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I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning,

I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species. Anecdote, but it does seem like a lot of younger folks I speak with are exhausted by the dark patterns and dopamine extraction that top-k social media platforms create. If agents/AI/bots inadvertently destroy the current incarnation of social media through noise, I think we'll be better for it.

idle_zealot 6mo ago
> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species Do you have a mechanism for this in mind, incentives-wise? I can't see this making money.
- slopinthebag 6mo ago
  It doesn't need to make money directly (and probably shouldn't). The incentives would be those which have motivated people throughout history: to create something which benefits humanity.
  - pixl97 6mo ago
    Ah yes, I too love free servers and bandwidth.
    - slopinthebag 6mo ago
      Lol, it doesn't have to run for free and servers are really powerful these days (especially if you don't use a slow language). There are other monetisation strategies besides exploiting users for profit.
      - pixl97 6mo ago
        It doesn't have to run for free, but if you're competing against anyone else running for free you've already lost the game as they suck the air out of the room with the network effect. Next, text only platforms are nice, but niche on the modern internet. People seem to love multimedia which takes tons of bandwidth/cpu. Paid for services don't mean spam free either. If it's worth people to pay for, it's worth spammers paying to get in and spam. Then you have all the questions on what happens if you grow, how do you deal with working with all the laws around the world, how do you deal with other legal issues. Having a site/service of any size can quickly become an expensive mess.
- benoau 6mo ago
  I guess the real question is whether a website where you communicate with friends and close ones needs to be a multi-trillion dollar company in the first place... historically most of them have not been worth very much at all.
  - pixl97 6mo ago
    The question then becomes how can you make a website with all your friend (and by association all their friends) make enough profit to run itself?
    - sosborn 6mo ago
      Early Facebook was kind of a great mix. It had enough people on it, it was making money, and the advertising was much more reasonable. At the time it really was a place to connect with IRL friends.
    - andai 6mo ago
      You mean, how can my friends and I fundraise my $3 VPS? It's going to be rough, but I think we'll find a way ;) (If we hit the stretch goal, we can upgrade to a raspberry pi!)
      - pixl97 6mo ago
        This is a bit of a silly response on your part. You're not answering the question of WHY people are on FB and not on the little sites like existed 20 years ago before FB. It's called the network effect. You have friends, your friends have friend, those friends have friends. Rather than there being 30 bajillion separate sites representing these friends connections, people go "hey, why not one site with everyone there". Said little sites may run for a bit and die, and the massive monolith remains, at least until another monolith replaces them.
        andai 6mo ago
        Well, indulge my silliness for a moment... what if the servers on the internet could talk to each other? I suspect in just a few more decades, we shall reinvent the 90s and 2000s p2p networks from first principles.
- andai 6mo ago
  Well, another example comes to mind. Coordinated efforts to preserve the biosphere for all mankind are probably not going to be great for GDP. We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist? The "the incentive structure says we should all destroy our brains" thing is just a small aspect of that.
  - 0x3f 6mo ago
    Actually that's probably really good for GDP, just not over the kind of time periods an individual human deals with or cares about. > We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist? The continued survival of individuals or humanity as a whole? The individuals seem to survive OK, and arguably there's nothing that could convince them to prefer the survival of the amorphous group, save for some kind of brainwashing.
    - andai 6mo ago
      Heh, that's a very good point. GDP begins to correlate with the biosphere over sufficiently long timespans. We shouldn't be optimizing for quarterly returns, but for the next ten thousand years.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6mo ago
  Ads were profitable before the outrage optimized flamebait internet era.
- Zigurd 6mo ago
  A $4.99/mo subscription would yield more revenue than Facebook makes in ARPU from all that fancy, creepy, and intrusive ad tech. Paying YouTube to not advertise to you makes it a 10X better experience.
  - myroon5 6mo ago
    > $4.99/mo subscription would yield more revenue than Facebook makes in ARPU Even ignoring the adverse selection of who'd subscribe, their ARPU is higher than that in North America: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average-revenue-per-user-by-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
asim 6mo ago
It will come. The problem is. So will the addictive stuff. The key is going to be real meaningful connection. Social media wasn't about community. Web 2.0 was. In 2005 we were connecting with real people we knew and probably up until 2011-2012 maybe we still were, but I guess friends of friends, colleagues, people in our network. Then it got really bad. Getting back to community is key.
amelius 6mo ago
> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species. This sounds like the original internet. Before adtech took over.
- 0x3f 6mo ago
  The original internet wasn't about that at all, it was just in limbo while people were figuring out what it was going to be. It wasn't developed or optimized enough to be _anything_.
aprilthird2021 6mo ago
> If agents/AI/bots inadvertently destroy the current incarnation of social media through noise, I think we'll be better for it. They are going to be (and AI slop already is) so much worse. Once they get ads to work well / seem natural the dark patterns will pop right back up and the money spigot will keep flowing upwards
andai 6mo ago
I hear word that in some countries, the government makes it so that screen time is limited, and algorithms promote educational content. Fortunately we civilized peoples are free of such a brutal oppression ;)
iamnothere 6mo ago
> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species. To me this statement reads as both inaccurate and ignorant of human nature. Social media was actually better when it was about individual ego (Myspace/LiveJournal); as obnoxious as that can be, today everything is worse because of petty tribalism. Most conflicts on social media are inter-tribal, whether it’s racial, political, national, or feuding “stan” culture groups. The worst problems come from groups who organize on platforms like Discord or Kiwi Farms to direct harassment campaigns against perceived enemies (or random “lolcow” victims). Simple observation of the present world and history will tell you that a platform focused on “collective improvement” will only appeal to a small subset of potential users. Of course such a platform would not be a bad thing. Places like this (such as The WELL) used to be common when the internet was dominated by academics, futurists, and tech enthusiasts. But average people are not interested in this kind of platform, and will not participate in good faith in such an environment.
- fraywing 6mo ago
  > To me this statement reads as both inaccurate and ignorant of human nature > But average people are not interested in this kind of platform, and will not participate in good faith in such an environment. I'm not ignorant of human nature and tribalistic tendencies. The undercurrent of my comment is of an optimistic hope (or cope) that we can move past competitive individual validation programming. I'm aware that it's due to our nature, but also aware that it's exploited by dark patterns and extraction at scale through software.
  - iamnothere 6mo ago
    Thanks for replying. I agree that dark patterns and other psychological manipulation is a problem, I just don’t think it’s necessarily ego-centric in origin any more than gambling. These companies have found very efficient methods to extract attention and money from humans by exploiting their brain’s natural reward functions. I’m not sure what the answer is, because it’s obviously a problem (again just like gambling addiction), but I do support people’s rights to engage in things like gambling. Since we don’t live in a perfect world, I suppose some regulation of the industry would be fair, just as we mitigate the harms of gambling somewhat through regulation. I just worry about regulation being used as a Trojan horse to stifle political organization and/or open communication about corruption, cronyism, and oppression. It may be that the future is more small platforms where conflict is limited to in-group conflict rather than global platforms where all of humanity’s disagreements are surfaced and turned into fodder for monetization.

idle_zealot 6mo ago

slopinthebag 6mo ago
It doesn't need to make money directly (and probably shouldn't). The incentives would be those which have motivated people throughout history: to create something which benefits humanity.
- pixl97 6mo ago
  Ah yes, I too love free servers and bandwidth.
  - slopinthebag 6mo ago
    Lol, it doesn't have to run for free and servers are really powerful these days (especially if you don't use a slow language). There are other monetisation strategies besides exploiting users for profit.
    - pixl97 6mo ago
      It doesn't have to run for free, but if you're competing against anyone else running for free you've already lost the game as they suck the air out of the room with the network effect. Next, text only platforms are nice, but niche on the modern internet. People seem to love multimedia which takes tons of bandwidth/cpu. Paid for services don't mean spam free either. If it's worth people to pay for, it's worth spammers paying to get in and spam. Then you have all the questions on what happens if you grow, how do you deal with working with all the laws around the world, how do you deal with other legal issues. Having a site/service of any size can quickly become an expensive mess.
benoau 6mo ago
I guess the real question is whether a website where you communicate with friends and close ones needs to be a multi-trillion dollar company in the first place... historically most of them have not been worth very much at all.
- pixl97 6mo ago
  The question then becomes how can you make a website with all your friend (and by association all their friends) make enough profit to run itself?
  - sosborn 6mo ago
    Early Facebook was kind of a great mix. It had enough people on it, it was making money, and the advertising was much more reasonable. At the time it really was a place to connect with IRL friends.
  - andai 6mo ago
    You mean, how can my friends and I fundraise my $3 VPS? It's going to be rough, but I think we'll find a way ;) (If we hit the stretch goal, we can upgrade to a raspberry pi!)
    - pixl97 6mo ago
      This is a bit of a silly response on your part. You're not answering the question of WHY people are on FB and not on the little sites like existed 20 years ago before FB. It's called the network effect. You have friends, your friends have friend, those friends have friends. Rather than there being 30 bajillion separate sites representing these friends connections, people go "hey, why not one site with everyone there". Said little sites may run for a bit and die, and the massive monolith remains, at least until another monolith replaces them.
      - andai 6mo ago
        Well, indulge my silliness for a moment... what if the servers on the internet could talk to each other? I suspect in just a few more decades, we shall reinvent the 90s and 2000s p2p networks from first principles.
andai 6mo ago
Well, another example comes to mind. Coordinated efforts to preserve the biosphere for all mankind are probably not going to be great for GDP. We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist? The "the incentive structure says we should all destroy our brains" thing is just a small aspect of that.
- 0x3f 6mo ago
  Actually that's probably really good for GDP, just not over the kind of time periods an individual human deals with or cares about. > We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist? The continued survival of individuals or humanity as a whole? The individuals seem to survive OK, and arguably there's nothing that could convince them to prefer the survival of the amorphous group, save for some kind of brainwashing.
  - andai 6mo ago
    Heh, that's a very good point. GDP begins to correlate with the biosphere over sufficiently long timespans. We shouldn't be optimizing for quarterly returns, but for the next ten thousand years.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6mo ago
Ads were profitable before the outrage optimized flamebait internet era.
Zigurd 6mo ago
A $4.99/mo subscription would yield more revenue than Facebook makes in ARPU from all that fancy, creepy, and intrusive ad tech. Paying YouTube to not advertise to you makes it a 10X better experience.
- myroon5 6mo ago
  > $4.99/mo subscription would yield more revenue than Facebook makes in ARPU Even ignoring the adverse selection of who'd subscribe, their ARPU is higher than that in North America: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average-revenue-per-user-by-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...

asim 6mo ago

It will come. The problem is. So will the addictive stuff. The key is going to be real meaningful connection. Social media wasn't about community. Web 2.0 was. In 2005 we were connecting with real people we knew and probably up until 2011-2012 maybe we still were, but I guess friends of friends, colleagues, people in our network. Then it got really bad. Getting back to community is key.

amelius 6mo ago

0x3f 6mo ago
The original internet wasn't about that at all, it was just in limbo while people were figuring out what it was going to be. It wasn't developed or optimized enough to be _anything_.

aprilthird2021 6mo ago

> If agents/AI/bots inadvertently destroy the current incarnation of social media through noise, I think we'll be better for it. They are going to be (and AI slop already is) so much worse. Once they get ads to work well / seem natural the dark patterns will pop right back up and the money spigot will keep flowing upwards

andai 6mo ago

I hear word that in some countries, the government makes it so that screen time is limited, and algorithms promote educational content. Fortunately we civilized peoples are free of such a brutal oppression ;)

iamnothere 6mo ago

> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species. To me this statement reads as both inaccurate and ignorant of human nature. Social media was actually better when it was about individual ego (Myspace/LiveJournal); as obnoxious as that can be, today everything is worse because of petty tribalism. Most conflicts on social media are inter-tribal, whether it’s racial, political, national, or feuding “stan” culture groups. The worst problems come from groups who organize on platforms like Discord or Kiwi Farms to direct harassment campaigns against perceived enemies (or random “lolcow” victims). Simple observation of the present world and history will tell you that a platform focused on “collective improvement” will only appeal to a small subset of potential users. Of course such a platform would not be a bad thing. Places like this (such as The WELL) used to be common when the internet was dominated by academics, futurists, and tech enthusiasts. But average people are not interested in this kind of platform, and will not participate in good faith in such an environment.

fraywing 6mo ago
> To me this statement reads as both inaccurate and ignorant of human nature > But average people are not interested in this kind of platform, and will not participate in good faith in such an environment. I'm not ignorant of human nature and tribalistic tendencies. The undercurrent of my comment is of an optimistic hope (or cope) that we can move past competitive individual validation programming. I'm aware that it's due to our nature, but also aware that it's exploited by dark patterns and extraction at scale through software.
- iamnothere 6mo ago
  Thanks for replying. I agree that dark patterns and other psychological manipulation is a problem, I just don’t think it’s necessarily ego-centric in origin any more than gambling. These companies have found very efficient methods to extract attention and money from humans by exploiting their brain’s natural reward functions. I’m not sure what the answer is, because it’s obviously a problem (again just like gambling addiction), but I do support people’s rights to engage in things like gambling. Since we don’t live in a perfect world, I suppose some regulation of the industry would be fair, just as we mitigate the harms of gambling somewhat through regulation. I just worry about regulation being used as a Trojan horse to stifle political organization and/or open communication about corruption, cronyism, and oppression. It may be that the future is more small platforms where conflict is limited to in-group conflict rather than global platforms where all of humanity’s disagreements are surfaced and turned into fodder for monetization.