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With all due respect, the narrative being spun here positions the social network as an entity as an impartial, disinterested actor that is simply facilitating c

With all due respect, the narrative being spun here positions the social network as an entity as an impartial, disinterested actor that is simply facilitating conversations: this is not the case. All mainstream social media websites are (operated by) for-profit entities. They are selling access to human attention to advertisers to generate profit. Because of this, they are motivated to increase the amount of attention they have to sell; keep people in their app. And they have found via reliable experimentation by numerous social scientists that the most effective way is to keep users in a near-constant state of some combination of rage, indignation or disgust. This poisons the entire well. I don't think the issue is that ~5% of the population is insane. I think the issue is social media has every reason in the world to find that 5% and give them the largest megaphone possible, up to and including TikTok's model of outright paying them for their insanity. The fact that the agent mediating all this intimacy as put by the author is inclined to do this, to shove the insane person in front of as many people as possible because they will readily cause reactions and further engagement with their product, makes it impossible to ignore them, nor to ignore the subsequent consequences of them being shoved in front of so many other people. I've said it before and I'll say it again: social media cannot be a profit-driven industry. It simply cannot. The incentives for what makes a good, healthy, useful social media apparatus and the incentives that make it profitable to industry are two circles, with MAYBE 2% overlap in the middle on a good day.

em-bee 3y ago
they have found via reliable experimentation by numerous social scientists that the most effective way is to keep users in a near-constant state of some combination of rage, indignation or disgust this is only true for social media that promotes particular content, which means it is not true for signal, telegram, whatsapp, wechat and many others that just share messages as the users intended.
- polygamous_bat 3y ago
  I've never used WeChat, but are signal/telegram/Whatsapp considered "social media" now? I thought they belonged to a separate category of "messaging apps", which consist of people messaging others that they already possibly know from a different channel.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    fair point. this is a matter of definition. i agree with the distinction, but this is not shared by everyone. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media so i find it useful to point it out. case in point, in this wikipedia article wechat is clearly categorized as social media, even though it's messaging component is no different than whatsapp, telegram or signal, which are "maybe" social media. in summary, some people call them social media, and some don't.
  - grotorea 3y ago
    This is not the only use of those apps. There are plenty of large channels that are either broadcasting from a central source of a sort of forum sorted by new of people who don't know each other but share some type of interest, specially in countries and regions where those apps are dominant (which I believe is not the case of the US).
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  As the other commenter said, I think most people would call those more messaging apps than social media (though wechat blurs the line even further being a sort of everything app but I digress). That said it's also worth considering that few users of any of these products use only one; therefore, the network effects of say, Facebook steering people into more extreme content, will reflect back when they join more extreme Telegram channels, with it being at least decently plausible that further interaction on Telegram will steer them into yet further Facebook Groups or into the influence of content creators elsewhere still. Enough of these utilities engage in this attention-grabbing funnel tactic that the effects of their algorithms far exceed the boundaries of their own products, and reinforce each other as well.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    network effects of say, Facebook steering people into more extreme content, will reflect back when they join more extreme Telegram channels, with it being at least decently plausible that further interaction on Telegram will steer them into yet further Facebook Groups or into the influence of content creators elsewhere still. the distinction is where the steering comes from. on facebook the steering is affected by the algorithm, which decided what messages you see, while on telegram it is not. on facebook, twitter, youtube etc, i can be confronted with extreme content that i didn't ask for. on telegram, whatsapp, wechat, etc, i only get content that i explicitly asked for.
    - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
      Oh yeah, 100% agree and they're much less toxic for it. But messaging apps like telegram because of the lack of reach of their groups, also makes them more difficult to moderate which is worth noting too. The people who believe whatever extremism is on offer are not likely to report those channels, and even if they were, Telegram could just remove the reporting user, say "we'll take care of it" and do nothing because the likelihood of followup is basically nil.
      - em-bee 3y ago
        why would groups have to be moderated from the outside? if their content is not public because you can't find it unless you explicitly join the group does it matter if the conversation is happening on telegram or in a room somewhere in the city or in a private forum somewhere else?
grotorea 3y ago
Two things: First, does the problems still happen in places that aren't financially motivated like a hobby forum some guy hosts or on volunteer Mastodon servers? And don't internet forums broadly speaking also have problems even if they don't have feeds engineered for engagement? For example 4chan is just chronological sorting.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  > First, does the problems still happen in places that aren't financially motivated like a hobby forum some guy hosts or on volunteer Mastodon servers? I can't speak for Mastodon as I've never used it, but I was an avid user for a long time of many forums and boards on many topics back in the old Internet. And while we certainly had our share of flamewars about shit related to the topics, nobody was ever building a following invoking the tenets of White Supremacy on any of them? > And don't internet forums broadly speaking also have problems even if they don't have feeds engineered for engagement? For example 4chan is just chronological sorting. I mean, 4chan is a large board that doesn't have feeds, sure, but it does have different boards for different things. Most of them are benign nonsense and weeb culture stuff. What most people think is 4chan is actually 4chan's /b/ subforum. And while voting systems certainly increase engagement, I don't think they're required at all, especially when the larger community has already defined a culture of... well, whatever you'd like to call 4chan. It's certainly interesting whatever word you want to use.
  - grotorea 3y ago
    > I can't speak for Mastodon as I've never used it, but I was an avid user for a long time of many forums and boards on many topics back in the old Internet. And while we certainly had our share of flamewars about shit related to the topics, nobody was ever building a following invoking the tenets of White Supremacy on any of them? Ok, but that may be just because they were over at Stormfront, which seems to have existed since 1996. Although I guess not having to share a platform and having undesired interactions with some groups is preferable.

em-bee 3y ago

they have found via reliable experimentation by numerous social scientists that the most effective way is to keep users in a near-constant state of some combination of rage, indignation or disgust this is only true for social media that promotes particular content, which means it is not true for signal, telegram, whatsapp, wechat and many others that just share messages as the users intended.

polygamous_bat 3y ago
I've never used WeChat, but are signal/telegram/Whatsapp considered "social media" now? I thought they belonged to a separate category of "messaging apps", which consist of people messaging others that they already possibly know from a different channel.
- em-bee 3y ago
  fair point. this is a matter of definition. i agree with the distinction, but this is not shared by everyone. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media so i find it useful to point it out. case in point, in this wikipedia article wechat is clearly categorized as social media, even though it's messaging component is no different than whatsapp, telegram or signal, which are "maybe" social media. in summary, some people call them social media, and some don't.
- grotorea 3y ago
  This is not the only use of those apps. There are plenty of large channels that are either broadcasting from a central source of a sort of forum sorted by new of people who don't know each other but share some type of interest, specially in countries and regions where those apps are dominant (which I believe is not the case of the US).
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
As the other commenter said, I think most people would call those more messaging apps than social media (though wechat blurs the line even further being a sort of everything app but I digress). That said it's also worth considering that few users of any of these products use only one; therefore, the network effects of say, Facebook steering people into more extreme content, will reflect back when they join more extreme Telegram channels, with it being at least decently plausible that further interaction on Telegram will steer them into yet further Facebook Groups or into the influence of content creators elsewhere still. Enough of these utilities engage in this attention-grabbing funnel tactic that the effects of their algorithms far exceed the boundaries of their own products, and reinforce each other as well.
- em-bee 3y ago
  network effects of say, Facebook steering people into more extreme content, will reflect back when they join more extreme Telegram channels, with it being at least decently plausible that further interaction on Telegram will steer them into yet further Facebook Groups or into the influence of content creators elsewhere still. the distinction is where the steering comes from. on facebook the steering is affected by the algorithm, which decided what messages you see, while on telegram it is not. on facebook, twitter, youtube etc, i can be confronted with extreme content that i didn't ask for. on telegram, whatsapp, wechat, etc, i only get content that i explicitly asked for.
  - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
    Oh yeah, 100% agree and they're much less toxic for it. But messaging apps like telegram because of the lack of reach of their groups, also makes them more difficult to moderate which is worth noting too. The people who believe whatever extremism is on offer are not likely to report those channels, and even if they were, Telegram could just remove the reporting user, say "we'll take care of it" and do nothing because the likelihood of followup is basically nil.
    - em-bee 3y ago
      why would groups have to be moderated from the outside? if their content is not public because you can't find it unless you explicitly join the group does it matter if the conversation is happening on telegram or in a room somewhere in the city or in a private forum somewhere else?

grotorea 3y ago

Two things: First, does the problems still happen in places that aren't financially motivated like a hobby forum some guy hosts or on volunteer Mastodon servers? And don't internet forums broadly speaking also have problems even if they don't have feeds engineered for engagement? For example 4chan is just chronological sorting.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
> First, does the problems still happen in places that aren't financially motivated like a hobby forum some guy hosts or on volunteer Mastodon servers? I can't speak for Mastodon as I've never used it, but I was an avid user for a long time of many forums and boards on many topics back in the old Internet. And while we certainly had our share of flamewars about shit related to the topics, nobody was ever building a following invoking the tenets of White Supremacy on any of them? > And don't internet forums broadly speaking also have problems even if they don't have feeds engineered for engagement? For example 4chan is just chronological sorting. I mean, 4chan is a large board that doesn't have feeds, sure, but it does have different boards for different things. Most of them are benign nonsense and weeb culture stuff. What most people think is 4chan is actually 4chan's /b/ subforum. And while voting systems certainly increase engagement, I don't think they're required at all, especially when the larger community has already defined a culture of... well, whatever you'd like to call 4chan. It's certainly interesting whatever word you want to use.
- grotorea 3y ago
  > I can't speak for Mastodon as I've never used it, but I was an avid user for a long time of many forums and boards on many topics back in the old Internet. And while we certainly had our share of flamewars about shit related to the topics, nobody was ever building a following invoking the tenets of White Supremacy on any of them? Ok, but that may be just because they were over at Stormfront, which seems to have existed since 1996. Although I guess not having to share a platform and having undesired interactions with some groups is preferable.