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Linus Torvalds on Social Media: 'It's a Disease. It Seems To Encourage Bad Behavior.' (linuxjournal.com)
From a wide-ranging interview of Linus Torvalds with Linux Journal on the magazine's 25th anniversary: Linux Journal: If you had to fix one thing about the networked world, what would it be?
Linus: Nothing technical. But, I absolutely detest modern "social media" -- Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It's a disease. It seems to encourage bad behavior. I think part of it is something that email shares too, and that I've said before: "On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle". When you're not talking to somebody face to face, and you miss all the normal social cues, it's easy to miss humor and sarcasm, but it's also very easy to overlook the reaction of the recipient, so you get things like flame wars, etc., that might not happen as easily with face-to-face interaction. But email still works. You still have to put in the effort to write it, and there's generally some actual content (technical or otherwise). The whole "liking" and "sharing" model is just garbage. There is no effort and no quality control. In fact, it's all geared to the reverse of quality control, with lowest common denominator targets, and click-bait, and things designed to generate an emotional response, often one of moral outrage.
Add in anonymity, and it's just disgusting. When you don't even put your real name on your garbage (or the garbage you share or like), it really doesn't help. I'm actually one of those people who thinks that anonymity is overrated. Some people confuse privacy and anonymity and think they go hand in hand, and that protecting privacy means that you need to protect anonymity. I think that's wrong. Anonymity is important if you're a whistle-blower, but if you cannot prove your identity, your crazy rant on some social-media platform shouldn't be visible, and you shouldn't be able to share it or like it.
Linux Journal: Is there any advice you'd like to give to young programmers/computer science students?
Linus: I'm actually the worst person to ask. I knew I was interested in math and computers since an early age, and I was largely self-taught until university. And everything I did was fairly self-driven. So I don't understand the problems people face when they say "what should I do?" It's not where I came from at all.
Linus: Nothing technical. But, I absolutely detest modern "social media" -- Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It's a disease. It seems to encourage bad behavior. I think part of it is something that email shares too, and that I've said before: "On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle". When you're not talking to somebody face to face, and you miss all the normal social cues, it's easy to miss humor and sarcasm, but it's also very easy to overlook the reaction of the recipient, so you get things like flame wars, etc., that might not happen as easily with face-to-face interaction. But email still works. You still have to put in the effort to write it, and there's generally some actual content (technical or otherwise). The whole "liking" and "sharing" model is just garbage. There is no effort and no quality control. In fact, it's all geared to the reverse of quality control, with lowest common denominator targets, and click-bait, and things designed to generate an emotional response, often one of moral outrage.
Add in anonymity, and it's just disgusting. When you don't even put your real name on your garbage (or the garbage you share or like), it really doesn't help. I'm actually one of those people who thinks that anonymity is overrated. Some people confuse privacy and anonymity and think they go hand in hand, and that protecting privacy means that you need to protect anonymity. I think that's wrong. Anonymity is important if you're a whistle-blower, but if you cannot prove your identity, your crazy rant on some social-media platform shouldn't be visible, and you shouldn't be able to share it or like it.
Linux Journal: Is there any advice you'd like to give to young programmers/computer science students?
Linus: I'm actually the worst person to ask. I knew I was interested in math and computers since an early age, and I was largely self-taught until university. And everything I did was fairly self-driven. So I don't understand the problems people face when they say "what should I do?" It's not where I came from at all.
I knew I was interested in math and computers since an early age, and I was largely self-taught until university. And everything I did was fairly self-driven. So I don't understand the problems people face when they say "what should I do?"
So the advice he's really giving here, just in a roundabout way, is "Do what you like".
That is, if some aspect of computer technology is not complying enough that you want to try and work with it for fun, move around until you find something that does so move you.
I would say there are a lot more areas to explore now than there used to be when studying CS, so it's easier for younger students to feel a bit lost and not really know what to do. Explore niches and find out what is naturally fun and interesting, even better if it cross-correlates with any other interests you have.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Did they actually interview Linus? He wasn't calling anyone stupid or ugly in his response, so I can't be sure that it was actually him.
This should be construed as sarcasm, in case you couldn't hear me being subtle.
... the reality is the internet has shown us the true face of the human race - everyones reality is right and it's those other guys who are incorrect. It has been the average human being and the masses getting internet. We've seen everyone come online over the last 20 years.
Watching the last 20 years of slashdot comments has been surreal. The rise in anti intellectualism as more normal people came online and the dumbest shit you can possibly imagine getting upvoted. The outright destruction of PC gaming and the masses falling on their own sword and falling for the mmo scam, drm and steam. As an original nerd from the 90's, the masses getting internet has just shown us how stupid the human race is from every class and every walk of life.
Everything PC nerds in the 90's were worried about came true, and what a gift the internet has been to the corporate world that the average human being is so uncaring and unflinchingly stupid, they'd literally bend over to have their rights and freedoms taken away but do so willingly.
I guess we don't encourage bad behavior.
Thank you Linus for saving me from becomming nuts. I'm so happy to find out i'm not the only one - that's trying to avoid at a high cost these awful social media. Thank you for linux - thank you for this kind supportive message.
That is, if some aspect of computer technology is not complying enough that you want to try and work with it for fun, move around until you find something that does so move you.
I think this is applicable to any relatively technical profession. I remember seeing an ad for a home computer (Atari?) when I was 7 and I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. Been hooked since then. I hear similar stories with doctors, lawyers, etc... If it doesn't grab your attention right away, it's probably not worth the investment in time and money to figure out, once you have a JD or MD or BS in CS, that it's just not that interesting enough. IE, if you aren't sure right away, then the answer is probably no. Not always, but usually.
Emails are rude to one person or a small group, and probably between people that know each other to some degree. Social media is broadcast worldwide. Linus even points out that email has some of the same problems for the same reasons.
I don't think Linus would disagree that he's often an utter prick either. In most cases I think he fully intends to be.
It's important to remember that the crappy stuff is what we tend to hear about. Meanwhile 3+ nines of usage of these platforms is perfectly bland, uninteresting, and useful. Facebook has been a great tool for keeping in touch with my dispersed sisters. No one is forcing me to read a bunch of empty shitposts, and I don't. I used to avoid Twitter until a colleague demonstrated how it could be very useful as an information source for our job. The majority of usage on these platforms is all like this, not very interesting. But the shitposts get all the attention. It's much like when I used to work in a bookstore. Co-workers used to complain all day about how these 'stupid customers' could not put books back in the right place. I admit, I made that mistake too, until one day a mentor told me to look at how many people came in and out of that store every day (I date myself, this was pre-Amazon) and think about how few actually put the book back wrong or some other annoying thing. Come to think of it, that little piece of advice may have turned my life around..anyway, stop being such a negative nellie.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
"if you cannot prove your identity, your crazy rant on some social-media platform shouldn't be visible, and you shouldn't be able to share it or like it"
In about 99% of the cases, I do have to agree with him. Anonymity is abused. Someone who wants to spew hate, drop f-bombs, disrupt discussions with ad hominem attacks - they almost always hide behind anonymity. If they acted like that IRL, someone would punch them. Make them put their real name* to their posts, they might moderate their speech, and add in some politeness and discussion.
The practical problem is: how do you allow speech by true whistleblowers, or by other people in a position where they genuinely cannot speak with their own voice? How can a platform allow them to use true anonymity, without allowing it for the ACs? I don't think it's really possible. Moderation systems like /. or Soylent are the best compromise I've seen: start ACs with less visibility, and let mods raise them or bury them. It's not ideal, but it's better than almost any other system I've seen.
*Yes, I practice what I preach: my pseudonym leads pretty directly to my real identity, and that is not an accident. It's just difficult enough to dissuade most trolls...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Poe's law, in the e-flesh. Well played, sir.
A distinction with Linus is that generally he calls some piece of CODE ugly or stupid, not a -person-. In the vast majority of cases, anyway. I've written a lot of stupid code, and I'll call my own stupid code stupid. I've written code that has a comment saying "this is ugly, but don't try to fix it because ....".
I've written plenty of stupid and ugly code. I'm not stupid*. I think in Linus's mind that distinction is so obvious that he forgets it's not so obvious to some other people. He forgets that other people take "this code is still crap" as a -personal-insult; they hear him saying something about them, as opposed to saying something about the code. That's normal. It's just not how Linus thinks, and I personally have had to practice keeping in mind that people take things personally. -I- don't mind if you tell me my Makefile is goofy ASF. It probably is. That doesn't inply anything about me, other than that I'm not the King Guru of makefiles.
* I am ugly
The problem with social media seems largely that we have not have time for the culture to learn what are helpful and unhelpful ways to use it. We just assumed it was wonderful and everyone should be on Facebook. Slowly a set of principles will develop about how to use the new media and parents will teach their children to use it wisely. But the first decade of social media has indeed been a disaster as Linus indicates.
Linus giving lessons on subtlety of language and expression, lol. Social media was precisely made for screaming zealots like Linus Torvalds.
were no different than current social media.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
"Do what you like" will leave you with lifelong debt and a degree that leaves you completely unemployable.
Few are far between are people who have an authentic passion for something that pays well.
If you are considering a degree in a field with a completely saturated job market, think again. On the one hand, every single one of the successes in that field will go on and on about how they stuck with it and persisted. And it makes you think "all I have to do is stick with it and persist!" But it is not true, because for every one of them, there are thousands of others who were just as talented and persisted just as long and wound up going broke and eventually burning out. Because there just aren't enough slots for everyone.
It isn't a feel-good thought, but most of the work that provides stability and income is work that people don't enjoy doing. Find something you don't hate, that gets your hands dirty, and you will be WAY better off than chasing that dream of being a journalist.
1) Requiring someone to know at least three programming languages by the end of high school is a particularly idiotic form of gate keeping because it ensures that everyone who 'passes' has wasted their time learning the syntax for various languages rather than actually learning how to program in those languages.
2) Nobody has ever said "must know three programming languages" is sexist and nobody would. That's entirely in your imagination.
3) Nobody has claimed college is faster than self-training. It is, however, more thorough and forces you to study subjects you would otherwise skip and forces you to follow through with projects rather than abandoning them. The breadth of knowledge and discipline that you have to develop to get the degree is what people value about college over self-training.
Many flavors of social media are not broadcast to the world. Some do.
Not advocating it, but ultimately Facebook allows you to choose who your message reaches.
One of my more favorite social networks is /. And it is one of those that is broadcast to the world.
Caution: Contents under pressure
One person's "rational statement" is another person's "crazy rant". Defending the Second Amendment or each state having (as the Constitution specifies) equal suffrage in the Senate or deportation of illegal immigrants would qualify as "crazy rants" in some circles and companies.
In a world where technology companies have gone overboard with political and societal issues unrelated to their product, anyone who doesn't adhere to the hive-mind is putting their career at risk by posting under their real identities. It's easy for Torvalds to take this stance as he doesn't need to work for anyone else on a regular basis and he's already known as a "flaming asshole" (which, by the way, was something I used to like about him -- as a thought leader in his area, he made high contrast statements without sugercoating which got the message across to all much more effectively than carefully worded "policy statements" and advice to "you may want reconsider introducing an error not previously returned by an API").
So, no, it's not just whistle-blowers who should enjoy anonymity. Apparently when Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay were publishing the Federalist Papers under the anonymous pseudonym "Publius" they didn't think so either.
Of course, being a native Finn, perhaps Torvalds doesn't quite grok a diverse culture for some reason.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
It's not possible. The trolls are a relatively small percentage of the "problem." The bigger "problem" is that what half of the population sees as legitimate whistleblowing, the other half sees as toxicity that must be silenced and the perpetrators unmasked and banned.
On a meta level, the problem is that we're trying to assign categories to speech based on how we perceive it, rather than on the intent with which it's said. What's sounds like a legitimate anonymous complaint to one person is toxic speech to someone else. Speech really needs to be assessed on the basis of the intent of the speaker, not on how the speech makes you feel. The PC crowd is the one most guilty of this. Someone finds "Negro" printed on their sofa and gets all offended, and sympathetic PC advocates in the media make the story go national. When "negro" is the Spanish word for "black", and the (black) sofa was manufactured in a Spanish-speaking country. Prioritizing people's reaction to the word over the intent with which the word was printed creates a non-existent racial offense.
If you could magically know the speaker's intent, you would know if they're a troll, or if they were being genuine in what they're saying. Unfortunately there is no magic that can tell you this (though occasionally you can tease it out through logical gymnastics - a troll will sometimes exhibit behavior contradictory to if they actually believe what they say). But people are unsatisfied with calling this an unsolvable problem. So they keep trying to solve it by insisting on judging speech based on how the speech is perceived by others.
Well, if you're going to that, then the only metric which works is whether anyone judges the anonymous speech to be useful to them. And if so, then the speech should be allowed. Which is the inverse of the standard currently being used - where people try to get it banned if anyone gets offended by it. If you carry that standard out to its logical conclusion, all speech will be banned because someone, somewhere will be offended by anything that's said.
I absolutely detest modern "social media" -- Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It's a disease. It seems to encourage bad behavior.
Couldn't have been said any better. This 100% on the mark. Now let's start discussing the cure.
I don't think taking away anonymity for everyone is going to help very much. So let's just skip that thought.
Quite frankly, my only idea is to just shut all that stuff down. It's ills far outweigh it's benefits.
Here's the thing:
I'm not an expert at everything - and I KNOW that.
That's awesome because thinking "don't know" equals "stupid" PREVENTS learning.
I'm not under the delusion that I'm an expert at everything, or that I'm supposed to be. I'm grateful that nobody ever put into
my head the idea that if I have room to learn, I suck, or am stupid. I would hate to have that wrong idea because a need to insist that you know everything prevents learning.
I can't count the number of times there has been discussion here on Slashdot and somebody posts a mistaken idea of what the law is. That's fine, if they aren't an employment attorney, they aren't SUPPOSED to know everything about employment law. I'll post the actual text of the law and far too often the person who guessed wrong gets defensive and has to try to argue that the law doesn't say what it says. The actual text of the law is "employers may not ..." and they feel the need to argue it means "employers must", just because that was their first guess. They completely miss the opportunity to learn anything.
They have this crazy idea that if they were wrong, that means they're stupid, so they will go to any length to avoid recognizing that their first try was wrong, and therefore learning something. Thinking they are supposed to already know prevents them from ever knowing. Being afraid of LOOKING stupid ensures they permanently ARE stupid.
A couple of hours ago I posted a messages in my company chat practically beggingmy new co-workers to tell me what's not very good about the work I just did at my new job. I did that because I want to improve it. I would my work to *actually* be good, so I want to know how to improve it, rather than me just pretending it's good. Why? Because of how and why I got hired here.
At my last job, two months ago, I was teaching classes, making presentations to educate co-workers about security and programming topics, with a side-dish of law. I really enjoyed doing that and wanted to do more of it, but I knew I wasn't great at it. I earnestly asked my co-workers / students for feedback after every presentation, telling them I needed their help to improve. Three weeks ago I landed what may be my dream job. I'll now spend my days mentoring my a thousand programmers on security and creating robust software systems - and getting paid quite well to do it. I got this job because I was able to talk about how I had taught programmers at my last job, the successes in mentoring. I never would have had success mentoring if I wasn't constantly asking co-workers to tell me how they think I could improve.
> It IS a personal insult if you put all your best effort into something and the immediate reaction from the receiver is that it is stupid.
There are a lot of smart people here on Slashdot.
If you handed out cadavers to all of us and had us "put all our best effort" into a practice brain surgery, approximately 100% of us would make several major mistakes.
Not because we're stupid, because we haven't mastered the application of a specific skill in a particular context.
Stupid people can do things well. For example, a lot of idiots are good at getting elected. Stephen Hawking is brilliant, and his cake decorating really, really sucks. He's smart, he hasn't mastered the particular skills of cake decorating.
Smart is having the ability to learn. Stupid is not learning.
Bottom line, here's the difference between smart people and stupid people.
When they become aware that they did something stupid:
Smart people learn from it and then know next time.
Stupid people get offended.
No I think it's quite different. Linus has never been an attention whore, posting silly content for the sake of increasing his popularity. He cursed a lot of times in a way that wasn't subtle, sure, but the goal was not to increase his popularity or lower that of a competing guy, which seems to be the primary goal of social media. That's the tragedy of social media: it encourages to focus on the links instead of the content, up to the point where negative content creates more links and is thus more valuable than anything else. That's a damn low SNR.
Disclaimer: I don't do social networks, and I've never seen anything tagged social media in the regular press that I have found positive or worth anything.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
I remember seeing an ad for a home computer (Atari?) when I was 7 and I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.
So where are the ads for openly programmable computers these days? I keep seeing phones/tablets which seem to be targeted for social media consumption, and gaming PCs which are likewise consumption-oriented. Well, there's also the middle ground of somewhat regular laptops aimed at students for light coursework. But the excitement of writing your own code is nowhere to be seen. I could see this was already hard in the 90s with Windows, where everything is hidden and the "users" are separated from "developers" as much as possible, but it's looking much harder now.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
If I provide my real name, my reputation just might make you believe the subject. Alternatively, it might make you *disbelieve* that 2+2=4. That's how propaganda works. The only reason we're paying attention at all is because it's Linus. Let's see some AC put forth a good argument against anonymity. If it's a compelling argument, it won't matter that it's an AC.
Otherwise though I agree with him about simple thumbs up/down and re-tweet being garbage. That's why I'm still here, still pseudonymous after all these years. It's stood the test of time better than sites that require your real name, and better than sites that try to distill everything into a simple up/down vote, and sometimes, Sometimes, ACs put forth the best arguments right on this very site..
I submit this site as empirical evidence against his opposition to anonymity, and for his arguments against simpler moderation and sharing schemes.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Did Linus say that, or was that Accujack, commenting on Linus's words (on Reddit in 2013)?
Accujack's "brain dead" comment was his reaction to Linus's 2007 response to a troll saying it's "bullshit" that Linux didn't write git in C++. Linus's actual response to the troll explained what the technical problems are with C++ for such an application, and did mention that C++, in it's brokenness, does attract less capable programmers.
I'll skip the technical details and quote the part where Linus wasn't being very nice:
--
C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.
[Technical details of problems with C++]
So I'm sorry, but for something like git, where efficiency was a primary objective, the "advantages" of C++ is just a huge mistake. The fact that we also piss off people who cannot see that is just a big additional advantage.
If you want a VCS that is written in C++, go play with Monotone. Really. They use a "real database". They use "nice object-oriented libraries". They use "nice C++ abstractions".
--
Linus wasn't super nice to the person who called his work bullshit, and he did NOT say all C++ programmers are braindead. That was Accujack who said that, six years later.
Congratulations on proving Linus Torvalds correct.
It's trivial to not use a real name on Facebook, and I assume it's true elsewhere.
Linus underestimates the psychological damage you do to yourself when posting with your name. Facebook exploits this human trait like sugar industry exploits our being wired to get as much historically rare carbs as possible.
This is a most insightful comment. Social media is looking more and more like a shared psychosis. Even a cursory study of the reward related dopamine responses in the brain with respect to UI behavior reveals what FB is doing to make people addicted.
In time I suspect that social media will be recognized as toxic as smoking.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The maker movement, arduino, and raspberry pi. Those communities are full of the excitement of not only writing your own code, but writing code that interfaces with the physical world. They're also very affordable, and much more welcoming and accessible than many of the old machines some of us grew up on.
As someone who grew up with a trash 80, survived the rise of windows, and recently returned to hobby electronics/robotics/programming, I can tell you with no uncertainty that playing with tech is much more accessible and affordable now than it was back in my day.