Social media isn't yours
Don’t think social media owes you a damn thing
Over time different people get mad at things social media sites do and complain as if they are entitled some level of service or performance from the site. This has happened a lot in the last year. Twitter has shifted operational practices under a new outspoken owner. Reddit has put policies in place to better handle the cost of serving and load, but messaged and dealt poorly with a large swath of their users. I’m sure there are dozens of other examples, but none of them matter in terms of what is really going on.
You don’t own it, nor should you expect any rights
None of these sights belong to you. Your accounts on them don’t even belong to you. The sites have a vested interest in making that account private to you and that you feel some connectedness to the site. In the end though, you are contributing your voice and other talents to those sites. You have relinquished some, if not all control over what you have donated (varies with each site and with the type of contribution). There is nothing stopping them from replacing all the characters in that well crafted tweet with poop emojis. In many of those cases they could probably replace all the faces in your images with poop emojis. They are private companies and they own the sites.
There are some lines that afford some level of protection to the users, but even these are HIGHLY contested legal points and open to legislation and court rulings around the world. Most of them have to do with the sites wanting immunity for what you post the same way a common carrier (the phone company) can’t be held libel for what you communicate. Looking under the covers though, these argument’s are flimsy at best from both sides and rely on either slim legal interpretations or gross misunderstanding of the technology. In the end they are often thinly veiled partisan distractions.
You take a picture, type a few sentences in an app or web page and hit whatever is the equivalent to “submit” or “send”. You are giving that content to the company that owns the site. If you wanted to control what you created, don’t use a site. If the company that owns the site does something you don’t like, you have to take back control of your voice and stop using their resources. There is no other way to handle any of this that does not start going down a slippery slope that ends poorly.
How do you retain control
Publish these things yourself. If it’s for public consumption, start a blog. It really isn’t hard. You can host it out of your house, or on any number of cloud based services (in those cases it’s fine because you are the paying customer and the company has a legal and financial responsibility to you). Want to share something with your friends? Email still works and it is the only cross service communication that has ever. You can run chat servers if you want something a little more real time, or pay for a chat service (my family does this via an enterprise account I pay for monthly). There is also distributed services that are available and growing, but I will get to that later.
UGH
Whenever I point this out I get a barrage of groans. Maybe it’s too hard. Maybe their friends prefer service X. Independent of the issues, the complaints fall into the a bucket I will label “Why can’t someone make social media do what I want.”.
Do we really want the government to start making social media do things? Of course some regulations are helpful. Safety regulations for airlines can be seen as a net positive. Regulations around hair bradding is an example that by some counts is a net negative. Most of what people want in terms of regulation for social media would be net negative. Issues of censorship start cropping up anyway you cut it, and current partisan voices use those as cries to promote extremism, but a bigger problem is that many of these sites may not be profitable. When companies aren’t profitable they have to turn that ship around or go out of business.
In the end, that convenience that the general population demands cost money. Someone has to pay for it and it probably isn’t the same people that are complaining. I didn’t see people rush to buy twitter verifications or facebook business suite accounts. On the flip side, the cost of social media you own may be prohibitively expensive for some of the poorest people that really do need to have their voices heard. I pay $6/month to host this blog, but that may be $6 more than some people can afford.
Distributed options
One of the biggest winners of twitter self imploding was the Mastodon community. Mastodon is a distributed micro blogging protocol/community. Basically twitter run by a loose confederation of servers. You can move your account from one server to another to better match availability and policies. See Nazi traffic, switch to a server that specifically filters and prohibits it. Don’t like flame wars, switch to a server with a strong policy of calm and rational debate. It almost sounds like a paradise, but…
Mastodon requires that you load a client and create and account with a server. Most people find this step hard and/or confusing. It’s been a large hurdle that has prevented many people from moving at all. These are the users that can’t be expected to do more than push an account sign up button. Then there were some servers that could not handle the new load. They were setup by hobbyist that wanted to play around. A crush of new users and traffic was more than they could afford to keep up with and they shut off the servers. Users complained because they had an expectation of services rather than understand it was a voluntary community.
People coming from twitter brought a narcissism with them that almost upended the fledgling community. I can’t stand the dribble on social media sites. It’s people saying nothing important (or often of negative value) and I have to read/look through that garbage to get to proper content. At first Mastodon was a great option as I only saw real content. The twitter masses changed that overnight. It went from a refreshing source of information to dribble sprinkled with content. For example the python tag before the wave was articles and technical discussions. After the wave it became help with homework and photos of people working out in their python t-shirts (actually happened more than once). I don’t have time to sort through that, and I don’t want to pay for the bandwidth either. Keep your selfies, to yourself.
Mastodon does offer blocking and muting features that allow for a fine grain of control and it may yet be something I look at regularly if I choose to invest in those settings. In the mean time it has one major advantage, what comes across my screen is not controlled by an algorithm. It is just posts in the order that they were sent and had the tags I was interested in.
The algorithms used by social media companies are something that causes more problems but increases profitability for the site owners. A strong emotional reaction will cause you to spend more time and post more content. It’s unhealthy and not unlike feeding megadoses of antibiotics to livestock. The only different is the livestock die if the doses become too large.
There are distributed chat options also, like Matrix. They aren’t really distributed, more ways to link large groups of small servers together in a single fabric. I can talk a lot about this and it’s positives and negatives, but for now it is simple enough to point out that this model is currently winning market share because it is easy enough for a hobbyist to run a service for 1000s of people who don’t, or can’t, run it for themselves.
Cost of communication
One thing that we see with social media is that too many people say what’s in their head, or something that should be said quietly to another, in their outside voice. This generates hate and division and since the posts are not ephemeral like speech is, they sit and stink up the place more and more over time. Social media companies like this as it drives an visceral emotional response. Driven by and “us vs them” part of our lizard brains. It gets promoted by the algorithms to be seen by more people and making connections that align with our worst instincts. If you wonder why has the world become more crazy, this is a lot of it.
There needs to be a cost of communication. Maybe not monetary. Maybe it’s effort or part of an allotment. By having a cost, people will hopefully think twice before communicating and the agents of our worst nature will need to accumulate resources before bombarding us with posts. Right now social media makes it as easy as possible. They even nudge you if you haven’t posted lately. Can’t make money if the livestock isn’t producing product.
Money is probably one of the more problematic way of costing posts. It ends up making a billionaires voice more powerful than someone working minimum wage and that isn’t a good thing for a democracy or a republic. With social media, reputation has some of this effect in that influencers have outsized voices. The problem is that I haven’t seen anyone labelled an influencer that I would ever want to hear from. Even people I respected for their prior academic work have become shallow and distasteful in chasing influencer status. It’s bad enough to promote vapid people, but to drag down our intellectuals is really a bridge too far.
Previously I’ve blogged about quantum resistant signature schemes. Most of these lend themselves to only allowing a limited number of signatures for each identity. If the communication was one of X posts you could make it would hopefully increase the value of the communication. I would be well suited by 10,000 public posts for my lifetime, but it would hamper an influencer who needed to post new fast fashion finds. Win - Win.
Rambling on
This is really rambling on. It keeps coming back to my mind though. Social media is failing us because it is inherently designed and optimized to do just that. It’s profit motive is not in our best interest. The populace doesn’t understand this because they got the easy button for shouting at a larger scale than ever before. At the same time no one is weighing the unintended consequences of cheap/free communications for everyone with an Internet connected device.
The Internet was not created for people to shout at the world. It was created to allow small groups to collaborate. Having small groups collaborate from anywhere is really powerful, but is jeopardized by broadcast communications dominating the medium. As a global society we need to protect and nurture the small group collaboration aspects of the Internet and be very careful of adding anything that is closer to broadcast. Broadcast consumption is how most people spend most of their time on the Internet and that is a shame.