Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)
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When I put it that way it feels banal, but like, you know the “fast-growing subreddits” list on Reddit? There were meetings! Someone worked on that! People literally sat in a room and said effectively, “Hey Fatimeh, what is the status of the ‘make subreddits suck faster’ feature? Management is very interested in delivering that in Q3.” Right? Like this connection from global to personal is just automatically assumed, nobody spends a waking moment thinking it could be anything but that way.
A similar one that I used to get wrong all the time is empanada. No ñ in that either, but I always said em-puh-NYAH-duh. Then one day I noticed it was just a regular n and it is pronouced em-puh-NAH-duh.
Now for a really embarrassing one. This was back in the day when I was working with my friend and colleague Alan Cooper (of interaction design fame) on what became Visual Basic. We were on a phone call and I said something about a zhuh-NAIR of music. Alan asked "what's that?" I explained that it was like a category or a particular style. He said "do you mean ZHAHN-ruh?"
It's funny how these embarrassing moments stick in your brain. I could tell you exactly where I was, and even which direction I was facing when we had that conversation.
But I was grateful that Alan corrected me and I won't sound like a fool any more when I talk about a genre.
I had one friend who would never gracefully accept a correction like that. One time he told me about a neighbor who "took his dog to the pond." I said "that's nice, does the dog like to go swimming?" He said "no, the POND, the place where they put dogs to sleep."
He went through his whole life mispronouncing "dog pound", and many, many other words.
One of our cats thinks she is my girlfriend! When I go to bed, she immediately jumps on the bed next to me and places herself right where my hand is, so I can scratch her back and tummy.
No cat peeling here!
"I could care less" vs "I could not care less"
The amount of people who defend the former with their own head-canon is frightening. Ones I have heard are "It's sarcastic" and "I care so little that I won't put the extra effort into caring less"
https://www.google.com/search?q=steven+pinker+i+could+care+l...
From Pinker's book The Language Instinct (p.377 or 389 depending on the edition):
> A tin ear for prosody (stress and intonation) and an obliviousness to the principles of discourse and rhetoric are important tools for the language maven. Consider an alleged atrocity committed by today's youth: the expression I could care less. The teenagers are trying to express disdain, the adults note, in which case they should be saying I couldn't care less. If they could care less than they do, that means that they really do care, the opposite of what they are trying to say. But if these dudes would stop ragging on teenagers and scope out the construction, they would see that their argument is bogus. Listen to how the two versions are pronounced:
[If viewing on mobile, turn your device sideways to avoid wrapping.]
------------------------
COULDN'T care
LE
ESS.
i
------------------------
I
CARE
LE
ESS.
could
------------------------
But I hear you and sympathize with your point of view. I have been there myself. It didn't make sense to me that people would use a word or phrase in any meaning other than its literal one.
Especially a word like "literally", right?
Merriam-Webster has a article on that. It's literally the best article ever written!
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-lite...
> From Alexander the grammarian: to avoid fault-finding and not to censure in a carping spirit any who employ an exotic phrase, a solecism, or harsh expression, but oneself to use, neatly and precisely, the correct phrase, by way of answer or confirmation or handling of the actual question—the thing, not its verbal expression—or by some other equally happy reminder.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Meditations_of_the_Empero...
"Old-timer's disease" (Alzheimer's)
"Valentime's Day"
Too late to correct him now! May he rest in peace.
(In fact I see that it is mentioned at the beginning of that article!)
In any case, "empañada" is a real word, it mean's "foggy", but used for glasses, not for the weather itself. For example, "tengo las gafas empañadas" -> "my glasses are foggy"
It is banal, at least the largest portion of social media is. Originally, I could see the usefulness of FB with connecting with friends near & far, sharing, planning, etc. All sounds useful, but then FB turned it creepy with their method of monetizing their products and algos to pull the strings to make it as addicting as possible. Insta, TikTok, etc has pretty much fully embraced the dark side of social. LOOK AT ME!!! LIKE ME!!! FOLLOW ME!!! Again, with the tweaking of the algos to up the addiction factor. All in the name of "engagement".
YouTube already made me nervous, but there's definitely some people creating content there that is not about that at all so I don't lump them in with the others.
honestly I would love social networks that was just that but as it is now i actively avoid most social media outside of small niche communities (certain subreddits that relate to fairly narrow interest fan communities for a couple of authors that sort of thing [i don't fallow any default subs], hacker news, and a couple of small discord servers for open source projects and small podcasts)
but everything for talking to friends and family and keeping up on there lives is either been turned into a politically toxic battleground or monetized into unusability.
When I used FB, I used it as a non-professional LinkedIn. Like, networking, but for people outside of your professional network.
Being connected to people who are not so close that you shared your cell number, but still wanted to stay connected.
(Email isn't big where I live)
> We can conceive of all but the simplest societies as comprising three levels of social relations. The first level consists of highly personal or primary relations, notably the family. The third level contains relations inclusive of the whole population, notably the state. The second level comprises all intermediate relations, notably the local community, voluntary association, and occupational group.
Etc., the argument being that much of the socially important parts and ills of industrialization, urbanization, and the ensuing mass society are reducible to the dissolution of the second level and the transferral of its customary characteristics and behaviours (strong attachment, group identity, and so on) to the third.
But that’s mostly me channelling my history teachers, not original thought, so maybe someone who actually knows this stuff can say more.
Lest this be perceived as doomsaying, let me mention that Russian-language LiveJournal seemed to retain that small-town feel up until the very end (early 2010s) despite the considerable number of readers and commenters (thousands of readers for the most popular post on a slow day—much less than on Facebook, much more than you could ever possibly know). Possibly that’s because the number of writers (worth following) was much smaller, due to the higher effort required for long-form posts.
Again, people with more experience in older online communities should know more about this, as that was the only thriving one I experienced personally.
There are little consequences when the pool of people you have access to is massive; and there remains no reason to become emotionally invested in a certain "core" of people, when you can easily jump to another if that "core" is not perfect.
This leads to a feedback loop that stunts relationship "depth."
Or further: when you have options, the default modus operandi is to not become completely invested into any single one -- you can always "jump" to another, and are always on the lookout for "greener pastures."
People have more options than they used to.
As much as I craved these "second level" (and even "first level") social relations, over the years I've become assimilated and contribute to the aforementioned feedback loop.
The "ills" of modern life have been exponentially increasing, but for the future generations they are simply "life."
In my opinion, it's good to have options. It's good not to have an X-or-bust social investment in a particular community because, as the 20th century has demonstrated, communities don't last forever. They change, they warp, they include, they exclude, they rise ,and they disappear. Societies are built to serve an instrumental function. When a society fails to provide that function in any meaningful way, people will vote with their feet when they can find another goal that suits their purposes. Even if such a goal is outside their current limits. This his been the way of humanity for thousands of years, so I don't understand why should we stop people from having options. I don't see a reason why people risk sinking with a ship they no longer have an interest being aboard.
Ideally one would have an arrangement that mimics the Viennese Cafe societies. Strict but fair rules on conduct, but ultimately leaving personal agency to oneself and one's confidants .
This sounds harsh but not everyone deserves to be heard all of the time- myself included.
"I think when I was younger I wanted to tell everybody everything, because I thought I was so damn interesting. Then I heard the snoring."
* Of course, there are exceptions, and I actually use hnreplies.com to get emails when someone replies to me, but there's enough of a delay that I usually am able to avoid getting caught up in a back-and-forth argument. Especially since, by the time I see the replies, someone else has already clarified my position :)
I get it though, there are mental tiers I know where I am. Thankfully I can at least make a decent living/do my own thing.
I'm also aware of effort too. Looking into something/asking.
There can be automated systems to fix that - to rank contributions, with the aim to boost the signal and reduce the noise, with the final aim to facilitate a lean and productive debate and information sharing; and also to connect contributions, to reduce dispersion, etc.
Such systems to rank contributions are related to the theory of voting systems (quantitative ranking of voters and options).
The aim of many big "social networks" is not «to facilitate a lean and productive debate and information sharing».
I could be wrong, I hope I am wrong.
Do we want to live in a sophisticated democracy as opposed to a naïve democracy? Some would.
Would you like to be part of an information exchange and debate platform using sophisticated systems as opposed to an open billboard? Some would.
It is very doable. It was done in history and it can be done technically in many ways.
Take for example HN: before you can downvote, you must have consolidated your position as contributor. Very simple - yet affecting the result, the "experience". Much more sophisticated techniques can be used.
Malicious parties could attack a system exploiting its weaknesses: yes, this is why take precautions like testing systems theoretically and practically, and implement defence systems.
> automating moderating
The point is not to automate moderation - it is not about the work of DanG. It is about reducing the noise generated by users "in development" and boosting the signal donated by "developed" users.
In the area of "ranking according to the favouring of favoured users, recursively" is a way to implement it.
No automated system is going to fix eternal September style problems. And before you suggest that I could simply follow the groups I'm interested in, that's still not the same thing because the people in those groups will still be engaging with/distracted by the people I'm not following.
When you upvote an item - you connect stronger to people who upvoted that same item.
When you downvote an item - you connection to those who upvoted it becomes weaker.
The content is ranked based on how strongly you are connected to people you upvoted each item.
That way when a lot of clueless/uninformed people come in and start upvoting useless to you content - they don't create noise in your personalized content list.
The content you see comes from people who have proven to find useful content for you.
This is how my hobby project https://linklonk.com works.
I did a Show HN a week ago and that post has more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405659
No, absolutely not. Voters can be categorized, clusterized and ranked, already as part of voting systems theory (one single example in the latter: election of electors), and more beyond it.
> No automated system is going to fix eternal September style problems
And why not. One example: views filtering contribution by score.
> people in those groups will still be engaging with/distracted by
Not necessarily, if they are given the option to avoid that.
Most social media platforms are simply to big to moderate in any meaningful way, in my opinion. AI has so far show to be ineffective, as show by comments and open letters from Facebooks human moderation staff.
One recent example is Piers Morgan in the UK, who randomly decided to criticise Emma Raducanu, a rather likeable British teenager, who just won the US open without dropping a set (including in qualifying rounds)! I can't understand why he would do that, other than to stir up some controversy, and get himself back in the public eye. Either way, it worked.
This can be seen on websites like: https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/rammjaeger/monthly Picture: https://i.imgur.com/poc1QcE.png
Edit: when it comes to Piers Morgan, it does not seem to have been worth it. The last bump of followers happened in March.
Reference: https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/piersmorgan/monthly Picture: https://i.imgur.com/s7145UK.png
I mean, it’s still better than closed source SDKs with bugs unfixed for years and books written about working around them, but that would be a pretty low bar anyway.
> fauxpen source
> Etymology: a term invented by Phil Marsosudiro at a dinner party in North Carolina
> Date: 2 May 2009
> A description of software that claims to be open source, but lacks the full freedoms required by the Open Source Definition. http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php
> synonyms: see open core, neo-proprietary
> antonyms: see Linux kernel, Apache, OpenNMS
It was a thread about an application correcting for some aspects of ADHD. With ADHD persons there is already an information filtering disorder of variable degree; specifically an inability to separate ones-self from a context of conversation, subject matter, or even the logical distance therein. This means that under an extreme case it only takes a single person to mimic the effects of a social network echo chamber of heightened sensitivity. That thread was bizarre in that many comment replies were wildly on a tangent from their respective GP comment and the emotion expressed was completely off the chart for HN.
It really was too much to self-moderate your way through. The volume was just too much. As well, you couldn't sort through the trash to find the pearls.
The volume was a trickle compared to volume today. I don't have a source for this assertion, but I think it is reasonable.
The exact same rules don't quite apply to real life, but they make for a nice comparison: in a small group of people (say, 4-5 people) no formal rules are needed. Generally, everyone will have a chance to speak and be heard. Imagine a a much larger group, say, 300 people. There's no way everyone can meaningfully be heard. In the real world no one goes into a group of 300 people to communicate with those 300 people. Usually there is a speaker or performer communicating them as an audience. Even if those 300 people wanted to set aside the time to listen to every audience member, it'd be meaningless: no one would remember anything meaningful from most of the 300 different speakers.
In any case, it should be obvious that group dynamics and the need for structure are modified by group size. A very large online community can never be intimate, and perfectly healthy communities can be irreparably damaged simply be in influx of people.
Engagement stats and views are the wrong KPIs to focus on for social media aites and most of us know it yet Product Managers are just trying to stay n their jobs and collect checks.
If you want to really succeed in creating a community like HN that lasts much longer than a cheap start up like ClubHouse, the key is to stay local, dedicated to a niche, keep ads controlled carefully, and be happy with smaller-scale operations rather than trying to dominate the world. Dominating the world is a very risky and high overhead venture meant only for those who can ask for a small million dollar loan from their father.
i have this nagging feeling that nothing good ever comes out when there is a large group of people involved. and that the most successful communities, teams or groups are small. i have seen small communities ruined when they got big or niche communities wrecked when they went mainstream. time and again. but we keep pushing for larger groups, larger teams, more networking, more friends, etc...
This made me think of the quote from Men in Black:
> A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
I think there's some major exceptions but they require heavy-handed moderation. Notable among these is the AskHistorians subreddit. You could argue though they're the exception that proves the rule.
I will say though, I'm a frequent participant in a few topic-specific forum, and I think if anything the concentration to places like Reddit, Facebook groups, and Discord has helped these places quite a bit in the exact way you suggest. They've been insulated because they're too obscure now and that has allowed them all to largely have reasonable organic growth, rather than explosive "hug of death" style sudden growth. I just hope that lasts.
Management is everything: creating an environment and systems that facilitate the best allocation of resources.
Of course if your small team of three already contains "the masters", the result can be e.g. the CBM C64. And, they say, "in ancient Athens democracy was easier". But the small team did great thing because of the quality of its members, and a small community is facilitated by a reduced noise. Quality of members and noise control are the problem of management.
Niche subreddits could have been the solution. It is the specific implementation suck, not the idea of openness of a subgroup to new comers e.g., there can be a feeling community while participating in an open source project even if anybody may join.
You need such a stream of newcomers that within their first, say, 500 contributions they get savvy enough to fit in and carry the momentum. You also need enough people who understand and tend to the spirit of the community so they can successfully oppose a famed veteran who may suddenly go renegade.
I'm a bit split about spreading the word about Scuttlebutt, I don't want to ruin it since it's already so great. But felt it was very related to what you were writing, so here goes nothing :)
In case you wanna join: https://scuttlebutt.nz/
The client I'm using is https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork
Also, never try archery as some people might try to use the word "prickshaft" towards you. The horror.
Where's the "awful"?
eta: Exactly what we today refer to as "water cooler chatter/gossip"
The ideas of requiring engagement, and mixing the groups, are interesting, but I'm not sure how they'd work. I've seen the "You must engage" idea applied elsewhere without success, so it needs a little more work.
Even so, I think your ideas have promise.
The relationship appears to be : destroy classes & traditional relationships -> produce masses & the mob -> totalitarianism arises out of the masses' anxiety and the mob's despotic idiocy.
Something like how too many chickens in a big barn can't form hierarchies and so live in a perpetual panic, except along comes a Big Chicken who makes everyone feel better because they finally know their place again.
I hope something different and less awful happens. But the early results are worrying.
Can we just pull the plug on this experiment, please?
> In the simulation, the decision whether to rebroadcast is random, rather than being driven by “virality” or cognitive bias, so the simulation is an optimistic one. > It turns out that message propagation follows a power law: the probability of a meme being shared a given number of times is roughly proportional to an inverse power of that number.
So they implement a textbook model and a textbook result comes out - surprise? There’s nothing to be drawn by this.
I may share the authors sentiment but frankly this blog post is bunk.
There’re some interesting parts in the source though once you get through all the grand-standing fluff.
[0]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl...
For perspective, genetic algorithms are a biased random walk and they clearly work quite well.
What they actually did was they started with some data on things which had gone viral but could only see how many were "infected" (number of views over time). They didn't have direct access to the granular information of who had seen what and who they shared or didn't share with. They decided to work backwards and model virality for some assumed network properties and contagiousness properties and then see which of their models had the similar statistics to actual viral posts.
Network topology: iirc they tested the case of a gaussian distribution of connections meaning on average 95% of nodes had n connections +- 2sigma and they tested a power law type distribution meaning some thin minority of "influencers" had connections to nearly everyone".
Contagious property: they tested the case where different content had a different virality property r0 with more or less contagious content all competing at the same time. They also tested the case of sheer randomness wherein all content is equally likely to be shared and which goes viral basically depends on the luck of who's eye it catches.
The end result was that a power law and random contagiousness best fit the real world statistics.
The only means of counter-acting is human oversight/criticism/regulation, but, as the study shows, this reaches only that far.
[1] A simple simulation may be found here: https://www.masswerk.at/misc/wealth/
I avoid this by unfollowing people very frequently. I see one stupid candid or a pout or a food shot, I just unfollow that person.
Same goes for SJW/White Supremacy types. Whether you are OP or a sharer, you get muted/unfollowed.
This is how I use Quora. When I used Facebook five years ago, I used it this way.
Twitter I use only for professional content. Very strictly. I also set the trending country to Namibia, so that I don't even know what they are talking about.
I am less and less active on social media with the passing of days, but a good social media experience can be achieved by strictly filtering normies, politics, food porn, etc.
In what way are these 'types' equated?
In the context of the comment, it seems that they simply do not want political noise in their social network in any form.
I'm saying this even if I actually do agree with their cause.
This way I can decide whose posts I see, and not the algorithm. Ha, take that! Facebook even displays an error message in your feed if you unfollow everyone :)
Facebook seriously asked me if it was my own account I logged on to. Because, "when people log on to other people's accounts, they tend to log off quickly".
Yeah!
One of the most important "soft skills" I've learned as developer over the past 25 years is that ignoring people because they're interested in things I'm not interested in makes managing a team incredibly hard. You need to be able to listen even when people are talking about "boring" or irrelevant stuff, because sometimes there's something very relevant buried in there. People aren't one-dimensional and they won't always talk about things you want to hear, so if you reject them on that basis you'll miss the good stuff too. Plus, I've found a lot of the time the rest turns out to be quite interesting too if you take the time to listen.
Does everyone have to be social via social networks nowadays in order to be considered “social”?
Can’t we just be social, you know, face to face? And then just leave online media to news/facts?
It’s so weird to me that in order to be considered “social” it’s not enough to just be social in person.
Have we really come to that?
I think about this a lot. My hypothesis is that social status is increasingly, and will be increasingly, dictated by your "follower" count. How many eyeballs you can attract. Even worse, in my opinion, it will be the primary driver of people's perceptions of you. Basically how good are you at getting attention?
It seems a bit ridiculous to say, but I observe the "high status" or high follower count people networking more and more exclusively with each other. On the other side I see traditionally "high status" people developing their online persona - whether its a youtube channel, twitter account, substack, podcast, etc.
We are in the middle of a societal restructuring (that much is obvious) in a way that the internet is now injecting itself right into the middle of social hierarchy and relationships.
You don't have to be social online, but getting angry at people for socializing on a social network is definitely anti-social.
People have spoken over the phone and have had pen pals for a very long time, so "we have come to that" a long time ago.
I never implied that being social over social media is wrong.
The GP, however, was implying that by not engaging in social media (or, using your examples, phone or pen pal) is antisocial, which I argue is wrong.
If engaging in social media is the only way to be social — or, to put it another way, if by not using social media socially you’re considered anti-social — then Facebook et al. have won.
If uncle Joe keeps talking about conspiracy theories in family gatherings, I'll keep away as much as possible.
I hang withy friends on Discord. we talk daily and game together.
Can’t we just be social, you know, face to face? And then just leave online media to news/facts?
Of course you can. You just can't claim to have "a good social media experience" if that's what you're doing (as rg111 did). If you're removing all the social parts from social media then you're not have a "social media experience" at all. You're doing something else. That might be good, and you might enjoy it and find it useful, but it's not sociable if all you're doing is consuming filtered content about a topic you're interested in.
Rejecting the social aspects of social media is, by definition, antisocial. That doesn't reflect on how sociable you are in other contexts though.
Disagree. The commenter above may as well lead a healthy social lifestyle AFK. It's just that he/she does not want to be bombarded superficial stuff. There is already too much information presented to us on social media, one can not humanly consume them all, so might as well focus on content that is actually useful in bettering oneself.
I have the best SO, caring friends (< 5), better than average relationship with parents with no social rivalry.
I just don't buy into the popular culture- soulless movies like Avengers, sports, celebs, TikTok awfullery, virtue signalling, covert racism, keyboard activism, and so on.
I am content with the social media that I use.
I happen to be a good organizer. I organize religious ceremonies despite being irreligious, I organize other socio-cultural activities and actively take part in them.
As I have grown old, I have learned that it is in my best interest to not show my full self by default- I had gotten judged for not conforming to shallow social norms, being an atheist, etc.
And while on social media, I get to be close to my true self.
For people who don't conform with social norms, either for individual traits or other reasons, social media is simply hellish in nature.
I would love to be part of small social media groups with bonds of friendship and tolerance. Trends, food, non-extreme politics, in proportion to their magnitude in everyone's lives, varying with people's interests but not magnified by one-issue echo chambers. Not 100% sure what you mean by normies but I suspect I'm in favour of them.
Group chats with close friends and family fulfil this need fairly well, and are quite relaxing compared to wider social networking. But they're likely only to cover a small subset of every person's interests. Something like the infamous 'Circles' might actually be useful on a larger scale.
For 3-4 people of my parents' generation, I just call them up once in a while.
Actually, there isn't a lot of an overlap of interests with those of the people I grew up around. I have no interests on sports, celeb culture, etc. And politically, I conform to neither side (although I am not a centrist).
People have said things behind my back and in one particular instance, I have been verbally harassed for not liking the things most people like.
So, I don't bother being "social". I do community service, donate time and money to charities, attend marriages and funerals and such and nod and smile for 1-2 hours. I also mentor 2-3 kids. One is a neighbor, one lives on a different country.
I don't see the point of a "social" media. I just want to be away from most people I know in real life.
I find better solace on anonymous sites like Reddit, HN, or new like-minded people I get to know through interest-based forums.
I do send people pictures of stuff I cook, glasses I buy, etc. tgrough DM.
I also have a private Instagram where I allow about 30 people to follow me.
I would never even think about social media like most people use it.
It would just be nice if the big sites were less terrible. If Facebook were once again a nice place to stay in touch with 'real life' people instead of an engagement-driven nightmare. If LinkedIn could be a wider-professional-interests place with HN-quality discussion instead of just recruiters and drivel. If Twitter remained an amazing place to connect with thinkers but not the place for outraging people into campaigning for someone to lose their job. Because of network effects, the big sites eat up a lot of what should be better discussion.
And while they might not be small, servers corresponding to niche reddit subs might tickle your interest.
Here's an analogy: Imagine if we discovered that thousands of cars had some fatal flaw that could result in death and instead of recalling them the manufacturer just made a DIY repair kit available for twenty bucks online. How many people would just put it off or ignore the problem until their car exploded?
That's the problem we have with social media: It's got huge problems that most people are only vaguely aware of, and the solutions they offer are mostly esoteric DIY controls that very few people will care about or use.
... if you assume people don`t read the message at all, but use a coin flip to decide if they should reshape it.
I cannot for the life of me fathom how anyone could make a model that completely ignores content quality in respect to distribution and then use that model to make a statement about average quality of content that gets distributed.
This really is the “sperical cow in a vacuum”equivalent of modeling social networks.
"Simulation shows that coinflip leads to 50/50 outcome." Genius.
This is based on a simulation of social media which shows that, at least in the model (and with strong evidence that reality follows suit):
[The] winner-take-all popularity pattern of memes, in which most are barely noticed while a few spread widely, could not be explained by some of them being more catchy or somehow more valuable: the memes in this simulated world had no intrinsic quality. Virality resulted purely from the statistical consequences of information proliferation in a social network of agents with limited attention. Even when agents preferentially shared memes of higher quality, researcher Xiaoyan Qiu, then at OSoMe, observed little improvement in the overall quality of those shared the most. Our models revealed that even when we want to see and share high-quality information, our inability to view everything in our news feeds inevitably leads us to share things that are partly or completely untrue.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl...
That was discussed exctensively at the time on HN (166 comments):
It's a big leap to pretend the model reflects the real world, let alone today's real world. As far as I can tell, sharing has become largely fenced into communities (reddit subs, Facebook groups). People who still share with people they know personally appear to me to be a minority.
Don't get me wrong, the principle is sound, but the world changes fast and the described model doesn't seem very relevant nowadays.
Also, the entirety of Twitter, in a completely different way.
...Well, it turns out he's sharing the conclusions of the linked SciAm article, but the SciAm article just says "the super smart researchers plugged numbers into their simulation and this result magically came out". There's no insight or explanation.
Are we expected to just believe that computer simulations built by credentialed scientists prove things about the real world?
We could model it...
1) each node is an imaginary scientist with a random set of in and outgoing citations, they can only read and cite a finite number of randomized publications, the publications are assumed to vary randomly in quality...
2) ?????
3) Conclusion: As the number of publications in the network rises, the quality of those which propagate falls.
Looking at a similar phenomenon in a different medium, I'd argue that both Nickelback and Adam Sandler films fall into this same category.
People everywhere love to shit on Nickelback but when they were touring they were selling out stadium after stadium after stadium, having albums go platinum, etc. They were an outright commercial success despite being panned critically and seemingly "universally hated."
Adam Sandler films get the same treatment.
My theory is: Sometimes you just want to not think deeply about a thing and turn your brain off and enjoy, and I think that applies to music, film, and memes equally. There's something inoffensive but satisfying about mediocrity in these things.
If quality is random and decision to rebroadcast is also random - and independent of quality - then why is the result more low-quality messages?
Did they write anywhere that they tag posts "low quality" with higher probability than "high quality"?
Of course it remains to be seen if it's possible to create a consensus of a nation without centralized media like we had until now. If it's not, we will have to get used to the population fragmenting into different groups with different chains of trust, or we will have to accept the government imposing totalitarian measures on the internet to reestablish a centralized consensus. I guess each option has issues.
This is becoming harder to do with the current culture wars. If each group would have respected the other that would have been possible, but it seems each group (especially the radical left if we are being honest) wants the other to comply to a new set of rules and philosophies. In schools, in the workplace and even when privately talking to each other. This makes it very difficult.
And boy ever is the USA's right wing oppressive, but the oppression is in private, at home, in church, and in religious schools. What we're seeing is a breaking open and spilling over in a reverse direction of this oppression: an equal and opposite force.
Yes, the "radical left" could really learn to be more respectful, but the examples of how to do so will be hard to find. Mr. Rogers comes to mind.
No, its not; its just that when its been public, its been broadly supported, because the center of US political power is ideologically on the Right, or at least has been for most of modern history.
So right-wing, whether economic (anti-socialist/anti-communist) or cultural (like PMRC’s push against naughty music, or the spate of internet censorship laws of the 1990s) tends to be supported not look partisan, because ot has support across both parties (the exact divide changes with partisan realignments, but for the more recent instances the Republican Party and the dominant centrist faction of Democrats tend to be in support.)
Quite the opposite, the once-thriving ecosystem of conspiracy theories is gutted now. Social networks did to it what industrial farming did to agriculture. It's one huge monoculture spanning nations, generations, languages and cultures. Even across the professed political alignments.
When once you were able to meet a person with crackpot beliefs in one area but seemingly sane in the other, now it's a wholesale deal. Listen to them rant about a single cliche conspiracy and you very much know their whole worldview on every issue down to the minute detail.
I like the analysis saying that america has collapsed in the last years from a "Two-Story State" to a "One-Story State", so everybody that is left out of that story is now a traitor to the country.
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-clear-pill-part-1-of-5-th...
> In the simulation, the decision whether to rebroadcast is random, rather than being driven by “virality” or cognitive bias, so the simulation is an optimistic one.
Why not model the decision to rebroadcast based on something other than a simple dice roll? Why not drive it by virality? Why not drive it by quality? Why not model tribal affiliation? These things seem significant when talking about the "information hellscape" we've created.
The algorithmic filtering/ordering of items in a feed is really just censorship of the items that don't benefit Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/YouTube.
These tools serve their owners, not the society they ostensibly serve to connect.
It's censorship on a huge scale, and it's terribly damaging.
We don't have to theorize though. Given all the open source platforms of the fediverse [1] people can setup networks, tweak to their heart's content and explore what "works" when actual humans are involved.
Maybe what is really missing is some sort of crowdsourced framework for collecting and sharing that information.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl...
An blog post about a pointless research project aimed at drawing a conclusion that could be drawn from common sense without any research at all.
All of which is a somewhat circular exercise in bad content announcing itself to the world in an ontological sense.
furthermore, i'm also noticing at my workplace many people saying a lot of things, to the point of utter rambling and going off topic, in extremely verbose ways but communicating ideas that could have been said in the most basic of ways. i'm not sure if i'm just slowing down as i get older and get dumber, but i am feeling like a lot of information hasn't gotten more complex, but the way its communicated very much has.
You can see the same thing in the humanities, which went through all of this before there was a tech world. There's only so much you're going to find digging through Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and Ovid for the 10,000,000th time.
So people create new discourses, new fields of study, and new languages to describe them that aren't really new at all, but rather just a roundabout saying that the author didn't know what else to say.
Social networks just make it easier to access the news stream, in that sense. But they are not responsible for creating the news, or at least, not in a significant way - as infinite+whatever amount of "news" SN create is still infinite.
This just in relation to the article - of course SNs create all kinds of problems, but the amount of information is not really the problem caused by SNs.
Share and collaborate on documents, send and receive email, manage your calendar and have video chats without data leaks.
For a Twitter equivalent, Mastodon.
Facebook's a bit more of a challenge --- longer-form content, the ability to group contacts, and the like.
Principally there are Diaspora*, Friendica, and Hubzilla, all based on or near the ActivityPub standard.
There are limits and compromises to these, though all should handle small-scale (family/community) sharing easily. Mastodon's at millions of users, the others are probably smaller.
At scale, moderation and administration of Diaspora* is a bit of a pain, though that's (slowly) improving.
Discord is invite-only but not self-hosted. Maybe that would work for you?
scuttlebutt https://scuttlebutt.nz/
twtxt https://indieweb.org/twtxt
iris.to (hypercore protocol)
meshtastic https://meshtastic.org/
So you can set it up as an "invite only social network where I choose who can join", as you say.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl...
I can't determine what this article means by "quality", is it gauged by validity or some subjective notion? If it's the latter, I'm not sure how any of this is useful.
As a generating function, all you need to get a "Power Law" distribution of connections is a "preferential attachment" probability either statically or dynamically/transiently.
Finite attention automatically creates that preferential attachment because you want to avoid "wasting the precious resource of attention"!!
The job of technology here should be to reduce noise, both on open platforms like twtr and closed platforms like slack channels and forums.
Computers are good at categorization -- now just use it to restrict what I see rather than recommend extra stuff.
Spam detection for things not traditionally considered spam.
but there's a political version of a filter bubble which is getting the same news, but opposite interpretations
vs things like industry-specific updates -- I get a much smaller volume of, say, biology news than someone who works in it
So, curation is needed. Yet the curated groups do not have sufficient cross pollination of ideas. Why is that?
There's three reasons for this.
One, this is compensation for negative externalities, such as the Myanmar massacres, fake news proliferation and so on.
Second, social networks are the ultimate network effects companies, where their enduring success is less about provision of a fantastic product and more about the staying power of the network once the ball got rolling initially.
Third, their success is built on the exploitation of our evolved dopamine systems, similar to opiates and gambling, and their product in many cases isn't actually improving the lives of their customers. This is seen in circumstantial evidence of rising teen depression, especially among young girls.
Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon would of course all be exempt from this tax.