Status Traps: Learning from Web2 Social Networks
a16zcrypto.com
a16zcrypto.com
Web3 isn't worth the digital paper I'm writing this screed on, but if there's anything that a decentralized social network should be able to do, it's get us out of hyper-aggressive VC-subsidized optimization for eyeballs and growth, and put us back into humane territory. The mis-step of adding back "status" into the network is just showing us nobody even recognizes the problems here, or more likely, intentionally want to make a worse version of what already exists.
also, tbh, the "follow" system is a confusing web of permissions. Primarily it means "I want to see their posts in my feed", but also sometimes "I want the ability to see someone's private feed" and "I want to be able to DM someone", because inexplicably, there's only one relationship available in Twitter... the follower.
I use Tweetbot, which approximates this by saving my place in the timeline (though it doesn't let me mark tweets as read/unread/needs-followup on a more granular level, which would be a useful feature). But ironically, I suspect I might be better off using the standard unstable feed, precisely because I only check Twitter anywhere from once a week to once a day.
Every day, my timeline gets hundreds of tweets. The actual volume of text is not that high, compared to the long blog posts I'm accustomed to reading at a fast pace. But the tweets are about many different topics, and many of them are tips of icebergs, having links or being part of longer threads. So the timeline feels overwhelming, and I almost never read it all.
Given that, perhaps I'd be better off without the pretense. Ditch the saved place; prioritize recent tweets, so that they're still live discussions in case I feel like replying; but rather than solely prioritizing recency, use a filtering algorithm to identify which tweets are most worth reading.
But for now I'm stubbornly sticking to Tweetbot – partly out of habit, partly because I don't want to use an algorithm unless it's something open source that I can customize.
hell, they bring up the gini coefficient not once but twice. how the fuck is this relevant to a person's social life? if you're looking for a way to balance a social network, look no further than Dunbar's number: actual social networks are naturally somewhat egalitarian (moreso than the stuff a16z is discussing at least) -- as soon as you stop thinking of them in terms of some hierarchy meant to be gamed.
Step 1: Find literally any crypto project. Doesn't matter.
Step 2: "Invest in it", and immediately receive tokens with no lockup.
Step 3: Have Chris Dixon write a breathless tweet about it, call your friends and get press coverage. Get a16z-adjacent influencers involved.
Step 4: Price goes up because a16z is leading; immediately dump.
Step 5: Project rugs.
Yay, crypto. It's the best.
It's interesting because most of these projects are absolute dogshit and will go to zero, but since they've already exited, they'll show nice returns to their LPs. But to the average person following it, all they'll see is a16z backing a string of rugs and embarrassing failures; I guess the PR hit is worth it, until Marc starts talking NIMBY shit again.
Like... Followers are people with their own agency! Even if they tend to read someone more often then the others, you can't treat this in same way as the wealth distribution
I mean… empirical evidence would suggest that this is true, no?
Has there ever been a popular social media/network that didn’t have a very direct form of status token?
Early forums and then social networks were massively popular before getting algorithmic feeds or basically any of this stuff. Nobody was getting rich or famous off their post count.
Honestly, the biggest failure of imagination here is assuming that what's really going to succeed here is a modified (with "UBI" or whatever ideas) form of the status quo. TikTok, for instance, has a wildly different interaction model than FB/Twitter-era networks completely outside of any conception of "modeling statu" in it.
You say “a16z content is excellent” but a16z is the largest VC firm, with the VC industry funding closed source proprietary companies that extract rents and capture the market. People like Peter Thiel who say “competition is for losers, build a monopoly” and make sure Mark Z never builds wirehog, a peer to peer file sharing network, because that wouldn’t extract enough rents. People like Adam Neumann who build money-losing companies and dump the shares on the public, how are they any better than say the folks behind MaidSAFE who have been toiling since 2006 to bring everyone a FREE and open source secure file sharing network?
Crypto is cryptography powering open, byzantine fault tolerant protocols. It is the future. People governing things together (currently called DAOs). Code you can trust. And so on.
What sucks is blockchain, not crypto.
For example, everything I've built and given away over the last 10 years has been building towards an alternative to Big Tech: https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf
LOL. I've been working on distributed systems for... a while. I've even had a few conversations with Lamport, pre-Turing award.
Apparently today BFT is a buzzword used by alt-suits to hawk unnecessary solutions to fake problems.
> With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to be online regardless of any third party, and so on?
1. That's... not what byzantine fault tolerance gives you.
2. Fault tolerance was a huge problem in the 90s and 00s but today is in most practical cases a solved problem (and without any use of "crypto").
> For example, everything I've built and given away over the last 10 years has been building towards an alternative to Big Tech: https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf
Lots of nudity AFAICT.
As for fault tolerance being “solved”, how’s Google Reader treating you? Are you able to control your Facebook or Instagram experience? I hear they know their new changes will irk people but will do them anyway. You think trusting others and giving them all the control to change something under you at any time is good because they trust themselves? That’s cute. Maybe they’ll even call their offering “the cloud” and you’ll believe it is like the Internet. Put all your photos there and don’t make any backups. Heck, put all your legal agreements there too! Who needs multiple distrusting parties to secure a ledger?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/27/instagr...
Don’t worry, though. You’ll own nothing and be happy. Software as a service. DRM books that can be removed. Centralizing all the data in one place can attract all kinds of government agencies and advertisers hungry for cheap data. Heck, if government agents want, they can even impersonate you, and all they have to do is send one letter to people you never met! How nice:
https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/australia-surveillance-bill
How can Hackers support these “anti Hacking bills” that let the governments and police hack your accounts and impersonate you… I guess I should come out with several flavors of ice cream for many in the HN crowd — it’s bootlickin good!
LOL you started by asking me if I know what BFT even is and now you're going on a rant about totally unrelated things.
BFT is a mathematical property about models of distributed computer systems. A property I'm now willing to bet you don't understand. and which you are now also invoking, vaguely, as part of a sweeping social critiques. This is such a silly pitch. I genuinely can't believe people fall for it.
Why do you drag no less than half a dozen vaguely related hot-button emotional topics with your sales pitch? The only thing they have in common is the constituency you're trying to exploit. People reading this for whom the parent post resonated: you're the fucking mark.
What's the point of this rhetoric? What are you trying to sell? To whom?
The solution to the Social Media Problem is really very simple:
Step 1: log off.
Step 2: Lobby for better privacy laws.
Step 3: Avoid repeating the original mistake; the crypto bros make the tech bros look like saints.
The problem with social media not primarily that it's centralized, so the fact that anything other than "log off and pass privacy laws" is pitched as a solution to FB/Instagram is probably the most astounding "Emporer Has No Clothes" situation I've ever seen.
as for data availability, bittorrent works stupidly well today without any monetization. it turns out that upload/download ratio works as a pretty decent metric to combat tragedy of the commons for larger torrent communities that really want to protect against it. for websites, i've been surprised in the past when i let a domain expire, and then it pops up a month later because somebody who enjoyed it had archived it and brought it back online themselves. that's more satisfying to me than if it had been kept available because i paid some distant/dispassionate person $1 to do so.
point is, the future i want is largely one of reciprocity. decrease hierarchy and encourage participants to act as both consumer and producer. financialization doesn't do this: it encourages large, efficient producers to compete with each other to serve consumers. i don't want my 20,000-person retro-arcade community to be served by 5 people who've provisioned 4x10Gbps uplinks charging us for BW. then it's just some extractive thing (these producers are likely directing their proceeds to things unrelated to the community) and the magic's gone.
financialization helps when the capital cost of entry is otherwise too high. say, using loans that are repaid by usage-based micropayments as a way to get mesh power/data networks off the ground since these require costly physical equipment. such networks would be beneficial both from the redundancy/fault-tolerance perspective you care about and also from the social angle i care about of being able to participate in more of the things around me. but after deployment, continued monetization works against that latter aspect.
the one crypto project which financialized data networks (Helium) completely failed at the participatory aspect. its users (gateway operators) are merely providers for a different set of consumers (LoRa users). you may have good intentions, and you may build something better than FB/AWS, but if it's built around monetization it will only ever be a stopgap. stopgaps are fine and often good, but the places we need them are already shrinking. federated chat/social networks and peer-based media/streaming applications are developed and advancing rapidly enough for me to take them seriously today. another "big tech" alternative -- open SW/HW stacks for mobile phones as an alternative to Apple -- is in a similar state and crypto hasn't even started any parallel project that i know of. search alternatives are the furthest behind, but is anyone using crypto to build an alternative to Google? my understanding of search is that it's a tough problem to solve because of the money incentives (if a click results in profit via commerce or ads, then there's an incentive to pay for more clicks, either via backchannel payments or SEO), and that social ranking of search results is one of the only ways to overcome this.
Example: https://community.qbix.com/t/freedom-of-speech-and-capitalis...
So I'd be very interested to hear and discuss your ideas about fostering a participatory economy that helps protect against the emergence of hierarchies and extraction of rent. How can we prevent people banding together and forming organizations that dominate others?
You can contact me through the email in my profile. Or is there a way I can contact you?
my answers to your economic questions may be less concrete or justified than you'd hope for. they're generally aligned by some broad goal of "decrease the cost of baseline human existence to $0, and leave the culture to figure out the rest." in a previous era that would be phrased in terms of "post scarcity" of the base needs like food and shelter.
from the scarcity angle, automation is the way out and if it's widely replicable then many of the incentives that drive hostile behavior are reduced. in a previous life i was active in personal manufacturing, and creator/maintainer of some 3d-printing firmware that later expanded into open source pick-and-place machines.
today i'm more active in the base layer of computation: how can we fabricate logic gates/integrated circuits without costly, centralized fabs. i'm wrapping up some experiments around ferromagnetic logic gates. such logic gates would use materials that you can assemble safely on a SLS printer; for now i have only the repo -- i hope to write something more accessible in a month or so. https://git.uninsane.org/colin/fdtd-coremem
Its already being centralized and co-opted by the big guys.
But the idea of crypto isn't just to work on a blockchain. It's about having public-private keys that you use to issue transactions on a decentralized, permissionless network. For example the Dat protocol / hypercore. What about all the other architectures? Is BitTorrent being centralized and co-opted, for instance? Is IOTA tangle or MaidSAFE or any of the other architectures?
On my dappnode I bought a single 3TB drive to set up Storj. It paid for itself in the first year, now it generates enough revenue to pay for its power consumption and turn a very modest profit. Based on many different nodes just like mine, Storj offers a S3-compatible service at a fraction of the cost from AWS.
PGP has been around for many decades. Not exactly lighting the world on fire.
Didn't the first DAO cause a fork of Ethereum? And isn't the most important part of investing understanding what you're investing in?
Apparently these contacts as code are so complex in practice (DSLs require understanding it and all its dependencies.) they tend to be foot guns, waiting for someone more dedicated to find and exploit them.
Anyway, I think that "Code is law" is a bad phrase. A more appropriate (but still silly) phrase would be "Code is law enforcement". The laws themselves still need to be written by people, should still be subject to context-dependent interpretation and should still have room to be changed.
That’s an interesting approach. The popular conception from the evangelists is that code is law, because it’s meant to be a major advantage. By saying it’s not, what real benefits does a DAO/on chain contract offer? Certainly nothing like legal recourse like you’d get in an actual court in the real world.
And ultimately, it appears that code is neither law nor law enforcement. It’s just an opportunity for hackers to occasionally wipe everyone out and a community to scramble to roll things back with significant mud on face
The "real world" is full of corrupt institutions and people in positions of authority that are not working with the interests of ordinary citizens in mind.
The "real world" is also a place where people have ubiquitous access to the internet, but don't have access to banking systems, easy credit or fast/cheap ways to settle minor disputes.
For these situations, a system that can provide an alternative to the established, well-functioning institutions is better than nothing, even if flawed.
None of this is static. The DAO hack showed a flaw in the then-current practices of smart contracts. Developers learned from it, changes were made to the system. The system became more robust after it.
Much like any organism living in an ambient with evolutionary pressure, different mutations come up. After the DAO hack, some prefer to write their contracts in a way that allow some level of control by trusted admins, some of them still don't like the idea of privileged access to the contracts but will favor adoption of contracts only after formal verification. Some saw that as opportunity to specialize in contract security and become auditors.
None of these approaches are perfect by themselves. Other bugs will come, other "hacks" will exist, and hopefully each of these will act as evolutionary filter on the existing system.
Without a central authority, this is the only I see for systems to evolve. And if the whole point is to create an alternative that does not depend on a central authority, I'm fine with the current approaches to risk management.
So, to answer your question: no, those things don't depend on blockchain, but they're also not "crypto", according to the current usage of the word.
[0] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
https://community.intercoin.org/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...
We're also equally vulnerable to the mass-media distortions of emerging concepts ("AI", "Crypto", "Social Networks" etc.), often at the behest of incumbent powers and players.
All you can do as an aware hacker is patiently, politely, persistently explain in clear language. Eventually some of it sticks.
Related, and perhaps to salvage something productive from my confusion: I think we’re well past being able to rescue the word ‘crypto’ from being synonymous with cryptocurrencies in general, and blockchains in particular, in the minds of most. For general ‘crypto’, I think it’s time to start using ‘cryptography’.
I also like that the quality of the post is reflected in the # of votes in the UI (by graying the post out if it's not good). I wonder if it's useful to add some indicator that a post was "highly voted", or would that create more "status accrual" behavior?
I think Reddit is completely designed around status accrual with the badges and votes plastered all over each post — that's probably taking it too far.
Instead of resetting everyone's status to zero, you can create a new status game. E.g. if you've implemented "likes" to your posts, you can add a "voted most helpful" status and highlight "these are the ones voted most helpful". Adding another status game side steps original status game.
It could also be interesting to have "status mini games" where different statuses switch out over time, but this probably works better for small communities rather than massive social media sites like Twitter.
> To my knowledge, no one has really tried the logical extreme version of this: set all status indicators to zero periodically and reset the network from scratch. Might be an interesting experiment to run!
IMO, this mechanism is one of the reasons why the forkability of cryptocurrencies is such a huge feature: invoking a jubilee is within relatively easy reach for the population, something that has been locked away by the state for some time now. With a belief in a cascade of currencies, constantly allowing many opportunities to be an early adopter, the "revolution" will be priced in.
https://extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20Three-Shirky...
I am almost zero social network status and I can:
1. Find people on LinkedIn and talk to them.
2. Have meaningful discussions on Reddit.
3. Talk to friends.
4. Chat to a random interesting person on Twitter.
The only thing I can't do is make a million dollars from my audience. But surely most users don't need that.
You can't get rid of status as long as you have people. People will prefer some people to other people. Some will be popular.
So I think it is a bit of a non topic. Privacy, security and avoiding addiction and bias are the interesting topics of what we do with social networks.
- For LinkedIn, there have been cases where certain job positions (typically sales, marketing, and social media management) actually prefer candidates to have a certain number of followers (500+) as evidence they are good at using social networks.
- For Twitter, some people in certain social circles allegedly judge potential dates based on their number of Twitter followers. At a less extreme sense, some people judge others with wariness if they have no social media accounts. You can easily avoid having deep relationships with these people, but status can have real-life effects. Separately for Twitter, you may be more likely to get customer support by publicly mentioning a company, if you have more followers.
- Lastly for Reddit, having less karma or a newer account raises suspicions you are a bot (some subreddits actually forbid newer accounts).
In practice, none of these really matter if you don't work in sales, don't date or befriend people who care too much about social media, don't comment on more mainstream subreddits where there are karma thresholds, and can do without mentioning companies publicly on Twitter for support as a last resort. However, there can be real-life effects from internet points.
“But we’re just animals” That Smart Guy inevitably says I’m the comment section. Maybe, but it doesn’t excuse how ridiculous it is to be fighting over Internet Points. Go outside and meet actual people.