"Getting screamed at and insulted by people who disagree with you doesn’t take you out of your filter bubble — it makes you retreat back inside your bubble and reject the ideas of whoever is screaming at you."
Ha! I'm on Bluesky where I get insulted by people who agree with me!
I’m not on social media much because of much of what you say… however I do wish we could have more face to face discussions where we can agree to disagree if necessary but see the humanity of others. I have friends on both side of the aisles and I don’t always agree with them, but at least we can talk about things and then move on.
My other concern is TikTok. It is basically a propaganda platform for the Chinese government for the CCP. China does not allow things like Facebook and Twitter or ex because they are afraid it will propagandized their society, but we freely allow China, the communist party in China to propaganda dies our society. Many countries have ban tik tok but it rolls on in the U.S.
The basic takeaway from this seems to be that the profit motive is incompatible with a healthy social sphere. Things were fine until they were monetized, then they ate their seed corn, and now we are retreating to platforms that aren't subject to those pressures.
We crossed the rubicon with twitter in 2021 when my city announced a month-long COVID lockdown at 10PM on a Sunday evening via Twitter and no other platform. Politicians, my grandma, the weird right-wing kid from 8th grade, the dorm Marxist - they're all here; giving undo credibility to the platform and each other. It's an evil putrid cesspit, dante would have reserved a higher order for it if it had existed. A thrumming mélange of our worst extinct, a skinner-box; an algorithmically optimized cortisol-dopamine rollercoaster ride. The balkanization of the internet can't come soon enough, it feels like the normies took it from me, and then the normies went insane.
Very good. Not being a Twit, and having seen FaceBook only over someone else's shoulder, this techno-social update is helpful for understanding current trends I don't understand. If social usage develops as you foresee, a comparison to Tim Wu's "The Master Switch" would be interesting.
Currently amongst the people I know, the older ones seem to be the most negatively affected: their preferred media channels or users serve them nonstop rage bait.
Edit adding reference: "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires is a 2010 book by Tim Wu that argues that information industries, from the telephone to the internet, follow a cycle of open innovation followed by consolidation into a single, dominant entity."
This is your occasional reminder that Metcalfe's law is wrong: the value of a communications network grows less quickly than the square of the number of users, because not all users are equally valuable and some are actually net negative (spammers, trolls, etc.). In practice, the value tends to scale as n*log(n) rather than n^2 (where n is the number of users).
This is interesting to see an upside in the move from the text-based social media of Facebook and Twitter to the short-format-video social media of TikTok and Reels and whatever. The text-based social media has already been moving in the fragmented direction, as the algorithms get better at sorting and recommending, and since Facebook has by default been friends-only for almost 15 years now. But I guess short format video is easier to target even more tightly, because you get lots and lots of feedback on what people are actually watching (much more than Twitter does about what you're actually reading). Also, because video is a little bit more exposing, a lot fewer people actually create short format video, so it can be more passive for most users (though it's always been hard to tell how many lurkers there have always been on Reddit and Facebook and Twitter).
An observation .... it appears that every new form of communication goes through a cycle....
1) introduction 2) ramping/great power...seemingly unstoppable 3) calibration... people figure out how to deal with it 3) sunset (only the old guys are impacted)
Historically....
Newspapers ==> Yellow Journalism
Radio ==> fireside chats
TV ==> the JFK moment
Internet ==> your article
It seems that the social platforms are getting normalized and the general population has built their filters/defense mechanisms.
I am sure there is a new technology in the horizon... where we will repeat this cycle.
"And paradoxically, despite the centralized nature of algorithms and TV production companies, I think private consumption helps us become more distinct individuals"
I think this is true but the concern is that in the centralized TV days, you might see something that piques your interest and want to learn more. Depending on the year you might go to your library or Google or something else and take agency in learning more. With highly adaptable algorithmic feeds, it knows what you want and will keep you as a passive consumer instead of taking agency in your interests. (spoken as someone who recently realized I was doing this and had to break out of the bubble- also part of why I just started my own Substack!)
I worry about a coming time when DM’s, etc. are all siloed and only NSA and the platforms get to observe the trends and potentially manipulate the discourse, hidden in the background. How can a fragmented internet be protected from the Overlords granted universal access? I’m afraid Jared Lanier has already, now permanently, found the best answer by withdrawing completely. The promotion of “Free Press” to CBS News is alarming enough! HB
Funny enough, this is what I hoped would happen, that social media as we remember it from the 2010s would get so filled with ads, slop, and suggested crap that people would get frustrated and leave. And the age of unrest we lived through would be gone with it.
Pouring myself a shot right now. Cheers to a new era.
"Getting screamed at and insulted by people who disagree with you doesn’t take you out of your filter bubble — it makes you retreat back inside your bubble and reject the ideas of whoever is screaming at you."
Ha! I'm on Bluesky where I get insulted by people who agree with me!
I’m not on social media much because of much of what you say… however I do wish we could have more face to face discussions where we can agree to disagree if necessary but see the humanity of others. I have friends on both side of the aisles and I don’t always agree with them, but at least we can talk about things and then move on.
My other concern is TikTok. It is basically a propaganda platform for the Chinese government for the CCP. China does not allow things like Facebook and Twitter or ex because they are afraid it will propagandized their society, but we freely allow China, the communist party in China to propaganda dies our society. Many countries have ban tik tok but it rolls on in the U.S.
The basic takeaway from this seems to be that the profit motive is incompatible with a healthy social sphere. Things were fine until they were monetized, then they ate their seed corn, and now we are retreating to platforms that aren't subject to those pressures.
> Twitter’s editorial slant leaned slightly left-of-center
Understatement of the century.
I feel like the "Cozyweb and private gardens vs Dark Forest" analogy could be of some use here https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2024/04/16/the-dark-forest-anthology-of-the-internet/
Nice.. Venket is a good guy
I feel like 10% of load-bearing mental frameworks in my subjective universe originate from Venket
John,
I know what you mean .... though I have to brace myself before reading some of his articles.. did I get enough rest ? am I awake enough ?
LOL... I am joking a bit, but he does think very deeply about topics....which I like.
/Rahul
We crossed the rubicon with twitter in 2021 when my city announced a month-long COVID lockdown at 10PM on a Sunday evening via Twitter and no other platform. Politicians, my grandma, the weird right-wing kid from 8th grade, the dorm Marxist - they're all here; giving undo credibility to the platform and each other. It's an evil putrid cesspit, dante would have reserved a higher order for it if it had existed. A thrumming mélange of our worst extinct, a skinner-box; an algorithmically optimized cortisol-dopamine rollercoaster ride. The balkanization of the internet can't come soon enough, it feels like the normies took it from me, and then the normies went insane.
Very good. Not being a Twit, and having seen FaceBook only over someone else's shoulder, this techno-social update is helpful for understanding current trends I don't understand. If social usage develops as you foresee, a comparison to Tim Wu's "The Master Switch" would be interesting.
Currently amongst the people I know, the older ones seem to be the most negatively affected: their preferred media channels or users serve them nonstop rage bait.
Edit adding reference: "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires is a 2010 book by Tim Wu that argues that information industries, from the telephone to the internet, follow a cycle of open innovation followed by consolidation into a single, dominant entity."
This is your occasional reminder that Metcalfe's law is wrong: the value of a communications network grows less quickly than the square of the number of users, because not all users are equally valuable and some are actually net negative (spammers, trolls, etc.). In practice, the value tends to scale as n*log(n) rather than n^2 (where n is the number of users).
This is interesting to see an upside in the move from the text-based social media of Facebook and Twitter to the short-format-video social media of TikTok and Reels and whatever. The text-based social media has already been moving in the fragmented direction, as the algorithms get better at sorting and recommending, and since Facebook has by default been friends-only for almost 15 years now. But I guess short format video is easier to target even more tightly, because you get lots and lots of feedback on what people are actually watching (much more than Twitter does about what you're actually reading). Also, because video is a little bit more exposing, a lot fewer people actually create short format video, so it can be more passive for most users (though it's always been hard to tell how many lurkers there have always been on Reddit and Facebook and Twitter).
An observation .... it appears that every new form of communication goes through a cycle....
1) introduction 2) ramping/great power...seemingly unstoppable 3) calibration... people figure out how to deal with it 3) sunset (only the old guys are impacted)
Historically....
Newspapers ==> Yellow Journalism
Radio ==> fireside chats
TV ==> the JFK moment
Internet ==> your article
It seems that the social platforms are getting normalized and the general population has built their filters/defense mechanisms.
I am sure there is a new technology in the horizon... where we will repeat this cycle.
So this means that Bluesky is good?
"And paradoxically, despite the centralized nature of algorithms and TV production companies, I think private consumption helps us become more distinct individuals"
I think this is true but the concern is that in the centralized TV days, you might see something that piques your interest and want to learn more. Depending on the year you might go to your library or Google or something else and take agency in learning more. With highly adaptable algorithmic feeds, it knows what you want and will keep you as a passive consumer instead of taking agency in your interests. (spoken as someone who recently realized I was doing this and had to break out of the bubble- also part of why I just started my own Substack!)
I worry about a coming time when DM’s, etc. are all siloed and only NSA and the platforms get to observe the trends and potentially manipulate the discourse, hidden in the background. How can a fragmented internet be protected from the Overlords granted universal access? I’m afraid Jared Lanier has already, now permanently, found the best answer by withdrawing completely. The promotion of “Free Press” to CBS News is alarming enough! HB
Funny enough, this is what I hoped would happen, that social media as we remember it from the 2010s would get so filled with ads, slop, and suggested crap that people would get frustrated and leave. And the age of unrest we lived through would be gone with it.
Pouring myself a shot right now. Cheers to a new era.
"...but so did Saturday morning cartoons in the 1980s, and we 80s kids turned out fine."
That's how I was raised, and I turned out TV.
90s Saturday morning cartoons were way better than 80s ones!
70's were the best.