I suspect that the only way out is to provide a solution that has all the advantages of e.g. Facebook, without most of the disadvantages. Because there are advantages, especially for people who are less tech-savvy. Facebook allows them to communicate online with many people, and requires only minimum technical knowledge.
Before social networks, I usually communicated with people by e-mail. It was nice, but it required me to install and set up an e-mail program. (This problem was also solved by GMail.) Instant messagers were also nice, but again required installing and setup. Plus there were multiple instant messengers, and then you had some open-source client that could connect to all of them, but you still had to create the accounts, and configure the contact lists. Using these programs required some technical skills, or having someone with these skills in your family. I also visited all kinds of web forums.
Facebook is like GMail + instant messenger + web forums, all in one, and requires minimum setup. And although I hate the policy of providing your actual name and photo, it makes maintaining the contact lists easier. You do not have to install anything, which among other things means you can access Facebook at work from the company computer (unless it is specifically blocked); but there is also the optional smartphone app.
Blocking users solves the problem of spam. (Although you get ads, which are another form of spam.)
Multiple applications are, on one hand “yay competition” and less vendor lock-in, but it also makes maintaining contacts difficult in long term. If I have someone’s ICQ number, but the person already moved elsewhere, how am I supposed to know, and how am I supposed to contact them again?
A possible way out would be to make a non-evil (or maybe just less evil) application that provides all of these services. And then somehow convince everyone to switch over. And if it isn’t just as easy, people are definitely not going to switch over.
I prefer to have things sorted by topic, like one Reddit forum for this, and another Reddit forum for that. But from the perspective of a lazy publisher (or a publisher with near-zero technical skills), throwing everything on the wall is the easy way. So we need to allow this, at least as a default. (But of course, Facebook also supports joining groups, and writing on group walls.)
Maybe Facebook has already all figured out (they do spend lot of money on research), and the non-evil alternative would be surprisingly similar, only with more options and fewer ads.
Now another question is how to pay for the costs. Suppose you are not a profit maximizer, but you are not going to generate yourself a loss. And most people are not willing to pay something they can get for free at Facebook. Oops, are we stuck? Maybe not. Maybe we could allow advertising as a default alternative… and if you pay, dunno, $5 a month, the ads get turned off. Also, the ads would be less annoying, because we are not trying to generate profit, only to cover the costs of non-paying users.
Then we have the problem of policing content… you may prefer free speech, but at some moment the government is going to hold you responsible for something. We probably need to address users impersonating real people… first because it goes against the value of simple maintenance of contact lists, second because at some moment the impersonated people will sue you for libel. (That means, using a pseudonym would be ok, but using another real person’s or organization’s name would not.)
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.
You laid out the problem and all its sub-problems quiet well.
I suspect that the only way out is to provide a solution that has all the advantages of e.g. Facebook, without most of the disadvantages.
I’m writing a post about a potential solution like this that I picked up from reading a paper :). It’s a very interesting space, which I feel doesn’t get a lot of focus because a) most people dont want to build/program b) most people are satisfied with things as-is and c) the problem space is huge and searching it is hard. But with the malleability of software, I think that once we hit a new, working set of ideas, they will take over as quickly as social media pushed out traditional forums/mailing lists/link rings back in the 00′s.
Facebook is like GMail + instant messenger + web forums, all in one, and requires minimum setup.
Well put. It’s like Facebook/Twitter/etc. are an extra layer above everything else, a “layer 8” in the OSI model, that allows people to completely not care about all the protocols, filesystems, name-spacing schemes, storage requirements that sit underneath it. Just point your browser to this one page and you get it all (no installer, no plug’n’play, no versions/updates, no fees...).
Now another question is how to pay for the costs. (...) Then we have the problem of policing content… (...)
I feel this is very accurate in how it points out that we’re dealing with issues on both the technical layer and the social one. My gut tells me that purely technical solutions like mastodon will never take over because they don’t address any of the social issues like usability, moderation, accountability, etc.. I don’t have a good example of something that would work well on the social layer, but not on a technical one.
Currently, I place a lot of hope on stuff like the push for decentralization and web3. (I need to read up more about it though as right now these are just utopian ideas in my head). If we were able to get the efficiencies of centralized platform on a decentralized one, then that, I think, would have a good chance of winning in the sense of migrating over hundreds of millions of users. I imagine it would work by allowing users to very precisely price/pay for what they use, eg. the average user would most likely pay most of their fee for photo/video storage, while a power use would dedicate most of their fee toward specific features, or even characteristics like uptime. In both cases, they could still enjoy living on a higher level of abstraction than running their own email servers, but they get as much value as the price they’re willing to pay.
Yeah, speaking about decentralization… I would recommend using one default server (which will be used by all people who do not know what “server” means, that means most of population), but allow the protocol to connect to independent servers. They should be handled kinda like alternative app stores in smartphones. You connect to an alternative server, you get all the warnings, and then you choose your mode of contact-making with the alternative server: whether only you can actively seek for friends there (because your phishing resistance is zero, and you only wanted to connect with one specific person there), or whether other people can send you friend requests. (When you get a friend request, it is clearly shown that is comes from an alternative server.)
I suspect that the only way out is to provide a solution that has all the advantages of e.g. Facebook, without most of the disadvantages. Because there are advantages, especially for people who are less tech-savvy. Facebook allows them to communicate online with many people, and requires only minimum technical knowledge.
Before social networks, I usually communicated with people by e-mail. It was nice, but it required me to install and set up an e-mail program. (This problem was also solved by GMail.) Instant messagers were also nice, but again required installing and setup. Plus there were multiple instant messengers, and then you had some open-source client that could connect to all of them, but you still had to create the accounts, and configure the contact lists. Using these programs required some technical skills, or having someone with these skills in your family. I also visited all kinds of web forums.
Facebook is like GMail + instant messenger + web forums, all in one, and requires minimum setup. And although I hate the policy of providing your actual name and photo, it makes maintaining the contact lists easier. You do not have to install anything, which among other things means you can access Facebook at work from the company computer (unless it is specifically blocked); but there is also the optional smartphone app.
Blocking users solves the problem of spam. (Although you get ads, which are another form of spam.)
Multiple applications are, on one hand “yay competition” and less vendor lock-in, but it also makes maintaining contacts difficult in long term. If I have someone’s ICQ number, but the person already moved elsewhere, how am I supposed to know, and how am I supposed to contact them again?
A possible way out would be to make a non-evil (or maybe just less evil) application that provides all of these services. And then somehow convince everyone to switch over. And if it isn’t just as easy, people are definitely not going to switch over.
I prefer to have things sorted by topic, like one Reddit forum for this, and another Reddit forum for that. But from the perspective of a lazy publisher (or a publisher with near-zero technical skills), throwing everything on the wall is the easy way. So we need to allow this, at least as a default. (But of course, Facebook also supports joining groups, and writing on group walls.)
Maybe Facebook has already all figured out (they do spend lot of money on research), and the non-evil alternative would be surprisingly similar, only with more options and fewer ads.
Now another question is how to pay for the costs. Suppose you are not a profit maximizer, but you are not going to generate yourself a loss. And most people are not willing to pay something they can get for free at Facebook. Oops, are we stuck? Maybe not. Maybe we could allow advertising as a default alternative… and if you pay, dunno, $5 a month, the ads get turned off. Also, the ads would be less annoying, because we are not trying to generate profit, only to cover the costs of non-paying users.
Then we have the problem of policing content… you may prefer free speech, but at some moment the government is going to hold you responsible for something. We probably need to address users impersonating real people… first because it goes against the value of simple maintenance of contact lists, second because at some moment the impersonated people will sue you for libel. (That means, using a pseudonym would be ok, but using another real person’s or organization’s name would not.)
Sounds like a lot of work.
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.
You laid out the problem and all its sub-problems quiet well.
I’m writing a post about a potential solution like this that I picked up from reading a paper :). It’s a very interesting space, which I feel doesn’t get a lot of focus because a) most people dont want to build/program b) most people are satisfied with things as-is and c) the problem space is huge and searching it is hard. But with the malleability of software, I think that once we hit a new, working set of ideas, they will take over as quickly as social media pushed out traditional forums/mailing lists/link rings back in the 00′s.
Well put. It’s like Facebook/Twitter/etc. are an extra layer above everything else, a “layer 8” in the OSI model, that allows people to completely not care about all the protocols, filesystems, name-spacing schemes, storage requirements that sit underneath it. Just point your browser to this one page and you get it all (no installer, no plug’n’play, no versions/updates, no fees...).
I feel this is very accurate in how it points out that we’re dealing with issues on both the technical layer and the social one. My gut tells me that purely technical solutions like mastodon will never take over because they don’t address any of the social issues like usability, moderation, accountability, etc.. I don’t have a good example of something that would work well on the social layer, but not on a technical one.
Currently, I place a lot of hope on stuff like the push for decentralization and web3. (I need to read up more about it though as right now these are just utopian ideas in my head). If we were able to get the efficiencies of centralized platform on a decentralized one, then that, I think, would have a good chance of winning in the sense of migrating over hundreds of millions of users. I imagine it would work by allowing users to very precisely price/pay for what they use, eg. the average user would most likely pay most of their fee for photo/video storage, while a power use would dedicate most of their fee toward specific features, or even characteristics like uptime. In both cases, they could still enjoy living on a higher level of abstraction than running their own email servers, but they get as much value as the price they’re willing to pay.
Yeah, speaking about decentralization… I would recommend using one default server (which will be used by all people who do not know what “server” means, that means most of population), but allow the protocol to connect to independent servers. They should be handled kinda like alternative app stores in smartphones. You connect to an alternative server, you get all the warnings, and then you choose your mode of contact-making with the alternative server: whether only you can actively seek for friends there (because your phishing resistance is zero, and you only wanted to connect with one specific person there), or whether other people can send you friend requests. (When you get a friend request, it is clearly shown that is comes from an alternative server.)
OK, now we just need to make this happen. ;)