8 ms·

I made a similar observation some time ago, so let me add this: human interactions in general don't scale. Social media easily turns completely normal human int

I made a similar observation some time ago, so let me add this: human interactions in general don't scale. Social media easily turns completely normal human interactions into something perverse. Eg, say you've just exited to the cinema and vent to your friend that this movie sucked. What were they thinking? Who had the brilliant idea to change directors mid trilogy? There's a bit of venting, but quickly things settle down. There's a bit of bonding over the shared experience. Nobody is hurt, you're just having a private talk with your friend. Take that to Twitter, use the same words, and now the same thing is an addition to the torrent of hate aimed at the movie's director. You might have meant to reach your 10 followers, but search, recommendations, hashtags, retweets, etc can easily pull your statement out of its intended context. Then there's what it must be like to end up on the other side of that. This happens organically, people aren't organizing around it for the most part. So the torrent of hate can regain its strength at random, wherever some person posts about it 3 years later, it makes #2 in some countdown on Youtube, comes up on the top of AskReddit, etc. In real life most things settle down, the Internet allows rehashing old stuff effectively forever. And I think human interaction breaks at those scales. A single person can't meaningfully interact with a million random people which mostly spontaneously decided to flood you with messages. You can ask a prominent one or two to leave you alone, but more can show up at any time.

eloisant 3y ago
People have to understand that posting to Twitter is the equivalent of shouting in a megaphone at Time Square. It's not the equivalent of sharing something with your close friends, even if some people might think so. Yes most of the time your Twitts will only be noticed by your close friends. But they're still public speech.
gspencley 3y ago
It's also worth noting that even with in-person interaction, when you've got a party of more than 4 people, even sitting at the same table together, the group typically splits into smaller groups with their own individual conversations. Any in-person situation where a "group conversation" is meant to scale (ex: town hall meeting or class room), there is always a person in charge of leading and moderating the conversation (hand raising, mic queuing etc.).
dredmorbius 3y ago
One useful analytic trick I've developed is of inverting propositions: "human interactions in general don't scale" gives us "how is it that human interactions can and do scale?" Because one frame of history is to look at it as the story of precisely that scaling: family units to clans, clans to tribes, tribes to warlords or kingdoms, kingdoms to empires, the emergence of democratic republics (or of communist states, if you subscribe to an alternate arc), increasing scales of militaries, of religions, of commerce, of academia, etc., etc. Each of these can be considered as networks, and there are some well-known models of network value. The naive Metcalfe model states that network value grows with the square of the nodes. A superior alternative was proposed by Ben Tilly (btilly at HN) and Andrew Odlyzko, which is that the value grows as n * log(n), that is, additional nodes add value, but comparatively less over time. I've extended that to include a constant cost function, that is, one that's uniform for the network (at least on average), though it may change over time: V = n * log(n) - k * n This means that the value of the network grows so long as k n is less than n * log(n). Put another way, k constrains the maximum size of the network. Your network will grow if you can reduce k and keep it small. One way this manifests is as hygiene factors. Through the mid-19th century, the maximum size of a city was limited by its reproductive rate less its death rate plus net in-migration. As deaths typically outpaced live births (from disease and accidents, generally), cities needed to sustain large in-migration simply in order to maintain constant size. And the limit for 19th-century London was about 1 million people, roughly the size of ancient Rome at its peak. Deaths from epidemics such as cholera would claim tens of thousands of victims per year. The solution was public health and hygiene, particularly the establishment of both clean fresh-water supplies, and of removing sewage waste. That latter was somewhat accidental: sewers built to drain away storm water were connected to by individual households as those installed flush toilets. The sewerage and storm water were drained away far to the east at the Thames Estuary. Further advances came with food purity regulations, pasteurisation of milk, improved preservation and canning, refrigeration, increased bathing and handwashing. In the case of New York City (which saw a similar set of improvements) 85% of the reduction in mortality from 1850 to 2015 had occurred by 1920, which is before the introduction of modern antibiotics, most vaccines, organ transplants, medical imaging, and cancer treatments.[1][2] I'd first seen this pointed out by Laurie Garrett in the 1990s. The further increases in the late 20th century largely come not from medical technology but rather access to medical care, and show far more strongly in under-served population (minorities generally, Black women, and especially Black men) than among the White population.[3] More recently Robert J. Gordon made this a major point of his analysis in The Rise and Fall of American Growth, noting an almost complete halt to medical progress (as measured by outcomes) beginning in the 1960s / 70s. (2015). Put another way: one of the key reasons a site such as Facebook can grow to 5 billion MAU is because it tamps down hard on the systemic costs imposed by each additional member. In particular I've noted a general progression of decline as sites scale, with consistent patterns at roughly order-of-magnitude scales: 10, 100, 1k, 10k, 100k, 1m, and beyond. Networks have a number of characteristics: scale or size, topology (e.g., point-to-point, star, tree, mesh, hybrid), speed (the rate at which actions or messages propagate), etc. It's far easier to maintain control over a star (broadcast) network than a mesh (fully p2p) network, as the central node is the sole originator of content, and mediates all interactions. As I've describe elsewhere in this thread, hierarchical, modular or divisional structures tend to scale far better than monolithic ones. They do of course have their own limitations. The key takeaway though is that scaling interactive networks, of any type, is largely a cost-minimisation function. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Graphically illustrated in "The Conquest of Pestilence in New York City" <https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uTWEATUzgxk/TXQoTibILtI/AAAAAAAAAAM/eyirotYDmXo/s1600/2004_01_healthstat.jpg https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uTWEATUzgxk/TXQoTibILtI/AAAAAAAAA...> <https://economicspsychologypolicy.blogspot.com/2011/03/conquest-of-pestilence-in-new-york-city.html https://economicspsychologypolicy.blogspot.com/2011/03/conqu...> 2. A surprising number of anti-cancer chemotherapy treatments can be traced to the chemical warfare compounds of World War I. <https://medicine.yale.edu/ycci/clinicaltrials/learnmore/tradition/chemotherapy/ https://medicine.yale.edu/ycci/clinicaltrials/learnmore/trad...> 3. See: <https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/05/black-americans-have-fewer-years-to-live-heres-why https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/05/black...> and "The gap between blacks and whites was seven years in 1990. By 2014, the most recent year on record, it had shrunk to 3.4 years, the smallest in history, with life expectancy at 75.6 years for blacks and 79 years for whites." <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/09/health/blacks-see-gains-in-life-expectancy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/09/health/blacks-see-gains-i...>
jddj 3y ago
And to add another case, you step out of the cinema and make some rather tasteless remark about the lead actor. Your relatively well-chosen circle of friends reacts to that negatively and you concede that you were probably being unfair. The online equivalent of that is more like a splitting of universes. Half of the comment's blast radius impacts a group of people who much like your friends finds it distasteful, but unlike your friends has very little other context about you with which to build an image. They launch an attack against this new simulacrum. The other half finds, amongst the near-infinite crowd of people you're not hanging out with right now (many of which wouldn't have passed some other social filter of yours), some number of people who agree with and amplify your off-the-cuff nasty take.
- lqet 3y ago
  Also, in your example, if you start this remark, you will immediately get subtle non-verbal feedback, often before you have even ended your first sentence. If you see a few friends cringe, twist their mouth, or start with "errr...", you quickly realize that your opinion is unfair, strange, or has no majority. You have a chance to pull out before too much (or any) damage is done, often by simply adding an attenuating end to your sentence or by changing to tone of your voice to make it clear that you are overly cynical / sarcastic. On social media, you have usually published your opinion in several multi-sentence posts, without any non-verbal context at all, before any feedback is received. Human conversation is a delicate dance to a fine, multi-dimensional tune. In comparison, online conversation seems like shadow boxing.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    The trio of direct-ancestor messages I am replying to is a great summary.
  - lynx23 3y ago
    So, are only opinions which have a majority worth voicing these days, or even worse, should every opinion that does not conform with majority be kept to oneself? Do you know what you are implying with this?
dredmorbius 3y ago
That's mostly describing context collapse, yes? <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse>
robertlagrant 3y ago
> Who had the brilliant idea to change directors mid trilogy? Whoever it was hopefully didn't also annihilate the all other properties under their purview in the last 2 years.
steveBK123 3y ago
One issue with social media not scaling is that ~5% of the population is insane. In day to day real life, you don't notice 95% of the time, and when you do, you avoid that person in your life going forward. Online, the 5% insane are over-represented, and a constant presence in any social media interaction beyond a few eyeballs.
- Kosirich 3y ago
  Well put. I think the 5% is a combo of "low IQ psychopaths", narcissist and just assholes ("bad people"). The word insane IMO points perhaps to much to inability for rational judgment, while a certain % of 5% is very much aware of their impact. The most dangerous among the bunch are obviously high IQ psychopaths...
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Anyone who has worked a retail job, sat on a condo board, worked in a medical office, etc .. dealt with general public, basically understands this principle. Someone will inevitable nitpick my particular choice of word, but "insane" is the general non-clinical description of the category. Points to high value in making your kids work a bad retail job in high school to build some character & experience this first hand early.
    - specialist 3y ago
      For reasons, I had to learn about actual insanity. 5% is spot on (filed under believe but cannot prove). The kicker is when someone is high functioning, as in can pass for sane, in most contexts. But then unpredictably acts totally out of bounds, sometimes in very scary ways. Start thinking about insanity and you'll get pulled down the sinkhole of "what is sane?", "am I insane?", "would I know if I wasn't?" IMHO, the takeaway point isn't "insane" or "sane". It's more like "Do I have a theory of mind for the person(s) I'm interacing with?" and "How do I have compassion for people who are suffering in ways that I don't understand?" YMMV.
    - maccard 3y ago
JoeyJoJoJr 3y ago
Social media in its current incarnation has a foundation of perverse incentives, so its outcomes will of course be perverse. IMO social media has massive potential to be a truly positive force in our existence, if only the positive incentives could be embedded into its fabric.
heresie-dabord 3y ago
> human interactions in general don't scale The reason why human interactions do in fact scale socially is because in the real world there are consequences for bad behaviour. People carry resentments but restrain themselves because of the risk to their benefits in participating in society. In the fiction that is social-media business, there are no consequences. Petty resentment trumps social principles.
phkahler 3y ago
>> Take that to Twitter, use the same words, and now the same thing is an addition to the torrent of hate aimed at the movie's director. Thats because of the commercialization of social media and making posts public. If you comment in your private FB feed it will most likely be a minimal response. It's still not the same as talking to the person you just saw it with, but it stays within a closer circle.
- amelius 3y ago
  But then it's not really social media anymore, and closer to good old communication through telephony. The point is that 1 person broadcasting to many doesn't scale, unless you are prepared to deal with the mess.
atak1 3y ago
Doesn't the movie example provide a counterpoint? Some human interactions do scale - townspeakers, specifically do on Twitter, on Instagram. 1-1 discussions don't. Is the point more that social media is mixing various human interactions into the same bucket of "online discourse", and mixing the two (1-1's vs town halls) makes it "something perverse"? It's like accidentally handing your friend a mic during your walk back from the movies.

eloisant 3y ago

People have to understand that posting to Twitter is the equivalent of shouting in a megaphone at Time Square. It's not the equivalent of sharing something with your close friends, even if some people might think so. Yes most of the time your Twitts will only be noticed by your close friends. But they're still public speech.

gspencley 3y ago

It's also worth noting that even with in-person interaction, when you've got a party of more than 4 people, even sitting at the same table together, the group typically splits into smaller groups with their own individual conversations. Any in-person situation where a "group conversation" is meant to scale (ex: town hall meeting or class room), there is always a person in charge of leading and moderating the conversation (hand raising, mic queuing etc.).

dredmorbius 3y ago

One useful analytic trick I've developed is of inverting propositions: "human interactions in general don't scale" gives us "how is it that human interactions can and do scale?" Because one frame of history is to look at it as the story of precisely that scaling: family units to clans, clans to tribes, tribes to warlords or kingdoms, kingdoms to empires, the emergence of democratic republics (or of communist states, if you subscribe to an alternate arc), increasing scales of militaries, of religions, of commerce, of academia, etc., etc. Each of these can be considered as networks, and there are some well-known models of network value. The naive Metcalfe model states that network value grows with the square of the nodes. A superior alternative was proposed by Ben Tilly (btilly at HN) and Andrew Odlyzko, which is that the value grows as n * log(n), that is, additional nodes add value, but comparatively less over time. I've extended that to include a constant cost function, that is, one that's uniform for the network (at least on average), though it may change over time: V = n * log(n) - k * n This means that the value of the network grows so long as k n is less than n * log(n). Put another way, k constrains the maximum size of the network. Your network will grow if you can reduce k and keep it small. One way this manifests is as hygiene factors. Through the mid-19th century, the maximum size of a city was limited by its reproductive rate less its death rate plus net in-migration. As deaths typically outpaced live births (from disease and accidents, generally), cities needed to sustain large in-migration simply in order to maintain constant size. And the limit for 19th-century London was about 1 million people, roughly the size of ancient Rome at its peak. Deaths from epidemics such as cholera would claim tens of thousands of victims per year. The solution was public health and hygiene, particularly the establishment of both clean fresh-water supplies, and of removing sewage waste. That latter was somewhat accidental: sewers built to drain away storm water were connected to by individual households as those installed flush toilets. The sewerage and storm water were drained away far to the east at the Thames Estuary. Further advances came with food purity regulations, pasteurisation of milk, improved preservation and canning, refrigeration, increased bathing and handwashing. In the case of New York City (which saw a similar set of improvements) 85% of the reduction in mortality from 1850 to 2015 had occurred by 1920, which is before the introduction of modern antibiotics, most vaccines, organ transplants, medical imaging, and cancer treatments.[1][2] I'd first seen this pointed out by Laurie Garrett in the 1990s. The further increases in the late 20th century largely come not from medical technology but rather access to medical care, and show far more strongly in under-served population (minorities generally, Black women, and especially Black men) than among the White population.[3] More recently Robert J. Gordon made this a major point of his analysis in The Rise and Fall of American Growth, noting an almost complete halt to medical progress (as measured by outcomes) beginning in the 1960s / 70s. (2015). Put another way: one of the key reasons a site such as Facebook can grow to 5 billion MAU is because it tamps down hard on the systemic costs imposed by each additional member. In particular I've noted a general progression of decline as sites scale, with consistent patterns at roughly order-of-magnitude scales: 10, 100, 1k, 10k, 100k, 1m, and beyond. Networks have a number of characteristics: scale or size, topology (e.g., point-to-point, star, tree, mesh, hybrid), speed (the rate at which actions or messages propagate), etc. It's far easier to maintain control over a star (broadcast) network than a mesh (fully p2p) network, as the central node is the sole originator of content, and mediates all interactions. As I've describe elsewhere in this thread, hierarchical, modular or divisional structures tend to scale far better than monolithic ones. They do of course have their own limitations. The key takeaway though is that scaling interactive networks, of any type, is largely a cost-minimisation function. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Graphically illustrated in "The Conquest of Pestilence in New York City" <https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uTWEATUzgxk/TXQoTibILtI/AAAAAAAAAAM/eyirotYDmXo/s1600/2004_01_healthstat.jpg https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uTWEATUzgxk/TXQoTibILtI/AAAAAAAAA...> <https://economicspsychologypolicy.blogspot.com/2011/03/conquest-of-pestilence-in-new-york-city.html https://economicspsychologypolicy.blogspot.com/2011/03/conqu...> 2. A surprising number of anti-cancer chemotherapy treatments can be traced to the chemical warfare compounds of World War I. <https://medicine.yale.edu/ycci/clinicaltrials/learnmore/tradition/chemotherapy/ https://medicine.yale.edu/ycci/clinicaltrials/learnmore/trad...> 3. See: <https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/05/black-americans-have-fewer-years-to-live-heres-why https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/05/black...> and "The gap between blacks and whites was seven years in 1990. By 2014, the most recent year on record, it had shrunk to 3.4 years, the smallest in history, with life expectancy at 75.6 years for blacks and 79 years for whites." <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/09/health/blacks-see-gains-in-life-expectancy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/09/health/blacks-see-gains-i...>

jddj 3y ago

And to add another case, you step out of the cinema and make some rather tasteless remark about the lead actor. Your relatively well-chosen circle of friends reacts to that negatively and you concede that you were probably being unfair. The online equivalent of that is more like a splitting of universes. Half of the comment's blast radius impacts a group of people who much like your friends finds it distasteful, but unlike your friends has very little other context about you with which to build an image. They launch an attack against this new simulacrum. The other half finds, amongst the near-infinite crowd of people you're not hanging out with right now (many of which wouldn't have passed some other social filter of yours), some number of people who agree with and amplify your off-the-cuff nasty take.

lqet 3y ago
Also, in your example, if you start this remark, you will immediately get subtle non-verbal feedback, often before you have even ended your first sentence. If you see a few friends cringe, twist their mouth, or start with "errr...", you quickly realize that your opinion is unfair, strange, or has no majority. You have a chance to pull out before too much (or any) damage is done, often by simply adding an attenuating end to your sentence or by changing to tone of your voice to make it clear that you are overly cynical / sarcastic. On social media, you have usually published your opinion in several multi-sentence posts, without any non-verbal context at all, before any feedback is received. Human conversation is a delicate dance to a fine, multi-dimensional tune. In comparison, online conversation seems like shadow boxing.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  The trio of direct-ancestor messages I am replying to is a great summary.
- lynx23 3y ago
  So, are only opinions which have a majority worth voicing these days, or even worse, should every opinion that does not conform with majority be kept to oneself? Do you know what you are implying with this?

dredmorbius 3y ago

That's mostly describing context collapse, yes? <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse>

robertlagrant 3y ago

> Who had the brilliant idea to change directors mid trilogy? Whoever it was hopefully didn't also annihilate the all other properties under their purview in the last 2 years.

steveBK123 3y ago

One issue with social media not scaling is that ~5% of the population is insane. In day to day real life, you don't notice 95% of the time, and when you do, you avoid that person in your life going forward. Online, the 5% insane are over-represented, and a constant presence in any social media interaction beyond a few eyeballs.

Kosirich 3y ago
Well put. I think the 5% is a combo of "low IQ psychopaths", narcissist and just assholes ("bad people"). The word insane IMO points perhaps to much to inability for rational judgment, while a certain % of 5% is very much aware of their impact. The most dangerous among the bunch are obviously high IQ psychopaths...
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Anyone who has worked a retail job, sat on a condo board, worked in a medical office, etc .. dealt with general public, basically understands this principle. Someone will inevitable nitpick my particular choice of word, but "insane" is the general non-clinical description of the category. Points to high value in making your kids work a bad retail job in high school to build some character & experience this first hand early.
  - specialist 3y ago
    For reasons, I had to learn about actual insanity. 5% is spot on (filed under believe but cannot prove). The kicker is when someone is high functioning, as in can pass for sane, in most contexts. But then unpredictably acts totally out of bounds, sometimes in very scary ways. Start thinking about insanity and you'll get pulled down the sinkhole of "what is sane?", "am I insane?", "would I know if I wasn't?" IMHO, the takeaway point isn't "insane" or "sane". It's more like "Do I have a theory of mind for the person(s) I'm interacing with?" and "How do I have compassion for people who are suffering in ways that I don't understand?" YMMV.
  - maccard 3y ago

JoeyJoJoJr 3y ago

Social media in its current incarnation has a foundation of perverse incentives, so its outcomes will of course be perverse. IMO social media has massive potential to be a truly positive force in our existence, if only the positive incentives could be embedded into its fabric.

heresie-dabord 3y ago

> human interactions in general don't scale The reason why human interactions do in fact scale socially is because in the real world there are consequences for bad behaviour. People carry resentments but restrain themselves because of the risk to their benefits in participating in society. In the fiction that is social-media business, there are no consequences. Petty resentment trumps social principles.

phkahler 3y ago

>> Take that to Twitter, use the same words, and now the same thing is an addition to the torrent of hate aimed at the movie's director. Thats because of the commercialization of social media and making posts public. If you comment in your private FB feed it will most likely be a minimal response. It's still not the same as talking to the person you just saw it with, but it stays within a closer circle.

amelius 3y ago
But then it's not really social media anymore, and closer to good old communication through telephony. The point is that 1 person broadcasting to many doesn't scale, unless you are prepared to deal with the mess.

atak1 3y ago

Doesn't the movie example provide a counterpoint? Some human interactions do scale - townspeakers, specifically do on Twitter, on Instagram. 1-1 discussions don't. Is the point more that social media is mixing various human interactions into the same bucket of "online discourse", and mixing the two (1-1's vs town halls) makes it "something perverse"? It's like accidentally handing your friend a mic during your walk back from the movies.