Stop trying to make a “good” social media site
theintrinsicperspective.com
theintrinsicperspective.com
There is a moral element to a holistic design that doesn't exploit dark UX manipulation patterns, but it can't be a "single-issue POTUS candidate".
There are many patterns that make social media sites better quality:
- Verifying real names and faces instead of too much anonymity. (Basecamp discovered this.)
- Exclusivity, invite-only, vouch-invite system.
- Limit participation, perhaps a micropayment to post.
- Don't monetize it with ads and doomscrolling random content.
- It has to appeal to the tastemakers: celebrities, and high school and college kids.
Mastadon is going somewhat in the right direction, but I think there is room for better if an app were responsive to users and didn't take themselves too seriously that they're destined to be billionaires.
1. It’s too focused on broadcasting yourself rather than cultivating close friendships
2. Social media at large scale seems to become increasingly toxic, with no real winning moves because different people want different moderations.
On (1), most social media is largely one sided. you’re tweeting out onto your own profile or making some grandstand on a post. hell, what I’m writing now isn’t anything more than some random words from a random person who doesn’t matter in your life - whether my words resonate or not being somewhat irrelevant. about the best I can hope for is someone to read this and either agree or disagree, and maybe discuss on it. but there’s some implicit desire for me to shout out my opinion into the void of the internet, and so here I am.
very little social media seems designed to take people on common interests and actually link them into longer term relationships like friends. it wouldn’t be close to this form of interaction if it did. the best example might be dating apps, but even those aren’t great bc they profit off a lack of success and so don’t put in the effort to be good, imo.
On (2), this seems nearly insurmountable. maybe client side filtering would help, and maybe LLMs or ML client side is getting good enough to be mechanisms for really intelligent filtering, but without each user being able to determine what they want to see and filtering, i don’t think large scale social media is tenable. I think you literally can’t moderate a good experience for everyone.
I happen to like the idea of going into an office as a young adult isolated into their home with no real life relationships. /r/technology immediately becomes frustrating to read because there’s a solid post a day where the comments section collectively calls anyone who wants an office a bootlicker; how is that going to make me feel?
in a different vein I’m quite progressive. if I read a comment on a programming subreddit trivializing the terrible conditions in much of the US because they make a programmer’s salary, it’s going to piss me off. someone reading this sentence who’s conservative has now gotten pissed off because of me by reading that above line.
so maybe you just moderate to repress opinions or anything strong? maybe we could start with decency? except to some people being decent and kind is an endorsement of status quo and makes you a bootlicker. so that won’t work. and beyond that do you really want to have a sterile experience? or is something in you craving the opposite? because I’ve found I went on Reddit far past fully knowing it was damaging to my happiness, because of some pull into the awful toxic doomer discourse now prevalent there. call it addiction or whatever, but it’s hard to stop.
we aren’t built to run at the scale of the internet, or the world, or even our own cities. social media as it stands makes it so difficult to turn any of that off; corporate incentive and profit also feeds off the anger it creates. the only good social media would be one detached from the capitalist profit machine, substantially smaller scale and dynamic to groups of compatible users, and it should probably be unrecognizable from the social media of today. (It also probably needs to be designed by psychologists and not tech bros, and given I'm in the latter I’m not volunteering to try.)
When I think about the problem with social media, I think abstractly. It's a broad social problem. But if I think about the problems I've had with it personally, they're different problems than the ones you hear about. I don't really care about 'toxicity'. I'd rather someone was directly rude to me than that they downvoted my comments without explanation. I dislike euphemism.
I agree with you that social media does not seem to be about cultivating friendships. But was it designed to be? I think this again gets into the issue about the definition. Social networking was about digital friendships, at least in some sense. Facebook even calls your contacts 'friends'. Being able to easily contact someone you haven't seen for a decade, organise reunions, etc. That's social networking. But the way some people use Facebook is more like a social media website: not to interface with friends, but to follow news organisations and get into arguments in the comments. They use it more like someone who uses r/worldnews on Reddit or someone who follows mostly news organisations on Twitter.
On the other hand, you have people like me. I unfollowed almost every page I was following on Facebook. Now I just see (infrequent) posts from friends and family members: pictures of their kids, weddings, etc. Family notices posted about births, deaths and marriages. I haven't seen a 'status' posted by someone on Facebook that was just an ad-hoc musing since high school. I use FB Messenger more than FB itself. I don't use Twitter, but if I did it would be for microblogging as it was originally intended about things I was working on, not for getting into arguments with people about politics. I doubt anyone would read it, so I don't bother.
I don't know why those platforms devolve into arguing but I suspect it is not actually the algorithms that people like to blame. I think people like to argue. The shield of anonymity allows them to do so. People used to do this on old web forums back in the day. They try to do it here, where the algorithms punish it severely. If people could get into ferocious arguments in real life where they were shielded from anonymity but could use whatever words they liked and there was no chance of physical escalation, they would do so there too. People give Facebook as a counterexample to the idea that it's anonymity, but I don't think the people that argue in comment sections on Facebook ever expect to meet the people they're arguing with in real life, or expect any of the comments to come back to them in real life, so the cloak of anonymity is still effectively there. It's consequence-free and it's escalation-free.
The threat of physical escalation and long-term social consequences seems to moderate people in real life. The old rule that you oughtn't to discuss religion or politics at family gatherings is evidence that without such a rule, people probably would do so and it would cause long-term negative consequences for them socially. What's the solution online? I don't know that there is one. People will escalate verbally because there's no limit to it. Physical escalation IRL is (maybe controversial?) kind of similar to nuclear weapons: very bad, of course, but the threat of it actually reduces the occurrence of lesser (but still detrimental) conflict.
Part of the problem with moderation is that it is very hard to do well. For example, moderating for "decency". What is decent conduct depends on the person's perspective. If I have a strong moral objection to something you are talking about, then to me you saying so is indecent. Palantir is a controversial example but I think there was some controversy about "just talking about technology" when they are involved on here or on Lobsters. On the other hand, to them bringing up political disagreements with how the technology is used is not decent and kind, but introducing politics where it isn't needed. I'm not really sure how you square those two. Or to use a different example, to some people it is indecent and unkind to suggest that diversity, equity and inclusion policies do more harm than good to workplaces. So if there were an HN thread about a tech company changing their DEI policies, do those people get to decide that any anti-DEI comments are unkind and should be moderated away? For the people making them, they don't feel they're doing anything wrong. Moderation should, in my view, always result in a reasonable person thinking to himself "I'm not sure I agree with the decision, but it is a decision that a reasonable person could reasonably have made in all the circumstances." If that's the case, then at least people don't feel hard-done-by.
Part of the issue is that online there doesn't seem to be as much scope of agreement on what is and isn't acceptable, other than illegal material like child pornography, and "NSFW" except in places where that content is clearly allowed. But websites where people can make comments vary between those where you are permitted to directly insult others using slurs (like 4chan and to some extent Twitter and Reddit depending on the moderation policy of the subreddit, where you are expected to just deal with it) all the way to websites where any kind of unkind comment is against the rules (like the Rust subreddit, for example, where the result is a different and more euphemistic kind of toxicity).
Moderating fairly is difficult, and kindness isn't always a good thing. When you use a metric, you end up working to the metric rather than the real goal. If you moderate to require everyone to be nice, what you end up getting is people writing things that are superficially nice - they don't use nasty slurs and they don't directly say anything nasty at all - but they are toxic in their own way. You only need to look at the discourse around the recent Rust controversies to see this: everything is communicated by people saying they're "uncomfortable" or "uneasy" about things rather than saying "I think this decision was bad and that people operating behind closed doors while preaching openness are dishonest bad-faith actors that should leave the project" which is pretty obviously what they're actually thinking, IMO. I think this euphemistic way of working is particularly American, but I don't want to overgeneralise.
I'm sorry, my comment doesn't really address all of your points. All I can really say is that I agree that it's a big problem and it's not clear how to solve it. The obvious solutions like "make everyone be kind" don't work, but neither does not moderating at all for obvious reasons.