
Hyper Social is Dying - williamldennis
https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/e09e789d297
======
josh2600
Quick story that I promise is actually relevant.

When I was watching Kevin Systrom speak about Instagram at the Castro Theater
with Kevin Rose back in May, I distinctly remember one particular question. KR
was reading a question from the audience to the two cofounders of Insta:

Kevin Rose (Reading a question from the audience): "Hollerback is being called
the New Instagram, have either of you used Hollerback?"

KR looks around and says, "Hey guys, maybe I'm getting too old for this, but
I've never heard of this. Have either of you heard of Hollerback?"

Kevin Systrom pipes up, totally confused, "No, I honestly can't say that I
have."

KR turns to the audience and says "Does anyone use Hollerback?" Complete
silence from the audience, crickets even; not one hand goes up.

KR looks out on the audience and says "Is that the CEO of Hollerback up there
asking this question?"

"Yes..." A timid voice is heard to say from the audience.

And that my friends is modern guerrilla marketing and how I've heard of
Hollerback when they haven't launched yet. Frankly, I thought it was
deplorable at the time but in retrospect it did leave an impact on me (whether
it was positive or absurdly negative though, I can't tell). I do find it
interesting that reading this article made me recall that anecdote so clearly.
Branding in action I suppose...

~~~
jacquesm
Hehe, classic. That took some guts to owe up to it and sharp of them to call
the guy on it. I don't think I would have caught on that quickly, maybe later
at night in bed reviewing the day or so.

~~~
josh2600
Kevin Rose is a smart guy.

As an aside, I had the pleasure to meet him at Disrupt in 2010 right after the
launch of Digg v4. It struck me as an incredibly interesting moment in time
(to set the stage, Digg had just flattened their site, removed granular
categorization and was now pulling in content automatically while Reddit was,
antithetically, doing the complete opposite).

I talked with Kevin and it was clear to me that he knew what was at stake and
that he was doing his best to deliver what he thought was the right answer.
It's sort of like 1984 versus Brave New World. The leader in '84 is sort of a
tyrant and we almost universally reject his dictum because of this. In BNW,
Huxley's leader genuinely believes that what he's doing is right, and he's not
sure, but what he is sure is that he thinks what he's doing is the best way to
lead.

This was a profound lesson, for me, about management. Even though Kevin Rose
was ultimately mistaken about his hypothesis, he executed with conviction and
leadership. On some level, you still have to admire the captain of the
Titanic, and that's a sort of backhanded way of explaining why I admire Kevin
Rose so much.

To fail, and rise from the ashes, is one of the most difficult things in the
world, but I think Kevin has certainly done it.

------
cliveowen
This whole write-up is based on the assumption that everyone has hundreds of
"friends" on Facebook, but let me tell you something: if you have hundreds of
"friends" on Facebook then you're using it wrong. I have 54 friends on
Facebook, I know all of them, if someone asks me to add him and I don't know
him/barely know him, I don't fucking add him, it's that simple really.

Besides, even if you're so dumb that you can't stop adding strangers as
friends, rest assured that on your feed you'll only see activity from the
people with whom you interact the most. So, basically, the whole thing is
pointless.

~~~
borplk
I keep hearing this argument but I think it's impractical.

Because every person has a different idea about when and who it is appropriate
to friend on Facebook and no one is really right or wrong, it's just a
preference.

However this makes for awkward social situations.

For example your college classmate that you don't really know, adds you on
Facebook because hey you are his classmate (or teammate). To him, that
relationship is sufficient to justify connecting with someone on Facebook. To
you, that may be far from it because you choose to keep ~60 friends but he
likes to have a broader network.

This happens in all sorts of different contexts. For example you meet someone
at a local community meetup, or you speak at a conference and people that you
see there will ask to add you on Facebook.

At that point, how do you gracefully handle the situation? Do you really turn
around and say "Uh...yeah thanks...but I only keep 'real' friends on
Facebook". Or "Uh...sorry I can't commit to a Facebook friendship right
now...you are not good enough of a friend just yet to qualify".

No matter how you put it, you come off as rude and weird and that person will
likely not even come close to you any more. But your relationship would
otherwise be valuable.

That's one of the many reasons I don't have a Facebook account.

~~~
cliveowen
What we're dealing with in this setting is the social pressure fueled by the
faulty expectations of people regarding what's rude and what's not. As I see
it, that's not something Facebook can address. Not now, not ever.

~~~
quadrangle
Wrong. What we're dealing with is a serious market-failure in a truly good
system to keep in touch with the guy you just met at the meetup who you truly
want to connect with. He just goes and uses Facebook, and you use nothing.
Neither is good. And that's the problem, not the rudeness issue.

------
natrius
One day, a dialog popped up on Facebook suggesting people to put on my
Acquaintances list, which hides most of their posts from my news feed. It
improved my life.

[https://www.facebook.com/help/209850012449913](https://www.facebook.com/help/209850012449913)

~~~
cliveowen
Second that. Lists were introduced as a response to G+ circles just as the
subscribe function was added as a response to the follower model of Twitter.
Everyone expected a response from Facebook and they delivered. Then the
features were left languishing and were never updated/enhanced. I don't know
what's the rationale behind this, lists are actually a wonderful way to
catalogue your "friends" and most people would find them very useful, if they
knew they're available. Facebook should really consider to make them a more
prominent feature and simplify the whole adding process.

~~~
bpatrianakos
Are you sure that lists were added in response to G+? I remember having lists
long before G+ was even a thing. I could be mistaken but I'm pretty sure lists
and the ability to share things among certain groups of friends had existed
for quite some time but was rarely used.

~~~
cliveowen
It might very well be, I'm not an expert, I know for sure that they became a
thing around the time that Google introduced G+ and its circles.

------
bpyne
"In fact, I’d contend that the friend and follower models can be elegantly
replaced by a frequency and engagement model."

Quite honestly, I think FB (as an example) tries to do this already. When I
"Like" friend A's feeds more often than friend B's feeds, I see more of friend
A's feeds. As far as "engagement" goes, I assume the author means "quality of
engagement". How do you begin to come up with a way of quantifying the quality
of an engagement for one person versus another? Time of engagement? Number of
words spoken/written?

"Based on current smartphone technology, social networks can and should
leverage location, time, frequency of interaction, and behavioral
similarities."

Smartphone, laptop, whatever, they're just data collection vehicles. The
difficulty is developing a model that maps values to people. Someone
optimizing a social network for behavioral similarities, for example, fails if
the individuals in the network thrive on behavioral differences.

There is plenty of room for improvement with social networks. I don't think
the way forward is for social networks to improve on network building
optimizations.

~~~
williamldennis
I could have expanded on the frequency and engagement point. Currently, the
most representative social interactions happen off of services like FB (such
as texting, phone calls, going to the movies, grabbing coffee, meeting
someone, etc).

FB then relies on the user to input this data with the promise that the data
will be spit back out in a relevant, useful, and entertaining way.

Phones, contrastingly, can pick up all this external engagement passively and
produce a more representative of a true life social network. Because its data
collection is passive, it can dynamically adapt a network without explicit
user input.

------
mbesto
> _The central mechanic and experience of these networks, the feed, becomes
> worse as the network connections increase. This is a huge problem. As more
> friends enter your new feed the strength and relevance of relationships
> decreases. The experience should be getting better the more you use it._

Thus why lists were created. Google "got this right" with Circles.

> _The next great social network will provide its users with an experience
> that values friendships and relationships dynamically._

Basically an "Auto-Signal-Noise" generator. I get it, but I don't see it
happening anytime soon.

The problem is most _people_ can't even assign true value to their own
friendships. Why is a piece of technology going to do that any better?

I wrote about my thoughts more in depth about this awhile ago:
[http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/09/18/we-are-far-from-
sol...](http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/09/18/we-are-far-from-solving-
signal-to-noise-problems-with-technology/)

------
incongruity
_" Based on current smartphone technology, social networks can and should
leverage location, time, frequency of interaction, and behavioral
similarities."_

And this sort of approach encourages a power-law distribution in who ends up
in my feed and that's misguided.

The thing is, actually, I want to see the _important_ updates from _all_ of my
friends on FB and the fluffy stuff from only my closest friends and family.

It's not just who, but what -- and yes, that's harder to algorithmically
assess, for now, but that doesn't change that anything short of it isn't the
big-win solution as the author proposes, IMHO.

~~~
williamldennis
I definitely see the value in receiving these kinds of wide-reach-yet-
important social updates.

However, I think the opportunity (from both a business and user experience
perspective) is for a true digital representation of your current real life
social network.

~~~
incongruity
Except, I reject that there's a difference between my online life and my
"real" life. You're thinking 20th century/pre-mostly always connected world.

I care deeply about friends and family that I cannot see on a daily basis
because of distance and time. That doesn't make those bonds any less real or
important and it doesn't mean that online socialization (jokes aside) is any
less meaningful than "real life" (there are, in fact, scholarly research
publications that support this and I could find them, but honestly, it's been
a long day).

Moreover, frequency of interaction doesn't always reflect strength of social
bond. I have friends I would kill for who I talk to once a month or less,
simply due to schedule, new parenthood, etc. I think that's certainly the case
for many adults.

------
borplk
Keep in mind that the dynamic argument also applies to the information that
you give out and the content that you create which I think is even more
important.

For example, in traditional relationships, the closer you are to someone the
more they know about you.

Your parents probably know many things about you that your wife/husband and
your best friends don't know.

Your wife/husband knows things about you that your best friends don't know.

Your best friend knows things about you that your friends don't.

Your friends know things about you that I don't know.

And it goes on and on...

This feature of traditional relationships is extremely important and valuable
to me.

If you get out of touch with someone, their knowledge of you gets outdated. As
you become more intimate with someone, they learn more and more about you.

So there's a natural self-adjusting and dynamic layer and hierarchy to
traditional relationships that keeps everyone sane and allows for longevity of
relationships.

Social networks throw everyone in the same bucket. Granted they provide you
with tools to try and manage the mess like the circles and lists. But that is
not really dynamic and to me is very unattractive, imperfect and time
consuming. I'm not willing to spend hours managing my social network.

Traditional relationships take care of themselves.

------
Fuzzwah
As an Australian living in the US I've come to rely on facebook far more than
I ever did when I was living back home. It really is the main way I keep in
touch with my friends and family back home. I have a small circle of friends
who I chat with on IRC every couple of days, but the time difference generally
results in this being a "ships passing in the night" type catch up. My nuclear
family I have probably monthly google video chats with. I swap emails with my
Dad once a week or so.

I check facebook daily and really feel like it has made it possible to still
be part of my friends' lives.

I have run into a bit of a niche use case issue recently though. My hobby is
skydiving and facebook has become the way that I get access to photos and
videos taken by my new "skydiving friends". So it is quite a regular scene
that after jumping with a group of people for a day we'll all trade facebook
details, add each other as friends and tag everyone in photos and videos.

This is excellent.... except that these new found friends have access to all
my facebook history unless I work out some way to manage the privacy features.

I looked into this today and the "acquaintances" idea kind of fits... except
this lowers the weight of these people's updates making it into my news feed,
which isn't what I want. I'm really keen to see skydiving related posts from
this group of people. I want to know the next time they're planning on a trip
to the dropzone. I want to see their other skydiving photos.

So I make a skydivers group and I can limit my old posts to not show up for
these people. When I make new posts I can include them if it is skydiving
related. But I'm relying on them doing the same. I can't see anyway that
facebook makes it easy for me to filter their content. It seems all or
nothing. Either I get all their updates or none.

------
Groxx
So, basically, the solution to "hyper social" is _even more_ social data,
automatically gathered and funneled to company X, so it can be more context-
sensitive in what it shows you.

Forgive me for not leaping for joy at the prospect of this future. Imagine if
FourSquare were always (literally) on, and tracking literally everyone you
meet. And then they started selling your data for advertising, as they're
doing now. Or they get hacked, and someone dumps the data / performs enough
queries to make an _extremely_ detailed ID-theft of a handful of random
people.

I'd rather not have all my past, present, and future eggs in the hands of one
_anything_ , much less a for-profit company.

~~~
williamldennis
The value and utility of such a service will be so significant that it will
trump most individual's concerns about privacy. Facebook has lead a successful
charge in this direction for the last 9 years.

------
aznjons
I'm not sure that dynamic segregation of social connections is the ultimate
solution to the mediocrity of social network applications. Or rather, most
social network sites come to serve a specific purpose or narrow purpose rather
than actually facilitate _social_ interaction.

Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are just as the author describes, "a digital
filing cabinet that you fill with your relationships." They have peripheral
uses like being a channel for recruiters and being quoted on mass media, but
fundamentally they store contact information.

A "digital filing cabinet" for storing slightly different sets of
relationships seems like a tool with limited use, rather than a true
virtualization or revolution of social interaction.

I would say that social networks or "social spaces/contexts" (maybe someone
can coin a better term than me) that actually facilitate meaningfully novel
kinds of social interaction, start relationships, and generate content are
more along the lines of HN, reddit, IRC, and forums (online spaces where ideas
are exchanged, discussions and learning occurs, and people connect to new
people).

Others include Meetup.com, which focuses on connecting people with similar
interests so they can interact in real life.

Surprisingly I am more social on Steam than any of the conventional social
networking sites, Steam is a surprisingly effective social network for gamers.
Additionally, social games like MMOs or other multiplayer games change the way
people interact socially through guilds, alliances, clans, trading,
competition, and cooperation.

Generalized social "filing cabinets" like FB, LI, and Twitter serve their
purposes and being generalized, they have use for a large population of
people, but they don't actually generate or enhance interesting new social
dynamics or content (twitter sort of does). Friendships and relationships are
difficult to cultivate without specified context. A "filing cabinet" has
little context for interaction, but a "social space" can provide context for
new interaction and that's where more interesting stuff happens.

------
purplelobster
I don't really like Facebook, but those are non-problems really. I have about
250 connections, which I guess is pretty average or to the lower end. In the
past, I would actively go through the list and purge people who I only met a
few times or fell out of contact with, but at this point if I see something on
my feed that is not interesting to me (either a person I'm not interested in
anymore or someone who posts a lot of annoying stuff) then I just hide all
their posts. That made my news feed very clean. It also safeguards against the
possibility that I might run into one of those people again, it would be very
awkward if I deleted them completely.

------
PaperclipTaken
The social networks of the future will have the potential to access all of
your daily interactions via your smartphone. They have the potential to know
who you call, who you meet with, and where you hang out.

This enables your social network app to keep up with your relationships,
without you needing to tell it that X is now just an acquaintance and Y is
suddenly an important person in your life. In fact, your app might figure
those changes out before you do.

Even under the threat of panopticon, these advancements are attractive.

------
mathattack
Why couldn't facebook adopt this dynamism? I expect they do some of this
already, in putting more items in our feed from people we're engaged with. Why
not incorporate geographic proximity too? It's feasible (if scary) to bump
posts of people we've called. The data is on the phone, no?

I don't see why a new service has to be created for this, when Facebook
already has a tweakable algorithm.

~~~
williamldennis
Part of the main problem I see if the "friending" model. There's too much
friction there to maintain a truly current social network.

------
jbigelow76
I don't even think of Twitter as a social network anymore (probably never did
actually). To me it's a hodgepodge of really nichey news, occasional customer
service interactions, random personal asides that I don't care about but are
mostly harmless, with the occasional personal interaction sprinkled through
out.

~~~
btbuildem
Some of the younger people I know use it as a chatroom -- they tag messages
with usernames to draw people into discussion, and the frequency of messages
is usually high.

I do not understand how they are comfortable with having what often amounts to
quite private conversations out in public. I found I had to unfollow most of
them, the constant and mostly irrelevant noise ends up polluting my feed.

------
jtmcmc
Facebook already does this by showing you only a part of your friend's
information on the newsfeed, based in part at least on interaction type and
regularity. Google does this via circles. I believe twitter is not curated in
that fashion but twitter has a slightly different model due to it's type of
asymmetry.

------
squozzer
The frequency and engagement model seems to have merit. I might add to the
other concept described -- Core vs Circumstantial Relationships -- a notion of
Aspirational -- under which following a celebrity might fall.

------
marban
These arguments are about the same category as stating that email is broken -
If you have 600+ friends or emails that overwhelm you, blame your process and
not solely the tool.

------
childoftv
Facebook does make this dynamic and based on engagement. If you look at photos
of someone or send them a message their relative frequency in you feed goes
up...

------
jpswade
"The Next Social Framework Will Be Dynamic" \- I think this is what Google is
trying to do with "circles".

~~~
lmm
Maybe - but at the moment they just make the problem worse, because you have
to manually curate who's in which circle and make sure you keep it up to date.

------
nollidge
One giant argument from anecdote.

~~~
wuliwong
lol, exactly.

