4 ms·

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 compani

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.

renewiltord 6y ago
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.
Syonyk 6y ago
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.
TheJoYo 6y ago
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."
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  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.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    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.
  - sefrost 6y ago
    Strava brought back the chronological feed and seemed to get a lot of good press for it at the time. https://road.cc/content/tech-news/271757-strava-has-brought-back-chronological-ordering-and-allows-you-favourite https://road.cc/content/tech-news/271757-strava-has-brought-...
  - TheJoYo 6y ago
    https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org has 500k active users this month, 1 mil the last 6 months.
naravara 6y ago
> 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.
Dracophoenix 6y ago
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.

renewiltord 6y ago

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.

Syonyk 6y ago

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.

TheJoYo 6y ago

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."

Nextgrid 6y ago
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.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  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.
- sefrost 6y ago
  Strava brought back the chronological feed and seemed to get a lot of good press for it at the time. https://road.cc/content/tech-news/271757-strava-has-brought-back-chronological-ordering-and-allows-you-favourite https://road.cc/content/tech-news/271757-strava-has-brought-...
- TheJoYo 6y ago
  https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org has 500k active users this month, 1 mil the last 6 months.

naravara 6y ago

> 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.

Dracophoenix 6y ago

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.