Social networks are no longer social
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For me, social network stopped being social as soon as reasonable assurance of anonymity when out the window once companies started pressuring people use their real identity, and that became the norm.
Just be careful, because if you are using Facebook with Tor, you run the risk of outing your real identity from things like your social graph, search queries, likes, and other metadata.
I’m not sure how I feel about this…
Be careful... some cell providers use IPv6 these days. T-Mobile US gives me an IPv6 address and a 192.0.0.x CGNAT address.
You can’t be anonymous from Facebook or from Facebook users (with or without Tor) without violating its ToS and worrying about being blocked and asked to prove your real/authentic identity if you piss off some random person online or get flagged by one of its bots that check accounts periodically.
In the case of Facebook you will probably not get flagged even when you are a complete jackass, anonymous or not. Twenty percent of the userbase would disappear
Now we realize that real life social structures were 1) seasoned 2) nicer and social networks are reinventing all the problems, but amplified by speed and scale. And also weird companies interests and paradigms, that weren't meshing well with us.
I'm getting fuzzy ..
Heck, I wrote a Dutch online book about Slackware with a guy I didn't really know the name of until after a couple of years when he told me he just used a pseudonym.
For me, social network stopped being social as soon as reasonable assurance of anonymity when out the window
To me it is the introduction of likes (which are really a hack to make people more addicted through social confirmation) destroyed social networks. Shallower posts (party pictures, family announcements, memes) to get more likes, so people post them more and more. Genuinely interesting posts are buried by algorithms. Since comments can be liked as well, people write comments to conform with group biases (and are more likely to be upvoted) rather than to be useful.
tl;dr: to increase engagement, social networks have turned into popularity contests. As with other popularity contests, they are usually vain.
The idea of "engagement" as a key metric for some of these services is bizarre. When Netflix changed from 5-star ratings to like/dislike to "increase engagement", the usefulness of ratings on the site plummeted. I will take a single, considered review over thousands of mindless "+1" clicks any day of the week.
Emoji "reactions" are like that too. They're fun to click on, but are all noise and no signal if you actually want feedback.
I'm not sure how true this is with cheap(ish) subscription services. In many cases, the Planet Fitness model might be more apt. They rely on inertia and apathy to keep the subscription payments coming, but they actually rely on people not using the service very much and actively discourage "power-user" usage patterns.
That's true, but it's also true that in the next town over, you can be anonymous again. The difference with social media is the profile follows you everywhere.
You can be anonymous in a city.
It's the writing style - it feels like a cheap thriller written for teens. Too many characters and cheap tricks to 'educate' the reader about technical mumbo-jumbo.
Of course, this is my very subjective opinion. But having read enough PKD and Gaiman, my expectations are different than may be majority of the readers.
Boy those ad designs on the new layout sure are starting to look like regular posts. I’m sure it won’t get any worse, right?
That adage about boiling the frog by slowly upping the temperature so it doesn't notice probably applies here
not on iOS
Agreed; it seems like I'm having to re-opt out every day, at least once a day. I haven't figured out if it is a setting in the subs' that I read (maybe something in their themes?) or something on my end.
It's funny how in the early days of the internet, everyone was so open and honest about who they are that it was very common for their e-mail messages, Usenet posts, finger plans, etc... to have their real names, home and/or work addresses, and home and/or work phone numbers.
Then the scammers discovered the internet, and everyone had to dummy up about who they are.
Then the corporations got involved, and decided to use "AI" unmask everyone and sell that information back to the scammers.
I wonder what the next move is. Maybe we should all go back to blatantly stating who we are to make the corporations' information gathering worthless.
Google doesn't stop at your name and address, in fact that's not even what they are mainly interested in. Revealing your identifying information would just open yourself up to harassment, especially when a tech company leaks the top 10,000 list of the most-likely-to-buy customers of some embarrassing product.
Well yes, that would devalue your name/address details, so they'd shift to more invasive approaches like reading your emails and messages, bugging your person and/or home, tracking your financial transactions, etc.
Credit ratings from the 3 major providers are used by banks to assess credit worthlessness of personal loans. Naturally, the more data these firms have on people the better they can rate (perceived) risk. These 'data controllers' serve banks and corporations who make their billions on loans.
Disruption is not welcome. Anyone remember occupie wallst ?
Credit ratings of individuals (Equifax) are unrelated to credit ratings provided by companies such as Moody's for corporate and government bonds.
> Credit ratings of individuals (Equifax) are unrelated to credit ratings provided by companies such as Moody's for corporate and government bonds.
It depends on how you look at it. They'll all part of the larger financial/banking industry.
It was a mixed bag then and a mixed bag now. In usenet, some people were very open and some were already anonymous. On webboards, anonymity was more common but plenty of folks still put out their real name.
One of Facebook's selling point, how it got a significant fraction of the US population online at all, was presenting the (false) impression that you could safely use your real ID online.
And talking about this stuff, it's important to realize that until say 2008-2010, you had a process of more of the population getting online, so those online in the 90s were by definition outliers and didn't have "typical for everyone" experiences.
Not really. I mean, yes, on one hand, yes. On the other hand, places for open-topic discussions explicitly allowed fake names and nicknames.
The best timeframe on the internet I can remember was when everything you needed was a nickname of your choice and an email account somewhere.
If anything went wrong, you could just drop everything, get a new pair of nickname/address and start anew.
I got my first modem in 1985. I racked up a $300 phone bill my first month calling bulletin boards exchanging messages and software with people all over the world. My parents took my modem from me until I paid off the debt.
I’ve been on dozens of forums with topics I’m interested in over the last 3.5 decades. I’ve used every kind of internet communication including Usenet, irc, web, etc.
There’s no reason to miss the early days. Those special interest forums are still out there with lots of activity. Just look for them! I’ll take today’s ease of communication any day over having to dial up with a 300 baud modem to a single-person-at-a-time BBS.
That's an issue in itself. Google used to have a "discussion" search feature you could use to find a search term in forum posts. Now, that feature is gone. Social media content is highly prioritized and incentivized.
Forum discoverability was better in the past. Now, if you search for a community, you'll find a half-dozen Facebook groups, its Twitter feed, a subreddit, its G+ counterpart and YouTube videos.
Trivialities are fine. I just wish there was a language (as in, spoken language not profanity) and NSFW filter.
When everyone's identified, only the crazies and extremists truly speak their mind - they don't care about offending anyone.
You might end up with a mix of crazies and extremist "thought leaders" with packs of quiet followers - a suppression of the moderates and deep thinkers.
It didn't work. It just deterred me from commenting at all, and when I did comment I think I was more terse and condescending than usual. I'm not sure why, but I wonder if maybe in anonymous forums I kind of just assumed a lot of the stupid things being said were by edgy teenagers. I was inclined to be patient with them or write them off since I just sort of assumed they were too young to know better and would grow out of it. But once you see the profile pictures of the people posting, and they're grown ass men who really ought to know better, it's much harder to be nice because you know these peoples' horrible beliefs have consequences.
Although to your last point, I don't think following thought leaders is such a bad thing. I mean, we have been following crazies for as long as humans have history.
A minimum of pseudo anonymity that holds people accountable for what they say is an important part of enforcing a healthy community of people making good faith arguments.
First, size. Although I can't speak to "modern" (say, post-2012) 4chan due to lack of firsthand experience, prior to then many of the smaller boards were actually quite nice places for serious discussion of their subject matter. /out/ (outdoors), /m/ (mecha), /n/ (transportation), and even some of the text boards like /prog/ were all fairly high quality due to their strong, persistent board cultures that discouraged pointless shitposting and encouraged actual contribution and dialogue. In each case, the ratio of new contributors to old hands was low enough to allow these board cultures to perpetuate and maintain quality. For example, when a community is small enough that many participants will have personally witnessed the debunking of a set of claims, reposting the same crap will be minimally effective. This dynamic breaks down at size, and it's easy to see how increased traffic over the years leads to the erosion of communities that rely on their small size for their quality.
That's where the other factor comes into play: quality of moderation. Despite being much larger and faster than the aforementioned slow boards, /a/ was quite good for a long period of time, largely thanks to very aggressive moderation. Low tolerance for off-topic content (especially anything with the scent of /pol/ on it) enforced a strong culture of topical, relatively thoughtful discourse. As one of the handful of places where you could discuss anime way too seriously without being hampered by those troublesome Naruto-watching non-elitists, old-/a/ produced a mind-boggling amount of in-depth textual analysis, especially of popular and controversial works like the F/SN VN. This was in large part due to the differences between the predominant pseudoanonymous forum-based model and the anonymous discussion model that aimed to address the deficiencies of the former. For example, a blight of old forums was circlejerking around the opinions of established members. Some guy, possibly a mod, would have a pet theory or position and everyone else had damn well better fall in line because he's got 20k posts and/or will ban anyone who disagrees. Crap like that wasn't universal, but it was a major issue with a lot of forum communities. Minus the persistent egos, discussion was allowed to progress. I think we let nostalgia blind us to a lot of the problems that afflicted old forum communities - the reasons that led folks to anonymous imageboards in the first place. Eventually, though, the pattern of strong moderation that enabled high-quality anonymous discussion fell by the wayside.
What caused that, though? Having spoken with a variety of janitors over the years, the common thread is that the ability to trivially ban evade via mobile connection (especially ipv6) DHCP pools basically destroyed the mod team's ability to quash bad actors. Ban evasion was always a problem, but prior to the emergence of phoneposting it took a lot more effort and was easier to combat. Banning known proxies and tor exit nodes is a pain, but banning mobile carrier IP ranges is a non-starter. This led to a general sense of resignation, which in turn translated to less-aggressive moderation and a decline in quality.
What I'm really getting at is that discarding the lessons learned about what makes an anonymous discussion system good or not just because the overall experiment didn't pan out is unfortunate, and that all hope isn't necessarily lost. For instance, an anonymous community with a barrier to entry (say, a SA/metafilter-type entry fee, where your ability to post anonymously is contingent upon not getting your paid account banned) could address the issues of size and moderation while maintaining the freedom-of-expression benefits of the anonymous model. The hard part there is bootstrapping - nobody wants to pay to participate in a yet-unpopulated community whose moderation model/community culture isn't a guaranteed personal fit, but opening it up initially to develop a userbase exposes it to the Gab/Voat problem.
The point is that they aren't stored anywhere and disappeared once they were finished.
Over here I've been told that I can't have more than one account to post things I don't want associated with me in public. Give that I have a more than even chance I will work in some regime that takes offense to many things I might say, e.g. that I theoretically support LGBT rights, I just don't talk about anything remotely controversial.
But people with real knowledge eventually grow tired of sharing that information with a userbase that is happy to discuss which programming language has the best Hello World, whether Good Eats or Food Wishes is better for someone that has grown tired of ramen noodles, how to get into starting strength, which JR pass to buy on a first trip to Japan, etc.
The discussions don't seem shallow when the topics are new but they hardly ever get in depth because of the fact that the posts are fleeting outside of information contained in the sticky. There is very little point in having anything besides shallow discussion because it is ultimately a waste of time to constantly rehash the actual relevant and deep information you just posted a couple days.
This is when the users are in more or less well behaved forums. You go into some of the more trolly boards and the conversation just degrades even further.
Reddit has its own issues with people posting stuff just for likes and refusing to disagree for fear of losing internet points, but the actual content on the site is far superior to 4chan at this point, even though they started off by basically stealing all the interesting meme content from 4chan. There is actual useful information all throughout Reddit, even though I don't particularly like the community as a whole.
I would really like to hear why you think either site comes close to the discussion on hackernews however. This is easily the most civil and well moderated large site I've been on in a long while.
I ended up getting 100% on that coursework.
4 chan is like a piggie bank. You get out of it what you put in.
So I'll go ahead and do my simple maintenance routine that can be communicated in a 5 x 4 table while redditors read high school tier essays about how calorie io is a flawed paradigm and long-term weight loss isn't possible.
What really devastated so much of the pre-social-network internet is erosion of this practice, in my opinion.
I use Facebook for this 75-80% of the time. A few IRL friends communicate with my account but it's mostly about common interests with people spread across the world. I did this in various web boards before Facebook but Facebook is better, more people with my common interests are gathered in one place, better debate happens, discovery is easier and so-forth.
But that's how I've systematically worked to use Facebook. I run a group where I enforce civility ruthlessly, banning all trolls in an otherwise troll-heavy part of the site.
Facebook is a factor because it allows better interest-discovery than other sites and it's easier to compete with admins who allowing trolling just by creating a group and being better (where starting a competing web-board was hard).
This might not be how most people experience FB but remember, the board users were only a small fraction of the population also.
Edit: Hot tip, Facebook doesn't make much of an effort to enforce real names. A little, certainly but not much. Most people today don't get the value or need for anonymous accounts. That was true before Facebook too but then the majority simply hesitated to get online at all. I'm not sure if this is a matter of education or psychology, whether this will ever change or not.
It's certainly easy to say that until you get requested for an ID, being locked out all your activities and friends until you compromise your privacy.
It was one of the default applications installed in all computer in the labs at University. And it was very common at the time to use its search function to seek out random people and chat.
I wouldn't get too rose colored glasses about that era of computing though, flame wars were nothing new (and there's still probably some Usenet flamewars that continue to rage uninterrupted for decades.)
That's what HN is to me right now. Yeah it's not truly anonymous but almost everyone here's a stranger to me and I have some wonderful discourse with like-minded perceptive folks any time I visit.
Also reddit to a lesser degree but more experienced redditors than myself this is diminishing I don't fully understand that point
There are many great forums, and Reddit is still reasonable despite the trouble.
Some sites, Quora, Facebook, et al. are using real name policies with mixed results.
Facebook is mostly a negative for me, though I do enjoy a few private groups.
Quora, of the real names experiments, has actually been a reasonable experience. 8 was early to the platform and many of us early on made strong efforts to set good norms around real names. A lot of that worked well.
It is working a little less well at big scale, though like I said, not bad. Sometimes more authoritarian than I prefer. The new spaces feature is a big test. Could be real names Reddit. Hmmm...
Having tried all extremes, I frankly still prefer pseudonyms. Handling trolls and such is not too big of a deal, and minor league for me personally.
The number one thing one can do to innoculate a community against trolling is to educate members on agency in dialog and model strong norms as to how that can work.
(People have more options than the usual righteous indignation and when they use them, trolling becomes largely ineffective as does "bitings" of varioys kinds)
Avoiding the bigger venues leaves one with mostly the same basic experiences that have always had value.
Typed on mobile, plz forgive typos
I've long been cautious to step into the WhatsApp hysteria going on here in Brazil. But the last (disgraceful) election here was the last straw. The level of stupidity in the memes from both sides was far beyond repulsive.
A solution that is working so far: automatic regulation. I created a Telegram group with a bot that censors the most common names and expressions on Brazilian partisan politics, using regular expressions. It is surprisingly effective, in a "no broken windows way": if you block the small infractions people don't come close to big infractions.
Breaking rules is a second national pastime in Brazil. Therefore, at the beginning people found it amusing to try to cheat the censoring regular expressions (e.g.: B0150N4R0, etc) After a while the trick only sharpened these expressions and now they just don't mention politics in the most partisan terms. We do see postings about issues (e.g.: education, fiscal crisis, etc) but not the stupid partisan dogfight. Politics is mostly a tribal thing, not an ideological one.
EDIT: I'd like to stress the "automatic" aspect of it. When you make the regulation/moderation algorithmic you gain 2 big psychological benefits:
* A fast feedback loop: because the post is immediately removed the association between cause and effect is much stronger. People understand much more that they are breaking a rule when the consequences of it are certain and immediate.
* Algorithmic solutions are "rules based" for most people that don't understand them. They perceive it as "the way things are" instead of an arbitrary decision by the person that wrote the algorithm.
Did you notice any improvement on the level of discussion? Or do they just reacted different with each other posts?
Also, do you just censor the keyword or remove the post entirely?
> Did you notice any improvement on the level of discussion?
So far, people are still on a "treading the waters"/"sensing the environment" period. But I sense that:
* The posts tangent to politics don't immediately trigger a knee jerk reaction. Surprisingly, when people discuss politics in a more abstract way, there is a lot more "I agree with you" between people that used to fight a lot. I count this as an improvement, although it is too early to see an increase of depth of understanding on the issues.
* In the beginning some people complained about my heavy-handed approach, calling it censorship and authoritarianism. I just didn't engage in their complaints. My standard response was "my house, my rules".
* There is a lot more of light-heart, especially among the younger ones. Childish jokes and memes are still around, but nothing offensive. In friends and family groups it is ok, these are habits I don't want to break.
> Also, do you just censor the keyword or remove the post entirely?
I remove the post and post a standard bot answer. Often, the bot gives some false positives, but people find it funny (e.g: "PT" is the acronym for both the main opposition political party and for "total loss" in Portuguese). Because I use regular expressions, people started a game of trying to outsmart the bot. Since it was for fun, it only helped sharpen up the expressions.
Politics is not an innocent team sport with few/no consequences for the losing side. Figuring out where to draw the line requires a deep understanding of what is politicized and why.
How did you handle simple substitutions and noise like rethuglicans -> rethug1icans or rethuglicans -> re.thug.licans?
It will not handle some of them. But I discovered that partisan politics follow a Pareto rule, of sorts: 80% of the talk is around a small set of words. If you remove the adequate 80%, what remains is very ineffective, grotesque and pathetic communication. It is not enough to get people excited or willing to fight.
The tricky parts is to keep changing the set of words and regular expressions. Particularly on the months before an election the terms to filter go through intense change. After that they remain very stable.
Edit: I am trying now to use the Levenshtein distance[1] algorithm to preemptively detect the tricks you describe, of people deliberately changing some word in order to fool the regular expressions.
The most scalable defenses against exploitation of social networks will be distributed cultural notions of etiquette, self determination and even hygiene - not instantly-out-of-date regulation or even technological solutions (although a strong cultural take on owning your information landscape will inspire it's own technical opportunities)
I hope my kids will find it kind of gross and embarrassing to be caught up in somebody's disinformation, rather than lending it credibility as enemy action.
> Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90's. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet. Looking back now, their early attempts look ridiculous and doomed to failure, for we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good.
> But at the time no one knew what it would feel like to have a big global network. We were all waiting for the Information Superhighway to arrive in our TV set, and meanwhile these big sites were trying to design an online experience from the ground up. Thank God we left ourselves the freedom to blunder into the series of fortuitous decisions that gave us the Web.
> My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button. It's just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online.
Let me introduce you to The Private Group Chat where 90% of online social activity happens between people under 30. It’s rrally quite fascinating.
It’s everything Google+ wanted to be, but totally organic, apread over dozens of chat apps and services, and without the big brother oversight.
Perhaps the best answer you can get here is "no." That's exactly what the privacy advocates would want to hear, yet the phenomenon is very real.
I'm in my mid-30s but almost all of my social networking with younger colleagues/friends is done via ephemeral group chats (Snapchat) and Signal. I keep a business Twitter and personal Facebook like everyone else, but any substantial communication is moved offline to encrypted and less-trackable methods.
The younger crowd figured out how to use the encryption technologies we've been wondering how everyone will adopt all while we've been missing it. Are they perfect implementations? No. But a lot better than what standard communication looked like years ago.
If anything, a generation gave up even wanting to have a public space and a spirit of tolerance, and retreated into purely private rooms, moderated by private tyrants. Ancient Greeks had a word for people who restrict themselves to the private, and aren't interested in public offices and affairs, which today is an insult -- while what it used to describe is viewed as desirable, something people brag about.
Many people gave up, they aren't even part of the discussion anymore. They cannot fathom what is under discussion, because they never had it. It's not that I'm not aware, it's that I weighed it, and found it too light.
This reminds me of the CGP Grey video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
We’re going to look like primitive ape-men. I guess it’s similar to how we look back at drunk driving in 1500 pound steel death traps. Or oppressing blacks simply for being black. But then again those grandkids will probably in turn look dumb for falling into the trap that virtual reality was a valid replacement for actually living your life.
It's also been useful at times where I've found people willing to put in a good word for a job, mentor me and there are a few people who are really good at providing a fruitful environment for discussion (even controversial topics) that makes me sad to leave.
Unfortunately, it just got too extra for me. I mean, there is a lot of bullshit in the world, but at times it looks like people just want to get mad for the sake of it. While I'm not a big proponent of don't feed the trolls, I doubt quote tweeting some asshole to score a satisfying dunk does any favors. It just seems to import garbage into other people's timelines.
Also, they'll be done people going about their day, or writing something intended for their like-minded friends and it catches wind far beyond where it was supposed to go, setting you up for an unwanted roast.
Even though I deleted my social media, I'm hoping that it becomes less extra because there can be a lot of value in it.
Sadly, it's hard to see that happening, especially with how social media is becoming the whole internet and IRL for many people in the world. The Telecom operators in my home country insist on selling unlimited social media packages rather than just giving us cheaper internet even though they can somehow provide 2GB of data for $5 that has to be used in 24 hours.
Synonyms: ratchet, trifling.
The world of Usenet, BBSs, forums, blogs, etc. Had their dramas and trolls and whatnot. What they had much less of was the clickbait, post order manipulation, and spammy notifications. Whether major social media can become less "extra" probably depends on whether an alternate commercial model can be found, I guess.
The killer feature? Being able to tag people in photos, such an obvious thing, but LJ was unable to do it. Add events and it was game over for LJ.
Incidentally, I said at the time, it was a massive strategic blunder for Google+ to launch without full integration with the Google Calendar. People want a one-stop shop and FB was it for photos and events.
It was a constant process of landing on a friends profile, being amazed by some feature or design and then going back to work on your own.
It also felt more like people’s profiles expressed through design, or music, or gifs, or other media, rather than what they had to say or any form of posts. I don’t really remember “posting status updates” at all, but I’m sure it was a feature.
And then at some point Facebook wiped it all out.
I can’t see people wanting to manage their own homepage. But then again, I remember we all did in high school for MySpace... maybe we will again.
The keyboard was what allowed such interaction.. How are nowadays' teens to manage such designs if their main device is a touchscreen?
For example if I don't tweet for a few days Twitter will give me a "notification" that several high follower count accounts I follow have tweeted.
That's not a "notification". I'm well aware frequent posters post frequently.
Reddit's a little too open to have that kind of connection.
I can see "the next messenger app" plus "total privacy à la signal" capturing that feeling back.
However, being attached to the larger reddit "network" can easily ruin those communities. All it takes is a single front page r/AskReddit thread where a top comment says "check out r/[small_community_here], it's great!" and that pretty much spells the end of that small, tight-knit community.
It's the age old problem that's not at all unique to online communities: everyone wants to be part of the cool, fun communities/bars/neighborhoods. But if everyone crowds in, that community/bar/neighborhood isn't as cool or fun anymore.
I was into Punk & Hardcore and found a local Punk & Hardcore music messageboard (powered by PostNuke!). I definitely remember being at a show (probably in 2003 or 2004) and someone saying, "Wow, most of the people I hang out with, I met on the internet."
When I went to college I met a bunch of friends on a bike focused messageboard I'm still active on. I met people who went to the same school as me, but what was probably the most odd is that I met them online, not at school.
I can say that a good social experience is usually in a very small group, dynamic, immersive, thrilling, you can feel it in your entire body, you loose your sense of time. On some social media the interactions are relatively slow, shallow, fragmented, in some sense performative because you know potentially alot of people can read what you're posting. It's like a totally different kind of social, which of course can have it's value but it becomes a problem when most of our social interactions are like this.
Take the experience of sharing your vacation pictures. On social media it is like you are packaging your memory to present for a broader audience. Imagine, in contrast, how you would invite your friend over and share your (printed) pictures over a coffee. Depending on what your relationship looks like you will present your trip differently. This shared memory will be woven into your relationship in a unique way, giving it yet another layer.
It's like the word social has been hijacked. It was never about making a "social media". It was about changing our idea about what social means..
It sounds like you're making a distinction between 'public' and 'private', a distinction with a very long history in the West with sharply differing sets of norms.
Early social networks were intensely private, even though you were dealing with individual members of the public.
As networks grow and try to vacuum up connections, the actual connections weaken and social networking becomes either quasi-public (the circle of friends' friends could be hundreds to thousands of people), or if something goes viral then it's just public.
Our norms for public discourse are sharply different from private conversation—you can say lots of things in the privacy of actual friends and family that presumably you wouldn't say in the middle of a town square.
But social media today means that every interaction you have targeted just to friends has a low, but non-zero probability of being judged also by all your neighbors and faraway strangers who have less context. Of course that's uncomfortable—you don't know ahead of time which set of rules are going to get applied to you.
The only thing missing: allow assigning exclusive psuedonames per group. Users shouldn't be allowed to associate one name to another across group.
It currently allows multiple accounts, but this still makes users worry about accidentally responding from the wrong account.
I can't even enjoy tech without the invasion of politics, use to like a bunch of sites that I found out are gawker writer staffed like jalopnik. Every 10 or so car articles is an anti-trump article. They can't even leave politics out, social media is 100x worse.
I remember the days, I could read linux news and not once would politics be mentioned, that is no more.
I find that hard to believe. I find that VERY hard to believe. Either he is completely ignorant, or he has no problem lying to the general public. Because between forcing Top Stories and broadcasting things you never meant to broadcast... well, it's a bald faced lie.
Why can't these companies either listen to their customers directly or if they absolutely must make user hostile decisions, say that they must do that because the venture capitalists demand it? I'm getting very tired of the "feedback matters to us" when it clearly doesn't.
They do listen to their customers. We just aren't their customers.
Didn’t work. Haven’t been back since.
But yeah, common-interest groups are way better than the de-anonymized social graph of Facebook.
When humans interact we not only process the words that are communicated but the context: what is our social history, what facial expressions and micro-expressions are being displayed, what is the race and/or social standing of the people involved. All of this is lost in anonymous conversation.
Now, this definitely has it's perks, it allows for communication on a neutral platform, where racial and sexual discrimination is less likely to occur and individuals can choose which parts of themselves to reveal, but humans are not really built to communicate this way, and it shows if you've ever been on an online forum or in a chatroom of an online FPS.
Widespred persistent harassment only grew in popularity as real identities were plastered all over the popular sites.
I'm looking to setup a private community and I'm not totally stoked on the features of mastodon and diaspora and I'm not exactly looking for a forum.
I suppose this could be an AskHN...
The social aspect of the Internet used to be about people communicating with people. Today it's about large corporations deciding how you interact, who gets to know about it and what consequences it'll have for your life in the following decades. Disgusting.
Most of my sites have Google Analytics that gets disabled when DNT is turned on. That plus server logs for fail2ban and DoS protection easily bumps the policy to 500 words.
Do you use cookies for storing basic session data? That's more. Run ads or use affiliate links? That's even more.
There's limit to a sane Privacy Policy, but all of this is rudimentary, common stuff.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/verizon-signals-its-y...
The funny thing is Marissa Mayer made more from the deal than Yahoo is now worth for Verizon:
https://money.cnn.com/2017/06/13/investing/yahoo-marissa-may...
And she got a severance paycheck that's also worth 10% of Verizon's content business now.
Eg I still have no idea what data they collect and who they share it with or how can I opt-out (itself is non compliant btw, but I'm assuming industry best practices here)
I thought the idea was that you could either agree to accept them and continue or decline.
IIRC forced/umbrella consent like that is explicitly forbidden.
The platforms are addictive not because they're designed to be, but because they pick out the best and most interesting content!
FB, YouTube etc represent a revolution about how content is created and consumed. You no longer need to browse through 10s of posts or emails (or videos) to find something you really like. Algorithms do the curation for you.
I learned so much by hanging out in FB forums (much more so than any other old-style forum). And my favorite pastime these days is YouTube Red.
Don't believe in the scare or the negative hype. Social media and AI curated content aren't going anywhere. They might evolve as required.
The best by the users interests or the best for the advertisers? I think ignoring the personal and societal effects of social media is something you do at your own peril.
But let's not overlook why these things have become popular in the first place (from a utility point of view). Google made the whole web searchable and digestable. Facebook made social & forum content much higher utility than before. YT did the same with billions of mostly-uninteresting videos.
Going back to an old style forum & email-list experience is a step backwards. Well, be my guest, do it if you like :) I won't.
See Reddit, Hackernews etc regarding how social cues can be used for ranking/curation. Yet, those platforms do a bare minimum (imo not quite enough). E.g. Google Feed is more engaging, interesting, and informative (in my experience).
>The biggest benefit of social media over forums or email lists is ML-based ranking.
That's what Jaron Lanier calls 'behavior modification networks' and control of that stuff is intensely valuable to whoever wants to behavior modify, valuable in myriad VERY practical ways. Machine learning? My ass. The machines can learn all they want; application is going to be controlled by management, when it's that profitable.
>The platforms are addictive not because they're designed to be
Not designed to be, my ass. Next you'll tell me mobile games aren't designed to be addictive? This is a science by now, and we're seeing the results. Like hell they aren't designed to be. You could say (from a certain viewpoint) that it's a breach of fiduciary duty if they are NOT designed to be addictive.
>Algorithms do the curation for you
Control of that is more valuable than any previous form of advertising or marketing. The social media revolution as you describe it has meant you can define people's experiential bubbles, orthogonally to what their wishes might be. You can expose 'em to whatever you need them to believe in. They don't even experience what you want to exclude. All for a price.
This ain't the Singularity. Algorithms give big data to the people who really make decisions on who gets to influence, and you know neither the influencers nor the decision makers. Something like youtube 'Elsa videos' for kids are not an AI deciding kids need more creepy in their lives, there are people trying to manipulate the system and other people who see it happening and go 'heh' and probably make notes and study what happens. The algorithms are just not sophisticated enough to be directive in the way you allude to.
It's not going away, which is WHY to attend to the negative side. If you're cynical, you don't have to see it as 'scare' so much as yet another banality of evil. Which we don't casually accept, even though it has been with us since the days of cavemen.
Of all the things to complain... What a lousy article.