No, The Internet Hasn’t Gotten Worse: Just Your Outlook
from the scientifically-proven-godwin dept
Ah, the good old days of the internet – a utopian paradise where everyone was kind, respectful, and definitely not arguing about Hitler. Or was it? A recent study published in Nature has some surprising findings that might just shatter your rose-tinted glasses about this past internet that never actually existed. Brace yourself for a shocking revelation: the internet has always been a bit of a dumpster fire.
The study in question has the compelling title of “persistent interaction patterns across social media platforms and over time.” Caitlin Dewey summarizes it more simply as “actually, the internet’s always been this bad.”
There is a tendency in all things to assume that everything is progressively getting worse and everything is falling apart in a way that is uniquely new. And yet, history keeps telling us that it’s not true. Violent crime rates? They’re hitting historic lows, despite what you may have heard. The wave of shoplifting? Probably didn’t happen.
And how about the internet? Is the internet awash in hate, disinfo, and toxicity way more than in the good old days?
Well, nope.
Not according to the study. It exists, certainly, but it’s no worse than in the past.
The researchers went deep:
To obtain a comprehensive picture of online social media conversations, we analysed a dataset of about 500 million comments from Facebook, Gab, Reddit, Telegram, Twitter, Usenet, Voat and YouTube, covering diverse topics and spanning over three decades
Three decades, 500 million comments, eight platforms. Seems like a good place to start.
The team used Google’s Perspective API for classifying toxicity. Some may quibble with this, but the Perspective API has a history of being pretty reliable. Nothing is perfect, but when dealing with this much data, it seems like a reasonable approach. On top of that, they spot checked the results as well.
The researchers found: Godwin’s Law is legit. If you’ll recall, the original formulation is: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Godwin himself admits it was written in the form of statistical language as a joke to make it seem more scientific. And the researchers determined that, well, yeah, pretty much:
The toxicity of threads follows a similar pattern. To understand the association between the size and toxicity of a conversation, we start by grouping conversations according to their length to analyse their structural differences. The grouping is implemented by means of logarithmic binning (see the ‘Logarithmic binning and conversation size’ section of the Methods) and the evolution of the average fraction of toxic comments in threads versus the thread size intervals is reported in Fig. 2. Notably, the resulting trends are almost all increasing, showing that, independently of the platform and topic, the longer the conversation, the more toxic it tends to be.
That said, the research also shows that when a thread gets toxic, that doesn’t necessarily stop the conversation.
The common beliefs that (1) online interactions inevitably devolve into toxic exchanges over time and (2) once a conversation reaches a certain toxicity threshold, it would naturally conclude, are not modern notions but they were also prevalent in the early days of the World Wide Web. Assumption 2 aligns with the Perspective API’s definition of toxic language, suggesting that increased toxicity reduces the likelihood of continued participation in a conversation. However, this observation should be reconsidered, as it is not only the peak levels of toxicity that might influence a conversation but, for example, also a consistent rate of toxic content. To test these common assumptions, we used a method similar to that used for measuring participation; we select sufficiently long threads, divide each of them into a fixed number of equal intervals, compute the fraction of toxic comments for each of these intervals, average it over all threads and plot the toxicity trend through the unfolding of the conversations. We find that the average toxicity level remains mostly stable throughout, without showing a distinctive increase around the final part of threads
I would suggest that seems consistent with Techdirt’s experience…
But, the study also found that there’s no particular evidence that conversations today are particularly more toxic than in the past when looking over this historical data. The key factor, as always, is just the length of the conversation. Average toxicity over time remains pretty constant. However, toxicity increases with the length of any conversation (though at different rates on different platforms).
As Dewey’s report notes, the approaches of different platforms can matter, but it doesn’t appear as if the world is somehow getting worse. It’s just people suck. And some platforms maybe attract more of the worst people.
That finding held true across seven of the eight platforms the team researched. By and large, those platforms also exhibited similar shares of toxic comments. On Facebook, for instance, roughly 4 to 6% of the sampled comments failed Perspective AI’s toxicity test, depending on the community/subject matter. On YouTube, by comparison, it’s 4 to 7%. On Usenet, 5 to 9%.
Even infamously lawless, undermoderated communities like Gab and Voat didn’t fall so far from the norm for more mainstream platforms: About 13% of Gab’s comments were toxic, the researchers found, and between 10 and 19% were toxic on Voat.
There’s something deeply unfashionable and counterintuitive about all of this. The suggestion that online platforms have not single-handedly poisoned public life is entirely out of step with the very political discourse the internet is said to have polluted.
Dewey also quotes one of the study’s authors, Walter Quattrociocchi, pointing out that this isn’t an argument for giving up moderating.
Quattrociocchi said it would be a mistake to assume his team’s findings suggest that moderation policies or other platform dynamics don’t matter — they absolutely “influence the visibility and spread of toxic content,” he said. But if “the root behaviors driving toxicity are more deeply ingrained in human interaction,” than effective moderation might involve both removing toxic content and implementing larger strategies to “encourage positive discourse,” he added.
Interventions do matter, but the internet isn’t inherently making people terrible. And, I guess that’s a bit of good news these days?
Comments on “No, The Internet Hasn’t Gotten Worse: Just Your Outlook”
Offline analogies
This dynamic makes me think it might apply to most large gatherings when there’s any controversy involved. If you’ve ever been involved in a precinct caucus when there’s disagreement about something up for debate, things can get pretty toxic as the night goes on. Same for city council meetings. That may be why most legislatures strictly enforce codes of conduct and decorum so you hear deadly enemies refer to “my esteemed colleague” even while implying their opposite number may eat children.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Search results have absolutely gotten worse
Blame SEO, blame google and other search engines (it seems 90% of non-google run off bing), blame that none of them allow true boolean searches anymore but results SUCK now.
How can you gaslight about this simple, incontrovertible fact? Were you literally paid to write this article?
Re:
This article isn’t about search engines and search results. It’s about socialization on the Internet and the arc of toxicity within online conversations.
Re: Re:
Actually, it’s about how dweebs like Bratty Matty will inevitably come along and shit up the comments, which is… actually kinda what you said. OK, I’ll bow out now.
Re:
Just again Matty making it clear that he doesn’t actually read the articles, only the headlines, before spewing nonsense.
The study is about online idiots, like you, and whether or not they’ve become more prevalent of late, showing up and fucking up perfectly nice conversations by being idiots.
Turns out there have always been Bratty Mattys in every online conversation: stupid gits who don’t read the articles, but still feel the need to parade their ignorance for everyone to see. Matt, you’re not unique at all. You’re just a shitty troll, like the study notes have always existed since the earliest days of the internet.
Re:
Hey, Matthew.
You’re doing that off-topic harassment thing again.
Even if you’re right, Mike has never denied this, and he’s already written about the enshittification of Google Search.
Re:
“Hello everyone, this is your daily dose of illiteracy.“
Re: Re:
You don’t need to put an admission like that into scare quotes, you know.
Re:
All you had to do was read five fucking sentences, and you would have understood what the article was about. Just five. That was it. But no, instead you chose malicious ignorance. Raw, unabashed, stupidity.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Because nuance doesn’t sell. It doesn’t outrage.
People need to feel like there’s MAGAts at every turn, trying to rape babies into women and ban their porn and yeet nonbinaries out of windows. Otherwise what’s the point? Besides, what if it’s all true and we’re just letting these ticking time bomb penis-bearers on the loose so that they’ll eventually shoot up a school because girls don’t talk to them? Same thing for the other side. The white boys need to feel like the girls are in their games, lesbianizing their waifus while BBCs spraypaint hashtag BNWO on their doorsteps.
We all need to feel like we’re the ones who are either heroes or victims and it’s the people we don’t agree with who are the problem. I believe the Gen Alphas these days call that “main character syndrome”.
Re:
Excuse me, did I imagine republicans trying to pass laws to ban porn or their project 2025 garbage? All of them blatantly say the age verification laws they’re passing now is just the first step towards a full ban, I didn’t decide to imagine them antagonizing me one day to have an excuse to hate conservatives just because.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
Exactly. Anyone trying to sell you this idea that not all men are assholes, or not all straight people are freaks, is a straight man trying to escape the consequences that are finally coming to their over-privileged demographic after a grace period of centuries.
Assume that the OP is Matthew Bennett or Hyman Rosen, flag him into the fucking ground, and move on.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:
Shut up, faggot.
Re: Re: Re:
Did you forget to take your medication today?
Re: Re: Re:2
No, he forgot to bleach his skin today.
Re: Re: Re:2
I did, in fact, have to take my medication.
You want to know why I took my medication? Straight men make me depressed.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re:
FUCK OFF, HYMAN.
TERRORIST. TERRORIST. TERRORIST.
Re:
People just wanting to throw me out a window would be a lot better than the actual situation of banning my healthcare and right to exist in public
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
Please self-terminate, disgusting homosexual.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:
Right back atcha!
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:2
You’re the deviant, not me! Productive straight white men like me rule the world, haven’t you heard?
Re: Re: Re:3
Actually, the country that makes the tech the rest of the world relies on rules the world, and Xi Jinping isn’t white. Also, with how hard he’s cracking down on homosexuality, he seems to be very deep in the closet. How do you like them apples?
Re: Re: Re:
Right back atcha, perv!
I was on Prodigy in the late ’80s, and this checks out.
(Though some aspects of the Internet have gotten worse. Search engines are worse than they were five years ago. I also see an ebb and flow where people seem to have to re-learn the importance of the open Internet over proprietary silos every generation or so. But neither of those things is really what this study is about.)
Re:
People also still cherish time offline, speaking with other people about things they haven’t seen in the internet, or simply spending time on their own, thinking or reading (the old thing still called a book), without a bit of technology (until some device starts bipping to get some attention).
We haven’t became the mindless animals continuously connected to technology we wanted to believe some three decades ago, and we may have become a little bit more knowledgeable thanks to internet; well except the ones on Gap, it seems.
Re: Re:
Being moderately dyslexic, I read ebooks. There’s a reliance on tech for an act as seemingly simple as reading right there. Try again.
There’s something deeply unfashionable and counterintuitive about all of this. The suggestion that online platforms have not single-handedly poisoned public life is entirely out of step with the very political discourse the internet is said to have polluted.
Well, the conversations about online platforms have been going on for a long time…
Outlook
I was wondering what this had to do with the MS mail program. After reading through the article, I re-evaluated the title and re-adjusted my understanding of it.
Note: I read a post last week that MS wants to introduce ads to their mail program and I assumed this article had something to do with it: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/04/surveillance-by-the-new-microsoft-outlook-app.html … I was wrong but in a funny way.
Re:
I didn’t. I went with it because that makes for a funnier comment.
It's the algorithm, stupid
Bizarre to discuss a survey of internet comments as if each one gets equal placement. The outrage algorithm displays the hate and disinformation more often.
Re:
The “outrage algorithm” is what causes people to believe that the internet is worse now, but as the study highlights, that’s not really true.
Re:
The “news networks” did it first.
Re: Re:
However principled, whether for actual profit or not, the currency, the ‘capital’ of all media, from ye olde print to news to social media is attention. All media is out to get/retain attention, or the venture (unless it’s some kinda audienceless dadaist wank) has failed.
I find it helpful to keep in mind.
And, giant slap fights get attention. As per the article, companies don’t have to really do anything to start them, but if they’re not looking further than next quarter’s numbers they’re not super incentivized to stop them, either.
“The wave of shoplifting? Probably didn’t happen.”
I agree. I think all the store closures are due to business’ just not interested in making money anymore.
Re:
” I think all the store closures are due to business’ just not interested in making money anymore.”
Millions of people dying from the pandemic had nothing at all to do with the lack of customers at your business.
/s
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
Yes I saw how 104 million in us alone died from that.that’s more than 1/4 of the population.
I call bullshit.
Re: Re: Re:
I guess everyone agrees with me that the US did not lose 1/4 of its population a few years ago.
Re:
Right, because as we all know, there are only two things that can cause businesses to close: shoplifting and working against themselves.
Re: Re:
You think the stores are lying about why they are closing?
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Propaganda
Some more propaganda… To whoever’s reading, Stop trying to enslave people, Online or Offline! Satan wants us slaved, God wants us Permanently and Completely Free!
The New World Order is nothing more than Satan’s Work.
And they will be brought down!
Re:
Go to bed, Marjorie.
Re:
“Some more propaganda”
At least you chose an honest title for your screed.
Re:
“God wants” Who cares? What the hell do you want?
Re:
Correct.
Re:
Do you believe in heaven? However nice my room might be, if I cannot leave, it is a prison.
At least Outlook has a search function these days. Remember having to install xobni? Oh, not that outlook?
Twitter X is alot worse since it pushes trolls extremists into every comment thread if they pay for a blue check mark
Also people make websites that are full of low quality content that may get search priority over real independent journalism
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re:
And yet my experience with X-Twitter is that it’s BETTER THAN EVER!
Re: Re:
Found the Nazi.
Over time or over time periods?
I’m not sure the study is talking using “over time” as in decades but as in a conversation duration. I can’t find where there is a comparison between decades in the study, but I can find multiple figures using proxies to compare across a conversation lifetime (emphasis mine):
In Extended Data Fig. 4, the lifetime is indicated in days. Moreover, in the discussion (emphasis mine):
It seems that the authors use “time periods” for the evolution between decades, and “time” for the timescale of a single conversation.
Now given that the different subjects and platform data come from different time periods, one could try to infer some information about the evolution of toxicity. And it seems the authors have done that privately (from the quoted Caitlin Dewey newsletter):
But then I wouldn’t use the study as proof of that, only this quote. Unless I missed something in the study?
This sort of thing predates the internet. I would see the same effect on dial-up bulletin board systems in the early 80’s The longer the thread, the more likely some idiot would jump in and derail the conversation with ugly comments.
What are you talking about, my Outlook? I use Android to access the Internet, and access AOL via Opera Mini. Outlook is never involved at any stage of this process.
The internet has gotten worse, just not along the vectors measured.
Re:
Cato the Elder would like to remind you that Carthage must burn.
Re:
Agreed, when discussing the internet getting worse to me it’s not about discourse between individuals, it’s about so many services climbing the enshitification curve so quickly.
It's not just my Outlook that has gotten worse
It is my Word and Excel as well.
Re:
Too late, AC already got there before you.
“The Internet” has always reflected society as a whole.
Makes sense
The internet doesn’t fundamentally change one’s personality or outlook on life, it just exposes it to a wider audience. So ideas and reactions that were once limited to private conversations can become social movements. And social movements are newsworthy — especially when so many outlets are searching for “news”.
OTOH, a study of whether the internet actually makes misinformation more “sticky” due to the congregation of like-thinkers within that wider internet audience would be even more useful.
30 years is still WWW, not plain Internet
I’ve been in discussion groups on the Internet beginning in the seventies. It was all text-based. Moderators were occasionally required to tell participants to tone it down, but not often. Back when users had to have some technical knowledge to get onto the Internet it was pretty much self-regulating. People helping people was actually the case. In the mid nineties, with the Web getting started, things began to change. Web browsers allowed non-technical users to join discussions, and eventually anyone with a computer or phone got involved.
I, of course, miss “the good old days.”
Re:
ORLY?
how to improve the internet
The internet is much nicer with an ad blocker and by avoiding social media. Okay I’m on Nextdoor but that’s just to check for mountain lion sightings. The only actually useful social media platform I’ve ever found.
I don’t think because A is true, you can actually conclude B is true. From this study, at least. Sure, the internet might have always been full of assholes, but the internet hasn’t always been a central part of everyone’s life.
Between 2000, and 2024, internet use among the public grew from about 40% to almost 100%. During the same time, broadband use went from 0% to 80%. Substantially more people are spending more time online.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/
Conversations between individuals have stayed largely the same, sure, I can believe that. But the Internet has gotten worse and more toxic in other ways.
We are seeing a lot more structural toxicity as bigots and other toxic individuals organize or re-organize into full campaigns or gather around provocateurs who tell them what they want to hear, said provocateurs being on YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, Steam, and more.
One horrid thing that this has led to: In the last few months, GamerGate reared its ugly head again in the form of angry right-wing gamers slinging harassment and abuse at writers, writing consultant companies, and community managers. These people are using platforms such as Discord to gather and talk, and then Steam’s Community features to move in and harass and attack the creators and community managers of games. The game South Of Midnight has had its Steam Community Forums inundated with racists. Alongside this, Steam itself doesn’t bat an eye as it lets horrid people such as Alex Jones publish games with racist and conspiratorial messages.
The scale of harassment, the organized nature of it, and the level of permissiveness that platforms are allowing feels like it goes beyond what we’ve seen in the past. KotakuInAction, a GamerGate Subreddit, has been allowed to fester and foment and exist for nearly a decade now because Reddit just refuses to ban it. Even though when they banned other Subreddits like r/fatpeoplehate and another one called r/(racist slur for black people)town, toxicity had gone down site wide.
Reddit also had the opportunity to delete r/the_donald and remove a lot of toxicity from their site when that Subreddit was still active. They only removed it when it was a ghost town. It became a ghost town because Reddit gave them enough time to organize and build out their own website.
So I disagree with the stance of this article. I think the Internet has indeed gotten worse.
Re:
The Ku Klux Klan would like to remind you that they organized cross-burnings just fucking fine without the Internet, emboldened by the Jim Crow bullshit of its era.
Cato the Elder would also like to remind you, from his grave, that Carthage must burn.
Fox News would also like to remind you its sole purpose was to ensure that the Southern Strategy would be a terminal success, and its entire goal is to entrench a Republican Presidency into power, and it didn’t need a stinkin’ Internet to do that, just Nixon and something called Watergate…
Re: Re:
Nothing you said disproved my point.
Re: Re: Re:
Or, to put what I just said simply…
It has never been about the Internet getting worse. (And Mike’s already written on the parts of the Internet that’s getting worse, like search)
The Internet is merely a tool, like cable TV, books, and even swords and guns. It’s how you use said tools that shows a person’s character.
And frankly, humanity has largely been utter SHIT at being decent beings.
You know, what I’m interested in seeing is how the AI decides what is and isn’t “a rude, disrespectful or unreasonable comment likely to make someone leave a discussion”, since many AIs don’t do nuance well if at all, words that might be considered “toxic” indicators now might not have made said conversations so in the past, and depending on what training data was used, may not actually be accurate at all. I think a second study on this same topic using a different AI, or even using humint data collection might be in order.
Obligatory “Hitler” comment.
Crap article; dishonest headline
This article isn’t about “the internet”; it’s about social media.
There used to be a helluva lot of internet that didn’t involve large social media companies. Much of that has consolidated into shitty, large companies. How many forums closed and moved to reddit? Most of them.
The internet is in generally far shittier than it was 10 years ago. Hell, even search was better then.
At the very least, this article’s headline should be changed to make it honest.
I completely disagree with those findings
First, there’s no way to compare the internet of today with the internet of 30 years ago.
Remember, 30 years ago is 1994. Back then, only a fraction of people even had internet access, and then just a fraction of those people even connected to the internet.
When people posted something stupid, it was confined to a single BBS or AOL forum.
Now,when people post crap, it gets spread on Facebook or Twitter to hundreds or millions of people.
Another follow up research topic could be: how many people crave attention by posting on the internet now, versus 30 years ago. Could this craving of attention be related to how much junk is posted and shared?
Re:
Depends where it’s posted and how visible it is to most people. For example, Bratty Matty, Arianity, and andrea iravani post a lot of crap here, and I’ve never seen any of it on Ex-Twitter or Facebook.
Re:
Really? Because nothing in your post actually contradicts any of the data you “completely disagree” with.
Did you read the article, or just the headline?
I suspect part of what’s changed is that we’ve lost hope in the Internet getting better. The early Internet was full of trolls, spam, and the like, but it was thought that was just growing pains and once the Internet reached mass adoption there’d be a new golden age of communication, information, and discourse. Instead all the problems of the early Internet have just gotten worse, the whole thing is increasingly controlled by a handful of people willing and shockingly able to mold the world into what they want, and we’re realizing that humanity is just like this.
Re:
Late-stage capitalism has really fucked us up.
it's always been like this...
The ‘internet’ has been a flame-fest since when I started on Usenet using Pine. It’s no better now. What is different now is that so many users on mainstream sites post content without regard for verification, truth, or balance. It seems like ‘getting clicks’ and ‘going viral’ supersedes any consideration of their reputation, or their integrity. And there are many people monetizing the lies and incitements, spreading any kind of tripe, trash, or lie if they can cash in on it, or con someone by it. There have always been scammers, but now there are “big names” making careers of it, publicly. When did one person’s lie become just as ‘important’ as a verifiable fact from someone else?
” Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” Asimov’s observation did not used to be the basis for careers.
Re:
The Daily Mail was founded on such nonsense.
Fox News was founded to push that sort of anti-intellectual bullshit you spoke of.
The former was founded in 1896. Fox News was founded in 1996, and its brand of anti-intellectual bullshit was being pushed in the mid-1980s.
Cato the Elder would like to remind you, the reader in 2023, from his deathbed, that Carthage must burn. Despite it being burnt several times, and currently does not exist. (Or, would you burn down a suburb of Tunisia just because some dead rich guy politician from the Classical Era told you so?)
The WWW, not the Internet!
I know I’m going uphill here…
You are all talking about things on the WWW, the Web, the layer on top of the Internet.
The Internet provides transport for many things, including the Web.
So tired hearing about how bad The Internet is. it is not bad, it works very well.
Re:
I wasn’t aware that email relied on the Worldwide Web. Who knew?
Re: Re:
Well, email does run on WWW, when you use a web MUA to read and send. The actual messages dealt with by MTA of course go over SSL over TCP these days. But you know that already.
Re: Re: Re:
So how on earth did people receive email spam prior to 1993, then, dipshit?
Re: Re: Re:
Actually, email doesn’t rely on the Worldwide Web at all, but you knew that, disingenuous troll.