The End of Social Media(miikavonbell.com) |
The End of Social Media(miikavonbell.com) |
This article is a dog whistle for right-wing behaviour and is quite frankly problematic, starting with this quip in the first paragraph which sets the stage: "[...] instead of letting algorithms and machine learning decide what is good for you."
We've spent a good twenty years now, and longer really, building the infrastructure to ensure that when it comes to the World Wide Web, FAAMNG+ companies - not just restricted to US-centric ones but globally really - can make sure that the things you see, and the way the algorithms work, are done in a way that is good for you.
I used to be against mass surveillance, logging everything, but seeing this kind of an article in 2021 sends shivers up my spine. I'm quite worried. Is this what we should look into next?
> We've spent a good twenty years now, and longer really, building the infrastructure to ensure that when it comes to the World Wide Web, FAAMNG+ companies - not just restricted to US-centric ones but globally really - can make sure that the things you see, and the way the algorithms work, are done in a way that is good for you.
Wait, maybe I'm being hit by Poe's law here -- is your post actually sarcasm?
Every time I see a sentence like this, I interpret it as the first step of an attempt to reduce speech.
Step 1: Identify 'problematic' content.
Step 2: Create rules to limit the distribution of 'problematic' content.
Step 3: Broaden the definition of 'problematic' content to include anything that disagrees with a specific point of view.
Step 4: Dystopian hell straight from Orwell.
> can make sure that the things you see, and the way the algorithms work, are done in a way that is good for you.
Is this a 'woosh' moment? Is this intended to be satire?
> I used to be against mass surveillance, logging everything
> Is this what we should look into next?
If this is satire, can you please clarify?
When Friendster, MySpace,Facebook, et al started, it was about connecting friends online. People that already had a connection. When you shared something, you wanted to share something personal with friends. YouTube was about sharing your home videos. Not for money, but for actually sharing. What a strange concept!
Then people noticed you can monetize their content. No longer was it about sharing with friends, but creating for profit.
Social networks, as they were envisioned, are a great concept. As a method for distributing content to be monetized, not so much.
The fact that consumers as well as creators need permanent accounts in order to use the platform enabled a level of tracking that normal studios and publishers could never have dreamed of. Warners could never put activity loggers into their viewer's eyeballs to figure out the exact rate at which the content of frame N leads them to continue watching at frame N + n. They had to rely on some level of positive word of mouth and positive reviews. They needed to leave some lasting impression that after their viewers spent a few minutes going home and thinking about it, they still thought the content was worth recommending.
That is all gone now.
Well it's a different style of engagement and a different standard for "quality" from what we colloquially think of those terms to mean. Traditional media needed you to engage with the media. Social media needs you to engage with the comment section associated with the media. The qualities the system is optimizing for, then, isn't the stuff we typically consider to be good for that medium. Instead it's the stuff that's good for making people talk about it.
This is almost certainly to blame for things always gravitating towards largely subjective evaluations of where something falls on some axis for a highly charged metric. Is this racist or not racist? Queer friendly or unfriendly? Liberal of conservative? Arguing about how to 'keep score' with which boxes any specific bit of media gets is a good way to say something about something topical that keeps people engaged and arguing.
Even in the days of the old blogosphere it was well known that you needed to have a comments section to get the page views. You can only crank out so many articles as an individual. But you can make your site "stickier" and encourage people to keep clicking the bookmark for it if you can get them engaged with talking about your article. It's not surprise that the most noxious elements of the modern Internet were more-or-less born on Reddit and Tumblr. These were two sites that basically thrived on creating selective pressure for this sort of content.
I really hope they're not.
Between my habit of leaving youtube playing in the background with the sound off before randomly coming back and closing the tab, and my toddler figuring out touch interfaces for the first time on their app, they're not going to get anything actually actionable...
I find this to be very hopeful, because it means we can design and form networks that elevate people, not lower them into mindless zombie states.
That's the interesting part about humanity though. We could live on a paradise planet together, with complete freedom, using high tech inventions to live anywhere with power and water.
But instead we are building a prison planet.
A similar topic comes up in music all the time, too: People accuse their favorite band of changing their style in order to get mainstream appeal and, therefore, more money. Which is definitely true to some extend, but I don't think this makes paying musicians a bad thing in general. And it's the same thing with content creators on the internet.
That’s great and I’m happy for them... but it’s not social media. It’s just regular impersonal broadcast media, with a lower barrier to entry.
> you can monetize their content.
Wouldn't that put the blame on the monetization of social media? Content creators are trying to make money, social media companies determine what kind of content is relevant and worthy of views, thus which content deserves the money. Content creators seem to be at the mercy of providing content that will be recommended.
I view it as a sort of "don't hate the player, hate the game." And the social media companies determine the rules of the game.
Nothing wrong with making a few bucks off of your craft.
And over the last decade youtube creators has been providing content with quality way superior compared to what more traditional entertainment industry has been producing (mainly marvel junk food, low effort remakes and SNL)
I think that's an oversimplification of the issue. OPs main point (as I read it) was that once a profit motive became dominant, it pushed out enthusiast/passion-motivated content creators, and as a result the output is distorted towards that which is profitable.
I just entered 'crocodile' into Google search while signed into my normal private account, and got a ton of useful information about crocodiles. Shoes were nowhere to be found in the first 30 or 40 results that I scanned. I don't know if the OP is using a different search engine that is more blatant about ads.
But I think the author's general point isn't about the information being unavailable (even if croc was the whole word, you can just write 'croc animal') but about the internet being engineered as a distraction machine. He didn't set out to look for shoes--but once they were presented, suddenly he found himself shoe shopping despite having no internet in purchasing shoes.
Why would you do that when searching for crocodiles?
60 years ago, before even the ARPANET, there was Newton Minow giving a speech [1] about how TV was garbage (the "vast wasteland" speech). If you want to read something timeless, read that instead.
[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/09/the-vast-wast...
The mind boggles.
[1] https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/newtonminow.htm
- Most content produced by people on social media is not good and you probably don't want to see it. Serendipity of a bunch of crappy content "I had a bad day nobody ask me about it" is not something you want, but it is serendipity.
- Social media isn't where you go to get info on Crocodiles, not sure how that would even work? That's Wikipedia. ... or if we're talking social media, YouTube (I searched YouTube and got a lot of legitimate results).
Is it true that people are getting dumber? Big claim, no evidence. Do paragraphs exist? I'm looking for solution. Saying nobody knows what the future looks like ain't it.
"I dislike ads and only stupid idiot babies would tolerate platforms with ads, therefore everyone using the majority of websites is an idiot" is such lazy thinking. IDK, I'm a huge fan of social sciences which means I might as well be the devil to many engineers/HN posters.
However the author also posits that whether intelligence is increasing is still controversial and difficult to prove conclusively.
[1] Are We Getting Smarter?: Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century https://books.google.com/books?id=Z_-ykOVpRccC
This is so obviously false. If education was the goal of advertising, ads would inform about the negative sides of the products as well. I've never seen that. The goal of advertising is to make people buy more using any psychological trick you can come up with.
If you want to educate people, you need to do actual education. Bombarding people with propaganda is not education.
They try to make consumer to buy the product in all means. Which means, that this education is often very far away from facts in the most of the cases.
So I wrote a goodbye note on instagram and facebook, felt confirmation by reading Jaron Lanier. Got a new domain and configured jekyll.
Now I can blog and write my 'digital garden' notes on my own island and share it with a smaller circle of people outside of the regular social media which artificially disciplines my thoughts, responses and behavior like the panopticon (michel foucault). I'll keep an eye on facebook groups, will schedule some script to rss-ify some feeds from 'facebook friends' but that's it.
He mentions mirror.xyz in the footnotes, but I can't figure out what that is. One of those annoyingly exclusive projects like Clubhouse. The fact that not letting people in was a "feature" really just turned me off. Sour grapes, but oh well.
[2]: https://iris.to
Many bloggers are trying to do it as a way to gain income at this point, and the ads are either all over the site or inserted directly into the "content".
So yeah, mentality needs to change to stop seeking revenue out of everything...
I feel impervious to social media advertising & you can too if you just go through the effort.
meaning a jailbreak app must be ran after a phone has booted. your phone stays jailbroken as long as it does not power down.
it is functionally untethered. as the app that jailbreaks the phone persists through reboots.
there are firmware restrictions where these methods work however.
It'd be like if there were some massive drama involving Netflix and YouTube. You wouldnt call it the end of streaming, or web based video. There'd be a massive shift in the market certainly, and I think eventually social media will look completely different to how it looks now, but thats not the end.
It might sound like I'm arguing over semantics but I'd disagree.
Neil Postman on Cyberspace, 1995
I pay for YouTube Premium so I don't get any ads on YouTube. And I don't really care about the (crappy) algorithm because I only watch what I subscribe to.
I hope Twitter's utility will similarly increase as they pivot to (a) premium paid services, and (b) open protocols via BlueSky.
Glass is a new social media photography app for iOS that feels a lot like early Instagram, but it's a paid service with no ads.
So yeah, perhaps it's the end of social media as we knew it…but that's fine because new and existing services will adapt to provide people premium experiences (for a fee of course).
Remember, we are the internet. If we don't like what it is, we can build something better.
No, actually, we can't. By "we", of course, I mean garden-variety consumers.
The legal, financial, and social barriers to entry are far too high.
Anyone attempting to make the next youtube would be priced out of existance, anyone trying to make another reddit would be reduced to a smouldering crater by the time the lawsuits hit them, assuming that paypal doesn't force them to do an onlyfans first.
It's not 2003 (when 4chan started) any more. The internet game is fixed, rigged and it will only become more restrictive, not less.
Fuckerberg pulled the ladder up after him; there's not gonna be another movement -at least not coming from the internet.
Wasn't really expecting this much discussion and attention for my article, but I am quite happy to see so much people having similar thoughts like I have, which I wrote in my article.
I wrote a follow up post to my blog to share some of my afterthoughts: https://miikavonbell.com/posts/front-page-hacker-news/
If we hadn't had advertising but instead came up with some micropayment formalism, I bet the internet never would have developed to be what it is today, even for today's content that is not ad driven.
ADDED: I do tend to think the commercialization of the Internet with advertising was probably inevitable, but someone could probably construct at least a vaguely plausible narrative around a less commercialized post-NSFNET world.
> consuming content through internet has become more and more manipulative.
This is 100% true. With those ML-based "personalized" info feed, users keep getting pushed biased information that matches their prejudice and is not a reflection of the true picture.
I'm actually dubious that what fraction of the pro-Trump conspiracy theorists had developed their conspiracy views "thanks to" Facebook et al's ML-based info suggestion algorithms.
Hard disagree. I want to see everything from everyone I follow in a specific newest-to-oldest order. I also don't want to see other shit in my feed (X liked Y, who to follow, whatever), but I'm fine with having it outside of the main feed (be it a sidebar or a click away).
I also want to "tag" my follows into lists (family, close friends, topic X, topic Y), allowing me to filter through the timeline.
Currently only Twitter and Mastodon allow me this use case, and that's what I use on a semi-regular basis. Everything that deviates from that (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube's home feed) also loses me as a regular visitor with zero exceptions.
But the reason everything deviates from that eventually is clickthrough rate on ads. If my timeline is confusing enough, I'm more likely to click on ads.
It can take tens of minutes to hours for major news sites to report on a breaking event (e.g., the fall of Kabul). Meanwhile, you can get detailed - albiet in some cases very innacurate - information within minutes of it happening simply by watching for Tweets from people on the ground.
I would correct to most cases. Or that the information you get is without sufficient context to be of use.
I need to access Youtube from a completely different IP address, with a different user agent and browser window size to get rid of certain themes and suggestions that magically appear on the front page. Browser fingerprinting is responsible for this adversarial dynamic I find myself in.
I am sure they are still hoovering up all my data but I hope they at least heed the signal that some people will pay for ad-free alternatives!
I do think there is merit to the idea of market segmentation and value offerings in different ways:
1 - Eyeballs : Give us attention in exchange for browsing
2 - Premium : Pay us, and we will omit all ads
3 - VendorCosted: Vendor pays, and we omit all ads from certain content
IMO the curated youtube experience is far better. Yes, it recommends similar content and will push you down a rabbithole if you let it, but that's what recommender systems do. The flipside of discovering good content from good choices is discovering bad content from bad choices, and I don't think those can be automatically separated. On occasion you have to actively and firmly tell the algorithm "no" in the form of "don't recommend this channel," but once you do it respects your decision. A tiny bit of curation goes a long way, and if if I didn't let youtube work with me to figure out what I liked I imagine I would wind up doing the same thing but worse by keeping a list of interesting channels that I periodically checked.
I don't use it to watch political content, so I don't get much of it.
I'm not addicted to YouTube. I don't spend that much time on it. It's not my go-to source when I go online. Maybe I'm in the minority, but when you treat it only as a video hosting service where you can follow specific feeds, I don't think it's really problematic.
What about Hacker News?
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=s...
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sitcom%2C+situ...
It looks like sitcom ran in parallel below situation comedy from the start, then sitcom took over with the boom in the 1980s. Situation comedy never went away, but it never came close once they diverged.
That's not to say your prediction is wrong, just feels extremely unlikely, barring some massive regulatory upheaval changing the internet's current paradigm.
The other option is everyone spinning up and hosting their own sites, which will not happen because Helen the mommy blogger has 2 kids to deal with and photos to edit and content to write so she does not also want to learn how to set up hosting and write HTML.
I'd like for certain things to "go back to the way they were" but that's just not how it works usually.
I frequently miss life updates from people I'm in low contact with, and instead get endless suggested paid nonsense that I've tried very hard to curate personal preferences away from.
I also use ad block plus. I read until stuff looks familiar, then I'm done for the day.
Since our jumping off point was "people are getting dumber"(they aren't) I just want to point out people aren't also developing ADHD, they just have more things vying for their neurtypical brain's attention.
Old Old media also was a "vast wasteland" of sponsored radio programs, poorly written syndicated stories meant to engage readers to see other advertisements in newspapers (literally the social media model), and billboards adorning theaters and most aspects of public life, even more than today. I was hoping he would get into something about devoting ones efforts towards improvements, personal or otherwise, rather than endless consumption that leaves you in the same place as beforehand, but that wasn't really his mark and probably not even in his capitalist head given the opining about 'tyrannical communism'.
[1] https://youtu.be/m3NBEurnIqY [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimina...
Now I can get around it with a ton of effort, but it will break sooner or later, which is why why I find Twitter/Mastodon lists far more useful and flexible.
The 'why' part is a completely different matter. If there's any interpretation or time difference between the event and the post, scepticism is absolutely warranted.
There are good reasons, although I share your general concern. E.g., if you believe that you may be affected by an event, or if it's important/relevant enough that others will start to frame how it's perceived, it's generally good to find out about it as it's happening.
On the other hand, the vast majority of trending events aren't worth being concerned about for most people.