SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Critics may accuse President-elect Donald J. Trump and his supporters of dragging down public discourse in America, but civility took leave of open discussions years ago – online. Beneath digital news stories and social media posts are unmoderated, often anonymous comment streams showing in plain view the anger, condescension, misogyny, xenophobia, racism and nativism simmering within the citizenry.
In the early days of the World Wide Web, digital conversation areas were small, disparate, anonymous petri dishes, growing their own online cultures of human goodness as well as darkness. But when virtual forums expanded onto mainstream news sites more than a decade ago, incivility became the dominant force. The people formerly known as the audience used below-the-line public squares to sound off with the same coarse "straight talk" as our current president-elect.
[...] As a scholar of journalism and digital discourse, the crucial point about online comment forums and social media exchanges is that they have allowed us to be not just consumers of news and information, but generators of it ourselves. This also gives us the unbridled ability to say offensive things to wide, general audiences, often without consequences. That's helped blow the lid off society's pressure cooker of political correctness. Doing so on news websites gave disgruntled commenters (and trolls) both a wider audience and a fig leaf of legitimacy. This has contributed to a new, and more toxic, set of norms for online behavior. People don't even need professional news articles to comment on at this point. They can spew at will.
Freedom of speech is only for approved narratives. Miss America explained it best in Bananas.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Wednesday December 28 2016, @08:28PM
I would like to propose that maybe the problem here isn't something about professional narratives vs. real public opinion, or anything about PC at all. The real problem is the "global" part. PC only exists when your audience is too large to know what they actually want. Posting bullshit is only entertaining when a bunch of strangers are going to get butthurt about it.
It cuts both ways. Commenters aren't the only ones with a global voice, after all. Everybody with that much power inevitably wants to use it, and most of us don't really know what it's good for.
I really think that the strongest benefit of SoylentNews is the small size of the community. Make news smaller. Build communities small enough for people to recognize each other frequently. Cross-fertilize those communities to get more perspectives without anonymizing them. The world would be a whole lot better if instead of trying to make our kingdoms bigger, we just had more kingdoms coexisting peacefully.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?