Tim Berners-Lee: We need social networks where bad things happen less | Hacker News Reader

Tim Berners-Lee: We need social networks where bad things happen less

theguardian.com

115 pointswombatmobile131 comments

I have a lot of respect for Tim Berners-Lee, but he's basically incorrect about this. The problem with social networks is not a technology problem, it is fundamental to what social networks are. We don't call Stack Overflow a social network, because it's got a purpose, even though it has a lot of the same features as facebook. The problem with social networks isn't the software, it's that they aren't for a particular purpose, because if they did most people wouldn't go there (as most people don't go to Stack Overflow, because most people aren't programmers). If you want to make a social network with a billion users, you have to make it general purpose, and that means you do not have a narrow enough focus to keep the conversation on task (because there is no task). This means the conversation falls back to tribal bickering and shouting, because there is no focus/task to keep it from doing so. They're "social", with everything that makes socializing (facial expressions, tone of voice, only so many people able to talk at once) removed. You're not going to fix that with technology, because the thing that needs "fixing" is fundamental to what they are.

The problem with social networks, is that they're social.

I disagree. You can create mechanics around the network that reduce the amount of toxicity.

Ephemerality being a big one. If there's no history, there's less of this cached aggression potential by raging over words said in the past. Ephemeral constructs focuses the conversation to the now since whatever current context you're in is fleeting.

Internal fragmentation (siloing) within a larger network being another. Silo might be a dirty word right now but I think combining ephemeral spaces with more siloing can help reduce the "bad things".

I agree with both generality and technical means. But I would add a third reason: there's people that want social networks to be that way. They want a place where they can make concerted attacks against other people that thinks different so they can express their ideas and make others shut up. And somehow this people has got their way.

I probably just haven’t spent a lot of time in social media to actually see this happen, but where I’ve caught wind of people claiming to being silenced (cancelled) by some “woke” crowd of sorts, they aren’t actually being silenced and instead remain able to post their side of the story. So is this really a problem? How come so much of right-wing politics of the last four/five years were framed in such a narrative?

For all of the things said about people in the internet being easily offended “snowflakes” these days, I’ve noticed that people who claim to being cancelled actually have (1) said something divisive or not clear enough so as to cause a public uproar, and (2) are simply taking on a victimhood mindset when justifiably-outraged people react to their content, instead of coming to terms with the fact that people are allowed to disagree with them when they post controversial thoughts on social media.

If someone was successfully silenced, then I guess by definition you wouldn't hear their complaint.

What you can hear, are the near misses, like people employed by an institution that took a vote about whether to fire them, and decided that it wouldn't. Or people who took a hit and recovered, like they were fired but found another job later... maybe a less paying one, but they can still afford an internet connection.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. I assume that for each person who spoke bluntly and lost or nearly-lost their job, there are at least ten people who decided to keep quiet.

> said something divisive or not clear enough so as to cause a public uproar

That's in my opinion quite sad that being "not clear enough" is a punishable offense these days. In the past, people were less hysterical... well, probably the hysterical ones were just less interconnected.

Like, seriously, if someone says a genuinely stupid thing once, would you fire them from their job? This seems completely crazy to me. Did we completely lose the ability to forgive / forget / ignore?

How do you make someone shut up in a social network?

Mark Hurst and WFMU station manager Ken have an interesting discussion about how Ephemerality is used in the stations chat to achieve a healthy online community, and their past problems with the status quo. https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/101042

I agree with you that the "networking" aspect of social networks is functioning, but I happen to think it is functioning to make the "social" aspect less pleasant.

> This means the conversation falls back to tribal bickering and shouting

You are right that this will always happen, but I do not think it will be the dominant interaction. One of the reasons this interaction comes up so much is that platforms optimize for it - bickering and shouting is engaging. It gets clicks and eyeballs and shares. Jerry Springer was a popular tv show (and good for that team) but it's wrong to say that we can only make TV like Jerry Springer.

There's a great deal of research in the UX / Social Science world on "affordances" - UI features basically. They're the nouns and verbs that we have in digital spaces. Often the research is very basic but it is out there. I think social media companies could do a lot better with the affordances they give to people. They could be more playful. They could be more free form. They could slow down conversations where people are rapidly tagging each other and sentiment analysis suggests they are fighting. Etc, etc.

The human brain is a very complex thing and one of its primary purposes, as far as we can tell, is to be social - the thing you say isn't a task. I don't believe being social isn't a task. I just think we're very bad at helping our brains be social (a thing they evolved to do for millions of years) in a medium we just invented maybe fifty years ago. We can get better, but only if we try.

It's not that.

It's as simple as: use of recommendation algorithms + forums at scale.

When you do this, people are automatically shown things that piss them off (outrage has higher engagement).

The bigger the scale, the worse it is.

Once you get past a certain scale you could get the same effect without the algorithm, but the algorithm makes it much worse.

I will concede one thing, GME was an outrage driven investment. Because there was a story about "evil" short sellers doing "evil" things everyone was collectively mad at them and social media networks spread this all over the place, even Youtube.

The motivation behind using algorithms that optimise for engagement is to build massive networks with billions of users. So, ultimately it does come down to what is the business objective for the network in the first place because that forces you to make these choices.

If it was a human problem then we'd expect all social networks to show the same behaviour. But they don't; the "online abuse, bullying and harassment" he talks about is overwhelmingly a Twitter phenomenon, and the roots of it can be found in Twitter design decisions. Bullying does happen on e.g. Facebook, but that's actually a very different interaction pattern (it's people in the same social group attacking other members of the same social group - whereas Twitter harassment is overwhelmingly happening between strangers).

overwhelmingly a Twitter phenomenon

Are you sure about that, or do you just think so because more social science is done on Twitter due to their relatively open API, and conveniently short post format? If you're sure, I think you should shore up your claim with evidence.

I'm talking about my own experience of what I've seen on different platforms, not social science results.

Have you ever waded into the comments section of posts on the front page of /r/all? Not only will you find plenty of bullying, you'll also find plenty of misinformation, but not the kind that's had the conspiracy theory label attached so it evades our awareness. This is one thing that I never see mentioned in articles like this: the degree to which social media shapes non-conspiracy-theorist's perception of reality. It is right there in front of our noses, but so hard to see.

Exactly. There are so many people who have an extremely cynical view of the world based on what they learned online. The idea of an honest politician or company seems impossible to them. I just hope that it doesn't lead to self-fulfilling prophecies.

Is that noticeably different from any other information source? Traditional newspapers/TV present a very misleading picture of reality too.

They do, but newspapers don't allow readers to distribute misinformation among themselves, or vote threads full of self-reinforcing misinformation to the front page of /r/all.

The thought shaping at scale capability of Reddit is massive, and seems to go mostly unnoticed as everyone is laser focused on QAnon and conspiracy theorists (which quite conveniently are very common topics of discussion in these threads).

> The problem with social networks isn't the software, it's that they aren't for a particular purpose ... The problem with social networks, is that they're social

Let's take look how Hacker News is designed: A discussion platform that utilize tree structure to keep discussions structured, easy to track and on point.

There are many different kind of designs, the flat-list one for example, which causes less structured and often ineffective discussions.

The problem of social networks is not just due to social factors, software design plays a key role.

You know, most physical real-world bars/clubs, which are also social places, couldn't generate that level of toxicity. Even the toxicity on Reddit is no match for the top social networks. Those systems are what I called "moderated-islands", on each island, there are people who wants to keep things in check.

On the social networks however, the people who checks things are the same people who post the content, and moderation is done directly under the content they've posted, there is no "the third eye". Then, you introduce the feature that prevents your users to from structured discussions, and then give them a "How popular U R" counter ...

It's more complicated than "It's just social".

I disagree, it's because of post weighting and weighted newsfeeds.

Provide the feed based on post time, allow you to agree or disagree to view hidden posts due to friends votes (down and up).

That's it. I useto enjoy FB(like 10 years ago), until I lost the ability to scroll through a time based list of posts.

I have no "purpose" when I go to a party besides drinking, eating, and socializing. Yet they rarely devolve into tribal bickering and infighting. Human beings have plenty of natural regulating mechanisms to keep social interactions from becoming sour of hostile. We've even replicated or adapted many of them to work in pseudonymous/anonymous spaces like bulletin boards, IRC, Usenet, etc.

I don't think you can make that assertion that easily. For example, would it be true if there was 1 capable moderator per user on the network?

Let's see. I log into Facebook. I type "vaccine" into the search page. The first autocomplete entry is "vaccine injury stories" - that looks interesting, let's see what that finds. Okay, so the first entry is "Looking for vaccine info" (Boring!), the second is a "Vaccines save lives" group (not what I searched for), and the third is "see all groups for "vaccine injury stories""

That seems more like it. What does that find? Ah, here we go, "COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects" - a group with 66k members. And lots of juicy, fascinating stories of bad things happening after someone got vaccinated.

And 10 minutes later, even I, who knows that in a country that has delivered almost 100M shots, shots that don't protect against stroke or heart attack (or eczema or whatever), there are going to be a lot of folks who get the vaccine and then have something bad happen to them can't help but feel at least a little more worried about the prospect of getting one of those shots. (I don't have to imagine the effect of these stories on folks with a weaker stats background - I just have to talk to my relatives...)

And that's something that's not necessary, but is extremely lucrative for FB. And that's a problem for anyone who likes living in a functioning democracy.

Your problem is that people are allowed to find people and talk about things that you think they shouldn't talk about?

Even in your example, you had to go digging pretty far for that group -- you didn't accidentally happen upon it. If you people are motivated to find bad information, they will. That's the nature of the internet. If you don't want people to be able to gather and share information, then unplug your Ethernet cables because that's what the internet is all about; FB or no FB.

our first thought is not really our thought. However, on Twitter we hit reply immediately after we read something. In real life, many people aren't capable to think deeply when having a face to face conversation, that's why we keep the topic casual and maybe mostly wasteful words. And we are expected to discuss politics, real issues on twitter in real time. There is no going back, but I really liked the BBS time where I have to download all messages and only reply to them once or twice a day.

In real life you won't go social with others debating on a heated topic, maybe we shouldn't do it on social network, slow down a little bit, we don't have to change the world in one day.

Social networks cannot exist and not devolve on today’s internet. Here is why:

1. They cannot be monetized via anything but ads. Sure a few people will pay for access to a social network. But the majority will not pay $0.01 because the friction of the transaction will prevent them. Moreover, an SN operator can make a lot more money from ads than from subscriptions, at least until proven otherwise. As a result any useful value that an SN provides will quickly be overtaken by more and more intrusive ads.

2. General purpose social networks are relatively boring. I mean how often do you actually hang out with a proportional representation of the general public? No, we want topic or interest based social networks. We want to form consumer tribes, political tribes, sports tribes, etc. We want to talk to people from our school, work, neighborhood, yoga practice, etc.

3. All that is overshadowed by the fact that most people straight up don’t have anything interesting to say. Think of the average person. Do you expect them to wow you with what they are working on even once a month? Chances are, most people will post pictures of their lunch or repost a stupid meme that they finally discovered. Twitter sort of solves this by letting you follow leaders in their fields, but still the SNR is so low that it’s really difficult to find meaningful interactions and unless you are one of those leaders nobody gives a crap about what you shout into the void.

The only thing I can see being a path forward is small communities forming their own very limited in size networks with some common authentication platform to help people jump between them. Discord is sort of that, but far cry from a sustainable model.

Your third point is the second most important, but the most important is number one by far. People are willing to let social media turn into a shitshow because they're not invested. It didn't cost them anything and it doesn't continue to cost them anything, so it has no value.

Starship Troopers (both the book and the movie) hit the nail on the head... "Something given has no value."

TANSTAAFL :)

The thing is that if your social network gave you more value than $10/month, you’d sign up for it, no? Remember when texting on your mobile phone was a separate plan that cost about $10-20/month? People fell over themselves to sign up for that because it gave them access to a large social network, one that consisted of people you actually meet in real life and that are presumably worth keeping up with. I don’t use Facebook because nobody on there really is worth my time to keep up with, and I can’t bring myself to try to curate my feed/friends list because that’s just work, all the while FB will keep polluting it with ads anyways. Instagram is mildly more worth it to me because you can actually find some meaningful connections on there as a photographer, but I suspect that’s 100% temporary.

But the book (as I understand) is straight faced, while the movie is biting satire. Aren't the two saying opposite things with that line?

I saw the movie more as a campy adaptation than satire. In either case, while most people are familiar with the movie, the book is much more significant. I believe it’s still required reading in the Marine Corp for example.

TANSTAAFL is from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, basically a libertarian manifesto. Heinlein had range. Add Stranger in a Strange Land, the hippie manifesto, and you have the trifecta.

indeed. Like online snipers. Shooting from cover. They don't expose themselves while insulting.

That asymmetry enables toxicity. And volume will make it a matter of time until arbitrary toxic things eventually show up.

Participation must require more committment than opening a free account.

I wonder how those free accounts without any accountability get any credibility.

> 1. They cannot be monetized via anything but ads. Sure a few people will pay for access to a social network. But the majority will not pay $0.01 because the friction of the transaction will prevent them. Moreover, an SN operator can make a lot more money from ads than from subscriptions, at least until proven otherwise. As a result any useful value that an SN provides will quickly be overtaken by more and more intrusive ads.

I don't know about this. It may well be that only being ad driven can monetize them to $billion+ valuations. But I don't know if it is for sure that you can't have a more modest, but still very respectable business worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars by monetizing in other ways.

It should also be clear that social media's monetization strategy isn't just about ads, it's about data farming to serve highly targeted ads. They're not just selling out full page ad spreads and selling classifieds like in a newspaper. Those would be perfectly fine monetization plans that just focus on self-reported areas of interest and some very basic geolocation. There is some incentive to drive engagement to get eyeballs but it's not nearly as strong because they just need you to log in and hang out. They don't need you to interact constantly to collect data on your emotional state and receptivity.

> They cannot be monetized via anything but ads. Sure a few people will pay for access to a social network. But the majority will not pay $0.01 because the friction of the transaction will prevent them.

This could be done by the ISP hosting an instance of the service that can inter-operate with other hosted instances on other ISPs. They already do this with email and many of them did with usenet.

So you want your ISP to offer the Facebook Package, the Twitter Package, the Slack Package, the Discord Package, the Instagram Package, the Tik Tok package, and with any of them you can get the AOL package? Sort of like the opposite of net neutrality? Plus do you really want Comcast to have control over what most people see as news via social media? The same Comcast that is very politically connected and regularly lobbies state and federal legislatures to blatantly advance their own interests.

The idea doesn't work with closed source protocols like what you listed. It would work with open source protocols that can interface with other instances on other ISPs.

Unless your ISP blocks that traffic or makes you pay extra for access to that system you want them to host or has their own curation team curating the news to suit their needs.

You're only able to access the service using the credentials you use for your internet connection. What other people post is not under the ISPs control, nor is what you post.

Back when ISPs provided access to usenet, they never filtered what was posted and what you saw was under your control.

Here in Hong Kong, lots of isp have stop providing email. Lots of internet users are mobile-only and never had an ISP email to begin with.

> Social networks cannot exist and not devolve on today’s internet... They cannot be monetized via anything but ads.

I tend to think of IRC as sort of a proto-social network (channels are kind of like tribes - there's usually a topic that is of common interest for those participating). It has existed for a long time without ads or even monetization.

That would be more applicable if IRC had the broad appeal or ease of use of major social networks, however despite being around longer it has been repeatedly eclipsed in user count by every contending service.

IRC has no power to shape national discourse, international politics or even quotidian humdrum discussion topics because it has a high barrier to entry, low user friendliness and no additional features.

Personally I wouldn't have it any other way: IRC is perfect as is, but it is not a social network that has ever gained enough steam to devolve. It's like saying your family blog has a great comment section, therefore all comments sections can be great without devolving: that's not even universally true for family blog comment sections.

I do not think the barrier to entry was so high. Some years ago (before facebook or even earlier), it was common to see all kind of people chatting in cybercafes, and also not so long ago in countries or places with poor connections. They either used some installed client or, most often, a web interface. And people could manage quite well, even non tech savvy people.

But, except for that, I totally agree with your comment. It did never have the power that social networks have today, and as soon as more interesting tools were available, most people moved on.

IRC isn’t accessible by most people. It discriminates based on technical knowledge, which isn’t necessarily bad because it leads to mostly people with some level of education or intelligence (on average) finding it.

Yes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I don't think it's that hard to use IRC. I've certainly run into some non-tech folks on IRC. But yes, I guess it does tend to be more exclusive and maybe that's not a bad thing.

It’s not hard to use. But it’s not a one click signup that everyone knows how to use. It’s sort of how “the dark web” isn’t hard to use but your grandma isn’t on there and wouldn’t know where to start, let alone why she’d want to be on there.

Being text-based, and chat, I'd guess IRC is many times lighter to (financially) sustain for a set amount of users, compared to many web based social network today.

Page loads, reloads, dynamic content, rich media and more does add up to amazing amounts of data. As the user base grows, monetization or financial donations becomes a requirement if such a platform will be sustainable. A lot of processing and data transfers "need" to happen to simply read a short text message from a friend.

How could we design social platforms as streamlined as IRC? What technologies do we have? HTML works. How do we keep the online experience and rich media we are accustomed to today while going for an affordable architecture.

Solving the ads and monetization issue should be tackled from multiple angles. Not just asking where the money will come from. I believe more could be discussed about creating sustainable, lightweight solutions as well.

I've been working on a network of small communities and I'd tend to agree that these are the path forward. Even so, all 3 points you make are valid. I have no idea how I'd ever monetize the thing, and the only way I've been able to find interesting people is via direct recruiting (on average, the organic users have less to say).

I've been trying to open the network up to the public more, but I'm starting to realize that making the communities more insular and invite-only had been more successful - but that's very hard to scale.

The site is https://podaero.com - always appreciate new users.

I run a community Discord of about 80 people currently. I personally would pay something like $100-200/year for a nice network for these people as the administrator. If the network grew more, I might be willing to pay more. Discoverability is a thing though. This community is deliberately private but is discoverable from two other social networks, and centered around a business which ultimately makes money from the community.

In other words, the meetup model might work for these kinds of communities.

Why is a modern forum (like Discourse on your own domain) not an option?

I've been doing the same thing but around live TV. The goal is each show is its own community that essentially forms and disperses as the shows are live and then end.

https://couchmate.com

that's a pretty cool idea. I've been looking for something like that with a crowdsourced playlist with live chat, and just to watch youtube videos. I think there used to be something like that but I can't remember it.

What are you doing to market your project, and have you had an easy time getting users?

Ha, so I'm an engineer by trade so I've been focusing on stabilizing the platform and adding table stakes features but I've tried to start reaching out to existing communities around different TV genres, mainly reality TV.

As you can imagine, it's hard to crack the chicken/egg social platform problem, so user acquisition is slow going and I'm completely bootstrapped. I'm in it for the long haul though (it's been over 8 years now in the making).

If you haven't already, you might want to start looking at those 'live threads' for popular tv shows on reddit, and try to message those users to try your app.

Kind of a tangential thought - it would be kind of cool to have crowdsourced 'prediction markets' for the tv shows - i.e. people guess what's going to happen in an episode or season.

This is what you are looking for: https://campfire.gg/

yeah that's pretty close, although it doesn't seem to have the amount of activity I'm looking for. It would be nice to have a few hundred people from HN in a room over there - I'm always trying to get youtube recommendations from people I meet here.

FortNine is an excellent channel.

Aside from that my motto has been that if you say something that doesn’t exist should exist, it’s now on you to make it happen or to find and fund someone who will. Organize an event using this service or another, advertise it to a few friends, make sure everyone has a fun time, they’ll spread the word for the next event for you.

agreed. might have to make a weekend project of it one of these days.

Nit on the homepage: TV's -> TVs

Ah, thanks!

> They cannot be monetized via anything but ads.

What if ads were banned?

Then VCs wouldn’t invest as much into social networks.

Would that be a good or a bad thing?

Depends on what you want. If you want to whip out your phone and be able to look up and message your uncle’s ex-wife’s second cousin and message them, even without speaking the same language, you probably won’t get that without large networks. Same with if you want to gather an audience of 5m followers for your brand.

If you just want to talk to your buddies or your church group, yeah you don’t need an ad supported network for that.

I agree with you but you have given the solution as well. Add VAT on all digital advertising and keep raising it until ads aren't the least friction way for people. As long as the social media is encouraged to leverage for profit, they will. We have to force them into a model that has different incentives.

You don’t think that would just lead to even more intrusive ads in an attempt to make them more effective to offset the cost?

It is a fair question and to be honest we'll never know. I think we have to try something and this is the best idea I have. The erosion of privacy and the amplification of hate are being driven by this ad funded leverage.

I would beg to differ about the monetisation.

See how many people pay crazy money for Bloomberg terminal just to be part of the in crowd.

A social network could work for a few bucks a month I think.

This is an excellent summary of the problems with social networks as currently implemented. All the incentives are pre-wired to make them horrible places.

> All that is overshadowed by the fact that most people straight up don’t have anything interesting to say. Think of the average person. Do you expect them to wow you with what they are working on even once a month? Chances are, most people will post pictures of their lunch or repost a stupid meme that they finally discovered. Twitter sort of solves this by letting you follow leaders in their fields, but still the SNR is so low that it’s really difficult to find meaningful interactions and unless you are one of those leaders nobody gives a crap about what you shout into the void.

Imagine the implications of actually believing this, because if you thought hard enough about it, you probably don't believe it. For example, if you truly believed this, you must think most people straight up don't have any friends. I mean, why would anyone want to be friends with someone who straight up doesn't have anything interesting to say?

Like, do you think the average person, hanging out with their average friends on a regular basis is just mind-numbingly, dumbfoundedly bored? Why do you think they keep hanging out with all those average people? You think they derive zero meaning from their interactions with anyone who isn't a "leader in their field". The dim view you have on humanity blows my mind. There's meaning to be had all around for these average people.

This is exactly why average people hate the proverbial elites. You (ostensibly elite) view them as worthless plebs whose social interactions with their friends are so worthless, they don't even deserve the chance to share them online. Only so-called leaders in their field should be allowed to interact publicly online. Their interactions are the only ones with meaning in your view.

When I'm on FB or Instagram or Snapchat, and I see the plenty of average people I know interacting, I see all sorts of wonderful, meaningful human interactions. Today, my old high school math teacher posted a joke image of the side effects of the COVID vaccine which included hugs from his grandchildren. His son replied about how he can't wait for him and his grandson to be with him again and many of his friends commented about how touched they were. Who gives a fuck if it's a cringeworthy, stupid meme they discovered? It was a wonderful expression of humanity from completely average, nobodies.

There's so much wrong with social networks, but the plebs having no meaning and nothing interesting to say isn't one of them.

I think you are taking what I said a bit out of context. Most people have a half dozen close friends and they find that person interesting or pleasant to be around or whatever it is they see in them. But hand a average person a megaphone in front of a crowd of 10,000 people and they won’t know what to say and will run out of steam quickly. Global social networks are that megaphone. This is why your feed, while having some gems, is also likely full of reposted memes, personality quizzes, and other retweeted/reposted content. If you have no actual special connection to the person who is posting the meme/quiz/repost, it is just noise to you, no?

I firmly believe that technology like social networks can bring people closer together and enrich lives of everyone, from luminaries to ordinary folks. And I believe we should build better networks. But if I throw a dart at a completely random Facebook post and read it, there is a very good chance it’ll be a lot less interesting than a random post from e.g. Neil deGrasse Tyson or Neil Patrick Harris or Obama. My point is that having these huge global networks doesn’t actually achieve the goal of furthering friendships or increasing the quality of content the participants read.

> Global social networks are that megaphone.

Uh, what? No they aren't. If I shared something on FB or Instagram, it would be shared exactly to the people who I'm friends with on FB or follow me on Instagram. I, and I'm willing to bet really large amounts of money at favorable odds to you most other people, don't have anything close to 10K people in either of those categories. Weirdly, despite your favorable comparison, and in fairness to your point, Twitter is much closer to being that megaphone.

> This is why your feed, while having some gems, is also likely full of reposted memes, personality quizzes, and other retweeted/reposted content.

Actually it's almost entirely not this. It's mostly boring baby photos or engagement photos or posts about middling shit in most people's lives. I wouldn't be surprised if FB downranked that type of content a lot. On IG, it's literally none of that. Mostly baby photos and photos of little trips and outings people do.

> If you have no actual special connection to the person who is posting the meme/quiz/repost, it is just noise to you, no?

Why would I be connected to that person???

> there is a very good chance it’ll be a lot less interesting than a random post from e.g. Neil deGrasse Tyson or Neil Patrick Harris or Obama.

NDT: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1371154155931377666 Just as interesting a meme

NDT: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1371147864361996293 a meme joke about pi. So profound.

NDT: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1371139056218742784 Did you know pizza is known as pizza pie and pie and pi are homonyms? Wow, thanks, Neil! Glad a leader in the field like you could hook me up with this interesting content that no average person could!

NDT: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1371121692064374785 Normally, I would need a calculator for this content, but NDT has got my back on Twitter.

NDT: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1370797127459278856 cute cows are cute, also pithy political statement. An average person might be able to post a cute animal OR make a pithy political statement, but BOTH!?

NDT: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1369144426845663234 buy my merch! No average person could ever have merch! He produces great content like this on a weekly basis. Even if an average person was able to have merch, could they post about it weekly??

NDT: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1366730477642649603 Faux deep statement with a picture of space. My grandma literally posts shit like this all the time, I'll let her know she's a leader in her field.

NDT: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1366097324276027393 LOL dogs smell butts. Classic content no average person could do.

NDT:https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1365764623820029959 LOL DAE dogs shed on furniture!?

NDT: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1363840108861005829 Same vacuous quips my teacher friends post when they're feeling down.

NDT: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1363159290601758723 Seriously, it's all memey bull shit. I'm not even being selective here!!!

Let's do NPH.

NPH: https://twitter.com/ActuallyNPH/status/1364362084985823234 Thanks for saying nice things about me! Average people are never thankful for things in their lives!

NPH: https://twitter.com/ActuallyNPH/status/1355157217478123524 Just like MLM shit people post.

NPH: https://twitter.com/ActuallyNPH/status/1352751015121063937 Shameless self-promotion. Average people don't have personal brands that they self-promote. Just leaders in their field like NPH. This is the vast majority of what he posts. Thank GOD I can get this on Twitter by following leaders in their field instead of FB or Snapchat where people share stupid shit like their vacations with friends.

NPH: https://twitter.com/ActuallyNPH/status/1328787438232276993 Last one because I can't stand how ridiculous your lionization of these people is over the average person. Here he recommends a book, which of course average people, on account of being illiterate, could never recommend!

I agree, there's a lot of valuable posts on my feed. A lot of posts here seem to be written by people who don't use social media

Solid sounds like a nice idea, kind of like Urbit without the feudalism and for normal people but I think it also sounds a lot like the semantic web. (which is no surprise given that Berners-Lee is on board I suppose).

I'm not too optimistic about this and I don't think it will see widespread adoption, in particular not without any kind of legal framework behind it.

When Berners-Lee talks he still has essentially the early web mindset. Build it, and individuals will come voluntarily because it looks nice and we'll make friendly communities... somehow. I think if that was enough Mastodon would have already replaced Twitter.

> I think if that was enough Mastodon would have already replaced Twitter.

For some of us, it has. ;)

For others who are fine with Twitter, well, there's still Twitter.

I realized earlier today we're still in the era of AOL. Only now AOL is called FAANG and instead of snail-mailing you plastic discs, they pre-install on all your hardware. The people who either prefer the corporate ecosystem or simply don't know any better hang out there while the wild west waits just outside.

Foster the Indieweb where participating takes owning a domain.

That decelerates the trolls and doesn't harm the others. Entry must be possible for laypeople, however, and can be, if a few tools (like my https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo) exist and improve.

And self-host. Very few people burn their own garden.

All it takes is an adult approach where candy isn't free.

We don't need "social networks". We need forums, or something similar.

The problem with social networks is moderation. Moderation can only really be done well by users; not by some corporate top-down approach like Facebook, Twitter, et al have been trying.

Couldn't agree more. The community self-policing (and having the tools to do it correctly) is the path to actually sustainable online communities.

How would that work for the echo-chambers of conspiracy theorists?

I never said the tools are meant to produce certain communities. My point was centrally controlled communities are futile since it's a losing battle. The only way to sustain healthy communities is to have them self policing. Healthy meaning sustainable, not "of a certain ilk".

There hasn't been a viable solution proposed for those.

I mostly only go to /r/conspiracy, but there is plenty of disagreement on the epistemic status of the various ideas discussed there, way more than you'll find in most any other subreddit.

My cofounder and I met Tim and his team back in 2015, when they had just started building it. We actually had about a 5 year head start on them, and wound up building this social network.

Here's what I think the future of social networking will be:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-future-of-social-networkin...

LinkedIn? It might go to show that specialized social networks can minimize malintent, although I personally don't use LinkedIn and only assumed since it is business focused, there would be less [d|m]isinformation there.

My LinkedIn feed is much worse than my Facebook feed. That is not meant as praise for the latter -- it's around 50% irrelevant crap, but the former is 95%+.

I suppose it's fair to say that there isn't as much outright malicious disinformation on my LinkedIn feed, but to me it's a distinction without a difference -- crap is crap.

edit: And at least when I see crap on Facebook, it's usually my own fault to an extent: it's almost always from someone I follow directly. LinkedIn seems intent on populating my feed with almost entirely stuff from people I don't know, about subjects I couldn't care less about, just because one of my connections "liked" it.

If your feed is just content you don't care for, that's infinitely better than disinformation and hate.

It's better but as a network it's failing quite badly at transmitting any information.

You’d think. I’ve seen everything on Linkedin comments and posts, from harassment to openly racist comments. Occam’s Razor explanation here is it’s a smaller problem because it’s _used less_ for general discussion than the other networks

LinkedIn is full of banal spam instead of triggering propaganda spam.

LinkedIn doesn't allow you to put your email address into your name field, so that people can contact you directly off of LinkedIn, and naturally prevents you from a) contacting all of your contacts at once, either serially or in a single action, and b) snoops on all of your DMs, in and out.

LinkedIn exists to benefit Microsoft, not you.

Yeah, people aren't going to shitpost if if they think that might impact their ability to find work. So for the most part LI posts are pretty bland. But bland maybe isn't so bad when you compare with the dumpster fire that is FB?

Linked in is people selling themselves, their career, their made up expertise, etc. Always someone trying to make a buck directly (products & services) or indirectly (self promotion). I’ve never gone to a Lyons Club, though from the little I’ve heard it’s selling but also helping and Linked in doesn’t have much helping (with the exception of the professional side of things it works for many people one way or another).

Social networks ought to be less... social. Instead of text boxes, we should provide options for reactions and that's it. Maybe there are a lot of options, but the idea that anyone can share any thought at any time is probably too much.

Limiting how people can interact and reward people for reacting positively, is a great 1/2 punch way to prevent the nastiest people from entering into a positive feedback loop.

Yeah, it's not as free, but I think we've gathered enough evidence that freedom (in this social media context) causes more problems than it solves.

Your approach is actually used a lot. There are a lot of apps already out there which only allow you to communicate with reactions (e.g. Clash Royale). However, these reactions seem very artificial and impersonal. There is no real community, and you never feel like people are truly being "nice" to you because they might only be doing it for the in-game reward. Social media as is is already too impersonal, just reactions would make it worse.

I think what we really need is exclusivity and accountability. So you can't just be messaged by random people, and if people messaging you are being assholes they will at minimum be kicked off your network. I think this is similar to how "real" friend groups work, how they worked before social media. The main problem is it's hard to find new people.

Just curious, what would be your take on reactions combined with text comments? I think that it would kind of be like giving a face to an otherwise impersonal comment, kind of like emoji. Not really sure though, currently experimenting on this kind of idea: https://www.wndr.xyz

Yep, I saw how communication in M:tG Arena worked, and I thought about how much less toxic that community is, possibly as a result. There's still ways to troll, but they're limited and hard to cause any real trouble with.

My problem with accountability is that it doesn't seem to matter. Facebook users have shown us that even linking terrible content back to real people won't stop the real people from sharing those terrible content. Anonymity (or its inverse) isn't the answer.

Has anyone tried putting up a paywall to use comments? I feel like surely someone has, but I can't think of an org off the top of my head.

Would you treat hackernews or reddit as social networks in the same sense? We have text boxes for comments, but I don't see nearly the same level of "cancel culture" that seems to happen on Twitter. I think that providing reactions is an interesting concept, perhaps this would pair well with text in providing additional context?

Social interaction is not better facilitated by hobbling communication between parties.

Agreed!

I don't think the goal should be to maximally facilitate social interaction anymore. We've proven there are enough bad actors that it poisons the well.

So, given the above, how can we still enable some interaction? How can we get the value out of crowdsourcing without creating an opportunity for toxicity?

I don't think that bad actors are the problem you think they are. They still exist in our society and we manage.

The issue in my view hinges upon making it easier for people to choose who they interact with online, including tools for delegating those decisions to zero or more third parties.

We'll need a good decentralized identity system first.

I think bad actors are the only problem worth talking about. Remove bad actors, and social media becomes a lot more tolerable/positive.

The other problems with social media are either not important to most people, or solved by other services already.

I think reactions can be text, but they shouldn't be shared with everybody by default.

E.g. you post a picture, and I comment on it. Doesn't mean your mother should see the comment too.

Interestingly, I used to use Instagram like this, only posting stories, and only reacting to others stories. It makes the interactions more personal and often spurs a nice private conversation.

The problem with emoticons/reactions is that there's no way to indicate whether you are reacting to the linked item or your friend's commentary on it. For example, imagine your friend posts a link to a news story about RBG's death, commenting "so sad that RBG died, and now Trump gets to replace her". What would it mean to have a reaction of an angry face or +1 or thumbs-up? Does angry face mean you're angry at the news, or angry at your friend's reaction? Does +1 mean you agree with the news, or agree with your friend's reaction?

Among close friends, it would be obvious most of the time. But most of our social media contacts are not close friends, and it's not clear what these reactions would mean.

Why does everyone seem to think "something needs to be done" about social media? We didn't blame the cellphone carriers for "allowing" racist groups to coordinate organized violence. Why are we blaming Facebook?

Facebook didn't cause or perpetuate the situation in the USA, it simply reflects it, as any communications tool.

Let me tell you: Facebook sadly has no monopoly on partisan lies and associated screaming, or rampant misinformation.

Everybody thinks that, because it is the leftist agenda and pushed in all media channels (who also happen to compete with social networks for clicks). The ultimate goal behind that narrative is of course censorship and control.

I'm disappointed that TBL, who seems to be very smart, falls for it so easily. Like when he mentions "feminist bloggers" - these people get toxic replies because they write toxic articles and messages (basically "all men are assholes", so naturally some men get angry about the insult). Haven't experiments in fact found that men receive much more hate messages than women, they just don't make such a fuzz about it?

I don't think TBL actually advocates for censorship (except with his "curation" idea) when he asks for better controls. Good muting, blocking and reporting features go a long way towards making social networks usable.

> Why does everyone think "something needs to be done" about social media?

Facebook offers shitty controls, and reads and influences our conversations. Unlike cellphone carriers.

Same could be said for television, newspapers, and the church, all of which have reflected society's misinformation and misconceptions back onto it for a very long time.

You act like that a lot of things were not done about newspapers or TV?

There are still televangelists and cable news, so I'm pretty sure that the misinformation that people are so upset about on Facebook are still there on TV, too.

If the social network is a reflection of society as a whole, then it's not possible to ensure bad things happen less.

What is required is to shift focus from social networks to the society. Removing hate, bigotry, evil and social factors that induce crime ought to be the focus.

A society cannot be reformed if it is corrupt at its core, no matter how many controls you put on public communication systems.

The problem has to be addressed from within, not from outside controls.

> as if to underline that the human race may now have its priorities slightly wrong, at 345,000, his Twitter followers number less than 5% of Piers Morgan’s.

Are we supposed to celebrate whoever created the plumbing or the interface? After all, Tim is not responsible for the user adoption and for all the user content created out there. If it were not for WWW it would have been someone/something else and nobody would know Tim right now.

I would follow my plumber on Twitter before I would follow Piers Morgan.

Not gonna happen. Social networks just tap into and amplify what’s already going on: humanity.

All mediums of exchange will amplify certain kinds of information, and suppress others, hence the phrase "The Medium is the message".

Marshall McLuhan, using his theory of media, was effective at diagnosing the downsides of social media decades long before it became the dominant medium through which our worldviews are shaped.

I don't think Tim, nor anybody else in the tech industry* was listening when McLuhan claimed "peer to peer electronic media" would bring out our tribal impulses, but here we are. The internet is a bunch of identity groups, each working with distinct sets of facts, all of them suspicious and distrustful of the others, who enjoy beating on one another for sport.

Of course, humans are inherently tribal, and civilization is a hack. For it work we have to suppress, and find safe outlets for our basic tribal impulses.

*Zuckerberg has claimed to be a McLuhan fan, but if he actually understands what McLuhan was saying, then he's straight up evil.

Zuck likely understands McLuhan very well, and it has made him billions to the point that he cares not for your trifle notions of good or evil.

"[...] Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature.

The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?

John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities."

- Emma Goldman, "Anarchism: What it Really Stands for" (1917);

Funny she wrote that while Europeans were slaughtering each other by the millions. And what does an un-caged human actually look like?As a social species, we're always going to be in some form of bonded existence.

We need to get off the internet, and re-discover how to connect with real humans and form lasting social bonds.

I can't imagine how different (and more socially vibrant) life was 40 years ago.

It wasn't that more socially vibrant really. The same issues existed back then. We just moved all of them online with us :)

I have the perfect site for you then.

https://cancel.pointless.click

did you know that the internet was invented by this guy and not Tim Berners-Lee? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cailliau

Yes, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and is the Director of the W3C.

I live with the premise that people are inherently bad and build around that concept.

Selfish or egocentric maybe. But inherently bad, no.

People aren’t inherently bad, but they’re inherently _different_ - and just like any other animal, people tend to react to _difference_ with mistrust. The thing IMO that social media _amplifies_ is your exposure to people/points of view you wouldn’t ever get in real life, or find people that share your worldview and “bond” with them, forming larger groups.

I believe that individuals are almost universally good. Groups, on the other hand...

But does the group dynamic just amplify individual "badness"? Does it turn those "good" people bad or were those "good" people good just because there were certain social obligations and when a group throws off those restraints does it just give people permission to be their "bad" selves?

I feel like philosophy has been debating this issue for millennia.

Hi,

I think that trying to look at it from the perspective of innate goodness or badness of an individual really misses the point.

In my world view, everyone basically has the same motivations[0]. You can understand this in terms of what philosophers call "negative freedoms"[1] - freedom from hunger, freedom from pain, etc (the linked wikipedia article doesn't fully convey this sense, but it's what I learned in philosophy class). People, basically, want to "eat, drink and be merry".

Individuals naturally adapt their behaviour to satisfy these freedoms - for example, you get a job so you can be free from hunger and free from danger, among other things. Of course there are positive freedoms and aspirations too, but the basic stuff, like not being hungry, or wanting your kids to do well, is pretty much universal, and deeply informs my view of the world.

Anyway -- as an individual, pursuing your desire to eat, drink and be merry seems like a pretty harmless way to go about life. But if that individual joins a group, and some people in that group tell them that the reason they can't get a job is because <insert group here> has <insert cause here> - then their behaviour will reflect that group dynamic for all the reasons we already know, and that behaviour will become self-reinforcing within the group itself. You can see how this has played out in US politics recently; it's very obvious and I don't think I need to give examples.

The problem of groups comes about, in my world view, because groups are completely different from individuals. It's far harder to change the opinion of a group, than it is to change the opinion of an individual. It's really a scaling issue; once you get a group of similar people who reinforce their own beliefs - for example, that certain other racial or ethnic "out-groups" threaten their ability to meet their needs - then they are going to feel justified in taking action against those groups.

There is no question that the actions of those individuals and of that group are bad, because in my worldview everyone is equal and nobody deserves to be hurt when they are just trying to "eat drink and be merry". But the perpetrator, too, was just doing what they thought was right, in order to achieve the same goals. That they were misguided is entirely different from them being "bad people".

That doesn't make the actions of the individual OK, but it obviates the notion of people being innately bad. To be clear: if they do bad things then they still need to suffer the full consequences of the law for their actions (the law's role is not to punish people for being bad, but for doing bad things). It's never OK to hurt people for any reason. But it's senseless to say if an individual who likes puppies, looks after their kids, likes a beer after work, donates 10% of their income to charity, and is also a racist, is "bad", if the latter attitude is the accepted behaviour of the group that they belong to.

I feel like I need to be super clear here: my world view is that racism is stupid; racists do bad things; and the leaders of racists groups are scumbags. But humans learn by observing, so a group member who's a racist is, at worst, generally redeemable.

So, in my world view, it makes no sense to rank people in general in terms of their individual goodness or badness, because I suspect that most people are basically good; I know this because I can walk the streets of my suburb and not get stabbed. It certainly *does* make sense to rank group leaders in terms of good or bad, because groups ossify group behaviour; the very behaviour of in-groups that I pointed out above can be weaponised by unscrupulous people, which includes the obvious historical figures and many, or perhaps most, politicians.

So - to sum up this overly long post - I believe that individuals are almost universally good. Groups, on the other hand...

[0] Clearly, this is not absolutely true. Some people have pathologies which maybe make them unlike this - wanting to harm people etc - and some people are willing to hurt others for personal benefit. But in my world view these people are very much in the minority.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty

I have similar view

Imwill: “We need a reality where bad things happen less”

HE says so many interesting things, yet what the guardian chooses to showcase is a minor point in the interview(Particularly when he talks about a topic he is not as knowledgeable of)? Casually enough a point that goes in favour of the nu guardian's agenda ( More censorship on social media). Honestly this is definitely not the first time they do this, this is reaching insulting levels, particularly with such a distinguished guest for the interview.

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