6 ms·

As other people have mentioned but I think not quite nailed perfectly, restrictions on behavior aren't quite the right solution to the problems that plague soci

by darawk 4y ago

As other people have mentioned but I think not quite nailed perfectly, restrictions on behavior aren't quite the right solution to the problems that plague social media. Some people think that the right move is to eliminate engagement optimization algorithms, and I think that's not quite exactly right either. IMO the right solution is personal executive autonomy over content presentation and algorithmic optimization. By which I mean, I want to be able to make an "executive" choice over what kind of experience I want to have on a social platform. By "executive" I mean, I want to be able to make that choice explicitly, not implicitly by my behavior. For instance, an implicit choice is walking by a beautiful chocolate cake and being unable to resist eating it. An explicit choice is being able to architect my environment in advance, such that there are no beautiful chocolate cakes to tempt me. The biggest problem with social media right now is that the incentives of the existing platforms do not allow people to make these choices explicitly. They do not allow us to craft our information environment using our higher order executive functions, they force us to do it using our reptillian brains, one moment at a time. Essentially, they force us to choose: either you get none of what social media has to offer, or you take every aspect of it, whether you like it or not. Being able to explicitly say "for the next hour I want to be fed thirst traps and rage bait, but then I want that turned off" would be an amazing feature. People have a right to that kind of content if they want it. But they equally have a right to engage their higher cognitive functions and choose not to be expose to it if they don't want it, or choose to be able to architect the manner in which they are exposed to it.

CitrusFruits 4y ago
I agree, it's not perfect. Maybe, just maybe though, it's better than other alternatives out there. Your suggestions for being able to apply our "higher order executive function" to our social networks is honestly a great take, and a great suggestion. Unfortunately though, that's not something I can really build, even if I had the time, resources, and personnel. That sort of social network requires critical mass of content and would by definition almost, have to be a competitor or aggregator of other social networks. However, that's not the sort of social network I personally am interested in building either. I think what you're describing definitely falls into our modern definition of a social network, but I also think that definition falls very short of the potential for technology to facilitate relationships. In my opinion, the "thirst traps and rage baits" totally have there place (they're a lot of fun!), but I don't think their place is in the same app as your best friend sharing about their mixed feelings of loss and euphoria as they move from one job to another. That all being said, I think you bring up a really good talking point, one that I hope the people at Instagram, Snap, TikTok, etc. all pay attention to. As for me though, there's nothing I can really do about it other than start discussion.
- darawk 4y ago
  Totally get that, and to be clear I think what you're doing is super cool. I should have given a more relevant example to you. I think the general category of "user autonomy" over how/what kinds of content they see or don't see is a better abstraction than restrictions on behavior. So, for something like your network, that might mean rather than limiting how frequently people can post, give users the option to aggregate content from frequent posters in their feed. So, maybe I have a switch I can toggle that says, "show a unit of content from one person no more than once per day", where that single block of content is expandable, and gives some aggregated summary of how many things they posted / what its content was, that I can drill into if I want to, or quickly skim over if I don't care.
mhink 4y ago
I mean, for what it's worth there's an aspect of this on Reddit, in the sense that you can choose which subreddits to join (and can maintain multiple accounts to keep your experiences separate). Although I'm sure it's not perfect, it's not terrible either. Especially if you follow the perennial Reddit advice and unsubscribe from the massive default subs.
- alephaleph 4y ago
  I kind of disagree about this: maybe it's different if you're more mature but reddit was my first social media platform, I used it a lot in middle school, and in my experience rage bait was a huge problem. Rage bait subreddits become more and more extreme over time, losing the ability to distinguish the people they hate from parodies of the people they hate and effectively building up an effigy/totem of "the other side" to concentrate that hate onto. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I eventually realized I had to quit reddit because the extent to which I engaged in rage bait made me a worse person.
  - mountainriver 4y ago
    Yeah I agree, had the same experience. I found I literally couldn’t get away from the rage bait either. They keep putting things in your feed even if your aren’t subscribed. Reddit is also just an awful hive mind.
    - alephaleph 4y ago
      oof it's probably worse now than it was for me lol, when I used it I don't think they even had an algorithmic feed, just a subscribed and /r/all. and yeah the hivemind stuff is pretty bad. I'm reminded of a talk that ViHart of all people did where they argued that in a McLuhanist "the medium is the message" way, reddit's focus on up and down votes and karma creates an extremely judgy and kind of adversarial experience that eventually breeds hiveminds. I'd also argue that reddit's focus on small communities managed individually by specific moderators creates an undercurrent of site drama that reliably rears its ugly head every few months or so, but I guess that's neither here nor there.
pandesmos 4y ago
> Being able to explicitly say "for the next hour I want to be fed thirst traps and rage bait, but then I want that turned off" would be an amazing feature. Did you use Google Plus? I found the circle system to be so good for this. I like following artists, and sometimes they can be exceedingly political/depressed/self destructive and I can't take them in my "main feed". With G+ I could drop those people into a circle and then "dip into" the madness for a bit and hunt for gems, then leave before becoming overwhelmed. Being able to "sort people" into groups on social media (using a single account) was just excellent. Here are my programmers, here are my RPG people, here are my RPG people that have a different core belief than the previous group of RPG people, here are my Artists, here are my Writers, here are my Sad But Brilliant people. Then when they added collections so I could present the different "facets" of my interests and allow my followers to unsubscribe from those facets was excellent. I'll tag this post as gaming, this one as music, this one as bullshit hot takes, and you, my follower can say "I hate his taste in music" and never see it. I miss it so much.
- pandesmos 4y ago
  Also, the original ability to "circle share" was exceptional (and it's truly sad it was apparently abused into the ground by spammers). It allowed "real people" to curate groups of other real people around a certain topic, and then a new user (assuming they could find the curator) could then mass follow/watch those people. "Here is a group of people who are creating things and having great conversations with each other. Check it out." It was like someone opening a hidden door to a very nice party. Don't know how to make something like that non-abusable or how to mitigate the abuse that killed it, but then I never saw it because I wasn't following spam circle shares.
  - blondin 4y ago
    google+ loss was a true tragedy.
- civilized 4y ago
  I think Google+ was just ahead of its time. Now a huge chunk of people are ready for a different platform.
alephaleph 4y ago
the first social media platform I used was Reddit where you really can choose to be fed thirst traps or rage bait for the next hour by exclusively browsing one or two specific subreddits and I'm not sure I'd say that's much more healthy than fully algorithmic social media, it just has different problems. Particularly the rage bait: I basically had to quit reddit because I realized the extent to which I engaged in rage bait made me a worse person.
- DennisP 4y ago
  It can have that problem if you make that choice. I use reddit extensively, mainly subscribed to a bunch of mostly small subs for my own set of narrow interests, and it works great.
  - alephaleph 4y ago
    yeah, that's fair. I was also in middle school at the time which is probably a bit too young to be using reddit, but I think that it's important to recognize that a social media platform that gives you high level control of the kind of content you see won't completely solve the problem of unhealthy social media usage, it will just make it easy for your usage to be either very healthy or very unhealthy. And that those unhealthy users will end up causing problems for the healthy users. In a weird way I actually think that the weird stuff twitter has been doing to try to make it look like they're doing something about unhealthy social media usage (all the "remember the human" stuff) would probably be more effective on a reddit-type social media platform.
    - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      I think this is a good example of the folk wisdom that kids don't have the best decisionmaking skills. I spent time in many an IRC flamewar as a middle schooler myself, so I'm not judging :) of course. Reddit first came out while I was in high school and subreddits became a feature near the end of my time in HS. I definitely was making better choices about the content I consumed as a high schooler and I've gotten better as I've gotten older! I deeply appreciate Reddit's openness to customizing the experience. The defaults suck, I agree, but you can choose to curate the experience how you like. Moreover despite lots of jaw clenching over financial incentives, Reddit still offers the Old Reddit interface _and_ an API which lets power users consume Reddit however they like. These values were pretty common among other fora/BBSes at the time. The experience one got on 4chan's /a/ or /jp/ was very different than /b/ or /pol/ or /soc/ (and most of 4chan's famed toxicity came from the latter 3 boards.) Forums were usually partitioned by topic. > In a weird way I actually think that the weird stuff twitter has been doing to try to make it look like they're doing something about unhealthy social media usage (all the "remember the human" stuff) would probably be more effective on a reddit-type social media platform. I don't think the algorithmic feed as-is is compatible with healthy usage, no matter what rhetoric a company uses. ML models need to not only take engagement as input but also some sort of personal toxicity input. I need to be able to say "content X is addictive to me but not for a good reason." The model also needs to offer as much transparency as possible to the user, offering things like partial dependence plots for auditing by the user. I'm not sure whether a ranking model trained that way can still provide good ad targeting performance. Moreover knobs like this are probably just too complex for a layperson to interact with. Many engineers don't understand how a partial dependence plot works let alone laypeople. My problem with social media is about the lack of choice. I have no qualms that the majority will continue to use social media the way most people in the past would spend time mindlessly flipping TV channels or window shopping at malls and boutiques. But there was always alternatives. People that didn't want to spend time window shopping could be found in libraries, bookstores, bars, playing sports, or outdoors. Once you became an adult this was expected. That didn't mean I was ostracized from them. I encountered people in college who hung out in very different places than me but still connected with me over shared interests. In the social media age every form of social media is siloed. If you're not on Twitter you can't engage with people on Twitter. If you're not on Facebook you can't see people's Facebook content. You _have_ to join the platform to reach people on the platform. I'd love to see a world of federated social media where we can all talk to each other no matter our hobbies and third places.
grumple 4y ago
When Facebook was first created, there was no feed. We flocked to it because it was useful for a few important reasons: 1) communicating with friends, 2) finding events to go to, 3) organizing groups, 4) storing and sharing photos, and 5) meeting new people (sometimes). It was great as a tool to supplement your social life. When they introduced the feed, Facebook gradually became worse at all of those things. Facebook became less about being a useful tool and instead became a media sharing instrument for serving advertisements. Your entire post is about that aspect of it though, and really it's the problem with all social media. The feed design is fundamentally incompatable with providing the utility that was initially offered by Facebook. The feed is purely a tool for distribution and consumption, not forging connections or otherwise improving the lives of users.
- scarface74 4y ago
  The feed was introduced in 2006. Facebook was founded in 2004. Not many people “flocked” to Facebook before the feed.
  - jimkleiber 4y ago
    I think the feed was chronological for a while. Did it switch to being non-chronological in 2006? I thought it was later than that.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      The algorithmically generated feed was introduced in 2011.
  - grumple 4y ago
    Those first few years when it was limited to certain edu addressed fueled the hype and growth.
distantsounds 4y ago
It's called RSS. and a feed reader. I swear, people are too busy re-inventing the wheel when it already exists. use one of the literal hundreds of free services to write what you want and syndicate it. and use the same system to ingest exactly what you want. We hit the nail on the head 2 decades ago. It's been rusting since.
- jimkleiber 4y ago
  That works for the consumption side, but at least from what I've seen (it's been a while), the feed readers don't have so much share/comment/like side to them. Frankly, they seem to miss the social side. Again, maybe I'm just not using the right feed readers, but when I use some these days, they feel somewhat isolated, just receiving info, not also sending it.
  - derekzhouzhen 4y ago
    Shameless plug: Airss does that. https://airss.roastidio.us https://airss.roastidio.us The reader can be used without login. To comment and share, you need to login to https://roastidio.us https://roastidio.us (free open registration) Warning: I have very few users. So you will still feel isolated, unless you can gather a community yourself.
    - jimkleiber 4y ago
      Ooo, I like the concept. I just logged in and submitted one for this URL: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/04/18/world/ukraine-russia-war-news https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/04/18/world/ukraine-russia... Two things come up for me: 1. I'm curious, how do you imagine people will discover there are comments on a specific URL? Will it show up in their browser? An embed that sites can use to show it on their site? Other? 2. I found that the name made me feel a little confused and hesitant to engage, because I didn't want to roast the article I submitted. I get the feeling you started in one direction and may be opening up, but I'm not sure.
      - 4y ago
jimkleiber 4y ago
Yes, I've been yearning for platforms really to just let me control the database query, basically. I want to be able to create custom filters/sorts/queries, or even choose some from an algorithm store, that lets me control how I view things. For example, on Twitter, I love having the "latest tweets" option. But maybe I want to also have "only tweets from verified people with over 100 retweets from other verified people." This is somewhat possible on Tweetdeck, but not possible directly within Twitter itself. It reminds me of the Facebook Graph Search, which I loved—"my friends of friends who speak Spanish who live in San Francisco." But FB shut that down a few years ago. Makes me wonder what are the main reasons they don't implement such options to help us better choose how we see the data—is it technically difficult to implement? Does it run counter to the business model of placed advertisements? Does it really just unleash too much power in the hands of the users and make these companies afraid what might happen? I'd love if they did implement the changes you suggest and I wonder why they haven't.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  > Does it really just unleash too much power in the hands of the users and make these companies afraid what might happen? Social media companies spend incredible resources trying to continuously improve the stickiness of the app so users keep coming back to it. Giving users total control over curation creates two big problems for this. 1) if I can cut out all of the BS in the feed, I can utilize the app more passively which likely reduces overall usage. I would try to get my social media into a weekly feed, which is not compatible with the business social media companies are trying to run. It's all about DAU's. 2) total curation makes researching and optimizing the UX for eyeballs more difficult because you introduce an entirely new set of variables into the equation. This increases the likelihood that behavioral research draws erroneous conclusions based on the patterns being observed. By controlling the drip of the content to the users, the company can control for this much more easily.
  - jimkleiber 4y ago
    > 1) if I can cut out all of the BS in the feed, I can utilize the app more passively which likely reduces overall usage. I would try to get my social media into a weekly feed, which is not compatible with the business social media companies are trying to run. It's all about DAU's. Fair point, some may use it much less. Ironically, I might use it even more, because now I can explore more. Being given only one path can bore me at times. Sometimes I want to choose my own path. I absolutely loved the Facebook Graph Search, but then it vanished and I'm back to just hoping that Facebook gives me what I want instead of letting me dive deeper. In other words, I spend a ton of time on Wikipedia rabbit holes even without an algorithm that tries to predict what I want. > 2) total curation makes researching and optimizing the UX for eyeballs more difficult because you introduce an entirely new set of variables into the equation. Ah, yeah, I agree with this. Fewer variables make it easier to run social experiments and behavioral research.
idealmedtech 4y ago
I think such a network, while great in theory, would mostly be filled with techies like us, because by design, it favors intentional interaction over mindless swiping, giving advertisers less incentive to fund you and thus eventually struggling to remain solvent. Now, if we put some regulation on dopamine loop limitations, such a network might absolutely THRIVE! Just my personal take! Do I wish people engaged more actively with the idea that these products can be living breathing things that we also can exhibit influence over? Absolutely. Do I think the critical mass of such users exists today? Sadly not, but I hope one day to be proven wrong!
tejtm 4y ago
Ahhh the original web vision and promise of the Semantic Web. Snippets of machine readable datum everywhere fetched and assembled for you by your own "intelligent agent". The competition would be innovating better personal agents and data tagging. I think TBL found the mother of all misunderestimations when they made http servers and browsers as step zero.
a-dub 4y ago
so, basically blogs and rss readers... with privacy features and channels for subscriptions. sounds good to me.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
alar44 4y ago
Neat idea but literally no one wants that. You think the average Joe wants to explicitly configure his social media algorithms? Get real.
- tacocataco 4y ago
  Does everyone in Path of Exile create their own loot filters? You could, but most people download neversinks or someone else's custom filter.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
solstice 4y ago
This sounds like https://fraidyc.at https://fraidyc.at which is delightfully weird and really functional at the same time
- attilaperez 4y ago
  That early 2010s tumblr-esque UI is wonderful. Reminds me of MLKSHK. Good times.
civilized 4y ago
This is exactly what I was trying to say in my other post. Currently I suspect the logic behind social media engagement algorithms is something like "feed the user more of what they have clicked on in the past". But in real life, I don't just do more of what I did in the past. Sometimes I choose to do different things. But in legacy social media like FB I can't choose to be offered anything different than what I clicked on in the past. I can't ask for the culture wars and political hot takes to fuck off so I can see normal friends and family posts (or vice versa). This lack of choice in what we're offered is what's essentially inhuman about legacy social media.
judge2020 4y ago
While I think this helps, Twitter has their 'lists' feature that effectively allows you to choose what timeline you want to view at any point; the only difference with your post is that it's not forced upon you, and perhaps you envision platform uses some ML model to classify posts from people you never follow. As it stands, people don't like the friction that comes with needing to hand-pick people to put into different twitter lists, so the feature is largely unused.
sacrosancty 4y ago
Your ideas and the OPs sound like solving drug addiction by offering a new less addictive drug. Obviously the addicts will continue using the addictive ones! I think the social problems can only be solved by legislation because the existence of even one Facebook is already the problem.
- darawk 4y ago
  As a former opiate addict myself, I don't think that's true at all. Moving the choices of addiction from the simple parts of the brain to the higher parts is the whole game. If at any time while I was an addict, you had told me "I'll give you a week's supply, but after that, you can never use again", i'd have made that deal every time, even if I knew it would be enforced. The problem of addiction is the problem of inter-temporal choice, and a broken discount function. Most addicts don't want to keep using in the executive part of their brain. They know it's self destructive, but they keep doing it anyway, because the next hit is always, in a very local sense, rational. The ability to bind your own hands is the way out.
  - sacrosancty 4y ago
    While your example deal might work, that's not what new social media services are doing. They aren't preventing users from using the existing ones whenever they feel the urge.

by darawk 4y ago

CitrusFruits 4y ago

I agree, it's not perfect. Maybe, just maybe though, it's better than other alternatives out there. Your suggestions for being able to apply our "higher order executive function" to our social networks is honestly a great take, and a great suggestion. Unfortunately though, that's not something I can really build, even if I had the time, resources, and personnel. That sort of social network requires critical mass of content and would by definition almost, have to be a competitor or aggregator of other social networks. However, that's not the sort of social network I personally am interested in building either. I think what you're describing definitely falls into our modern definition of a social network, but I also think that definition falls very short of the potential for technology to facilitate relationships. In my opinion, the "thirst traps and rage baits" totally have there place (they're a lot of fun!), but I don't think their place is in the same app as your best friend sharing about their mixed feelings of loss and euphoria as they move from one job to another. That all being said, I think you bring up a really good talking point, one that I hope the people at Instagram, Snap, TikTok, etc. all pay attention to. As for me though, there's nothing I can really do about it other than start discussion.

darawk 4y ago
Totally get that, and to be clear I think what you're doing is super cool. I should have given a more relevant example to you. I think the general category of "user autonomy" over how/what kinds of content they see or don't see is a better abstraction than restrictions on behavior. So, for something like your network, that might mean rather than limiting how frequently people can post, give users the option to aggregate content from frequent posters in their feed. So, maybe I have a switch I can toggle that says, "show a unit of content from one person no more than once per day", where that single block of content is expandable, and gives some aggregated summary of how many things they posted / what its content was, that I can drill into if I want to, or quickly skim over if I don't care.

mhink 4y ago

I mean, for what it's worth there's an aspect of this on Reddit, in the sense that you can choose which subreddits to join (and can maintain multiple accounts to keep your experiences separate). Although I'm sure it's not perfect, it's not terrible either. Especially if you follow the perennial Reddit advice and unsubscribe from the massive default subs.

alephaleph 4y ago
I kind of disagree about this: maybe it's different if you're more mature but reddit was my first social media platform, I used it a lot in middle school, and in my experience rage bait was a huge problem. Rage bait subreddits become more and more extreme over time, losing the ability to distinguish the people they hate from parodies of the people they hate and effectively building up an effigy/totem of "the other side" to concentrate that hate onto. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I eventually realized I had to quit reddit because the extent to which I engaged in rage bait made me a worse person.
- mountainriver 4y ago
  Yeah I agree, had the same experience. I found I literally couldn’t get away from the rage bait either. They keep putting things in your feed even if your aren’t subscribed. Reddit is also just an awful hive mind.
  - alephaleph 4y ago
    oof it's probably worse now than it was for me lol, when I used it I don't think they even had an algorithmic feed, just a subscribed and /r/all. and yeah the hivemind stuff is pretty bad. I'm reminded of a talk that ViHart of all people did where they argued that in a McLuhanist "the medium is the message" way, reddit's focus on up and down votes and karma creates an extremely judgy and kind of adversarial experience that eventually breeds hiveminds. I'd also argue that reddit's focus on small communities managed individually by specific moderators creates an undercurrent of site drama that reliably rears its ugly head every few months or so, but I guess that's neither here nor there.

pandesmos 4y ago

> Being able to explicitly say "for the next hour I want to be fed thirst traps and rage bait, but then I want that turned off" would be an amazing feature. Did you use Google Plus? I found the circle system to be so good for this. I like following artists, and sometimes they can be exceedingly political/depressed/self destructive and I can't take them in my "main feed". With G+ I could drop those people into a circle and then "dip into" the madness for a bit and hunt for gems, then leave before becoming overwhelmed. Being able to "sort people" into groups on social media (using a single account) was just excellent. Here are my programmers, here are my RPG people, here are my RPG people that have a different core belief than the previous group of RPG people, here are my Artists, here are my Writers, here are my Sad But Brilliant people. Then when they added collections so I could present the different "facets" of my interests and allow my followers to unsubscribe from those facets was excellent. I'll tag this post as gaming, this one as music, this one as bullshit hot takes, and you, my follower can say "I hate his taste in music" and never see it. I miss it so much.

pandesmos 4y ago
Also, the original ability to "circle share" was exceptional (and it's truly sad it was apparently abused into the ground by spammers). It allowed "real people" to curate groups of other real people around a certain topic, and then a new user (assuming they could find the curator) could then mass follow/watch those people. "Here is a group of people who are creating things and having great conversations with each other. Check it out." It was like someone opening a hidden door to a very nice party. Don't know how to make something like that non-abusable or how to mitigate the abuse that killed it, but then I never saw it because I wasn't following spam circle shares.
- blondin 4y ago
  google+ loss was a true tragedy.
civilized 4y ago
I think Google+ was just ahead of its time. Now a huge chunk of people are ready for a different platform.

alephaleph 4y ago

the first social media platform I used was Reddit where you really can choose to be fed thirst traps or rage bait for the next hour by exclusively browsing one or two specific subreddits and I'm not sure I'd say that's much more healthy than fully algorithmic social media, it just has different problems. Particularly the rage bait: I basically had to quit reddit because I realized the extent to which I engaged in rage bait made me a worse person.

DennisP 4y ago
It can have that problem if you make that choice. I use reddit extensively, mainly subscribed to a bunch of mostly small subs for my own set of narrow interests, and it works great.
- alephaleph 4y ago
  yeah, that's fair. I was also in middle school at the time which is probably a bit too young to be using reddit, but I think that it's important to recognize that a social media platform that gives you high level control of the kind of content you see won't completely solve the problem of unhealthy social media usage, it will just make it easy for your usage to be either very healthy or very unhealthy. And that those unhealthy users will end up causing problems for the healthy users. In a weird way I actually think that the weird stuff twitter has been doing to try to make it look like they're doing something about unhealthy social media usage (all the "remember the human" stuff) would probably be more effective on a reddit-type social media platform.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    I think this is a good example of the folk wisdom that kids don't have the best decisionmaking skills. I spent time in many an IRC flamewar as a middle schooler myself, so I'm not judging :) of course. Reddit first came out while I was in high school and subreddits became a feature near the end of my time in HS. I definitely was making better choices about the content I consumed as a high schooler and I've gotten better as I've gotten older! I deeply appreciate Reddit's openness to customizing the experience. The defaults suck, I agree, but you can choose to curate the experience how you like. Moreover despite lots of jaw clenching over financial incentives, Reddit still offers the Old Reddit interface _and_ an API which lets power users consume Reddit however they like. These values were pretty common among other fora/BBSes at the time. The experience one got on 4chan's /a/ or /jp/ was very different than /b/ or /pol/ or /soc/ (and most of 4chan's famed toxicity came from the latter 3 boards.) Forums were usually partitioned by topic. > In a weird way I actually think that the weird stuff twitter has been doing to try to make it look like they're doing something about unhealthy social media usage (all the "remember the human" stuff) would probably be more effective on a reddit-type social media platform. I don't think the algorithmic feed as-is is compatible with healthy usage, no matter what rhetoric a company uses. ML models need to not only take engagement as input but also some sort of personal toxicity input. I need to be able to say "content X is addictive to me but not for a good reason." The model also needs to offer as much transparency as possible to the user, offering things like partial dependence plots for auditing by the user. I'm not sure whether a ranking model trained that way can still provide good ad targeting performance. Moreover knobs like this are probably just too complex for a layperson to interact with. Many engineers don't understand how a partial dependence plot works let alone laypeople. My problem with social media is about the lack of choice. I have no qualms that the majority will continue to use social media the way most people in the past would spend time mindlessly flipping TV channels or window shopping at malls and boutiques. But there was always alternatives. People that didn't want to spend time window shopping could be found in libraries, bookstores, bars, playing sports, or outdoors. Once you became an adult this was expected. That didn't mean I was ostracized from them. I encountered people in college who hung out in very different places than me but still connected with me over shared interests. In the social media age every form of social media is siloed. If you're not on Twitter you can't engage with people on Twitter. If you're not on Facebook you can't see people's Facebook content. You _have_ to join the platform to reach people on the platform. I'd love to see a world of federated social media where we can all talk to each other no matter our hobbies and third places.

grumple 4y ago

When Facebook was first created, there was no feed. We flocked to it because it was useful for a few important reasons: 1) communicating with friends, 2) finding events to go to, 3) organizing groups, 4) storing and sharing photos, and 5) meeting new people (sometimes). It was great as a tool to supplement your social life. When they introduced the feed, Facebook gradually became worse at all of those things. Facebook became less about being a useful tool and instead became a media sharing instrument for serving advertisements. Your entire post is about that aspect of it though, and really it's the problem with all social media. The feed design is fundamentally incompatable with providing the utility that was initially offered by Facebook. The feed is purely a tool for distribution and consumption, not forging connections or otherwise improving the lives of users.

scarface74 4y ago
The feed was introduced in 2006. Facebook was founded in 2004. Not many people “flocked” to Facebook before the feed.
- jimkleiber 4y ago
  I think the feed was chronological for a while. Did it switch to being non-chronological in 2006? I thought it was later than that.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    The algorithmically generated feed was introduced in 2011.
- grumple 4y ago
  Those first few years when it was limited to certain edu addressed fueled the hype and growth.

distantsounds 4y ago

It's called RSS. and a feed reader. I swear, people are too busy re-inventing the wheel when it already exists. use one of the literal hundreds of free services to write what you want and syndicate it. and use the same system to ingest exactly what you want. We hit the nail on the head 2 decades ago. It's been rusting since.

jimkleiber 4y ago
That works for the consumption side, but at least from what I've seen (it's been a while), the feed readers don't have so much share/comment/like side to them. Frankly, they seem to miss the social side. Again, maybe I'm just not using the right feed readers, but when I use some these days, they feel somewhat isolated, just receiving info, not also sending it.
- derekzhouzhen 4y ago
  Shameless plug: Airss does that. https://airss.roastidio.us https://airss.roastidio.us The reader can be used without login. To comment and share, you need to login to https://roastidio.us https://roastidio.us (free open registration) Warning: I have very few users. So you will still feel isolated, unless you can gather a community yourself.
  - jimkleiber 4y ago
    Ooo, I like the concept. I just logged in and submitted one for this URL: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/04/18/world/ukraine-russia-war-news https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/04/18/world/ukraine-russia... Two things come up for me: 1. I'm curious, how do you imagine people will discover there are comments on a specific URL? Will it show up in their browser? An embed that sites can use to show it on their site? Other? 2. I found that the name made me feel a little confused and hesitant to engage, because I didn't want to roast the article I submitted. I get the feeling you started in one direction and may be opening up, but I'm not sure.
    - 4y ago

jimkleiber 4y ago

Yes, I've been yearning for platforms really to just let me control the database query, basically. I want to be able to create custom filters/sorts/queries, or even choose some from an algorithm store, that lets me control how I view things. For example, on Twitter, I love having the "latest tweets" option. But maybe I want to also have "only tweets from verified people with over 100 retweets from other verified people." This is somewhat possible on Tweetdeck, but not possible directly within Twitter itself. It reminds me of the Facebook Graph Search, which I loved—"my friends of friends who speak Spanish who live in San Francisco." But FB shut that down a few years ago. Makes me wonder what are the main reasons they don't implement such options to help us better choose how we see the data—is it technically difficult to implement? Does it run counter to the business model of placed advertisements? Does it really just unleash too much power in the hands of the users and make these companies afraid what might happen? I'd love if they did implement the changes you suggest and I wonder why they haven't.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago
> Does it really just unleash too much power in the hands of the users and make these companies afraid what might happen? Social media companies spend incredible resources trying to continuously improve the stickiness of the app so users keep coming back to it. Giving users total control over curation creates two big problems for this. 1) if I can cut out all of the BS in the feed, I can utilize the app more passively which likely reduces overall usage. I would try to get my social media into a weekly feed, which is not compatible with the business social media companies are trying to run. It's all about DAU's. 2) total curation makes researching and optimizing the UX for eyeballs more difficult because you introduce an entirely new set of variables into the equation. This increases the likelihood that behavioral research draws erroneous conclusions based on the patterns being observed. By controlling the drip of the content to the users, the company can control for this much more easily.
- jimkleiber 4y ago
  > 1) if I can cut out all of the BS in the feed, I can utilize the app more passively which likely reduces overall usage. I would try to get my social media into a weekly feed, which is not compatible with the business social media companies are trying to run. It's all about DAU's. Fair point, some may use it much less. Ironically, I might use it even more, because now I can explore more. Being given only one path can bore me at times. Sometimes I want to choose my own path. I absolutely loved the Facebook Graph Search, but then it vanished and I'm back to just hoping that Facebook gives me what I want instead of letting me dive deeper. In other words, I spend a ton of time on Wikipedia rabbit holes even without an algorithm that tries to predict what I want. > 2) total curation makes researching and optimizing the UX for eyeballs more difficult because you introduce an entirely new set of variables into the equation. Ah, yeah, I agree with this. Fewer variables make it easier to run social experiments and behavioral research.

idealmedtech 4y ago

I think such a network, while great in theory, would mostly be filled with techies like us, because by design, it favors intentional interaction over mindless swiping, giving advertisers less incentive to fund you and thus eventually struggling to remain solvent. Now, if we put some regulation on dopamine loop limitations, such a network might absolutely THRIVE! Just my personal take! Do I wish people engaged more actively with the idea that these products can be living breathing things that we also can exhibit influence over? Absolutely. Do I think the critical mass of such users exists today? Sadly not, but I hope one day to be proven wrong!

tejtm 4y ago

Ahhh the original web vision and promise of the Semantic Web. Snippets of machine readable datum everywhere fetched and assembled for you by your own "intelligent agent". The competition would be innovating better personal agents and data tagging. I think TBL found the mother of all misunderestimations when they made http servers and browsers as step zero.

a-dub 4y ago

so, basically blogs and rss readers... with privacy features and channels for subscriptions. sounds good to me.

deleted 4y ago

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alar44 4y ago

Neat idea but literally no one wants that. You think the average Joe wants to explicitly configure his social media algorithms? Get real.

tacocataco 4y ago
Does everyone in Path of Exile create their own loot filters? You could, but most people download neversinks or someone else's custom filter.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

solstice 4y ago

This sounds like https://fraidyc.at https://fraidyc.at which is delightfully weird and really functional at the same time

attilaperez 4y ago
That early 2010s tumblr-esque UI is wonderful. Reminds me of MLKSHK. Good times.

civilized 4y ago

This is exactly what I was trying to say in my other post. Currently I suspect the logic behind social media engagement algorithms is something like "feed the user more of what they have clicked on in the past". But in real life, I don't just do more of what I did in the past. Sometimes I choose to do different things. But in legacy social media like FB I can't choose to be offered anything different than what I clicked on in the past. I can't ask for the culture wars and political hot takes to fuck off so I can see normal friends and family posts (or vice versa). This lack of choice in what we're offered is what's essentially inhuman about legacy social media.

judge2020 4y ago

While I think this helps, Twitter has their 'lists' feature that effectively allows you to choose what timeline you want to view at any point; the only difference with your post is that it's not forced upon you, and perhaps you envision platform uses some ML model to classify posts from people you never follow. As it stands, people don't like the friction that comes with needing to hand-pick people to put into different twitter lists, so the feature is largely unused.

sacrosancty 4y ago

Your ideas and the OPs sound like solving drug addiction by offering a new less addictive drug. Obviously the addicts will continue using the addictive ones! I think the social problems can only be solved by legislation because the existence of even one Facebook is already the problem.

darawk 4y ago
As a former opiate addict myself, I don't think that's true at all. Moving the choices of addiction from the simple parts of the brain to the higher parts is the whole game. If at any time while I was an addict, you had told me "I'll give you a week's supply, but after that, you can never use again", i'd have made that deal every time, even if I knew it would be enforced. The problem of addiction is the problem of inter-temporal choice, and a broken discount function. Most addicts don't want to keep using in the executive part of their brain. They know it's self destructive, but they keep doing it anyway, because the next hit is always, in a very local sense, rational. The ability to bind your own hands is the way out.
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  While your example deal might work, that's not what new social media services are doing. They aren't preventing users from using the existing ones whenever they feel the urge.