many others.
The end result is positive people making their way out of the scary mess, and you’re left with only negative users with ill intentions. And just in case you didn’t realize, that makes things so much worse.
If you really read Wong’s thread in detail, he shows how Musk is far behind in this approach. Users from Gen X have been raised in a totally different manner than the rest, or perhaps it's best to look at it from a softer approach.
Musk may assume that free speech is the call of the day and it means avoiding bans that irk the religious police. And while Wong says he used to think like that at the start too, his experience with Reddit showed a new meaning to the internet.
Today’s reality is that the old internet is gone, sadly, and the new vicious one is here to stay. Hence, we’ve got to wake up and smell the roses because the web battles fought in the past are very different from those of today.
Read next: New Study Shows Most People Don’t Know How Big Tech Uses Their Private Data
