1. What value am I actually getting out of social media, and is that value good?
Keeping in Touch With Friends
I have a perception, similar to Dr_Manhattan, that I am actually using facebook for a fairly reasonable thing (that it seems to actually aspire to be good at) which is keeping in touch with friends, in a way that most other platforms do not enable.
I can imagine this turning out to either:
Not be true – it’s simplyan illusion that the thing I’m doing is “keeping in touch with friends”, and I’d be much better off if I just “actually kept in touch with friends” using some other process.
True, but a much weaker version of the thing than it should be – Maybe facebook actually helps me keep in touch with friends, but naturally forces it into a milquetoast version itself. Maybe I’d be better off if I had a small number of friends that I was closer to, and didn’t even pretend to keep in touch with the others. Maybe I could keep loose connections going more easily if facebook didn’t have a few behaviors that actively sabotaged it.
(both of the above are separate from what other costs FB might be imposing)
Marketing Products and Ideas
FB enables certain kinds of grassroots marketing that’s hard to do otherwise. I’ve most-obviously used this to promote the Secular Solstice. I also sometimes use it to recommend products that actually served me well that I want to reward.
I have a sense that this is actually good when done at small scales, encouraging entrepreneurship that generates new valuable things for the world. And meanwhile people have a fair degree of control over whether to subscribe to a given person’s self-promotion, so there’s incentives for the promotion to be actually useful. (Insofar as people don’t have that control it’s because FB is separately manipulating people with skinner box tech)
I have a sense that this is bad, when it reaches certain thresholds of commercial-ness, or simplified-for-the-masses-ness (which I think my solstice promotion has sometimes reached), where the tails come apart.
There’s a similar thing for the marketing of ideas, where there’s a low-barrier-to-entry way to share your thoughts and have it naturally scale. At low doses this is good and fruitful. But supercharged with goodhart’s law it turns into bad political memes.
I’m less confident that these things are net good. And, if I’m correct that they are good at low doses but bad at high-volume, less confident that there’s a principled way to fix that.
–
What are the current alternatives? How hard is it to build a real alternative?
Assuming there is value to social media that isn’t an illusion and is net-positive....
First, are there actual alternatives that do all the things well? (I don’t know, feel free to pitch me on a thing I’d want to coordinate to move my friends and my family to that already exists. Zvi, insofar as you’ve gotten people to leave facebook, where did they go?)
Could a nonprofit funded by people with good-judgment be incentivized to make a “good” social media platform? I have a sense that this would be challenging but mostly a matter of executing well on the obvious things, and would be a good project for someone in the rationalsphere to just do. (I’d default expect it to fail for the generic competition-is-hard-reasons, but given the right founder I could imagine it having enough chance of working to be worth it)
The easiest way for friendships to build is out of repeated low stakes interaction. The more atomized society gets, the less those happen naturally. Jumping from “hey I met you at a party” to “let’s eat 1:1″ is hard, and puts pressure on the 1:1 interaction. I’ve found facebook and blogs to be good ways to bridge that gap.
One interesting sub-problem – I think FB does a good job of keeping in touch with most friends. It does an actively bad job of me keeping in touch with my parents and some relatives, because most of what they post is political memes, so I unsubscribed from them.
Sub-questions that I’d like to answer:
1. What value am I actually getting out of social media, and is that value good?
Keeping in Touch With Friends
I have a perception, similar to Dr_Manhattan, that I am actually using facebook for a fairly reasonable thing (that it seems to actually aspire to be good at) which is keeping in touch with friends, in a way that most other platforms do not enable.
I can imagine this turning out to either:
Not be true – it’s simply an illusion that the thing I’m doing is “keeping in touch with friends”, and I’d be much better off if I just “actually kept in touch with friends” using some other process.
True, but a much weaker version of the thing than it should be – Maybe facebook actually helps me keep in touch with friends, but naturally forces it into a milquetoast version itself. Maybe I’d be better off if I had a small number of friends that I was closer to, and didn’t even pretend to keep in touch with the others. Maybe I could keep loose connections going more easily if facebook didn’t have a few behaviors that actively sabotaged it.
(both of the above are separate from what other costs FB might be imposing)
Marketing Products and Ideas
FB enables certain kinds of grassroots marketing that’s hard to do otherwise. I’ve most-obviously used this to promote the Secular Solstice. I also sometimes use it to recommend products that actually served me well that I want to reward.
I have a sense that this is actually good when done at small scales, encouraging entrepreneurship that generates new valuable things for the world. And meanwhile people have a fair degree of control over whether to subscribe to a given person’s self-promotion, so there’s incentives for the promotion to be actually useful. (Insofar as people don’t have that control it’s because FB is separately manipulating people with skinner box tech)
I have a sense that this is bad, when it reaches certain thresholds of commercial-ness, or simplified-for-the-masses-ness (which I think my solstice promotion has sometimes reached), where the tails come apart.
There’s a similar thing for the marketing of ideas, where there’s a low-barrier-to-entry way to share your thoughts and have it naturally scale. At low doses this is good and fruitful. But supercharged with goodhart’s law it turns into bad political memes.
I’m less confident that these things are net good. And, if I’m correct that they are good at low doses but bad at high-volume, less confident that there’s a principled way to fix that.
–
What are the current alternatives? How hard is it to build a real alternative?
Assuming there is value to social media that isn’t an illusion and is net-positive....
First, are there actual alternatives that do all the things well? (I don’t know, feel free to pitch me on a thing I’d want to coordinate to move my friends and my family to that already exists. Zvi, insofar as you’ve gotten people to leave facebook, where did they go?)
The Ferrett recently wrote a post on how commercial social media wants lots of users, which intrinsically pushes against the ability to make choices to maintain high quality.
Could a nonprofit funded by people with good-judgment be incentivized to make a “good” social media platform? I have a sense that this would be challenging but mostly a matter of executing well on the obvious things, and would be a good project for someone in the rationalsphere to just do. (I’d default expect it to fail for the generic competition-is-hard-reasons, but given the right founder I could imagine it having enough chance of working to be worth it)
The easiest way for friendships to build is out of repeated low stakes interaction. The more atomized society gets, the less those happen naturally. Jumping from “hey I met you at a party” to “let’s eat 1:1″ is hard, and puts pressure on the 1:1 interaction. I’ve found facebook and blogs to be good ways to bridge that gap.
Things I like about facebook, beyond what you and elizabeth have mentioned:
Makes my day more fun by showing me amusing things.
Shows me interesting discussions that I can join in a low-stakes way, and yet the discussions still go places.
Introduces me to people I don’t know via those interesting discussions, making it a bit easier to get to know them in real life.
Helps people around me run events that I’m invited to.
Helps me get answers to quick questions I have.
Shows me aspects of friends’ lives that I wouldn’t otherwise be aware of.
Lets me poll my friends about topics of interest.
Created a centralised messaging system that ~everybody uses.
One interesting sub-problem – I think FB does a good job of keeping in touch with most friends. It does an actively bad job of me keeping in touch with my parents and some relatives, because most of what they post is political memes, so I unsubscribed from them.
Eventually my family made a messenger group including my parents, sister, and maternal grandparents, which works OK for this.