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It's inevitable that social media will split up into separate and distinct networks of people who can no longer stand or even undertand the other sociopolitical

It's inevitable that social media will split up into separate and distinct networks of people who can no longer stand or even undertand the other sociopolitical tribes. All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance. Did this happen at all? Social networks have always been balkanized by culture.
EasyMark 2y ago
I use both X and bsky. I would say the behavior on bsky and the hate language is dialed down by a factor of 10.
shiroiushi 2y ago
It shouldn't be any surprise: it's not like the internet's userbase of 1990 represented a broad cross-section of American society, let alone western or global societies. It was mainly a bunch of academics and college students and government users. It's just gotten more and more fragmented as more people have been added.
- ipaddr 2y ago
  And social media didn't exist
  - orbat 2y ago
    Usenet, BBSs, mailing lists etc. are social media
    - lolinder 2y ago
      In most ways they were far more social than modern social media, in that they were about socializing. The distinguishing characteristic that sets modern social media apart from the old school stuff is the performative aspect of it—where everyone is now encouraged to behave as a content producer optimizing for engagement—which is hardly social.
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      They are social networks not social media, social media is when you scream in a void and the void screams back. The latrinalia of our age if you will.
      - antod 2y ago
        I wouldn't call the old stuff social networks. What made social networks a new thing was the social graph of connections becoming the information architecture of the content rather than topics. You found stuff (or it found you) by person rather than subject. Usenet was topic based (eg reddit seems closest these days), mail lists were usually topic based, forums were organised around topics etc.
    - ipaddr 2y ago
      Those are very social places but I would classify them as not social media because real names / identities weren't attached.
      - orbat 2y ago
        Real names were absolutely used on Usenet especially in the early days, ditto for mailing lists (and still are for that matter), even though technically they are pseudonymous. In any case pseudonymity doesn't seem like it's relevant for whether something is a social medium or not – many social media are pseudonymous (or even anonymous, like the chans). HN is pseudonymous. Reddit. Tumblr. The various Fediverse services.
      - ajmurmann 2y ago
        Not everyone on Twitter uses their real name. Meanwhile I knew the real names of about half the top 20 most active users on a retro gaming phpbb board in the early 00s and had meet many in person and knew we everyone lived, what other hobbies they had and what they did for work or school.
    - mingus88 2y ago
      Not in the modern sense. Those mediums do not have algorithms, feeds, followers, profiles, influencers, likes, or any features that many people point to as the toxic aspects of pretty much every commercial social media site of the last decade. I’d say livejournal was the tipping point where the internet became very self-centered and your value in the platform was measured by how much engagement you were able to get. Up until that point, in a world before blogs, social sites were mostly centered around shared interests and communities would aggressively police off topic content
      - otteromkram 2y ago
        > Not in the modern sense. Yes, no one was making that comparison.
      - arethuza 2y ago
        I wonder if Arthur T. Murray would count as an influencer?
    - jjav 2y ago
      > Usenet, BBSs, mailing lists etc. are social media In a generic sense, yes. People did socialize. But "social media" today really means: a proprietary platform controlled by a single corporation, where all the user interaction is ultimately just a ploy to keep the participation metrics up so the corporation can profile you better and sell more advertising. So in that sense, the absolute opposite.
- user3939382 2y ago
  And even then we were segregated by usenet, mailing lists, etc.
ks2048 2y ago
It does seem natural to happen. But there are loads of "neutral" accounts: gov agencies, businesses, etc that use social media for announcements and simple broadcast communication. Most are on Twitter now. I think I big question is will they add bluesky, or move (probably not, because of inertia), or something else.
alsetmusic 2y ago
[flagged]
- dandellion 2y ago
  >> It's inevitable… > Yes and no. Yes and yes. The right and the left don't even speak the same language. I'm not a native English speaker and half the time I don't even understand what the left are even saying. Examples: > regress into an id-dominated state of hyper-reality > what can be, unburdened by what has been What does that even mean? People keep calling the right stupid, but at least everybody can understand what they're talking about.
  - jrflowers 2y ago
    I think one example of hyperreality(1) would be a person seeing a phrase that they don’t immediately understand and deciding “this is how ‘the left’, a real and cohesive/consistent group, talks” 1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - athrun 2y ago
        The real world is a complicated place. You want simple answers when reality is complicated and nuanced. The fact is that there are—and have always been—people for which these things are not the same. You might want to wish it away, but that doesn't change reality.
        llm_trw 2y ago
        >>I've just committed a hate crime and possibly called for genocide. >You might want to wish it away, but that doesn't change reality. My post was 4 sentences long and you skipped 2. Why even bother replying?
spamizbad 2y ago
I disagree somewhat. Social media apps are powered by feed algorithms that fall into two camps: The first camp biases toward sprinkling provocative, highly engaged content in your feed even if it falls outside your network of follows or areas of interest. A sort of “forced discovery”. Elon’s Twitter and YouTube during the 2010s follow this model. The second camp does the same thing but requires recommended content to track closer to its perception of your interests. TikTok does this exceptionally well, to the point where people often say they feel like their feed is “reading their mind”. Bluesky seems to follow this pattern as well. The latter is more scalable than the former, but to your point it is an open question how big it scales, and maybe there’s just too many people for either approach to work.
- Onavo 2y ago
  The second camp is just artificially creating echo chambers, a virtual "separate and distinct network" for the parts that matter.
  - spamizbad 2y ago
    I disagree with this: if the only thing you allow to pierce the veil is selected based on engagement metrics you just walk away with a shallow view of your opposition. If anything this may entrench your existing views and give you a false sense of intellectual and/or moral superiority. You need to “meet people where they are” and the first type of algorithm just doesn’t do that. It just says “conservatives/liberals really like this, so you’re going to be forced to see this too because you show interest in politics” To give an example: let’s say I’m a small business owner who voted Trump but has some lingering concerns around how tariffs might impact my business. Am I going to be better informed reading some engagement-bait post from liberals talking about how I’m going to get “deservedly” crushed by tariffs or a post from a conservative economist laying out the cold hard facts (both good and bad)?
    - Onavo 2y ago
      Your argument is in support of mine. Separate networks are an interesting legal and software engineering detail, but from the POV of the user, as long as they see what they want to see, they will stay with the network.
jowea 2y ago
I don't know, the entire point of the "algorithmic bubble" was to keep the tribes separate but happy, no? And the value of the network still increases with more people on it. Maybe some future social media will figure out how to keep everyone happy at the same time. For example, I think everyone but a couple of hardcore FOSS advocates and the far-right are still using Youtube.
cosmic_cheese 2y ago
I don’t think it’s inevitable at all. In fact I believe that the present day situation boils down to one thing only: the prioritization of engagement at the cost of all else. That’s what set us down this road. It incentivizes inflammatory posting that eschews nuance and context and twists and exaggerates the subject matter in order to provoke emotional responses — whether they be angry replies, “dunk” quote-posts, reposts, or even spending a couple extra seconds with the post on screen. Anything to steal away more of your attention and mindshare. Over time, this has polarized people to ever further extremes and normalized disrespect and bickering (as opposed to discussion). It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged.
- lmm 2y ago
  > It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged. Who would read it? The same people who already avoid twitter - not journalists, and therefore not celebs/politicians.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    > Who would read it? Presumably, normal people who want to interact with people they already know? interaction with journalists and politicians is valuable in an entirely different manner.
- anon7000 2y ago
  Added to that is user choice over moderation and algorithms. That’s what’s truly interesting about BlueSky. It allows for side A and B to both exist, with people who want to be more isolated in a safe space (so to speak) to do so. That’s a really great property. If I want to engage with content I severely disagree with, I can put it in a feed I check infrequently so that it doesn’t impact my life. Humans aren’t good at coping with a constant barrage of disagreeable (for one’s personal definition of disagreeable) or inflammatory content.
protocolture 2y ago
Not really. The issue is that social media sites produce feeds and content matching, forcing alternative views in your face. Its like, they have decided to push metcalfes law as far as possible, to see when the breaking point is. Like a giant social experiment. But if everyone is in one place thats still the most desirable network to be on. Just dont push Joe Blo's dumbest political opinions in my face as sponsored content.
beeflet 2y ago
Is it inevitable? I am not sure either way. I think that if you look at real-life Friend-to-Friend groups, this is what you find: clusters of people with similar values. So it it makes sense that the same applies to F2F groups over the internet. But most social media is not F2F groups. Most (advertiser-driven) social media (including this site) is based on the idea of what I call "implicit ranking": The idea that a user can influence what another user sees (through "likes", "votes", "reports", "bumps", etc.) without having an explicit consensual relationship with them (such as a "subscription", "following", or "sharing" or "direct message channel"). This "implicit ranking" model is pretty successful because it is better at finding engaging content is and probably the dominant form of social media. In contrast to F2F, implicit ranking networks tend to promote controversial content from outgroups because angry users are engaged. We all love to flamewar sometimes, I'll admit it.
dehrmann 2y ago
If the algorithm doesn't make the filter bubble, people will make it on their own.
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  See the Fediverse for example, which prides itself on not having algorithms, and is yet the most echo-chambery and radical place I know of. People automatically filter themselves into different servers, and defederate with each other with frequency. (Whether or not this is good or bad depends on your moral views. But I think it is obvious that "algorithms" are not really to blame.)
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    Didn't it spring up in response to those blameless "algorithms"?
    - dehrmann 2y ago
      It's more a product of cheaper and easier content distribution. When TV is expensive to produce, there are only three channels, and it's heavily regulated, you target your content to be broadly appealing and inoffensive. The rise of cable TV, revocation of the fairness doctrine, rise of the internet, and fall of the USSR all led to more exposure to broader views. Like GP said, whether this is good or bad depends on your view.
      - CaptainFever 2y ago
        This is another good point. I didn't actually intend to make this point, but I wanted to thank you for pointing this out. I am not a sociologist, just a layman. But I feel that there seems to be two axis of communication. Mass (you don't know who you're talking to) vs targeted (you do know who you're talking to, like friends). Then, professional (you try to be unoffensive) vs casual (you have no such obligation). Before the Internet, generally communication happened either mass-professional (e.g. TVs, newspapers, magazines) or targeted-casual (e.g. chatting with friends and family). This reduced offense, since mass channels were largely unoffensive as you said, while targeted channels knew how to avoid offense (i.e. you knew how to not offend your friends and family). However, the Internet enabled a lot of mass-casual communication. And this created a lot of offense, because you didn't know who would read your messages (i.e. Twitter posts), while you didn't have the professional obligation to make sure it was unoffensive and easy to understand. This created a lot of misunderstandings, offense, etc., which leads to cancellations, hate mobs, etc. Do note that once again I am not a sociologist, and there seems to be holes in this view. What about large group gatherings? Trashy magazines? Clubs? They seem to be examples of mass-casual communication too.
emseetech 2y ago
I'm not convinced everyone sharing a singular global network was ever a good idea in the first place.
fooker 2y ago
There's one single that prevents this: sharing screenshots, and the impossibly difficult task of blocking those in practice.
nitwit005 2y ago
The press coverage is a bit misleading. Everyone is leaving Twitter. Liberals are just leaving faster. Keep in mind that a lot of Twitter users never wanted political content. They were there for sports, art, science discussions, etc. Some of those communities are clearly migrating.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  I think I’ve even noticed a huge decrease in hate bots lately in my feed, certainly doesn’t seem to up date as often (aka takes longer for my usual “followees”to go off the firehouse, as they have some precedence in the feed make up

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

> All of us sharing a singular global network was an exceptional and ephemeral circumstance. Did this happen at all? Social networks have always been balkanized by culture.

EasyMark 2y ago

I use both X and bsky. I would say the behavior on bsky and the hate language is dialed down by a factor of 10.

shiroiushi 2y ago

It shouldn't be any surprise: it's not like the internet's userbase of 1990 represented a broad cross-section of American society, let alone western or global societies. It was mainly a bunch of academics and college students and government users. It's just gotten more and more fragmented as more people have been added.

ipaddr 2y ago
And social media didn't exist
- orbat 2y ago
  Usenet, BBSs, mailing lists etc. are social media
  - lolinder 2y ago
    In most ways they were far more social than modern social media, in that they were about socializing. The distinguishing characteristic that sets modern social media apart from the old school stuff is the performative aspect of it—where everyone is now encouraged to behave as a content producer optimizing for engagement—which is hardly social.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    They are social networks not social media, social media is when you scream in a void and the void screams back. The latrinalia of our age if you will.
    - antod 2y ago
      I wouldn't call the old stuff social networks. What made social networks a new thing was the social graph of connections becoming the information architecture of the content rather than topics. You found stuff (or it found you) by person rather than subject. Usenet was topic based (eg reddit seems closest these days), mail lists were usually topic based, forums were organised around topics etc.
  - ipaddr 2y ago
    Those are very social places but I would classify them as not social media because real names / identities weren't attached.
    - orbat 2y ago
      Real names were absolutely used on Usenet especially in the early days, ditto for mailing lists (and still are for that matter), even though technically they are pseudonymous. In any case pseudonymity doesn't seem like it's relevant for whether something is a social medium or not – many social media are pseudonymous (or even anonymous, like the chans). HN is pseudonymous. Reddit. Tumblr. The various Fediverse services.
    - ajmurmann 2y ago
      Not everyone on Twitter uses their real name. Meanwhile I knew the real names of about half the top 20 most active users on a retro gaming phpbb board in the early 00s and had meet many in person and knew we everyone lived, what other hobbies they had and what they did for work or school.
  - mingus88 2y ago
    Not in the modern sense. Those mediums do not have algorithms, feeds, followers, profiles, influencers, likes, or any features that many people point to as the toxic aspects of pretty much every commercial social media site of the last decade. I’d say livejournal was the tipping point where the internet became very self-centered and your value in the platform was measured by how much engagement you were able to get. Up until that point, in a world before blogs, social sites were mostly centered around shared interests and communities would aggressively police off topic content
    - otteromkram 2y ago
      > Not in the modern sense. Yes, no one was making that comparison.
    - arethuza 2y ago
      I wonder if Arthur T. Murray would count as an influencer?
  - jjav 2y ago
    > Usenet, BBSs, mailing lists etc. are social media In a generic sense, yes. People did socialize. But "social media" today really means: a proprietary platform controlled by a single corporation, where all the user interaction is ultimately just a ploy to keep the participation metrics up so the corporation can profile you better and sell more advertising. So in that sense, the absolute opposite.
user3939382 2y ago
And even then we were segregated by usenet, mailing lists, etc.

ks2048 2y ago

It does seem natural to happen. But there are loads of "neutral" accounts: gov agencies, businesses, etc that use social media for announcements and simple broadcast communication. Most are on Twitter now. I think I big question is will they add bluesky, or move (probably not, because of inertia), or something else.

alsetmusic 2y ago

[flagged]

dandellion 2y ago
>> It's inevitable… > Yes and no. Yes and yes. The right and the left don't even speak the same language. I'm not a native English speaker and half the time I don't even understand what the left are even saying. Examples: > regress into an id-dominated state of hyper-reality > what can be, unburdened by what has been What does that even mean? People keep calling the right stupid, but at least everybody can understand what they're talking about.
- jrflowers 2y ago
  I think one example of hyperreality(1) would be a person seeing a phrase that they don’t immediately understand and deciding “this is how ‘the left’, a real and cohesive/consistent group, talks” 1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - athrun 2y ago
      The real world is a complicated place. You want simple answers when reality is complicated and nuanced. The fact is that there are—and have always been—people for which these things are not the same. You might want to wish it away, but that doesn't change reality.
      - llm_trw 2y ago
        >>I've just committed a hate crime and possibly called for genocide. >You might want to wish it away, but that doesn't change reality. My post was 4 sentences long and you skipped 2. Why even bother replying?

spamizbad 2y ago

I disagree somewhat. Social media apps are powered by feed algorithms that fall into two camps: The first camp biases toward sprinkling provocative, highly engaged content in your feed even if it falls outside your network of follows or areas of interest. A sort of “forced discovery”. Elon’s Twitter and YouTube during the 2010s follow this model. The second camp does the same thing but requires recommended content to track closer to its perception of your interests. TikTok does this exceptionally well, to the point where people often say they feel like their feed is “reading their mind”. Bluesky seems to follow this pattern as well. The latter is more scalable than the former, but to your point it is an open question how big it scales, and maybe there’s just too many people for either approach to work.

Onavo 2y ago
The second camp is just artificially creating echo chambers, a virtual "separate and distinct network" for the parts that matter.
- spamizbad 2y ago
  I disagree with this: if the only thing you allow to pierce the veil is selected based on engagement metrics you just walk away with a shallow view of your opposition. If anything this may entrench your existing views and give you a false sense of intellectual and/or moral superiority. You need to “meet people where they are” and the first type of algorithm just doesn’t do that. It just says “conservatives/liberals really like this, so you’re going to be forced to see this too because you show interest in politics” To give an example: let’s say I’m a small business owner who voted Trump but has some lingering concerns around how tariffs might impact my business. Am I going to be better informed reading some engagement-bait post from liberals talking about how I’m going to get “deservedly” crushed by tariffs or a post from a conservative economist laying out the cold hard facts (both good and bad)?
  - Onavo 2y ago
    Your argument is in support of mine. Separate networks are an interesting legal and software engineering detail, but from the POV of the user, as long as they see what they want to see, they will stay with the network.

jowea 2y ago

I don't know, the entire point of the "algorithmic bubble" was to keep the tribes separate but happy, no? And the value of the network still increases with more people on it. Maybe some future social media will figure out how to keep everyone happy at the same time. For example, I think everyone but a couple of hardcore FOSS advocates and the far-right are still using Youtube.

cosmic_cheese 2y ago

I don’t think it’s inevitable at all. In fact I believe that the present day situation boils down to one thing only: the prioritization of engagement at the cost of all else. That’s what set us down this road. It incentivizes inflammatory posting that eschews nuance and context and twists and exaggerates the subject matter in order to provoke emotional responses — whether they be angry replies, “dunk” quote-posts, reposts, or even spending a couple extra seconds with the post on screen. Anything to steal away more of your attention and mindshare. Over time, this has polarized people to ever further extremes and normalized disrespect and bickering (as opposed to discussion). It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged.

lmm 2y ago
> It would be an interesting experiment to see the effects of effectively the polar opposite of twitter, where ragebait and other attention-seeking behaviors are actively punished, with the content that’s most readily surfaced instead being that which is thoughtful, candid, and not emotionally charged. Who would read it? The same people who already avoid twitter - not journalists, and therefore not celebs/politicians.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  > Who would read it? Presumably, normal people who want to interact with people they already know? interaction with journalists and politicians is valuable in an entirely different manner.
anon7000 2y ago
Added to that is user choice over moderation and algorithms. That’s what’s truly interesting about BlueSky. It allows for side A and B to both exist, with people who want to be more isolated in a safe space (so to speak) to do so. That’s a really great property. If I want to engage with content I severely disagree with, I can put it in a feed I check infrequently so that it doesn’t impact my life. Humans aren’t good at coping with a constant barrage of disagreeable (for one’s personal definition of disagreeable) or inflammatory content.

protocolture 2y ago

Not really. The issue is that social media sites produce feeds and content matching, forcing alternative views in your face. Its like, they have decided to push metcalfes law as far as possible, to see when the breaking point is. Like a giant social experiment. But if everyone is in one place thats still the most desirable network to be on. Just dont push Joe Blo's dumbest political opinions in my face as sponsored content.

beeflet 2y ago

Is it inevitable? I am not sure either way. I think that if you look at real-life Friend-to-Friend groups, this is what you find: clusters of people with similar values. So it it makes sense that the same applies to F2F groups over the internet. But most social media is not F2F groups. Most (advertiser-driven) social media (including this site) is based on the idea of what I call "implicit ranking": The idea that a user can influence what another user sees (through "likes", "votes", "reports", "bumps", etc.) without having an explicit consensual relationship with them (such as a "subscription", "following", or "sharing" or "direct message channel"). This "implicit ranking" model is pretty successful because it is better at finding engaging content is and probably the dominant form of social media. In contrast to F2F, implicit ranking networks tend to promote controversial content from outgroups because angry users are engaged. We all love to flamewar sometimes, I'll admit it.

dehrmann 2y ago

If the algorithm doesn't make the filter bubble, people will make it on their own.

CaptainFever 2y ago
See the Fediverse for example, which prides itself on not having algorithms, and is yet the most echo-chambery and radical place I know of. People automatically filter themselves into different servers, and defederate with each other with frequency. (Whether or not this is good or bad depends on your moral views. But I think it is obvious that "algorithms" are not really to blame.)
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  Didn't it spring up in response to those blameless "algorithms"?
  - dehrmann 2y ago
    It's more a product of cheaper and easier content distribution. When TV is expensive to produce, there are only three channels, and it's heavily regulated, you target your content to be broadly appealing and inoffensive. The rise of cable TV, revocation of the fairness doctrine, rise of the internet, and fall of the USSR all led to more exposure to broader views. Like GP said, whether this is good or bad depends on your view.
    - CaptainFever 2y ago
      This is another good point. I didn't actually intend to make this point, but I wanted to thank you for pointing this out. I am not a sociologist, just a layman. But I feel that there seems to be two axis of communication. Mass (you don't know who you're talking to) vs targeted (you do know who you're talking to, like friends). Then, professional (you try to be unoffensive) vs casual (you have no such obligation). Before the Internet, generally communication happened either mass-professional (e.g. TVs, newspapers, magazines) or targeted-casual (e.g. chatting with friends and family). This reduced offense, since mass channels were largely unoffensive as you said, while targeted channels knew how to avoid offense (i.e. you knew how to not offend your friends and family). However, the Internet enabled a lot of mass-casual communication. And this created a lot of offense, because you didn't know who would read your messages (i.e. Twitter posts), while you didn't have the professional obligation to make sure it was unoffensive and easy to understand. This created a lot of misunderstandings, offense, etc., which leads to cancellations, hate mobs, etc. Do note that once again I am not a sociologist, and there seems to be holes in this view. What about large group gatherings? Trashy magazines? Clubs? They seem to be examples of mass-casual communication too.

emseetech 2y ago

I'm not convinced everyone sharing a singular global network was ever a good idea in the first place.

fooker 2y ago

There's one single that prevents this: sharing screenshots, and the impossibly difficult task of blocking those in practice.

nitwit005 2y ago

The press coverage is a bit misleading. Everyone is leaving Twitter. Liberals are just leaving faster. Keep in mind that a lot of Twitter users never wanted political content. They were there for sports, art, science discussions, etc. Some of those communities are clearly migrating.

EasyMark 2y ago
I think I’ve even noticed a huge decrease in hate bots lately in my feed, certainly doesn’t seem to up date as often (aka takes longer for my usual “followees”to go off the firehouse, as they have some precedence in the feed make up