The cost of opinion- A case for payoffs in social interactions
The other day, surfing through reddit, I stumbled upon an obscenely written post glorifying violence against minorities- with graphic, sadistic details of whys and hows. Unsurprisingly, the post was upvoted in the sub’s community, users were engaging and lauding the OP in the comments.
The same post, the same OP, in another community, was downvoted to the abyss and some days later the post was deleted.
There are many occurrences on twitter, facebook and similar social platforms where an Opinion, often unpopular, finds engagement from a range of audience, and gets deleted amidst uproar but not before its reminiscences are engraved somewhere in collective memory of those who agreed to it.
When we try to draw parallels between online and real world social interactions, in real world we find hesitancy in certain type of actions in public because of likelihood of it’s acceptance and laws (punishment) if rejected- the repercussions and payoffs tamper social image. Hence, the toxic opinions are limited to closed room discussions with like-minded people. These closed chambers mirror the social media phenomenon more closely compared to public discourse.
Let’s try to break it down-
Closed communities (closed room discussions):
With like-minded members, our opinions- however degenerate may they be, find a degree of coherence within the group. Circle-jerking follows, and the social reward of acceptance conditions us to remain associated with the group.
Since there is lesser scope of opposing feedbacks, there is lesser long term value generation for personal growth/learning with closed room discussions
Open forums (Public discourse):
There is a code of conduct, discussions are supposed to be civil and towards a goal of greater understanding and value generation. There are feedbacks on sub-optimal behavior- improper conduct, or illogical discussions. Personal reputation is at stake and by design, there is lesser freedom of expressing opinions, since the forum is open and an opinion attracts questions more than support from the number of ideologies at stake.
Problem is, that the public space of internet is flooded with opinions apt only for close community, without any repercussions of defection in public discourse. One can go with fake identity/anonymous profile, or even with real profile in a crowd of bit-sized netizens, and spit out opinions without anything at stake, which costs the proper consensus in an open forum.
A personal opinion/view gets valuable when it becomes a universally accepted- by confronting hard questions in public space and accepting constructive feedbacks which are required to strip the opinion off subjective lens. Elements of Science and News media are subject to open discussions, as they deal with absolute truths and logical interpretations with a larger aim of trustworthy acceptance of value, and a permanent log in public memory that assists general growth. A fruitful route to such a value goes through consensus town, and that’s a place without echo chambers.
With the above view, one solution that applies to Open forums, is feedbacks (dislikes, downvotes, bad karma) and open chamber consensus. There’s a definite use case to associate stronger repercussions and payoffs to internet discourse, with a surety of representation from open world. Both have to work together do derive value, and one without the other tends to compromise the system.
We are working to devise a system to achieve consensus on absolutes from a heap of subjective opinions.
Do you agree that news media needs to shift to Absolute truths and harness trust in order to generate value for community? Let us know in the comments
