I'm always reminded of this quote from Larry Wall, the creator of Perl:
"The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol."
It's tough to get all this right. Humans are ok at dealing with one another in person most of the time, but being behind a screen really doesn't happen in many cases.
I have no idea what the solution is... it's a people problem, so probably not a strictly technological solution.
HN works fairly well because of the hard work of the moderators.
FB is kind of maddening to me. You can't just put it in a 'good' or 'bad' bucket.
Some things I get a lot of value out of:
* Being able to keep track of acquaintances from all the places I've lived. There are a lot of friends and family I have in Italy that I can't see often, and I do enjoy hearing what they're up to.
* As a tool for organizing it's been a very handy, low-friction way to get people involved in some political issues where I live in Oregon.
On the other hand, lately it has also been a source of stress. The sheer amount of anti-science, poorly thought out political comments and plain hatred is really depressing at a time when a lot of things are not going well.
I dislike this trend (especially in Silicon Valley) to blame problems on the users - e.g. creating a startup, and becoming frustrated with users when people use it "incorrectly." Technology is supposed to be used by people, not the other way around. When technology is using people for its own interest (in this case, ad revenue), then we have a real problem with the technology, and it is absolutely not a people problem.
Only 80 years ago, plain images on posters could be used to motivate people to die for their country in World War II. 400 years ago, images were so rare that it was enough to paint church walls with them to fill people with belief in God and afterlife. And as of the last ten years, we're suddenly expecting people to drop their belief in images and use their "rational" logic to see through fallacies, saying it's a "people problem" when they can't? It's just too fast for evolution, and the onus is on the ones who create the technology that disseminates images to be careful, lest they create the perfect conditions for a society to fall apart because they were too busy looking out for their bottom line.
>The sheer amount of anti-science, poorly thought out political comments and plain hatred is really depressing at a time when a lot of things are not going well.
On this front, I prune my contacts when my feed starts stressing me out. It used to be you had to totally unfriend someone, but Facebook wised up and now you have a variety of options. You can put them on a 30-day timeout so their posts won't show up on your feed while they get their rant on, or you can unfollow entirely while remaining friends (so you can still actively check on them but won't get passively bombarded with dumb stuff). You can also opt out of seeing content from specific sources they share if the only problem is they're sharing dumb links.
It's still not perfect, but keeping in touch with people who post dumb stuff is always gonna be a balancing act and Facebook's come a long way in facilitating that act even though most of the options are not obvious (most of the above are found in the ellipsis icon in the upper right of every post).
"HN works fairly well because of the hard work of the moderators."
Moderators and size limits, the latter keeping the amount of work small enough that a couple of moderators can handle it, and aren't getting subjected to the sort of stuff Facebook moderators deal with. Obviously, not having images or video also helps that. (Though I recall some times when Slashdot trolls were taking some good swings at Can't Unsee even with those limits.)
HN is on the upper end of what a community structured in the way it is can handle, I think, and it has taken some tweaks such as hiding karma counts on comments. I'm not deeply in love with reddit-style unlimited upvote/downvote systems... in their defense, they do seem to scale to a larger system than a lot of alternatives, but it comes at a price. I do fully agree it tends to create groupthink in a community, as a structural effect, though I think that's both a positive and a negative, rather than a pure negative as some people suggest. Some aspects of "groupthink" become "community cohesion" when looked at from another point of view.
Never thought about it that way, but maybe that's why a reddit-style karma system does tend to hold relatively large communities together.
But even as one of the more scalable known systems, it still breaks down long before you hit Facebook scales, or "default Reddit subreddit" scales.
> There are a lot of friends and family I have in Italy that I can't see often, and I do enjoy hearing what they're up to.
In the old days we had to actively do that using letters, or emails, or phone calls. I think it was a better system because it forced you to choose who you cared enough about to stay up-to-date with. Minimalism isn't just about things, it's also about relationships.
I only have so much time, and FB makes it easier to keep in touch with more people. Sure, I'll find the time for really good friends, but it's a benefit to be able to keep in touch with more people who I enjoy having in my life.
If I was king of Facebook (or a social media company that had its network) and I could change things for users without worrying about the company's revenue I'd do two things.
1. No links to outside content.
2. Mandatory deletion of all historical data with a max retention option no longer than 1 year with a default of 30 days. (Let users pick the 'fuse' length within this time frame).
I think that would double down on the things I like about it (keeping tracking of acquaintances like you mentioned, handling events, etc.) - while also removing a lot of the things I don't (arguing about news, targeted ads based on historical data).
That said I'd just like to make it easier for people to control their own nodes (https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...), but I also recognize that getting the social element to work in a federated way is not easy. Maybe Urbit will pull it off eventually.
"The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol."
It's tough to get all this right. Humans are ok at dealing with one another in person most of the time, but being behind a screen really doesn't happen in many cases.
I have no idea what the solution is... it's a people problem, so probably not a strictly technological solution.
HN works fairly well because of the hard work of the moderators.
FB is kind of maddening to me. You can't just put it in a 'good' or 'bad' bucket.
Some things I get a lot of value out of:
* Being able to keep track of acquaintances from all the places I've lived. There are a lot of friends and family I have in Italy that I can't see often, and I do enjoy hearing what they're up to.
* As a tool for organizing it's been a very handy, low-friction way to get people involved in some political issues where I live in Oregon.
On the other hand, lately it has also been a source of stress. The sheer amount of anti-science, poorly thought out political comments and plain hatred is really depressing at a time when a lot of things are not going well.