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STOP TRYING TO MAKE A "GOOD" SOCIAL MEDIA SITE


YOU WANT WHAT CANNOT BE HAD

Erik Hoel
Jun 7, 2023
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Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

It’s an unkillable idea. Oh so predictably, some fresh-faced company will try to
introduce a new social media website. It’s Twitter, but better! How it should
be. Just in the past year, there was Mastodon (Twitter but decentralized!) and
then there was Bluesky (Twitter but invitation-based, oh, and also
decentralized!), and now there is Substack’s Notes (Twitter, but to follow
people you need to subscribe your email). Now it’s been leaked that Meta will
build a Twitter clone as well.

I was in Substack’s Notes beta, and I can attest firsthand—when it starts,
people are always euphoric at the new site. It’s like everyone discovering some
unblemished part of the cave wall. Here is a journalist at Verge over a month
ago detailing the exuberance at Bluesky:

> Bluesky is really, really fun. . . Very soon in my Bluesky journey, I stumbled
> upon a post from Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, that helped me get a sense of
> what I was in for.
> 
> “It was getting pretty scene-y here so we just emailed 5K people from our
> waitlist, say hi when you see them trickle on!” Graber wrote. . .
> 
> Bluesky kept feeling good throughout the week. My feed wasn’t littered with
> angry posts about HBO Max’s change to Max, for example—instead, the people I
> follow seemed most invested in maintaining Bluesky’s currently positive
> culture. . . On Friday, people were posting pictures of their bookshelves:
> “shelfies.” It was enjoyable to scroll. 

And here is Verge, the same outfit, just over two weeks later:



Now that the site is growing, guess what? It sucks, and has all the same
problems as Twitter, from pornography to death threats. From the article:

> This was not ideal for anyone, but it was especially not ideal for pundit and
> blogger Matt Yglesias, formerly of Vox.com and now a successful Substack
> writer. . . It’s not clear exactly what riled people up on Bluesky about
> Yglesias, though some cited his attitude toward trans rights issues.
> Regardless, on Thursday, his posts were under fire, with over a hundred
> replies ranging from merely hostile to descriptively violent. “WE ARE GOING TO
> BEAT YOU WITH HAMMERS,” said one user going by “hannah :)” who identified
> herself as a teen girl. 

How lovely. This process will inevitably continue until the site becomes as
terrible as all the big social media sites, transforming into places of witch
hunts, derision, barely formulated thoughts, snuff videos, clickbait, and
occupied with all your favorite anime avatars threatening to kill you. For a new
social media website, going from “omg it’s so great we’re inviting another 5,000
people!” to “we will beat you with hammers” takes about two weeks.

Abonnieren




And just to be clear: obviously the definition of “social media” is a spectrum.
When I’m using it here, I mean mostly those sites on the end of one side of the
spectrum, like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram—especially with its upcoming
changes. Despite both being video sharing platforms, TikTok is further along the
social media spectrum than YouTube, as it’s built on a constant stream of 30
second clips, whereas YouTube is built on 30 minute Mr. Beast videos. While
other websites like Twitch or Substack have a social component, like accounts
and subscriptions or followings, they don’t throw you into an all-to-all
instantaneous web of interaction and virality. They don’t insert you into a
realm governed by an always active group-mind focus of attention that sweeps,
lighthouse-like, from subject to subject, and poor soul to poor soul.

To be sure, I like Substack’s Notes a lot more than Twitter right now. But I’m
pretty sure that’s just because of its size. An analogy to cryptocurrency is
helpful here: Bitcoin is too slow and decentralized to confirm transactions
fast, and everyone complains about it, and so people create new alternative
currencies with supposedly superior architectures. At first things go great,
because no one is using the new blockchain and transactions confirm fast. But
then, eventually, the new chain starts getting actually used, and transactions
begin to slow to a crawl, and everyone realizes that they can’t outrun the
problem that decentralized currencies are inevitably very slow, and that Bitcoin
might be close to as good as it gets anyways. This is because there is an
irreducible flaw—that decentralization is slow—that no design can fully get
around. You’re limited by your materials.

Spinning up new social media websites mimics this, except what you are trying to
outrun is human nature. No design of social media can get rid of what I like to
call the “semantic nadir,” which is what you’ll inevitably experience if your
tweet ever goes viral, wherein eventually someone will take your tweet in
literally the worst possible way (there’s some classic examples of this, as
generally if you say “I love cheesecake” it won’t be long before someone reaches
to “Oh, so you hate regular cake”—that’s the semantic nadir).

Companies try a litany of changes: It’s open-sourced! It’s decentralized! It’s
got good governance! We’ll ban whatever you want! We’ll ban nothing! It doesn’t
matter. You’re limited by your materials, which is mostly the people who really
thrive on social media. The simple truth that, unless someone is already famous
for other reasons, no one gets a million Twitter followers by being nice. They
get it by being an asshole. A big chunk, maybe even the majority, of people who
accumulate a million followers accrue them by being at the front of the crowd
throwing rotten vegetables at people in the stockades. One day they take a turn
in the stockades, and it either destroys them or they live through it, shamed,
and return right back to the front of the crowd, their faces contorted even more
demonically. I meet moms and dads who happily have no idea what’s going on on
Twitter, because all the actual sane people left long ago, and the sociopaths
who feel pleasure watching other’s lives get destroyed, and live for the snarky
comeback, and want to snidely gossip about everything under the sun, are the
ones left to wield the scythe.

But Erik, you’re on Twitter.

Well. . . yes. That’s how I know. I don’t post much, and I try to avoid the
natural tendencies—but in the rare instances where I have made that snarky
remark, growth and interaction skyrocket through the roof. With just the barest
hint of teeth it’s like chum in the waters. My original reason for using Twitter
is that I make my living by writing and thinking and researching, and Twitter is
where people go to get content like that. But I honestly and openly don’t like
it, and say as much when I’m on there.

Some take my openly negative view of social media as an attack on themselves,
and their own use of it. Certainly, I understand why people use it.
Occasionally, there’s gold in there! I’m not denying that. And it’s basically a
necessity, at this point. Social media is where the action is—it’s not just
where people get their news, in many ways social media is the culture now. And
just because you are de facto “forced” by incentives (even if it doesn’t feel
like you’re being forced) into using a terrible system, this does not make you
individually terrible, particularly if you’re not a contributor to its
atrocities.

“What about all the positives?” a defender of social media might say. And these
do exist, sure, but arguably almost everything about social media that’s good is
actually from the power of the internet. “I get so much information!” Power of
the internet. “I don’t have to rely on mainstream sources!” Power of the
internet. “I get to connect with people far away!” Power of the internet. “I get
to be anonymous!” Sorry, power of the internet. “I’ve made so many friends on
social media!” I have too, a few at least. But are they as real as real life? If
you were in the online stockades for the day, would they say anything? Maybe
some would—I certainly would for some people I’ve only met online. But there are
other ways to make friends across continents in a world of group chats, zoom
calls, and all the many other slower websites that don’t have the same malicious
incentives as Twitter does that still give us what’s great about the internet.
Most of what’s great about social media has nothing to do with it. Most of
what’s specific to it is evil and terrible. 

The problem is that we like it. Or at least, enough of us do. I think that’s
because we literally evolved in a situation similar to social media. I outlined
this theory in “The Gossip Trap” last year in an essay that also won Scott
Alexander’s annual book review contest. The idea of a “gossip trap” is my answer
to what’s called the “Sapient Paradox,” which itself asks: Why did civilization
and culture take so long to get started? Humans from 100,000 years ago wouldn’t
stand out on a NYC subway, and they had brains as large as our own—and yet it
takes until ~10,000 BC, and far after in most places, to escape prehistory. It
implies some kind of trap, for why were we stuck for so long? What were we
doing?

Abonnieren




I think the key is that humans evolved in small tribes where there were no
formal powers—no states, no officials, no laws, no constitutions. There were
just popular and unpopular people, and all the wild obnoxious high-school-esque
dynamics that entails. When your group is small enough, you can get away with
organizing your society solely through raw social power. And while this is
actually a hell—or at least we moderns would find it so—for humans it is a
strangely comfortable hell. In a sense then, civilization was a reaction to a
state of nature ruled not by violent barbarism, but by soft social power.
Consider that all our paragons of civilization, from judges to tenured
professors to sequestered juries to politicians serving for fixed terms, are all
defined by their immunity to gossip.

The notion of a resurrected gossip trap is the anthropological version of Jon
Haidt’s work on the negative psychological effect of social media and
smartphones. We originally left the gossip trap simply because, once group size
is large enough, Dunbar’s number kicks in (the number of social relationships
primates can keep track of), you can’t organize society through gossip alone.
But Twitter and Facebook, by creating an all-to-all connected web structured and
assisted by viral algorithms, has beaten Dunbar’s number and resurrected the
ability to run culture and society mostly through gossip. Mark Zuckerberg,
originally just trying to create FaceMash, a website for ranking the hotness of
Harvard girls, in his second attempt with Facebook accidentally summoned back
our first, and most perhaps most consistently oppressive, form of government.



Eventually, all media dictatorships end. Some people of my generation, the
millennials, still watch cable news, but no one from my generation would say
that they fully trust cable news in the way that older generations do. We just
don’t take it that seriously. Maybe the generation after ours will look at
social media the same way. It’ll still be there, sure, but less relevant, and a
younger generation will view its dynamics and actions, the great show of it all,
as skeptically as my generation views cable TV. I hear that Gen Z spends a lot
of time on semi-private forums like Discord, preferring that over the huge
everything-all-at-once web of connected accounts that is social media. Maybe
that’s the beginning of a shift, and so we can eventually, slowly, recapture a
bit of what was lost. But first people have to stop building new social media
sites, and go build something else.




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Abonnieren



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John Carter
Writes Postcards From Barsoom
Jun 7Liked by Erik Hoel

We thought electronic media world create a global village in all the best ways,
and instead it created the digital longhouse.

A retreat into private fora, group chats and other walled gardens, is very
likely to be a major reaction to this. After the brief narcissistic love affair
with social media, a lot of people - maybe a majority at this point, it's
intrinsically hard to say - realized they don't actually like having their
personal lives on display for the world. It's icky and hazardous. Anecdotally,
many people I know have withdrawn from social media entirely, and have retreated
to group chats in Telegram, WhatsApp, Messenger, etc., where they can limit
their interactions to family and friends without worrying about their dirty
laundry drawing the Eye of Sauron.

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Rachael Varchetto
Writes The Practical Therapist
Jun 7Liked by Erik Hoel

Your piece is excellent, and the parts about people gathering for the spectacle
around a stockade is reminiscent of people who gathered to watch executions or
beheadings in France during the terror. It's rubbernecking on the highway during
an accident or gawking at a train crash. There's something primal in the
voyeurism of tragic witness.

I was listening to an old episode of Joe Rogan as he spoke to Dave Chappelle,
and Chappelle made the point that a lot of the sociopathic, predatory behaviors
we see on social media is due to the anonymity of the interactions, the lack of
responsibility, and a real inability to see the interpersonal emotional damage
done to the receiver of the attack. Social media reveals the darker parts of our
animal natures, and as you said, all the sane people left Twitter a while ago.

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