Social media platforms: what's wrong, and what's next
scottgoci.com
scottgoci.com
I was just getting into development when social media was coming on the scene. It was so cool to be engaged in communities with people who I loved to see what they were doing, finding emerging technologies and development frameworks and techniques. People were willing to tell you about stuff they were working on. It really felt like a community. Every new platform someone at work would find it and send out invites or get us to sign up and run it through its paces. It was such a great time and I really felt like my growth as a developer was accelerated by being apart of these early communities.
Now? Its not about bringing people together with common interests. Its 100% about getting people to stay on your platform as long as possible and engage with your content. Usually that means creating content that gets people to negatively engage with your content. So much so, its now referred to as "rage bait" where Only Fans women purposely post content that gets men to engage with their posts in order to make more money. Political posts are made to inflame either side and get more shares and upvotes.
It would seem the entire purpose of social media these days is just about getting people to react negatively to what you're posting in order to generate MORE negative content. It turns into a self fulfilling cycle that is now in a space where I have no idea how it will be broken.
As a footnote to this, there are still very good people, still posting very good content that does not have that purpose. One account I found a few months ago was trailerparksports on instagram. Its a black guy who got interested in Hockey after the Four Nations Cup and how crazy that tournament started out with the Canada/USA game. His interest was 100% genuine. In the last four months, he's detailed how much he's learned and the outpouring from hockey fans AND the teams themselves has been unreal. The LA Kings flew him out for a few of their games, he's been going to games in other cities. He's 100% into the sport now and its been really cool to see him go through the process of picking a team to support, learning the rules and the strategies.
So yes, there are still very honorable and decent content creators who are sharing ceratain aspects of their life with the internet and getting a lot of positivity in return. But man oh man, it takes a LOT of digging to find them these days.
I touch upon this in https://www.scottgoci.com/social-media-platforms-whats-wrong... and https://www.scottgoci.com/social-media-platforms-whats-wrong... -- but as you mention, this is a result of engagement being a core metric of social media platforms, and users attempting to game the platform's algorithm for their own purposes.
An easy way to solve for this is customization -- if no two users have the same "algorithm" powering their feed, it becomes hard for anyone to do this, because perhaps one user's algorithm filters out anything tagged with politics, or with a low Flesch–Kincaid score, or non-text posts, etc.
The problem, and where I strongly agree with the parent's statement that "I feel like social media has changed human behavior", is that the users themselves seek the engagement. Content creators want feedback about their content. You can codify that as "views", "likes", or whatever, but the whole problem here is fundamentally that most creators try and pursue strategies that increase whichever metric they are tracking to get value out of their posting.
I watched Bluesky grow up and become a "real network" and once Bluesky hit a certain scaling point it became the exact same as all the other supposed algorithmic-engagement optimized sites. Posters started posting snippy, sneery comments because it made the Like count go up.
> perhaps one user's algorithm filters out anything tagged with politics, or with a low Flesch–Kincaid score, or non-text posts, etc.
Zuck talked about how Threads specifically filtered out political content [1] and how that decision was reversed [2]. It turns out that users didn't like filtering out political content even though as most of us know, it tends to turn into dunking competitions online.
So I largely agree with what the parent said. The expectations in the game have changed. Content creators want big number to go up. People want to dunk on each other because it's fun and feels righteous. No algorithms or manifestos seem to change this fundamental change in the way folks post and engage with social media. Maybe a protracted education campaign can, though.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/26/1240737627/meta-limit-politic... [2]: https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-mark-zuckerberg-anno...
Did you intentionally call “thirst traps” “rage bait” erroneously so that someone would correct you? Engagement bait works surprisingly well on HN, I just wasn’t sure if that was an ironic wink at the audience.
Now, you see posts from women leaning up against say a Ferrari saying, "Thank you to all 2,000 men who helped buy this Porsche for me!" which is what I refer to now as "rage bait" where people flood the comments talking about how stupid the person is that they don't even know the difference between a Porsche and a Ferrari. And then you get all the other comments about "Your father must be so proud" comments. All the while, the account is making money by getting people to engage in her content that she purposefully posts to get people going in order to drive engagement.
So I think it started out as "thirst trap" and has since migrated to "rage bait" because the former wasn't working well enough.
Misogyny and slut shaming in particular are so common on social media that thirst traps also function as rage bait, and the more transparent content creators are quite open about the fact that they often benefit quite a bit from the hostile response/QRTs (not just in terms of engagement on the regular social platform they are posted on, but in terms of direct boost to subscriptions on their pay sites traceable to the degree of hostile engagement.)
This isn't surprising, the negative responses are often from the same people complaining about, and with networks of followers expressing concern about, porn addiction, a behavior that correlates positively with both "being a conservative Christian" (probably not helpful on its own) and "being an active porn consumer" (bingo!), so the hostile engagement tends to also serve as promotion of the content within a set of social media users that is unlikely to be current followers but is likely to be interested in the service being promoted (even if they show public disdain for it.)
Cognitively, yes. This is like saying "a lot of us want the same thing - healthy, fresh food that makes us stronger, sleep better, and live longer". Of course. But fast food is a $400B industry in the US. Social media is fast food. Nobody says they want it but their behavior indicates otherwise.
Ideally, I think if we could, we'd only get content from the creators or people we care about -- but that content runs out eventually, and yet our minds still want to be stimulated.
To bring it back to your food analogy, if I had a personal chef that made delicious food whenever I wanted it, I'd probably not indulge in fast food very often -- but if I needed a quick bite to eat, I'd probably still jump into a McDonalds.
For instance, Yahoo 360 let you create "circles," so you could have your "work circle" and your "friend circle" and so on, and let them overlap however you wanted, and then you could post things to whichever circles you wanted and read them how you wanted. Seems like a great idea, but most people didn't want it. Too complicated, probably. Easier to just scroll through garbage looking for gems like flipping through TV channels.
And the truth is, most people posting a selfie want everyone to see it. All their friends, at least, but really, the world if possible. So they don't really want restrictions on what reaches them because they don't want restrictions on themselves.
These platforms prey on us with every possible tactic to keep us there since every second "engaged" means profits for them.
If we take a generic view of "if they are in these platforms, then they want it" we might as well say that fish want to be caught because they bite the hook.
I could check it once a day, know that I had seen every post from my friends and family, like the cat pictures, ask for the recipe for the lunch picture, and be done. Of course it's not very profitable for Facebook for me to be done so now it tries to show me a bunch of stuff I can't look away from. That drowns out posts from my friends, so those posts get less interaction, and now my friends don't post pictures of their cats regularly.
The social network part is really really simple. The early form of Facebook was remarkably effective, simple, and useful. The same goes for Instagram and MySpace. The business side, however, has poisoned that original creation into a profoundly corrosive "content delivery system" and a spy network that hides behind a fancy profile page and algorithmically (read: business interest determined) "feed".
There are a very large number of major platforms? None of them fit your needs?
Many of the examples throughout are reddit. Though many of the memes are more facebook.
The big question to me; can you be social and interact with people on many subjects. Say what I want, when I want. I want to see what I want. Just because a small group of people dont like what I said, they dont get to unilaterally hide what I said.
When you go on reddit and you say something that many people agree with, but many dont. Suddenly my message is disappeared. Why bother being on reddit? You now have a small group of people curating content.
If you go on X and say something many people agree with and many dont. I top comment. The people wont dont like what I said can leave a comment but they cant hide my message.
This is the fundamental flaw in many social media.
It costs next to nothing, provides some sort of sensation in your brain that you're doing things, you might see some neat pictures or videos. It's like a different kind of video game where you can't win and it's appealing to nearly every age group, gender, demographic.
Perhaps you don't want to receive news about celebrities, _unless_ it involves someone you care deeply about, for example Michael Jackson. It would require quite a bit of tailoring for a platform to be able to curate for that.
I, uh... don't expect much news in the future about Michael Jackson.
Trying to grow a new product is super hard. Trying to move into an established market is even harder. Trying to do that while also foregoing all the dark patterns is … well I won’t say it’s impossible but ugh it would take a huge head start in terms of name recognition, funding, or something else truly extraordinary.
if anyone knows any solutions (ex. browser extensions) that solve this, id be really interested
I don't use Xitter anymore, but when I did, Control Panel for Twitter was my go to.
It's insane how better (and boring/less addictive) social media becomes by simple enhancements.
In the open source world there's this tendency to confuse software and services - people write software with which a service could be run, and then declare that the service exists. Highly P2P software (like Bitcoin) is an exception since the software and the service are basically the same thing.
Services don't have to be expensive to run, but they do if they want to host image and video uploads. IRC is still available for free. The most expensive part of running a service in the current environment is most likely mitigating the legal risk when someone uploads something the government doesn't like. Note this expense doesn't exist if you run it on the dark web, but then you won't have any users either.
Now imagine a celebrity appearing on the network. Suddenly there is a ton of people who want to know which events the celebrity is attending. And what pictures the celebrity shares. And what opinions the celebrity holds.
Then someone discovers that they can attract a lot of followers by posting not only about events they attended, but also cat pictures and funny jokes.
Hello, mentions, retweets, tags, and other ways of mass broadcasting. Hello interactive drama machine.
To avoid this, you have to actively resist broadcasting, force the users vet their subscribers, etc. All this works against the network effects, and thus against the money-making potential of the service.
Exactly! I have different groups of friends and acquaintances with different tastes, interests, senses of humor, etc.
I appreciate moving between them and interacting directly with them very much. It never feels like I'm "managing" anything, nor does it feel like work. It feels like community.
Nothing wrong with that.
Heck, even RSVPs to calendar events can be misleading and don't actually tell me why my friend marked themselves as attending. Sometimes people use it as reminders, or maybe they were interested last month but aren't anymore and forgot to remove the event from their list. Maybe plans have changed and they're not going, or maybe their reason for going would be wildly different than mine. I'd rather find out from them what's happening and what they're excited about.
What's proposed is a centralized platform with some sort of identity verification and no community moderators. It presumably aims to avoid many of the issues the series describes as being wrong with other platforms but doesn't say how it's going to handle the enshittification problem. Many of the issues mentioned are related to the only business model we've seen work for large social platforms; good intentions at the start won't keep them from popping up later when the incentives are aligned in their favor.
Decentralization is my favorite solution to that problem, but it's not compatible with the ideas of one account per person for life and no community moderators. I'm interested to see what comes next in this series.
I hope to have some of the followup posts soon, although you are right that my idea is based around a centralized platform with ID Verification.
RE: How to solve for enshittification, I'd mention two things:
1. I think a good product can _stay_ good over time with strong centralized leadership, aka a "benevolent dictator". Think Steve Jobs at Apple, DHH at 37 Signals, etc.
- Once that power structure changes, however (new leader, etc), that can quickly fall apart, so it's definitely not a bulletproof solution.
- If you have to choose between customers who give you $0/month and advertisers who will give you $1000/month, you'll eventually choose the advertisers to the detriment of the users.I guess we have to assume that Mastodon is not "large" by the author's definition.
All existing large social media platforms of today are for-profit. Moreover, being large, they require large amounts of capital. Practically speaking, the existence of a large social media platform requires investors seeking unlimited growth, and that's the predictable recipe for enshittification, which is why all large social media platforms have followed this pattern for the past ~30 years, even if they started with good intentions and user friendliness. What's the author's escape route to avoid this trap?
Unfortunately, it appears that social media platforms are not the type of product that many users are willing to spend money for, thereby maintaining some level of respect for the users. If the product is not free, it won't become "large". Several platforms, including Twitter/X (and remember ADN?), have tried and mostly failed to promote subscription funding. As the old saying goes, if you're not the customer, you're the product.
It's a fair point that Mastadon was left out, and yet it does tackle some of the problems I mention -- perhaps worth a followup post. That being said, I feel like federated social media platforms are not going to be the answer in the end -- and although its adoption has grown in the coming years, I think it's always going to lag behind others.
> Practically speaking, the existence of a large social media platform requires investors seeking unlimited growth, and that's the predictable recipe for enshittification [...] What's the author's escape route to avoid this trap?
I think reddit, to some extent, can be considered a success story here -- it grew fairly slowly compared to other social media platforms, but now feels like it has quite a lot of staying power (although as it approached its IPO it did indeed start to enshittify).
That being said, I think a lot of problems I mention can be solved just by giving the customer (e.g. the user on the social media platform) more choice. Imagine you had a platform that asked you how you wanted to pay to use it: with your data, with advertisements, or with a membership of $XXX/month, amongst other options.
Care to give an argument to substantiate that? These are pretty strong claims, "in the end" and "always" have a certain finality to them, which indicates you very strongly believe that. Why?
Because eventually bad actors take any decentralized platform / standard and ruin it for the rest of us, leading us to trust the few good players that remain (see: email). Sure, technically you can spin up your own mail server -- but because of the copious amount of spam from people who have done that in the past, you'll go through so many hoops that eventually you'll throw in the towel and probably use GSuite or a known major provider.
As Ben Thompson says:
> [...] centralization is a second order effect of decentralization: when all constraints on content are removed, more power than ever accrues to the entity that is the preferred choice for navigating that content.
Agreed, although as a user that doesn't bother me. I'm satisfied with Mastodon's current size.
> I think reddit, to some extent, can be considered a success story here
I've never considered Reddit to be particularly "social". I'm a daily Reddit user, but I don't have any friends on Reddit. Maybe I'm using it wrong? Unlike some other Hacker News commenters, I don't have a particularly high opinion about the level of discourse on HN, but still, in general it seems well above many areas of Reddit. (Of course that depends crucially on the subreddit.) I think that downvoting, for example (which exists on Reddit and HN), is an inherently hostile, nonfriendly action that's not conducive to being social.
> although as it approached its IPO it did indeed start to enshittify
For example, killing third-party Reddit clients that users loved.
> Imagine you had a platform that asked you how you wanted to pay to use it: with your data, with advertisements, or with a membership of $XXX/month, amongst other options.
Well, X basically has that now. I find it interesting that the "Premium" subscription is only "Half Ads", whereas a Premium+ subscription for $395 per year, out of the price range of most users, is required to be "Fully ad-free", which is still a bit of a lie, because it comes "with occasional branded content in less common areas." The problem is that unless a service is fully funded by subscriptions, the advertisers are still going to make severe demands on the service, and the advertisers don't like it when the service removes user eyeballs from their ads.