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A social network that automatically prunes friends I haven't talked to in years sounds benign. Except I'm quite certain that once they get into the habit of pruning friends without asking me directly, they'll start to distance and/or prune friends for other reasons too. 'The algorithm' deciding who is or isn't a positive influence for me sounds like I'm back in 6th grade and my mother is telling me who I may or may not be friends with. Except 'the algorithm' isn't my mother and I am far less certain that it has the good intentions for me.

a benign version would be instead of the connection being a boolean, have it be a float, with interactions re-inforcing the connection and apathy diminishing it, then your social graph would develop sort of like neurons, links rarely if ever being snapped out right, but connected only tenuously.

This is exactly how my hobby project works: https://linklonk.com

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.

Based on your description alone, it sounds like a great way to generate echo chambers.

I guess the "easy" solution to that is to have a small fraction of presented content to be randomly selected from outside the echo chamber. Either by presenting completely random content or randomly from contributors that have already been downvoted.

This is a very common reaction. I was just responding to this yesterday on Tildes: https://tildes.net/~tech/yrf/as_of_october_2021_what_is_in_y...

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. """

There is no benign version, it will be simply wrong initially, and then very shortly coopted to be used for control.

"Big Mother"

This sounds stupid but is indeed as troubling as the big brother

Personally I'd like the exact opposite. The people who post every day, I'm not really missing much if I don't see their latest posts. But the friend who posts once a year? I want to see that post, even if it's from a while ago already and I haven't logged in since.

I would love this. I think it better replicates how in-person group discussions work. I remember being at a workshop and we sat in small group discussions. There was one person there who was the leader of a famous org in the space, much higher org status than all of us there. He spoke very rarely, and when he did, he used few words. I really paid attention when he spoke. That person on FB, Twitter, IG, and others would probably not even make a tiny ripple in the ocean of noise.

If the user worked with a famous org then they may be verified, ergo the algorithm would weight their content differently.

Fair point, I didn't think of that.

I want to receive no communication from many of my friends and extended family for months, and sometimes years, and then, when I do receive something, I want it to be real and thoughtful and written to me personally, not to a distribution. I want to respond at my leisure to these people in the same way, with no expectation of immediacy. There is often more joy in long absence, and finally reconnecting, than there is constantly being connected. And less pressure. The days of very expensive long-distance phone calls and cheap stamps were great.

Agree, although this might have the effect of scaring someone from posting again after a long while.

I want less of a social network and more of a time series database

> I remember reading about someone advocating for an app to make unfollowing easy

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.

> 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.

That sounds like a bad idea. We want to keep our connections and not be unfriended by the machine.

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.

Thus we became compulsive social connections hoarders.

https://www.google.com/search?q=compulsive+hoarding&tbm=isch

I.e. it's not mechanically hard, but psychologically hard - or even, wait for it, socially.

But that, too, is something which a platform's UX design can influence to some degree.

It isn't just FOMO, its that when you unfollow someone it is seen by the other person has a rejection and people are loathe to reject others. Especially if the other person is important to you in any way, that is a problem. Muting is better, because it doesn't let the other person know you aren't following them.

>> > A higher fidelity social product would automatically nip and tuck our social graphs over time as they observed our interaction patterns.

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 dont want my network -optimizing- my social graph, and facebook has done this to a point where I need to supplement my social graph external to their product since i simply have different communication profiles for different (equally important) nodes in my graph.

Facebook optimizes the content from the social graph to try to make the derived interest graph better.

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 "circles" idea from Google Plus was actually pretty useful in theory. If instead of binary in/out pruning, a network suggested moving people between "circles," that might be better than just deleting people unprompted.

Agreed, circles was conceptually great, just too much work (IIRC) and a bit late to the social network game.

> A higher fidelity social product would automatically nip and tuck our social graphs over time as they observed our interaction patterns

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.

YouTube is super explicit about this, and they even "manage up" in the same way that an employee might handle a manager who wants everything to be the first priority: by maintaining a priority list on the top to couple the action of promoting something to 1st priority to the action of demoting other priorities.

>> 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. Slack's public channels act as public squares within companies, exposing more employees to each other's thoughts. This can lead to an employee finding others who share what they thought were minority opinions, like reservations about specific company policies.

> 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?

> A higher fidelity social product would automatically nip and tuck our social graphs over time as they observed our interaction patterns.

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.

While it faceplanted on so many other levels, I thought Google Plus' Circles feature was an interesting way to try and produce and consume content by interest from a single account.

> 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.

I never thought of this and it's hilarious and insightful at the same time haha

So the guy favors content over relationships? No thank you.

I think it would be more accurate to say he prefers to be able to choose the extent to which the two are commingled - I largely consume my twitter feed for content, keep up with my relationships via assorted more private methods, and haven't had a facebook account in years because its forced commingling made it largely useless to me for either purpose.

Other people may, of course, have different preferences, but I do understand his irritation.