Like in real life - if you were giving a conference presentation you wouldn't have any expectations of intimacy.
I don't know why people would communicate in public spaces if they don't want to interact with the public. Isn't that the entire point?
> in real life - if you were giving a conference presentation you wouldn't have any expectations of intimacy.
Of course you would. Every conference I've ever been to had a bunch of social norms attached to it, encoded implicitly or explicitly in the conference materials and attendees' behavior. People were at the conference to socialize on those terms. People who violated those terms would quickly find themselves excluded. Even those who were there to broadcast information as widely as possible still had a lot of expectations attached to how that would happen. At the best-run conferences you never notice any of this happening, because the people running it are good at their job - and the result is a feeling of intimacy that builds trust among the attendees.
Online forums carry all the same features.
I suspect broadcasters and columnists for newspapers and magazines might have --- they would flip out a few hundred or thousand words of copy, or make a statement live on air, and start hearing back from people. In the broadcast case the response time might be comparable to the online experience --- seconds to hours or days. In print a piece might not hit the streets for days or weeks, giving a delayed hit.
But there's still the experience of writing up something in what's putatively a private space (office or home), without the immediate sense of ten thousand eyeballs, but knowing intellectually that that actually is the case.
(Do I dare hit "reply" now? ...)
Public performers, whether authors, actors, artists, etc., not reading reviews of their own work is so commonplace as to be a trope, and it long predates the Internet.
Rather, the asymmetry is that whilst in a broadcast-mode world the performer is a public character and faces the audience's response, the audience does not in turn have a similar experience. Very rarely a single individual might be made an example of ridicule, but my sense is that that was rare.
Today, the spotlight can, and does, turn on anyone at virtually any time. And it can be incredibly discomfitting when that happens. Moreover text, or audio, or images, or video, can suddenly be published around the world. Jon Ronson's explored the contemporary experience in his 2015 book So You've Been Publicly Shamed, describes several incidents.
(At least one of these ... was featured fairly extensively on HN.)
But that's the distinction I was trying to draw. Prior to, say, the late 1990s to early aughts, it was people in broadcasting, mass media, entertainment, and a few in high-profile political or business careers who might draw mass attention with frequency. Now that effect can strike virtually anyone online (and in some cases off) with little warning or reason, and expose them instantly to mass judgement by strangers.
It's not that the broadcaster could go home to avoid the onslaught (and in many cases they couldn't). It's that the many others weren't similarly vulnerable.
I've actually taken that up as a guideline, before I hit send on anything I do ask myself if I'd say that to someone sitting across the table.
I broadly agree with you, but, a minor counterpoint: Depending on the social network in question, setting the privacy of a reply-chain is either tricky or impossible (RIP Google+, too good for this world...). If Person A posts something intended-as-public and Person B wants to respond to it, it is unreasonable to expect the average-Joe Internet-user to start up an appropriately-privacy-scoped discussion thread for it. The "in public" aspect of their discussion might not be by choice, or may not even be something that is in their mind at the time they make the reply. "They should just learn to use the tool better" is not a helpful observation - a tool that is routinely misused is, by definition, a bad tool.
- Public: everyone[1] has access to the toot, and it's listed on public timelines.
- Unlisted: everyone has access to the toot, but it is not listed on public timelines, and hashtags if used aren't ordinarily discoverable.[2]
- Followers only (FO): only accounts which follow your own can view the toot.
- DM: only accounts named in the toot, and yourself, can view the toot. Oh, and admins of the originating and any recipient instances as well.
The problem is that the followers-only scope is set for each toot within a thread. I'll often face the question of responding to another person's FO toot, and doing so myself FO, which means that my set of followers can see what I'm saying and potentially glean context, or as a DM. I'll often reply DM so that only the recipient sees my response, particularly if there's any sensitive information involve.
On platforms which have a post-and-thread mechanism, such as here on HN, but moreso sites such as the late Google+, Diaspora*, and from my understanding, Facebook, responses are already scoped by the top-level parent's visibility. (On HN that's pretty boring: posts are either visible globally or not at all, it's more interesting elsewhere.) Microblogging systems such as Birdsite and the Fediverse ... don't have that, so context collapse within FO threads is far more likely.
Google+ also had the notion of "Circles" ... clunky, but usable, which were defined by the poster and which could be the target audience of a given post, and (in time) Communities, which were shared groups, public or private, open-admission or moderator-approved, to which third parties could subscribe themselves. (Similar to subreddits, generally.) Both did provide ways of defining scope and context of discussions, with some reasonable bounds on privacy.
There's also the challenge that multiple participants within such a thread may not be, and in all likelihood are not mutually visible to one another, so that the view of all participants but the thread parent author is likely to be partial, with fragments of the discussion open, and broken threadlets appearing and disappearing as followers and non-followers comment.
Then there's the whole notion of setting my privacy scope by who has chosen to follow me, which is to say, an action I've virtually no control over. The Fediverse has an additional setting which can somewhat manage this by requiring specific authorisation of follow requests, but that itself is clunky and cumbersome. It seems to me to be far more sensible to define a group either by explicitly joining one, or by defining one myself, and setting the posting scope to that group of my explicit choice or definition.
The upshot for all of this remains largely the same: using the Fediverse for highly-personal communications is probably a poor choice. But, see my earlier reply on thread,[3] people's sense of "public" vs. "private" online seems to be quite poorly tuned and not easily addressed by any means, technical or otherwise.
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Notes:
1. Excluding various block mechanisms which are ... complex in their own way.
2. The exclusion of hashtag visibility from Unlisted toots strikes me as among the more profound design/architecture failures of Mastodon. It's quite often that I don't necessarily want public-timeline exposure but would like hashtags used to be visible to those with a specific interest in them. Recent changes (v. 10.4) with some really useful search improvements (as in, it exists at all, but also specific filters and criteria) make this much less painful.
These 'social networks' the link speaks to may rely on the public to function, but that is just an implementation detail, not the point. The point is to submit your not-fully-formed thoughts into a piece of software and have it come back with details you have overlooked so that you can come to better understand the topic.
However, the software it speaks to becomes buggy at scale, going off on random tangents that have nothing to do with anything, failing to stay true to speaking to details you have overlooked. It proposes that there is no way to scale that software to avoid such tangents because the implementation is ultimately, and fundamentally, flawed.
Online the level of exposure and amplification are difficult to judge. Your direct environment may be entirely private --- alone in a room, with a screen and keyboard (of various descriptions). Or you might well be out in public, but the immediate public and the public you're reaching online are themselves almost completely independent of one another. One of the more common complaints or statements I see is to the effect that other, uninvited people are barging into a private or limited discussion. But at the same time, that discussion is occurring in a highly public space.
There are a few interpetations of that:
- It could be a "simple matter of training", of educating people to understand that what is online is inherently public. See xkcd's 10,000 for the scale that's involved, and multiply that by roughly a factor of 80 to reach global scale. That's a lot of painful confusion endured every single day.
- People holding this position could well be disingenuous, know full well that they're monopolising a public discourse, and are seeking simply to exclude conflicting voices and viewpoints. I'm told that such things happen....
- The principles might simply be wired too deeply into our psychology. We have an inherent sense of rooms and spaces and friends and groups, and think that we're having discussions amongst them even when the reality is that we are not, and much as optical illusions and legerdemain still work and fool us even when we know the trick, there's no engineering around this.
I'm divided among all three of these viewpoints, though I put strong weight on the third. And there may well be others I'm not considering.
But the point remains that attempting to have intimate discussions at scale really presents fundamental and insurmountable contradictions that can't easily be resolved.
(Original author / submitter.)
I know I've left trails, and that if this were something my life absolutely depended on I'd probably not be writing this now. There are any number of ways to determine who a person is, or even to narrow down the probable set of individuals, often with only the thinnest of data. Given the prevalence of sensors, tracking, and physical-space monitoring (facial recognition, device tracking by WiFi and Bluetooth sensors, license plate readers, purchase and credit card data, and more), odds are pretty good that an online persona could be narrowed down to a few score of potential targets reasonably quickly by a motivated entity. Doing that at scale might be more challenging, but seems to be at least roughly possible by some state-level actors.
And that level of surveillance many well not be necessary, only the threat of such actions.
For discussion, semantic analysis, time(s) of activity, correlation with other known factors (travel or commute patterns, power or communications outages correlating with non-active periods, and the like), there's a lot of data to go on.
The biggest protections seem to me to be far less technical measures such as encryption, obfuscation, and pseudonymity, than they are strong privacy laws, civil rights, legal protections, rule of law, and civil institutions which are strong, robust, highly-trusted and trustworthy, effective, and dedicated to their mission.
That's not to say that technical protections aren't necessary; I absolutely believe that they are. However they are not sufficient, and often prove to be highly brittle: affording strong protection until at some point, whether due to a technical fault or lapse in tradecraft, they aren't. At that point the jig is up, and absent the social institutions in my previous 'graph, vulnerability is absolute.
We cannot live without trust. An absolute faith in anonymity is the false belief that we can.