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I was very ready to suggest this must be an old article, but no it really is only six hours old. I suppose doing good statistical work takes time, but this feel

I was very ready to suggest this must be an old article, but no it really is only six hours old. I suppose doing good statistical work takes time, but this feels like the obvious truth that every single product manager has known since KPIs were invented for social media engagement - anger and fury are the best for engagement. This isn't news either. Ryan Holliday's "Trust me, I'm lying" talks about this in depth and was published in 2012. I am quite sure folks before him discussed this as well. We could fix social media tomorrow if we disabled resharing/retweeting/whatever and removed likes, make timelines/feeds strictly linear time based. You want to be an epic troll? Fine, copy and paste your content in. That's enough of a barrier that social media would go back to being reasonably decent.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
> We could fix social media tomorrow if we disabled resharing/retweeting/whatever and removed likes, make timelines/feeds strictly linear time based. There is too much revenue to be made in not fixing the problem. Witness the pushback with Apple “only” warning users about tracking data and the force with which Facebook tried to push back. I don’t believe there is a solution. Social media companies have weaponized fundamental rights (freedom of speech) and human emotion for profit. You can’t minimize the harm without infringing on those rights, and social media will fight to the end to enable what engagement looks like on their terms. https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-vs-apple-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-their-privacy-feud/ https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-vs-apple-heres-what-you-n...
- nixpulvis 5y ago
  https://youtu.be/Hag2JWC8qZ0 https://youtu.be/Hag2JWC8qZ0 @1:50
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- mrDmrTmrJ 5y ago
  The 'abundance of revenue' is why banning reshares/retweets change will only happen if forced through via legislation. Tobacco companies would sell cigarettes to kids if we let them. Car manufactures fought mandatory seat belt regulations for decades too...
- mindvirus 5y ago
  I think the solution is a legal one. I think laws around users being able to delete their content, around tracking, and protecting people's jobs from social media pile-ons would go a long way in detoxifying the internet.
- travisgriggs 5y ago
  Just tax ad revenue. Really really tax it. Outlawing/prohibiting things in the west is too hard. But we're good at lobbying and taxing things.
  - chasd00 5y ago
    If you keep using taxes as punishment then people will perceive being taxed only as being punished.
  - NullPrefix 5y ago
    Next thing you know there will be an ad industry bailout, like the California $100 million weed bailout.
- proc0 5y ago
  > There is too much revenue to be made in not fixing the problem This is always the excuse, but it's really not true. Once you put ethical constrains on business, new soutions arise and then people start to see the difference. This is what's happening with renewable energy. Social media needs to start innovating in this area.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    That's for anyone who's not in advertising. Advertising and marketing are perhaps some of the scummiest businesses on the planet at the low end because they plain do not care about anything but user-response rates. And however you slice it, Google, Facebook and Twitter are all in the advertising business - that's where they make the bulk of their money. Amazon, ironically, kind of isn't (but has been more then happy to not fix it's SKU/fakes problem for years). At the end of the day when someone wants to make a change at any of those organizations, it's the advertisers who are pointing to charts of potential lost revenue and reminding everyone who's salary is paid for by who.
    - proc0 5y ago
      Good point, but I can still see the possibility of somef feature where people are at least warned about or have to go through some disclaimer when posting on certain subject matters, and this causes the whole platform to be more positive, open minded, and improving the lives of people in significant ways. All current major platforms are getting a lot of heat for being so corrosive to society in some form or another, I think soon there should be more demand for more wholesome social media sites that do some innovation in terms of how they reward attention, but I agree, advertising is the lowest form of business model or whatever it is.
sokoloff 5y ago
I’m pretty sure I’d find that way less appealing than the current situation. I want to see a curated feed of what’s most interesting (as gauged by any system that can approximately judge for me, and a good one is what other people engaged with). I discover other Twitter accounts to follow via sharing/commenting/follower graphs. It’s why I read the top news (/news) here and not /newest. I don’t want to miss my cousin’s cute baby pic or my niece’s graduation pics or other popular posts just because trolls forced a order by id desc onto a weak product owner. If other people get wrapped around axles over political, religious, or cultural posts, so be it. I go to social media to see interesting things.
- AgentME 5y ago
  Yeah I tried using Mastodon for a while (decentralized Twitter clone that happens to only show posts in linear time order), and I quickly got sick of it because I almost purely saw the posts from the most active people I followed, and almost never the meatier posts from the people I followed who posted less often. I have this issue much less on Twitter with its algorithmic feed so I went back to Twitter. I'm baffled by how often I see people espouse linear timelines over algorithmic timelines like it's obviously superior; if they've actually tried it and liked it then they must follow a very different kind of mix of people than I do.
  - JoshTriplett 5y ago
    > I almost purely saw the posts from the most active people I followed I'm very careful to select people to follow who won't drown out my timeline. Sometimes I come across someone with interesting content, but they tweet several dozen times a day, so I just don't follow them.
TheTester 5y ago
> That's enough of a barrier that social media would go back to being reasonably decent. When has social media been "reasonably decent", I think that "boomers, karens, nontrolls and the moderate" crowd have forgotten how the internet really was before social media gave them everything they wanted. SOrry but just no like the actual things that you used to see on the old internet were too much compared to today's mild trolling just as an evidence see all the left and right wing pundits pruned from leedit. SOcial media was never supposed to be a calm place, it was supposed to be dangerous and fun. If anything we dont have to make the internet like that, instead we require a solution analogous to this https://www.outsideonline.com/2360451/make-driving-dangerous-again https://www.outsideonline.com/2360451/make-driving-dangerous...
amadeuspagel 5y ago
> We could fix social media tomorrow if we disabled resharing/retweeting/whatever and removed likes What about votes? How are upvotes different from likes? It's just different terminology.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  So HN's system is unique since only you can see your "score", and a post maxes out at -4. I think it works well since you can derive some info about how useful a post is, and downvotes are rare. It can still lead to people trying to maximize score instead of content. With a system like reddit which is mostly visible, brigading and using downvotes as a weapon is much much more prevalent and probably could do with either tweaking or removal. There is some feedback you want from votes, which is something like the upvote to downvote ratio as a measure of controversy for a given post.
  - amadeuspagel 5y ago
    > So HN's system is unique since only you can see your "score" That's true for individual comments, but there's a total karma score that everyone can see. And even for individual comments you can see when they're downvoted. > and a post maxes out at -4. A tweet maxes out at 0. You can't have negative likes. > It can still lead to people trying to maximize score instead of content. Sure. You have that tradeoff in any system. If you don't have anything that is in some sense a "score" at all, people might not particpate at all, or not put any effort into it, if you do have a score then people might try to maximize it in ways you don't like.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

> We could fix social media tomorrow if we disabled resharing/retweeting/whatever and removed likes, make timelines/feeds strictly linear time based. There is too much revenue to be made in not fixing the problem. Witness the pushback with Apple “only” warning users about tracking data and the force with which Facebook tried to push back. I don’t believe there is a solution. Social media companies have weaponized fundamental rights (freedom of speech) and human emotion for profit. You can’t minimize the harm without infringing on those rights, and social media will fight to the end to enable what engagement looks like on their terms. https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-vs-apple-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-their-privacy-feud/ https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-vs-apple-heres-what-you-n...

nixpulvis 5y ago
https://youtu.be/Hag2JWC8qZ0 https://youtu.be/Hag2JWC8qZ0 @1:50
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
mrDmrTmrJ 5y ago
The 'abundance of revenue' is why banning reshares/retweets change will only happen if forced through via legislation. Tobacco companies would sell cigarettes to kids if we let them. Car manufactures fought mandatory seat belt regulations for decades too...
mindvirus 5y ago
I think the solution is a legal one. I think laws around users being able to delete their content, around tracking, and protecting people's jobs from social media pile-ons would go a long way in detoxifying the internet.
travisgriggs 5y ago
Just tax ad revenue. Really really tax it. Outlawing/prohibiting things in the west is too hard. But we're good at lobbying and taxing things.
- chasd00 5y ago
  If you keep using taxes as punishment then people will perceive being taxed only as being punished.
- NullPrefix 5y ago
  Next thing you know there will be an ad industry bailout, like the California $100 million weed bailout.
proc0 5y ago
> There is too much revenue to be made in not fixing the problem This is always the excuse, but it's really not true. Once you put ethical constrains on business, new soutions arise and then people start to see the difference. This is what's happening with renewable energy. Social media needs to start innovating in this area.
- XorNot 5y ago
  That's for anyone who's not in advertising. Advertising and marketing are perhaps some of the scummiest businesses on the planet at the low end because they plain do not care about anything but user-response rates. And however you slice it, Google, Facebook and Twitter are all in the advertising business - that's where they make the bulk of their money. Amazon, ironically, kind of isn't (but has been more then happy to not fix it's SKU/fakes problem for years). At the end of the day when someone wants to make a change at any of those organizations, it's the advertisers who are pointing to charts of potential lost revenue and reminding everyone who's salary is paid for by who.
  - proc0 5y ago
    Good point, but I can still see the possibility of somef feature where people are at least warned about or have to go through some disclaimer when posting on certain subject matters, and this causes the whole platform to be more positive, open minded, and improving the lives of people in significant ways. All current major platforms are getting a lot of heat for being so corrosive to society in some form or another, I think soon there should be more demand for more wholesome social media sites that do some innovation in terms of how they reward attention, but I agree, advertising is the lowest form of business model or whatever it is.

sokoloff 5y ago

I’m pretty sure I’d find that way less appealing than the current situation. I want to see a curated feed of what’s most interesting (as gauged by any system that can approximately judge for me, and a good one is what other people engaged with). I discover other Twitter accounts to follow via sharing/commenting/follower graphs. It’s why I read the top news (/news) here and not /newest. I don’t want to miss my cousin’s cute baby pic or my niece’s graduation pics or other popular posts just because trolls forced a order by id desc onto a weak product owner. If other people get wrapped around axles over political, religious, or cultural posts, so be it. I go to social media to see interesting things.

AgentME 5y ago
Yeah I tried using Mastodon for a while (decentralized Twitter clone that happens to only show posts in linear time order), and I quickly got sick of it because I almost purely saw the posts from the most active people I followed, and almost never the meatier posts from the people I followed who posted less often. I have this issue much less on Twitter with its algorithmic feed so I went back to Twitter. I'm baffled by how often I see people espouse linear timelines over algorithmic timelines like it's obviously superior; if they've actually tried it and liked it then they must follow a very different kind of mix of people than I do.
- JoshTriplett 5y ago
  > I almost purely saw the posts from the most active people I followed I'm very careful to select people to follow who won't drown out my timeline. Sometimes I come across someone with interesting content, but they tweet several dozen times a day, so I just don't follow them.

TheTester 5y ago

> That's enough of a barrier that social media would go back to being reasonably decent. When has social media been "reasonably decent", I think that "boomers, karens, nontrolls and the moderate" crowd have forgotten how the internet really was before social media gave them everything they wanted. SOrry but just no like the actual things that you used to see on the old internet were too much compared to today's mild trolling just as an evidence see all the left and right wing pundits pruned from leedit. SOcial media was never supposed to be a calm place, it was supposed to be dangerous and fun. If anything we dont have to make the internet like that, instead we require a solution analogous to this https://www.outsideonline.com/2360451/make-driving-dangerous-again https://www.outsideonline.com/2360451/make-driving-dangerous...

amadeuspagel 5y ago

> We could fix social media tomorrow if we disabled resharing/retweeting/whatever and removed likes What about votes? How are upvotes different from likes? It's just different terminology.

vorpalhex 5y ago
So HN's system is unique since only you can see your "score", and a post maxes out at -4. I think it works well since you can derive some info about how useful a post is, and downvotes are rare. It can still lead to people trying to maximize score instead of content. With a system like reddit which is mostly visible, brigading and using downvotes as a weapon is much much more prevalent and probably could do with either tweaking or removal. There is some feedback you want from votes, which is something like the upvote to downvote ratio as a measure of controversy for a given post.
- amadeuspagel 5y ago
  > So HN's system is unique since only you can see your "score" That's true for individual comments, but there's a total karma score that everyone can see. And even for individual comments you can see when they're downvoted. > and a post maxes out at -4. A tweet maxes out at 0. You can't have negative likes. > It can still lead to people trying to maximize score instead of content. Sure. You have that tradeoff in any system. If you don't have anything that is in some sense a "score" at all, people might not particpate at all, or not put any effort into it, if you do have a score then people might try to maximize it in ways you don't like.