When you interact online, you fundamentally are interacting with only yourself. It is a solipsistic endeavor. You fundamentally choose which comments to respond to; unlike the real world, where a conversation occurs between two people, you can instantly drive into a conversation whenever you see fit, and leave whenever you wish also.
Therefore, the choice of which conversation, which comment, is entirely yours. And since the comments available are literally never-ending, you have the ultimate choice as to which you are responding. Therefore, every conversation you have is with a version of a person you have constructed in your head.
This is what enables people to be mean and rude on the internet. It's because they are talking to a construct which is fundamentally in their own head, often times with their own nasty internal conflicts applied.
This is also the fundamental mistake people make about the online world being a place where "discourse" can change anyone's internal landscape. It cannot, because it every discourse on the internet is by definition completely a subset of the ego of the single individual.
As soon as it appeared, when I was like 16 and an adept of philosophy, classic theater and general litterature which were, with video games, big escapes at the time, we were all talking around me about this network of people looking at themselves yelling in the void.
A few years pass by and everyone is addicted to facebook for news so much that my parents became fascists, my sister went through communist then populism and now post stuff like the EU is going to steal our savings, my friends are either gone off of it or completely vain selfying their vacation to no one in particular.
And now I post yet another comment to myself, marvelling at my english and smiling at my little twist. You're right, we don't talk to each other at all we just show our best angle to ourselves while raging jealously at other people's better angles.
The reasons for the difference as pointed out by the parent comment are valid and are what is making the interactions different, but I think it might not be "fundamentally". I can also choose which comments I respond to, which conversations to interject in, although it is a markedly different and easier experience to do so - online it's as easy as closing the tab or scrolling to another comment. Offline I need to not only ignore a comment/person, but also keep in mind a variety of other factors which don't exist online. Something that will always be lacking offline though is the infinity of possibilities.
> Therefore, the choice of which conversation, which comment, is entirely yours.
It's not that simple though. You're likely to be part of a broader community and simply deciding to leave that community, and all of your friends, over the actions of one person, is not very reasonable. Often times we are forced to be around people we don't particularly like. When that person does something valuable, they get a level of protection from being reprimanded for their bad behavior that isn't afforded to outsiders of the group, so kicking out such people often becomes difficult as well.
That's a neat idea but what about people who only see each other in real time chats (voice or text)? You can stop reading but AFK you can also walk away and it's pretty much the same.
I think texts/video calls/etc. isn't social media, it's much more like conversation.
That's why people (in general) are not nearly as mean or rude on a voice call or a 1-to-1 text chat. When you hear someone's voice or actually engage with a real time conversation (like a text chat, which you can't as easily just walk away from), they develop an interiority to you that forces you to empathize with them. The physical world is the ultimate version of this: seeing a person's body and face forces you to acknowledge their internal life, because the shared physical experience forces it. That's why it's a much higher barrier to bully or be bullied in the physical world.
There are exceptions to this, obviously. Tight knit forums, irc rooms, small moderated communities have an empathetic cost of interaction. But those are not really "social media", imho.
> I think texts/video calls/etc. isn't social media, it's much more like conversation.
> That's why people (in general) are not nearly as mean or rude on a voice call or a 1-to-1 text chat.
This doesn’t have to do with social media per se and is inherent to group dynamics. People are more rude as a rule in many-to-many conversations: where there is a group, there always lurks contention for status. Bullying is the most extreme case and is not the only one. (Speaking of, an insidious aspect of IRL bullying is how a bully can be compelled to be nice to the bullied if they meet away from
the watching crowd, causing all sorts of twisted effects on victim’s psyche.)
“All” social media does is adds an element of scale to this.
Yes, I think you're right. It's useful to have the unique label of "social media" because the scale you mention can't really be replicated offline. A difference in quantity is a difference in kind in this case.
> seeing a person's body and face forces you to acknowledge their internal life, because the shared physical experience forces it. That's why it's a much higher barrier to bully or be bullied in the physical world.
No, it’s not about seeing a person’s body and face forcing you to acknowledge their internal life. Pathological cases aside, we are fundamentally human and we perfectly understand that we are communicating with a human online as well as offline.
It’s about the group. Is there a watching group? Cue contention for status, in worst cases culminating in bullying. No group? Former bully can be nice to the victim, because suddenly there is no winning of status, and having a cooperating entity is practical.
The barrier to being bullied in the physical world is not shared physical experience. The barrier is the potential of a higher-status person taking the side of the bullied. Absent that potential (e.g., classroom without a teacher), bullying flourishes. Shared physical experience means nothing to the bully.
Here’re some aspects particular to bullying online:
— Unlike real world, bullying online can happen in 1:1 chats, because the bully can be accompanied by people IRL and can be gaining status in their eyes, unbeknownst to the victim.
— In public social media, the bully has to account for the potential of a higher-status person coming out of the blue and causing a separate crowd to take the side of the bully, which can be harder to predict compared to my classroom example. This makes public bullying a bit higher-stakes, especially if real identity is associated with the account; which somewhat balances out the scale.
Indeed, that is what I'm saying. Even though I'm a real person, when you read this comment, you do not gain any interiority into my real person.
You read my comment in your mind's voice, entirely with your own biases. And the fact that you choose to read & respond to my comment over any other means that the "conversation" we are having is with the disembodied voice (my voice) in your head with another disembodied voice (your voice) in your head.
I don't know you, and you don't know me; the exchange takes place on your side, within your ego, and only informed by your perspectives and biases. (Likewise, for me!)
What I'm not seeing is what is going on in the lives of these people that fosters such negative behavior. These studies almost never ask questions like "Are you being abused by your parents?" or "Have you been molested?"
There is this presumption that they engage in malicious behavior simply because they think they can get away with it, basically. It's an "idle hands are the devil's workshop" theory and generally lacks substance.
Sure, people do all kinds of stupid stuff when bored and when they have time on their hands, but why are these young adolescents online all the time? Does this mean they have a terrible home life and no one is paying attention to them?
I don't really like proxies like "Spends a lot of time online." I spend a lot of time online. I don't bully people.
For me, the internet is a means to have a life when that wouldn't otherwise be possible. I earn income online. I have hobbies online. Etc.
I really dislike the subtext that "spending time online is bad and more time spent online is worse." I would guess it is something more like "Spending time online to try to escape your shitty life in an abusive household means you take your baggage out on internet strangers because that seems safer and more do-able than resolving your thorny problems."
I don't think it's only adolescents. You can see rich Google employees bullying poorer developers on Twitter in the name of social justice. Some of the bullies must be at least 50 years old.
Social media and Twitter are bad because you can form virtual tribes and yield to age-old instincts.
The more individualistic people are, the less they join those tribes. Individualists tend to be grumpy though, for which they are bullied by the perfect Twitter moralists.
In recent years, I have found my internet experiences enormously frustrating because I used to have real friends via internet.
We exchanged Christmas presents. They helped me sort out how to raise my challenging children. I always had someone to talk with any time of the day or night when I was having insomnia or whatever.
And I haven't had stuff like in recent years. I just thought it was me because I spent a few years homeless.
But then I run into comments like this one that posit people can either connect socially and be assholes or have a mind of their own and (implicitly) no friends and be grumpy.
I don't know what the hell is going on in the world, but maybe my internet life going to hell isn't just about my life going to hell. Maybe there's something else going on and it's sort of "coincidence" that my internet life went to hell at the same time that my actual life went to hell.
But in my experience life does not compel you to either have a mind of your own or have social connections. And having social connections doesn't compel you to go along with being part of a lynch mob or some shit.
That's never how my life worked. I used to have friends and a mind of my own. I still have a mind of my own, but I've mostly not had friends in a long time.
I kept thinking "I must be doing it wrong," but maybe not. Maybe the internet isn't what it used to be or something.
I think partially it's that mainstream social media has become a hell-hole.
I've found HN to be much better for discussion in general (recognizing that this is not the case for everyone), and have participated in IRC rooms and whatnot where if I spent more time I could probably consider the people there friends, while still retaining individualism.
I tend towards grumpy isolationism however, so I may not be a good standard.
I think your observations are accurate. I've also noticed the problem, and that private-ish group conversations like WhatsApp groups and small Discord servers are so much better than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and co. The only problem is discoverability -- because groups like these are private, it's very hard to discover the ones you'd like to join.
I'm currently working on an early-stage startup on this space, and we're specifically trying to solve the discoverability problem while keeping the group chats themselves small and private (or at least private enough). Do you think you could see yourself using something like this?
Discoverability is an anti-feature. Small groups are good because they have a small number of long term users who you get to know. Everyone is less inclined to troll because they are emotionally invested in the group and being on good terms with other users.
How you end up in these groups is you either get invited by real life friends or you hang around in a big public group for a while, make friends with people who will then invite you to these smaller groups.
Because users have to be invited rather than just finding the group on a search page, the users are of higher quality and share similar interests.
> Maybe the internet isn't what it used to be or something.
I really think this is what it is. Internet discussion forums used to self-select for curious people actively seeking out discussion. It wasn't hard to find meaningful interactions because most people who sought out forums were looking for something similar. Now that everyone is on the internet, the random person you interact with likely doesn't have the same disposition as before.
as I get older I struggle to see the magic and joy of something new because nothing really is new anymore and just a variation of something previously experienced. Perhaps the Internet has changed for the worse idk it's impossible to measure since I have also changed too much to be able to gauge this properly myself.
I do know that my own and others expectation of Tech (from the mid 90ies) was just another utopia and I resent myself for drinking the Kool-aid, and hate myself for having gotten a job in Tech and playing my tiny part in being an ambassador for this type of future among the small group of people I had influence over (family, friends etc who all wished they did the same seeing my salary and lifestyle with much envy). I was so convinced of science and Tech being the answer to all problems we create that I thought teaching my kids to use Tech is a good use of time. But today I can't bring back time and I hate myself for it because I could have gone for a walk with them in the woods and created real memories instead.
another thing that hits me as I get old is it's becoming harder to make new connections IRL. I see my old friends having given up on life by refusing to get out of a stuck marriage, getting fat and lazy, having lost their confidence and ability and interest to do anything new, and the best I can get from them is a statement about what's cool on Netflix these days.
Then I look at myself and realize that I'm as much a slave to the algorithm as them even I do everything to not be part of this. There simply is no escape[1]. I gave up all social media years ago (except HN) and spend at least 2-3 hours outside every day. And my hate shifts from "Tech in general" to myself because I know there is no way out. Perhaps people like David Foster Wallace and others who are no longer with us have seen it coming years ago, and knew there are only 2 options: a) avoid others and be happy with just myself or b) off myself. I'm doing an OK job (I think) managing a) but I can't claim that I'm not looking forward to the day I snuff it either. It feels like the only thing that is worse than dealing with my own judgement and myself is dealing with the judgement or opinions of others (see the idea of "Hell is other people" from "No Exit")
I've certainly spent my time in hell of the "hell is other people" variety. I've spent my time there both in my youth before the internet took over the world and in recent years after it did.
Because of the internet, I've had friends -- real friends who were extremely important to me -- in Canada, in Guam and in the Middle East. They helped save my life and shape my character.
While largely housebound due to my health, the internet was how I had close relationships with people the world over without exposing me to their germs or them to mine.
I left my corporate job that was helping to kill me and slept in a tent for a few years while trying to figure out how to make a few bucks online. That helped save my life and helped me get healthier when there's not supposed to be any hope for me.
Once, my oldest son said to me "There's both good and evil in all things." I thought that was profound and life giving and eye opening.
I asked him where he learned such profound wisdom given his relative youth. He told me I taught him that. He learned it from me.
That was even more surprising. I didn't have any memory or awareness of having done any such thing.
I don't hate tech. I see tremendous untapped potential in it to build a better world and I flail about trying to figure out how to write about it knowing that I have no audience and I have no credibility and no one believes my story.
I start little blogs that peter out and go nowhere. I start little reddits that sometimes have me as the only member for ages.
And I'm sorry to hear that someone who likely de facto helped to save my life by being one of the cogs in the machine that built the tech that helped me live when, by all rights, I should have died is someone so bitter and disillusioned with the very thing I still find wondrous and life giving and a means to connect with people in spite of my incurable condition and compromised immune system.
I had a bone marrow transplant in 1989. I had to remain isolated for about a year. Back when 12 months seemed like forever.
I started a BBS network. That was my social life. Those digital pen pal friends were my life line. Probably the most intense, intimate relationships I've ever had.
I don't know what happened in the medium transitions since. Dial up to internet, FidoNet to UUCP & NNTP, FTP & Gopher to HTTP, multiuser to MMORPG, blogs to social media, desktop to laptop to mobile, social media to livestream.
Maybe it's like Chomsky tried to warn us: Anything ad supported is bad for us.
Maybe it's like David Graeber suggests: While winner-takes-all is something like a natural law, we can always find nooks and corners to connect with each other and have genuine relationships.
I think it's a case of innocence lost. Having been burned, I can no longer trust people I meet online.
Long ago, I trusted people I met online in a way I can't anymore and that creates a barrier that protects me from potential predators, but it also keeps out potential friends. Multiply that across literally billions of people and it's a hard problem to solve.
I don't think the tech, per se, is the problem. We opened a social Pandora's Box and having seen how things can go wrong at scale, we optimize for trying to guard against potential evil rather than for fostering good.
With that, our fears deepen. It becomes a case of "Going to war to preserve the peace is like fucking to preserve virginity."
Ultimately, it comes back to the people and how they live their lives and what is in their minds. Tech is a problem because we've decided The Tech is the problem rather than deciding how we use it is The Problem.
Then we very ironically design new apps to remedy our problems rooted in the idea that The Tech is the problem rather than designing new philosophies and new ideas and new social norms which has historically been the effective remedy for social ills.
I think living thru transitions helps provide perspective.
I'm casually rereading the media and technology critics. McLuhan, Postman, Chomsky, Shirky, Orwell, others. It's kind of amazing how prescient some of their observations were.
As a counter anecdote, I have a group of about 15 real friends on the internet that I met mostly on an instant messaging app. Real friends to the point of meeting up and going on holidays together without actually knowing their full real names.
It can be "a little of column A and a little of column B." Conditions being generally worse will hit some people harder than others.
I'm not suggesting that it's simply impossible to make constructive connections anymore. I'm only saying that I spent some years thinking the change was 100 percent about me and my life and maybe it wasn't 100 percent me.
Maybe it was at least partly general conditions. And I couldn't see that because my life being derailed was very in my face and I just figured that was the entire explanation.
You're not wrong, the internet isn't what it used to be. Google "2007 the year when the internet went to shit" to get a minuscule glimpse of what happened.
This is wild to me, as my rule of thumb is the exact opposite! I assume anybody whose profile picture isn't themselves is either a bot, a troll, or a throwaway account they use for comments they know will be controversial. It's the equivalent of having a username like "@John448172312". (Not that you should really trust either group to argue anything in good faith on Twitter).
There's a lot of nuance, but my rule of thumb isn't so far off from the comment's above you.
My Twitter avatar is a picture of a fractal I generated with my own software. That reveals (fuzzily) a certain non-obvious aspect of my personality, which you couldn't get just from looking at my face. The majority of people have faces; mine isn't much of a signal to strangers.
Faces are for recognition. If we met at a conference, you could recognize me again by my face. If you don't know me, my face isn't very useful unless you expect to meet me in person. So, a face on Twitter is unhelpful to the point of being counterproductive.
Unwarranted self-importance. Bonus points if it's a photo of them on a stage holding a microphone with that open-palm I-am-giving-a-TED-talk gesture :)
I know someone who hates pictures of herself, never took a selfie in her life, but switched to a picture of herself and used her real name simply because it's less likely she'll say something stupid/inflammatory in the middle of an argument. If you're using some random name like chickenslippers1981 and have a pic of a cat, you might feel less like being thoughtful. You can always walk away from chickenslippers1981/cat, but you can't walk away from yourself.
This is probably a pretty decent heuristic actually! My guess, as an armchair psychologist, is that narcissism and a toxic need to generate attention and drama are highly correlated with constantly taking selfies and sharing them. Look for the profile picture and just a quick glance at the feed, and if it's full of selfies, you probably have a pretty good idea of who you're dealing with.
> The more individualistic people are, the less they join those tribes. Individualists tend to be grumpy though, for which they are bullied by the perfect Twitter moralists.
As a grumpy individualist, I'm not on Twitter, so it's pretty hard to bully me there. There's people there, why would I want to be there?
Because we've given every single person a voice and the promise that their opinion is just as important as everyone else's, despite their understanding or their qualifications, and it has made people collectively entitled and vitriolic.
Couple this with absolutely batshit insane current events for the last ~5 years and you have massive divide.
Then multiply that by the expansion of technology into every day lives, where everyone is connected and has an up-to-date, moment-by-moment window into literally thousands of other lives, and people get extremely detached from their own selves and their own beliefs. They stop thinking for themselves, almost entirely.
Not to mention things like Twitter, with quirks like "you have to fit very heavy conversations into cute little limited messages" so as to even further increase the pressure on public discourse.
All of this friction creates heat, so to speak, and people start realizing that outside their circles are people who are so foreign and different that they MUST be idiot enemies, and thus everyone begins to despise each other, categorizing people and using assumptions about their character against them, all formed from a few blurbs of random information either from context or a few textboxes on a social media profile.
It's just like when one is unable to effectively communicate, they often resort to violence. I firmly believe this is the same thing happening online - it's just a huge, crowded shouting match and since nothing ever happens despite how loud you're screaming, you have to resort to other means to get a rise out of someone else.
I'm not a particularly happy person and I really, _really_ dislike interacting with other people, so I can certainly understand why some of this happens. Life sucks for a lot of people, and being able to express that whilst having the buffer of a computer screen and ethernet cable between you and the other person is certainly a "great power, great responsibility" type of situation.
This. It's the modern equivalent of breaking windows on an old building or setting off fireworks or some other adolescent destructive behavior. It's just they have access to a new platform to conduct this behavior on. These people always existed--people just didn't have to see it and it wasn't easily accessible like it is now.
I'm not trying to suggest "Bullies are all abused people."
I said These studies almost never ask questions like ... That was very intentional.
"I'm being abused" is merely one example of someone having a crappy life. There are lots of ways a person's life can be crappy.
So your comment doesn't really disagree with my suggestion, though it sort of seems to. I'm only suggesting that bullies are probably miserable and taking their misery out on other people and that element isn't actually examined by most studies.
The study characterizes these cyberbullies as males who spend too much time online. I object to that.
That more or less smears men and people who spend a lot of time online without finding any real cause. I think it's a characterization that amounts to harmful disinformation.
It's not much different from racial profiling which people object to for the implication that "people of color are just immoral and inherently inclined to be criminal." (Among other reasons.)
I object to this study essentially pointing fingers at innocent characteristics as if they are causal without finding any meaningful causes. It doesn't even seem to look for meaningful causes.
I spend a lot of time online. That doesn't per se make me more inclined to bully people.
I do my damnedest to be a decent person in spite of having a very difficult life. I've been on the receiving end of bullying on a forum where it was mod policy to actively encourage members to pick on certain people and then the mods would act like the people being bullied were at fault for any drama that swirled around them when there was no means for those people to shut that crap down (I have reason to believe I continued to be stalked by some of these assholes even after they banned me).
I was homeless at the time and it was an extremely classist forum.
So there's no doubt all kinds of factors that contribute to such behavior. But this study doesn't seem to list a single thing that looks like a meaningful contributor.
The mods were a large part of the problem on the forum where I was harassed. That doesn't mean "Becoming a mod puts you at greater risk of becoming a bully."
Those people were just assholes who found themselves in an easily abusable position of power. Some of them were assholes who were very open about their childhood baggage, such as having an alcoholic father.
So personal baggage was a contributing factor. But we all can choose whether our baggage is a source of compassion for the suffering of others or a bullshit excuse to kick others while they are down.
These folks chose to kick me while I was down while bragging to the world about what amazingly woke and good people they are. And most people buy their BS about being good people and woke people and fail to see how they actively and intentionally crap on some people for no real reason.
I'm not sure. Bullying, offline and online, is rarely done to random people you don't have any connection to and without other people. It either ties into offline, i.e. they're bullying someone they know, or it's an online community thing where some people from some community have fun together bullying someone they might not know.
My point is: in both cases it's not "I'm miserable and unhappy", it's either a community-building thing, or it's a social status thing. If you're bullying someone in school, that's a power move to assert status. They're not unhappy, they're just trying to get ahead; under different circumstances, they'd just mug people to take their money. Now they bully them to get more status.
In this field, sending out surveys with "objective" questions to a large amount of people to collect data is the only way to get your research deemed "scientific". I think everyone would agree that the role of the scientists and writers of these pop-psych articles should be to interpret the point and help readers come to an insightful and true conclusion like yours, but really everyone in the psychology and journalism fields are forced to run a "I'm just reporting the facts like my boss wants me to" mantra to keep their job.
It's kind of sad that this academic system makes it so only well-paid therapists get to do that, because of course looking at the current state of affairs in the world and coming to and reporting on and building insight on the logical conclusion that only hurt people hurt people isn't "scientific research" because the peers in your field only allow themselves and others to repeat what the numbers in the excel spreadsheet say. The psychology and objective journalism fields are great examples of dysfunctional academic systems.
I like Alice Miller's hot take on her field in her book "For Your Own Good". I'm just going to straight up copy her text:
Those who swear by statistical studies and gain their psychological knowledge from those sources will see my efforts to understand the children Christiane and Adolf [Hitler] as unnecessary and irrelevant. They would have to be given statistical proof that a given number of cases of child abuse later produced almost the same number of murderers. This proof cannot be provided, however, for the following reasons. Alice Miller lists off 1) child abuse takes place in secret 2) testimony of victims on their own suffered child abuse is often very flawed to protect their parents 3) experts in criminology have already noted this trend in their scientific research
Even if statistical data confirm my own conclusions, I do not consider them a reliable source because they are often based on uncritical assumptions and ideas that are either meaningless (such as "a sheltered childhood"), vague, ambiguous ("received a lot of love"), or deceptive ("the father was strict but fair"), or that even contain obvious contradictions ("he was loved and spoiled"). This is why I do not care to rely on conceptual systems whose gaps are so large that the truth escapes through them, but rather prefer to make the attempt ... to take a different route. I am not searching for statistical objectivity but for the subjectivity of the victim in question, to the degree that my empathy permits.
I was molested and raped as a child. Most people had no idea.
I did attempt suicide at age 17 and I began making two grades per year below a C starting after I was raped at the age of twelve and I spent time in an insane asylum.
But I also was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class, had the highest SAT scores of my graduating high school class, won a National Merit Scholarship (to UGA, in fact) based on those scores, etc.
Most people are not talented at identifying indicators of abuse and people in abusive situations are often doing everything in their power to find some high road solution because they know they are at risk of being blamed and ending up in jail or some shit.
When I was institutionalized in my teens, I was initially presumed to be a badly behaved teenager. I distinctly remember having a conversation with a staff member who assumed I was just some asshole teenager and they markedly changed their tune when they found out I was a victim of being molested and raped and I was suicidal and that was why I was hospitalized, not because I was doing bad things to other people.
I think looking for deeper motivations such as abuse will likely prove fruitless in these cases.
A few years ago the 14-year old old daughter of a coworker of mine got into a lot of trouble after being revealed as the person (cyber)bullying two classmates because they were "flaunting their new iPhones on social media too much". Anecdotal for sure, but kids can be mean and with the internet still offering a veil of anonymity, incidents like this are bound to happen.
> The study also found that adolescent males are more likely to engage in cyberbullying than females, aligning with past studies that show aggressive behaviors tend to be more male driven.
for a certain definition of aggression. but social media bullying is a Mean Girls phenomenon. it's reputation and character assassination, which is aggressive behavior. male aggression tends to be physical and they spend more time playing video games, while females spend more time on social media. as a result, girls are seeing higher rates of depression compared to boys.
here's the research on this topic that Jonathan Haidt and other academics are maintaining;
Men do reputation and character assassination pretty routinely. They are no strangers to smear campaigns or even subtle manipulating group against one. Males use words for aggression quite a lot, actually.
Being online leads to a deep mental disturbance that just grows and grows.
It's like you're hungry and you're reading through an endless stack of menus with this weird idea that the menus will sate your hunger. And you just keep on reading, about sandwiches, pizza and Chinese food. But none of the reading helps. You just keep on getting hungrier.
I think that the Buddhists talk about this state, in their version of Hell.
It's only natural that this would lead to "demoniacal" behavior.
I've thought about this problem a lot - I want to create a social network that has the following attributes:
- $1 a year to participate
- You must read posts/articles to reply. Imagine the mechanism in which this is determined to be "perfect."
- No pictures
- Karma is gathered by writing posts that are read a lot, as opposed to comments that have a lot of "upvotes."
- Upvotes/downvoting doesn't exist.
From my experience the social media addiction is heightened by 3 attributes:
1. pictures
2. how controversial something is
3. trolling
The issue though is that a social network like I described would be something people wouldn't want to use, so it wouldn't really serve to be a place people could go to that's a healthier community. It's a tough nut to crack.
Why do you want to build a platform for a community ? That s the thing.
When I was a kid before facebook we had huge IRC and forum communities, with no ad, direct contact, true friends you d meet IRL sometimes. I know some who married.
Facebook is the opposite of an online community: it takes your existing relationship graph, the one with true deep value you kept secret from the internet before, and milk and milk it for every drop of attention you can give your waking hours to ads. Whatever it takes.
However you measure something being "read a lot" is basically the same thing as upvotes. People will try to game it to get more readers. Unless you are saying posts will not be sorted by popularity in which case discover-ability of good writing will be a problem (high noise to signal ratio).
YouTube is a good example of players adapting to the game. Since view time became such an important metric, it’s been frustratingly difficult to find straight-to-the-point videos (that aren’t 10-second memes or TikTok reposts). It incentivizes repetition and meandering to stretch 1 minute of content into a 10 minute video.
I wonder if social media had the potential to be a force of good or if it was doomed from the start. I'd like to run an AB experiment where social media companies didn't optimize for engagement. And maybe an AB experiment where they tried to optimize for healthy usage, even if it harmed engagement.
I don't think social media was doomed from the start - there were many years of healthy enough communities (I'm mostly familiar with LiveJournal in the early 2000s) that didn't have all the downsides of modern social media. You saw updates in most-recent-first order, if you refreshed the page you got the same thing (perhaps with a new update at the top, but it was easy to tell when you'd caught up), and if you had too much stuff to read, you figured out how to trim some of it away ("FRIENDS CUT!"). The cost to operate the infrastructure was fairly minimal, and it accomplished most of the things we actually would like from social media without the downsides.
What we haven't proved is that you can have social media run by a publicly traded, ad-revenue-funded company without all sorts of harmful effects (with the main interface being smartphones with push notifications). That's where all the nasty "engagement" effects come from - trying to drive eyeballs to ads to improve revenue. It's very much a zero-sum game - every pair of eyeballs has 24 hours in the day, so the goal is to command their attention for as many of those hours as possible. That's where the evil creeps in.
> I'd like to run an AB experiment where social media companies didn't optimize for engagement. And maybe an AB experiment where they tried to optimize for healthy usage, even if it harmed engagement.
This is just a theory but my fear is that social media that's optimized for "healthy usage" probably looked more like the forum and blog culture that social media killed.
Optimizing for engagement means you basically have a genetic algorithm on your hands for surfacing the content with the most "viral-potential." Eventually that stuff eats the healthy parts of the internet because people inevitably talk about the viral stuff that's happening, which means your healthy-use forum is nonetheless revolving around the conversation in the viral centers.
From there it's a matter of time before people start going directly to the viral source to keep up with the context and conversation. And once they're there, because it optimizes for engagement, it crowds out their use of everything else.
So there's a natural selective pressure here. Optimizing for engagement/addiction gets you a network effect that leads to overshadowing any other type of socializing. Unless there's some mechanism to actively select against virality and engagement they will naturally rise to the top even independent of ad-impression incentives.
I've been using a chronological order social media for a couple of years now and I wouldn't trade it for a sorting algo.
Sure, I miss some things that are likely interesting and sometimes I need to mute some that post too often.
I think content tagging is what people were really asking for when they got "optimized for engagement."
Is there a mainstream social media platform that still supports a chronological order? Twitter is the closest one but as far as I know they still periodically reset the feed to the algorithmic one, overriding your previous decision.
Old school forums. I'm a member of quite a few hobby-related forums and they are great.
Basically anything without crowdsourced voting that affects placement of the message. That could be obvious things like reddit posts, and other things like online reviews. Effortless "likes" and "upvotes" produce the worst feeds.
Sure. Instagram was that. They have limiters that will tell you to take a break, they have a marker that tells you you've caught up, and the default view is subscriptions-only.
I only see my friends' stuff on Instagram and it's lovely. Though they've recently changed to stick random stuff underneath the last post from a friend which does diminish the point somewhat.
What's your threshold for doomed? The kinds of conversations/actions that have happened haven't changed all that much since the Internet as we know it began. The term "flamewar" and "troll" were coined on Usenet. The only differences between now and then is scale and visibility.
In addition, how does one define "engagement" and "healthy usage"? Way back when, people spent much of their free time on a landline. Does one go on to blame AT&T for "optimizing for engagement" by providing a service that could keep people connected to any person in the country for hours upon hours while the phone company made millions minute-by-minute? Ultimately this depends on the person and his/her wants/needs (however "unhealthy" you think they might be) and those can only be determined by oneself regardless of how much data someone else collects.
Your AB experiment would only work if you had sentient gingerbread men as a control group. Even then, I doubt it would say or change much about what people do on a person-to-person basis.
Social media encourages dogpiling. "Engagement" measures shares, reactions and comments. Shares get more eyeballs on a post and "the algorithm" further promotes posts already garnering a lot of "engagement", creating a feedback loop. More eyeballs means more people commenting and a greater likelihood of repeating what has already been said, hence more dogpiling.
Early online communities were not only much more heavily moderated than even sites like reddit or HN are today, but they also usually had explicit rules prohibiting dogpiling because it made it impossible to have a discussion or actually explain to someone why what they said may have been deemed offensive, inappropriate or wrong.
If you spend more time "interacting" on social media, you probably encounter dogpiles more frequently and end up contributing to them more than someone who mostly just consumes social media and doesn't actively participate. This probably also means you face more of the resulting backlash, further polarizing your views of the "others".
This seems to generally lead to one of two outcomes: Either you quit, or you embrace the angry surface level discourse and turn lashing out at people online into a hobby. You can see this happen in real time on Twitter because the character limit rewards witty one-liners and comebacks over wordy nuance (even if people try to work around this with threads, but note this doesn't work well for replies and this still requires replying several times in a row and results in notification spam).
To put it differently: social media is competitive and encourages antagonistic behavior (because people are more likely to "engage" something snappy they disagree with, than something nuanced they agree with). Cyberbullying is just the extreme end of it.
If we wanted to avoid this, we would need to encourage cooperation over competition. But even sites explicitly built around cooperation (like Stackoverflow) often end up promoting competitive behavior by introducing rewards and privileges for supposedly cooperative behavior. If you gamify cooperation and reward people for being "good at cooperating", you just create a competition with extra steps and this can still poison the well.
Humans, their personalities and traits, have barely altered in 1000s of years. The internet is polarising the worst aspects. Humans haven't changed, but their worst behaviour is unleashed by anonymity.
My opinions not so much on the study itself, but the topic of general shitty behaviour people seem to display on popular social media platforms.
Personally, I think it has less to do with things like anonymity, up/downvotes and other gamey systems employed that tend to get blamed and more to do with the communities themselves.
Specifically, their size. But also, the willingness of moderators to enforce a few basic rules of civility.
I think they suffer from that same phenomenon that makes cities on a whole, less friendly than smaller towns and communities. I realize there's exceptions, but speaking generally this tends to be the case.
To further the comparison a bit, you're also more likely to have the police respond with favourable results to personal and petty crime in smaller towns.
You can see the same things in smaller internet communities. Whether they're pseudonymous or not or whatever kinds of upvoting systems they have or not, there's less people, moderators tend to respond more quickly to personal attacks and things and usually in more reasonable ways than automated algorithms.
Again, generalizing, but when communities are small enough all the people participating are recognizable and when moderators are active in enforcing those basic rules of conduct, people tend to behave a little more reasonably.
As a sidenote, I'll throw HN in as an exception to the size thing, because it's a pretty large community, but dang and the mods are like super human or something so manage to keep the conversation pretty civil most of the time here.
> I think they suffer from that same phenomenon that makes cities on a whole, less friendly than smaller towns and communities.
There is data that shows the opposite is true[1]. While the pace of life is faster in urban areas -- which may be jarring to people aren't accustom to it -- living in areas with high population density teaches people to be courteous and respectful.
How the fuck do I use the adtech delivery system you generously gifted to me in order to read the body of a research article[1] from this public institution of higher learning?
This is so trivial it's useless nonsense. This is like saying that that existing in reality is linked to bullying. Yes, sure, you have to exist in physical space to be non-cyberbullied. And you have to exist in a digital space to by cyberbullied.
Therefore, the choice of which conversation, which comment, is entirely yours. And since the comments available are literally never-ending, you have the ultimate choice as to which you are responding. Therefore, every conversation you have is with a version of a person you have constructed in your head.
This is what enables people to be mean and rude on the internet. It's because they are talking to a construct which is fundamentally in their own head, often times with their own nasty internal conflicts applied.
This is also the fundamental mistake people make about the online world being a place where "discourse" can change anyone's internal landscape. It cannot, because it every discourse on the internet is by definition completely a subset of the ego of the single individual.