There will come a time, years from now, when it will be obvious to everyone that the basic mechanics of Twitter, of Tumblr, of Reddit, of Facebook, of all these Web2.0 catastrophes in the waning years prior to their Dot.Com.Crash2.0 cataclysms, were carelessly engineered in such a way that they rewarded inhumanity and gamified cruelty. There will come a time when we look back and wonder how we managed to engineer social structures that emphasized our least filtered, most caustic emotions and rewarded the least emotionally stable among us with cachet, numerical validation and clout. Some day, we will look back and we will wonder how we collectively allowed a culture that emphasizes attack and anonymity over community and connection to flourish, grow legs and crawl out into the real world where it could destroy lives. I'm reading reclaiming conversation. It's fucking fantastic, but Sherry Turkle has been fantastic since I was eating paste. The amazing thing is that she legit starts a chapter with a quote from Louis CK: And then she drops knowledge, studies, chapter and verse on it to back up every fucking point for like the rest of the book. It's fucking STUPID that I know who Zoe Quinn is. It's RETARDED that I'm allowed an opinion about this. It's unspeakably TRAGIC that legions of misanthropes have aligned to destroy the life of a woman they'll never meet for transgressions they don't understand against a person they don't know and it's utterly predictable that 21st century problems are poorly handled in 19th century courts. Honestly? I don't think gamergate is a problem for your industry. I think it's a problem for the social networks we've allowed to flourish, for the connections we've chosen to foster, and for the basic humanity we're foregoing. I think this is what happens when socialization is dictated by people with CS degrees that never took psych 101. And I think it's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better... but I think it will eventually get better.
> I think this is what happens when socialization is dictated by people with CS degrees that never took psych 101. Social networks initially worked well, and have changed society so much that I don't think psych 101 students from an era before they existed would have fared any better at predicting design outcomes. (and surely psych grads are used now) But putting that asside, do you know of attempts to design social networks that won't cause harm? There's no anonymity on my Facebook feed for example, but it still seems to be doing bad things to many of my friends. Every social network seems to create its own unique kind of dysfunction - different for each platform. You seem confident better social networks will happen, is anything happening now?
Yes. Unfortunately Diaspora was just too hard; Google Plus stole a lot of their ideas, they were developing server-side rather than client-side and they weren't nearly monetized enough. This is the problem: a social network should be a public works project, not a private group, because if you attempt to monetize them they turn evil. Like rd95 I think the attempts made here at Hubski are a step in the right direction, but it'll never be Facebook (or anything like it). At best it'll be a kinder, gentler Reddit which is the best possible thing. There are needs for anonymous networks and named networks and Hubski is the best design I've seen for anonymous. That Facebook has become "your parents' social network" says a lot about the failings of monetization and anonymity. The rise of SnapChat says more (at least, in principle - in fact, they're lying about anonymity and forgetability). Users WANT a social network that exists for them, not for Zuckerberg and his advertisers, but there haven't been any viable alternatives yet. Another basic problem is that social network design, right now, is all about engagement, not fulfillment. How many times you come back to the site and mash "like" buttons vs. finding out what your friends are up to. Bragging about your triumphs and burying your failures rather than presenting your honest self to the people that matter to you. These qualities can exist on a social network, but there's no business model that supports a social graph that you interact with as little as possible. It'll happen, though. Kids are turning away from the invasive, kudzu-like social networks that erupted in the '00s. They just don't have a viable alternative right now.But putting that asside, do you know of attempts to design social networks that won't cause harm?
Diaspora still exists, is an active project, and has users. Its problem isn't getting developers and pod operators, it's that people use social networks because their friends are there, and unless your friends are tinfoil hats and hackers your friends are probably not using Diaspora. And I'm not sure your friends have any reason to trust J. Random Hacker more than Facebook. I do, because that's my community, but if all you know about it is Silicon Valley and Salon articles about "brogrammers" I could see not having much confidence.
Entirely too true. However, there was a time when Diaspora was the shining white hope of all these Facebook oppressed because it was magically going to give them a Facebooky place that wasn't Facebooky. Then Google did the same thing and nobody left. I think Facebook has finally figured out that their continued success depends on locking in their users. I think Messenger was their play. And I think it will work.
I dunno. Facebook stopped being cool when your mother started using it. I think having a Facebook account is going to be the expected thing for a long time, but that doesn't mean it will remain the center of anyone's Internet world. I still have AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ accounts because I have a few friends I talk to regularly who still do and having Pidgin set up to speak ICQ and AIM is easier than asking them all to join the 21st century. Doesn't change that ICQ would be dead if not for the porn industry and how AIM continues to exist is a complete mystery.