Even without the algorithm, though, I also believe that humans just aren't evolved to have some kinds of discussions asynchronously, remotely behind a screen. I've found myself needing to disconnect from social media because it leads me to having negative feelings about people that I know I like. E.g. after the overturning of Roe v. Wade there were some posts by family members who I know and love, even though I know we don't share the same politics. After seeing their posts the first thought that went through my mind was "WTF is wrong with these people??" But if we had been discussing it face-to-face, I'm sure we would both have been more respectful of the other person's viewpoint, or at least would have agreed to disagree and move on.
Everyone has seen it (and probably done it) - said something extremely hostile in an online forum that we would never say face-to-face.
> Even without the algorithm, though, I also believe that humans just aren't evolved to have some kinds of discussions asynchronously, remotely behind a screen.... But if we had been discussing it face-to-face, I'm sure we would both have been more respectful of the other person's viewpoint, or at least would have agreed to disagree and move on.
Yes, this. But what I fear is that heavy use of social media is causing our face-to-face interactions to change for the worse as well. People seem to be getting less respectful in face-to-face interactions as social media led the way towards making it easy to dehumanize the other.
I used to think this was only a property of algorithms but I'm not convinced anymore. Any number of link aggregator sites I'm on with no algorithmic surfacing of content, Reddit (at least on the old site), HN, Lobsters, Tildes, etc all have the same effect. Everyone comments on and engages with the rage inducing post. Nuanced, sanguine conversations get maybe an upvote or two but are just a few posters talking. This tracks with my experience on forums back in the '90s where huge hellthreads would spawn and have people arguing for weeks, and every archive of Usenet flamethreads that I've seen.
I don't think the algorithms are helping, but I think this is just a property of socializing in the large. Humans, when socializing in person, have a lot of context. When my friend rants "relationships are terrible they are just adults emotionally manipulating each other" to me, and I have the context of knowing my friend just had a bad breakup, I know the place this is coming from. When someone posts this on Twitter, everyone is up in arms because there's no context. There's other properties of socializing in the large that I suspect leads to the patterns we see in online discourse, but I'm beginning to think that the algorithms are the minor part.
I think you're laser focusing on Twitter because of your experiences on the platform. I only started using Twitter recently as I felt the non-technical content on HN became too one-sided or rage-filled, so I can't offer much observation there, but I've been on non-algorithmic social sites for decades. I've been on HN for over a decade. Heck, you can hop onto Usenet today and see hellthreads still spawning. A Raspberry Pi group I'm in had a (crossposted) hellthread about Apple products.
People respond to rage whether there's algorithms or not. People give others online much less benefit of the doubt than they do in person. I've seen this constant on every non-algorithmic social site I've been on. Mastodon, despite being a much smaller network, also has huge chains of posts spawned by angry toots/posts. At this point I'm convinced that this is just a modality of failure in human discourse. I'm cautiously optimistic that humans will develop norms around socializing in the large, but it took centuries of political instability for the printing press to be normalized, so it may take (turbulent) decades for socializing in the large to be normalized.
No, these algorithms (often) purposefully amplify content that increases the engagement rate or "average time on page" metric.
It's just that toxic content coincidentally often has high values on this metric:
- if you agree with the content, you stay on the page longer to read more of what you love
- if you disagree with the (toxic) content, you perhaps invest a lot of time to post strong counterarguments (increases engagement rate and average time on page)
> In other words, maybe its undermining our current system by actually being more technically democratic.
I think OPs point is valid if the algorithm is really just giving humans more of what they want. In other words, if the engagement metric really is responding to how humans prefer to spend their time, this really is a view into what a more technically democratic society looks like.
Personally, I don't like the idea of that and would prefer the thought that these algorithms really are measuring the wrong thing!
To highlight the point I'm making, assuming the above is true, your stance could be summed up as: "yes, humans prefer this content, but we know better and will make the right decision on their behalf"
To re-enforce a sibling comment, being able to choose your own algorithm is exactly how you tease apart these two takes. Twitter supports this (chronological vs. engagement) - I personally opt for chronological. I'd be interested to see the stats on usage of that!
What makes people engaged and what people want are not the same thing by definition. If you want to state they are, you should say why you think it.
I agree that it's not, but long-term desires are not all that people have.
> many would argue
Maybe, maybe not, but I would disagree.
> that they're not freely choosing to succumb to addiction either.
"freely" is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence. And a discussion about that is philosophical. They're as free to make that decision as they are to make any other.
Those things are literally the result of human and automated research on how to make people read/share content. I wonder what is your definition of "forced".
They aren't forcing you to keep your eyes open and see the content on their sites
Your computer can open another web page. You can get off the seat.
Tired of seeing garbage clickbait articles? Block the sites which post that stuff.
Tired of conspiracy theories and gossipy articles? Block the sites and mute/unfollow those people.
Tired of experiencing the world in 140 character chunks? Get off Twitter.
Personally I try to go out of my way to purchase books directly from the author, publisher, a book store with a local presence, and online retailers in that order.
I’ve mostly cut Barnes and Nobel out of my vendor list for this exact reason, their book shelves are full of products I have no interest in - walking into their store has such a high noise to signal ratio that, unless I place my order in advance for a specific product, I don’t bother walking in anymore. The books of value are buried on shelves drown out by heavily marketed pop culture noise; and that’s if I’m lucky, often I have to have it ordered and shipped to store to pick it up locally. They don’t meet my needs for content discovery so I don’t do business with them very often.
Just because they haven't succeeded does not mean they haven't tried.
I know the actual text of the bill would require a lot of finagling and legalese, but that's the concept of what I want.
"Non algorithmic" means "some human creates the content feed by hand". This is also not free of lots of biases and what news portals in the web did in the past.
There used to be a news app called Pulse that LinkedIn bought and killed. To me, that was the best possible execution of the feed concept. It was essentially RSS with a scrollable feed component. You could browse feeds by category, but it wasn't recommending things based on current interests. If you wanted to go down a right/left wing newshole it was possible, but you had to consciously seek it out and go down it. The app wasn't breadcrumbing you.
if u want an example: tiktok has the for you page (algo discovery) and the following page (just ppl u follow). its the fyp where ppl spend time.
Say you hit a button, and each time you hit it you gain a million dollars. After you hit that button once or twice, you discover that it also causes great harm to other people. If you continue to hit the button, your original intent (when you didn't know it's effects) is no longer relevant to whether or not it you should continue hitting the button, since you would now knowingly be harming people for your own profit. The side-effect is no longer a side-effect. It's just an effect.
To answer your question anyway, perhaps we should consider the well-being of a user and bake that into our algorithms. It might not be as profitable, but there's a reason we regulate companies- having some restrictions on profitability can often be a net benefit to society.
The problem rather is: how are we supposed to algorithmically measure the well-being of a user?
If this is your stance: what algorithm do you propose to separate content that is "toxic" from content that is "non-toxic"?
I saw youtube's new shorts feature and clicked on it out of curiousity. It gave me a couple funny cat videos and some cooking content copied from tik tok... but after that it was just a doomscroll of the guy I'm talking about above, Prager University, etc.
Youtube has like 2 decades of data on what videos I watch, and it's definitely not that shit, but yet it's clear their algorithm is optimizing to put that in front of my eyes.
Who is this? And what platforms? I'm not seeing anything like this on fb/twtr/ig/tt/yt
But if it's know to be just a correlation, it is a defamation to claim that this was done on purpose ("purposefully").
As for toxicity, I don't think there's one magical root cause for all of it. And I'd argue that most features and designs to increase engagement _are_ one of the many causes for people to create lucrative polarizing digital content.
edit: Also I'm not sure how my original post was confusing correlation with causation. You can replace "correlation" with "coincidence" there without issue.
Why toxic (which is subjective) appeals to so many humans is really the question here. The algorythms has no say in that.
"Purposefully" means that the algorithms were developed with the purpose to amplify toxic content. I seriously doubt this is the case. Amplifying toxic content is rather an unintended side effect of the metrics that the algorithms optimize for.
No, my position is that since the developers had neutral intent, it is defamation to claim that these algorithms purposefully amplify toxic content.
It really doesn't matter what the algorithm is meant to do because it's very obvious the material consequences of what it does.
Because people democratically choose to engage with it!
I very much agree with everything else you said.
Evolution does not have an intended purpose.
> I've found myself needing to disconnect from social media because it leads me to having negative feelings about people that I know I like
That sounds a lot like heated face to face interactions. I guess that's why they call it "social" media!
People can take responsibility for their feelings and actions. Or they can find a scapegoat like social media. There's a long human tradition of scapegoating, after all.
I never said it did. What's your point? I'm just emphasizing that humans have clearly evolved to have social constraints in face-to-face interactions that haven't evolved in async, remote interactions (which is unsurprising).
> That sounds a lot like heated face to face interactions
Except it's not, and that's my whole point. Yes, of course people can have heated face-to-face interactions, but it's undeniable that people can be a lot nastier, quick to judge, be belligerent, etc. in remote interactions vs. in-person. And it's not just social media. Louis CK has a great bit about how he can be a total asshole when driving in traffic in a way that would be completely unacceptable/insane if he did it in an elevator, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8062QEFk5g . The same dynamic applies in online interactions.
I don't think it's that hard to differentiate between things people do for enjoyment that they think of as a positive influence, and addictive substances that can fleetingly make people "feel better" but are extremely harmful.
Most addicts may say they enjoy getting high, while even simultaneously talking about how drugs have ruined their lives. The fact that social media companies have hacked the same brain pathways doesn't mean the answer should be "it's fine, they all like it!"
There's no easy answer to "this is toxic, we should ban it." Everyone has a different definition of toxic. Cultures form around different norms. Social media, like HN, spans multiple continents and cultures. I don't think you'll ever be able to get all of the userbase of any of these sites to agree on what is toxic and what is not.
I'm of the opinion that the user should be able to:
1. Audit their algorithmic recommender to see which bin they're bucketed into.
2. Adjust the weights on the recommender
But anything more, any form of broad agreement on toxicity, is asking for humans around the world to land at a single definition of what is good and what is bad.
And the fact is that most Americans are actually on the fence on the abortion issue, although most people are also against a full-on ban against abortion which the media is focusing on. The media has been presenting a very narrow view in the past, and now you are just getting exposed to the full spectrum of viewpoints on the internet.
Reddit I think is the best counterargument against further moderation of social media. The moderation outside the US at least is wholly haphazard and out-of-touch with mainstream views in said localities. For example if a left-wing American were to actually go around asking how Scandinavians themselves viewed their socialist paradise nordic welfare state as being viable, the response would be something that might be against left-wing interests, and they would be banned on Reddit. Similarly the way the media has supported Muslims and the on-the-ground Islamophobia in Europe and Asia are widely apart, and most of these people would be blanket-banned on Reddit as well.
If a drunkard wanders through a (physical) town square, verbally harassing everyone he meets, it is possible a mob will assemble and physically remove him. Such an outcome may be illiberal (it deprives the drunkard of his voice), but since it fulfills the wishes of the majority, it is highly democratic.
If a drunkard wanders onto social media and harasses everyone, what happens next depends on the design of the social media site.
Social media, like most online media, causes people to behave and to think differently than they would offline. There's a low limit to what we can correctly extrapolate about humanity in general from the behavior of humans on arbitrarily-designed social media websites.
Let me introduce you to Reddit.
Although on Reddit, you may be digitally removed for merely saying something unpopular.
If we make generalizations about society using social media sites, we have to take into account that the design of a site, and the idiosyncrasies of online communication, foster unique kinds of behavior.
My own view is a variation of 'the medium is the message': that social media molds the world to suit itself.
Online platforms all have idiosyncrasies: one platform incentivizes performative behavior, another incentivizes flame-wars, a third leads users to misjudge the prevalence of some subculture in society, and so on.
So I agree with the article that social media is weakening democracy, in as much as we have designed social media sites stupidly. And I disagree with the comment to which I responded, insofar as, if social media represents a flowering of democracy, it represents democracy based on people who are effectively in an altered state of mind.
I don't mean to attach a value judgement to direct democracy. If you asked me to, I'd agree that it's something thats doomed to fail.
I just find it ironic that an elite media institution makes the argument that something that ostensibly lets every person (all of the 'demos') voice their opinion is undermining "democracy".
I find it hard to explain the amusement that I get from this scenario... it's sort of like a double entendre. If you use the original literal meaning of the word democracy, the headline seems like an obvious contradiction (letting all the people speak is undermining rule by the people!). If you translate democracy to "our specific form of democracy" or just "our current system" then the effect goes away.
Of course a lot of this relies on social media being some perfect public forum, which it obviously isn't. I just saw some comedy to the situation is all.
I also can see the irony in democracy falling to democracy, but, at the risk of sounding preachy, we should remember that the most infamous dictatorships of the 20th Century sprang from democratic elections.
The irony is in an institution that has enormous power in our system complaining that giving the little people a chance to speak up is somehow undermining the ability of those little people to self-govern.
Edit: In other words, social media may not be perfectly representative of the people's will, but it's almost certainly more so than what comes out of something like the atlantic. On top of that, you could argue that social media diminishes the power of an institution like the atlantic. That is the irony.
The mob mentality, fake news, conspiracy theories, and so forth were all big problems in the past. Until sometime in the 20th century, lots of newspapers published that kind of stuff too. It’s an unavoidable part of human nature.
People who want regulation of social media need to realize that they really desire a return to elite control of public discourse and want the microphone taken away from many of the people it has been given to. Maybe that is the correct position — but people making that argument should realize and admit that is the case.
Bullshit. Anyone can post, but how much their post actually gets shown to others is dependent on the algorithm. Everyone gets a microphone but the microphone manufacturer gets to decide how loud every microphone is.
Next you'll tell me the Letters to the Editor page in newspapers is a democratic space everyone has a microphone for because anyone can write in.
The real innovation here is being able to make people feel like they're in a "democratic" communication space when it's still a top down media space where what gets heard is controlled centrally.
Usenet, forums, etc were more real democratic spaces since anyone could just post, and it was up to individual readers to decide who to ignore. That said in practice, most successful communities usually had to have moderation to avoid being overrun in spam-- but this is a much more honest, gentle, and transparent sort of control than an algorithm that operates subtly, with the readers not even really realizing what other choices were ignored.
Yes, and people like it, and we know that because they continue to engage with the content. If they didn't like the results of the algorithm they would not engage.
The algorithm does not shape people's preferences -- quite the opposite! It is an attempt to discover their preferences and cater to them in order to sell more advertisements. If the algorithm did not give people what they want, it wouldn't work, and social media companies would have to change it in order to chase the advertising dollars.
If there were two equivalent social networks, and one of them had algorithmically curated content and one of them just presented a straightforward chronological feed of posts, the vast majority of people would flock to the one that had the algorithm. The social network that did not have an algorithm would need to invent one in order to stay in business.
So? People like cocaine too.
> The algorithm does not shape people's preferences -- quite the opposite! It is an attempt to discover their preferences
Which preferences though? There might be a hundred different types of content that I hypothetically would find very engaging, but the system happens to pick one particular one of those somehow. Yes, it's subject to some constraint but there is still a lot of degree of freedom left over.
I personally do and I always find it a little bit funny that this is framed as so scandalous. How to elevate capable elites so they can govern responsibly and create some sense of regularity and order is one of the oldest and maybe the primary questions we've always dealt with. 'Let the inmates run the asylum' and don't dare question if they're qualified to do so is a fairly new experiment, with so far questionable results
As for it being controlled by a privileged few I believe that part is true from my experience in the industry, and my experience with it in general. It's very, very easy to sock-puppet and there are maybe...3-4 companies who control ~80% of all "truth" that is out there. For example, the rise of so-called "fact-checkers" is largely due to the control needed on society. You can probably think of 10 examples where a fact checker would be useful, but who controls them? Who signs their paychecks? The same people who control the flow of information. If you want evidence of this one-sided control ask yourself what would happen if you were a normal joe nobody and google shut down your gmail account, or instagram, facebook, etc. You've completely lost your voice.
This fact that some company can be the arbiter of "truth" and information flow implies tyranny, rather than democracy. If the world was set up on mastodon I would be inclined to agree with you. However, in it's current state it feels more like a method to control people and not a method for so called "democratic" exchange. Control of the media is very important to governments exactly for the purpose of reducing democracy [1].
> I don't believe social media gives us a glimpse of democracy, but rather anarchy.
But it seems like the conclusion you reach is that it's tyranny. Do you view anarchy and tyranny as the same thing? Or would you view them as opposites, or somewhere in between?
Well... that's true, but it's also the way things always were until very recently.
This has a side effect of promoting fringe content, because it drives engagement. Even if the interaction is the user calling someone an idiot for thinking the Earth is flat, that is still engagement. It gets fed into the algorithm, and now that content gets recommended to more and more people.
Reddit is the only social media platform that I think actually resembles a direct democracy. It's algorithm is driven by the karma system, not engagement. Posts and comments that people mostly dislike or disagree with get hidden by their low karma scores even though they often have high engagement metrics for the few people who do see them. This direct democracy comes with it's own problems though, mainly in how it reinforces groupthink and the formation of echo chambers.
I would have agreed with your view 25 years ago, when everyone was making blogs instead of instagram profiles. But today what you assume is organic discussion on social media is entirely artificial, designed to limit the shades of acceptable opinion amongst the public in a manner not much different than old media has done (deferring to authority, pundits, established known variables).
The Internet democratizes the spread of information and smartphones give easy access to all of it. Social media allows bloggers and podcasters to distribute information faster, cheaper, and to a much larger audience than the printing press, radio, or television could ever dream of.
A consideration: Could it also be that the politicians are voting quite like before, it is just that social media made you much more aware of the fact that this voting behavior is not representative of the wishes of their voters?
Topics going viral are sort of like issues coming up for a vote, and the result is that you see different consensuses emerge and different real world consequences (companies changing policies and making phony apologies for things, for example).
Social media largely does the opposite, as a byproduct of optimizing purely for engagement
Only if unfettered direct democracy includes censorship of any comment that exists outside the official approved message. I would call social media an unfettered plutocracy.
It's not just the usual resources, it's time. If you have lots of free time, you can make a name for yourself on social media. If you have to work and raise children, you can't engage as much. Guess who dominates the discussions?
Previously, the authority are more careful in presenting information. Now the social media just recommend whatever that can attract us to the platform, regardless of how ridiculous the information is.
If Cambridge Analytica is "a glimpse of what unfettered (direct) democracy actually looks like" , then yes. Social media is a mass controll platform.
Social media as "people interacring on the internet" is not bad per se. For example I'd guess Hacker News' net benefit for democracy would be positive.
If anything is giving us an example of how not to implement distributed/liquid democracy.
but, you could argue that it's always been that way. The scale has multiplied.
In my opinion, it's important to distinguish between different types of social media, though. Heavily moderated forum-based social media like Reddit and HN make it possible to have halfway civil discussions, although the amount of noise and misinformation can still be high. I personally consider them relatively neutral or only slightly negative for democracy. They are good for finding like-minded people interested in niche topics, which can be good or bad depending on the topic.
Social media like Twitter and Facebook, on the other hand, seem to have no positive effect at all. Their rules of conduct basically enforce and select for passive aggressive posts and intellectual insults. It's unbearable for everyone involved and merely makes everyone more aggressive until they have customized their feeds so much that they create echo chambers. Such social media systems polarize a lot, even more so than traditional media.
That pure popular democracy per se doesn’t work was well known when our republic was founded. That knowledge, drawn from antiquity and refreshed over millennia, has been edited out of our culture’s diet over the past century. (In part because in fascism and totalitarianism we saw its opposite noxiously close.) A perusing of the Federalist Papers [0] is quick refreshment, however, and it’s shockingly topical to this day.
Unfettered democracy is a ship with untethered cargo. Once the crowd starts oscillating it self amplifies, careening into majoritarian tyranny (often punctuated by hyper partisan deadlock). This happens [1]. Every [2]. Single [3]. Time [4].
In small groups we intuitively know this, and thoughtlessly deploy troves of customs and manners reinforced from childhood and in part hard coded (e.g. our sense of fairness [5]). We make allowances for those whose interests are repeatedly, but reasonably, in the minority. And we tell jerks to shut the hell up, and if they don’t, stop inviting them. In large groups, none of that comes naturally. It needs to be codified. Particularly when customs and norms vary across people, regions and time.
Yet we somehow are led to believe that no, if we just did this or that with elections, the law of large numbers ensures rationality, and the madness that would ensue at a dinner party unconstrained by manners, norms, laws or empathy is somehow chased off by the garlic of popular consent. (In case it isn’t clear, I don’t believe in legitimate government without democratic elections. I love democracy. But more popular control isn’t boundlessly good. You don’t rest your case after showing X is more democratic than Y. If you love democracy, you should want it to thrive; for it to thrive, we must tend to it.)
[0] https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-athenian-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Titia
[3] https://www.juridicainternational.eu/index.php?id=15331
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street
[5] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/baby-justice/
Me and Elon Musk both have "a voice" but one reaches much farther than the other. It's like saying capitalism is true democracy because everyone can vote with their wallet. Or as a farm animal once put it "all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others"
People like Hasan, Destiny, or Popehat have a pretty much unprecedented amount of reach for "normal people".
This is demonstrably false, as illustrated by the spate of silencing dissenting voices on various platforms, regardless of whether their content is factual. Just today even, you can no longer talk about how the Biden admin has redefined the word "recession", without Facebook removing your post. They claim it's not factual, when it clearly is. But is it dissenting from what the "privileged few" want the masses to believe, so it is silenced. There's literally a new example of this each and every day.
Too much going on behind the scenes for it to actually be democracy.
The same goes outside of Facebook too for Americans, we can speak our minds but our political rights are being taken away because they inconvenience wealthy and powerful people. Without other freedoms, like freedom over your body, freedom from corporations abusing you by breaking the law and suffering no consequences, the right to vote, the Fourth Amendment, etc, freedom of speech is pretty empty on its own.
Direct democracy can have problems like you're describing, but I don't think it's the issue here. Rather it's exposing the fundamental issues of late capitalism that fails to meet human needs (healthcare, housing, belonging/emotional needs), compounded with unchecked corporate power which is increasingly resembling fascism. In fact, at this point most of the major tech companies (Google, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit) are hiring many people from intelligence services. Corporate power merging with government power, especially by corporations hiring government spies, is a huge red flag for fascism taking hold. Before questioning democracy (which is a trend I've seen lately, as if to normalize democratic backsliding), I think we should start questioning that first.
- https://mronline.org/2021/06/14/jessica-ashooh-the-taming-of...
- https://www.mintpressnews.com/twitter-hiring-alarming-number...
- https://www.mintpressnews.com/national-security-search-engin...
- https://www.mintpressnews.com/nato-tiktok-pipeline-why-tikto...
There are at least a couple flaws in this viewpoint: that social media is mostly controlled by a privileged few, and with enough resources an individual can gain more votes (if you consider an account as a vote). But social media is basically letting everyone have a voice in the conversation, and the result is kind of gross sometimes.
In other words, maybe its undermining our current system by actually being more technically democratic.