4 ms·

Social media as it is done by Facebook is the major problem. We need no algorithmic timelines, no manipulation what can be seen by a company. Just what you fol

by myspy 4y ago

Social media as it is done by Facebook is the major problem. We need no algorithmic timelines, no manipulation what can be seen by a company. Just what you follow is a scrollable timeline. Group features that cannot be moderated need to be banned. Forums were good because the mods kept it together. Same goes for commentaries to posts.

hackerlight 4y ago
Not just Facebook, all of the big platforms. Twitter and Reddit also stoke division, outrage, echo chambers for profit. Example of bad faith from Twitter: allowing users to disable replies in order to prevent harassment by mobs, but still sneakily allowing mobs to use quote tweets to dunk. It's transparent. They just want to appear to be addressing the problem (maybe to placate a small contingent of outspoken employees by greenwashing) without actually addressing it. Another example of bad faith: resorting to content moderation because the real fix (altering dynamics) will cost them engagement. What's needed is regulation. I don't think the US will be able to do it, both because of ideology and political dysfunction, it'll have to be the EU.
- myspy 4y ago
  I agree, good post.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
Yeah for me this timeline stuff totally killed Facebook for me. It's so horrible now. They should have made it possible to keep the old feed.
Joeri 4y ago
Those features are all but inevitable to an ad-funded social media platform. If you want to increase ad revenue you need people to spend more time in your app, and that means you need a constant stream of new stuff in their feed. If facebook and instagram just showed us the stuff from the people we knew, we would scroll through it, be done, and move on. Instead they push us to follow lots of people we don’t know, so there is always more new stuff and a reason to be in the app and watch ads, but now the stuff from the people we do know gets buried, so they give us an algorithmic timeline that tries to make sure that no matter how often you go in or how long you keep scrolling, there is always a reason to keep scrolling and you’re always seeing the stuff you came to see. Commentaries on posts are the same thing, every reply is a notification ping and another reason to be in the app. Ideally the discussion / group functionality has enough drama to keep people energized and posting, not so much as to turn them off completely. This is the market at work. If the current crop of social media platforms with these patterns hadn’t chosen this path, other platforms that did would have outcompeted them. The fact that people spend so much time in these platforms is proof they are really good at showing them what they want to see. Wanting to build a “healthier” social media platform is sort of like trying to make a “healthier” alcoholic beverage. We make it healthier by consuming it less, not by changing its nature, because its nature is the point of why we consume it in the first place.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  Agree except for the last bit. People don't want to be hooked on a website that makes them feel like shit. They keep coming back not because they enjoy it, but because these companies have figured out how to game our primitive dopamine system that has had no time to evolve a defense to this attack vector. So we need regulation to fix this market failure.
- myspy 4y ago
  I'm a little nostalgic here, but social media was more fun and healthier when the timelines were simple streams of the stuff your friends posted. That's when it was still good and went down the drain around 2014 or 2015 when the Facebook told me what I should see. For Twitter I use third party apps that still present me the classic timeline instead of the things they do. And I only follow stuff I want to read, similar to an RSS feed reader. And ad-funded social media platforms will eventually die when regulation roles in that says what needs to be done. No loss, as it causes more problems at the moment than it solves.
michaelchisari 4y ago
| We need no algorithmic timelines, no manipulation That would require a totally different business model. For years, I've been convinced that a social network that figured out how to painlessly charged people $0.50 a month for an ad-free, non-manipulated experience would be more profitable per-user than existing social networks.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> We need no algorithmic timelines, Any timeline provided by a computer is algorithmic. You just prefer a particular algorithm.
- myspy 4y ago
  Yeah, I just prefer sortBy('created_at')

by myspy 4y ago

hackerlight 4y ago

Not just Facebook, all of the big platforms. Twitter and Reddit also stoke division, outrage, echo chambers for profit. Example of bad faith from Twitter: allowing users to disable replies in order to prevent harassment by mobs, but still sneakily allowing mobs to use quote tweets to dunk. It's transparent. They just want to appear to be addressing the problem (maybe to placate a small contingent of outspoken employees by greenwashing) without actually addressing it. Another example of bad faith: resorting to content moderation because the real fix (altering dynamics) will cost them engagement. What's needed is regulation. I don't think the US will be able to do it, both because of ideology and political dysfunction, it'll have to be the EU.

myspy 4y ago
I agree, good post.

GekkePrutser 4y ago

Yeah for me this timeline stuff totally killed Facebook for me. It's so horrible now. They should have made it possible to keep the old feed.

Joeri 4y ago

Those features are all but inevitable to an ad-funded social media platform. If you want to increase ad revenue you need people to spend more time in your app, and that means you need a constant stream of new stuff in their feed. If facebook and instagram just showed us the stuff from the people we knew, we would scroll through it, be done, and move on. Instead they push us to follow lots of people we don’t know, so there is always more new stuff and a reason to be in the app and watch ads, but now the stuff from the people we do know gets buried, so they give us an algorithmic timeline that tries to make sure that no matter how often you go in or how long you keep scrolling, there is always a reason to keep scrolling and you’re always seeing the stuff you came to see. Commentaries on posts are the same thing, every reply is a notification ping and another reason to be in the app. Ideally the discussion / group functionality has enough drama to keep people energized and posting, not so much as to turn them off completely. This is the market at work. If the current crop of social media platforms with these patterns hadn’t chosen this path, other platforms that did would have outcompeted them. The fact that people spend so much time in these platforms is proof they are really good at showing them what they want to see. Wanting to build a “healthier” social media platform is sort of like trying to make a “healthier” alcoholic beverage. We make it healthier by consuming it less, not by changing its nature, because its nature is the point of why we consume it in the first place.

hackerlight 4y ago
Agree except for the last bit. People don't want to be hooked on a website that makes them feel like shit. They keep coming back not because they enjoy it, but because these companies have figured out how to game our primitive dopamine system that has had no time to evolve a defense to this attack vector. So we need regulation to fix this market failure.
myspy 4y ago
I'm a little nostalgic here, but social media was more fun and healthier when the timelines were simple streams of the stuff your friends posted. That's when it was still good and went down the drain around 2014 or 2015 when the Facebook told me what I should see. For Twitter I use third party apps that still present me the classic timeline instead of the things they do. And I only follow stuff I want to read, similar to an RSS feed reader. And ad-funded social media platforms will eventually die when regulation roles in that says what needs to be done. No loss, as it causes more problems at the moment than it solves.

michaelchisari 4y ago

| We need no algorithmic timelines, no manipulation That would require a totally different business model. For years, I've been convinced that a social network that figured out how to painlessly charged people $0.50 a month for an ad-free, non-manipulated experience would be more profitable per-user than existing social networks.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> We need no algorithmic timelines, Any timeline provided by a computer is algorithmic. You just prefer a particular algorithm.

myspy 4y ago
Yeah, I just prefer sortBy('created_at')