Another aspect: if you built software intended to deliberate on people’s needs and problems and then formulate plans and collect volunteers, the result would look fairly thoroughly not like Facebook. Any system for collating, corralling and organising different opinions and evidence would, also, look not at all like Facebook. You might end up with an argument map[1], or some “garden and the stream”[2] mix of dialogue and accumulated wisdom.
TL;DR: social software intended to avoid or ameliorate the problems we see with Facebook might function very little like Facebook does.
I like the warren & plaza description of bi-level communities for productive discussion. ‘Garden and stream’ seems to overemphasize wikis as a mechanism, when it’s really about persistence & specialization for filtering (eg Usenet discussion groups feeding into FAQs).
That’s a good point. Another way to look at the difference between Facebook and X would be that Facebook/Twitter/etc. lean heavily on self-expression. Very little of the content on those sites actually aim to contribute to something, like a dialogue or body of knowledge. I think this is why communities focused around specific goals, say, writers, weight lifters, or rationalists do not do their work over Facebook/Twitter/etc. Some might use those to stay in touch, but the serious work gets done on yee old phpbb forums and the like, where self-expression is not the main point.
Wow, thanks for those links. I’ve spent a few hours going down the garden/stream rabbithole. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen it before—though I’ve seen tools like Roam or the Zettelkasten and such, and of course I’ve read the Vanevar Bush article, but somehow it never occurred to me that maybe we already have working, albeit relatively not so popular, systems that work very differently than Facebook.
Another aspect: if you built software intended to deliberate on people’s needs and problems and then formulate plans and collect volunteers, the result would look fairly thoroughly not like Facebook. Any system for collating, corralling and organising different opinions and evidence would, also, look not at all like Facebook. You might end up with an argument map[1], or some “garden and the stream”[2] mix of dialogue and accumulated wisdom.
TL;DR: social software intended to avoid or ameliorate the problems we see with Facebook might function very little like Facebook does.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map
[2] https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
I like the warren & plaza description of bi-level communities for productive discussion. ‘Garden and stream’ seems to overemphasize wikis as a mechanism, when it’s really about persistence & specialization for filtering (eg Usenet discussion groups feeding into FAQs).
That’s a good point. Another way to look at the difference between Facebook and X would be that Facebook/Twitter/etc. lean heavily on self-expression. Very little of the content on those sites actually aim to contribute to something, like a dialogue or body of knowledge. I think this is why communities focused around specific goals, say, writers, weight lifters, or rationalists do not do their work over Facebook/Twitter/etc. Some might use those to stay in touch, but the serious work gets done on yee old phpbb forums and the like, where self-expression is not the main point.
Wow, thanks for those links. I’ve spent a few hours going down the garden/stream rabbithole. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen it before—though I’ve seen tools like Roam or the Zettelkasten and such, and of course I’ve read the Vanevar Bush article, but somehow it never occurred to me that maybe we already have working, albeit relatively not so popular, systems that work very differently than Facebook.