Anecdote, but it does seem like a lot of younger folks I speak with are exhausted by the dark patterns and dopamine extraction that top-k social media platforms create.
If agents/AI/bots inadvertently destroy the current incarnation of social media through noise, I think we'll be better for it.
This sounds like the original internet.
Before adtech took over.
Getting back to community is key.
To me this statement reads as both inaccurate and ignorant of human nature. Social media was actually better when it was about individual ego (Myspace/LiveJournal); as obnoxious as that can be, today everything is worse because of petty tribalism. Most conflicts on social media are inter-tribal, whether it’s racial, political, national, or feuding “stan” culture groups. The worst problems come from groups who organize on platforms like Discord or Kiwi Farms to direct harassment campaigns against perceived enemies (or random “lolcow” victims).
Simple observation of the present world and history will tell you that a platform focused on “collective improvement” will only appeal to a small subset of potential users. Of course such a platform would not be a bad thing. Places like this (such as The WELL) used to be common when the internet was dominated by academics, futurists, and tech enthusiasts. But average people are not interested in this kind of platform, and will not participate in good faith in such an environment.
> But average people are not interested in this kind of platform, and will not participate in good faith in such an environment.
I'm not ignorant of human nature and tribalistic tendencies. The undercurrent of my comment is of an optimistic hope (or cope) that we can move past competitive individual validation programming. I'm aware that it's due to our nature, but also aware that it's exploited by dark patterns and extraction at scale through software.
Since we don’t live in a perfect world, I suppose some regulation of the industry would be fair, just as we mitigate the harms of gambling somewhat through regulation. I just worry about regulation being used as a Trojan horse to stifle political organization and/or open communication about corruption, cronyism, and oppression.
It may be that the future is more small platforms where conflict is limited to in-group conflict rather than global platforms where all of humanity’s disagreements are surfaced and turned into fodder for monetization.
Regulation could work, but in my opinion the problem isn't devious mastermind product people attempting to entrap humanity -- it's self entrapment in a recursive way.
Regulators could add red tape and boundaries for what is or isn't kosher or legal, but in the end can prohibition fix systemic integration with addictive technological superagonist of our own creation?
Regulation isn’t perfect; in the best case all it can do is limit the worst harms. It’s still a bad idea to engage in regulated gambling, as you are very likely to lose money. Almost everyone knows this, yet many people do it, and I can’t see that changing any time soon.
Do you have a mechanism for this in mind, incentives-wise? I can't see this making money.
(If we hit the stretch goal, we can upgrade to a raspberry pi!)
Said little sites may run for a bit and die, and the massive monolith remains, at least until another monolith replaces them.
I suspect in just a few more decades, we shall reinvent the 90s and 2000s p2p networks from first principles.
They worked great when most actors were well behaved and got abandoned pretty quickly once that changed.
(EDIT: to clarify, I don't mean to build an alternative monopoly, I mean to build alternatives that are big enough to survive as a business, and big enough to be useful; A few million users as opposed to the few billions Facebook and Youtube (allegedly) have)
The reason it's hard to imagine such a thing today is because the tech giants have illegally suppressed competition for so long. If Google or Meta were ordered to break up, and Facebook/Youtube forced to try and survive as standalone businesses, all the weaknesses in their products would manifest as actual market consequences, creating opportunity for competitors to win market share. Anybody with basic coding skills or money to invest would be tripping over themselves to build competing products which actually focus on the things people want or need, because consumers will be able to choose the ones they like.
It would cost tons man. You don't understand the scale these apps operate on at all. Meta has their own data center footprint that rivals AWS or any other cloud company and they had that before AI, and it's not just all to run ads on. On demand photo and video streaming and storage for free for all of humanity is incredibly expensive.
Social media with only millions of users is basically worthless because it won't capture enough of an average person's circle to be useful to them
Maybe you missed my edit? I specifically said not a clone of the monopolies, but a competitor big enough to be a sustainable business. The economics of a monopolist's empire are irrelevant.
> Social media with only millions of users is basically worthless because it won't capture enough of an average person's circle to be useful to them
There's so much wrong with this statement. First of all, I will never meet anywhere near a million people in my lifetime. A regular human being's real social connections won't be anywhere near that big.
But even if it is (or users want to discover/follow random people), it doesn't take a computer science genius to discover how to interoperate between social networking apps. Meta and Google would never do this, but that's because they're anti-competitive monopolists; if you're a startup trying to gain marketshare and win on your product's quality, interop with other networks is a no brainer. We probably don't even need regulation to require interop, as the market will see it as a useful thing to develop on its own.
There are platforms that try this, like Bluesky but they are not really sustainable businesses
Even ignoring the adverse selection of who'd subscribe, their ARPU is higher than that in North America: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist?
The "the incentive structure says we should all destroy our brains" thing is just a small aspect of that.
> We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist?
The continued survival of individuals or humanity as a whole? The individuals seem to survive OK, and arguably there's nothing that could convince them to prefer the survival of the amorphous group, save for some kind of brainwashing.
We shouldn't be optimizing for quarterly returns, but for the next ten thousand years.
The incentives would be those which have motivated people throughout history: to create something which benefits humanity.
Next, text only platforms are nice, but niche on the modern internet. People seem to love multimedia which takes tons of bandwidth/cpu.
Paid for services don't mean spam free either. If it's worth people to pay for, it's worth spammers paying to get in and spam.
Then you have all the questions on what happens if you grow, how do you deal with working with all the laws around the world, how do you deal with other legal issues.
Having a site/service of any size can quickly become an expensive mess.
They are going to be (and AI slop already is) so much worse. Once they get ads to work well / seem natural the dark patterns will pop right back up and the money spigot will keep flowing upwards