So this turned into more of a rant so I apologize in advance. I left facebook and social media (excluding HN of course) in general 10 years ago. The sad reality is I lost every friend I had to that hell hole. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the day facebook notified me that a Serbian had accessed my account, so I scrubbed all my content, unfriended everyone, and deactivated the account except for one post warning not to trust any future posts.
I’m even considering leaving HN after taking a two week break from it. The problem with all online forums in general is that they sour once their population reaches the onset of chaos. This phenomenon is not as subjective as it might sound; it’s loosely related to entropy in information theory introduced by Claude Shannon, but that’s a conjecture beyond the scope of this thread. Humans historically work at their best together in small groups or tribes for the same reason why smaller classroom sizes produce better grades, meaning that our capacity for communication increases with our level of autonomy.
I’m frankly surprised why that fact isn’t salient among social media services today, but I’m sure there’s a good reason. I know Mastodon is taking distributed social networking seriously, but honestly Mastodon is very awkward, it’s kind of like being in a small waiting room alone with another person where you can only communicate in terms of orthogonal and pithy announcements, rather than form a natural conversation.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the elements that would make for a natural, healthy, and conductive social networking service quite recently, but my largest question is how much of a factor is the underlying platform technology itself a measure of success in engineering a social network?
I was surprised when my nephew told me not too long ago that his only friends are ones he meets in his video games; having grown up in the early 90’s this is bizarre to me, but also is provocative in the sense that it reminds me of how random sampling works. An individual may more likely to form a significant lasting social bond as part of a random sampling of a population of peers through a controlled trial process, such as a video game, than they would had the selection process been through biased selection events such as systematic population nepotism, proximity, or stratification. For example, I hate my neighbors, I don’t miss my facebook friends, coworkers and couples are a drag, and I could honestly do without relatives. I think that finding friends as an adult is hard for many logical or practical reasons, but may just be because in life we our forced to abandon our sports and adopt absurd “hobbies” instead. Having said this, I can take pity on my neighbors rather than hate them, because now I realize that sadly the only socially acceptable way to play as an adult these days is with annoying pets.