We might be at a local maximum, but we're nowhere near the peak. What we're seeing is an end of the race to the bottom.
What's happened is that most of the major social networks only hire and promote people who make decisions primarily based on analytics. As a result these sites no longer have any real communities or organic content, and have been completely hollowed out by math-friendly refrigerator magnet junkfood. Even though everyone can recognize that most users no longer find these experiences to be compelling, they're all stuck in a one-way spiral.
Web 3 is just getting started though, and with new technologies are going to come novel and compelling forms of social interaction.
> What's happened is that most of the major social networks only hire and promote people who make decisions primarily based on analytics. As a result these sites no longer have any real communities or organic content, and have been completely hollowed out by math-friendly refrigerator magnet junkfood.
_Exactly_ this. Rather than understanding their users as real humans, having unique insights about them, and building something that meets their real needs, everything has been about maximizing hollow engagement metrics. And guess what? That's good for short term revenue but not long term trust. If you're running a startup and the main way you learn about your users is through statistical tracking and A/B testing, you're missing an important opportunity to get to know them properly. They will lead the way and although you can't simply ask them what they want, if you understand them deeply you'll know what to do.
I'm excited about the next wave of platforms, which are tapping into enormous unmet needs. It's early days, and I can't stand the "web 3" label, but there's definitely going to be a sea change.
Sounds like an example of Goodhart's Law: "When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric."
Optimizing for something as abstruse as "engagement" seems like a great way to completely ignore everything that actually makes social networks compelling.
> Optimizing for something as abstruse as "engagement" seems like a great way to completely ignore everything that actually makes social networks compelling.
Or anything else, for that matter. The most shocking part of Android Pie release[0] was the repetition of the "drive engagement" mantra (in the post as well as surrounding articles). Fundamentally, phones are tools; how good is any tool to me when it's purposely designed to make me use it more? A tool should make me more efficient, hence, for the same task, make me use it less! Everything about this is spiralling to artificially inflate dubious metrics such as eyeball time or number of interactions.
I wish there was some kind of pledge or iOS/Android rule not to waste my time.
Example: I'm on 2 dating app. I want notification on so I can make sure to receive messages from actual people but I get one notification every day from each app "You should check for new matches today!" Nether app has a way to turn off that notification.
Google Maps now does something like this too where they are trying to get me to add reviews and photos so Google Maps starts notifying me "Add a review of that place I think you just visited?" I think Google Maps at least had a way to turn it off though not 100% sure.
In general though the more some service bugs me with anything the less I want to do business with that service. That includes mailing lists. Hate them! Don't add me. I didn't opt-in! Etc...
> A tool should make me more efficient, hence, for the same task, make me use it less!
It makes sense when you consider Android phones as a set of tools used by advertisers to reach consumers. The more eyeballs the more efficient the tool becomes.
It shows in both app stores on either platform. The play store gives me lots of suggestions on apps to download based on activity, and the iOS store has these write ups to promote apps. Both get them money.
Does Android have something like Siri suggestions with P? Because that seems intended to do the exact opposite of what you’re saying. It is the feature that suggests your notes app if you often use your notes app in the grocery store location. It would be a good use for Android instead of the constant asking to review the store.
It does have a suggested apps section at the top of the apps list. It's supposedly time / location aware, but I haven't dug into how effective that is (I tend to use 3-4 apps almost exclusively on my phone, so that's all I tend to ever get suggested).
There are also situations where a sticky note can be a vital piece of safety equipment because an instrument is malfunctioning. And even though the pilot knows the instrument is showing bogus data, they're so used to looking at it that they will instinctively do so and react to its bogus indications, so the safest thing is to hide it from view entirely. Fortunately there's enough redundancy in the information from the basic instruments that even if one of them fails, you can still fly the plane by extrapolating the missing information from the other ones.
I'm forced to interact with certain people in my life through certain social media tools, but I lost interest in most if it a long time ago. I've tried to quantify what it is that made it so exciting at first, and the best thing I can think of is that I used to meet new people or engage with people I wanted to get to know better when things were first kicking off.
I never wanted it to become the way I talk to my folks, I wanted to talk to that cute girl in my class or some guy in Russia that happened to like the Smashing Pumpkins too. Maybe I'm not using it right, but it seems more difficult to find new people while wading through ads and political posts from peripheral friends.
I couldn't agree more with this. I'm in the same boat. 32 years old, so I had a social life before social media. There is one exception for me and that's Instagram. I'm a visual person and it satisfies that for me. Three minutes on Twitter is enough to make me depressed for the rest of the day. Facebook isn't much different... I think humans will naturally shift to actually hanging out in real life again.
they’re just optimizing for the wrong metric. If the metric was “user satisfaction” they could target it day and night and nobody would be complaining.
Any metric can be abused if you try to optimize it at all costs. You can easily increase average user satisfaction by reducing the usage by less satisfied users, it doesn't mean you improved things.
The issue is that something like this difficult to operationalize. User Engagement conflated with user satisfaction, with poor results. Maybe you could force your users to fill out Likert scales all the time, I bet they'd love that.
I don't want to sound like an ass because I wholeheartedly agree with you. The experience is hollow.
But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics. Snapchat and the like have thrown enormous money at understanding humans and have the best people in their fields to get this right.
I think what worked 10 years ago no longer flies now. How we socialize on the web has changed, and we're turned off by the traditional mechanics to keep us viewing. There are many alternatives to the service Facebook offers, but I'd like to people aren't 'showing off' as much anymore and are having more 1-to-1 or small friend-group experiences. The larger community is almost always toxic.
Look at cord-cutting: For the longest time we just ignored commercials, until we didn't.
Once upon a time, a record company had A&R people in it who would take a chance, make a decision, use their gut reaction, sign a group, and see what they could do with it. Okay? That was, whoa, a long time ago. It's not that way anymore. All decisions about who get signed and what happens to the record are made by these drooling little midrange accountants. And everything is based on the numbers games in there. And the taste of the accountants is what is ruling the mass media."
Continues at link.
This attitude is like trying to predict the weather tomorrow by just guessing it'll be the same as today. You're right most of the time...
`A&R` by Bill Flanagan[0] is a fun read about the now deceased world of A&R. Of special interest to anyone interested in the music business who wasn't around pre-internet.
> But you can't invest in things you can't quantify.
I hope you mean the current world of VC and the greater finance world can't do that. Because as individuals and small companies we can absolutely invest in anything we want whether there's a metric or not. Granted, you can't organize a mega corporation or a hypergrowth startup around vague values because you're so far past Dunbar's number that any kind of shared understanding of anything more complex than simple metrics is tenuous at best.
However it's worth recognizing that there's a real thirst in the world for authenticity in a world driven by global brands and corporate behemoths. There's plenty of room for other approaches, it's just not what interests the financial world whose interest is directly proportional to the number of zeros involved.
But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics.
Sure you can. It's how Jobs turned Apple around. By all accounts, nobody had metrics saying consumers wanted less choice. No metrics suggested that a music player with "no wireless [and] less space than a nomad" would be a market leader. No metrics, as far as I'm aware, showed that there was a huge demand for Unix-like stability and command line tools but without the need for tinkering just to get a great UI and commercial software support.
It's difficult, certainly, and requires a nearly pathological drive to make your product as good and polished as possible - a drive that most people don't have today, including Tim Cook. But it can be done.
> But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics. Snapchat and the like have thrown enormous money at understanding humans and have the best people in their fields to get this right.
Not everyone can, but great products often have a bit of genius or perfect timing in their creation. Snapchat - disappearing picture messages! - wouldn't have been arrived at by analytics alone.
Quantifiable metrics can amplify good instincts, but it can't replace them, and most of Facebook post-newsfeed, or Snapchat post-stories, has been just the metrics-driven iteration part.
Cord cutting isn't just about commercials (indeed, there is an ad supported tier of Hulu).
It's about control over what you get to watch, when. No more waiting around for a particular time, no forgetting to set the DVR. This has always been a nuisance.
Indeed, even before full-on cord-cutting was a thing, Tivo was (and still is, AFAIK) a thing, including speculative recording of content (i.e. it became more than just a digital version of a VCR).
There's evidence that this has been an evolution rather than a revolution.
> But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics
Having metrics is important, but thinking that metrics - any set of metrics - capture the whole of reality is delusional. And anyway, in the end you can always quantify your ROI in terms of money.
Reminds me that the balance between logic and emotion within a sociological system was explored many moons ago in the Matrix trilogy through the relationship between the Architect(Logic) and Oracle(Intuition).
WARNING: Mild spoilers if you've not seen the Matrix films
The analytics led social media platforms are evolving towards the early versions of the Matrix created solely by the Architect and ultimately rejected by the humans within:
"The first Matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equalled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being.
Thus, I redesigned it based on your history to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure.
I have since come to understand that the answer eluded me because it required a lesser mind, or perhaps a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. Thus, the answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive program, initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche.
If I am the father of the Matrix, she would undoubtedly be its mother." Architect - The Matrix Reloaded (via Wikiquote)
As an industry (and engineers) we have a tendency towards being led by logic and there has been a cultural focus (e.g. DevOps) on being led by metrics...we can sometimes miss or downplay the squishy yet equally important emotive side of systems ;)
Do you have examples of such platforms? Also, your point is legit, but think about a vast number of online services which do not measure anything. A plethora of financial services (insurers, I won't even dare), and other rigid institutions.
I bailed at the advent of forced non-chronological timelines. I would have been less insulted if Facebook hired someone to spit in my face.
Easily the scummiest design decision I have ever whitnessed.
Actively manipulating the structural representation of time in a communication platform is begging for chaos. Yes, of course I know the time stamps are still presented. That is not my point. Communication is sensitive; very sensitive. Adding barriers in reverse like that signals to me these companies do not have a clue. The issues with this sort of thing will not be measurable or even observable.
Our lives and society are impacted in mass proportions by events we as individuals will never perceive, or have the capacity to. And this is precisely what thinking is for; we theorize, organize, and make sense of things. This is the basis for all of our potential, and that potential is all we have.
But this is not rocket science. It’s a sorted list. that everyone uses. And now it’s unsorted. for And what?
Chronological is just one ordering. Why are you so attached to it? Why must deviating from this one specific ranking approach lead to "chaos"?
Algorithmic ranking is not evil. A tiny minority of people rail against algorithmic ranking, but the vast majority, as demonstrated by their engagement, prefer the algorithmic model. Should we let this tiny vocal minority dictate policy, data be damned?
> Algorithmic ranking is not evil. A tiny minority of people rail against algorithmic ranking, but the vast majority, as demonstrated by their engagement, prefer the algorithmic model. Should we let this tiny vocal minority dictate policy, data be damned?
I was listening to the Next Billion Seconds podcast the other day. They made the point that in social media 'engagement' is a polite euphemism for 'addictiveness'.
I've rephrased your post to show why I find it unsettling:
> Algorithmic ranking is not evil. A tiny minority of people rail against algorithmic ranking, but the vast majority find the algorithmic model to be more addictive. Should we let a tiny vocal minority dictate policy, data be damned?
How can you distinguish "addictiveness" from people just liking the product? The default assumption should be that people are in control of their own actions.
One hint to help differentiate addiction and enjoyment is to ask about enjoyment. Research shows that addicts tend to enjoy the focus of their addiction a bit less than regular folk.
For example, if I’m honest with myself, I don’t enjoy checking my email. But I still compulsively check it dozens of times a day. I think it’s fair to say that I’m an addict.
Do you enjoy checking Facebook? Ask your friends. I know what mine said.
No, if you want evidence then just look at the numbers of obese people in the population. People don't make rational decisions, this isn't some moral failing, it's just the way we are.
It by definition is a bad thing. I suspect you’re using the term as slang. Like, you enjoy working out, you do it regularly, and you don’t feel right when you’ve gone too long without a bit of exercise.
That’s not addiction, that’s a healthy habit. If you were truly addicted to working out, you’d be late for work because you wanted that last mile. Or miss your kids birthday party to hang out at the CrossFit gym. It would consume your time and attention to the detriment of other needs and the needs of others.
That’s the spirit the parent comment is using the term in. As something that demands more of your attention than it deserves.
"As demonstrated by engagement" - isn't really true. It's more "As demonstrated by count of time spent in the app". I believe that is true. But it's also a worse experience. Those two really seem to contradict each other, however, it's really quite nuanced.
I'd like to see mostly what my friends are up to. Instead of that, on Facebook at least, I mostly see viral videos from whatever groups I happen to be in. It is true that a lot of the time, those suck me into watching them. Technically that counts as "time spend in the app", but I also see that I'm wasting a lot of my time on crappy pointless videos and because of that I've actually not opened the app at all from time to time. In general, my attitude towards it has also changed - it used to be "ooh, exciting, let's see what's happened", now it's more like "meh, maybe this time there is something interesting, let's check, although probably not". Jaded is probably the correct description.
I realized a while ago that "engagement" is very much the wrong metric to optimize. The reason people optimize for "time spent" or "number of interactions" is because it is easy to measure.
I think ultimately what you need to optimize for is much harder to measure. I think for most senarios it is "value a user can recieve for a given amount of time". When measuring this, time spent in the application is acutally detrimental unless you are increasing the value a user is getting from the application by a substantial amount.
If your theory were true --- that apparent engagement increases really just represent navigational inefficiency --- you'd see drops in other metrics, like user retention and visits. But you don't. What you see is that people use the thing more. It's hard not to interpret that as better.
I'm not saying it's navigational inefficiency - it's giving me useless stuff that's really hard to stay away from. I don't want a platform that gives me a free shot of opium every now and then just to get me to stay there.
I'm quite the person to say that it is useless to me.
I also am quite free to have the opinion that a lot of content is simply a waste of time. I also propose the question of how much actual enjoyment it produces and the quality of said enjoyment. You are free to think otherwise :)
Yeah, having to refresh my instagram feed 2-3 times just to make sure I didn’t miss anything from my friends certainly has me engaged. But it’s the exact kind of “math-friendly refrigerator magnet junkfood” engagement GP was talking about.
> Chronological is just one ordering. Why are you so attached to it?
This is a very deep question you’re asking, and I don’t know the answer. But, this boat only goes in one direction so let’s make the best of it.
But seriously, sure other sorting methods are useful. I would like to have many options, but I can’t think of a better default for this use case. Can you?
> ...as demonstrated by their engagement, prefer the algorithmic model.
You just don’t understand my point. Maybe read it again. I dunno. But ...
As demonstrated by their engagement, people prefer doing whatever their boss tells them to do.
As demonstrated by their engagement, people don’t actually like sex very much at all.
I'd offer you one blindingly obvious explanation for why it's putrid: because it is a machine deciding which of my human relationships I should pay the most attention to.
Machines can't do that, silly. They can only promote hate speech with 100 comments and lolcat pictures with 100 likes. The only option is for them to take a back seat and present an ordering that is semantically meaningful to the human computer operating the tool -- the only one qualified to perform any kind of filtering and sorting.
"Relevance ranking" in social networks is a result of engineers having zero clue what applications they're working on, but that's just typical IT people divorced from reality for you. As you said, they find it acceptable because it's written in Angular v7 and uses ML and A/B testing revealed a 3.2% increase in clicks. The idea of the software industry helping real relationships is in general hilariously contradictory (but of course there are exceptions!)
> > ...as demonstrated by their engagement, prefer the algorithmic model.
>
> […]
>
> As demonstrated by their engagement, people prefer doing whatever their boss tells them to do.
Engagement means people are engaging more with non-chronological feeds than with chronological ones. This isn't just about blindly accepting what you are given, it's also about caring more for pertinence than order.
If you give no other option than algorithmic ranking that is not designed to maximize my utility but your revenue, that is as close to evil as you can get in my books.
(Edit: as close to evil in the context of social media content sorting. There obviously are more evil things than that...)
The biggest issue for me, when FB moved away from chronological ordering, was that if I clicked on a post in my feed, I could no longer go back to the feed and continue browsing where I left off, because the ordering appeared to change when the page was refreshed. I pretty much stopped using the service around that time, and though I didn't actually think about it, I think this change was a big factor in that.
The same for me - it got to the point of infuriation that if I navigated away by clicking on a link to a Chrome tab, if I came back to engage with the post organically, it was hidden from the feed.
I can't speak for GP, but most people who don't like the switch from non-chronological timelines because their replacements are usually opaque algorithms that are optimized for maximum shareholder profit. That's a downgrade.
On the other hand, non-chronological timelines are celebrated in communities like Scuttlebutt, but it's because we have control and you can choose the UX that works best for you without sacrificing connectivity.
It's not demonstrated by engagement. The engagement exists simply because there's no alternative: FB made new attempts to enter the social media impossible. You will not get funding and you will not be able to monetize with advertising: monetization of user generated content with ads is impossible in 2018 unless you are at least the size of Reddit.
> Chronological is just one ordering. Why are you so attached to it?
Because one is essentially a feed of data, and the other is obviously/openly being manipulated based on things that I did not choose. The fact remains that removing that option is problematic. They switched the default - fine, makes sense. To remove the basic time ordered feed just shows they aren't interested in allowing users real choice.
I largely mothballed my facebook use years ago - so I'm not a user they should optimise for. But probably have bailed at that anyway.
Exactly this. I like Instagram but I wish they would optimize for how I want to use it, now how they want me to use it. I want to get on, see stuff from my friends and get off. I want to spend the least amount of time possible on the site and that's something that social media sites seem to think would be bad for them.
One of the reasons that I like Twitter... It has a short section with "important" (by some metric) tweets since the last time that you viewed your feed, followed by tweets in chronological order. Facebook surely has the ability to do something similar but it would negatively impact how much time people spend on the site.
Personally I'm not a fan of this feature, but thankfully it doesn't do it to lists, so most of the more interesting people I follow I put into various lists by topic instead. That and I'm not a fan of the main timeline injecting likes from the people I follow, but that's twitter for you...
Twitter forces me to do a monthly dance of "I don't like this" clicking on stuff like that or the "XXX liked this tweet" crap to remove them, instead of providing a simple on/off setting and sticking to it.
> with new technologies are going to come novel and compelling forms of social interaction.
What, Web 3.0 will come with booze?
While I am entertained by social media, I can't remember the last time I actually interacted with anyone in a substantive way. I'd much rather hit the bar and admit to myself that social media isn't very social.
Off topic but, you know what, maybe it eventually will. Just like in the movie Ready Player One, nothing says it couldn't be done.
Maybe the reduce of physical interaction between people are not caused by social medias, maybe just because people don't want to spend time and energy (or, lazy) on those physical interactions.
If meet with friends face to face cost 2 bars of power, and interact with them on social media cost 1 bar, I think many people will rather to save 1 bar, so they can do more tings (like, take a nap).
> Web 1.0 lets individuals create and express ideas
> Web 2.0 lets groups create and express ideas
> Web 3.0 lets societies create and express ideas
It's blockchain. Blockchain is what gets us from web 2.0 to web 3.0. The technology is almost here, and after another few years of basic R&D the stuff we're going to be able to start building is going to transform society in ways that are barely even imaginable today.
Could you explain exactly how blockchains allow societies to create ideas? I'm not sure how append only lists allow idea sharing in ways a database does not.
Alex isn't wrong. But I don't think it's blockchain. It's decentralization in general.
For example, I want to release a tool that can mod old ROMs. I cannot legally sell this. This is a new idea, I'd like to make a living with it, but I can't. And why not? Because the concept of IP has turned us into servants.
Meanwhile you have youtube series like Freeman's Mind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SQhfkpX9bc making a killing, and I'm preeeetty sure he didn't ask Valve for permission. Nintendo is possibly the most litigious game company in history, and will aggressively shut down anything remotely connected to any of their characters. The whole situation is completely fucked for artists, and decentralization can solve it.
Unfortunately it looks like I'm born a couple generations too early to benefit, but at least my kids might.
That will work... until a talented guy from a poorer country starts selling a cracked version of your ROM for half the price. Good luck competing with that in a 0% regulated environment.
At least it'd be a fair matchup. Me vs big companies is like an ant vs you. I'm less worried about a talented Russian who's stuck one generation behind my latest work anyway.
except he will be 0.1 generations behind. Literally, the day you release your update he will start feverishly reverse engineering it. Once you show the way with all your hard work, copying becomes easy. Good luck monetizing that.
What's the incentive to crack it, to sell it? Does the cracker sell it for less? Would I be willing to buy a cracked piece of software? It'd be a horribly unsafe idea if it were, for example, security software or a tool for modifying my operating system.
Even in a complete wild west, some people are going to do the right thing. Maybe even most people. Probably is far more a cultural issue than a legal or technical one. Still, I'm not arguing that 100% deregulation is a good idea, just that I don't really think this is a convincing argument.
>Would I be willing to buy a cracked piece of software?
It doesn't matter if you would, it matters if the general public would. And all you have to do is look to China, where more cracked copies of windows are sold every day than legitimate copies. The only reason that doesn't exist here is because it's almost impossible for the average consumer to buy a cracked copy. If they were available at every corner store the average person would make that choice 9 times out of 10. And if they'll take that risk on the entire OS, they won't bat an eye at a rom.
It is not unsafe if the cracker is an actual company with brand, customer service, etc., because such a thing will at least briefly exist in an environment with no IP protection.
Then it all goes to heck because innovation just grinds to a halt.
I don't disagree, but at least some money would come my way. Currently no money comes. And yeah, I could build my own game with my own characters instead of modding old ones, but why? It'd be fun to put a silly hat on Starfox and make him into Piratefox and make him go yarrrr as he blasts all the innocent bad guys. I wanna try it and I wanna sell it and it'd be hilarious and benefit society and it's stupid I can't.
To be precise, the argument goes like this: Star Fox 64 is not currently generating any economic benefit for Nintendo. It doesn't harm Nintendo for someone to make a derivative work of it. In fact, I'd be more than happy to cut a deal with Nintendo and just give them most of the money. The problem is that no one tries to do this, and we all lose what could have been made.
Addendum to my previous comment: Look no further than the man who claimed to be Leonardo himself [1] for proof that a lawless blockchain protects no one and hurts original content creators.
"And now you, dear filmmaker, want to come along and want to make your own version of Star Wars: A New Hope? For shame! That's like stealing food right out of George Lucas' mouth."
Your comment reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright law. It is perfectly acceptable to copy the basic "idea" of a story. You just can't copy or make derivative works of Star Wars or Alice in Wonderland themselves, but you can copy all the themes and ideas thereof.
The argument is that it's harmful for society to restrict artists from remixing other people's work. And when you put it that way, how could it be otherwise? We'll have to agree to disagree that it'd cause problems for people to be able to tell a Darth Vader story.
It causes problems because then there is no profit incentive and then there goes the entire content creation industry.
You can remix themes and ideas all you want. Just don't call it Darth Vader and profit off other people's investment in that specific expression of the space opera.
Good point about Disney, they shouldn't be allowed to control characters forever. But two wrongs don't make a right. Nintendo and Valve made recent pieces of intellectual property that they should be allowed to own for a reasonable period of time.
I am just waiting for Disney to buy the rights to Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces" and try to claim they own the monomyth and all derivative stories are violating their copyright.
Being creative and copying ideas are not mutually exclusive.
For instance, I love the harry potter universe. I just happen to think that JK Rowling is a terrible writer. I would pay hundreds of dollars for quality fan fiction, ideally licensed or legal. There’s really no mechanism for any human on the planet to tell a story in this universe and widely distribute it legally.
Arguably this is more of an issue with copyright and trademark, but I think there’s a lot of room for art to fluorish if there’s a market not beholden to IP law.
Just a small nitpick, there is no such thing as "IP law". There are copyright laws, trademark laws, and patent laws. All of them have different rules and regulations, and the only thing some people think they have in common is that they (in some fashion) "regulate ideas" with small differences in their application. This is simply not an accurate view of such laws, and ends up muddying the waters by making the clear differences between such laws seem unclear (I'm not saying that you are guilty of doing this intentionally -- it is a very common misconception that is spread because the copyright lobby in the US intentionally tries to muddy the waters so that discussions of reform get squashed).
Always refer to copyright laws as "copyright laws", trademark laws as "trademark laws", and so on.
Harry Potter has more fanfiction about it than any other storiy. The most famous one is on hpmor.com, but you can find tons of others on fanfiction.net.
This is a ridiculous idea, that falls apart with even cursory scrutiny. For a trivial example, almost all of Shakespeare's plays were amalgamations of other people's plays or were based on other people's stories (Hamlet, for instance, was a retelling of a 16th century version of the 13th century Scandinavian legend of Amleth).
Would you argue that Shakespeare was not creative? Or is it possible that stories are based on the culture of a society, and the culture of a society is based on the stories told -- meaning that any story can be argued to be a copy of another person's idea.
You're not going to convince me that someone narrating over themselves play Half-Life has the same creativity as Shakespeare, because "everything is a copy". To say that no one actually owns the rights to Pokemon, that someone copying Pokemon frame-by-frame is of equal creative value as someone drawing their own monsters, well I just am deeply saddened by that.
(I'll be honest that I didn't originally didn't read that the topic under discussion was modding of games. Passing off a game as your own is obviously not right, but that isn't the only topic under discussion here.)
Of course modding is not the same as Shakespeare. My point was that stories like those of Shakespeare would not have been possible with our modern notions of copyright. I do agree that many (but not all) examples of such work are just simply rip-offs of other people's work. On the other hand, does it make sense for any work to be untouchable for an essentially unlimited period of time?
So while you might argue that mods are all shameless copies of another person's work, I direct you to 'The Stanley Parable'[1] which was a mod of Half-Life 2. I think most people would argue that it is a creative work that is unique despite the fact that it re-uses assets from a copyrighted work. There are many counter-examples to the idea that the only way to have creative value in a game is to "draw your own monsters". Jim Sterling ran a contest where people were to come up with original works based on an overused Unity asset, and the winning entry was a game made entirely out of textures based on that asset[2]. Is that not a creative work?
I think that ultimately it's a disservice to argue that all such works should not be allowed because many examples of people building on previous work is lazy or a transparent rip-off. That the requirement for a creative work be a strict sense of originality (not to mention that you need to decide how do you define sufficient originality -- is "Harry Potter Told Using Pokemon" an original work?).
Thanks for your comment. I'm certainly not arguing for a binary definition of creativity. I would play The Stanley Parable and vouch for it's existence as a stand-alone work of art.
But should The Stanley Parable be able to profit and set up a free enterprise on the tireless work of Valve engineers? Well, I wasn't really arguing that either.
All I was saying is that, as an artist, if you consider yourself "fucked" because you can't profit off of releasing a commercial game "Harry Potter with Pokemon" that sits on the shelves of GameStop alongside the originals- even though you would be quite good and creative artist in my mind, hell I would play the shit out of that game- you are not realizing that respecting copyright law and abiding by those rules, as "unfair" as they may be, is the only thing that protects companies from being ruthlessly shared on uTorrent for free, and that if you were truly creative and trying to form a business, why not respect this law, and take additional effort to create something "new" and "original", which I understand is total hyperbole, but within our confines of law is simply a matter of "reskinning" so yes Shakespeare could be regarding on the level of reskinning someone else's Angry Birds, but clearly he put his creative spin on it enough to be different or else he wouldn't have made his mark.
In conclusion, nothing is completely "original", and fanfiction is still creative, but artists should strive to not self-identify with other creative entities, if they wish to form a business, out of respect for the law that protects from 100% bad actors which do not wish to creatively enhance, but to sell or distribute identical copies of original creative work.
Again, Disney did exactly that. They ruthlessly exploited Alice in Wonderland and built an empire on it. And you're arguing that no one should be able to do the same. This is the definition of unfair.
I see we're very far apart and probably won't find some common ground, but the way I feel about the situation is that as automation removes the rest of manual labor jobs, people will need to specialize. And modding old ideas is one of the few ways people could specialize and make a living for themselves. You're free to disagree here, but the future is coming, and one day we'll both be gone. The best ideas, however, will be around. And it's hard to imagine that the best idea is not to let anyone else use anything you've thought of for your entire life plus ninety years.
> you are not realizing that respecting copyright law and abiding by those rules, as "unfair" as they may be, is the only thing that protects companies from being ruthlessly shared on uTorrent for free, and that if you were truly creative and trying to form a business, why not respect this law, and take additional effort to create something "new" and "original"
Copyright law is not meant to protect companies. From a historical perspective, it has always meant to temporarily protect authors' rights to their inventions so that society can get more works from those authors. Citing the US constitution (other countries have different justifications, but I assume that you are in the US):
> [The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
This matches the purpose of the copyright system defined in 1710 under Statute of Anne (which inspired this clause in the constitution). The copyright system that pre-dated the Statute of Anne was a system of censorship by the publishing houses (that were members of the Printers' Guild), and the public rebelled against their censorship and Queen Anne strove to come up with a system that was far more fair and was meant to inspire authors to produce more work (rather than restrict what they can write so publishers can make more money).
Having a copyright system that protects publishers (which is what we currently have) and lasts for 70 years after the death of the author does not "promote the Progress" of anything (in fact it actively stifles it). I would argue current copyright law is unconstitutional in the US, but I don't have enough money to fight that fight (and the only people that do benefit from copyright law's overreach).
Unfortunately, in our modern age, the true purpose of copyright has been forgotten. People (like yourself) think that the purpose is to protect companies profits -- this could not be further from the truth. Such companies benefit from this misinformation, and regularly lobby the US Congress to add laws which further expand copyright laws (both in breadth as well as length) that result in even more profits for large companies without any more works made as a result. The true hypocrisy is that many of these companies would not have been able to make their works at all without the public domain, and without liberal copyright laws. The first cartoon Mickey Mouse appeared in (Steamboat Willie) made use of things from previous movies (Steamboat Bill Jr -- which was released 50 years earlier).
> out of respect for the law that protects from 100% bad actors which do not wish to creatively enhance, but to sell or distribute identical copies of original creative work.
Even if we ignore that these copyright laws are written by these same corporations (that themselves used public domain, and even infringed on copyrighted works from smaller publishers, to make their products), as I said above this is missing the purpose of copyright law.
Ah, a small correction: I'd never pass someone else's work off as my own. The idea is more along the lines of "Look at this silly hat I put on Picachu. Won't you give me a few cents so I can keep dressing up Pokemon as space marines?"
It's also a way of doing leaderless agreement about distributed platforms in low-trust environments. I'm no blockchain fanatic, bit ISTM that a decentralised discussion board could require the spending of tokens to make posts. The market should hopefully make the tokens of desirable communities more expensive, which discourages cheap, low-effort posts. AFAICT, before blockchain you could have decentralisation or paid posting but not both.
I cannot envision myself joining a community like the one you described unless the utility of the community was very high. I do not think that paid posting will improve the average utility of a community, but I am open to examples showing I am incorrect.
The best publications pay people to write for them, not the other way around.
I honestly don't know, it's just an idea that's been kicking around in my head. If posting is cheap but spamming is expensive, then you might get better standards. If the forum becomes valuable then you might be able to reward the people who make it great? Except StackOverflow tried that with rep, and locked in all sorts of broken feedback loops.
If the forumtokens fluctuate wildly in value it would probably kill the forum too, particularly if the only way to get them was through the market. I can't think of any way to algorithmically deal out tokens to posters that doesn't reward at least one of: multiple accounts, spamming, or writing outrage bait.
> I'm not sure how append only lists allow idea sharing in ways a database does not.
So at the software developer level of the stack, what we get are new tools for managing reputation, identity, authentication, transparency, accountability, etc.
If you think of people as a graph of nodes, these tools enable novel patterns of trust and collaboration between individuals that aren't possible today. What this means is that every institution will ultimately have to reimagine itself so as to be cost competitive in the new paradigm, HT Carlota Perez.
To give a more concrete example, think of the 2008 real estate collapse. The reason the market failed isn't because people didn't have the data, it's because no one one going to read through a 3,000 page paper print out to figure out what was actually in whatever debt tranche they happened to buy. But when you can just run a simple Python script to analyze the contents of all that debt and get updates on payments in real time, suddenly those types of systematic market failures can no longer happen. And because a big portion of the lemon market problem is ameliorated, that creates new ways to finance big capital investments that would be completely impossible today.
Think about why we weren't able to have large corporations before double entry was invented/popularized in Florence in the late 1400s, because there was no way to really know if you were making or losing money once you got beyond a certain scale. Because blockchain reduces the costs of double entry accounting by 10,000x, we can (and will) restructure all aspects of society in ways that just aren't possible currently, everything from supply chains to social networks. I think it stands to reason that blockchain is going to be the most financially important technology of the last 500 years, since imho it's the biggest innovation since double entry accounting.
There's just one small problem: Blockchains are massive, slow, and it takes new users hours or days to join an old blockchain. Once those miiiinor problems are solved, I'll agree.
It makes sense as a store of value. But a realtime database that requires rapid, possibly millisecond-accurate entries? It just hasn't happened yet. Not on a scale that works in practice, anyway.
Example: I tried to use Namecoin a couple days ago. I got bored and quit after a few hours of "Synchronizing network". It seems to have consumed several GB. I just wanted to register a .bit domain. I didn't even get to "How do I acquire namecoin?" because (a) there is no clear "go here and pay this dude" service, and (b) you have to have GBs of free space just to try it. Such experiences are typical of blockchain, and this seems to murder consumer adoption.
> it takes new users hours or days to join an old blockchain
The main reason for decentralization is to prevent collusion. But the risk of collusion decreases very quickly even with relatively limited amounts of decentralization. E.g. a consortium of even 10 independent banks would be much less likely to steal your money than Wells Fargo alone. So while there will always be some use cases where power users will want to validate the entire chain, in practice I think we can get 99% of the benefits of decentralization with even a handful of nodes. Bitcoin wouldn't be trustworthy under this model since anyone can jump in and mine, but it's possible to create networks that are trustworthy in this way.
In terms of scalability, the three main contenders right now to be the next generation general purpose blockchain are Hashgraph, DFINITY, and RChain, with a couple dozen other dark horse contenders as well (protocol labs, eos, tezos, etc.) We don't know if any of them actually work yet, in the same way we didn't know whether or not Bitcoin was actually secure in 2010. But there is a bunch of stuff that will be launching in the next couple years and then slowly battle tested over the next decade while we figure out what really works.
Most consumer apps are still going to be driven just by Postgres or whatever, with data only validated on the chain when it actually needs to be. E.g. if you're buying a house, it's probably fine to take Zillow's word on the transaction history if you're just casually browsing, but then if you're getting serious about buying you can always hit the button to go directly to the chain explorer or whatever.
Yes! This is an important point, and I completely agree that decentralization is the main driving force here, not necessarily blockchains. Blockchains are a nice fallback mechanism to enforce trust, but Bittorrent proves that you can have happy ecosystems that work just fine without it.
The corollary is that I'm most interested in services that are focusing on decentralization, not merely trying to be a general purpose blockchain. One of the most important unsolved problems seems to be "I want to put this file up on the internet, but I don't want it to be taken down," plus "I want to request this file, but I don't want it to be traceable back to me," plus "I want to distribute this file, but I don't want it traceable back to me." Tor solves some of these concerns, but it remains a specialized niche. I can't just do it for any old file at any time; might as well use Dropbox for that. And why? There's no reason. It should all just be decentralized. After all, I'm online most of the time, and I'd happily upload the file to whoever wants it.
This all sounds quite shady, but the motives here are mostly pure: I'd like to distribute old ROMs and anime. Such things will get you kicked offline just as quickly as the more nefarious stuff. But this seems like a net negative for society. Society is at its healthiest when you're free to remix other people's ideas.
(More specifically, I want to write a service that lets you play whatever old ROM you want, whenever you want. There still is no Netflix of this area, and the game companies that could make it happen seem too inept. May as well force their hand with some decentralization. But that requires being able to write the equivalent of <img src="http://foo.com/img.jpg">, but for distributed binaries keyed by sha256. Blockchain could help here, but I look at this and go "Y'know, this is a perfect decentralization problem. Why aren't blockchains solving it already?")
Good idea; I tried that. Unfortunately IPFS doesn't yet seem reliable. Or at least I couldn't get it to work very well. I'll try again though.
Wanna collab? Shoot me an email and we can work it out. I'm really interested in getting this concept running. If only IPFS were low latency and easy for average gamers to upload files to, that seems a perfect fit.
I was hoping that as users play games, they would also upload the games to other people who want to play. That way there's no scarcity of server resources. You could fit ~40 n64 games into 1GB, so it's not a lot of bandwidth.
IPFS definitely has high latency, but you might be able to combine this with the Web Storage API [1] to compress and then store the ROM data for local use. I'd be interested in a collab, is your email in your profile?
The trouble is performance. N64 emulation is all software rasterization based, but it can be rewritten to use WebGL. It's just a lot of work that no one's done yet. RetroArch runs at 40fps because it can use SSE ops, which is beyond what browsers can do currently.
I think it would be possible to ship an Electron app with a local build of Retroarch, modified to export the rom's game data and selectively replace the draw calls with other ones. That way you can basically swap out starfox with mario, if you wanted. If any of this sounds interesting, shoot me an email (see profile).
> Because blockchain reduces the costs of double entry accounting by 10,000x [...]
Wat.
There is no aspect of double entry bookkeeping that would lead to a cost reduction when combined with blockchains, even less a reduction of an order of magnitude (or four!).
> If you think of people as a graph of nodes, these tools enable novel patterns of trust and collaboration between individuals that aren't possible today. What this means is that every institution will ultimately have to reimagine itself so as to be cost competitive in the new paradigm, HT Carlota Perez.
That is a logical fallacy. Every new dna mutation is 'novel' and some mutations are even solutions to real problems, but not every novel solution is the most competitive. Just because blockchain gives you new tools that solve problems doesn't mean it is the best way to solve that problem. (EDIT: To defend your statement you have the burden of proof to show that your paradigm is significantly more competitive than current paradigms. I suspect time will prove me correct.)
> when you can just run a simple Python script to analyze the contents of all that debt and get updates on payments in real time, suddenly those types of systematic market failures can no longer happen
There are many, many factors that went into The Great Rescission. Repackaging subprime mortgages was bad for investors. Maybe python could have helped that by giving investors better insight into what they were buying. The housing market declined, fundamentally, because many families were unable to pay their mortgages. Python wouldn't have helped people be able to pay their mortgage.
While the 2008 crash can be described as an informational failure, my understanding was that this information was deliberately omitted, not just unread; it was fraud, not just a systemic failure. Also, you seem to be describing blockchain costs as being minimal in some sense. My suspicion is that this is less true than you think. Currently, blockchains have very high energy usage. If you are saying we need to structure society around this, then you are asking us to absorb whatever externalities go with it. The people who live around the Colombia River, where the cheap hydro power is, are getting a bit tired of BitCoin mining. I'm sure there are things which can ameliorate this issue. I'm willing to be convinced that the problems of blockchains are surmountable, but your argument seems more enthusiastic than credible.
> my understanding was that this information was deliberately omitted, not just unread; it was fraud
Debt was fraudulently misrated, so you'd have junk bonds rated as AAA or whatever. But the primary data was all there, so you could actually go visit all of the properties and talk to the owners like they did in The Big Short, it's just that no one did. The people who approved the mortgages also weren't verifying people's incomes, and in some cases were even encouraging them to lie about their incomes. But the primary data was all there, the reason no one audited the primary data was that it was too expensive relative to the payoff. Blockchains can fix this. (The residential real estate market is pretty fragmented so it's unlikely to be one of the first industries to get transformed, it's just an easy to understand example.)
> Currently, blockchains have very high energy usage.
This is really only true for Bitcoin and things modeled after it, where the integrity of the chain is secured by wasting an amount of electricity that's directly proportional to the expected future price. This clearly isn't sustainable so BTC will have to change their POW if they want to be successful. But it's also not an inherent property of blockchains, there are many other blockchains that are already secured differently or are working on novel security mechanisms, but as I said they just need to be proven out over the next few years.
I did indicate that the power issues are not inherent, even in the quoted sentence. I am disappointed in your response to the degree that it does not address other externalities. In some ways the general lack of exactitude in human affairs is a feature. There are also two sides to the issue of privacy, which is not impossible to achieve for an immutable distributed ledger, but not necessarily the natural tendency. Further issues may occur to you.
Those are not the conventionally understood definitions of web 1 and 2. 1 is about bringing massive audiences to conventional publishing. 2 is about democratizing the creator pool and welcoming p2p and ucg. I have no idea what you mean by societies.
All the major social networks seem to end up like this at some point. They start out small, users really dig it and use it a lot, then the company experiences massive growth and begins to optimize around metrics, then the user/community experience slowly goes to shit.
Companies like Facebook endlessly proliferate they are all about “connecting people”, but what’s the point of even having people run it when “connecting people” really means just using algorithms to spoon feed bullshit to people so the company can count it as “engagement time” and report it back to their board on the quarterly conference call.
Digital social interaction isn’t a free public good centered around people as long as it’s privitized for the purpose of profit, and it’s also something the government can’t be trusted with providing either.
Honestly, I don’t think we have figured out a good solution or channel for social communication yet. I’m not trying to be a tinfoil hat wearer alluding to blockchain or p2p as the answer because who’s to say it is the answer. We can only use our current frustrations to push us to keep innovating further towards a solution that’s more natural and compelling to use.
Sometimes I long back to the days of AIM, because while it seems pretty feature poor compared to services today, it did the job that I needed it to do, which was provide an easy avenue to stay in touch with current friends and easily start conversations with new people. Simplicity is taken for granted in the world today, and even though we are in the “Web 3” age we shouldn’t just throw experiences and social channels from earlier days of the internet out the window for the sake of illusionary progress. Shit, I even meet people who are still passionate about Usenet, despite it being older than me. That’s damn powerful to see people care about the communities they were/are a part of and remember stories of building friendships and social interactions on the internet some decades later. These are things that seem lost today in a landscape focused on striving towards hitting target numbers.
It wasn't at odds with those techniques. The redesign was meant to force the users to view sponsored stories by sacrificing the usability of the app to view their friends stories. To look at the redesign as some kind of improvement for the users is totally wrong, IMO.
I've noticed a similar effect with fast food restaurants. Fast food up-and-coming competitors tend to offer higher quality, fresher food at a slightly higher price. Problem is that when you look back at McDonald's 50 years ago, it had higher quality and fresher ingredients than it does today. Profit motive drove slow incremental decreases in quality till eventually new competitors could differentiate by offering a product probably somewhat similar to an original McDonald's burger.
Are we destined to see this same cycle with social media? Profit motive slowly degrades the platform privacy and feed quality till a new player can enter simply by offering something closer to the original product Facebook offered?
It's basically just the life cycle of nearly every corporation due to their incessant need to grow. Offer a great product and build a strong customer base, then slowly cut costs by worsening product or externalizing costs.
This need is something I've never really understood and indeed is the root of all these problems. Zuck wouldn't be mister billionaire if he'd kept FB V1, but the world would have been better for it.
Growth or opportunities for growth must be present to convince buyers and investors to exchange more-liquid assets like cash for less-liquid assets like ownership. I part with $100 that I can spend anywhere for a share of stock that I hope will grow in value. Without opportunity for growth I have no incentive to part with my $100.
In the Facebook example, if Zuckerberg didn't want to grow Facebook, but wanted to still capitalize on it, he could have found a buyer and sold. The buyer would have been interested in growing it, and committed resources to doing so. Growing or Selling were the only two real options that would deliver Zuckerberg any gain. Once he decided not to sell, his only option was to deliver investors growth, so they would be willing to place their money in Facebook.
Another example would be an iOS app. There are plenty of apps in the app store where the developer built it, put it out there, charged $0.99 and that was it. If the app meets a need, this can work for a while, but eventually either demand will change or competitors will arise and the developer would either need to update/grow their app to maintain their revenue stream.
Growth is a fundamental piece of the financial system and eventually everyone decides to either grow, sell, or undercapitalize their asset.
Without wanting to sound like a socialist, couldn't these apps / businesses just be built to "cover costs"? Instead of producing 500 millionaires.
I'm not saying I could necessarily resist the temptation of becoming a millionaire at the cost of turning my great idea in to a shitty one, but I sure wouldn't feel good about it.
While I agree with your overall outline that „something“ is lost from current social media, I would argue that analytics or more specifically analtical mindset in general should not be blamed for this. Analytics is simply a tool that can be used for good and for bad. The real problem are bad overall societal incentives and ideals (i.e., focus on profits and other narrow/short term metrics) which lead to missuse of these powerful and potentially highly useful/benefical tools.
So I don‘t think we necessarily need to resort to an complete change of the tech stack (i.e., web 3), but should simply try to support projects focused on better incentieves and ideals (e.g., Mastodon over Facebook/Twitter) no matter the technology stack. Nevertheless, I agree that web 3 may enable more idealistic/well aligned business models in the long run.
Another thing to push for may be more end user friendly legislation such as GDPR. While it may stiffle innovation by small companies in the short run, having long term standardization around good practices will hopefully create better and enable easier scale up of organizations in the future. Hope some researchers are coming up with good designs to investigate the effects of such legislation on the internet landscape. (On that note, can someone tell me again why impact evaluation of laws is not a standard practice, yet?! How much grieve could be spared if we decided to use evidence and facts to ground legislation...)
The 'forms' may be different, the desires and needs stay the same.
People want to communicate with as little friction as possible - then some smarty pants thinks why don't I insert myself in the middle and be the creepy overlord.
It'd be novel and compelling if people thought beyond themselves for one second and wondered what they'd actually like to spend their life on. That'd be novel and compelling.
It's been novel and compelling since the beginning of time, because it happens so rarely. I don't expect that to change. Sorry, carry on :)
I don't know if that's it at all. I think the more likely explanation is that all of these companies are competing for a single, finite resource: human attention.
Maybe the opportunities for developing new ways to exploit human attention are simply drying up. Between streaming video, games, social media, podcasts, and just plain old traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers) how much more room is there to grow?
If I'm right this could be the signal of the current tech bubble finally bursting.
I think Web 3.0 is going to be more focused on small communities and niche-focused platforms. Look at how many people shove money to twitch streamers and YouTube personalities that have minimal operating costs but extremely strong communities.
The whole reason companies like the web is because it provides high profit margins since compared to physical things, the web is incredibly cheap. Communites allow companies to make money off of feelings and comradre that their users build for them. Twitter doesn't have sense of community so people are quick to leave, but even if pewdiepie left YouTube, the platform would be fine because it has so many other niches that people would stay for.
But... If other mediums are a guide, the messages don't get more artisanal over time. They can get more mass produced, "click-baity' and sacrine...TV=>reality TV ; Ne spaoers => tabloids.
These mediums aren't purely crap. We get Westworld and GOt too, but the thick part of the pyramid is low cost, replicable-by-hacks, low brow "content."
The online version of that is the algorithmic bias confirmation version of flame wars and cat pictures.
Specifically on online social media... History shows these have lifecycles. Digg, Reddit, stumbleupon... these were different in year one. Novelty wears off, low hanging fruit gets eaten and mature games take over.
It should be noted that Facebook is pushing very hard for more meaningful interactions in the form of Groups. These groups are taking an increasingly large amount of the newsfeed. Facebook's stated goal with these groups is to create meaningful communities. I think, at least to some extent, they are succeeding with this goal.
Anecdotally, I know several people who say groups are the only thing keeping them on the network.
Interestingly, the groups also dovetail well into the continued growth of their ad platform; they tend to be interest based, so they help with ad targeting.
Yeah there's still billions of people that aren't online yet, and even without all of the optimization targets, people still use services like Facebook, Snapchat, Whatsapp, etc multiple times per day - all of these services will remain highly profitable even with declining usage figures.
It's just that their share prices will take a hit and shareholders will be disgruntled. Fuck those guys though.
I'm not sure how close tech companies are to monetizing the kinds of users who aren't online yet. For example, I talked to somebody at Microsoft a while back who said that Bing doesn't even serve ads to many African users because there isn't a sufficient advertiser base trying to court those users. So the last few billion users may be we less profitable than the first few billion.
I have quit FB like 6 years ago and stopped using Twitter (I still have account I guess) like 2 years ago.
It doesn't mean the web became a lonely place for me - Github, HN, some music apps, Instagram, Duo, e-mail etc. What I have left behind is pictures of newborns, awkard 'friends', news and shallow exchanges - which I am not fond of also in real.
> What's happened is that most of the major social networks only hire and promote people who make decisions primarily based on analytics
Few years back there was a similar company called Zynga. Analytics was its secret of success as well as demise. Snap or FB is on the same course but with an evidently longer life span.
Decentralization is one part of Web 3. ActivityPub could be one technology that is relevant to this story.
Edit:
Moving things out of silos, re-focusing on the content and its value to people, instead of what's relevant to advertisers – as have been mentioned throughout this thread.
I really wish social media would "peak" to towards meeting people in real life semi-spontaneously.
No profiles, no media uploads, no digital showboating. The best relationships I have with other people fall in this category. Real life,common interests,no digital uploads.
Just add attributes of your geolocation and hobbies [biking, yoga,tensorflow,etc] or let it crawl your digital profile(s) to autobuild your attributes identity.
The system will group people with similar personalities/attributes.
Every once in a while, "the system" it sends you a text "Free at 9am? Mountain biking at X park for an hour with beer after with 3 new people? Text yes to opt-in"
Get revenue by having businesses bid on being the beer spot.
Refine the algorithm by having an anonymous rating system after the fact.
I like Meetup but it must be taxing to always manage the organization/logistics of a meeting.
Yes. I just realized I blended the show Betas,an episode of Black Mirror, and the 2016 movie Nerve together.
Heh, this makes me think of this anti-viral startup idea I had - which I'm not going to make because it's... Anti-viral and thus not something I think I could pull off. Anyway, the idea was pretty funny: a meetup-like website where you'd sign in with e.g. Facebook, and then you could only see and attend meetups that none of your Facebook friends are attending. In other words: everybody goes to these meetups with the expectation of not knowing anybody and getting to know new people.
That said, I think there's only so many people interested in actually meeting new people, at least of a certain age, and even those who are, are only interested in getting to know a small amount of new people.
Still, I quite like the idea. I don't even think you need to group people based on interests (though of course the subject of a group allows people to self-select); just being open to meeting new people can probably go a long way.
Haha, absolutely; especially since you quickly make friends with the kinds of people that go to these events, with the consequence that you're no longer able to go to these events.
But who knows, maybe enough people end up in a position where they want to make new friends (I'm thinking failed marriages, lonely elderly people, etc.) that there's a steady enough flow of new members.
This does seem like a powerful idea. The problem of networking friends, family, and co-workers has more or less been solved, but the problem of putting together complete strangers with shared interests and coincident physical locality really hasn't even been attacked except in very constrained use cases (i.e., dating services).
It's possible that the next big wave of social networks will be less "Facebook" and more "Spacebook."
That's not entirely true (your first point). Both my wife & I have met all sorts of acquaintances and what became good friends through interests that started with coincident physical locality: gyms, clubs, church, children's sports & school, etc. I don't think the problem exists completely in the way you seem to think. One potential mental block could be that spontaneity is a key piece of the equation. I argue that the vast majority of humans are not spontaneous and that's a hugely overrated attribute, if so.
I 100% agree with your second statement, though, that the future of social networks will focus more on the social and less on the spam & social signaling.
"the problem of putting together complete strangers with shared interests and coincident physical locality really hasn't even been attacked except in very constrained use cases (i.e., dating services)."
When clearly Meetup have both attacked and been very successful in "putting together complete strangers with shared interests and coincident physical locality". That's exactly what they do, would you not agree?
I'm honestly not that familiar with Meetup. I thought it was basically just a calendar for keeping track of local events. Do people maintain profiles or personal pages on it?
Agree 100% with this. I believe we should really utilize the internet more as a bridge for offline interactions. I've been trying to build something similar for sports called Reclub. https://reclub.co
We seem to be on the same wavelength. I might be giving up a viable idea here, but for a while I've been thinking about a sort of hybrid between Meetup and online multiplayer matchmaking where groups of people can meet up and do stuff without the need for an actual organizer.
Here's how I envision it:
- A user joins and provides a materials used to perform a background check.
- People with accounts sign in and are automatically grouped based on distance, interests, etc.
- Users cannot see who is in groups until they join one. This should help prevent people from backing out of matching because being lazy and skip over lots of people they don't like for minor superficial reasons. In other words, if you don't like fat people, guys who aren't cute, women who aren't hot, etc., you can't game the system without being punished. If a person really doesn't like someone they've met, they can set it to never put them in a group with that person again.
- Once a sufficiently-sized group has been formed(let's say between 6 and 8 people), they are given a time-limited choice between a list of activities. These activities can be autogenerated and evergreen(e.g. go see a movie, bowling, eat dinner, etc.) or be brought in from a list of actual events happening in the area(e.g. comedy shows, local bands, group painting classes, etc.). If consensus is not reached in 10 minutes, a random activity is picked.
- Once a group has formed, you can still back out but it will drastically deprioritize you in future meetups until you have actually attended enough of them that you appear reliable.
- When a group meets up, the app pops up with a unique QR code for the user. Each person in the group should scan each other's QR codes to verify that not only they showed up but that others showed up. This can be cross-checked with GPS proximity and motion, in case a user ever claims that the QR scan "doesn't work". By having your QR code scanned, you make yourself more likely to be grouped faster in the future, be given more interesting events, and be grouped with fewer flaky individuals.
I feel like there must be a reason why nobody has done something like this yet, especially since there's already an algorithmic model for this in games like Halo. Maybe autogeneration of meetups exposes a company to liability?
One thing I want to avoid, which is a part of your idea, is the notion of having users rate each other. I think that can lead to a lot of abuse and isn't really fair. I can only picture people downrating others because they are Jews or "she wasn't that hot". It would be much better to have a system where people are only judged on whether they show up(people are flakes) and if they have been reported for being creepy or worse.
> Users cannot see who is in groups until they join one. This should help prevent people from backing out of matching because being lazy and skip over lots of people they don't like for minor superficial reasons.
I'd worry more about being rejected in person, than beforehand. Ideally I'd want to never know I was rejected. Instead I'd like to notice when I wasn't (i.e., I'd rather never know there was an event of which I was never invited).
Also: the biggest challenge must be to prevent the whole system becoming impopular because of commercial abuse, i.e. "I went to one of those once for mountain biking, and of the 8 people there, 5 were bike salesmen pretending to socialize but constantly trying to advertise new bikes".
I believe we humans should raise our resilience to rejection instead of shielding ourselves from that information and therefore lowering that resilience even further. However since the first option is a human problem and the second one a technical problem, the second option scales better and is easier to implement (maybe towards our own downfall).
Don't worry about QR codes, it kills the vibe of an "organic" meeting. Just do it via GPS.
I wouldn't worry about liability, look at the physical contact Tinder is promoting :)
I think the rating should be on the group overall, and not on an individual level.
Negative individual ratings should only be done with consensus, if everyone says Bob was a bully. Then Bob's a bully. But if only Debbie says Bob was a bully, then maybe Debbie just overreacts.
If Debbie constantly negatively rates against the consensus, then Debbie probably isn't a good fit for group situations.
This would need a shitload of personal data to reach the point of "it just works." This means that it's most likely one of the tech giants that will do this right
How did this article make the New York Times? It’s awful.
I listened to the entire Snap conference call and Spiegel directly attributed the drop in active users to the app redesign, a fact that wasn’t mentioned until 2/3 of the way through the article.
Moreover, they gave no guidance for DAU projections, and merely said that historically fewer users are active in the third quarter than the second. This does not equate to a longer trend, it simply implies that fewer people are active in the late summer months than the late spring/early summer which seems to make sense.
It seems like the NYT more and more either wants to report negatively on the social media industry or has more success from these sensationalist headlines. What happened to thoughtful fact-based reporting?
>Spiegel directly attributed the drop in active users to the app redesign
I wouldn't be surprised. Navigation is all over the place in Snapshot. Try sending a snap, and now I'm suddenly view stories from people I don't know, with no clear way of getting out. I can see some users jut giving up on using the app.
The new Snap design is awful. It's confusing and difficult to use and overly pushes promoted content onto me. I am a young male, I don't care what snap chat stories some women's fashion magazine (or any other 'mainstream media' for that matter) are publishing. Why does Snap try and push it in my face?
Snap could have been something amazing, a true rival to Facebook perhaps, but now instagram just does it all better.
> How did this article make the New York Times? It’s awful.
The NYT is widely regarded to have turned a corner in the early 2000's, with the decision to put a color picture on the front and, in 2003, the cringe-inducing drum beat of the Iraq War.
Seems like just a Snap peak to me. Article doesn't mention Instagram, its most direct competitor, or tons of other non-Facebook/Twitter social networks that are gaining popularity (Reddit, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitch, even WhatsApp, and many country-specific ones).
To add to this, there's also Nextdoor, Discord, YouTube, Telegram, Life360 etc depending on how you define a social network. I'm pretty sure all of these are growing significantly both in the US and abroad.
Not to mention all the Asian social networks that are growing like crazy.
My theory is that Snap just doesn't have enough differentiation either as a product or as an audience to be sustainable as an independent entity long term (caveat: Snap in today's form). I don't know how long they'll be able to retain their core unique demographic and most loyal users when the action is all happening on Instagram. I get the feeling it'll be one of those shifts that happens slowly at first, and then quickly - especially if the company makes major missteps (like the recent redesign fumble) or becomes too stagnant. However, I believe Snap still has enough time and money to change that trajectory with the right vision and leadership.
Genuine question... how is whatsapp a social website vs just a chat application? Perhaps I've missed something critical about it but the way I've used it and seen anyone else use it is just as a replacement for SMS
As someone who doesn't use WhatsApp in a country where everybody does: the primary use case appears to be group chat. If it was just a replacement for SMS, not having it would not be a problem - I could still text with people. However, I'm "missing out" on things because I can't be in some WhatsApp chat groups.
Any proprietary communications platform meant primarily for communicating between humans can be referred to as a social network. It's a pretty broad definition in my mind.
As a long time Snapchat user i know my friends at this point like Instagram more. Snapchat’s recent interface changes make little sense and sometimes serve to actively confuse the user experience. Classic case of fixing something that wasn’t broken.
Agreed, the "let's put stories in your personal message view interface" was absolutely terrible in my opinion. I use to watch stories all the time but now I hardly ever do because it is so annoying to find them.
Shit, I watch instagram stories now more often because those are easy to see and pick whos I want to watch.
I think the confusing user experience serves to engage younger audiences who gravitate to what is regarded by the older users as complicated. I believe this is Snapchat's unique approach vs all the other social media.
Snap's UI is horrendous and it has nothing to do with ads. Kids can invest innumerable hours to find and utilize all the hidden ways to interact but your average adult is just going to do the basics and will put it down.
That's fine. Kids are often the market these social media companies target as they launch anyway.
At least software that ran in a text based terminal would customarily come with a manual.
Snap is a lot like that magic bag in Harry Potter that was bigger on the inside. You never knew what was in there till you stuck your hands in and hoped for the best.
Instagram has a pretty craptastic UI itself. It's a pain in the ass to copy images from the web UI (Have to use the inspector to get the link) and the video player doesn't let you skip ahead or move back.
I'd agree if those tasks were part of what they were planning to be a part of the app experience - but seeing as they're explicitly not, then from a pure design perspective, the UI is perfect in that regard.
It's bad, but bad intentionally. I haven't noticed it being buggy like snap chat. They just went out of their way to break features the browser gives you for free.
We are not anywhere near "Peak Social Media". Otherwise investor valuations would not be what they are.
Even discounting they can predict the future, Zuck hasn't even got started on his VR/AR "ready player 1" social network dream yet, decentralized social media hasn't had its try for the title yet, and the non-social big 5 are still waiting for FB weakness for their chance to strike with something new.
Not to mention whatever comes out of the BRICS countries that may be some innovation over SV social media tech.
This baby still has a lot of miles left in it, I think.
Fundamentally, people's desire for distraction / convenient "human connection" has not yet been sated. (Will it ever?)
Investor validations of tech before the bubble wasn't super accurate. I mean facebook lost 20% of it's value in a day, how does that not scream speculative bubble?
> decentralized social media hasn't had its try for the title yet
That depends on the answer to your first question. If HN is considered social media, then Usenet needs to be considered social media. In which case decentralized social media already had a good run, but users eventually came to prefer centralized systems.
My main question is: Where are people going? It seems like there is a slight dip in usage across all social media, but I'm trying to figure out where those hours/days/weeks are being spent. Are people turning to more real-life activities, just broadcasting and communicating less, turning to other up and coming platforms, or relying more on private messaging?
Perhaps they're turning to group chats and imessages? Any meaningful use of instagram, snap, or similar platform introduces ads into your "friend news stream", whereas simplicity of whatsapp or similar platform avoids them, while preserving fluidity of communication.
IM is honestly the number 1 social media right now. Its real communication with people you actually care about and not a popularity contest or marketing and no algorithm trying to tell you what you should be looking at.
I guess you can. Email seems to be more popular, though. For any given person, there's a higher likelihood they have email than any particular IM client.
In many countries in Europe, WhatsApp is just about ubiquitous, and used by the average guy way more often than email.
The same (from what I understand) for WeChat in China.
Yes, if you need to communicate outside of your local circle of family and friends, e-mail is still king (for business communication for example, no contest), but how often does the average guy does it?
I agree that more people have an email address than a particular IM client, however, a lot of people outside of the tech bubble don't use email much anymore for personal communication.
iMessage is the solidified IM platform I see most, as if you have an iPhone, you have iMessage.
In Australia SMS is still widely used because of IM fragmentation. A proprietary IM platform will never take over and we will stay in the current mess until one of the open source standards become well used.
Its the era of the notification and the interruption, now that we've addicted a fraction of the population to endless human-powered interruption we "need" to change all our software to have computer driven interruption. Consider app-spam in android notifications, the completely worthless notifications in the Windows notification bar.
The addicts will still get their hit, but much as bad money chases out good money, its too expensive and politically sensitive to have humans generate that attention / interruption rush, so have machines spam the hell out of us.
Besides, TV is dying, nobody watches that stuff anymore, and all those "push media" people need work.
Expect life in the 2020s to be filled with a lot more interruption, mostly machine generated.
Some interesting predictions: going to run into problems with work/life balance because of merging too close and spam explosion, such that even cognitively successful people are going to be much less well informed at work in the future than now due to sheer spam volume. Another novelty is we're in the last decade of the voice telephone call, in the death of the voice phone call era there will be bot armies in the cloud calling you dozens of times per day until you disconnect your voice call service. My guess is federated social media will have to rise when legacy hyper-centralized social media becomes pure propaganda and advertising to the point of being unusable. Possibly the same social factors that led to TV regulation of commercials back when people used to watch TV, might be reimplemented for the internet in a peculiar fashion. It'll be a major social status symbol to be interrupted all the time, much like follower counts used to be a big deal, of course cool people will spend all their time holding their phone to their face, swiping away meaningless notifications.
I've seen a fair few people and communities move to Slack, Discord and other such chat systems. Perhaps the 'public' side of social media is getting to them, so they're moving more in moderated communities rather than free for alls.
We dropped Snap because it moved from being that nice platform to share tidbits of your life with your friends to a platform made to push ads in your face.
The "Snapchat" we have today is an entire different app experience to the one we all adopted into our lives. If you build a new app and then skin it to make it pass like something else, users are going to notice and move on.
It doesn't help that they keep moving features around. First your friends' stories were on the left swipe screen. Then they moved them among the ads to the right. Then then moved them back left... and now they are back on the right screen with the ads. To be honest, I haven't watched any of my friends' story in age because why bother learning where they are every few months?
Users are jumping ship to Instagram. Once they duplicated the functionality it was the nail in the coffin for snap. If I had a ton of cash lying around I’d short the stock to zero. Insta was Facebooks greatest acquisition.
Three thousand dollars will get you options until 2020 that you can cash in for $50k worth. You don't need a ton of cash if you think they're going to zero.
hold up, how does that figure? I thought you could only get up to the amount invested back, which is why it is a really not great idea. Investing $3k now might net you up to $3k if the stock hits 0, but it could triple in which case you lose $6k.
Bounded upside, infinite downside. I'm sure it's more complicated but what am I missing?
Options aren't "an investment", think of them more like "gambling". So the 3k is the "fee" (non-refundable), and the "winnings" depend on the price of the stock at a predefined date.
In this case, the parent would buy a put option, which would pay out only if, and proportionally to the amount that, the stock is lower than some predefined price (usually the present price with a small delta).
"Peak social media" (like "peak oil") doesn't mean maximum theoretically attainable consumption, but the point in time at which consumption is highest, and can thereafter be expected to only ever be less.
I'm one of them. I deactivated my Facebook in January too.
I use Twitter for 5-10 minutes a day to keep up with a few topics of interest.
Instagram for 5-10 minutes a day to get some cool nature and travel photos, a few people I genuinely care about.
HN and Reddit keep in the loop for all the things I am interested in and allow me to discuss them anonymously with other people who are as into them as I am.
I am pretty sure 250 million+ people in my country India are still not on SO CALLED social network, they are not even on internet yet. So , we are far away from Peak Social.
As compared to the situation 3 years back, now none of my friend (me included) is even slightly active on any social media (except for whatsapp). Even people are getting less active on whatsapp. I am a member of like 12 whatsapp group, and almost 10 of those are silent most of the time.
I wonder if this is generally true. May be I (and my friends) am getting older.
Finally. I hate (most) social media. Everybody ought to go back to email, phone, and in-person. Much more human and much less "how many likes can I get with this glammed-up photo".
All that happened is that Instagram won the competition. I'm not sure what are the teens doing, but a lot of older, less invested, users moved on (or were on Instagram in the first place and just stuck to it).
Everything's a pendulum, especially, (un)fortunately, pendulums.
I, personally, doubt social media is really peaking. Maybe it is. Seems like more of the same, people switching providers. Going from that crufty thing the old folks use to something n new. Isn't Instagram the new hotness, spreading like crazy? How are they not even mentioned in the article?!? Seems pretty sloppy, or worse disingenuous but maybe I'm missing something.
So, then isn't Snap due for a fall? How does one provider falling signify a collapse of growing, still nascent, medium?
Can't speak for everyone, but personally I just got tired of Snap's bad UX and moved to a different platform.
Now a lot of my friends have moved to Discord, WhatsApp, and Slack. Really been digging Discord lately, wish they had some way to make money I believed would work so I knew they were going to be around for a while.
No one wants to pay for things anymore so what we have is a cycle of good tech that runs on investor money and makes none on it's own and then it gets sold to microsoft or whoever and they attempt to turn it in to something that makes money on it's own without charging for the service until everyone gets so sick of the product they move to the next new thing.
Couldn’t it be that users are switching more and more to Instagram from Snapchat? For sure my view is biased but all my friends that were using snap a year ago are now primarily pushing content through Instagram and all are ditching Snapchat ...
Or it could signal that snap has a weak value proposition that was easily emulated by Instagram and Facebook messenger devs (AR selfie face filters and stickers etc.) Thoughts?
Twitter is becoming the political infighting network. If it wasn't for Donald John Trump and the millions following or belittling him - what is there to do for the masses on Twitter?
Facebook struggles with revelations about their deep privacy invasions and complete lack of vision/product development for years and it seems Snap having never figured out what they really are or should be is now losing users too.
Let's just say, having been a Myspacer back in the day - I know how quickly the tide can turn once user growth starts to staqnate.
If you know 'Asians' you'll know that WeChat is primarily a mainland Chinese thing, and different Asian countries have different chat apps that are dominant.
I found it interesting when visiting south-east asia that many government style posters - such as reporting vandalism or unclean bathrooms - all had a WeChat number to contact as opposed to any sort of traditional telephone number.
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What's happened is that most of the major social networks only hire and promote people who make decisions primarily based on analytics. As a result these sites no longer have any real communities or organic content, and have been completely hollowed out by math-friendly refrigerator magnet junkfood. Even though everyone can recognize that most users no longer find these experiences to be compelling, they're all stuck in a one-way spiral.
Web 3 is just getting started though, and with new technologies are going to come novel and compelling forms of social interaction.