Me in 2017: 🦝 oh thank goodness, social media that feels like the old internet before social media bollocksed everything up
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Dan Fixes Coin-Opsreplied to Mystery Babylon last edited by
@erosdiscordia not saying centralized social media is any better mind, just if we're gonna decentralize let's actually decentralize y'know
And I know it tends to be the most tedious tech-heads who bang the decentralization drum, but... honestly as someone who's done two decades of the social side and couldn't really give a crap about the details of the technical side of things: the technical side really does affect the social side! Decentralization and getting off the biggest servers really *is* important, even if the folk saying so are the replyiest of reply guys
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Mystery Babylonreplied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops last edited by
@ifixcoinops You know I think you're on to something here. One of the reasons I believe federated social media is struggling to shed the problems of centralized social media, is the over-emphasis on mastodon itself. I know there are a ton of other services, but we're all here.
I think if mastodon were better integrated with the other types of federated platforms, and it formed more of an overall ecosystem, it would be a bit more self-regulating. Just by dint of having some of the worst abuses more diluted. Just a theory, do you think it's relevant to what you mean?
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Mark Shane Haydenreplied to Mystery Babylon last edited by
@erosdiscordia Fediverse is too dominated by one service (Mastodon) and that service is dominated by a few outsized servers (Gargron's own servers, Stux's, possibly Threads in the future), but @ifixcoinops has kinda touched on what might be an even more fundamental problem with fedi, and the internet as a whole.
The services themselves are defective by design. "Social Media" in general are defective by design.
The fediverse became a going concern based on microblogging services...Twitter wannabes. Subsequent efforts have brought other federated off-brand clones of commercial "social media"...Fedi Instagram, Fedi YouTube, Fedi Reddit, so on and so forth. Which is fine, but...well...they are too much like what they aim to replace.
All of these services have anti-features that drive online toxicity and we clone them out of familiarity. I think that is a mistake. "Social Media" as we have come to know it, in its entirety, should probably just end. At the very least it needs an epic refactoring.
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Mystery Babylonreplied to Mark Shane Hayden last edited by
@msh @ifixcoinops Well, the epic refactoring was what I was hoping people could spitball about. What have we got to lose, ya know?
I think if social media ended altogether, it would have to be due to something pretty dire. Too many people (myself included) have gotten used to the feeling of instant back-and-forth with people you hadn't already met in real life. Like, we used to have things like forums/BBS, but they weren't exactly accessible to the average person.
But holy shit do I agree with you about the built-in features that create toxicity. Something needs to happen. The very fact that a crummy foreign government has the ability to (probably relatively easily) fuck with our elections using social media is proof enough that changing the way this is done is a crisis.
Do you think that there are specific anti-features that cause most of the problems? Without which social media would be at least somewhat healthier? Which would you target first if you could change anything?
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Mark Shane Haydenreplied to Mystery Babylon last edited by
@erosdiscordia @ifixcoinops for me I think "discoverability" is the thing at the root of it all, and is the cause of many of today's problems.
It is human nature for us to want to discover things, to find old friends and make new connections over common interests. These things make us happy, make is social beings. We kinda crave discovery, and that makes us vulnerable.
"Social Media" as it has evolved in the corporate surveillance capitalism model has preyed on our desire to discover and connect. It has found a way to monetise it. We trade our personal information for ease of discoverability, and ultimately as a way to outsource our social labour. That is, we have given the responsibility to discover and be discovered to this Big Mess to use against us for profit.
So now *they* make the connections and *they* define the communities, and they do so algorithmically with the intent to maximise profit, not promote harmony and happiness. It has bit us all in the ass...
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Mark Shane Haydenreplied to Mark Shane Hayden last edited by
@erosdiscordia @ifixcoinops ...so now there is great concern over "echo chambers" or "bubbles" but those aren't really the problem. Those have existed as long as humanity. What is different is that they used to form organically from human activities. Now they are manufactured by large platforms algorithmically. Such "communities" are impossible to moderate effectively and are exceedingly easy to manipulate.
I am not opposed to tools to help people to connect or even discover, but we must take such tools much more seriously and ensure communities form organically through human interactions, not through targeted marketing techniques.
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Mystery Babylonreplied to Mark Shane Hayden last edited by
@msh @ifixcoinops I think it's tempting to conclude social media would be better off if it didn't exist, but I can't help but remember how it was at first. Everyone rushed on because there was something there that fulfilled a need. Facebook in 2005-06 and Twitter in 08 hadn't worked out exactly how to make everyone addicted yet. Not that they were healthy platforms, but there was something in people that made them want it. Whatever that need is, the big companies only make money if it's not truly fed. So I think the goal should be a form(s) of social media that does feed whatever those needs are. Reduce people susceptibility to getting caught in the manipulative webs, by providing more wholesome ones.
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Mint Chip Cervinereplied to Mystery Babylon last edited by
@erosdiscordia @msh @ifixcoinops I think most social media would be way better if, like in 2008, it wasn't the primary fucking form of interacting with anyone, and if we somehow...
I dunno, can we build in bright patterns? is that a thing? where people are encouraged to take their privacy seriously, build friendships instead of aspiring to having their every thought heard and reacted to by millions, where watching a feed and having a conversation are not a click away from each other? hell, I'm sure if you get into the psychology, those goals are naive and it's even more complicated than that
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Kate Bowlesreplied to Mint Chip Cervine last edited by
@amaranth @erosdiscordia @msh @ifixcoinops This thread is so useful and I was reading quietly but now I’m interrupting because I’m so taken with bright patterns.
It’s spoken for here and this might not cover exactly what you mean. But designing for brightness is supporting something important about social pathmaking. Pathmaking balances risk and curiosity, and that’s where safety is both essential and can become a defensive entanglement.
Bright Patterns Collection
Brightpatterns.org: A front page to define the term and collect examples
(brightpatterns.org)
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@kate @amaranth @msh @ifixcoinops All of this reminds me of "desire paths" in landscaping and architecture. The footpath that takes a shortcut where the planned sidewalks don't go.
Corporate social media kind of doesn't allow for those desire paths to form. People are constantly herded to patterns and "upgrades" where their activity is most profitable for the company, and most addictive for the user, at a short-circuiting psychological level. I think that actually feels demotivating to most people, and the addictive patterns are most of what keeps them using a platform, outside the most basic "I guess it works" communication crumbs.
A social network that was willing to evolve with people and to where desire-paths were noted and built into the next iteration -- have we really had that yet?
Where people have their own space if they want, and/or a shared space if they'd rather have that, and the point wasn't to sell things OR to sell them and their data?
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Mystery Babylonreplied to Mystery Babylon last edited by
@kate @amaranth @msh @ifixcoinops
Even in the 90 BBS age, it was more about visiting somebody else's space (the BBS itself), not necessarily having your own.
Webrings and personal sites kinda got close in the late 90s and early 00s, but search was still so new, that finding your people was sometimes difficult. And interaction felt like it took place somewhere separate, like IRC.
And the linked-blogs era came closer but "monetization" as a concept got introduced a few years later and just fucked everything up. I think this era overlapped with social media in its infancy, about 2002-2006, and it was great...until having a blog became about selling yourself for money.
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@erosdiscordia @amaranth @msh @ifixcoinops
“A social network that was willing to evolve with people and to where desire-paths were noted and built into the next iteration”
I’m curious: is there something beyond corporatisation that now blocks this willingness? I also remember the web and pre-web — I found my way through IRC too. I’m wondering about the culture that accidentally blocks agency.
Tentatively, I think the willingness to evolve with people needs a very strong foundation of trust, and there are now so many forces in play that intentionally diminish trust. Without social trust we end up defaulting to rules that limit agency, because we can’t risk agency used to harm. So then, the preferred path is the managed path — we don’t trust ourselves to find new ways that work for others.
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@kate @amaranth @msh @ifixcoinops I'm sure there are things that block it right now. Both in terms of basic human psychology, and also the habits we've all formed and the things we've all come to expect from online socializing. Look at the people who come over here from Twitter -- you can pick them out of the crowd because of how they're used to interacting. If they don't find that here they often leave.
I still think that paths are going to have to be managed. That's why people' ability to spin up something like their own server, easier than mastodon currently allows, has to be part of the new thing. That would allow for lots of different proposed "paths" to be offered, in how people interact. And with some means of discovery/search/common area, eventually people could find the paths they like best. I realize all this language is pretty vague. I'm not describing a protocol, but just patterns of possible behavior.
I do actually like a lot about mastodon/the popular fediverse. The ability to block and defederate, single-user servers, boosting for visibility, chronological timelines, and the way "likes" are just a little gift, not something that screws with a visibility algorithm. It gets a lot of things right.
Where it blocks agency is once again defaulting to having basically "the feed" as the only real way to interact. There are no places, except as mentioned before the really intentional locked community servers. No places means nowhere for desire paths to truly make themselves known. And the person in charge of mastodon, I mean there's kind of a fraught relationship there in terms of responsiveness to users' wishes...
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@erosdiscordia @amaranth @msh @ifixcoinops
I’m just hauling all the way back up here to ask whether one problem we have is that digital paths are hard to trace back. This conversation has many branches and now finding something up-path that connects across different servers is like fighting your way through curtains.
So a digital path is more like a waterfall and we have become used to being carried along. It’s more like reply all emails in that the thread starts to contain all the replies, or misses some.
And perhaps that in itself is part of the search for resting places. Question: is this a design issue, or a use issue?