There were plenty of other technologies that could've been used to organize large-scale virtual fight clubs (forums, BBSes, chatrooms, maybe even the telephone) but this didn't happen because nobody actually wanted to foster such toxic behavior.
I think no one realized you could make disgusting amounts of money by fostering it. There have been plenty of flame wars on BBSes and forums, but the tension between "engagement" and "quality" always favored the latter in small, private communities (HN is a good example). However, when it comes to Facebook and Twitter, the former is always favored (due to market forces, shareholder interests, etc.).
Observe flamewars on BBSs and forums tended to drive people away, thus tending to confine them through natural mechanisms. Our current systems encourage and fan them, and by profiting from them, create a system that sustains them indefinitely instead of naturally isolating them to just the people who actively want to participate.
As someone who has a low-grade hobby of kind of keeping track of this sort of thing, I think one of the major challenges of trying to structure communities is all the most powerful drivers of what is going to happen occurs in these low-level decisions that create persistent second-order effects on the community's nature, and this is one of the somewhat unusual cases where the second-order effects utterly dominate the first-order effects. In this case, you can read "first-order effects" as "the things the developers intended to happen", which I think are dominated by the structural effects of decisions that aren't intentional.
If you create a community that literally profits from conflict and flamewar, you'll never be able to fix them by any number of systems you try to add to fix that via first-order effects. The underlying structure is too powerful. Facebook can't be fixed with any amount of "moderation"; the entire structure, from the very foundation, is incapable of supporting a friendly community at scale. Until Facebook stops profiting from engagement, they will never be able to fix their problems with toxicity, no matter how many resources they pour into naively fighting it via direct fixups.
(Now, I have questions about whether a friendly community of the scale of Facebook is even possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20146868 . But the fact it may not even be possible does not mean that Facebook is still obviously not that solution.)
People aren't encouraged to think twice before they post because there's not going to be any significant consequences for breaking the rules.
Even if you somehow manage to get permanently banned from a social network, it's very easy to come back; it doesn't cost anything besides spending some time creating a new account.
From a business perspective it makes sense - why would you ban an abusive user that makes you money? Just give them a slap on the wrist to pretend that you want to discourage bad behavior and keep collecting their money.
Proper enforcement of the rules with significant consequences when broken (losing the account, and new accounts cost $$$ to register) would discourage a lot of bad behavior to begin with.
You could then introduce a karma/reputation system to 1) attach even more value to accounts (you wouldn't want to lose an account it took you years to level up and gain access to exclusive privileges) and 2) allow "trusted" users beyond a certain reputation level to participate in moderation, prioritizing reports from those people and automatically hiding content reported by them pending human review (with appropriate sanctions if the report was made in bad faith) to quickly take down offensive content.
As for user reports. I would expect the same kind of dog piling you see now with people flagging people/brands/content they don't like politically as "politics". Post a picture of a The Origin of Species? Politics! Post a link to Chick-fil-a? Politics! Etc.
"The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol."
It's tough to get all this right. Humans are ok at dealing with one another in person most of the time, but being behind a screen really doesn't happen in many cases.
I have no idea what the solution is... it's a people problem, so probably not a strictly technological solution.
HN works fairly well because of the hard work of the moderators.
FB is kind of maddening to me. You can't just put it in a 'good' or 'bad' bucket.
Some things I get a lot of value out of:
* Being able to keep track of acquaintances from all the places I've lived. There are a lot of friends and family I have in Italy that I can't see often, and I do enjoy hearing what they're up to.
* As a tool for organizing it's been a very handy, low-friction way to get people involved in some political issues where I live in Oregon.
On the other hand, lately it has also been a source of stress. The sheer amount of anti-science, poorly thought out political comments and plain hatred is really depressing at a time when a lot of things are not going well.
I dislike this trend (especially in Silicon Valley) to blame problems on the users - e.g. creating a startup, and becoming frustrated with users when people use it "incorrectly." Technology is supposed to be used by people, not the other way around. When technology is using people for its own interest (in this case, ad revenue), then we have a real problem with the technology, and it is absolutely not a people problem.
Only 80 years ago, plain images on posters could be used to motivate people to die for their country in World War II. 400 years ago, images were so rare that it was enough to paint church walls with them to fill people with belief in God and afterlife. And as of the last ten years, we're suddenly expecting people to drop their belief in images and use their "rational" logic to see through fallacies, saying it's a "people problem" when they can't? It's just too fast for evolution, and the onus is on the ones who create the technology that disseminates images to be careful, lest they create the perfect conditions for a society to fall apart because they were too busy looking out for their bottom line.
1. No links to outside content.
2. Mandatory deletion of all historical data with a max retention option no longer than 1 year with a default of 30 days. (Let users pick the 'fuse' length within this time frame).
I think that would double down on the things I like about it (keeping tracking of acquaintances like you mentioned, handling events, etc.) - while also removing a lot of the things I don't (arguing about news, targeted ads based on historical data).
That said I'd just like to make it easier for people to control their own nodes (https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...), but I also recognize that getting the social element to work in a federated way is not easy. Maybe Urbit will pull it off eventually.
On this front, I prune my contacts when my feed starts stressing me out. It used to be you had to totally unfriend someone, but Facebook wised up and now you have a variety of options. You can put them on a 30-day timeout so their posts won't show up on your feed while they get their rant on, or you can unfollow entirely while remaining friends (so you can still actively check on them but won't get passively bombarded with dumb stuff). You can also opt out of seeing content from specific sources they share if the only problem is they're sharing dumb links.
It's still not perfect, but keeping in touch with people who post dumb stuff is always gonna be a balancing act and Facebook's come a long way in facilitating that act even though most of the options are not obvious (most of the above are found in the ellipsis icon in the upper right of every post).
In the old days we had to actively do that using letters, or emails, or phone calls. I think it was a better system because it forced you to choose who you cared enough about to stay up-to-date with. Minimalism isn't just about things, it's also about relationships.
Moderators and size limits, the latter keeping the amount of work small enough that a couple of moderators can handle it, and aren't getting subjected to the sort of stuff Facebook moderators deal with. Obviously, not having images or video also helps that. (Though I recall some times when Slashdot trolls were taking some good swings at Can't Unsee even with those limits.)
HN is on the upper end of what a community structured in the way it is can handle, I think, and it has taken some tweaks such as hiding karma counts on comments. I'm not deeply in love with reddit-style unlimited upvote/downvote systems... in their defense, they do seem to scale to a larger system than a lot of alternatives, but it comes at a price. I do fully agree it tends to create groupthink in a community, as a structural effect, though I think that's both a positive and a negative, rather than a pure negative as some people suggest. Some aspects of "groupthink" become "community cohesion" when looked at from another point of view.
Never thought about it that way, but maybe that's why a reddit-style karma system does tend to hold relatively large communities together.
But even as one of the more scalable known systems, it still breaks down long before you hit Facebook scales, or "default Reddit subreddit" scales.
“Nobody” is leaving out some pretty notorious sources of toxicity (e.g. 4chan). I think a key difference is that these huge platforms dramatically increase the reach of those communities by giving them much better tools, highly-available servers, etc. and in particular mainstreaming them into the same place everyone else is, making it easier to recruit and share outside those communities.
In the forum era, people had to learn about a particular site, learn the community, maybe create an account, etc. to know these existed — now it's just one Facebook share away and there's an advanced “engagement” system ensuring that anyone who likes something widely shared will continue to see other content from the same source without needing to seek it out. Brigading was most noticeable with a wave new of new accounts and there wasn't something like an ML system making that activity drive unrelated users to see it.
I think the more important point is really the advertising angle: taking a bunch of small communities and giving them high-quality hosting powered by a billion dollar company along with a pre-developed audience.
But massive political fights aren't something that the advertisers (until recently) see as bad imagery for their brands.
I haven't seen evidence that outrage driven engagement is profitable, though the statement is frequently repeated.
Is it possible that divisiveness is an intended effect?
We know that governments sow discord to achieve selfish ends. Why wouldn't similarly powerful business interests?
Let's assume that you are able to create a social network the scale of Facebook and network effects aren't an issue (let's imagine a magical solution that interoperates with existing social networks in such a way that accounts work on either side and content is visible from both sides) with the caveat that you instantly ban accounts that participate in political flamewars, intentionally spread misinformation/fake news, etc. You're going to end up banning a significant chunk of people that would otherwise make you money if you just turned a blind eye to the problem like current social networks do.
Even as a relatively senior employee, you may be unable to discern intent. You might just get an incentive scheme that compensates you for engagement rather than profitable engagement.
Well, FB and the like have been bringing the ban hammer out a fair bit. Most recently was the QAnon kiddos.
If they really were keeping engagement up at all costs then banning a lot of accounts and dumping all that hand-wringing would be a strange thing to do time and time again.
Prior to this era in which we're constantly online and connected, for a message to be heard it usually had to go through a professional editor at a newspaper, radio station, publishing company, or TV station. If you had an opinion you wanted to share, you had free speech but you probably didn't have a platform. Now messages are global, immediate, viral, and permanent.
Max Wang's video makes a strong case that Facebook's content policy and Zuckerberg's concern with adherence to it is a stringent ideology which lacks the flexibility to address clear cases that it should cover but doesn't. In other words it lacks good judgement.
I think it's going to be a long time before an automated system can exercise good judgement. Obviously having a professional editor review every tweet is impossible. So in the meantime, I think we will see a continual elevation of tension between people who value free speech at any cost and people who think that certain messages shouldn't be given a platform.
Your point also applies to news -- articles these days miss the point by design. You get more clicks by being provocative and hyperbolic. And yellow journalism isn't really new, but its comeback has been triumphant.
If I translate the first entries titles right now:
* Amazing confidences -> an actress
* Big controversy -> a female singer
* Corruption suspicion -> OK, a politician
* Accused of lying -> an actor's wife
* a few trivialities and filler items
* Finally calm -> a dead singer's wife
* Turkish activities -> OK, international news
* from the previous item on, it is only now that you have a regular mix of normally interesting/important news items. You had to click once or twice on the Next arrow to get there, everything or almost everything on what I'd call the front page was clickbait crap.
So, that's a feed, but the content comes from actual newspapers, and if I go to my local newspaper, half of the top content is also oftennational/international 'people' crap.
I have a theory, that many of the high-profile "advertiser boycotts" recently aren't really about content moderation. I suspect that companies simply don't want to promote their body wash in the middle of a constant screaming match about wearing masks.
Being on Facebook bums me out. It makes me dislike my extended family, and old colleagues or people I knew from school. I've been unable to completely wean myself off it (the "engagement" hooks are strong), but I genuinely feel dirty and unhappy with myself after browsing the site. It certainly doesn't foster a positive view toward brands that I see advertising there.
I wonder if: (1) that perspective is common, (2) large advertisers have figured it out, and (3) their "boycott over hate speech" is really just a clever way to get social-trend-extra-credit for a move they'd like to make anyway?
The web already did that. By advocating that the world use only a single website to "speak", we allowed a single website owner to create a business by charging its users for the opportunity to publish their "speech" to segments of the website's audience.
The reason most of those millions of people "joined" Facebook was not to voice their opinions to an audience. It was to communicate with family and friends. A new mode of communication.
If those people who wanted to voice their opinions to audiences had their own websites, who would visit them? Would they have an audience of millions?
(The term "millions" is used here as an expression for "many", not as an accurate estimate of the numbers in question)
I have heard that there is talk in the US media of doing away with the US Postal Service. AKA Ye Olde Mode of Communication. It is unsettling how far things have come in eroding the American's right to be free from commercial or ideological pandering. There used to be a legally recognised principle that an American could say "No more", and then the pandering must stop. Try that with Facebook or any other "tech" company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_Form_1500
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_v._United_States_Post_Of...
Social media is a natural consequence of increased communication of larger groups, and as an emergent phenomenon based on everything else you aren't going to get rid of it. So instead we focus on how to mitigate the problems and live with it, because even if you shut down every single social network today, there would be new popular ones used by almost everyone a year from now.
I am hoping this allows people to get the news they want, interact with it and see what news other people are interacting with... without the flame wars and hate brigades that Twitter and FB prompt
Which is amusing given that even here we have to deal with an upvote mechanism that boosts posts from strong extreme opinions.
Facebook also thrives on a similar "re-share" model, which leads to the most toxic content spreading extremely quickly and bouncing to new audiences, whereas no matter how many times I upvote this thread, only a few % of the world browses HN.
The issue with Facebook is not about censoring the post that we don't like, it's about removing that polarization that comes with a platform that wants to get you hooked so they can sell you more ads.
Facebook and other social media are making us HATE each other because that's what they make money on. The debate should be around how can you build an ethical social platform that values your time and opinions.
This resulted in prioritizing those things that younger people are drawn to, such as novelty and attention.
Imo, this resulted in a huge cultural shift that has now resulted in “boring level headed opinions [based on years of experience]” being lost in the sea of people fighting for more attention through more novelty.
The internet just threw rocket fuel on the problem.
So much toxicity is rooted in exploiting this dynamic.
Push for ad-free social networks (probably not free to users, then)
... Because they were heavily promoted by the people who owned the media platforms. It wasn't because of any of their particular virtues.
Consider your bias when making this claim. What makes an opinion boring and level-headed? That it is squarely in the middle of the Overton window? Who sets the Overton window, in the pre-social-network world where the overwhelming majority of media is state/corporate-sponsored?
It's not some natural evolutionary process that caused boring, level-headed opinions to rise to the top. It was self-serving opinions rising to the top, that, because of their ubiquity, are believed to be boring and level-headed.
When viewed from a different cultural lens, many of those boring and level-headed opinions appear completely batshit insane. For example, the current American model for healthcare seems, for the most part (Everyone has a few minor tweaks they want to make - but setting that aside), boring and level-headed and reasonable to ~half the country. To the rest of the world, it appears completely insane, and anyone proposing switching to it would be a complete lunatic. In the US, however, the converse holds - switching away from it is considered by many to be absolutely crazy.
Which of those opinions is the reasonable, level-headed one? It depends on your current social setting, not on the virtues or drawbacks of the expressed idea.
"Die looted" is not referencing the information quality/concentration, but BLHO types know better.
Hence, introducing an easily swayed group of uneducated voters into the pool, and debasing politics to their level.
If democracy represents the intelligence of the average voter, then engaging literally tens of millions of uneducated/emotional/immature people to vote significantly diminishes the ability of our government to make decisions and/or speak about problems honestly.
I don't see us as having created a representative democracy to protect democracy from the masses. I like to think we are a representative democracy because the masses are supposed to have better things to do than keep the lights of government on.
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/primary...
Federalist No. 10[1] is probably one of the most highly regarded of the papers, and explicitly lays out these concerns. Selected quotes:
"AMONG the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice."
"Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority."
"By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community."
"If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution. When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens."
"From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
Hamilton also talks a little bit about this phenomenon in Federalist No. 68, and Federalist No. 62 lays out the impetus for having an equally represented Senate (which is inherently undemocratic), part of which was to check the immediate impulses/passions of the people, as can be the case with the House of Representatives.
Voter turnout in presidential elections is the same as it has been for 50 years at least. Voter turnout in the most recent midterm spiked a crazy amount, but I'm not willing to credit social media so much as a natural reaction to the extremism of the current administration. Which sources are you using that I missed?