We thought electronic media world create a global village in all the best ways, and instead it created the digital longhouse.
A retreat into private fora, group chats and other walled gardens, is very likely to be a major reaction to this. After the brief narcissistic love affair with social media, a lot of people - maybe a majority at this point, it's intrinsically hard to say - realized they don't actually like having their personal lives on display for the world. It's icky and hazardous. Anecdotally, many people I know have withdrawn from social media entirely, and have retreated to group chats in Telegram, WhatsApp, Messenger, etc., where they can limit their interactions to family and friends without worrying about their dirty laundry drawing the Eye of Sauron.
Indeed, yes. It contributes to a completely distorted view of the public mood, which then I think makes it easier for governments and corporations to do very foolish things, because they're unaware of the sociological dark matter that actually dominates the meme budget of the cultural galaxy.
This only matters when people pretend that a social media app, like Twitter, is any sort of “town square.” It’s never been that, but too many in journalism and politics began to assume it was even though only 1/5 of the us had an account.
I still do not see how social media can have a negative effect on those with the "power of the peon". If you have few or no followers, few will see anything you say so there is little risk of blowback. And if you have lots of followers, then aren't you asking for it?
People who complain about social media seem to be like libertarians, desirous of a handout without acknowledging that this is what they are asking for.
It’s not a problem, when there are few people. When there are many, it becomes unbearable. That’s one of the reasons that push people to “walled gardens”.
I have observed this phenomenon in others, but have not experienced it myself.
I can see how this could be a problem since if everyone useful leaves, then you are stuck in a sea of useless idiots and that is unfun.
But I have been on youtube for a long time as a viewer only, and I know there are all sorts of noxious idiotic types (e.g. Andrew Tate) on there, and I never see any of it, except when one of the people I do see reference it in their vids explaining just how idiotic these types are (which is how I know who the hell Andew Tate is).
Your piece is excellent, and the parts about people gathering for the spectacle around a stockade is reminiscent of people who gathered to watch executions or beheadings in France during the terror. It's rubbernecking on the highway during an accident or gawking at a train crash. There's something primal in the voyeurism of tragic witness.
I was listening to an old episode of Joe Rogan as he spoke to Dave Chappelle, and Chappelle made the point that a lot of the sociopathic, predatory behaviors we see on social media is due to the anonymity of the interactions, the lack of responsibility, and a real inability to see the interpersonal emotional damage done to the receiver of the attack. Social media reveals the darker parts of our animal natures, and as you said, all the sane people left Twitter a while ago.
True. Wrote this recently: "The reason Substack Notes is so good right now is because there aren’t that many people here yet. A park with a few hundred people will always be nicer/cleaner/more enjoyable than one with thousands of people in it. We don’t consider group size dynamics enough when discussing why social media sucks so much. It’s unnatural to have millions of random (often anonymous) people engaged in dialogue. It inevitably descends into trash."
💯 though I discovered your writing and all of Substack via a retweet of your essay about MFAs. So thank you 🙏 for that.
But you’ve nailed it once again. More and more I’m thinking about leaving social media, especially Instagram, which I perceive as the worst.
Also, people like Haidt keep talking about social media causing depression in teenage girls, but I’m just as certain that it causes chronic anger in adult men. Seen male relatives and friends become radicalized by social media and they’re constantly angry or experience incidents of unusual and explosive anger.
But not off the rails so hard that they shoot people...it’s men and boys who seem to be doing that. Then again, I think many men express all their emotions through anger and rage, while many women express all their emotions through depression and frustration, and that’s on and off social media. But I think social media makes both worse.
From a creator point of view, it makes you dance to the algorithm like a slave. To have engagement you have to copy format gimmicks on content or be a hot girl. It circulates the stupidest of all content. I find it to be the most mindless. Even less useful than Tik Tok. It’s just an addictive dopamine machine of crazy images, celebrities, and sex.
Research also has very little positive to say about Ig.
Also the most full of bots, drug dealers, and scams. You can’t pay to block the ads so you’re subjected to terrible ads too.
That being said I have made friends via Instagram that I now hang with in real life, but since Reels it’s really gotten crappy imo.
I used to like looking at art and photography on IG. Now I use Twitter more for that because I can more easily control what I actually see.
Thanks a lot for your answer. I admit that I do not care about the algorithm of Instagram as I do not use it for content creation or marketing. My account is really small and I use it mainly for scrolling through knitting pics. This probably keeps things easy.
But, I know that people who use Instagram as a marketing instrument are not happy about reels and the other stuff you mentioned. Many of them talk about leaving, but have no idea where to go. People who already hate reels want to stay away from TikTok and on the other hand they fear toxic Twitter.
I also heard/witnessed account stealing on Instagram. I have no idea if this is a problem on other platforms, too.
Yes. I’ve had multiple people copy my account and try and scam my followers which is super frustrating and another friend with even more followers had their account hacked.
I’m one of the few people who love Twitter haha, so thinking I’ll just be on Twitter and Substack, because IG is really the pits for creators.
Even saw some research recently that only 10% of the biggest accounts on IG actually use IG as their main platform, which shows that it’s not at all a favorite for content creators.
And yes, sticking to knitting is prob your best bet!
I think this is the most immediate answer we have to the problem. The best social experiences I have online are in niche social sites—whether that's a paid forum site for recruiting news for my local college football team, or a club of people trying to visit every national park in the country. It doesn't seem that surprising...smaller groups focused on a clear topic is going to work much better than large groups focused on everything. If you're a chess fan, you're probably going to enjoy an after school chess club more than sitting in the auditorium with the whole school—including the jocks, stoners, and everyone else—even if your chess friends are still scattered amongst the audience. The way to amass social status in the chess club is to either be great at chess, or help others get good at chess; these are one-on-one relationships. But the way to amass social status in the auditorium amongst the entire students body is quite different— it's to be disruptive enough that you gain attention.
For instance, I run a photo sharing site for regular travelers that prompts them to post one photo each day of a travel memory. The topic is specific, there's no monetization (including ads or data mining), and even the way you interact with the site includes limitations (you only post one photo for each prompt for each day). It's the most supportive online community I've witnessed, and I think that has more to do with the format and simple limitations of the club than anything else. The structure is key—it's focused on one topic that everyone has an affinity for, it's a space where sharing your experience can provide inspiration for others, and there's no algorithm that chooses what people see, so there's no game to be played there. The only reason to participate is because you enjoy participating, not because it helps you establish a following to be monetized, or because you're hoping something will go viral.
I think we should return to a variety of these smaller, more focused social internet sites—though I'm afraid that there's enough motivation to do so, as too many people view "success" as having an online following these days. Even most of my fellow travelers have a "side hustle" aimed at turning what was once a hobby—traveling to new places and experiencing new cultures—into something to be monetized and promoted.
At the very least, I'd love to see us "own" our own platforms and go back to the original "social media feed," where everyone blogged on their own personal website and we aggregated everyone's posts by an rss reader.
When you optimize for time-on-site, you're always going to create something that leads to doom scrolling and awfulness. And no investor driven social media company is *not* going to optimize for time on site. They need advertisers paying big bucks to please their VC overlords!
But I could imagine a social media site cooperatively owned by influencers that would optimize for click throughs and deeper engagement with their audiences that would be substantially less evil. Or a social media site co-owned by publications that builds off of internet comment sections, optimized for developing and exchanging ideas and deepening subscriber relationships. The latter isn't too different from what notes could be (and maybe almost is), with the "Also share to Notes" button added here.
tldr; the reason social media sucks is the incentive structure created by VC funding, not people being intrinsically terrible.
I think the essay is missing the primary reason that social media is "great" and "terrible" which is network effects. Network effects are a double edged sword and lead to many of the terrible things the essay laments. However, network effects are also quite powerful and useful, and not something "The Internet" provides on its own.
Also, it's true that all social media platforms of a certain type are likely to suffer from the same problems (here's a piece that lays it out nicely: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/). However, that doesn't mean it doesn't matter how a platform handles those problems. A platform's content moderation policies, affordances, and governance approach may not be sexy, but they do have a meaningful effect on people's experiences of the platform. There are countless studies that demonstrate that.
Finally, the gossip trap critique is strong but instead of being used to argue for the pointlessness of trying to improve existing social media platforms, it should direct us to the need for civilized digital institutions that are independent of existing social media platforms. We need digital institutions that distribute power, influence, and opportunity using thoughtful processes rather than popularity. This could buttress sclerotic offline civilized institutions whose processes for distributing power, influence, and opportunity have largely failed to adjust to the digital age. Some possible examples: a Wikipedia-style service for public health information, a foreign policy prediction market, and a gamified network for grant-funding.
Yeah I'm not the biggest fan of "gamified" as a term either. But it seemed like the best way to describe what I mean. Here is an example of what I was thinking: imagine a system for distributing grants that consists of a number of funding levels of increasing value. The system is open to anyone, and as a grantee completes projects successfully, they unlock higher funding levels and receive less scrutiny at funding levels they've already unlocked. Applications at the lowest funding level might be entirely evaluated by AI in order to support a high number of applicants. If a grantee fails to complete a project successfully, the process runs in reverse: they may lose access to some funding levels and receive more scrutiny at funding levels they still have access to.
Notes! I think the business model (subscription vs. ads) makes a significant difference in civility, though the content often boringly skews toward subscriber-count meta-chatter.
I’m still on Instagram too, which, for all its other flaws, at least structurally avoids Twitter’s destabilizing propensity to virality.
I am also on Instagram and I think it is way easier there to avoid the ugly stuff compared to Twitter. Never saw a shitstorm on Instagram. But I am mainly in a book and knitting bubble. And I think Instagram also lacks the chattier aspects of social media. It is mainly about pics and likes. Discussion do not really take place there.
I have been using Threads almost exclusively since about day 2 of its existence. It is so much nicer (so far) lots of democratic politics, photographers, a womensupportingwomen thread, very welcoming to LGBTQ folks, etc. I love it
It's all fun and games until the businesses and bad actors show up.
The rise and fall of any new social media service is inevitable. It feels like it's just human nature, unfortunately.
This is one reason I'm spending more time on Discord lately. I'd rather be in a handful of small groups than spend time on a massive platform with people who want to smash others with hate hammers.
i've been thinking (and hoping secretly) that maybe we just went through a very not-normal period of the internet's long life when you could sort of trust other people. Maybe soon with AI it will be very hard to know if anyone on the other side of the chat or video call is real, and everyone as a result will sorta just stop using the internet lol
Yeah, agreed. I just banned the first AI-generated post here (after giving a warning, the person did it again). Right now I can tell, but soon I won't be able to. It's gonna be a mess.
There's a funny thing about this trust element. Back in the ancient days up until around the first dot-com boom, it was understood that you didn't post personal information online. Most everyone wrote under a screen name, except in some of the newsgroups on Usenet which were closer and more personal. For the most part everyone kept to a sharp division between Online and Real Life.
To me, the blending of online and offline since ~2007 is the very not-normal period of the internet. Going back to the fragmented and low-trust situation feels right and normal to me.
I agree that social media is one of the clearest modern examples of your Gossip Trap idea. The way that I conceptualize it is that it is really just an endless digital re-creation of the middle school cafeteria (you say high school in the example, but I think middle school rings truer to the visceral nature of the social media situation). Most social media experiences are digital versions of the really bad parts of the middle school cafeteria. The middle school cafeteria gets a generally bad rap, for very understandable reasons, but there are also profoundly pro-social parts of this experience.
Perhaps I am naive and still in the euphoric optimism stage of the Notes and Substack experience generally, but I have mostly found my time on Substack to be closer to the pro-social and positive end of the spectrum--being introduced to new people and new ideas. Or maybe Notes is still small enough that it hasn't moved to the beating of random people with hammers stage of things.
Totally agree - although I suspect Notes is currently the superior one of the current Twitter clones, but I think it has some really significant advantages like being (a) pre-populated in its structure with Substack writers, who I think are generally saner (at least compared to Twitter), (b) still very small, and (c) 10 weeks old?
I would add one other significant advantage, which could eventually become a disadvantage--because there is a direct transactional relationship between writers and readers on Substack the rules or incentives of the game are more clear than something like Twitter. The way to make money on Twitter is pretty opaque; basically some version of, say outrageous things to get 1M followers, then do something (create a course about how to get 1M followers, do some sponsored content, I guess apply for Twitter's Substack clone now?). Having a direct paid link between writer and reader means we can more straightforwardly pursue clear digital relationships between two people who are strangers.
Another way to think about this could be to imagine social media relationships existing on 2×2 grid, where the relationship between users are either transactional or non-transactional and also either finite or infinite. Transactional relationships, like being a paid Newsletter subscriber, are good as long as they are finite (everyone understands the bounds and doesn't expect anything more than consistent newsletters about things they enjoy reading about). Transactional relationships become awful, however, when they become infinite, even more so when the transaction moves from a clear exchange of money to some unbounded expenditure of another resource (mostly time). This is sort of the default relationship between large non-famous for other reasons Twitter accounts and their followers. What is the expectation of this relationship? Unclear. Are you giving this person money or time or what? Also unclear. On the non-transactional end of the spectrum, things are okay again if the relationship is finite and clear, but run into trouble when there are no agreed upon bounds.
Erik - loved this piece, especially the conclusion that people may stop taking it as seriously, but I still would like to see a few more experiments run, especially since I am not the person building them.
A few thoughts: Is there a way to bring the human element online? Before responding to someone, can you replicate the experience of making a snarky comment to one's face? Will there be a way to use more intelligent AI filters to reduce the weight of bad-faith arguments?
Well articulated. No context? No way to set interpretive guardrails? Semantic chaos ensues and one’s statement just becomes fodder for whatever internal rant the reader is focused on at the moment.
Dec 18, 2023·edited Dec 18, 2023Liked by Erik Hoel
“…but arguably almost everything about social media that’s good is actually from the power of the internet…”
The one positive that Twitter really did afford was the ability to have a little valuable interaction with academics and journalists that the average person would otherwise never have the opportunity for. It’s amazing who I’ve had positive/valuable interactions with.
And it’s too bad that we don’t have the ethics and discipline as a species to maintain something like this.
We thought electronic media world create a global village in all the best ways, and instead it created the digital longhouse.
A retreat into private fora, group chats and other walled gardens, is very likely to be a major reaction to this. After the brief narcissistic love affair with social media, a lot of people - maybe a majority at this point, it's intrinsically hard to say - realized they don't actually like having their personal lives on display for the world. It's icky and hazardous. Anecdotally, many people I know have withdrawn from social media entirely, and have retreated to group chats in Telegram, WhatsApp, Messenger, etc., where they can limit their interactions to family and friends without worrying about their dirty laundry drawing the Eye of Sauron.
And this makes the problem worse, since it's often the people who withdraw to walled gardens who are the most sensible!
Indeed, yes. It contributes to a completely distorted view of the public mood, which then I think makes it easier for governments and corporations to do very foolish things, because they're unaware of the sociological dark matter that actually dominates the meme budget of the cultural galaxy.
This only matters when people pretend that a social media app, like Twitter, is any sort of “town square.” It’s never been that, but too many in journalism and politics began to assume it was even though only 1/5 of the us had an account.
I still do not see how social media can have a negative effect on those with the "power of the peon". If you have few or no followers, few will see anything you say so there is little risk of blowback. And if you have lots of followers, then aren't you asking for it?
People who complain about social media seem to be like libertarians, desirous of a handout without acknowledging that this is what they are asking for.
The problem is that you’re still exposed to things you didn’t sign for. Most social media have a “for you” feed that you can’t disable.
I do not see how this is necessarily a problem. Isn't part of the point of social media to see fresh stuff?
It’s not a problem, when there are few people. When there are many, it becomes unbearable. That’s one of the reasons that push people to “walled gardens”.
I have observed this phenomenon in others, but have not experienced it myself.
I can see how this could be a problem since if everyone useful leaves, then you are stuck in a sea of useless idiots and that is unfun.
But I have been on youtube for a long time as a viewer only, and I know there are all sorts of noxious idiotic types (e.g. Andrew Tate) on there, and I never see any of it, except when one of the people I do see reference it in their vids explaining just how idiotic these types are (which is how I know who the hell Andew Tate is).
So why would this not happen with substack?
Your piece is excellent, and the parts about people gathering for the spectacle around a stockade is reminiscent of people who gathered to watch executions or beheadings in France during the terror. It's rubbernecking on the highway during an accident or gawking at a train crash. There's something primal in the voyeurism of tragic witness.
I was listening to an old episode of Joe Rogan as he spoke to Dave Chappelle, and Chappelle made the point that a lot of the sociopathic, predatory behaviors we see on social media is due to the anonymity of the interactions, the lack of responsibility, and a real inability to see the interpersonal emotional damage done to the receiver of the attack. Social media reveals the darker parts of our animal natures, and as you said, all the sane people left Twitter a while ago.
Darker natures: yes!
True. Wrote this recently: "The reason Substack Notes is so good right now is because there aren’t that many people here yet. A park with a few hundred people will always be nicer/cleaner/more enjoyable than one with thousands of people in it. We don’t consider group size dynamics enough when discussing why social media sucks so much. It’s unnatural to have millions of random (often anonymous) people engaged in dialogue. It inevitably descends into trash."
Exactly.
💯 though I discovered your writing and all of Substack via a retweet of your essay about MFAs. So thank you 🙏 for that.
But you’ve nailed it once again. More and more I’m thinking about leaving social media, especially Instagram, which I perceive as the worst.
Also, people like Haidt keep talking about social media causing depression in teenage girls, but I’m just as certain that it causes chronic anger in adult men. Seen male relatives and friends become radicalized by social media and they’re constantly angry or experience incidents of unusual and explosive anger.
Boom!! You’ve nailed that one. Perhaps Congress needs to having a hearing about that?? 😬
Oh. Plenty of women have gone off the rails on social media. Especially on the ‘woke’ side.
But not off the rails so hard that they shoot people...it’s men and boys who seem to be doing that. Then again, I think many men express all their emotions through anger and rage, while many women express all their emotions through depression and frustration, and that’s on and off social media. But I think social media makes both worse.
Would you mind to share why you think Instagram is the worst? I like it quite well and I am really interested in your thoughts. 😊
From a creator point of view, it makes you dance to the algorithm like a slave. To have engagement you have to copy format gimmicks on content or be a hot girl. It circulates the stupidest of all content. I find it to be the most mindless. Even less useful than Tik Tok. It’s just an addictive dopamine machine of crazy images, celebrities, and sex.
Research also has very little positive to say about Ig.
Also the most full of bots, drug dealers, and scams. You can’t pay to block the ads so you’re subjected to terrible ads too.
That being said I have made friends via Instagram that I now hang with in real life, but since Reels it’s really gotten crappy imo.
I used to like looking at art and photography on IG. Now I use Twitter more for that because I can more easily control what I actually see.
Thanks a lot for your answer. I admit that I do not care about the algorithm of Instagram as I do not use it for content creation or marketing. My account is really small and I use it mainly for scrolling through knitting pics. This probably keeps things easy.
But, I know that people who use Instagram as a marketing instrument are not happy about reels and the other stuff you mentioned. Many of them talk about leaving, but have no idea where to go. People who already hate reels want to stay away from TikTok and on the other hand they fear toxic Twitter.
I also heard/witnessed account stealing on Instagram. I have no idea if this is a problem on other platforms, too.
Yes. I’ve had multiple people copy my account and try and scam my followers which is super frustrating and another friend with even more followers had their account hacked.
I’m one of the few people who love Twitter haha, so thinking I’ll just be on Twitter and Substack, because IG is really the pits for creators.
Even saw some research recently that only 10% of the biggest accounts on IG actually use IG as their main platform, which shows that it’s not at all a favorite for content creators.
And yes, sticking to knitting is prob your best bet!
Have you tried Threads yet? There are certainly a lot of very talented photographers on there. Some gorgeous pics & a few vids
I’m on there, but I really haven’t been using it. Think I’m just tapped out on social.
"That's just the power of the internet"
I think this is the most immediate answer we have to the problem. The best social experiences I have online are in niche social sites—whether that's a paid forum site for recruiting news for my local college football team, or a club of people trying to visit every national park in the country. It doesn't seem that surprising...smaller groups focused on a clear topic is going to work much better than large groups focused on everything. If you're a chess fan, you're probably going to enjoy an after school chess club more than sitting in the auditorium with the whole school—including the jocks, stoners, and everyone else—even if your chess friends are still scattered amongst the audience. The way to amass social status in the chess club is to either be great at chess, or help others get good at chess; these are one-on-one relationships. But the way to amass social status in the auditorium amongst the entire students body is quite different— it's to be disruptive enough that you gain attention.
For instance, I run a photo sharing site for regular travelers that prompts them to post one photo each day of a travel memory. The topic is specific, there's no monetization (including ads or data mining), and even the way you interact with the site includes limitations (you only post one photo for each prompt for each day). It's the most supportive online community I've witnessed, and I think that has more to do with the format and simple limitations of the club than anything else. The structure is key—it's focused on one topic that everyone has an affinity for, it's a space where sharing your experience can provide inspiration for others, and there's no algorithm that chooses what people see, so there's no game to be played there. The only reason to participate is because you enjoy participating, not because it helps you establish a following to be monetized, or because you're hoping something will go viral.
I think we should return to a variety of these smaller, more focused social internet sites—though I'm afraid that there's enough motivation to do so, as too many people view "success" as having an online following these days. Even most of my fellow travelers have a "side hustle" aimed at turning what was once a hobby—traveling to new places and experiencing new cultures—into something to be monetized and promoted.
At the very least, I'd love to see us "own" our own platforms and go back to the original "social media feed," where everyone blogged on their own personal website and we aggregated everyone's posts by an rss reader.
When you optimize for time-on-site, you're always going to create something that leads to doom scrolling and awfulness. And no investor driven social media company is *not* going to optimize for time on site. They need advertisers paying big bucks to please their VC overlords!
But I could imagine a social media site cooperatively owned by influencers that would optimize for click throughs and deeper engagement with their audiences that would be substantially less evil. Or a social media site co-owned by publications that builds off of internet comment sections, optimized for developing and exchanging ideas and deepening subscriber relationships. The latter isn't too different from what notes could be (and maybe almost is), with the "Also share to Notes" button added here.
tldr; the reason social media sucks is the incentive structure created by VC funding, not people being intrinsically terrible.
Long time reader, first time commenter!
I think the essay is missing the primary reason that social media is "great" and "terrible" which is network effects. Network effects are a double edged sword and lead to many of the terrible things the essay laments. However, network effects are also quite powerful and useful, and not something "The Internet" provides on its own.
Also, it's true that all social media platforms of a certain type are likely to suffer from the same problems (here's a piece that lays it out nicely: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/). However, that doesn't mean it doesn't matter how a platform handles those problems. A platform's content moderation policies, affordances, and governance approach may not be sexy, but they do have a meaningful effect on people's experiences of the platform. There are countless studies that demonstrate that.
Finally, the gossip trap critique is strong but instead of being used to argue for the pointlessness of trying to improve existing social media platforms, it should direct us to the need for civilized digital institutions that are independent of existing social media platforms. We need digital institutions that distribute power, influence, and opportunity using thoughtful processes rather than popularity. This could buttress sclerotic offline civilized institutions whose processes for distributing power, influence, and opportunity have largely failed to adjust to the digital age. Some possible examples: a Wikipedia-style service for public health information, a foreign policy prediction market, and a gamified network for grant-funding.
I’m cautious about any innovation that describes itself as being “gamified” but I’m curious what you mean. Do you have a link?
Yeah I'm not the biggest fan of "gamified" as a term either. But it seemed like the best way to describe what I mean. Here is an example of what I was thinking: imagine a system for distributing grants that consists of a number of funding levels of increasing value. The system is open to anyone, and as a grantee completes projects successfully, they unlock higher funding levels and receive less scrutiny at funding levels they've already unlocked. Applications at the lowest funding level might be entirely evaluated by AI in order to support a high number of applicants. If a grantee fails to complete a project successfully, the process runs in reverse: they may lose access to some funding levels and receive more scrutiny at funding levels they still have access to.
"Semantic nadir." That is such an accurate description. I'm sure I'll be quoting you in some future essay.
I am so glad I got off Twitter.
Have you been using another platform? What's the experience been like?
Notes! I think the business model (subscription vs. ads) makes a significant difference in civility, though the content often boringly skews toward subscriber-count meta-chatter.
I’m still on Instagram too, which, for all its other flaws, at least structurally avoids Twitter’s destabilizing propensity to virality.
I am also on Instagram and I think it is way easier there to avoid the ugly stuff compared to Twitter. Never saw a shitstorm on Instagram. But I am mainly in a book and knitting bubble. And I think Instagram also lacks the chattier aspects of social media. It is mainly about pics and likes. Discussion do not really take place there.
Point taken, though image-centric social media comes with its own set of challenges...
https://joukovsky.substack.com/p/the-theory-of-the-leisure-class-on
Very true! Thanks for the link - great read.
I have been using Threads almost exclusively since about day 2 of its existence. It is so much nicer (so far) lots of democratic politics, photographers, a womensupportingwomen thread, very welcoming to LGBTQ folks, etc. I love it
It's all fun and games until the businesses and bad actors show up.
The rise and fall of any new social media service is inevitable. It feels like it's just human nature, unfortunately.
This is one reason I'm spending more time on Discord lately. I'd rather be in a handful of small groups than spend time on a massive platform with people who want to smash others with hate hammers.
Discord sounds an awful lot like a revamped variant of the good ol' IRC ecosystem, no?
Feels similar in some ways
i've been thinking (and hoping secretly) that maybe we just went through a very not-normal period of the internet's long life when you could sort of trust other people. Maybe soon with AI it will be very hard to know if anyone on the other side of the chat or video call is real, and everyone as a result will sorta just stop using the internet lol
could be soooorta dope no?
Yeah, agreed. I just banned the first AI-generated post here (after giving a warning, the person did it again). Right now I can tell, but soon I won't be able to. It's gonna be a mess.
There's a funny thing about this trust element. Back in the ancient days up until around the first dot-com boom, it was understood that you didn't post personal information online. Most everyone wrote under a screen name, except in some of the newsgroups on Usenet which were closer and more personal. For the most part everyone kept to a sharp division between Online and Real Life.
To me, the blending of online and offline since ~2007 is the very not-normal period of the internet. Going back to the fragmented and low-trust situation feels right and normal to me.
I agree that social media is one of the clearest modern examples of your Gossip Trap idea. The way that I conceptualize it is that it is really just an endless digital re-creation of the middle school cafeteria (you say high school in the example, but I think middle school rings truer to the visceral nature of the social media situation). Most social media experiences are digital versions of the really bad parts of the middle school cafeteria. The middle school cafeteria gets a generally bad rap, for very understandable reasons, but there are also profoundly pro-social parts of this experience.
Perhaps I am naive and still in the euphoric optimism stage of the Notes and Substack experience generally, but I have mostly found my time on Substack to be closer to the pro-social and positive end of the spectrum--being introduced to new people and new ideas. Or maybe Notes is still small enough that it hasn't moved to the beating of random people with hammers stage of things.
Totally agree - although I suspect Notes is currently the superior one of the current Twitter clones, but I think it has some really significant advantages like being (a) pre-populated in its structure with Substack writers, who I think are generally saner (at least compared to Twitter), (b) still very small, and (c) 10 weeks old?
I would add one other significant advantage, which could eventually become a disadvantage--because there is a direct transactional relationship between writers and readers on Substack the rules or incentives of the game are more clear than something like Twitter. The way to make money on Twitter is pretty opaque; basically some version of, say outrageous things to get 1M followers, then do something (create a course about how to get 1M followers, do some sponsored content, I guess apply for Twitter's Substack clone now?). Having a direct paid link between writer and reader means we can more straightforwardly pursue clear digital relationships between two people who are strangers.
Another way to think about this could be to imagine social media relationships existing on 2×2 grid, where the relationship between users are either transactional or non-transactional and also either finite or infinite. Transactional relationships, like being a paid Newsletter subscriber, are good as long as they are finite (everyone understands the bounds and doesn't expect anything more than consistent newsletters about things they enjoy reading about). Transactional relationships become awful, however, when they become infinite, even more so when the transaction moves from a clear exchange of money to some unbounded expenditure of another resource (mostly time). This is sort of the default relationship between large non-famous for other reasons Twitter accounts and their followers. What is the expectation of this relationship? Unclear. Are you giving this person money or time or what? Also unclear. On the non-transactional end of the spectrum, things are okay again if the relationship is finite and clear, but run into trouble when there are no agreed upon bounds.
Middle school cafeteria: Yep!!!
Erik - loved this piece, especially the conclusion that people may stop taking it as seriously, but I still would like to see a few more experiments run, especially since I am not the person building them.
A few thoughts: Is there a way to bring the human element online? Before responding to someone, can you replicate the experience of making a snarky comment to one's face? Will there be a way to use more intelligent AI filters to reduce the weight of bad-faith arguments?
A different perspective from Graeber's book, which I really appreciated because it emphasized the diversity of small tribal societies. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything
I gotta say, though, that my personal experience of small-town life was more like the tyranny of gossip you describe.
Well articulated. No context? No way to set interpretive guardrails? Semantic chaos ensues and one’s statement just becomes fodder for whatever internal rant the reader is focused on at the moment.
👍👍
“…but arguably almost everything about social media that’s good is actually from the power of the internet…”
The one positive that Twitter really did afford was the ability to have a little valuable interaction with academics and journalists that the average person would otherwise never have the opportunity for. It’s amazing who I’ve had positive/valuable interactions with.
And it’s too bad that we don’t have the ethics and discipline as a species to maintain something like this.