Social media is navigating its sectarian phase
newyorker.com
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I don't think any of us can predict how this will play out, but it certainly is interesting to watch the user growth/receding and watch the waves.
The idea that anybody gets to say whatever they want is how you have a free society. Treat those people like threats and you have authoritarianism. Whether the end result is left tyranny or right tyranny, I don't want it.
Sure, link-curation sites can also be low-quality, toxic echo chambers. Reddit is roughly a link-curation analogue of BlueSky, and even HN has some low-effort content, toxicity and groupthink (though it's not nearly as bad). And there are high-quality posters on Twitter, and high-quality invite-only Mastodon instances (at least in theory, I'd love to find some).
But high-quality posts are hindered by Twitter's format. High-quality posts don't fit in 150 words, hence the "thread 1/N", "thread 2/N" workaround. High-quality discussion is hard with a handful of random reply-chains as opposed to a comment tree. Specifically on Twitter, high-quality posts get limited reach because it's non-public with a (mostly) non-customizable algorithm, to the extent I mainly find said posts via links on link-curation sites.
Meanwhile, link-curation sites encourage high-quality content by encouraging (if not requiring) posts to be links. Instead of posting a "hot take", you link to an article, paper, or at least self-hosted blog*. Or when possible, you link to the primary source, and maybe post your opinion in the comments, where it's presented almost exactly like opposite opinions (just with the "OP" indicator). Comments are also better, because every reply to every reply is shown and you can collapse reply trees to view others; and because there's no word limit, so even comments can be substantive (although there's no encouraging mechanism to comment with a link to your blog post or related/contrasting primary source, which in theory could lead to especially high-quality discussions and insight, but I suspect in practice would almost never be used).
* Self-hosted blogs tend to be higher-quality due to an expected minimum length and the effort required to set it up and get attention. Although unfortunately, I've seen some links to no-name blog articles that were especially short and low quality. As mentioned, link-curation doesn't guarantee high quality like Twitter-style doesn't guarantee low quality, they facilitate high/low quality respectively.
Meanwhile actual platform change is considered "unrealistic" but is actually a ton of fun and perfectly fine if you like connecting with other people more than stroking your ego with numbers obtained by sucking up to the system/algorithm and/or consumerism
The future is private enclaves like Discord, Slack, private networks, private forums, and chat apps. The open Internet is a dark forest.
Could you expand on this a bit? That sounds like potentially interesting idea. Especially since I read “The Dark Forest”.
But I think it is true, private or moderated groups might be the only safe place.
If social media is really a representative view on our society, i feel quite disappointed
However, even the private enclaves become corrupted over time, especially if they ever grow in popularity. I mean, look at HN as an example. What was once a niche place for tech people and STEM related topics, now any given day the front page is 30% pure sociopolitical content, 50-75% mainstream media content; comment threads full of partisan rage baiting and emotion-driven debate.
Also, once a niche place becomes in any way important/popular, the propagandists will swoop in and work their tricks to start controlling the messaging on it.
At this point I'm feeling that niche places can only exist long-term as long as they have some sort of dictatorial control by a truly moral admin, who forcefully keeps the community in check by viciously moderating content. Of course, such a person is eventually corruptible, and finding a successor later for such a person is its own issue.
It's not clear right now what tools we'll build to analyze users & subnetworks, to try to get a pulse for what is authentic versus propoganda. But I am 100% here in large part because it's the only network where the data will be available! Where there is a strong commitment & the protocol is designed to making the firehose/backfill readily available. And with that I think humanity stands some kind of chance of engineering defense against the Dark Forest, can reach up towards some exaltant connection.
The Fediverse is much more focused on small communities (which personally I think it mostly fails to do usefully) and has an ethos that strongly rejects search / findability / data-gathering / network monitoring. There's little hope for me if that's the outlook: limited networking. For it means no defense, no higher views. Big Social is of course now totally inaccessible, as dark as it comes, with academic research having been buried by massively expensive API access costs, brutally short retention limits, and utterly opaque ranking/moderation systems.
Furthermore, I already had a lot of mute words and blocks set up on X to keep it palatable. I don't see any politics over there and it's entirely focused on creative work. If I did this on Bluesky I imagine I'd significantly cull my feed down to it seeming dead.
Fast forward 10 years later and now r/seattleWA has become the right-wing subreddit. r/Seattle is more lighthearted and full of pictures of the space needle. This wasn’t the original intent, but once a community splits in two both sides are going to further differentiate to fill more user niches.
This feels like a natural process, for better or worse. Also thats the founding principle of America. If you have had enough, move and set up a new country/state/religion/homeschool group.
Honestly X has the biggest mix of partisan viewpoints. Many subreddits, bluesky, have become mentally unhealthy places to spend your time if you’re left leaning.
There are plenty of people that seem to celebrate what happened yesterday on these places. It’s the worse I’ve seen and it disgusts me.
It's basically what Truth Social would be if it didn't even have Trump.
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edit: it's not the fault of the technology, it's the fault of the awful company. They represent people strongly aligned with the Democratic Party, but with no power in the Democratic Party, and their philosophy has been stated over and over again: if you don't agree with whatever we believe today, we don't even want your support, or want you here, or want you to be employed. A lot of conservatives would add "they also don't want us to be alive."
The worst part is that they're all upper-middle class, and when as the Gini coefficient goes up with the right-wingers they're locking into power by being so repulsive, they'll just get wealthier and wealthier and more self-righteous.
I've been suspecting for years that there's a lot of botted support for the dumbest most out of touch liberals that is paid for by conservatives. I don't meet people like this in real life, and I am very left-wing. The liberals I meet are generally humble and thoughtful (if in love with their television sets.)
Having more people talk than follow is good thing and probably consistent across social media.
That's just saying the average person posts for 2 days and follows for 1. Which seems very typical if not heavy on the following.
Pointing at more people speaking than sheeping and calling that an ominous statistic seems off, don't you think?
I have a list of chronologically sorted articles from sources I trust. That’s it and that’s all.
I read them until they are read. Then I close the app and do other stuff until tomorrow.
Is it any wonder Google killed off Reader around the same time it tried to launch Google+? Managing our own feeds was never going to peak capitalism.
About the worst I saw were, in essence, saying this is bad, but those who live by the sword, die by the sword, which is a biblical thing.
Why is Bluesky an echo chamber but X, Rumble, Gab, Gettr are not? I bet there's huge vile "damn leftists" commentary there, even though we don't know who shot Kirk or why. Why isn't that an echo chamber?
I have not even heard of some of those. So I am not saying that they aren’t echo chambers either. But given the reputation for civil discourse that blue sky has, I was surprised to see a lot of comments that were saying disgusting things in thinly coded ways.
It’s impossible to generalize about the entire population of the site—many of Bluesky’s users do not post in English and do not engage with American politics—yet it has developed an identity as a haven for liberals in the aftermath of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and Donald Trump’s reëlection as President.
None?
Congratulations, it's de-facto a bubble. It's just math, half the electorate isn't on the table.
Does that mean I need to avoid Bluesky? Or Twitter? Is bluesky bad somehow because of that?
The models he - and others like him - make are probabilistic. 70% probability Hillary would win was actually accurate. 30% probability events happen all them time.
The ones with “skin in the game” in 2016 said there was a 99% chance that Hillary would win. And that they’d eat their shoe, etc, if Trump won. They were in so much disbelief that Trump could win they built models just for confirmation bias.
Based on what?
My model says there's a 70% chance of Foo, and that is actually accurate. How do you know it's accurate? Because my model said so.
It might have been accurate! 30% probability events happen 3 times out of 10. We just have no way to know if it truly was accurate.
It’s not black and white “know”, 70% is the mean of a probability distribution.
It’s more accurate to say, this model predicts “Foo” because historically polls like this favor Foo 70% of the time. But these are probabilities and have wide errors. It’s on the reader to have a level of statistical knowledge.
These are more handicaps than “predictions”. The same way we predict whether it might rain tomorrow, who might wins tomorrows game, without a Time Machine.
To say that a specific probability given by a poll was accurate is meaningless, there is no way to know.
IE X% of the time my model predicted the right result in this particular election.
You can test weather forecasts on the weather in the past.
You can test your model on a sports game on past games.
We do this all the time in many fields. With different degrees of certainty (error bars are small or large).
The entire basis of machine learning and predictions people use in everyday life is based on this assumption