"Engagement-based ranking, use by many social networks, is even worse. It concentrates attention on controversy, outrage, and out-group animosity."
It does concentrate on those things!
Perhaps a sad fact for humanity is that "our collective participation in public discourse produces the shared values and narrative that enables collective action toward common goals" - and maybe unconsciously, those common goals are controversy, outrage and out-group animosity.
Maybe social media really just exemplifies a really ugly side to human's that has been enabled by the internet. Perhaps, through the evolution of our species, we have been hardwired for negativity, and the internet just makes it a lot worse.
It is a fact that we tend to imagine what's the worst that can happen, and as a species it served us well back when we had to survive by escaping from other predators and hunt out own food. Now it doesn't serve us so well anymore, but evolution is a slow process.
I find that most of my questions about humanity are answered if I watch videos of primates tweaking each other just to cause commotion, which seems to be a source of entertainment and community cohesion.
In humans, this manifests as community building during stressful times, and we band together. I remember after 9/11 happened, a significant portion of the world seemed to coalesce emotionally in support of America (outliers notwithstanding).
Same thing with all the other mass tragedies around the world that we seek to turn toward the useful purpose of building community and a collective empathy.
I have many friends who will create chaos in their lives so that they can feel, even for a moment, the brief-but-beautiful reunion after a bitter fight.
Personally, I see this behavior building towards something on a very long timescale, but in the short term, it is incredibly disruptive. The disruptiveness is essential to break up habits, good and bad. We long for better ways, and slowly but surely, we develop them.
There can be no change, even positive change, without disruption and discomfort.
Tribalism is not inconsistent with a social species. Defend the in-group aginst outsiders. It predates humanity, other apes like chimpanzees also have wars.
I think its a way of addressing black-swans. Hearing about bad things that have happened to others allowed people to make changes to avoid those things when they came for your tribe. Whether it was raiders, pests/famine, disease, drought, etc. These things were good to know and the smart ones definitely made efforts to prepare by stock-piling food, building up arms and armies, avoiding contact with new people when disease was about, etc.
I've noticed in myself that my dopamine circuits aren't activated much by working for rewards. But they fire up a lot to get me to do a tremendous amount of work to avoid potential negative consequences. It's not in an anxious way per se... it's just that's what seems to fire up my reward circuits with respect to long-term planning/thinking.
There's an interesting and somewhat related saying I learned from one of the Indian tribes near me: "If you don't believe the rumors, you'll surely perish... but if you believe ALL the rumors, you'll perish even faster."
We are wired for negativity because being on the watch for bad things was a way to improve our chances of survival a long long time ago before the Internet. A little bit of anxiety is good for survival, a little bit of anxiety improves performance.
However, now we are bombarded by anxiety provoking news every single day. A lot of anxiety is disabling.
Being hardwired for negativity was once advantageous, but in the age of computers, internet and AI that seem to evolve much faster than we do, it does indeed seem to be a disadvantage of the negativity bias.
My above comment however was just a thought I had. I am not an authority on the topic.
I feel like a good way of seeing internet, and a lot of the global systems (fast food, porn, addictive video games, drugs etc.) we've created is that they amplify - the good and the bad - human nature. Too much of anything is unhealthy.
Many of these things are concentrated, always-available versions of an "important thing" - food, relationships, novelty, power fantasies.
These systems we've created aren't revealing anything new, they are just taking advantage of what triggers our brains the most.
I completely disagree with "controversy, outrage and out-group animosity" are our common goals. They are just some, among many, items effective at grabbing our attention.
>This is an important question. This is perhaps the most important question for society to answer today. Attention translates to influence. What people pay attention to influences what they believe. What they buy. How they vote. What they fight for. That’s why autocrats try to control the media. It’s why companies pay billions in advertising.
Good luck. When I have talked to people about advertising in general, I've found that they just don't care. Apparently it is a very special mode of thinking where you consider your own attention valuable, attach anything more than 0 importance or cost to watching a message, worry about getting influenced (people will quickly think you are crazy when you choose this tack)... For sure I have found some people here and there who are sympathetic to this way of thinking, but if you want a wider debate about these sorts of issues I fear the first step is let go of your assumption that you can get people to consider your arguments at all if you'd just explain your reasoning clearly enough.
My sense is that this is a personality/neurological difference. Some people are more prone to metacognitive modes of thought. I'm not sure on the whole it's an advantage. It allows you to see stuff like this, but I think it can also make people prone to indecision, depression, etc.
> When I have talked to people about advertising in general, I've found that they just don't care.
Perhaps rephrasing "do you care about watching ads" to "do you care how much time you spend on social media". I am sure people see little value in visual pollution, specially when you can tune most of it out using ad blockers. I am less sure people don't care about having more time to do things that make them actually happy.
It’s not just attention. It’s time in general that people have no respect for; their own time, and the time of others.
In a way this is not new, you can read Seneca complaining about this in his essay On the Shortness of Life:
“Men do not allow anyone to take possession of their estates, and, if there is the slightest dispute about the limit of their property, they rush to pick up stones and weapons: but they allow others to make inroads into their life, even extending personal invitations to those who will one day possess it.
No one is found who would be willing to divide up his own money: but when it comes to his life, each one of us gives others a share in it, and how many others!
…How many have plundered your life without you realising what you were losing?…You live as though you were going to live forever.”
I wonder if this is, in part, to the fact that we have an unknown quantity of time. It seems when people put a more finite value to it (through a prognosis, or even just regularly marking off 1 week of four thousand), they seem to attach more value to it. It seems to transition it from the abstract to the concrete.
The more I study History, the less convinced I am "progress" is a real thing. We keep unfolding all these technical achievements yet struggle with the very same issues as 2, 3, 4 thousand years ago.
For all the convolution Nassin Taleb has published (you really have to put what he publishes in the perspective of a guy who thought up a bet against the grain of the conventional thinking in financial markets, won big and got to live off that and just publish opinion pieces forevermore), I think he hit the nail on the head with the idea that very old books still in print are worth reading. The older the better, precisely because of what you said. I got more insight from reading Gilgamesh than from whole semesters of my college years.
I do think that there are always going to be people that fall in line with that they are told while a select few "decision makers" call most of the shots. The takeaway from your comment is that we need decision makers that are going to lead things to be more healthy instead just benefitting one side.
It's a short intro to raise awareness for the topic. Earlier, our research group "social protocols" published a new metric for Hacker News, but at that time, people didn't see the problem: https://github.com/social-protocols/news
> Social networks and online forums, as the public square where public discourse takes place, are public goods that should be independent of the whims of politics.
This is possible if everyone would agree to some reasonable ground rules… which they won’t.
For one thing, the public square is about politics. No matter what your rules of discourse are, they will allow some narratives to flourish, and since the goal is to dominate, this is necessarily at the expense of other narratives. Which means your rules are inherently political (and therefore, subject to debate), whether you want them to be or not.
Paying attention to the same things as everyone else seems like a bad idea? It means a bunch of non-experts paying shallow attention to things they probably aren't going to go into any depth on and will forget about within days, or it can result in unproductive doomscrolling where everyone worries fruitlessly about the same things.
Modern civilization is built on specialization. We don't have to all worry about the same things. We can pick and choose, and the other stuff is Someone Else's Problem.
This is why there are specialty sites, like forums and subreddits and Hacker News. However, even Hacker News is awfully broad, showing people lots of stuff they probably don't care about and aren't going to do anything about.
RSS feeds and subscription-based following can help if you're careful about curation, but following people has the downside that many people don't stick to the subjects they're experts in and will often repost stuff you don't like because they don't have similar tastes.
And this means having custom filtering would not be a bad thing if the providers of the algorithms could be trusted.
"For example in an online forum, the most up-voted posts may be shown on at the top of the page."
In the culture of the internet prior to 2010, usually whatever was the most recent post would get the the top spot, and I believe the internet culture at the time was more decentralised and people congregated around certain topics to only discuss that topic.
I think this is what is missing from the modern day internet (in part due to the combination of reddit and algorithmic attention seekers), in that people do not talk about the same things to the same people in real life. People usually keep their friends in different groups and talk about different things to each other, and they talk about whatever they want to think about.
The marketplace of ideas relies on everyone in it being some kind of purely rational actor who seeks truth. In reality, it can be to your benefit to believe something that isn't true, to get an out-group punished and yourself elevated. People will change what they believe or what they say the believe based on who is in the room with them. You have incentives to believe in certain things. This is going to affect what you choose to post yourself as well as what you upvote.
Attempting to measure, in real time, the validity or the popularity of an idea provides a perverse incentive. I honestly believe there is simply no way to do this.
Maybe the closest is by returning comments in random order on every load, and hiding all likes/upvotes on any comment for a set period of time. Even returning comments chronologically gives precedence to ideas that occur often, even if they are posted by the same user. This is however not a "fun game" and unlikely to be successful as a site.
Even with this, I think you would still end up with sites having a definite lean one way or another on certain issues, as users mentally total up they kinds of comments that reached the top after the results were revealed and users self-select into or out of the site.
So probably the "best" way is just random, always, and never show any rankings at all. People are free to rank the comments mentally based on their own incomplete information, potentially poor reasoning skills, and their own incentives. But that's the best you can do.
> For example in an online forum, the most up-voted posts may be shown on at the top of the page. This rule concentrates attention on popular content. But this is a terrible rule
It is a terrible rule indeed. It also serves mob censorship of opinions, especially when there is "downvote" option.
Recently I read somewhere that people prefer "potential" to "factual value". For example some prefer a potential Oscar film rather than a film awarded an Oscar. So perhaps the new algorithm for fostering true telling and honestity is base on the potential of people to construct the new rules not to adhere to them. Perhaps this is the NIH syndrome at work, or just that people prefer rediscovering facts than learning facts. But rediscovering requires a very good teacher and a lot of time.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 88.7 ms ] thread"Engagement-based ranking, use by many social networks, is even worse. It concentrates attention on controversy, outrage, and out-group animosity."
It does concentrate on those things!
Perhaps a sad fact for humanity is that "our collective participation in public discourse produces the shared values and narrative that enables collective action toward common goals" - and maybe unconsciously, those common goals are controversy, outrage and out-group animosity.
Maybe social media really just exemplifies a really ugly side to human's that has been enabled by the internet. Perhaps, through the evolution of our species, we have been hardwired for negativity, and the internet just makes it a lot worse.
Just a thought.
In humans, this manifests as community building during stressful times, and we band together. I remember after 9/11 happened, a significant portion of the world seemed to coalesce emotionally in support of America (outliers notwithstanding).
Same thing with all the other mass tragedies around the world that we seek to turn toward the useful purpose of building community and a collective empathy.
I have many friends who will create chaos in their lives so that they can feel, even for a moment, the brief-but-beautiful reunion after a bitter fight.
Personally, I see this behavior building towards something on a very long timescale, but in the short term, it is incredibly disruptive. The disruptiveness is essential to break up habits, good and bad. We long for better ways, and slowly but surely, we develop them.
There can be no change, even positive change, without disruption and discomfort.
I've noticed in myself that my dopamine circuits aren't activated much by working for rewards. But they fire up a lot to get me to do a tremendous amount of work to avoid potential negative consequences. It's not in an anxious way per se... it's just that's what seems to fire up my reward circuits with respect to long-term planning/thinking.
There's an interesting and somewhat related saying I learned from one of the Indian tribes near me: "If you don't believe the rumors, you'll surely perish... but if you believe ALL the rumors, you'll perish even faster."
My above comment however was just a thought I had. I am not an authority on the topic.
Many of these things are concentrated, always-available versions of an "important thing" - food, relationships, novelty, power fantasies.
These systems we've created aren't revealing anything new, they are just taking advantage of what triggers our brains the most.
I completely disagree with "controversy, outrage and out-group animosity" are our common goals. They are just some, among many, items effective at grabbing our attention.
Good luck. When I have talked to people about advertising in general, I've found that they just don't care. Apparently it is a very special mode of thinking where you consider your own attention valuable, attach anything more than 0 importance or cost to watching a message, worry about getting influenced (people will quickly think you are crazy when you choose this tack)... For sure I have found some people here and there who are sympathetic to this way of thinking, but if you want a wider debate about these sorts of issues I fear the first step is let go of your assumption that you can get people to consider your arguments at all if you'd just explain your reasoning clearly enough.
Perhaps rephrasing "do you care about watching ads" to "do you care how much time you spend on social media". I am sure people see little value in visual pollution, specially when you can tune most of it out using ad blockers. I am less sure people don't care about having more time to do things that make them actually happy.
In a way this is not new, you can read Seneca complaining about this in his essay On the Shortness of Life:
“Men do not allow anyone to take possession of their estates, and, if there is the slightest dispute about the limit of their property, they rush to pick up stones and weapons: but they allow others to make inroads into their life, even extending personal invitations to those who will one day possess it. No one is found who would be willing to divide up his own money: but when it comes to his life, each one of us gives others a share in it, and how many others!
…How many have plundered your life without you realising what you were losing?…You live as though you were going to live forever.”
discused a few days ago..
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/deadlines-as-technology/
To me that's one of the great values of these old philosophical/psychological texts. They can reveal what is essential and what is accidental in us.
I do think that there are always going to be people that fall in line with that they are told while a select few "decision makers" call most of the shots. The takeaway from your comment is that we need decision makers that are going to lead things to be more healthy instead just benefitting one side.
Opportunity costs.
We fundamentally don’t understand that life is finite and those times change into something 100% different with different pressures.
I believe that it can help to use the global ethics "capabilities approach" by Martha Nussbaum:
https://iep.utm.edu/ge-capab/
This is possible if everyone would agree to some reasonable ground rules… which they won’t.
For one thing, the public square is about politics. No matter what your rules of discourse are, they will allow some narratives to flourish, and since the goal is to dominate, this is necessarily at the expense of other narratives. Which means your rules are inherently political (and therefore, subject to debate), whether you want them to be or not.
Modern civilization is built on specialization. We don't have to all worry about the same things. We can pick and choose, and the other stuff is Someone Else's Problem.
This is why there are specialty sites, like forums and subreddits and Hacker News. However, even Hacker News is awfully broad, showing people lots of stuff they probably don't care about and aren't going to do anything about.
RSS feeds and subscription-based following can help if you're careful about curation, but following people has the downside that many people don't stick to the subjects they're experts in and will often repost stuff you don't like because they don't have similar tastes.
And this means having custom filtering would not be a bad thing if the providers of the algorithms could be trusted.
In the culture of the internet prior to 2010, usually whatever was the most recent post would get the the top spot, and I believe the internet culture at the time was more decentralised and people congregated around certain topics to only discuss that topic.
I think this is what is missing from the modern day internet (in part due to the combination of reddit and algorithmic attention seekers), in that people do not talk about the same things to the same people in real life. People usually keep their friends in different groups and talk about different things to each other, and they talk about whatever they want to think about.
Attempting to measure, in real time, the validity or the popularity of an idea provides a perverse incentive. I honestly believe there is simply no way to do this.
Maybe the closest is by returning comments in random order on every load, and hiding all likes/upvotes on any comment for a set period of time. Even returning comments chronologically gives precedence to ideas that occur often, even if they are posted by the same user. This is however not a "fun game" and unlikely to be successful as a site.
Even with this, I think you would still end up with sites having a definite lean one way or another on certain issues, as users mentally total up they kinds of comments that reached the top after the results were revealed and users self-select into or out of the site.
So probably the "best" way is just random, always, and never show any rankings at all. People are free to rank the comments mentally based on their own incomplete information, potentially poor reasoning skills, and their own incentives. But that's the best you can do.
It is a terrible rule indeed. It also serves mob censorship of opinions, especially when there is "downvote" option.