8 ms·

The Fediverse is an interesting social experiment testing the hypothesis of whether the ad revenue/profit motive of twitter, and the subsequent algorithms that

by bob29 6y ago

The Fediverse is an interesting social experiment testing the hypothesis of whether the ad revenue/profit motive of twitter, and the subsequent algorithms that maximize engagement, are the primary source of toxicity and other negative qualities of social media that have been documented recently (social dilemma et al) Interestingly, the* (see edit) Fediverse data point seems to show that really none of Twitter's problems are solved when its the user's paying and admining the servers themselves. EDIT: only my conclusion based on personal experience and expectations, encourage anyone to look for themselves

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> Interestingly, the Fediverse data point seems to show that really none of Twitter's problems are solved when its the user's paying and admining the servers themselves. It doesn't really tell you that until it becomes a more dominant form of social media. Otherwise most of the users there are also users of Twitter and Facebook, where they go to get radicalized and pick up nonsense conspiracy theories and vitriol which they then bring everywhere they go. Also, you're wrong and most parts of the Fediverse are already much less toxic than most of Twitter. And notice that you would otherwise expect the opposite of this if the major platforms are booting off any significant number of actual asshats for legitimate reasons, who then move to invade any alternatives. The relative success with which most decentralized alternatives have fended off this onslaught is a very good sign.
kixiQu 6y ago
Plenty of problems are solved. They may not be ones you care about, but they're not "really none". Anecdotally, the instances I know of take a much harder line on moderation of transphobic content than does mainstream social media, which is something desired by some communities and made possible by heterogeneous moderation policies; "no ads" is a problem solved in of itself; no QTs gets rid of about 70% of the "dunking on this bad take" posts relative to Twitter; lower stakes discoverability means people express themselves differently; content warnings make your feed more manageable; etc. etc.
- young_unixer 6y ago
  What's a QT in this context? Are cuties getting banned from Mastodon?
  - dljsjr 6y ago
    Quote Tweets.
  - _-o-_ 6y ago
    Quote tweets. Basically retweeting someone's disagreeable tweet to you followers and adding some scalding commentary.
- warkdarrior 6y ago
  So this proves that much stricter regulation and censorship can be maintained effectively in a decentralized setting.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    It proves that you can have community standards when you actually have a community. A big advantage of decentralization is that it doesn't try to impose a single worldview on everybody. If libertarians want to have an instance where they talk about how taxation is theft and communists want to have an instance where they talk about how capitalism sucks and moderates want to have an instance where all ideas are welcome but personal attacks are not, they can all do those things at the same time.
    - yborg 6y ago
      Exactly this. But there are a set of people who enjoy or feel the need to engage in combat with other schools of thought, either as validation or because of genuine desire to proselytize; and there is a subset of those people that believe that everyone should be forced into a single arena where the strongest ideas will prevail and thereby clearly delineate 'right' and 'wrong'. One of the major advantages of the Fediverse right now is that trying to do this is harder, plus there already are such arenas in the form of Twitter and Facebook. To me the complaint about 'bubbles' is usually from these believers in the school of trial by combat that are frustrated by their inability to impose this philosophy on the Fediverse. Which means it is working as designed...
jancsika 6y ago
> interesting social experiment A social experiment where people from the variable group randomly and freely wander into the control group? I don't think so.
mariusor 6y ago
Personally I kind of lost confidence in the non-viciousness of the microblogging fediverse, when Wil Wheaton got driven off of it because he got upset at being trolled by someone.
Digory 6y ago
The Fediverse solves the problem of authoritarian silencing. It doesn't solve the human inclination to share strong emotions with likeminded people, and to exclude and punish people who make you mad or sad. That causes many good things, but not in absolute terms, it seems. What we don't have is a Taleb-like model for anti-fragile speech under new tech. Is there a mix of social speech that includes "trans criticism" that makes trans people stronger, or encourages social cooperation even with the 'transphobic'? Is there any circumstance where "sticks and stones" helps, or are we rejecting that totally?
- mkr-hn 6y ago
  "Critics" are free to make their own instance and invite people on, but they are not owed a debate by trans people who are just trying to socialize and live their lives.
  - Digory 6y ago
    Yeah, I don't think you can compel debates. I'm sensitive to arguments about bodily integrity and complicity. People are exercising a right to exclude voices they don't want to hear. But new tech lets us do it so well. And all-day, every-day people self-sort into silos, and then get a steady stream of "facts" about pedophile rings and pee tapes. QAnon seems like a problem of having too much power to self-sort, not a problem of "unmoderated free speech." Is there a healthy amount of "hate" that makes us stronger, like mental exercise? If we don't owe it to them, is it in our own interest to give more to those who hate us or disagree strongly?
- devmunchies 6y ago
  > The Fediverse solves the problem of authoritarian silencing I would say it "addresses" the problem but you can't solve it. Battling powerful classes of people, whether businesses or governments, will be a constant fact of life. No resting or your laurels.
  - Digory 6y ago
    Agreed. I'm kind of pricing in DNS as a public good that can't be cut off.
devmunchies 6y ago
think of the fediverse like social media parallel to email. you can create your account on someone else's service (e.g. gmail or yahoo) or self-host your own service. Nothing is preventing a server from putting ads in their service. It would be like protonmail or gmail jamming ads down your throat. but because it federated like email, you can leave. its not centralized, but its still owned instances.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Perhaps "toxicity" has always been found on computer networks, consider 1990's Usenet. What is different now is that Twitter, Facebook, etc. are "monetising" web usage, any sort of usage (e.g., purely recreational, non-commercial usage), by selling web users out to advertisers, not to mention political campaigns. Imagine if all Usenet usage had been carefully surveilled with all possible deomgraphic and behavioural data collected whereupon the people doing this surveillance proclaimed "we are a startup" and tried to "services" to advertisers or political organisations. "Centralisation" makes surveillance much easier, hence "decentralisation" is percieved as a panacea. It also helps to curb the viral spread of low quality information. As long something makes surveillance and data collection more difficult, it is helpful. Because when the surveillance is no longer easy, the profit motive should decrease. The data collection frenzy should start to fade. We can close this ugly chapter in business and get back to real work. Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. want centralisation. They need sustained, heavy web traffic, lest they could not make money. They still do not have a legitimate, viable "business plan" outside of surveillance, data collection and perpetuating an online ad circus. The smart way to deal with all of this is to pass laws regulating the collection and usage of data on web users. Unfortunately leadership today is at crisis levels, corruption is on the rise, so this may not come anytime soon. In absence of legal protections, web users must fend for themselves.
Triv888 6y ago
> The Fediverse is an interesting social experiment testing the hypothesis of whether the ad revenue/profit motive of twitter, and the subsequent algorithms that maximize engagement, are the primary source of toxicity and other negative qualities of social media that have been documented recently (social dilemma et al) that's not why it was created
avivo 6y ago
Yup. I repeated this enough that I ended up making a term for it. 'The "magical decentralization fallacy" — the mistaken belief that decentralization on its own can address governance problems. What do I mean by governance problems? Things like misinformation and harassment.' (https://aviv.medium.com/the-magical-decentralization-fallacy-69b426d16bdc https://aviv.medium.com/the-magical-decentralization-fallacy...)
- twelfthnight 6y ago
  Great article. Especially how you tie decentralization to governance, which is actually the issue at play. The decentralization argument to me often feels like it framed like the only choices are a mercurial monarchy (Facebook) or balkanization (Fediverse). Enjoyed your ideas on alternatives.
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  Very interesting points, lead me to your twitter account. I've been thinking a LOT about the intersections of thought police, censorship, big tech, the polarization of America, and more. I saw your tweet here: https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1349073861476823040?s=20 https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1349073861476823040?s=20 It got me to thinking. Cumulatively, reddit seems pretty high up on a lot of the scores. So, say you were to create a new hypothetical social network and use reddit as a base. Some of the lower points it gets is for safety, encouraging humanization of others, strengthening local ties, show reliable information... I'd say being able to network with people you know, while remaining anonymous in certain "contexts", like for example sharing a story in /r/askredditafterdark it may not be a real shit post, or anything bad but it could be embarrassing. Having one verified account, with aliases/contexts you can switch to for different purposes would be a way to have better safety. Encouraging humanization of others. What if instead of moderation teams, there was some reward mechanism like steem or hive, and everyone who wanted to be rewarded could randomly be on "jury duty". Every post would be randomly juried by members of a sub, and it'd simply ask the questions: * If this is news, does it seem factual? * Does this represent hate speech? * Does this belong in this sub? That last one, might be something everyone can answer and an algorithm would choose what to allow or prune. Alternatively, there could be opportunities for people to flag content. Which would all get put in a weekly mega-thread, where there's no commenting just voting on flagged content, whether to redeem it, or Perma-ban the post from the sub. If someone else reposts, it'll automatically just be banned. On your account profile you can choose to put your location. This allows you to filter and see only content people within certain radii of your location, or your specific city or state or province. Essentially, you can jump into a "nearby users" context. Subs also would have marketplaces built in, and that and ads would be the way it's monetized. However, no tracking cookies just topical/sub-Reddit ads. These could feature local or shipped goods/items or event tickets. Another thought is what if you created something like Wikipedia meets archive.org. Essentially every news/blog post gets archived per revision. Then there'd be an API to essentially "characterize" links. Give them context and a single source of truth that other social networks, federated instances, etc. Could use, whether something is "fake news", etc. The biggest issue I see with that is how you convince people from either side of the political spectrum to "believe" the fact-checking of said sites. The best would probably be allow pros/cons for each link with descriptions, then the user can follow a footnote and see why 60% say it's true, and 40% say it's fake. Say Pat Robertson says it's "fake news" and "Paul Graham" and some Nobel prize winning scientist says it's true. Could have professional scores as well to a link like 65% of athletes say true, 85% of scientists, 75% of actors, 33% of theologians, 55% of politicians, 65% of news anchors, 75% with a college degree, etc... Could use AI too, maybe to give it a base score like: Article appears to lean 55/45 left:right. All that data for these "painted links" could be used when new submissions come in to determine things like does it fit the category, etc... The problem with misinformation I think is not enough context. Having more and more context on the information that's out there can help combat the misinformation.

by bob29 6y ago

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> Interestingly, the Fediverse data point seems to show that really none of Twitter's problems are solved when its the user's paying and admining the servers themselves. It doesn't really tell you that until it becomes a more dominant form of social media. Otherwise most of the users there are also users of Twitter and Facebook, where they go to get radicalized and pick up nonsense conspiracy theories and vitriol which they then bring everywhere they go. Also, you're wrong and most parts of the Fediverse are already much less toxic than most of Twitter. And notice that you would otherwise expect the opposite of this if the major platforms are booting off any significant number of actual asshats for legitimate reasons, who then move to invade any alternatives. The relative success with which most decentralized alternatives have fended off this onslaught is a very good sign.

kixiQu 6y ago

Plenty of problems are solved. They may not be ones you care about, but they're not "really none". Anecdotally, the instances I know of take a much harder line on moderation of transphobic content than does mainstream social media, which is something desired by some communities and made possible by heterogeneous moderation policies; "no ads" is a problem solved in of itself; no QTs gets rid of about 70% of the "dunking on this bad take" posts relative to Twitter; lower stakes discoverability means people express themselves differently; content warnings make your feed more manageable; etc. etc.

young_unixer 6y ago
What's a QT in this context? Are cuties getting banned from Mastodon?
- dljsjr 6y ago
  Quote Tweets.
- _-o-_ 6y ago
  Quote tweets. Basically retweeting someone's disagreeable tweet to you followers and adding some scalding commentary.
warkdarrior 6y ago
So this proves that much stricter regulation and censorship can be maintained effectively in a decentralized setting.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  It proves that you can have community standards when you actually have a community. A big advantage of decentralization is that it doesn't try to impose a single worldview on everybody. If libertarians want to have an instance where they talk about how taxation is theft and communists want to have an instance where they talk about how capitalism sucks and moderates want to have an instance where all ideas are welcome but personal attacks are not, they can all do those things at the same time.
  - yborg 6y ago
    Exactly this. But there are a set of people who enjoy or feel the need to engage in combat with other schools of thought, either as validation or because of genuine desire to proselytize; and there is a subset of those people that believe that everyone should be forced into a single arena where the strongest ideas will prevail and thereby clearly delineate 'right' and 'wrong'. One of the major advantages of the Fediverse right now is that trying to do this is harder, plus there already are such arenas in the form of Twitter and Facebook. To me the complaint about 'bubbles' is usually from these believers in the school of trial by combat that are frustrated by their inability to impose this philosophy on the Fediverse. Which means it is working as designed...

jancsika 6y ago

> interesting social experiment A social experiment where people from the variable group randomly and freely wander into the control group? I don't think so.

mariusor 6y ago

Personally I kind of lost confidence in the non-viciousness of the microblogging fediverse, when Wil Wheaton got driven off of it because he got upset at being trolled by someone.

Digory 6y ago

The Fediverse solves the problem of authoritarian silencing. It doesn't solve the human inclination to share strong emotions with likeminded people, and to exclude and punish people who make you mad or sad. That causes many good things, but not in absolute terms, it seems. What we don't have is a Taleb-like model for anti-fragile speech under new tech. Is there a mix of social speech that includes "trans criticism" that makes trans people stronger, or encourages social cooperation even with the 'transphobic'? Is there any circumstance where "sticks and stones" helps, or are we rejecting that totally?

mkr-hn 6y ago
"Critics" are free to make their own instance and invite people on, but they are not owed a debate by trans people who are just trying to socialize and live their lives.
- Digory 6y ago
  Yeah, I don't think you can compel debates. I'm sensitive to arguments about bodily integrity and complicity. People are exercising a right to exclude voices they don't want to hear. But new tech lets us do it so well. And all-day, every-day people self-sort into silos, and then get a steady stream of "facts" about pedophile rings and pee tapes. QAnon seems like a problem of having too much power to self-sort, not a problem of "unmoderated free speech." Is there a healthy amount of "hate" that makes us stronger, like mental exercise? If we don't owe it to them, is it in our own interest to give more to those who hate us or disagree strongly?
devmunchies 6y ago
> The Fediverse solves the problem of authoritarian silencing I would say it "addresses" the problem but you can't solve it. Battling powerful classes of people, whether businesses or governments, will be a constant fact of life. No resting or your laurels.
- Digory 6y ago
  Agreed. I'm kind of pricing in DNS as a public good that can't be cut off.

devmunchies 6y ago

think of the fediverse like social media parallel to email. you can create your account on someone else's service (e.g. gmail or yahoo) or self-host your own service. Nothing is preventing a server from putting ads in their service. It would be like protonmail or gmail jamming ads down your throat. but because it federated like email, you can leave. its not centralized, but its still owned instances.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

Perhaps "toxicity" has always been found on computer networks, consider 1990's Usenet. What is different now is that Twitter, Facebook, etc. are "monetising" web usage, any sort of usage (e.g., purely recreational, non-commercial usage), by selling web users out to advertisers, not to mention political campaigns. Imagine if all Usenet usage had been carefully surveilled with all possible deomgraphic and behavioural data collected whereupon the people doing this surveillance proclaimed "we are a startup" and tried to "services" to advertisers or political organisations. "Centralisation" makes surveillance much easier, hence "decentralisation" is percieved as a panacea. It also helps to curb the viral spread of low quality information. As long something makes surveillance and data collection more difficult, it is helpful. Because when the surveillance is no longer easy, the profit motive should decrease. The data collection frenzy should start to fade. We can close this ugly chapter in business and get back to real work. Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. want centralisation. They need sustained, heavy web traffic, lest they could not make money. They still do not have a legitimate, viable "business plan" outside of surveillance, data collection and perpetuating an online ad circus. The smart way to deal with all of this is to pass laws regulating the collection and usage of data on web users. Unfortunately leadership today is at crisis levels, corruption is on the rise, so this may not come anytime soon. In absence of legal protections, web users must fend for themselves.

Triv888 6y ago

> The Fediverse is an interesting social experiment testing the hypothesis of whether the ad revenue/profit motive of twitter, and the subsequent algorithms that maximize engagement, are the primary source of toxicity and other negative qualities of social media that have been documented recently (social dilemma et al) that's not why it was created

avivo 6y ago

Yup. I repeated this enough that I ended up making a term for it. 'The "magical decentralization fallacy" — the mistaken belief that decentralization on its own can address governance problems. What do I mean by governance problems? Things like misinformation and harassment.' (https://aviv.medium.com/the-magical-decentralization-fallacy-69b426d16bdc https://aviv.medium.com/the-magical-decentralization-fallacy...)

twelfthnight 6y ago
Great article. Especially how you tie decentralization to governance, which is actually the issue at play. The decentralization argument to me often feels like it framed like the only choices are a mercurial monarchy (Facebook) or balkanization (Fediverse). Enjoyed your ideas on alternatives.
gremlinsinc 6y ago
Very interesting points, lead me to your twitter account. I've been thinking a LOT about the intersections of thought police, censorship, big tech, the polarization of America, and more. I saw your tweet here: https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1349073861476823040?s=20 https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1349073861476823040?s=20 It got me to thinking. Cumulatively, reddit seems pretty high up on a lot of the scores. So, say you were to create a new hypothetical social network and use reddit as a base. Some of the lower points it gets is for safety, encouraging humanization of others, strengthening local ties, show reliable information... I'd say being able to network with people you know, while remaining anonymous in certain "contexts", like for example sharing a story in /r/askredditafterdark it may not be a real shit post, or anything bad but it could be embarrassing. Having one verified account, with aliases/contexts you can switch to for different purposes would be a way to have better safety. Encouraging humanization of others. What if instead of moderation teams, there was some reward mechanism like steem or hive, and everyone who wanted to be rewarded could randomly be on "jury duty". Every post would be randomly juried by members of a sub, and it'd simply ask the questions: * If this is news, does it seem factual? * Does this represent hate speech? * Does this belong in this sub? That last one, might be something everyone can answer and an algorithm would choose what to allow or prune. Alternatively, there could be opportunities for people to flag content. Which would all get put in a weekly mega-thread, where there's no commenting just voting on flagged content, whether to redeem it, or Perma-ban the post from the sub. If someone else reposts, it'll automatically just be banned. On your account profile you can choose to put your location. This allows you to filter and see only content people within certain radii of your location, or your specific city or state or province. Essentially, you can jump into a "nearby users" context. Subs also would have marketplaces built in, and that and ads would be the way it's monetized. However, no tracking cookies just topical/sub-Reddit ads. These could feature local or shipped goods/items or event tickets. Another thought is what if you created something like Wikipedia meets archive.org. Essentially every news/blog post gets archived per revision. Then there'd be an API to essentially "characterize" links. Give them context and a single source of truth that other social networks, federated instances, etc. Could use, whether something is "fake news", etc. The biggest issue I see with that is how you convince people from either side of the political spectrum to "believe" the fact-checking of said sites. The best would probably be allow pros/cons for each link with descriptions, then the user can follow a footnote and see why 60% say it's true, and 40% say it's fake. Say Pat Robertson says it's "fake news" and "Paul Graham" and some Nobel prize winning scientist says it's true. Could have professional scores as well to a link like 65% of athletes say true, 85% of scientists, 75% of actors, 33% of theologians, 55% of politicians, 65% of news anchors, 75% with a college degree, etc... Could use AI too, maybe to give it a base score like: Article appears to lean 55/45 left:right. All that data for these "painted links" could be used when new submissions come in to determine things like does it fit the category, etc... The problem with misinformation I think is not enough context. Having more and more context on the information that's out there can help combat the misinformation.