The Rings of Share – the unsolved problem of sharing
ruky.me
ruky.me
This is unprecedented and unnatural for eusocial human beings. We all have different personas and circles that we operate in, and so for me to put something on a Facebook profile where it can be discovered by anyone who knows me, that's disconcerting and it makes me feel naked. It is also not cool for people who don't really care about those aspects of me. I know a lot of Linux/IT nerds and I also know church people - the IT people don't care about the saints I'm praying to or the pro-life cause I'm celebrating. And vice versa.
But Facebook insists that it's one profile for everyone, and then they create features like we can add friends to "lists" to restrict post access, and "The Algorithm" determines what goes on someone's feed rather than just having us organically share like with like. That's a huge inefficiency and it's a recipe for disaster in most cases. Pragmatically, people like me keep our FB footprint really small and we post nothing but totally uncontroversial, universal-appeal stories, such as what we ate for dinner and how we prepared it.
...but they're working toward multiple profiles per account.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/14/facebook-tests-add-up-to-f...
At first it might seem that multiple profiles directly address the OP's problem, but I'm not sure. Having a way to communicate with completely separate groups of friends is one thing, but having a way to communicate with overlapping groups of friends is quite another. AFAICT the multiple-profile feature doesn't solve the latter.
Also, the way it's implemented wrt blocking is a bit of a disaster for members of marginalized groups. Blocking is per profile, not per account, so a stalker/harasser who has had one profile blocked can trivially create another to continue their mayhem. It's ironic, because a good implementation of multiple profiles would actually be useful to protect vulnerable people. As usual, though, Facebook found a way to make it actively harmful.
Trying to do it all under one account on one app always just makes you do much more work because you have to curate the lists, you have to make sure you're posting to the right context even though you see all the same stuff no matter which is active, etc.
Everyone thinks they want this but very few people are willing to put in the work to make it not suck.
And why should they? One Giant Social Network That Does Everything is the disaster state Facebook has been chasing for coming up on 20 years and it's been nothing but a mess, in some ways a literal detriment to society. Let that nightmare die.
Most of the things I do are completely irrelevant for most of the people I know. If I do something that I think could be interesting for someone in my social circle, then I share it with that specific person. If I'm right and they do find it interesting then we might even have a conversation about it.
This approach obviously requires more effort, but it strengthens individual connections and acts as a very effective filter/indicator for the importance of people in my life.
Instead of creating the illusion that I have an active connection with tons of people because they are automatically kept up to date, I'm forced to acknowledge that some connections are past their prime and that that's okay.
If there's stuff happening in my life that makes me think of people whom I haven't had contact with in a long time, then that's the moment to share that stuff with them.
Why not do that via social media? Sending separate emails to even a few people, let alone dozens who might be interested, gets cumbersome really fast. They won't follow a blog. What they will do, what they find easy and convenient, is hop on Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr and see my Wonderful New Thing in their timeline. That even covers the case where I forgot to include someone, which becomes inevitable with enough content and enough friends. I don't see how that's anything but an improvement over other methods.
You also seem to be ignoring the possibility of meeting people via social media. I met my wife on Usenet, which was the "social media" of the time. Also the person who got me my first job in my current state. I have met many people IRL who I first met on Twitter. I have many "mutuals" on Tumblr, each sharing stuff that the other enjoys. Those connections are not illusions, and they wouldn't happen without open sharing beyond the people I already know. Why are you even commenting here, if not for a similar purpose?
I know bashing social media is The Thing To Do, but let's not get carried away. There is a reason such sites, including this one, exist. They provide value to people.
I am commenting here and in other online communities, because the people there perceive me based on a specific interest. I'm not sharing a cute picture of my cat on hackernews, because the only thing I know about the people here is that they are generally interested in technology and technology adjacent topics. This is what I come here to discuss with them.
This is different from my personal connections. I don't think of my friends as a list of interests, I think of them as a nuanced person with fears and desires and all those other things that make them who they are. Of course I'm happy to build connections in online communities, but there's a very clear point where the connection transforms from being centered around the shared interest of the online community into a connection centered around the lifes of two people.
And some of those people might be very interested in that cat picture. But (and we might just differ here a lot) I have not once thought that more than a few people might be interested in a specific thing, let alone dozens(?). Do I know more than a few people interested in the same general topic? Sure. But just because I know 4 people who are interested in outdoor camping doesn't mean that all of them are interested in an article about new ultra-lightweight rain jackets made possible by a fancy compound-material.
I don't think that forgetting to include people is inevitable. I have never felt that I forgot someone, because I only share 1:1 and I only do it when person x pops into my head regarding the thing I'm actively doing in that moment. Even if more than a few were actually interested in that article, I can't have an in depth conversation with all of them about it. I could have a shallow conversation with all of them, but then it's JUST about the article, not about the people I'm sharing it with. And then what's the point if it's not really about the people anymore?
So I do see a lot of value in interest specific online communities, but I do not see how sharing on social media to people, with whom I already have a personal connection beyond a specific interest with, provides a value that 1:1 sharing does not.
- If they experience your circles as a DM, they are at risk of being spammed. They are experiencing your broadcast as something demanding their personal attention.
- If they see why they received this from you and can opt in or out, that's a mailing list.
- If they can opt in and post to that circle, it's a channel or group as is already in WhatsApp.
I think the need to compromise between sender and receiver is why we haven't seen more creativity here from platforms themselves. There are sender-centric agents for sales and marketing, but these are in an arms race with platforms for control of the reader experience, so only ones with a strong economic motivation persist.
For each group I need to communicate with, I have existing communication methods. That's one of the ways that I know that they're a distinct group. I don't worry about my students seeing all my Whatsapp messages to my friends because I don't communicate with students over Whatsapp - it's not a good tool for that, and I can use pre-existing channels of communication. If I did want to communicate with students over Whatsapp (which is prohibited by lots of organisations because it's rarely a good idea), I would put them in a dedicated group and message that directly.
Basically, I think you only encounter this problem of not being able to share information with only specific people/groups if you've previously spent a bunch of time cross-pollinating the distinct groups. If you're not using Teams to recommend your Discord so that you can promote your niche art Tumblr, you'll find that people put themselves into those 'sharing rings' automatically.
One of the core concepts is a "Book" which is a collection of notes. You can add a note to any number of books and you can share books using a link. To implement what you're suggesting, you could create a book for each group you wish to share with and only add the notes (which would have your images) to the relevant books. What's more is that you could have some books only allow View access and other books to allow Collab so certain users could work with you on those notes while others might only see them.
Witch means that in the past the capitalistic model was: I solve someone else problem and get paid for that. Win-win. Now and not from now is I exploit others problem, I create DELIBERATELY new issues to be solved to earn more. Lose-win.
Until enough people realize that and not only say stop but start looking for plain old feral, raw, bloody REVENGE the lose-win model will keep winning. When, because at a certain point that happen, revenge will arrive, than we fall down to a pre-IT age because almost ALL things built in the past will be long forgotten and no one remain knowing how to makes thing for the people, not against them.
That's the simple sharing problem: to exploit users modern surveillance capitalism create proprietary human networks/service, like a citizenship with State border impeding peer communications. In the west essentially all criticize Chinese "great firewall" while not understanding that WhatsApp is a more powerful "great firewall" simply because is designed from the start to be a CLOSE network. The same happen with all other proprietary services. In the past, from Usenet to emails passing though XMPP communications systems was designed to communicate with the world so they was open to all, not walled garden. That's the "modern sharing issue", the same for instance that locks ipv6 to AVOID on purpose giving any device a global to been able to communicate IP2IP freely.