And you will know us by the company we keep
eugenewei.com
eugenewei.com
I don't have a lot to add in commentary, but almost every time I read one of his essays, I learn something.
Here are some particularly insightful snippets from the article.
> A higher fidelity social product would automatically nip and tuck our social graphs over time as they observed our interaction patterns.
YES! I remember reading about someone advocating for an app to make unfollowing easy (daily, present someone on a social network and if you swiped right, unfollow them). But it'd be even better if the network did it; they have the data, after all.
> Twitter favors pure play Twitter accounts that focus on one niche.
This so much. And it's one of the reasons I struggle with Twitter.
> First, [TikTok] runs videos through one of the most terrifying, vicious quality filters known to man: a panel of a few hundred largely Gen Z users.
LOL.
> TikTok is an interest graph built as an interest graph.
Note that the entire article is built around the concept that western social media companies have used the social graph as a proxy for the content graph, to their detriment.
> It's no surprise that many tech companies install Slack and then suddenly find themselves, shortly thereafter, dealing with employee uprisings. When you rewire the communications topology of any group, you alter the dynamic among the members.
Shout it from the rooftops!
> [On linkedin:] It turns out if you map out the professional graph, not just today but also across long temporal and organizational dimensions, recruiters will pay a lot of money to traverse it.
A friend calls LinkedIn "a rolodex that someone else keeps up to date". I don't think we've seen the peak of LI's value. Such a smart acquisition by MS.
I would love if Facebook pruned my social graph. I still have a ton of FB friends from 2008-2010 when I joined FB and was active. But most of those people don't matter to my life much anymore. Why does FB think they do? Because they haven't pruned my graph based on my interactions.
So FB becomes less useful to me.
That said, I think any network with a monolithic graph (or incentives to have one) will run into the problem you outline (where you need to supplement the network with external tools/solutions).
The interest graph is built in response to your content upvotes/downvotes. The connections are float values instead of booleans. Here is how these float values are updated:
1. You start off weakly connected to all users and you see generally popular content.
2. When you upvote something - you get stronger connected to other users that upvoted that content before you (you don't connect to those who upvoted after you - this is a proof of work that Eugene wrote in https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service). The stronger your are connected to someone => the more weight their other upvoted items have for you => the higher their other upvoted items show up in your feed.
3. When you downvote - your connection to those who upvoted that content goes weaker. And your connection to those who also downvoted it goes higher.
4. Every time someone you are connected to upvotes something, your connection becomes slightly weaker to them. They sort of place a bet that this item is worth your attention and that bet is lost if you ignore that item. So if you ignore those who no longer post useful content or simply post too frequently for you - they will gradually disappear from your list. This prevents the old money problem from the same "Status as a Service" post above.
5. You can put the items you upvote into user-defined collections, so your tech content could go into your "tech" collection and users that are connected to your tech collection will not be bothered by the stuff you put into your "film" collection. This is similar to different boards on Pinterest.
This system is somewhere between popularity based systems (Reddit), subscription based systems (RSS, Twitter) and algorithmic systems (TikTok, Pinterest).
Your connections to other people capture how useful their previous recommendations have been to you (ie, their signal-to-noise ratio) and so can be thought of: how much you can trust them that their future recommendations will be worth your time.
I hope you will forgive my quoting: """ You seem to be concerned that the mechanism of LinkLonk will lead to a filter bubble where people would group by opinions they agree with and they would simply be preaching to their own (often misinformed) choir. That is a concern, but I'm not sure it is an inevitability.
Now that you know how LinkLonk works, what type of content would you personally upvote:
1. Content that does a good job at persuading the reader to agree with the opinion you hold, even if that content gives little useful information to you, or even if the reasoning is a bit disingenuous.
2. Content that informs you even if it does not promote "we are right, they are wrong" narrative.
My hypothesis is that you would be more inclined to upvote content (2) on LinkLonk more, than you would in other social systems (Reddit/Facebook/Twitter).
In existing social systems, upvoting content (1) is logical because you are trying to promote your opinion to others. The upvotes are used as a tool to win opinion popularity contests. And you are less likely to post/upvote content (2) because it may be seen as non-conformance to the group. That results in the tribalism you mention.
On LinkLonk:
- The main effect of upvoting content is to get more content from people who also upvoted it. If you upvote content (1), then you would personally increase the amount of noise your "future-self" will see (since it has little new information). If you upvote (2) then your "future-self" will be better off.
- Your ability to influence what other people see is limited by how useful they found your past upvotes. You can easily lose that ability if you misuse it - they can just downvote any useless content you try to push. There is no such feedback mechanism in popularity based systems. Every upvote has the same weight. And so it can be misused.
I'm not saying that LinkLonk will avoid the echo-chamber/filter-bubble problem. I'm saying that LinkLonk has a different system of incentives that it is not fair to apply the behaviour seen in other systems to it. And what kind of system level behaviour LinkLonk will have is impossible to predict just using a thought experiment. That's because this behaviour is emergent. The only way is to run an actual experiment - which is what LinkLonk is. """
I feel creator driven platforms like YouTube and TikTok do exactly this. I'm surprised that social media platforms haven't tried building similar algorithms where your recommendations are based off of what you're currently interested in instead of giving a platform to the loudest voices. I wonder if maybe this is a much harder problem to solve with companies like Facebook and Twitter.
It's not actually hard to unfollow people on most platforms, though.
Twitter shows the Unfollow button when I hover over someone's name in my feed. It's one click to unfollow and I don't even have to leave the page to do it.
I think the real problem is a type of FOMO: People are afraid to remove any connections they've established, lest they miss something important.
Good point. That's why making it automated would be even better. Avoids the Larry David moment the author mentions.
Instead of fighting human psychology the apps should sidestep it. How about unsubscribing, but not unfriending? Shadow-unfollowing, settings like the Youtube bell for your content-stream?
I don't care to see your status-updates, but I want you in my friend list - there should be an option for that.
But that, too, is something which a platform's UX design can influence to some degree.
https://www.google.com/search?q=compulsive+hoarding&tbm=isch
> Shout it from the rooftops!
Shout what? That employees should have a public square? Or that employers should keep people isolated, so reservations about company policies won't surface?
Other people may, of course, have different preferences, but I do understand his irritation.
This should not be so binary - follow/unfollow. PArtly because lack of interaction is not necessarily a sign of lack of interest as much as just different phases of life.
Rather, I think it should be more fine-grained and gradual, kind of depreciating down to lower-level follows, and eventually falling off after a bunch of steps. And, the ability to occasionally scan the depreciation levels to see if someone should be re-activated (oh, I've been meaning to get in touch...)
And of course, the distinction Eugene makes between the Interest graph vs the Social graph is spot-on -- it make so much about the dysfunctional social media system so obvious.
I never thought of this and it's hilarious and insightful at the same time haha
This is the one that most concerns me. Most people have some tension between versions of themselves; not just the professional/family distinction and the work/play one, but all sorts of things that people are trying to deal with when they're talking about "be the best version of yourself".
Automatic reinforcement machines make that worse. It's like a bartender finding the drunkest people and offering them more drinks; there's a reason a lot of places will cut you off by law or policy rather than feed your addiction.
Social media at its worst is Pavlov A/B testing different bell sounds on his dog.
One of the interesting things about TikTok was precisely that it had "social capital basic income" / anti-reinforcement mechanisms where it will take lesser shown people and show them around to see if they have anything new or different to contribute. But it still has a very strong interest reinforcement loop.
I’m surprised this is only mentioned in passing, as it most certainly relates to the problem of “over-attributing how people behave on a social app to their innate nature”.
To paraphrase, perhaps the single most important influence on users’ behavior in social media is platforms’ existential requirement to generate ad revenue from it?
The author mostly misses this factor in favor of overthinking what technically is its consequences. Seems blindingly obvious that such a business model would shape everything from high-level design to implementation to strategy—all that causes social media dynamics to be what they are.
On the flip side, I love TikTok. It's full of strangers! New, exciting strangers doing wild, strange things in trendy and funny and smart and annoying and cringe-filled ways! TikTok is an entire world of social media that could never exist on Facebook. (Or maybe it did back when it started? I can't remember.)
Instagram is the more interesting one for me. I observed over the course of this conversation that if you look at my feed, it's boring stuff I don't care about. I follow my friends and they post pictures of their kids and blah blah blah.
But if you click the "Discover" tab, it's almost entirely three of my biggest interests: horses, fitness, and D&D.
To Eugene's point, my feed is my social graph, but my Discover tab is my interest graph.
Like Eugene, one of the things I like about TikTok is that it's an interest graph and I happen to be connected to a few of my friends. But since I spend most of my time on the For You Page, I never see my friend's stuff. That's totally fine with me!
I'd love more social media apps to understand that connecting with my friends doesn't mean I want to know everything they're doing, and instead I want to meet at the intersection of my social graph and my interests. Those two things don't often overlap, but when they do, it's a recipe for fun and engagement.
FWIW, despite having dramatically increased the number of ads they display, I still maintain that Instagram's ads are far and away better than Facebook's, TikTok's, Twitter's, and even Google's. I see an ad on IG and I very often say, "huh, that looks cool" whereas I would just gloss over it on other platforms.
This is a fascinating insight. Facebook is optimized for in groups whereas Instagram and TikTok are platforms for creators. Naturally the latter is going to be more interesting especially if your peer group is pretty stable.
I guess I’m unusual in that I move around a lot (different countries, different parts of the country) and my peer group gets refreshed (or gets reshuffled) every few years. I often get to know people who have very little in common with my previous social groups so Facebook continues to be interesting for me.
There’s also something to be said about continually upgrading or changing one’s peer group. Not practical for everyone of course but for me it just kinda happens.
We don't need to "upgrade" our friends or our peer group at all.
The distinction I am (and I think Eugene is) making is that my reasons for being friends with someone has no bearing on the types of media I am interested in consuming.
You and I can be best friends, but that doesn't mean I need to see the photos of your breakfast. And the fact that I'd rather watch Hank Green pontificate on scientific facts in no way diminishes my friendship with you. As Eugene points out in his blog post, the social graph and the interest graph are two awfully different things that may wind up being totally orthogonal to one another, and the Venn diagram overlap may be very small in real life.
If I may try and rephrase your takeaway, it's that our social media landscape needs to be refreshed or reshuffled periodically to maintain our interest, and that can take many forms, including but not limited to finding a totally new peer group. I would agree with that assessment.
But reshuffling your interest graph is much easier than shuffling your social graph, at least for most people.
That said I do believe in changing my peer groups from time to time to get out of my comfort zone, reinvent myself and be confronted with new ideas. But that’s just because I’m in a growth phase. Not everyone needs to do this.
Also for me it helps to have friends who are writers and travelers. They may be the same people year after year but they constantly have new things to say about life or always have new observations/stories to share. I do think there’s a productive way to use Facebook. It’s just that that way only avails itself to certain groups of people like me and the kinds of friends I keep.
Plus, the life events that would be interesting to me, I much prefer hearing about once every however long over drinks - and even my heavy-facebook-user friends have commented that they really quite enjoy the fact that they get to tell me about things like that face to face rather than just assuming I'll have read it as it scrolls past.
Readership isn't everything. The best way to appeal to a broad base is to say nothing of import; i'm not sure a pared down version would be as interesting a piece.
> One of my favorite heuristics for spotting flaws in a system is to look at those trying to break it.
I use this "technique" quite often and I kind of think of it as a secret mini-weapon, and I loved seeing it mentioned here.
This is the heart of what's wrong. Nobody running these companies gives a flying fuck if the users get the most value out of their service. They want the service to get the most value out of the users.
It’s not that I don’t like being targeted. I just want to help them do it right.
The interface is presented as a giant list of hundreds of potential interests, all ticked by default, but which must be unticked one at a time. If you start actually unticking them all or try to automate it with a script (which is the only way to stop Twitter from suggesting tweets from those interests to you, until it comes up with some new ones), the unchecking gets progressively slower until it starts throwing 500 Internal Server Errors, showing the state as changing but silently failing.
I have to say, Facebook has this working well for me. Their "Suggested for you" posts are 99% interesting to me. I have no idea how they do it.
Twitter for me is 98% non-personal. YouTube is completely impersonal. No social interaction == much better fit to my interests.
1. interest graph 2. s(he) spends money on graph
There are A LOT of things that I am interested in that social media companies cannot monetize on. But there is also A TON of things they can. While number of companies are fairly great at #1, absolutely not a single on is even remotely decent at the #2.
The problem is that users and platforms have a very different definition of what a good use of a graph is. This comes from their business model - advertising. For #1, you want to see things that are interesting to you, but the platforms want things that will keep you "engaged" the most (maximizing your exposure to advertising, which they sell as a service). The result is, you get content that, while related to your interest, is mostly a bottom-feeding, lowest-common-denominator material geared towards pushing your emotional buttons.
So with #2, again, the platforms may know perfectly well what you're spending money on, but what they'll show you won't be the perfect deals for you - they'll be the worst deals for you, from customers of theirs who spent most money on getting their offers in front of people.
Are there any resources that delves deeper into theories related to "interest graph", "social graph", etc, from a product design point of view?
Now, LinkedIn and Facebook can track social milieus, but are they using that knowledge to direct social phenomena, so to speak? For example, if a group of people in opposition to BigTech begins to coalesce, are they using social media to discourage, shape, and manage the discourse in a way that diminishes the likelihood that such a group can mount a cohesive threat to BigTech (for example, by increasing fragmentation or cooling by increasing the amount of conflicting information different people in that group receive, or impeding the spread of certain kinds of information within that group)?
Whats the latest on that? Thought the Dunbar number prevents exponential scaling.
I recently tried to use Twitter and came to the same conclusion - I followed some people cos they are interesting on computer science, but why the fuck would i want to see their nature photos from their weekend walk?