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Twitter and other social media are probably the biggest problem of our time. By providing simple rules of information flow: small amount of content, retweet, f

• sAbakumoff 5y ago
  Yeah, feeling of novelty causes a dopamine spike, but shortly afterwards the level is back and we feel like they need more new stuff. Mindless purposeless scrolling may last hours and hours. Twitter is bad, but Tik Tok is the worst. Remove all this stuff from your phone and read HN instead. Here you at least should focus on sophisticated comments like yours!
  • drjasonharrison 5y ago
    Please don't use dopamine to explain addictive/repetitive behaviors. It's like blaming your eyes for finding the button to click. It's more complex. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/women-who-stray/201701/no-dopamine-is-not-addictive https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/women-who-stray/20...
    • hellbannedguy 5y ago
      Plus most medical doctors know modern Psychiary, and the brain, are still a mystery. Psychiatry is art. Yes all medicine is an art, but psychiatry takes tie cake.
    • sAbakumoff 5y ago
      OF COURSE it's more complex than this, the human's brain is a very sophisticated machine. But I just read a couple of "brain for dummies" books[1][2], so my knowledge is pretty limited. [1] - "Behave" by Sapolsky [2] - The Willpower Instinct From that I recall they explain that the reward system responds to feeling of novelty because it's good for survival, f.e. you can find food or water source in a new location or maybe notice a hostile animals there. So, it's a behaviour caused by evolution. Twitter, Facebook, etc. just exploited it. And they admitted it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/09/facebook-sean-parker-vulnerability-brain-psychology https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/09/facebook-...
  • electrondood 5y ago
    TikTok is terrifying. It is designed to be nicotine for your attention span, achieving engagement at any cost. Now they've added keyboard shortcuts. The effects of social media on our collective attention span legitimately scare me. Our attention spans are shrinking with each generation, and the effect has gone parabolic in the last 15 years. Look at old movies, and notice the longer length of cuts compared to movies today. Now look at the infinite feed on TikTok. What happens when the minority of the population that actually does their civic duty of informed voting can no longer pay attention to important issues? What happens when people can't think about any topic beyond a sound bite or meme? What happens when no one has more than 1000ms of patience to question whether they're looking at a deepfake? Climate change? Holding politicians accountable for corruption or abuses of power? I think we need to take a good look at where we're headed.
• c7DJTLrn 5y ago
  I wonder how much your mind would have to distort reality for you to believe you're providing the world with a good service when you're at the helm of Twitter or Facebook.
  • rtkwe 5y ago
    There's a fair amount of motivation to find a reason to believe it's a "the good out weighs the bad" situation. For starters they're making incredible amounts of money and then there's the desire to not think you're doing something bad.
  • Nasrudith 5y ago
    You just need to respect human agency instead of thinking you inherently know better than the world how to use it. It is a sentiment which is very out of current zeitgeist with its "boy who cried dystopia" bent.
    • TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      How do gigantic globe-spanning ad machines "respect human agency"?
      • jabedude 5y ago
        I can see the argument. Nothing forces an individual to click on or engage with an advertisement
  • yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    I expect it's quite easy; you believe that you're connecting people and that this is a good thing, and then you ignore the undesirable second-order effects of how you're doing it.
• dionian 5y ago
  What's worse, is it has ushered in a Technocracy, where unelected corporate interests now decide which political views are "misinformation" and, for example, may threaten "election integrity", which drugs doctors should prescribe, etc.
  • zpeti 5y ago
    To be fair I think it’s more unofficial capture by those in power. There is a gun at this point at Facebook and Twitters head by super powerful people (including journalists) to get them to comply or else… I think Silicon Valley made a major misjudgement thinking geeks with products with billions of people won’t be taken over by politicians with decades of power game experience. It’s not even a fair game. These are literally the biggest power players in the world, Zuckerberg and Dorsey didn’t stand a chance.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• jMyles 5y ago
  If feed-generating algorithms were dispassionate - amplifying liked content rather than massaging feeds for advertising and other behavior manipulation - then your assessment of the results as "brain viruses" might be more accurate. And the world might actually benefit from them.
  • spion 5y ago
    The thing is, the "natural selection" of this network is decided by people on average spending 5 seconds of thought before getting outraged/scared/intrigued etc (also, whatever is that emotion that says "look world, I found something really clever that y'all have missed!") and clicking retweet. I find that incredibly unlikely to yield any great content whatsoever.
    • akomtu 5y ago
      It's a clever trick. Short tweets with pictures skip the rational thinking part of the brain, for those tweets don't have anything to think about, and go straight to the emotional animalistic part of the brain. So twitter turns into a sort of colossus stadium where millions of apes screaming at each other. Usually, the stadium splits into a few big chunks where apes chant the same meme.
  • manigandham 5y ago
    Advertising is placed into the feed, but it doesn't determine it. You still get what you like and engage with the most.
    • jMyles 5y ago
      I'll believe claims of this sort when production feed generation algorithms are released under an open license.
      • manigandham 5y ago
        What difference do you think the feed makes for slotting in ads every few stories?
• brightball 5y ago
  Where it all went sideways was when mainstream news started showing tweets on air. EDIT: I need to add clarification. I don't mean when breaking news gets onto mainstream channels. No question that happens. What I mean is the use of a single tweet with maybe 1 or 2 likes here or there to reflect public sentiment on different issues. All any news station had to do was fish through the pile of tweets about any given topic to find something they wanted to show on air and then act as if it represented a large segment of people. I watched it happen over and over for years. Twitter created the ability to engineer the perception of public sentiment already with bots, but when main stream news joined in things went downhill much, much faster.
  • bonestamp2 5y ago
    I think that's a symptom and not the root cause. The root cause was when we stopped paying for news with money and started paying for news with clicks. That changed how news was gathered, reported, and shared.
  • mmastrac 5y ago
    I agree. News stories about X "dragging" Y on Twitter were rock bottom.
  • stcredzero 5y ago
    Perhaps things had started to slide sideways before that? I distinctly remember a period of time, I think nearly a decade back, when I'd constantly hear about something on NPR and think, "I saw that headline on reddit yesterday! Are they even trying!?"
    • datavirtue 5y ago
      Everything of significance comes by way of open sources. It isn't odd for anyone to do a story that was reported in another source.
      • stcredzero 5y ago
        If, at that time, NPR was aggregating information, that would be one thing. I really got the impression that they were mindlessly lifting headlines and story ideas.
• lazyeye 5y ago
  Its the asbestos or thalidomide of our time..software is eating the world.
• cletus 5y ago
  The real problem here is people, not the platforms or the products. How do I know this? Because the problems have existed far longer than any of the platforms. Maybe people here are too young to remember how toxic, argumentative, irrational and judgmental everything else was that came previously: forums, mailing lists, Usenet, you name it. Sure products can influence user behaviour but they can't totally change it. And if none of them (as you assert) "improve accuracy, increase thoughtfulness, paint nuance" ask yourself why: is it because all the platform providers are wrong? Or simply that's what users want? Personally I've never liked Twitter. Of all the platforms I find it dominated by people who like the sounds of their own voices. I've described it as a "write only" platform. Even calling it "social media" seems like a stretch as there are no relationships, just people you follow and a news feed.
  • Dumblydorr 5y ago
    If humans are inherently violent, why hand them free guns? If they're inherently greedy, why hand them free credit cards? If humans are inherently toxic and disingenuous and biased, why hand them the free reach to thousands of gullible minds? I'm in agreement humans are flawed, but why should we allow billionaires, who mostly want power and wealth, to decide how to referee our public discourse? To me, these companies are run by humans and used by humans, so like drinking and driving, speed limits, personal safety, and all other kinds of laws: we need guardrails against bad actions. We need some rudimentary policing, for as Hamilton stated: "if men were angels, no government would be necessary"
  • tcoff91 5y ago
    I'm sure people were saying the same things about the printing press as people are saying about social media. People were printing pamphlets in the 1800s that were just as crazy as any of the misinformation we see online today.
  • datavirtue 5y ago
    I have been on a lot of forums where it was generally amicable, informative, and unarguably valuable. Sure, there was toxicity but was usually just enough to be comic relief and could be ignored. However, a lot of dumbshits were still carrying around flip phones and did little else than play hunting or monster truck games on a PC. Now they have a frictionless platform from where they can interject thier wisdom into just about any forum without having anything invested.
• wonderwonder 5y ago
  I think they are a symptom, not the root. The root started before them with the advent of pay per click advertising. Everything else has spiraled from that. I truly believe that the massive divisiveness of the last 2 decades can be traced to this. Social media echo chambers, youtube rabbit holes, click baity headlines, all of it is because of pay per click advertising. The ML algorithms we have now have become so effective that the problem is only getting exponentially worse. Your news is fed to you with the sole purpose of making you click so they earn $.
  • mattnewton 5y ago
    But I think calling it pay-for-click is a misnomer, that's just the latest version of a very old business model. Cable news, like Fox, has had the same outrage-fueled engagement metrics that predate the internet, and before them there were newspapers doing the same thing. I think the technology of social media is just creating small efficiencies in an existing business model preying on very old aspects of human nature.
    • noahtallen 5y ago
      I think the difference is that cable news is hard to access for a lot of people. For example, you don’t have ML algorithms on cable boxes trying to suggest a show which will result in high engagement. It’s fairly siloed, in that you have to deliberately choose to watch cable news. (Though they definitely keep you hooked!) Social media really allows it to be much more pervasive.
      • mattnewton 5y ago
        Annecdotally, Cable news seems to work just as effectively at confirming prior biases as social media among my relatives who don't have computers / smartphones, maybe even more effectively. I'm skeptical that the algorithms are so much better than people self sorting between news networks that it's a difference of kind rather than degree, and I think we give "the algorithms" way too much credit in general
  • pmcp 5y ago
• rich_sasha 5y ago
  Is the is very different to what newspapers were when they first appeared? Of course they never achieved the same technological pace. Also, nowadays, when you think of newspapers, you think mostly of quality publications, writing considered, contextualised pieces. But even nowadays, there are plenty of crappy tabloids chasing ad revenue (clicks?), with no regard for information and only about the shock factor. And in the past it was much worse, since the whole cesspit of attention-grabbing was contained in newspapers and pamphlets. Tech changes, humans don’t.
  • Dumblydorr 5y ago
    While I agree printed media is biased and is a medium for propaganda, it's hard to argue it's comparable in scale or effectiveness to social media. 1) in the Renaissance, literacy was much lower, books were scarce and expensive, and writing was often made in Latin, like the original bibles and Newton's Principia Mathematica. Therefore, print had MUCH less reach than social media. 2) the attentional cost of a book is vastly greater than a tweet. Tweets are designed to be simple and read in seconds; books are often complex and take weeks to digest. 3) due to 2, I feel Twitter's discourse evolves and devolves much, much faster into extremism and bullying and bad behaviors. It takes a long time for book disses to reach their target, not so for Twitter. I could go on, but suffice to say, social media is an exponential notch above printed media in it's potential misuse and damage to society.
    • hadlock 5y ago
      A lot of printed media was released in poorly bound booklets, without covers, it was roughly equivalent to a tweet or blog post today. The good ones got reprinted and/or compiled into an anthology, the bad ones were simply lost to time as kindling for the hearth. Not as fast as a tweet, but low cost, sub-book media has existed as long as the printing press was around. The classic books we study today are the equivalent of the criterion collection dvd sets.
  • wutbrodo 5y ago
    > Also, nowadays, when you think of newspapers, you think mostly of quality publications, writing considered, contextualised pieces. This is a very unique perspective. It's one I don't share, and neither do the majority of Americans[1]. The economic and cultural forces shaping journalism make it so that it's vanishingly rare to find pieces that meet (my personal bar for) "considered, contextualized pieces". It's been a decade since the world of blogs/independent publishing has been an infinitely better source for that type of writing than traditional media has. Naturally, independent publishing is also where you go to find the absolute worst of analysis and reporting, to a degree that traditional media would never stoop to. The core problem is that of discovery, finding the subset of high-quality sources in the acres of chaff that is the modern news environment. It turns out that aggregators like Twitter are amazing for this, for those with the mental maturity and cognitive ability to use them with discipline. It's not very difficult to start with a trusted core of intellectually honest follows, then iteratively (and hyper-selectively) add high-quality accounts/author that you find through your existing follows. You have to be okay with a sparse feed to start, and you have to be disciplined enough to recognize perspectives that are high-quality even if you disagree with them, but it's an extremely straightforward path towards a much better media diet than the vast majority of people. Note that this process doesn't disadvantage traditional media; it just fails to give it an undue advantage. Traditional publications and individual journalists within them can be treated like a source like any other, that can be compared to In practice, this is nominal only: in my experience, the incentives of the industry are such that 99% of them fall massively short of the basic quality and intellectual honesty bar. (Seriously, try it: start checking the sources and reading the papers cited by every article you read from eg the NYT and see how long you maintain confidence in modeling them as basically intelligent people telling you what's basically the truth). [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/355526/americans-trust-media-dips-second-lowest-record.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/355526/americans-trust-media-di...
• ckastner 5y ago
  > By providing simple rules of information flow: small amount of content, retweet, followers) and rewards (likes), they've created the most efficient engines for finding and spreading novelty at the expense of everything else. Those are indeed elementary factors, but I think that Twitter's effectiveness stems from how it enables tribal thinking and actively nourishes it with its algorithmic ranking. It's one gigantic outrage machine, and few things are as addictive as outrage.
• dragontamer 5y ago
  https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2011647630/ https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2011647630/ William Randolph Hearst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst) did all of this first in the early 1900s. (Along with his rival Pulitzer. But the image above is clearly in Hearst's image, a fact probably lost to the modern audience) The "problems" you state are far older than Twitter, and its best to study history and the problem of "Yellow Journalism". Over 100 years ago, people were complaining about false-outrage that manipulates the American public. The only thing that has changed is that the American public has _forgotten_ what it was like to live in a outrage-fueled society, and we have to relearn the lessons of the past now. We need laws and society to change and recognize that all this fake-outrage is damaging ourselves, our psyche, and ultimately, our society.
  • aaroninsf 5y ago
    The class of problem and its origins are constant in the interaction between human nature and an open market. The specific problems of today are utterly unlike anything older. The medium is overwhelmingly determinate of impact. The simplistic version of this is: there are profound non-linearities introduced by lack of friction. "Superficial" differences in the role of feedback and tailored results which are noise in the case of print and broadcast media, are everything in contemporary social media. Most particularly, the so-called "algorithm" problem is specific to contemporary social media; and it is imbedded in our society in ways that are unlike anything which has challenged it previously: as the citizen-facing sharp edge of surveillance capital, in which the origin and flow of "value" (i.e. consumer data) is all but entirely removed from public view and individual agency; and acts as a meta-filter, which is the sharp edge of social media serving increasingly as the sole mechanism whereby people receive media. We live in a world in which what we read is ever more carefully targeted, deluded in the belief that we have agency in what we see and some defense about what it does not just to us, but to society as a whole. Contemporary social media is stochastic mind control. And as said, it is currently performed almost entirely in service of ends very much at odds with the common good, in almost any dimension you choose to inspect. Oh well. We had an OK run.
    • 5y ago
• captainmuon 5y ago
  No, gullible people, misinformation, polarisation has been there before social media. But in the old days, classic media used to keep a lid on it by mediating which positions could be heard publicly. We haven't learned yet as a society to ignore the unimportant noise. I believe that free publishing, or many-to-many media, is crucial for the future of our society. If anything, it is still not easy enought to get ideas out there and discussed (unless you have enough reach). To phrase it a bit provocatively, I believe radical democracy is a good thing, even if many of the plebs are stupid.
• runjake 5y ago
  Well said. But as CTO, the new CEO seems to have focused on increasing engagement and growing audiences. Unless that changes, expect the problem you describe to get bigger.
• Nasrudith 5y ago
  You do realize that there is a pandemic ongoing, right? While not good the moral panic about social media is downright absurd and lacks any sense of proportion.
  • spion 5y ago
    You do realize that social media is responsible for quite a few of the problems we have had during the pandemic? People are dying because of social-media-amplified misinformation: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1460368038859919361.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1460368038859919361.html
• intricatedetail 5y ago
  Isn't it how media in general work? Only difference is that almost anyone can publish and you don't have to wait for it to print and reach stores, subscribers... E.g. when the press publish something false you may get correction few issues later somewhere in small print, whereas on Twitter you actually can get a chance of seeing rebuttal in the thread. Most people only read headlines regardless of the medium.
• nprz 5y ago
  Have you read Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, Public Opinion by Walter Lippman, or Propaganda by Edward Bernays? If so, I don't think you would come to the conclusion that the media landscape prior to social media was bastion of truth and honesty.
  • mysecretaccount 5y ago
    Yeah, I cannot imagine how someone would say social media is the "biggest problem of our time" unless they were ignorant to the work you cited, and many other fundamental issues (profit motive turning the planet into a convection oven, for one).
  • datavirtue 5y ago
    Yeah, traditional media was/is a consent manufacturer. The elite decide among themselves the truth, and then repeat it over and over.
  • spion 5y ago
    Yes. While that situation was bad, it was not nearly as bad as the completely out of control results we get from social media. I actually think there is a great opportunity here to fix this problem as SM has made it painfully obvious and visible to everyone, while also democratizing the entire process. (Democratizing manipulation and outrage isn't necessarily the best thing in the world though, but we can at least start thinking what causes it and what can be done to improve things)
• game_the0ry 5y ago
  > Twitter and other social media are probably the biggest problem of our time. No, social media is not the root problem - it showed us who we really are. > The worst bit is that social media is becoming the primary source of news for most people today. The results have been nothing short of catastrophic. There is good news - people are figuring out the effects of social media. Your post is one example - you see there are issues, you have "woken up." The "Social Dilemma" on netflix is another example, that deprogrammed a lot of people. Frances Haugen's testimony to congress, another. Slowly and surely, people will build "immunity" to "mind viruses." Humans fought this battle and won [1], but the war will go on as long as humans and media coexist. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
• randomsearch 5y ago
  It’s not novelty that is optimised for, it’s engagement, and engagement is usually directly correlated with enragement.
• downandout 5y ago
  Interesting take. I do think that social media is driving the selection of increasingly unfit political candidates worldwide, which is a big problem. In an environment where the objective is to share things that get the most “WTF” comments from those with whom you disagree and the most applause from those with whom you do agree, only the most extreme and/or inept candidates wind up getting attention and the resulting votes.
• spion 5y ago
  For what its worth, its highly likely that this comment had artificial negative points added in the background for its sorting, after which it stopped its super quick gain in points (156 in 1-2 hours) and suddenly dropped to page two. I wonder what the mods found objectionable. Its a general news event, so this kind of commentary seems relevant. Social media CEOs are facing this problem everywhere and they seem unable (or unwilling?) to fight it.