6 ms·

To be honest, I don't really think there's much value in social networks for humanity. In theory, they can do something good and some people see only positive e

To be honest, I don't really think there's much value in social networks for humanity. In theory, they can do something good and some people see only positive effects, but it seems that the combination of pseudo-anonymity with algorithms inevitably brings out the worst in people.

kornhole 3y ago
Social media is the most important counter measure to propaganda. Before social media, we had a one way stream of information from the media outlets without much opportunity to question, discuss, and debunk. The fediverse resolves the problem of centrally controlled algorithms and censorship that manipulate people's speech depending on the moderation rules of individual instances.
- logicprog 3y ago
  This is a good point actually, despite my reservations about social media, if you want to get a big message out quickly there really is nothing better than something like twitter.
- speff 3y ago
  Your first sentence is the exact reason why propaganda thrives in social media. There's an understanding that fellow people are somehow more trustworthy than Big Media. The part that's not considered is that people on a whole are not able to understand every intricacy of problems out in the world - but they sure do love sharing opinions about every problem as if they do understand. Given this, easy-to-digest messages are easily amplified through social media and every complex detail is withered to nothing. This is why I stopped using Lemmy. The larger communities (read: the only ones that get any posts) ended up being a worse echo-chamber than every other platform due to people repeating the same simple concepts ad nauseam.
  - andoando 3y ago
    100% agree. I think Reddit is a huge propaganda machine in itself. The most ironic thread I’ve seen was a headline about how Republicans were more susceptible to propaganda, with every comment of course being 3-10 words amounting to “oh yeah so true, they’re terrible”. Anyone that actually read past the headline though could see the article was total nonsense. I suppose it may be harder to control since a central authority can’t publish anything they want.
    - hellojesus 3y ago
      At one point I heard someone talking about how people have transitioned from reading articles to only reading the headlines. Your comment reminds me that many people do this for most of their news. And I'm guilty too. I usually read comments on HN before the article, if even I read the article. Very interesting shift in media consumption, and it may help explain the sensational/disconnected headlines.
  - kornhole 3y ago
    All information can be considered propaganda as defined by Edward Bernays in his book Propaganda. Yes groups game social media to propagate information. Yes centralized algorithmically controlled platforms are easier to manipulate conversation. Yes you must weed through the chaf of useless opinions. Yes echo chambers are often reinforced. If topics are openly discussed, untrue narratives generally dissolve. What better tool do we have?
- iteratethis 3y ago
  Not really. First, nobody cares what anybody on the Fediverse says. It's tiny. It's pinnacle "app", Mastodon, is losing lots of MAU every single day and is now below 1M MAU. Besides being tiny, it's scattered and discovery and search do not work. How can this mess possibly counter propaganda? Second, whilst the Fediverse may not have sophisticated algorithms, it very much has censorship and typically way more than traditional social networks. It's basically a collection of far-left misfits that engage in constant defederation wars. You can't even post a photo of a meal because somebody will be "triggered".
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Has anybody written this up? I think it could be interesting to see how things are going.
  - kornhole 3y ago
    A good discussion between two people can enhance their understandings. Size/MAU is irrelevant in this context. People in my network smash propaganda every day. I can understand how you had this experience with the fediverse, but it has gotten better for me over the years. Many big instances are wokist with all kinds of rules such as banning hate speech, but you have many such as noauthority.social that are explicitly free speech. I have been running my own instance for years. People can block me, but nobody can kick me off.
- Minor49er 3y ago
  On the contrary, social media is a huge target for propaganda Special interest groups have been around forever (see Cryptome's article "The Gentleperson's Guide to Forum Spies" which outlines some useful tactics). These groups still exist (eg: the JIDF, or ShareBlue in whatever name it's calling itself these days, to name a couple) Platforms themselves also engage in tactics such as shadowbanning its users (Reddit and Twitter were both in the news for this at least a few times), or using a curation algorithm to show you what it thinks is relevant (Facebook's wall, or YouTube comments/chat being shuffled rather than showing activity chronologically to discourage discussion and to more easily hide censored comments). The idea that social media platforms are not one-way is an illusion In short, the people who you're talking to are not always real people. Some of the discussions you're trying to have might be getting silenced without you knowing. And the facts you read from a given source could have been invented. The Fediverse isn't exempt from these problems
logicprog 3y ago
I tend to agree with this sort of. In my opinion, stuff that's more real time, ephemeral, one to one, and focused on closed groups below a certain size, like IRC or Discord, or stuff that is one to many like modern social media but much less highly visible and networked, like the classic blogosphere, tends to be much more healthy and in the long run rewarding then microblogging social media like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or whatever. I don't think it's necessarily the anonymity though. Or even the algorithms — the fediverse has no algorithms and yet in my experience (having been a minor player in some big drama there before I left) it's getting just as toxic and judgy as Twitter, maybe even more. I think it's more that in micro blogging social media, because interactions and posts are automatically broadcast to this huge audience that doesnt necessarily share any values or social norms, and are immediately highly discoverable and visible to everyone even outside the people who initially saw it, and these interactions can sort of stay around in the zeitgeist a bit more permanently than an instant message, instead of being ephemeral, in the moment, and directed at one or two or a few people within a closed form community, every post you make and every interaction with people takes on a sort of grandstanding, performing for the crowd, dare I say it virtue signaling (I say this as a leftist lol so you know I'm serious) tenor. It becomes automatically a lot more adversarial and fake and just weird and distorted. And then if you add on top of that the fact that posts and responses are highly asynchronous, so it's actually difficult to feel like you're really having a dialogue with a person, instead of just combatting disembodied words on a screen, and difficult to engage in compassion and quickly correct misunderstandings and respond to feelings in the moment, it means that all of the grandstanding and performing for the crowd and virtue signaling will be that much more dysfunctional and detached from actual human social interaction.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Chronological feed + boosting is an algorithm and it's about as toxic of an algorithm as you could get without making a data set of toxic vs toxic posts.
api 3y ago
It's difficult to impossible to implement bulk level social media algorithms on decentralized networks because no single node has all the data and views/interactions are largely private. This is a feature and is perhaps an even more compelling reason to go federated or decentralized than the other autonomy and privacy related reasons. Social media algorithms are cultural lobotomy machines. A great example of technological limitations improving content is podcasts. Podcasts are one-way, still fairly simple in their distribution methods (RSS and a few major apps but no clear monopoly), and mostly non-interactive. This limits the ability of platforms and advertisers to ruin them, which is why podcasting is still a bastion of quality media online.
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  it was quite easy for a small team to crawl and index a good portion of the internet, enough to become the de facto gateway (talking about Google). it was similarly possible for a relatively small team to crawl a good chunk of the available internet and train some of the most sophisticated "algorithms" we've seen on them (talking about Open AI). if there is an incentive, this problem can be solved. if this was actually a hard problem, most current social media companies wouldn't put so much effort in restricting crawling to force everyone through restricted API access (look at Twitter, Reddit, Instagram or Facebook, as examples).
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  I make algorithms that filter RSS feeds and other social media content. You don't need a global view of the system at all to do this, you just need a point of view. That is, if you have a few thousand posts and a thumbs up/thumbs down judgement you can train an ML model that will predict those judgements. With about two days looking at toots I could make a model that shows you nothing but angry toots about politics or one that removes angry toots (could take down that keyword filter that means I never hear if somebody is having trouble with the transmission in their truck or that Transnistria got invaded.) The main reason I haven't developed a social media (as opposed to product/service) sentiment model like this is that it would involve looking at a few thousand angry toots. (1) The reason I want it is that I don't want to read those toots, (2) it would cause me great suffering to look at those toots. Social media moderators at companies like Facebook have been traumatized, it's no joke. If it was my social network, I'd use that filter to put a brake on selfish angry memes spreading so that the pain of one person reading angry toots gives relief to so many more. I have a model that predicts the probability of a headline getting a lot of comments relative to votes on hacker news: some high scoring headlines in my RSS reader right now are: Why do women commit far less crime than men? Study suggests anti-Black racism may account for conservatives' negative reactions to jobs requiring DEI statements Checking a bag will cost you more on United Airlines, which is copying a similar move by American Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened (2022) Three of those are clickbait, the last one is a good HN submission. A social media sentiment model can give a larger algorithm a "superego". There are other ways to pursue engagement other than selfish angry memes.
lorean_victor 3y ago
I've got to disagree on this point. I am a firm believer in "democratisation" of anything, including "publishing content that many other people will see". this is what social media mainly have done, in my opinion. they have made it extremely easy to publish content. the "social" part is just to further lower the barrier: it is easier to quote or comment on something someone else has already said compared to posting something out of the blue, and features like "like" or "share" allow you to create content with push of a button. they have also used other techniques that has no social aspect (Twitter's character limit, TikTok's musics and video length limit, Snapchat's stories, etc). of course, that means posting and spreading "worst in people" is also easier (as is spreading spam, etc). this aspect I feel has nothing to do with the "social" part of these platforms, any form of lowering the entry barrier would have caused more terrible things to be published and spread (maybe with different extents, but not essentially different). p.s. you might find this interesting if you haven't seen it already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuFlMtZmvY0&t https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuFlMtZmvY0&t
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  > this is what social media mainly have done, in my opinion. they have made it extremely easy to publish content. the "social" part is just to further lower the barrier: it is easier to quote or comment on something someone else has already said compared to posting something out of the blue, and features like "like" or "share" allow you to create content with push of a button. they have also used other techniques that has no social aspect (Twitter's character limit, TikTok's musics and video length limit, Snapchat's stories, etc). It was very easy to publish things on the internet before modern social media.
  - lorean_victor 3y ago
    how, though? I doubt we had an easier method than opening your phone and just typing a few sentences in a text box, or just "liking" or "reposting" something.
pembrook 3y ago
Somehow amusing you’re posting this on a pseudo-anonymous social network with an upvote based algorithm. Although I’d probably agree. Even tightly moderated communities who fancy themselves as “intellectual” and “rational” like this one are prone to bizarre group-think and emotional manipulation. But that’s also just humans in general. What you might call bringing out “the worst” in people, might actually be the best we can do given our biology.
shrimp_emoji 3y ago
Good. The "worst" in people is a part of people. To pretend it doesn't exist and suppress it forever is an insane social engineering experiment. And the Dionysian night of the Internet is a way better and safer place for it than the Appolonian day of real life. If you're willing to surrender that outlet and the game theoretic ground of pseudo/anonymity because your feelings are too hurt, I sorely hope whatever totalitarian government is in your future punishes you for your weakness.

kornhole 3y ago

Social media is the most important counter measure to propaganda. Before social media, we had a one way stream of information from the media outlets without much opportunity to question, discuss, and debunk. The fediverse resolves the problem of centrally controlled algorithms and censorship that manipulate people's speech depending on the moderation rules of individual instances.

logicprog 3y ago
This is a good point actually, despite my reservations about social media, if you want to get a big message out quickly there really is nothing better than something like twitter.
speff 3y ago
Your first sentence is the exact reason why propaganda thrives in social media. There's an understanding that fellow people are somehow more trustworthy than Big Media. The part that's not considered is that people on a whole are not able to understand every intricacy of problems out in the world - but they sure do love sharing opinions about every problem as if they do understand. Given this, easy-to-digest messages are easily amplified through social media and every complex detail is withered to nothing. This is why I stopped using Lemmy. The larger communities (read: the only ones that get any posts) ended up being a worse echo-chamber than every other platform due to people repeating the same simple concepts ad nauseam.
- andoando 3y ago
  100% agree. I think Reddit is a huge propaganda machine in itself. The most ironic thread I’ve seen was a headline about how Republicans were more susceptible to propaganda, with every comment of course being 3-10 words amounting to “oh yeah so true, they’re terrible”. Anyone that actually read past the headline though could see the article was total nonsense. I suppose it may be harder to control since a central authority can’t publish anything they want.
  - hellojesus 3y ago
    At one point I heard someone talking about how people have transitioned from reading articles to only reading the headlines. Your comment reminds me that many people do this for most of their news. And I'm guilty too. I usually read comments on HN before the article, if even I read the article. Very interesting shift in media consumption, and it may help explain the sensational/disconnected headlines.
- kornhole 3y ago
  All information can be considered propaganda as defined by Edward Bernays in his book Propaganda. Yes groups game social media to propagate information. Yes centralized algorithmically controlled platforms are easier to manipulate conversation. Yes you must weed through the chaf of useless opinions. Yes echo chambers are often reinforced. If topics are openly discussed, untrue narratives generally dissolve. What better tool do we have?
iteratethis 3y ago
Not really. First, nobody cares what anybody on the Fediverse says. It's tiny. It's pinnacle "app", Mastodon, is losing lots of MAU every single day and is now below 1M MAU. Besides being tiny, it's scattered and discovery and search do not work. How can this mess possibly counter propaganda? Second, whilst the Fediverse may not have sophisticated algorithms, it very much has censorship and typically way more than traditional social networks. It's basically a collection of far-left misfits that engage in constant defederation wars. You can't even post a photo of a meal because somebody will be "triggered".
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Has anybody written this up? I think it could be interesting to see how things are going.
- kornhole 3y ago
  A good discussion between two people can enhance their understandings. Size/MAU is irrelevant in this context. People in my network smash propaganda every day. I can understand how you had this experience with the fediverse, but it has gotten better for me over the years. Many big instances are wokist with all kinds of rules such as banning hate speech, but you have many such as noauthority.social that are explicitly free speech. I have been running my own instance for years. People can block me, but nobody can kick me off.
Minor49er 3y ago
On the contrary, social media is a huge target for propaganda Special interest groups have been around forever (see Cryptome's article "The Gentleperson's Guide to Forum Spies" which outlines some useful tactics). These groups still exist (eg: the JIDF, or ShareBlue in whatever name it's calling itself these days, to name a couple) Platforms themselves also engage in tactics such as shadowbanning its users (Reddit and Twitter were both in the news for this at least a few times), or using a curation algorithm to show you what it thinks is relevant (Facebook's wall, or YouTube comments/chat being shuffled rather than showing activity chronologically to discourage discussion and to more easily hide censored comments). The idea that social media platforms are not one-way is an illusion In short, the people who you're talking to are not always real people. Some of the discussions you're trying to have might be getting silenced without you knowing. And the facts you read from a given source could have been invented. The Fediverse isn't exempt from these problems

logicprog 3y ago

I tend to agree with this sort of. In my opinion, stuff that's more real time, ephemeral, one to one, and focused on closed groups below a certain size, like IRC or Discord, or stuff that is one to many like modern social media but much less highly visible and networked, like the classic blogosphere, tends to be much more healthy and in the long run rewarding then microblogging social media like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or whatever. I don't think it's necessarily the anonymity though. Or even the algorithms — the fediverse has no algorithms and yet in my experience (having been a minor player in some big drama there before I left) it's getting just as toxic and judgy as Twitter, maybe even more. I think it's more that in micro blogging social media, because interactions and posts are automatically broadcast to this huge audience that doesnt necessarily share any values or social norms, and are immediately highly discoverable and visible to everyone even outside the people who initially saw it, and these interactions can sort of stay around in the zeitgeist a bit more permanently than an instant message, instead of being ephemeral, in the moment, and directed at one or two or a few people within a closed form community, every post you make and every interaction with people takes on a sort of grandstanding, performing for the crowd, dare I say it virtue signaling (I say this as a leftist lol so you know I'm serious) tenor. It becomes automatically a lot more adversarial and fake and just weird and distorted. And then if you add on top of that the fact that posts and responses are highly asynchronous, so it's actually difficult to feel like you're really having a dialogue with a person, instead of just combatting disembodied words on a screen, and difficult to engage in compassion and quickly correct misunderstandings and respond to feelings in the moment, it means that all of the grandstanding and performing for the crowd and virtue signaling will be that much more dysfunctional and detached from actual human social interaction.

PaulHoule 3y ago
Chronological feed + boosting is an algorithm and it's about as toxic of an algorithm as you could get without making a data set of toxic vs toxic posts.

api 3y ago

It's difficult to impossible to implement bulk level social media algorithms on decentralized networks because no single node has all the data and views/interactions are largely private. This is a feature and is perhaps an even more compelling reason to go federated or decentralized than the other autonomy and privacy related reasons. Social media algorithms are cultural lobotomy machines. A great example of technological limitations improving content is podcasts. Podcasts are one-way, still fairly simple in their distribution methods (RSS and a few major apps but no clear monopoly), and mostly non-interactive. This limits the ability of platforms and advertisers to ruin them, which is why podcasting is still a bastion of quality media online.

lorean_victor 3y ago
it was quite easy for a small team to crawl and index a good portion of the internet, enough to become the de facto gateway (talking about Google). it was similarly possible for a relatively small team to crawl a good chunk of the available internet and train some of the most sophisticated "algorithms" we've seen on them (talking about Open AI). if there is an incentive, this problem can be solved. if this was actually a hard problem, most current social media companies wouldn't put so much effort in restricting crawling to force everyone through restricted API access (look at Twitter, Reddit, Instagram or Facebook, as examples).
PaulHoule 3y ago
I make algorithms that filter RSS feeds and other social media content. You don't need a global view of the system at all to do this, you just need a point of view. That is, if you have a few thousand posts and a thumbs up/thumbs down judgement you can train an ML model that will predict those judgements. With about two days looking at toots I could make a model that shows you nothing but angry toots about politics or one that removes angry toots (could take down that keyword filter that means I never hear if somebody is having trouble with the transmission in their truck or that Transnistria got invaded.) The main reason I haven't developed a social media (as opposed to product/service) sentiment model like this is that it would involve looking at a few thousand angry toots. (1) The reason I want it is that I don't want to read those toots, (2) it would cause me great suffering to look at those toots. Social media moderators at companies like Facebook have been traumatized, it's no joke. If it was my social network, I'd use that filter to put a brake on selfish angry memes spreading so that the pain of one person reading angry toots gives relief to so many more. I have a model that predicts the probability of a headline getting a lot of comments relative to votes on hacker news: some high scoring headlines in my RSS reader right now are: Why do women commit far less crime than men? Study suggests anti-Black racism may account for conservatives' negative reactions to jobs requiring DEI statements Checking a bag will cost you more on United Airlines, which is copying a similar move by American Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened (2022) Three of those are clickbait, the last one is a good HN submission. A social media sentiment model can give a larger algorithm a "superego". There are other ways to pursue engagement other than selfish angry memes.

lorean_victor 3y ago

I've got to disagree on this point. I am a firm believer in "democratisation" of anything, including "publishing content that many other people will see". this is what social media mainly have done, in my opinion. they have made it extremely easy to publish content. the "social" part is just to further lower the barrier: it is easier to quote or comment on something someone else has already said compared to posting something out of the blue, and features like "like" or "share" allow you to create content with push of a button. they have also used other techniques that has no social aspect (Twitter's character limit, TikTok's musics and video length limit, Snapchat's stories, etc). of course, that means posting and spreading "worst in people" is also easier (as is spreading spam, etc). this aspect I feel has nothing to do with the "social" part of these platforms, any form of lowering the entry barrier would have caused more terrible things to be published and spread (maybe with different extents, but not essentially different). p.s. you might find this interesting if you haven't seen it already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuFlMtZmvY0&t https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuFlMtZmvY0&t

vouaobrasil 3y ago
> this is what social media mainly have done, in my opinion. they have made it extremely easy to publish content. the "social" part is just to further lower the barrier: it is easier to quote or comment on something someone else has already said compared to posting something out of the blue, and features like "like" or "share" allow you to create content with push of a button. they have also used other techniques that has no social aspect (Twitter's character limit, TikTok's musics and video length limit, Snapchat's stories, etc). It was very easy to publish things on the internet before modern social media.
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  how, though? I doubt we had an easier method than opening your phone and just typing a few sentences in a text box, or just "liking" or "reposting" something.

pembrook 3y ago

Somehow amusing you’re posting this on a pseudo-anonymous social network with an upvote based algorithm. Although I’d probably agree. Even tightly moderated communities who fancy themselves as “intellectual” and “rational” like this one are prone to bizarre group-think and emotional manipulation. But that’s also just humans in general. What you might call bringing out “the worst” in people, might actually be the best we can do given our biology.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago

Good. The "worst" in people is a part of people. To pretend it doesn't exist and suppress it forever is an insane social engineering experiment. And the Dionysian night of the Internet is a way better and safer place for it than the Appolonian day of real life. If you're willing to surrender that outlet and the game theoretic ground of pseudo/anonymity because your feelings are too hurt, I sorely hope whatever totalitarian government is in your future punishes you for your weakness.