The global village is basically here, courtesy of social media like TikTok (which did not come from California). What we didn't expect was that the village idiots would also come along.
If that’s what we take that phrase for, then anything goes - both mildly irritated comments and aimless rambling pieces. Moderation too.
Long-form articles rarely do that.
If you're reading an established author that you know to be interesting, maybe. For a random internet article, I want to know what it's about. I don't know why more people don't include abstracts or summaries at the start
But A/B testing proves that sort of content has the highest engagement stats! /s
(Maybe they should be measuring how often someone comes back afterwards instead)
I think you get it. The nature of the medium itself changes people, not just the sort of content that is being delivered through that medium. TV puts people into couch potato trances. Karma-oriented commenting systems have people alter their beliefs to align with the popular majority. Anonymous commenting systems have people act bolder and ruder, etc.
SEO has worked this way for years. It helps nobody.
This can be an example of how social media incentive structure can be iterated on.
The main problem is that social media gets very few iterations on the fundamental stuff because you have to build a new audience for each attempt, or risk loosing the one that has already bought into your existing algorithm.
What if a social media platform could be built where "the algorithms" were user created plug-ins that users could subscribe to? Each "subreddit" with their own set of algorithms.
With that, single-issue voters, preferably in a form of gangs, get the most power.
I like the idea of iterating on algorithms within small social media niches / segments, like subreddits. The key is that it can be opt-in this way.
But who is going to work on implementing all that, and why? Developer time costs a lot :(
If I upvote what you upvoted then your votes get more weight for me.
This incentivizes each user to upvote what they truly found useful for themselves as opposed to the current incentives of social media which makes you upvote/like the stuff you want others to see.
Details of the algorithm: https://linklonk.com/item/3292763817660940288
I think this goes too broad, like asking "what if we there was one tool that could be turned into any tool?" Well, it wouldn't really be good at any of them.
We have enough data now to understand how different social media designs affect behavior, we should be able to propose changes to disincentivize certain ones. For example, reputation systems tilt towards well-mannered behavior. It's not perfect, but it's about nudges and pokes to subtly shape culture.
One of the most egregious offenders is still Facebook, whose comment and reply system actively boosts toxic content since the platform is only capable of measuring "engagement." Tons of angry reacts? Straight to the top! And the lack of proper comment threading means that everyone just kind of yells in each other's general direction, with no way to follow anyone's conversation.
That's called Slashdot.
Social media and a real public square are completely different. A social media post is never going to be the same as public speaking in front of large groups of people. The latter acts as a huge filter on who is going to speak. The village idiot would be filtered out from tending to not want to be shown to be the village idiot in front of the crowd.
That to me is why social media is exactly doomed to fail. It is exactly giving voice to the village idiot who would be filtered out otherwise. To have large scale intelligent discussion most people need to be on mute.
To me, it is a very strange conflation between everyone's vote counting in elections and everyone's opinion about basically everything mattering. The latter is obviously ridiculous.
I distinctly remember a period when the iPhone came out and the high score leaderboards for certain apps went from like a couple thousand to tens of thousands to like a million. I realized this kind of connectivity is going to select for a tiny percentage of hyper competitive winners. Those people are mixed in with billions of people not used to operating in that kind of a space. More and more people are being forced into a competition they don't really want to be a part of. The rooms are way too big and way too flat to allow for proper self selection and sorting into like minded peer groups at similar levels. They make 99% of people miserable, including many of those at the top who need to work ungodly hard to maintain positions that used to be more secure due to less global exposure.
What you can do is create a village of about 200 people and their networks with a much more interesting and larger set of like minded people than what your geography limits you to, and self select and bypass gatekeepers to create new and emergent communities beyond anything people might have dreamed or expected. But that requires a kind of community maintenance and segmentation that we haven't figured out how to do yet.
All the incentives of our society, are aligned to give us a lot more of the latter sort of products, and not much of the former. Imagine if the wheel were invented today; how many times will a dozen companies have reinvented it in ten years time trying to get around the patent, each with their own patentable twists to the idea? I don't believe this sort of thinking can be sustainable for long.
And as it grew, it became a more attractive target for zealots, propagandists, and trolls. And as it became a larger community, it became - to some degree - a diluted one.
Metcalf's Law says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users. V = k N^2.
AnimalMuppet's Law, which takes into account the greater attractiveness of larger networks to those whose activities destroy value, says that you must subtract a term proportional to the fourth power of the number of users: V = k N^2 - K N^4. Depending on the values of k and K, there will be some optimal number N of users, beyond which the value stops growing - or, beyond which the value to each user stops growing.
Intelligent discourse is a losing proposition. In the social market, whatever captures people's interest _is_ definitionally speaking the most important social thing. If intelligent discourse isn't capturing social attention then it's not socially valuable.
This shouldn't be news to anyone familiar with Society of the Spectacle. If you want sorcery over the spectacle, there are much better ways than pining for intelligent discourse.
Hence the ability to play the meta game, to capture and direct mass attention, is what remains the most efficacious skill, as it has been for centuries, if not millennia. Sadly, it is rarely used to direct the social attention towards a more intelligent discourse.
And that there would be so many of them.
Try AOL. Eternal September has the name it does for a reason.
> was that the village idiots would also come along
An example of a village idiot would be someone with Down syndrome, I couldn't say I see it more or less than real life on TikTok. I think that's complex, we didn't handle that well in the past, we don't handle it well now but it's still orders of magnitude better.
TikTok is more human than anything else, unlike Instagram for instance, but it's still an escape from the real world. It's not fair to expect it to be reality, we have reality for that. Just be happy it's non-toxic.
If there are indeed "idots" in society in a sense that they have physical or mental problems, I think looking down on them is wrong.
But I really wonder if there are "idots" at all. What's most likely is that tech people are angry that non tech people have different tastes and preferences, and by virtue of being a larger group, have the market cater to them.
However, who's to say that for example teaching is more important than the NBA? TikTok success should be a cause of celebration, as it means people with different tastes that weren't served by the market, now have an offering that makes them happy.
If you don't like it, don't participate. I don't like cellphones, so I don't operate one. Yet the few times I've had a friend show me funny stuff from TikTok I've been legitimately happy for them.
"De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum".
EDIT: BTW I checked your other comments, you don't bother with the niceties and speak your mind. And you are a goldmine! I especially loved the great content you gather about IQ and theory of the mind on https://i.redd.it/i1ywg8dajac71.png
It made me think about how IQ may just be an estimation of the Kolmogorov complexity threshold of problems a human brain can compute.
It's certainly influenced by the environment and many other things: for a computer equivalent, the CPU is not all that matters: you need RAM (working memory, IIRC the human brain "stack" is on average 6 elements), SSD (memory of experiences) but it was thought provoking and I'm genuinely grateful to the shadowbanned poster for having exposed me to such interesting ideas!