Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease'
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As of March 2019 Reddit seems still quirky and interesting though...
This can be read as a searing indictment of reddit: it's quirky and interesting, but its value ends there. There's no real discussion to be had and most topic-specific subs are wildly uninformed for most of the things I have any personal experience with. This is certainly not limited to the tiny slice of the world I know well.
Let's take some of the DIY forums. Reddit can get pretty useful, but how does this relate to 1999? Back then, getting DIY videos was difficult. Now the trick is getting to the right kind of quality videos. But perhaps in 1999 if you read something and engaged online the experience was maybe more personal/fulfilling/substancial?
Personally, I have found myself resorting to discussion sites focused on a single topic, like Hacker News instead of /r/programming, or DharmaWheel.net instead of /r/Buddhism.
The only thing that the administrators outside your community do is the shitty redesigns of the UI (big thanks to them for the "old.reddit.com" option though).
Everything else is done by the community of a subreddit.
It is far and away worse than fph and incels in terms of content, but for some mystical reason that's totally not /u/spez vetoing any attempt to reign it in due to his conservative ideology, it has missed the banhammer.
Complete political whims.
Every subreddit is constantly in the process of eternal September, which kills the dynamics of getting to know one another that were common on forums.
Social media that is good cannot have advertising and cannot be an algorithmic Skinner box that maximizes engagement.
I am starting to think of competing with Facebook as creating online tribes that are costly, perhaps even financially very costly, but full of rich directed action. Sometimes like the dynamics of a church, where users are collated into tribes of limited size.
Can't you just sort by new...?
Well, that's the double-edged sword of reddit: it helps niche forums stay alive by constantly bringing in new users that originally visited reddit for other reasons. But that visibility can also kill them.
Still, aren't there lots of private subreddits or subreddits where only subscribers can post? If mods are active and ban regularly, you can preserve a culture if you want.
Google did a really good job of indexing forums, they where a great place to find honest reviews, share information etc. Now they are dying with users spread across various services which are not publicly indexed making it hard to find interesting information, that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites.
A few of the communities I am interested in such as outdoors, adventure motorcycling have moved to google groups. It's frustrating as the content isn't publicly searchable so you can not discover it, it's also frustrating posts are displayed algorithmically so it may pop up in your feed, you navigate away to another page then are unable to find the post again.
Facebook has been great in it's trivial to create communities but it's terrible in the sense content is only surfaced based on some algorithmic value biased around display adds.
i find myself having to explicitly add "forum" or "forums" to my google search to find things that might be in a forum, despite them being the most relevant to certain searches.
With how everything is just in one platform, it becomes impersonal as well. I heard about mastodon which feels like it sort of is taking this 'little communities' concept again, but I really wish forums would have a comeback.
Mastodon is different, it's more like twitter and almost as impersonal
And I have to say, the modern versions of forums -- like Facebook Groups -- just don't replicate that same feeling to me.
I recall forums back in the day requiring a certain technical aptitude to find and post on them. That created a filter, keeping out those who weren't as deeply interested or as technically educated.
I think the large social networks have mostly poisoned a lot of people with harmful memes (the need to shout, weird conspiracy theories, etc) and now that the damage is done it's too late even for the old format. As a society we've moved past being adults online and degenerated straight into childlike behaviour.
Using other social media is definitely not like using those old forums.
I used to be quite active in a guitar forum. It was almost like a family - complete with crazy fights and arguments too! I bought and sold several guitars, amps, pedals, etc too. Not cheap stuff either, I would send £500+ to a random stranger and trust them to send me the guitar. That was how well the community integrated. People built up real respect, and you could rely on the fact they didn't want to lose it. That forum (probably the biggest in the UK) doesn't exist anymore.
I wouldn't even dream of having a Facebook account, nevermind participating in a community on there to that degree. I wouldn't even send £1 to a random person on Facebook!
Kids these days go to Discord and/or Google Docs for serious conversation. If you have an adult community, they may still use forums, but its more or less seen as a dated and ancient Web 1.0 sort of thing.
Google-docs fits all the requirements. No major school bans google-docs. It allows real-time communication, collaboration, and holds a repository of data. Its semi-private, scales to large numbers of users, and moderation is decentralized (controlled by the owner of the Google Doc).
(1) because they're both centrally controlled, which leads to some of the same problems (2) google docs for chat is pretty ad hoc, which is fine at some level, but points to something (secrecy? ban-proof-ness? teenagers co-opting something where there might be a better solution, like irc or riot or various group chats?) (3) I don't think google docs or discord are quite the same as twitter etc. in the sense that they serve a different function (group chat)... maybe discord has some similarities but it seems to serve a different function.
which leads me to:
How much is this discussion about centralization versus public versus private-facing communication?
I've always felt that centralization (as opposed to federation or decentralization) is a bad thing (or at least, less desirable, network math be damned), and think that some old-school things are underrated (e.g., IRC). At the same time, there's been a common thread for years of people wanting to communicate over the internet without the technical hassle. webpage without learning networking and programming -> MySpace/Facebook... rss without learning networking and programming -> twitter... forums without learning forum software and dealing with name registries etc. -> reddit ...
I've toyed around with mastodon and have been struck by how much it has the feel of a lot of the old web, but it seems like it needs more critical mass to take off like something like email.
Google Docs for chat is no different than Wikipedia for discussion. The "Talk:" pages are group owned and visible to everyone. Google Docs has a realtime element, but otherwise works as a realtime wiki.
Plenty of internet discussion took place on the Wikis of old, not just Wikipedia but the original c2 WikiWikiWeb.
> How much is this discussion about centralization versus public versus private-facing communication?
This is tangential. People don't visit "vBulletin", they visit SomethingAwful. If you have a decentralized protocol (like vBulletin, PhpBB, Masteodon, or whatever), the laypeople generally don't care about that technological detail.
The typical web-user will be visiting "SomethingAwful", or "Digg". The webpage itself is associated with a community: a set of moderators.
Wikipedia and Wikia use similar software, but their communities are completely different. Federalized vs Centralized is a blip in the radar, its about policy, contributors and community.
Just like social media.
One became somewhat shilled though.
People has huge signatures, they'd often quote another page long post, there was no upvotes or downvotes so you had to go through 87 pages of junk, the search functionality was terrible...
It's why I like Reddit, even though it's not perfect.
Reddit's like the forum of forums
Edit: although. One thing I do miss with forums is people knew eachother by name. Reddit's too big for that.
Tons of junk? Use search more. Also it depends on the forum on question. Some have megathreads, some do not.
Don't get me wrong, I do miss the forums of the past, but there is also some good in what we have today.
I stayed in Peru for a couple years pre-facebook. I told friends and my host family I'd stay in touch and we all shared email addresses. I wrote less than 3 emails.
Next couple years go by and they start shooting friend requests and suddenly I am interacting with long lost friends, talking about their kids, jobs, and reminiscing about the dumb things we did together.
There are definitely other ways to communicate, but there's something about social media that reduces the effort required to connect with someone. It's irrelevant that you might change your address, phone number, or even email address. You have a fixed place that I can contact you and reach out. Oh, and it's the same website where I can find my favorite college roommate too...
I thought that too, until I discovered that some of those old friends actually were impersonated and who knows how many identity thefts there are out there.
The biggest forums were always toxic wastelands. Life, Universe, and Everything (the LUEsers of GameFAQs) has gone through this same trajectory.
Toxic people attract OTHER toxic people, because trolls love trolling others. The forum gets more and more toxic as people prefer to mess with other people more than actually have solid conversation. Things get extreme: LUEsers start to post porn to an otherwise innocuous site known to have young people browsing (GameFAQs), and the admins are finally forced to shut LUEsers down.
LUEsers exodus to another major forum, known to be more open to "free speech", and the toxicity cycle continues. Similar cycles happen for 4chan (exodus to 8chan), Something Awful, Reddit (/r/clopclop, /r/TheFappening, /r/Jailbait, /r/BeatingWomen) and other websites.
Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have NOT had their exodus moment yet. The admins still think doing nothing is the best move. Eventually, there will be a controversy so big that the admins will be forced to do something about it. (Youtube is beginning to enter this cycle).
And "do something about it" inevitably means banning the toxic portion of the website. Its the most obvious choice.
Guess what? GameFAQs, 4Chan, Something Awful all still exist today. The Exodus moment is always scary, its always "against free speech", but guess what? The websites are fine afterwards.
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I see this all as part of the same cycle. The cycle seems to be slower for larger websites / social networks like Twitter / Facebook, but its the same cycle nonetheless.
The rise of all these trends of big data was corresponding to the wave of social media, and these companies are now holding so much public information that grant them an enormous power and opportunity to shape our world.
With great power comes great responsibility. Their current capability potentially allows them to manipulate the world and our information at will, if they choose to do so. It can become extremely dangerous and open for abuse if not kept in check.
Nobody is auditing their data so everything is a just a mystery black box with no transparency. You either choose to believe in what they say, or you don't. The data is irrelevant by itself, it's their intentions that could become dangerous.
Does anyone even trust social media companies? Even their own employees don't let their kids come near it. I wonder what happens on their bring kids to work day?
I grew up with the internet, so it felt natural to adopt things like social media (early days of FB), cloud storage, YouTube, etc etc. They just seemed to work their way into my life, aided by the adoption of smartphones (essentially a pocket computer).
Today, I've become a Free Software and Privacy advocate. I use libreboot+Debian, have a dumbphone, no social media, and aggressively restrict usage of services like Google et al.
But I feel this isn't going far enough. The real toxic element is the 90% of the internet which is not designed to bring any positivity or enrichment to my life. I recently made the decision to make my main workstation air-gap/offline and it was the best decision ever. My laptop will be my internet connected machine and I'll probably set-up some sort of whitelist on it. I also find it easier to physically isolate a laptop (e.g. put it in a drawer) outside of work hours and thereby regulate outside intrusion into my personal life.
I'm also very sympathetic to the concerns about not triggering the mass bovine herd of professional offense-takers. I work as a Doctor so it's a constant effort to police my opinions and actions on a daily basis. The internet used to be a refuge where I could do daft things like engage in a flame war on a random forum about a random obscure hobby. Today, the risk of inadvertently triggering someone and having it cross into my real life removes any incentive to participate. Even HN feels like that. I've lost count of the number of replies I've typed out, only to delete without posting. I just think there's no point. It's not fun anymore.
I'll probably give up HN soon. It's the last of anything resembling social media that I use. I strongly dislike the inability to completely delete an account and past posts. It's not like I post controversial stuff, but I've grown uncomfortable about leaving any trace online.
If Linus’s angry emails are on a distribution list, the exposure is minimal and the damage is contained.
His same excess in social media is reproduced and exploited for various reasons, positive and negative and overflows into unrelated circles where unrelated people have input into something containment would prevent them from being exposed.
This state of total diffusion without commensurate dilution is the problem. Everyone is a perpetrator and everyone is a victim.
An analogue in biology might be tumors. The individual cells might not be bad but them running unstopped can have negative consequences.
Social media needs to attenuate virality. But that’s at odds with their current economic model. So in the meantime they implement useless ineffectual bandaids they know don’t address the problem head on but gives them a plausible “we’re trying” or “shikata ga nai” 仕方がない
Perhaps. Another way to say the same thing however is something along the lines of the following. If you behave... poorly within a relatively narrow community, given sufficient authority you can just get away with it. Maybe you drive people away but it's all pretty invisible to the broader world and those that remain just put up with it because that's the way things are.
Perhaps that's deemed acceptable.Perhaps not. But just because things happen behind relatively closed doors doesn't make them right.
Let’s take people who are against childhood vaccinations. Their unfounded beliefs would remain contained and would not proliferate beyond their circles vs everyone gets exposed and people who’d never think of this anti scientific position become convinced this position kinda somehow makes sense.
From a certain perspective, the noospehere is currently tripping balls on social media.
>Colonel: You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems.
>Rose: Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large.
>Colonel: The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right.
>Rose: Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth."
Bob: 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.
Oh well. Rant over. I'm not on any social media (I tried G+ for a while, because the people on it weren't the mindless usual stuff, but it obviously never went anywhere), but it still annoys me.
nail on head
Couple that with being bombarded by obvious and not so obvious advertisements through promoted content, viral marketing campaigns, promoters and creators that act (emphasis on act) and galvanize certain lifestyles that appeals to individual wants and needs at a unrealistic level.
Just like the old medium of television, everything is manufactured to look a certain way, and consciousness of looks still persists.
The future you're talking about will have to be regulated much more (at, at least, differently) than the present. I doubt it could even be capitalist -- which, to be clear, I see as a good thing.
The broadcast of oversimplified messages through a human network that reacts strongly to those messages, and thus boosts the signal of those messages further, is something that bears careful consideration.
The world needs to figure out how to “put into place very strict requirements with appropriate consequences that make it unthinkable to violate them.”
“Everyone agrees we shouldn’t be doing this yet,”
These quotes are from a Bloomberg article* about the Chinese scientist who edited the twins DNA as embryos, found interesting that society is able to recognize the incredible dangers and implications of DNA modifications yet have a huge blind spot for tech, perhaps because it's so useful in our day to day lives. User-engagement, optimizing for addiction and driving individuals into echo chambers and the welcoming arms of extremists looking to recruit, worth it for free email I guess?
* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-13/top-genet...
Just seems weird that they give his opinion, and then we get someone else's opinion on HIM. That doesn't seem very unbiased. Maybe I am overthinking it.
No only the things you said, but it's written like it's targeted at a middle-schooler. I could barely make myself skim the 2nd half of it. I did, cause, you know, Linus.
Well, you could argue that people work on the Internet. It's not a bad argument, but the problem is much deeper than this.
Every single major social network is now being used as a storefront where you can promote and advertise your personal brand and/or product. I follow a fair amount of people in Web Design and Web Dev, and over the years, many have completely annihilated any emotional connection with their audience and instead run their pages as an established brand.
Look at what happened to Quora, a site that had an incredibly promising start and I personally enjoyed writing hundreds of answers. I enjoyed it because it felt like my answers are being heard, valued, and acted upon.
These days, Quora is a hellhole, a dreadful dump of marketing garbage where people are ready to get their pitchforks whenever someone tries to one-up their "best answer".
Instagram? Holy crap! Instagram is an absolute marketing godsend. Though, some would argue it's not exactly the most appealing type of marketing. The history books of the future will be like the pornography magazines of today. If this trend continues, then this is certain.
This, so much this.
The solution to that is not "make it easier to publish online", as Big Tech will always claim. One way may be to start curating your own list of interesting voices, and consume their content deliberately, instead of having it be passively fed to you (including their likes and RTs, which I personally don't like seeing) via the Feed.
The internet of the old days isn't gone. (Look at this website!). It's just that we are a minority because FB, Instagram and YouTube brought 2 billion more people online.
Looking at the vast majority of content on facebook, twitter, instawhatever, reddit, HN, etc I don't consider that to be a bad thing.
The rest of social media's problems have mostly to do with it being a cacophony, which you get with any large and horizontally organized group. Loudest speaker wins, shock replicates faster, etc.
Due to the nature of this business model, Facebook no longer serves its users, instead the platform has been tailored and customized in every possible way to exploit their users for its own profits, by selling their personal data/information to the highest private bidders, very often done behind the scene without much public awareness.
Having said that, the frequency of bad news about Facebook that seemingly keeps popping up every day is suspiciously abnormal. There must be an external force that is being dedicated to digging all the shit up at Facebook right now. You literally cannot go through a day without seeing new scandals from them on your news feed. An organization with security measures like Facebook's is incapable of leaking bad news at such rates by itself.
Don't want to mention their names here, but are these retaliation actions coming from those who had been previously wrong by Facebook?
This is the crux of the issue IMO. Once it was possible to gain "fame" via Twitter/FB/IG, it was game over. People become incentivized to maximize their likes and followers instead of having conversations. A big following can get you anything from a distribution deal with a fly-by-night supplements company, all the way to a book deal and appearances on Oprah or Comedy Central.
On old-school forums/message boards, you had a community based on a specific shared interest, so people weren't completely anonymous strangers and weren't posting to lobby for attention among the broader community.
You could control who you interact with, only so far. When no one you know reads the newspaper, while depending on 'social media' for all their opinions, you're going to run into a lot of noise. There's just no escaping it, unless you use this same social media landscape to join some nice new group of intellectuals that actually meets offline.
We just need to start paying for things.
Yes, there are some exceptions like cinema, HBO, etc.
On mailing-lists, worst case there is "that guy", and you can filter them out. Maybe you'll meet at a conf eventually and work things out in person. On Twitter/Facebook, you have to spend a lot of time blocking people and trolls have full control of the platform.
EDIT: from his interview: 'I tried G+ for a while, because the people on it weren't the mindless usual stuff, but it obviously never went anywhere'
As an example, check out the myriad articles about Google users being outed as trans when Google started integrating Google+ into everything: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/07/google-ha...
It’s pleasant here in the blogosphere. Come on back, door is always open.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070206145523/http://reddit.com...
Today you have to dig deep to find anything that is not vapid bullshit. The Donald has leaked into other subreddits and the site has become a disgusting cesspool. I feel like I'm the only person that thinks that the advent of memes as means to communicate seems to have degraded discourse to a level of bite sized concepts that eliminate complex analysis of any given topic. Have an opinion of LGBT rights? Post a meme! Have a political opinion? Post a meme! If you don't agree with my 6 word statement on a silly image I will be a complete asshole to you in the comments section that exposes a market of ideas that has devolved into racist diatribes and AnCap ideology.
Social media is also a tools, good or bad, its what you make of it.
That said, I'm hardly a Facebook/Zuckerberg fan and will jump ship the moment another platform becomes viable.
And I say this as someone who is subscribed to some niche meme pages on IG and enjoy them. It's just that if the page were to disappear tomorrow, I would have forgotten about it within a week. It wouldn't be missed. The value it gives me is very limited. I'd wager it's the same for a lot of other people. Social media's value is geared towards advertisers, not users.
Instagram is particularly weird to me, look at what's trending, semi naked teenagers/stars, selfies and ads, that's all, for miles of scrolling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Instagra...
Guy Debord used "images" as a metaphor but with Instagram it's not even a metaphor anymore.
> The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
> The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered .... They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption.
> Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle [...] naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. It is the opposite of dialogue.
Every platform you use to communicate with other humans is a social network, they're not new. Slashdot was an early 'modern' social network, after regular old forums, as was Usenet and the BBS. All these networks had very similar properties to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram - they just didn't have pictures, and were restricted mostly to computer nerds.
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram is what happens when you open up these services to the whole world, add media, make it easier to share, and more addictive to use. The 'highest upvoted story' is a picture with a quote and a lot of likes. Our old flame wars about text editors and OSes are now caustic rants about vaccinations or politics. The only significant change is the subject matter, and the number of people involved.
As a 'disease', FB, Twitter and Insta are just a more evolved form of something that's always been here. They reflect and amplify humanity. You can focus on the bad, or you can notice the good. But it's a mistake to think these products are somehow uniquely different than everything else, or even inherently bad. They're inherently human.
Well, didn't someone at Microsoft call Linux "a cancer" once? I suppose turnabout is fair play... well not exactly, but close enough! More like paying it forward.