Current social networks aren't great for conversations

This isn't like a normal essay, where you'd read linearly from top to bottom - instead, the essay is made up of small sections that are connected together - the connections are shown at the start and end of each section, in links that you should click on them to jump to that section. For example, down below you can see that this first section is linked to "required hedging".

If you're using a big enough screen, I've added something to the side of the page that'll give you a history of which sections you've clicked on, that should make it a bit easier to navigate.
I wouldn't recommend trying to read this from top to bottom like you normally would, I haven't written it with that in mind, I doubt it will make any sense.

Click on "required hedging" to start, then you can come back to the "An app designed for conversation" section later:

Friends before have told me I sound too confident when I say things, so much so that they just believe me by default, and that I should always say "I think" more often, so I'll get my hedging in now, and say:
I'm not 100% sure of anything I say here, this is just what I think, please don't take it as gospel.

A lot of this, probably even most of it, isn't my original thoughts, just me putting together things I've read, but I hope it'll still be useful.

Robin Dunbar, of number fame, has written more than 1 academic paper in his life.

The one I'm interested in here is his Anatomy of Friendship - I need to thank @choosy_mom for bringing my attention to it.
In it, he describes just how important friends are to people, and to their health; it's a lot more than I thought:

Over the past two decades, considerable evidence has emerged to suggest that the most important factor influencing our happiness, mental well-being, physical health, and even mortality risk, not to mention the morbidity and mortality of our children, is the size and quality of our friendship circles [..] Friends provide moral and emotional support, as well as protection from external threats and the stresses of living in groups, not to mention practical and economic aid when the need arises.

(this is a really interesting paper, and if you want to learn more about this whole topic, it has 222 references, so there's a lot to dig your teeth into)

The short version of this is:
Talking to people on the internet right now is very different to talking to them in person, and that's not good for us, but it could be more similar to face-to-face interaction.

This is pretty much a long list of "things I don't like about how we talk to each-other online".

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The first of many quotes from Adam Elkus:

Current social networks do not really fit with evolved human sociality. Could you build better ones? [...] We’re growing more rather than less online as time goes on, and online is becoming more rather than less game-like. Absent less destructive ways to interact with each other, our social media woes will only get worse.

And from someone called Ed, in this essay by Clay Shirky, A group is its own worst enemy:

Today, hardly anybody really studies how to design software for human-to-human interaction. The field of social software design is in its infancy. In fact, we’re not even at the point yet where the software developers developing social software realize that they need to think about the sociology and the anthropology of the group that will be using their software, so many of them just throw things together and allow themselves to be surprised by the social interactions that develop around their software.

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In his "Game Design Patterns for Building Friendships" talk, Daniel Cook mentions a lot of what I'm going to talk about myself here.

Dunbar's paper also said this:

Participants in a diary study were asked to evaluate the quality of the interactions they had had with their five best friends each day: face-to-face and Skype outperformed the phone and text-based channels [texting, SMS, email and social networking sites] by a considerable margin. Importantly, perhaps, interactions that involved laughter, whether real or digital (e.g., emoticons), were rated more highly than those that did not. What face-to-face and Skype interactions share is a sense of copresence (being in the same room together); in addition, they provide visual cues that allow us to monitor and adjust the flow of the interaction more effectively (thereby avoiding faux pas, for example) and radically increase the speed of interaction (facilitating repartee, and hence laughter). Single-channel (e.g., phone) or text-based media are simply too impoverished or too slow

I don't think I'd be as anti-phone-calls as Dunbar is here, there's some evidence that speech by itself is enough for connection, see the "Speech is the most important bit" section.

How we talk to eachother on our different websites and apps just isn't a substitute for face-to-face interaction with people, and it's harder to make friends with people using them, too.
And since friendships are so important to our physical and mental health, and we seem to be inexorably talking to people more and more online instead of in-person, I think this might have pretty big effects on us.

Jonah Bennett brings up some of the social effects in a call to action:

Teens date less. They have less sex. They drink less. The rate of illegal drug use is way down, and they don’t party. But this collapse in social vice is not because they’ve taken solemn vows of moral purity. It’s because they don’t leave the house and don’t have physical, embodied community.

As does Brad Hunter in The Subtle Benefits of Face-To-Face Communication:

While we maximize the abilities and benefits of [the Internet, e-mail, instant messaging, cell phones, pagers, faxes, and the World Wide Web], we need to remember to engage in local communities and physical interaction for the subtle and important benefits which they provide.

And Sherry Turkle (what I'm complaining about here seems almost identical to her Reclaiming Conversation):

We were increasingly willing to talk to machines, even about intimate matters. And increasingly, with the rise of mobile devices, we were paying attention to our phones rather than each other. In both cases, there was a flight from face-to-face conversation. In both cases, technology was encouraging us to forget that the essence of conversation is one where human meanings are understood, where empathy is engaged.
[..]
Our willingness to talk to machines is a part of a culture of forgetting that challenges psychotherapy today. What we’re forgetting is what makes people special, what makes conversation authentic, what makes it human, what makes psychotherapy the talking cure.

These are some of the consequences of expecting more from technology than technology can offer. I’ve also said that in our flight from conversation, we expect less from each other. Here, mobile communication and social media are key actors. Of course, we don’t live in a silent world. We talk to each other. And we communicate online almost all the time. But we’re always distracted by the worlds on our phones, and it’s become more common to go to great lengths to avoid a certain kind of conversation: those that are spontaneous and face-to-face and require our full attention, those in which people go off on a tangent and circle back in unpredictable and self-revealing ways. In other words, what people are fleeing is the kind of conversation that talk therapy tries to promote, the kind in which intimacy flourishes and empathy thrives.
[..]
Consider Vanessa, a college junior who talks about her trouble sitting alone with her thoughts and her habit of using the phone to avoid talking to other people. “As long as I have my phone, I’d never just sit alone and think,” she says. “My phone is my safety mechanism from having to talk to new people, or letting my mind wander. I know that this is bad, but texting to pass the time is a way of life.”

That's not to say online communication has no advantages; one is

Online interactions often provide anonymity and an ability to present ourselves differently than we might ordinarily. The predominance of written communication gives us a way to edit our utterances until they fit the image we want to project, something which is not quite so simple in a real time environment. Since our words are our only connection to others, it is much easier to be duplicitous or even self-deluding.

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Now, I'm not saying it's impossible to make and stay friends with people on the Internet, just that it's harder than it needs to be.

Luckily for me, the Anatomy of Friendship gave me some Scientific Evidence backing up thoughts I'd been having for a while, and pointed me in the direction of lots of other things I could read about friendship.
_{Especially since something doesn't exist unless Science proves it does.}

All is not lost, the skies haven't fallen, the gates of Hell haven't opened.
We can do better than our current systems, and we already are using some better ones than just plain-text communication, like Snapchat, Houseparty or voice messages on Facebook Messenger.

But first, to get pointed in the right direction, to find out what to make, I think it's helpful to explore some of the problems with our existing websites and apps - or, what specifically makes it different from talking to people face-to-face.

Important caveats

Just because when you use a plow to fish it doesn't make a good fishing rod, that doesn't mean the plow is a useless tool altogether, just that it has its strengths and its weaknesses; Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Discord, they all have their strengths and weaknesses too, I just don't think "making and maintaining friendships" are definitely some of their strengths.

Everything has a time and a place - maybe Twitter is good for getting up to the minute breaking news on some event, Reddit for lots of people congregating on one page to talk about a specific topic, but neither of them are perfect for conversations.

And, not everything is monocausal and specifically results from whatever shit I'm on about at any given time.

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Also, lots of these might just be problems I have, things only I experience, the hangups I have with them. Maybe I'm using the websites wrong. Lets see:

One of those things Dunbar's paper pointed me towards was Ned Kock's Media naturalness theory, explained more in this paper (The Psychobiological Model: Towards a New Theory of Computer-Mediated Communication Based on Darwinian Evolution) - this one's free to download and read.

The short version of it is "the more similar a communication medium is to face-to-face communication, the less effort it takes for people to use, and the higher quality it is", but there's far more good information in it than that. If that sounds obvious, there are some competing theories, like social presence and media richness, which also sound obvious, but have issues with them:
Social presence is how aware you are of the other person -

communication is effective if the communication medium has the appropriate social presence required for the level of interpersonal involvement required for a task

It's 1-dimensional - face-to-face has the most presence, and written text the least.

Media richness is similar - it categorises communications mediums by how well they can carry non-verbal cues, give you rapid feedback, let you convey your personality traits, and support natural language.

The main problem with these 2 theories is that a medium can have too much social presence - you can be too socially present for it to feel natural - it can be too rich.

"Natural" means how similar it is to face-to-face interaction.
Kock says there are 5 key elements of face-to-face communication, broken down into 2 axes - the space-time axis, and the expressive-perceptual dimension:

1. Colocation, so people can share the same context. and see and hear eachother
2. Synchronicity, so they can quickly exchange communication stimuli
3. Expressing and seeing facial expressions
4. Expressing and seeing body language
5. Speaking, and listening to speech
   Colocation and synchronicity are the space-time dimension, the last 3 the expressive-perceptual dimension

He argues that, a communication medium that has the most of those elements is the most natural one.

Conveying a message to someone over text is just so much slower than speaking it - paraphrasing the paper:

the number of words that an individual can convey per minute is about 18 times higher face-to-face than over e-mail in complex collaborative tasks, and, when you control for text being more time consuming to type than it is to read aloud, about 10 times higher

Because the cost of evolving the ability to speak was so high - it made us far more likely to choke (you'll need to read the paper for more info) - higher than any other naturalness element, he predicts that how much a medium supports speech contributes far more to the naturalness of a medium than any other element, so it's the most important thing to include in a communication medium.

[this suggests] that suppressing the ability to convey and listen to speech would substantially affect the naturalness of a medium, more than suppressing the ability to use facial expressions and body language
...
this is interesting from a [communication medium] design perspective, because it begs the question as to whether video-conferencing [...] is much better than audio-conferencing alone in terms of cognitive effort required. particularly given the substantial technical difficulties and costs associated with adding a video component to an audio-only channel. According to the theoretical perspective proposed here, it should not be; this expectation has been supported in the past by empirical research. Nor, according to the theoretical perspective proposed here, should face-to-face interaction be much better than video-conferencing, as long as the audio channel is of good enough quality

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This article makes the same point:

we asked people to connect with a stranger by discussing several meaningful questions (e.g., “Is there something you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?”), either by texting in real time during a live chat, talking using only audio, or talking over video chat
[..] Being able to see another person, in short, did not make people feel any more connected than if they simply talked with them. A sense of connection does not seem to come from being able see another person but rather from hearing another person’s voice. This is consistent with several other findings suggesting that a person’s voice is really the signal that creates understanding and connection.

our data suggest that you’re apt to overestimate how awkward it will feel to talk on the phone, or to underestimate how connected that will make you feel—and as a result you may send text-based messages when voice would be more beneficial. So, take a little more time to talk to others than you might be inclined to. You—and those you talk to—are likely to feel better as a result

As does this article.

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Roobz:

Favourite part of twitter spaces is hearing someone’s voice for the first time and getting a whole new understanding of them as a person
A voice adds a lot of character and life to a person

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My friend Kat made this point today and suggested I include it here: more and more, people my age talk to each-other with async text messages, but in the past everyone called more often instead. I joined a bowls and tennis club last week, but I wanted to join for weeks, and I kept putting off calling them to ask to join; I, and from I can tell, many other people too, are almost getting scared of talking to people on the phone and think it will be awkward, we do it so little. And since we do it so infrequently, we get worse at it, put it off even more, all a vicious cycle.

I asked a friend something on Facebook recently, and she didn't reply for a while. I didn't even think to call her to find out what she thought, I just sat and stewed. This is worse, it's not that I think to call and reject the idea, I never even think of it as an option in the first place.

we asked people to think of an old friend they had not interacted with in a while, but with whom they would like to reconnect. These people then imagined how these interactions would make them feel if they typed to their old friend (over email) or talked to their old friend (over the phone). Results were mixed. Although people expected to feel more connected to their old friend when talking compared to typing, they also expected to feel more awkward when talking compared to typing. When they were asked to choose which media they would prefer to use, the anticipated costs of talking seemed to loom large: The majority said they would rather just type to their old friend

Somehow, literally the day after I wrote the previous paragraphs, me and Kat were organising a trip we're taking this Summer, and we spent about an hour doing it over Facebook messages, completely forgetting our previous conversation. Afterwards I realised our mistake and we agreed next time to remember. Later on that week, we had a particularly nasty bug at work that 5 or 6 of us were discussing, trying to figure out the cause and how to fix it, all over Slack. Remembering the earlier silly mistake, I got us all talking on Zoom instead, and we found the root issue (it turned out to be a combination something I had done 2 months ago, something an intern did 2 weeks ago, and the day's date beginning with a 2, and not a 1) and agreed on a way to fix it, far quicker than we would in text.

And now, after a few more Zoom calls at work, this is from one of our sprint retrospectives:

Another possible reason people might not like phone calls or audio messages is that they're an inconvenience, an imposition that someone else is making on your well-ordered life or forcing you to make for their benefit - you need to take time out of your day to listen to them, or do speak back to them. To that, all I can say is there's a lot more to life than convenience, the point of life is not to minimise discomfort, or to optimise your life to the fullest extent.

It's very stupid to use a hypothetical strawman of fictional media that exists only in your head as examples for your argument. Think back to TV shows from 20 years ago, characters mainly called someone to talk to them, they didn't send a text. Nowadays, they text instead.

I would note that it's not just relatively old TV shows that people make phone calls in, I talk to my parents every week over the phone too. The older I get, the more I realise just how wise older people can be sometimes:

take a little more time to talk to others than you might be inclined to. You—and those you talk to—are likely to feel better as a result

Economists talk about how government fiscal policy crowds out public investment. I think the rise of sync text services is crowding out sync phone calls, which are far more life-affirming for us.
That sounded a bit stilted and cold, I'll try that again.
Phone calls are just more human than text messages.

One of the really interesting things I found in Dunbar's paper is that apparently only 4 people can really have a conversation with each-other - if a 5th person joins in, the conversation will probably break up into 2 smaller ones pretty quickly. I think that happened with me and some friends last week, actually.

Being able to understand your own mental state (like emotions, beliefs, knowledge) and intentions, and other people's, is called theory of mind - we're not born with it, we have to develop it as we grow up.
Theory of mind is the 1st level of something called mentalising - knowing that if you're talking to Alice, she has her own knowledge, her own beliefs, .. - and there are higher levels of it too, like "I know that you think that Alice wonders if Bob supposes that Charlie believes that pigs can fly", and the higher you get, the harder they are for people to do, and for you to understand. You probably had to think through that example; I did.

And conversations seem to be limited to 4 people because we can't really go beyond 5 levels of mentalising (including our own mental state) - "I know that you think that Alice wonders if Bob supposes that Charlie believes that pigs can fly" is pretty much our limit.

Visually, it's a bit like this "complete graph" K4 from Wolfram Alpha:

Even in conversations in plays, TV dramas and films you can see the limit, and if you're discussing the mindstate of someone who isn't present, the conversation is limited to 3 people, not 4! - this is true even in Shakespeare's plays, surprisingly - at most only 4 people have a conversation, and only 3 do if they're discussing someone else's state of mind.

From Dunbar's The small world of Shakespeare's plays:

Shakespearean dramas are structured in a very specific way that mirrors patterns observed in real human interactions. Characters are connected by a small number of degrees of separation, generally no more than 2. Nonetheless, social connections are highly clustered, as in real human behavior. Onstage interactions generally consist of cliques of four or fewer individuals, as in real human conversations. This limit is inflexible and maintained even as the total number of characters in the story increases. Thus, increasing the total number of characters necessitates increasing the number of different cliques, so the drama becomes less richly connected with increasing overall size. This sets an upper limit on the total number of characters in one play--30 to 40---that is remarkably similar to those observed in hunter-gatherer societies, and in people's social contacts in contemporary society. The reasons for the size regularities may be parallel in the two cases; as the size increases, the connectance decreases to the point that the network fissions (groups) or becomes incoherent (plays).

People say between 0 < x < 100% of communication is through body language, and you very obviously don't get that at all through text.
This is so obvious it almost doesn't bear mentioning, but I thought I might as well cover all my bases.

It might not be very important anyway, compared to the other differences - we know speech is far more important than body language.

At least in non-tonal languages, we can express quite a lot of our feelings and emotions through the tone of the words we say - again, pretty obvious.

You can imagine or remember the problems that come from that (there are so many, you can just imagine them yourselves), the misunderstandings, the ambiguities, the complications.
This is anthropomorphizing evolution a bit, but we're not made to communicate with people through writing, we're made to do it with speech - you learn how to speak growing up, but you need to be taught how to read and write (occasionally, kids will learn by themselves, but that's not very common).

I don't like how you can't do that in text, not as fluidly anyway - you can use CAPITALS or, if you're lucky enough, italics or bold, or, in most comms systems these days, emojis 😀 - but they have their issues as well (if you don't use them at every opportunity, think why you don't).

And when they are ambiguities, misunderstandings and in the like in speech, when your friend misunderstands something you say, you can clarify or correct them straight away, and go "no no, I meant xyz, not abc" and get everything cleared up really quickly - the synchronicity of speech lets that happen. Unfortunately, we now largely use async writing to communicate, the worst possible combination.

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Matjaž Leonardis:

In written word there is almost no perceptible difference between an off-hand remark and a deeply held view.
In spoken word the difference is very striking.

Almost all signals that you can use to communicate something through text are intentional, you communicate something because you intended to, you explicitly meant to communicate it - see the difference between laughing, and typing "lol" or pressing the "laugh" emoji. (also, doesn't the sound of a laugh feel far more natural, more real?)

I think the only implicit signal you can send is whether or not you reply to someone, that's about it, and replying is quite a serious thing to do - how often have you scrolled past something you didn't like, didn't agree with, did like, thought was funny, loved more than seeing your puppy for the first time after a hard day at work, but not said anything? I'd say, probably fairly often.

If you were talking to someone in-person, your face could show that you didn't like what they said, or maybe you'd scrunch your eyes up if what they said confused you somehow - if you "react" to a friend's message on Facebook, you must explicitly choose to react, to say "yes that was funny", it's not natural, it doesn't just happen, like it could in-person.
Emojis are a step in showing tone, but they're also explicitly intentional.

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You only send replies to people because you want them to read what you say, so if you explicitly say "I liked that!" you want them to know that you liked it - it feels more fake to me, more inauthentic, because an in-person reaction isn't guaranteed to be intentional, it's not just done because you want them to see it.

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Brian D. Earp has a really good thread about this on Twitter - he's actually talking about moral outrage specifically, but I think this is just an instance of a more general issue - which I'll quote in full in-case he ever deletes it or his account:

I have a hypothesis about what might contribute to moral outrage being such a big thing on social media. Imagine I’m sitting in a room of 30 people & I make a dramatic statement about how outraged I am about X. And say 5 people cheer in response (analogous to liking or RT). But suppose the other 25 ppl kind of stare at the table, or give me a weird look or roll their eyes, or in some other way (relatively) passively express that they think I’m kind of over-doing it or maybe not being as nuanced or charitable or whatever as I should be. IRL we get this kind of ‘passive negative’ feedback when we act morally outraged about certain things, at least sometimes. Now, a few people in the room might clear their throat and actively say, “Hey, maybe it’s more complicated than that” and on Twitter there is a mechanism for that: comments
But it’s pretty costly to leave a comment pushing back against someone’s seemingly excessive or inadequately grounded moral outrage, and so most ppl probably just read the tweet and silently move on w their day. And there is no icon on Twitter that registers passive disapproval.
So it seems like we’re missing one of the major IRL pieces of social information that perhaps our outrage needs to be in some way tempered, or not everyone is on board, or maybe we should consider a different perspective.
If Twitter collected data of people who read or clicked on a tweet, but did NOT like it or retweet it (nor go so far as write a contrary comment), and converted this into an emoji of a neutral (or some kind of mildly disapproving?) face, this might majorly tamp down on viral moral outrage that is fueled by likes and retweet’s from a small subset of the ‘people in the room

Jesse Singal's also talked about it here, as has Devon Zuegel, and Marc Andreessen, in his interview with Niccolo Soldo - he calls it passive disapproval.

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I think this is a big part of why, a lot of the time when I ask my friends a question on Facebook Messenger, they'll all read it, but no one will say anything. It keeps happening, over and over again, and it's very demoralising, thinking no one will answer your questions a lot of the time. It makes me not want to ask in the first place, and I wonder "what's the point of trying to talk to them, if they won't say anything back?"

A while ago, Codex replied to something I said, and I thought it was a but funny, I smirked. But I didn't reply to tell him that - "hey man, I just smirked when I read what you said", who would say that?

So all I could do was like it. Incredibly low-information signal there, and maybe missing out on that smirk isn't very important in the grand scheme of things, but imagine that multiplied across most tweets, most people that read them feel something, but the person that wrote the tweet never found that out.

The same thing happened with Luci's thread here - I liked that, I smiled when I read it, but did I tell her anything? No.

On Twitter you can "like" tweets, or you can reply to them with text, or attach images.
A like exists or it doesn't, it's 1 bit of information to represent all the limitless ways of expressing what we feel. Compare that with all the wonderful languages people can speak.
And what does a "like" mean, exactly? Some people use them for bookmarks, some just like every reply they get, sometimes they mean "yes I like that", or "that's funny", or any number of things!
But we only get 1 way to express all of them.
You can mean many things by a like, and someone else can read many other things into your like.

And on Facebook, they have 7 different reactions:

Heart, laugh, gasp, cry, anger, thumbs up, thumbs down - that's all you get to try to express all the different emotions humans can have. I don't know how many emotions we have, but I'd say there are a lot more than 7 of them.

I'm not saying likes and reactions are bad or that they shouldn't exist, just that they're not enough.

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Clay Shirky again (pdf), in A group is its own worst enemy:

Groups [and people, and social interaction itself] are a runtime effect. You cannot specify in advance what any given group will do, and so you can’t instantiate in software everything you expect to have happen

At the risk of sounding pretentious:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy

Simon Sarris has a really good thread about how you (normally) form friendships with people (he makes a lot of the same points in this blog post):

The loss of friendship in modern life is wrought by this: Deep friendship takes time.

Time: consistent, repeated small interactions with people in unplanned settings. You cannot set up what would amount to 5 minute meetings with all the people you may someday be friends with.

But you COULD live in a small walkable village or town where in your daily walking to work, the cafe, the pub, the grocer, etc you come across dozens of people over and over, enough to become familiar, friendly, and perhaps interested in each other.
It cannot be replicated in car-centric world, where its only easy to have groups like "school friends" and "work friends". When people speak of remote hurting socialization or chance meetings, I note almost all other chance meeting places are already lost [links to this thread from Paul Graham about how there aren't chance, unplanned meetings when you work remotely]

I think what we must come to value again is not making friendship compounds or aiding chance work-meetings, though both are great things. What we badly need more of are unplanned interactions between people pre-friendship, available in other contexts. The new village.

Today I live in the vestige* of a village in New Hampshire. It is greatly cherished, everyone loves it, but none think of expanding it or making new ones. Why?
*It's population density is lower than it was 200 years ago.
The only other village I (we) have is Twitter.

So, we get the concept of "third places", places outside of your home and your work where you can regularly meet people, like a cafe or pub, or a church (as opposed to Marc Auge's non-places). Maybe even a baugruppe.

Because of that thread, I've started going to a cafe quite close to my house every weekend - they make what I think is the best hot chocolate (their secret is it's only melted chocolate (probably Lindt) and milk!) - and joined a bowls and tennis club. One day soon I'll work up the courage and go bouldering too.
[weeks later: I did! I go every week now, I've joined a 2nd tennis club because the 1st doesn't have floodlights so you can't play in the Autumn/Winter, I'm trying to join an amateur dramatics group, and an ultimate frisbee team when they start up again next year; even the impetus for that comes from repeated small interactions, someone from a Zoom bookclub I joined mentioned he played it a few weeks in, I'd been looking for a team sport for a while, and realised I'd like to play it]

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This is the same point David Roberts made in his Vox article:

I read a study many years ago that I have thought about many times since, though hours of effort have failed to track it down. The gist was that the key ingredient for the formation of friendships is repeated spontaneous contact. That's why we make friends in school — because we are forced into regular contact with the same people. It is the natural soil out of which friendship grows.

This study isn't it, but it's similar, to wit:

The researchers believed that physical space was the key to friendship formation; that "friendships are likely to develop on the basis of brief and passive contacts made going to and from home or walking about the neighborhood." In their view, it wasn’t so much that people with similar attitudes became friends, but rather that people who passed each other during the day tended to become friends and later adopted similar attitudes.

And this also reinforces the point:

As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college, she added.

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Christopher Alexander, in the 68th pattern in his incredible architecture book A Pattern Language, Connected Play:

A typical suburban subdivision with private lots opening off streets almost confines children to their houses. Parents, afraid of traffic or of their neighbors, keep their small children indoors or in their own gardens: so the children never have enough chance meetings with other children of their own age to form the groups which are essential to a healthy emotional development.

He makes my point for me far more explicitly in 129, Common Areas at the Heart:

No social group - whether a family, a work group, or a school group - can survive without constant informal contact among its members.

Saffron Huang, applying it to the Internet

Thinking about Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities and how her sidewalk contact ideas apply to online communities: Lively communities of actually diverse people don't form in a landscape of silos, where buy-in is all or nothing - you need gradients of intimacy.
If people can float through, loiter, casually chitchat -- microinteractions they're not bound to, you'll get diverse, surprising interactions. What's more, people will be actually willing to have those convos. Each interaction is low commitment/trivial, but effects add up hugely
You can't float through or check out a gated Slack or Discord. People want to have gradients of intimacy, where you can interact at different levels of commitment, and maintain, decrease or increase it however you like -- the magic of public city life
Lots of well-intentioned people want to start online communities these days and make everyone be best friends, but its full of friction/not super fun to be thrown into a big group chat of strangers and be asked for your life story and commitment to weekly meetings
When sharing is all or nothing, the more common outcome is nothing. Furthermore, it's segregating and leads to little surprise/diversity when people do choose to share it all.
How can we make online communities more like a lively city sidewalk?
Twitter is one of the better platforms for this right now -- different levels of intimacy are possible. Massive accounts or small alts. Instagram normalizes microinteractions but they're low-substance (eg heart emoji on a friend's story). Discord/Slack/Facebook are default silos.

More and more, I think there are connections between Alexander, Jacobs, Walter Ong and James C. Scott's works, they all seem a bit related in my mind, Alexander and Jacobs especially.

---

Lots of people are having similar thoughts to Paul Graham there (including me, I've fleshed some of these out myself in this post) (all of these I copied from Branch's homepage) -
Ryan Hoover:

Question for distributed teams:
Have you ever hosted a regular happy hour, lunch, or hangout with your teammates over video chat? Curious how others replicate the serendipity and fun of working together in the same office.

Siva Gurumurthy:

What is the WFH-equivalent (they can’t ignore u) of walking to someone’s desk to chat about topic that needs an immediate response: Call people via slack/phone?
Social barrier to interrupt a weak-tie is pretty high, but seems like there is a need for such a communication tool

Benedict Evans:

It seems pretty obvious that after the initial euphoria that remote work for everyone is actually possible now, there’s going to be some sort of reaction in the other direction. Best quote on this from a friend: ‘on zoom you have no peripheral vision’. You can’t overhear or chat

Evangeline Ng:

How do you mark that you've started work for the day to your co-workers? In traditional office setting it'd be coming through the door, making coffee at the pantry etc. How do you do it remotely?

Aaron Levie:

Software idea for CEOs only: the ability to virtually replicate coming up to your desk and asking you non-urgent questions while you’re working on something important.

I can split up the differences into 2 categories:

• when, why, and with who you communicate - these differences are far more complicated than what's communicated; you really need to think about them, there can be a lot of unintended consequences here.
• what you communicate - these differences are simpler, and probably easier to fix, you don't need to think about them as much.

People complain about how Youtube, Facebook, etc are just platforms that spread hate and misinformation, but an important point there is missed fairly often - people are the ones that use Youtube and Facebook, they're the ultimate problem there (I didn't mean for this to sound so totalitarian..).

Adam Elkus talked about this recently (I think with Sonya Mann), but he deletes his tweets fairly regularly, and I didn't back what he said up, but it was something like:

Some people don't like other people on Reddit (right-wing people), so they get them kicked off Reddit, have their subreddit banned, because they think that will make the problem go away, like the platform is the only issue, that the people don't exist, that they don't have agency. But in reality, the people involved have their own wants, their own motivations, and they won't like it when you ban them, they'll go off and start their own social networks where they won't get banned, like Parler. People exist independently of social network platforms.

Julian Sanchez has said the same sort of thing:

In virtually every claim like this, you could replace “Facebook” with “connecting people.” Not that FB doesn’t deserve the crap they get, but the intensity of it feels a little like a form of denial—if not for the wicked algorithms, we would’t be doing this.
It is admittedly depressing to think a descent into psychotic and violent conspiracy theories is just a concomitant of widespread, low-friction connectivity, but… it probably is. This stuff spreads on all sorts of platforms, even without algorithmic boosting.
The underlying problem is this is the type of content that increases engagement. That means, sort of tautologically, that it’s what people are going to engage with absent aggressive intervention to prevent that from happening.
In Ye Olden Dayes, the “intervention” was the (in this one respect) benign paternalism of media gatekeepers. That’s not really a tenable strategy anymore, AND we’ve got at least one legacy gatekeeper that’s decided it’s more profitable to act as a gateway to the hard stuff.
On social media, the “intervention” is moderation, and by all means, the platform should do more of it, especially for non-English content, where they’re much laxer. But lots of human communication is unmoderated, and nobody really thinks that shouldn’t be the case.
Thought experiment: Say we have a bunch of fully decentralized social networking apps built on open protocols, with a wide array of content discovery algorithms and content filters that users themselves can choose between. No evil corporation is manipulating us. What happens?
Tautologically, the people who choose the algorithms that yield the highest engagement are the most engaged, sharing the most content, etc. What yields the highest engagement? Right. Back where we started.
To the extent that it still makes sense economically & technologically to have these functions centralized, the platforms provide a chokepoint that can slow this dynamic down, and they can vary in their willingness & competence to do so. But the tautology wins in the long run.
That is: the networking mechanism (whether it’s one of many platforms or a decentralized protocol) that yields the highest engagement will be the one people are most engaged with.

---

I think what the platforms do is emphasise particular ways of talking to people, and de-emphasise others, and that is something we can change if we design our platform carefully and properly.

Tumblr is a particularly bad example.

A lot of this difference is just "using writing/text to communicate" vs. "speaking out to another person".

I'm going to quote from Walter Ong's fantastic book Orality and Literacy a fair amount here - the entire book is about how the shift from orality to literacy changes people and cultures, it's relevant to what I'm talking about.

John Bjorn Nelson has talked about something related to this, ambient intimacy.

The biggest difference to face-to-face communication on Twitter and Facebook, I'd say, is how what you say is nearly always broadcast to the entire world, whether or not you wanted that to happen.

This one is fairly obvious: on Twitter, and most likely on Facebook too, anyone in the world can send you a message, whether that's a tweet or a post on your feed, and everyone who follows you or is your "friend" can see it.

Neha brought this up recently:

Discourse on internet is broken. Don’t think it will ever be fixed in the way people expect it to.
Saying even the most inane thing on internet in public mode generates an unmanageable amount of misengagement (threats/doxxing/hate) if things catch 🔥. This is a negative experience for most people. This can be improve but will never cease to be an issue.
Discourse on the internet right now is quite a bit like everyone putting all their variables in the global namespace and not getting the outcome they want and the chaos that follows.
[..] We need to spend more time on mutual spaces of trust away from social media that are small by design. (Think I am taking to myself here). Need something hybrid which could be a combination of people we know and people we want to know hanging out in mutual spaces.
The know all, care about all, dunk all living is exhausting. Both the positive and negative of the discourse is exhausting. The infinite topics of engagement are not human scale.
One more thing that sort of hurts the makeshift mutual spaces is regurgitatation of what people saw on social media. It is counter to the separation and useful “slowness” that is helpful for sticky realizations vs trend and building any group intimacy.

But I don't think is completely right, I think it's more precise to say anyone can talk to you really really easily, with no friction at all, on Twitter - technically, IRL you could fly around the world and talk to someone, but most people thankfully don't.

It's the lack of friction that's the issue, I think (thanks to Sonya Mann for linking to that article here)

---

Here's a recent example - again, please try to ignore the object-level issue. Thousands of people dunked on that guy, but 90% of them had probably never even heard of him before that. To them, it probably felt a tiny thing, but to him it could've been more like a pile-on.

---

Here's a pretty benign instance - in my ideal world, this would not have been reported on by a major world newspaper.

It's gossip at scale.

Simon Sarris again has some really good thoughts on what can happen when anyone can talk to anyone:

For most of history one talked to more people, sometimes in a day, than one would ever read in a lifetime. Today we read, watch, & listen to more recordings of people than we will ever have conversations with.

This difference birthed modern ideologies. I think it under-studied.

The internet has started to reverse a trend that began with the printing press. After a four hundred years of declining public sphere, Twitter among others brought us a new Agora. I think the value of this change is hard for us to comprehend because it has been gone for so long.

The intellectuals of Twitter are not the celebrities, scientists, journalists, comedian podcasters, academics. They are the mass of anons and little accounts, people willing to think out loud, doubt publicly, and use the gifts of anonymity or sincerity to speak true sentiments.

By mixing these people, Twitter becomes a check, however small, on ideological thinking. It also offers you the chance to befriend those who are doing, living and flourishing. It is the easiest way to publicly think and do, and by these acts, perhaps you will find your people.

I once wrote that "I don't think even @jack fully appreciates the nature of the thing he has built. He is still concerned with just who should be promoted, or who might best be an arbiter of truth or content, over other ways of organizing the platform. A careful lesson from before the age of print may give us a better answer, if we can find it."

I still think that's true. And I worry that the curtailing of replies may destroy part of what makes Twitter different from a broadcast machine. [links to here]
I understand why some people welcome the feature. Plenty of people today gave compelling reasons to want to reduce the public nuisance burden.

But we are witnessing the very slow closing of a large door. This isn't the first new feature modulating replies & it won't be the last.
I hope Twitter seriously considers what they are doing, but I think it will be easy to pass over this quickly. Less nuisance, happy celebrities, maybe engagement even stay the same. What we lose is much more subtle.
How many of you do I follow because of some comment on a public voice? How many others have you found this way? How many brilliant people sit a while on the shore of nothingness, because they have no popular friends to retweet them, then decide Twitter isn't worth it?
It sucks to be a person continuously dogged by crappy people on this site. I know it happens.

But it also sucks to be a strange weirdo with no friends and no way to find your people. Twitter is a great platform but discoverability is very, very low. Now its a little lower.
One problem with ideologies/cults is that ppl in them rarely see the outside. On (political) bad tweets its nice they come with an army of fact checking + doubting replies. It's a check on ideology and unhinged-but-popular ppl generally, & it lets others know that doubt exists.
I think a compromise for a feature like this is an option that would auto-hide and auto-mute non-mutuals, where anyone could click to see those replies.

This would combine and be more useful than the previous manually hiding replies feature, and less squashing.
An example of using this feature so people cannot publicly doubt: [links to here]

Twitter is awesome and I'm surprised more people don't think so. I've made more friends on Twitter than any other social network. It's easily the most intellectual social network.

If you follow good people, and you post sincerely yourself, then Twitter is a shimmering agora.

---

Elle has said something pretty similar:

[being able to just talk to anyone at all is] one of my favourite things! I love love love that twitter provides a completely equal footing for everyone from almost every possible background; if you speak the same language and have internet then you can be friends.

one of the loveliest things about this website is encouraging separate friendship groups to interact + merge for the first time

the dynamics are fascinating and beautiful

Here's a good example: almost every person I've mentioned, copied too much of, or talked with here, I found on or through Twitter:

• A donkey - https://twitter.com/choosy_mom
• Christopher Alexander - he doesn't have a Twitter account, but people on there told me about him
• Jonah Bennett - https://mobile.twitter.com/BennettJonah
• Daniel Cook - https://mobile.twitter.com/danctheduck
• Michael Curzi - https://mobile.twitter.com/michaelcurzi
• biblically accurate devil - https://mobile.twitter.com/lil_morgy
• Nadia Eghbal - https://twitter.com/nayafia
• Adam Elkus - https://twitter.com/Aelkus - it bears mentioning, Adam is probably one of the most intelligent people I've ever read, he knows so much about so many different topics, connecting things I never would've imagined are similar, it astounds me. I doubt he'll ever read this, but, like I say in "Permanent eavesdropping" elsewhere on this page, if he does, this will be very weird for him to read, I've replied to his tweets once or twice, but he has no idea who I am, and here I am praising his writing.
• Elle - https://twitter.com/ellegist
• Benedict Evans - https://twitter.com/benedictevans
• Tim Ferriss - https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/ I think I found through Adam Elkus or Sonya Mann
• Antonio García Martínez - https://mobile.twitter.com/antoniogm
• Maria Górska-Piszek - https://twitter.com/made_in_cosmos
• Tanner Greer - https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage
• Mason Hartman - https://twitter.com/webdevMason
• David Heinemeier Hansson - https://twitter.com/dhh/
• Daniel Howdon - https://twitter.com/danielhowdon/
• Saffron Huang - https://mobile.twitter.com/saffronhuang
• Jacob - https://mobile.twitter.com/yashkaf
• Luci Keller - https://twitter.com/itsLuciKeller
• Kirsten - https://mobile.twitter.com/Kirsten3531
• Matjaž Leonardis - https://twitter.com/MatjazLeonardis
• Sonya Mann - https://twitter.com/sonyasupposedly
• Neha - https://twitter.com/__Neha/
• Richard Nicholl - https://mobile.twitter.com/rtrnicholl
• roobz - https://mobile.twitter.com/tishray/
• Walter Ong - also doesn't have a Twitter account, because he died in 2003, but I still found him through there, Antonio García Martínez mentioned his incredible book Orality and Literacy
• Roobz - https://twitter.com/tishray/
• Julian Sanchez - https://twitter.com/normative/
• Simon Sarris - https://twitter.com/simonsarris
• Noah Smith - https://twitter.com/Noahpinion
• Ari Schulman - https://twitter.com/AriSchulman
• Clay Shirky - https://twitter.com/cshirky
• Zeynep Tüfekçi - https://twitter.com/zeynep, a fantastic journalist
• Sherry Turkle - https://twitter.com/STurkle, through Clay Shirky
• Venkatesh Rao - https://twitter.com/vgr
• Visakan Veerasamy - https://twitter.com/visakanv
• Peter Wang - https://twitter.com/pwang
• Wiskerz - https://twitter.com/wiskerz
• Wesley Yang - https://twitter.com/wesyang/
• Qiaochu Yuan - https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan
• Michael Zimmer - who I found through https://mobile.twitter.com/worm_emoji/status/1340701274468192256
• Aram Zucker-Scharff - https://twitter.com/Chronotope/
• Devon Zuegel - https://twitter.com/devonzuegel

One notable exception is the best blog on the Internet that I keep annoying my friends with, SlateStarCodex - I think I found him through Reddit.

Last week, I was over at a friend's house, and one of my friends, Ned, made a terrible joke - another person that was there laughed, I grimaced. I don't think I'm exaggerating to say that if I publicised what it was, and who said it, it could ruin his life - anytime a possible employer Googled his name, the extremely dark joke would appear, beside his name, and probably beside a big photo of his face, too - and he'd have no chance of being hired.

And that doesn't matter at all, because Ned said it in-person - I bet no one else that was there even remembers that he said it. But if he'd said on the Internet, it could've easily leaked out into the outside world, even completely by accident. Someone that wasn't initially involved, doesn't know the context, doesn't know that it's completely a joke, one that Ned didn't mean at all, they could read it and get angry, and they could set about destroying my friend.

---

Quite a few times, when I've been talking to friends on Facebook Messenger, I've said something that a normal person could interpret as harah, or nasty, that sort of thing, but I didn't mean it like that, and my friends will say something like:

We know you Nathan, we know you didn't mean it like that

And whatever I said is just forgotten about.

In one of my private chats, one friend said this about another:

we all know you have a heart of gold and I always enjoy your sharp honest remarks

Friends know what you, understand the context of what you say, understand what you actually mean, give you the benefit of the doubt, and (hopefully!) give you some slack. Strangers probably won't.

---

Similarly, text messages don't have any tone in them, but that's not as much of an issue in private chats with friends - they'll know what you mean sometimes, even if they can't hear your tone, since they know you, they know the message's context.

---

Here's an example of what Tanner Greer said, from a chat between Sonya Mann and Adam Elkus - he deleted his tweets, and I recorded them here beforehand, but out of respect to his deletion policies, I'll paraphrase:

the more popular a tweet is, the more likely it is that you'll regret posting it
social media networks' biggest flaw is that giving someone more attention means they're a bigger target
if a network was properly designed, it would create a situation where, if a post leaves its enclosure, there would be positive (or at least neutral) consequences, instead of negative ones
[..]
Whenever I get a popular tweet, I lock my account, normally for less than a week
[..]
I get as much attention as I want, most of the time, and I'm happy with the kind followers I have - it's not usual to have so many and for them still to be well-tempered and generous
the problem is the more that a tweet reaches outside your usual "audience", the more likely that it'll attract people that see you as something they don't like, and try to punish you for it

As to why that happens, @generativist discussed it in detail.

Wes Yang saying that:

I assume that people know that when I post cringe with a neutral descriptor, there is an implied raised eyebrow, which is usually true until I get rt’d into timelines beyond my typical audience and then I get replies from those who think I agree with the cringe

---

Here's a hopefully-not-controversial example - a British man says

He should have bitten your arm off for what you were offering

and Twitter, an American company, temporarily bans him for

You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. This includes wishing or hoping that someone experiences physical harm

"To bite someone’s arm off" is British slang that means something like "really wanted to accept that", a bit like "jumped at the chance to .." in this scenario, but Twitter isn't British, it's American. They don't understand British slang, so they lock a British man out of his own account because they can't understand him.
But if this was in-person, he'd be talking to (most likely British) people in the UK, and they'd understand him no-problem.

And he can't easily fix it, either - since Twitter is so popular, the moderation here is automatic, there's no person to appeal to.

---

When is "Die Bernie" not threatening violence? When it's in Dutch, and "die" means "that".

---

To quote Kirsten:

[I] can't help but think of when ... had a tweet go viral this week
we all knew the context (she was teasing her boyfriend who knows everything about Rome) but the 50k people who liked it did not

---

As Antón Barba-Kay says:

[A]s online communication makes it easier to broaden and multiply the audience ... it also abstracts us from a body of considerations governing the rhetoric and substance of other media: Who is speaking and why? Who is being addressed? What expectations are being adhered to or defied? What is the manner and likely tone? We speak online in the relative absence of circumstances by which we take our bearings to understand words on a page or overheard.

Most problems with and criticisms of online communication, most apologies for misunderstanding, or defenses of past remarks, make their way back to the problem of context, the problem of how to take someone’s words. In one way it’s obvious why this should be so. As ready access to all manner of views and sources has increased—and as information is so readily copied and repurposed online—some of it is bound to be misconstrued. But context is also different in kind from what we usually mean by information: information is a matter of factual content, while context is what informs our sense of how we should respond to it.

---

We're all guilty of mistaking the context, I'd bet. I definitely am, and I very nearly didn't recognise that I was doing it myself. I just felt some righteous anger at a person for saying something I didn't like. Days afterward, probably because I'd written this, it popped into my head that maybe what she meant by what she said isn't what I read, that she said it in a different context, where it means something else - as in, maybe she was talking to her friends, and I read it, not understanding how they talk to eachother.

For example, the word fenian can be used as a slur in Ireland, referring to Catholics or Irish nationalists, but it also means a member of the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish Republican organisation in the USA in the 19th century. You can very easily see someone talk about "fenians" and get angry, when you don't understand that they mean the Brotherhood.
I imagine this is more likely to happen the more emotional a word is used - the hotter it gets people when they read it, the less likely a person is to stop and think "but what context was this used in? Do I understand the context?" - you can think yourself of a particularly rousing word, which I won't mention to avoid poisoning this essay with a political slant, oil spill model of polarisation-style.

Visakan Veerasamy and Tanner Greer have both said Twitter gets noticeably worse the more people that follow you; Veerasamy:

you have 58 followers, Dr. Taber has 33,600
in my experience, "happily answer questions" is something that a normal person can handle up to about 5,000 followers, beyond which keeping up means your personal life has to take a hit

I’m always looking out for examples of people talking about signal vs noise filters,& every time (50-100+ egs by now) someone suggests better filters, they have significantly fewer followers than the person they’re suggesting it to

Past some threshold (100k followers?) the disincentive for being smart in public becomes inhibiting/debilitating - & at that stage your private networks are full of gold, so you don’t need to use public spaces this way anymore

I think [asking for clarification and getting blocked] is something that happens when you cross about 100k followers, maybe earlier - the infinite endlessness of people seeking clarification means your experience is the same whether you block or engage

---

Greer (there's far too much here to quote all of it, I've already quoted too much, you'll need to read it here too):

The twitter user with 500~ followers in some ways exists in a world similar to the blogosphere of old. She is part of a small, self-selected community. Her followers chose to follow her because they are sympathetic with her ideas or at least interested in them. It is not difficult to have open and honest exchanges when you swim in safe waters. Most people in her network know her, and she knows most of them, so there is little incentive for mischief.
This changes with scale.
[T]witter is not a constellation of carefully moderated communities. The users of twitter are one great mass. The ponds and lakes of the blogosphere have emptied into a heaving sea. In this sea, twitter users are linked together, but linked weakly. They are unmoderated, unorganized, atomized—but stuck all together. A retweet can roll through the lot in a day.

Communities of a sort still exist on twitter, but they are mashed together in an unhealthy way. Many of these communities will be filled with people whose base assumptions about how the world works are 100% different than your own. That is fine. It is quite possible to talk honestly to people who don’t share your commitments—but of course the way one does this is very different from how you talk to someone whose world view aligns 85% with your own. On twitter you do not get to refine your message for either group. On twitter you project to everyone at once.

This is the first difficulty that comes with a growing follower count on twitter. As the count grows, the number of different communities you are projecting to grows as well. Soon, large numbers of people start to follow because they see you as a representative of a certain strain of thought, or as a key voice in a particular conversation they care about. They are not are sympathetic to your ideas or even merely intellectually interested in them; instead they follow you to keep tabs on what you and people like you are saying. Many actually despise you and your ideas to their core (in twitterese, they are a “hate follow”).

My friend Matthew Stinson described this shift as that point where "interactions stop being inquisitive and start getting accusatory. “Points for my side-ism” becomes a real thing." Twitter's retweet mechanism makes this problem far worse. All one needs is a snarky RT for these people to take what a thought they dislike and BOOM!, project it into communities it was never intended for as the perfect example of what they all should be hating at that moment. [this is similar to what happens with tumblr reblogs, as Scott Alexander has talked about]

Thus if you have a large follower account your experience on twitter goes like this: you share a thought optimized for Group X. Members of Group Y, Group Z, and Group V automatically start sharing it as the textbook example of why Group X deserves crucifixion.

This is what happens in an online ecosystem where the boundaries between communities are gone, and moderators (by nature of the platform's universality) cannot exist. To run a high-follower account on twitter is to be constantly exposed to entire communities whose members will treat you as an enemy to be defeated or a buffoon to be humiliated the minute they become aware of you. People with 500 or so followers (e.g. my girlfriend) are rarely trotted out as the example of all that is wrong with the world. Anyone with a higher follower count knows this is the default state of their mentions on any given weekend.

(when does quotation become copyright infringement?)

---

And from Jonah Bennett, this time about Clubhouse:

Unlike in person, in Clubhouse, it's very, very easy to stumble upon cultures and groups which have extremely hostile values to your own. This unsurprisingly makes people MAD because they had forgotten or had chosen to forget that this even existed in the same society.
This creates a lot of drama, conflict, and attention which may or may not prove to be in Clubhouse's interest at the end of the day. But something about Clubhouse is fundamentally unnatural because normally you're not meant to see the behind the scenes of other cultures.
These tweets inspired by that recent Clubhouse clip going around where Somali women are going really hard against gays, which people forgot is still very much a thing.
Often, peaceful co-existence is about NOT knowing what the other groups are doing, because they have ways of being and thinking that drive you into a state of madness, which can lead to bad things.

---

And from Sonya Mann:

one of the best decisions that I ever made was filtering my notifications, because it turns out that once you amass enough followers / become "known" enough there is an unlimited supply of salty randoms who want to yell at you about various things
ppl will post aggrieved replies like "you have personal flaws! I shall now enumerate them!" uh yeah I know, quick question who the fuck are you

Twitter used to be called a firehose - everyone sees everything everyone posts, all the time.
You can't form spaces, or places, or even groups of people on Twitter, places where only certain people are allowed in.
People talk about "science Twitter", and "rationalist Twitter", and they don't really exist - they're just sets of people that like to talk to eachother about science or rationalism, but nothing stops them getting invaded by anyone else.

[T]witter is not a constellation of carefully moderated communities. The users of twitter are one great mass. The ponds and lakes of the blogosphere have emptied into a heaving sea. In this sea, twitter users are linked together, but linked weakly. They are unmoderated, unorganized, atomized—but stuck all together. A retweet can roll through the lot in a day.

Communities of a sort still exist on twitter, but they are mashed together in an unhealthy way. Many of these communities will be filled with people whose base assumptions about how the world works are 100% different than your own. That is fine. It is quite possible to talk honestly to people who don’t share your commitments—but of course the way one does this is very different from how you talk to someone whose world view aligns 85% with your own. On twitter you do not get to refine your message for either group. On twitter you project to everyone at once.

For a place to actually exist, it needs to have boundaries, there needs to be a way of limiting who joins it - none of that happens on Twitter, and it can't really happen either, except in a network of private accounts, but those would be very hard to break into - how do you discover it, if you can't see anything they say? If they reply to something you say, you'll never even know.

---

In 2006, Twitter described itself like this:

A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?

Say only 1 out of 100 people is an asshole, and only 1 of 100 assholes is dangerous. Then, 1 in 10000 people is a dangerous asshole. A lot more than 10000 people can have heard of you on the Internet.

Tim Ferriss has talked about the terrible things that he knows about, or have happened to him, now that he's famous. Quoting it wouldn't be kind.
We're not meant to be this known by that many people.

Twitter isn't anywhere near as bad as what he talks about there, it's far more lower-level, but it's more widespread. I've not experienced it myself, but then I have very few followers.

---

Similarly (please ignore the object-level issue here, and focus only on the meta-level!), bad things can happen when a popular person on Twitter (in this case, someone with 230 thousand followers), exposes you to their followers:

[by quote-tweeting me, he exposed] my tweets and my account to his hundreds of thousands of followers. I received some very stimulating correspondence from these quote-tweets. Several [..] called me a snowflake; several [..] called me a baby; and one fellow went so far as to threaten me with anal rape
A few nasty people is only to be expected if, like [him], you have 230,300 followers. Neatly, I had 238 followers when I posted last night, so we can conclude [he] has almost a thousand times as much reach on this platform as I do

I'm sure the large account didn't intend for that to happen, and he probably doesn't even know it did, but this sort of thing seems inevitable when you get that popular. "Don't reply to anyone, if you're popular" feels like the wrong solution, though.

230 thousand people being able to be made aware of another person, and the nutjobs among them threatening that person isn't good, but neither is "we're going to artificially only allow 1000 people to read what you say" or "you're not allowed to shine a spotlight on people with less than x follwers".
Also, "don't talk to people if they're popular" isn't a good solution either.

I wouldn't really have a problem with someone being able to write a newspaper column that does something similar, though - maybe because the friction to someone reading it and threatening the person is so much higher, far more than a button click away. I'm very wary of limiting what people are allowed to say, and where or how.

---

The reverse, you knowing of thousands or millions of people, doesn't seem great either, for more nebulous reasons.

It's like there's a commenting threshold - what you feel or want to say needs to be important enough to warrant a comment, and if it's not, it doesn't get said. It feels like we're missing a large amount of communication because of that.

---

This sounds stupidly obvious to say, but the easier something is to do, the more it happens. So, since speaking what you want to say is far easier than typing it, I'm pretty sure you're going to speak more than you would type, so the commenting threshold will be smaller if you're speaking.
That's definitely true in my experience, when I send voice messages to my friends on Facebook Messenger, I say far more than I do than in text messages (and they say far more to me when they speak, too).

Just think, how often do you call someone when you want a "proper chat"? Why don't you have proper chats in texts?

Most tweets are to the "void", to everyone in the entire world, but also to no one at all.

If you and your friends were all in the same room, you could have a rule like "we can't say the word 'discombobulate' today", and you can enforce that rule, and kick anyone out who doesn't follow it, like what Peter Wang has said here:

Every conversation is a space. For that space to be generative and not combative, the participants must agree on shared norms.
Without that, you get clashes that inevitably turn hostile, because they are value system conflicts.
Serendipity is then no longer a feature, but a bug

The easiest way of saying this is "norms" don't just exist by themselves, communities have norms, norms are communal norms, and you could think of you and another friend seeing eachother every week as a tiny community.

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Usenet users talk about Eternal September - in September 1993, AOL started letting their customers access Usenet, and AOL had a lot of customers. Before that, only a small number of people would start using Usenet each September (coming to uni for the first time, and accessing Usenet through them), so they'd learn and start following the Usenet norms. Few enough people joined each September that they integrated into Usenet's norms; AOL's just kept coming, and overwhelmed Usenet - too many people kept joining, and Usenet couldn't integrate them all.

Twitter is the epitome of Eternal September - it's even worse, because Usenet has newsgroups, where people go to talk about specific things (like comp.theory.self-org-sys, about self-organising systems). Twitter doesn't have categories like that at all, just 1 big category where everyone is.
You can enforce norms in tweets to specific people, but not on untethered tweets - anyone on Earth can reply.

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The best example of norm enforcement I can think of is the AskHistorians subreddit - it's heavily moderated, to make sure that only really high-quality answers are allowed - look how many rules they have! They ruthlessly delete every comment that doesn't follow the rules:

The most important thing to understand is that /r/AskHistorians is a space created with a specific purpose, namely to provide a place where users can, quite literally, Ask Historians their questions, and complementary, provide a place where knowledgeable users want to contribute by writing answers to the questions in their spare time. Because popular doesn't equal correct, and because being first doesn't equal being good, the Moderation Team curates the subreddit to ensure that the only content left standing is the content that deserves to be.

Importantly, this is on a subreddit, a specific place, something you could actually think of as a community.

Anything approaching that level of moderation just isn't possible on Twitter, and might not be desirable anyway, even if it was.

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Another good example of community moderation is the Brazilian Facebook group Profiles de Gente Morta (Profiles of Dead People), where users collect and discuss accounts of people that have just died:

Moderators play an active role in deciding what happens within the walls of PGM and are responsible for approving all profiles submitted by other members. They are tasked with keeping an eye on heated debates and will step in whenever someone disrespects the dead, like by mocking those who passed away or ridiculing cases of suicide. Each group has a slightly different culture, which is reflected in their policies. Some pride themselves on being “uncensored” and include posts with images of grisly deaths. Others poll members ahead of time about whether they want their profiles to be featured after they die.

The job is an enormous time commitment. “At the very least, I’m there from the hour I wake up to when I go to sleep,” said Ana Bittencourt, a Brazilian journalist who moderates Werle’s PGM group. [..] Bittencourt has lost count of how many notifications she gets in a day.

And another, from the moderators of /r/DeepFriedMemes, on how the dynamics in a community can be messed up by large scale:

We, the subreddit moderators, often became trapped in a cycle wherein the times in which moderation was not taking place as consistently. As a result of this, the sub would become overpopulated with shitty posts, misguided in their understanding of our humor which in turn breeded even shittier imitations.

We came to the realization that Reddit is simply poorly designed in offering a consistently effective moderation system to moderators, with team moderation being exponentially difficult as a result of mods usually only being able to moderate one at a time. One mod at a time would become the most active mod, and would carry the team during different periods of time until they would get burnt out. It became clear to us that this was unsustainable and was overall very draining to the team.

There are 2 major ways of talking to people:

1. Asynchronous (async) communication, like letters, text messages, emails, or Facebook messages - the other person can communicate with you at any time, their communication gets stored somewhere, and you can reply whenever you want.
2. Synchronous (sync) communication, like phone calls, or video chats - they communicate with you in real-time (as soon as they send it you receive it), and you need to reply immediately, otherwise they won't get a reply from you.

Their are pros and cons to both ways of communicating, of course - like how async chat gives you time to think through your answer (I've seen people complain about Zoom calls a fair bit, maybe because you need to respond straightaway, you don't get time to think) - on the Interintellect video chats, sometimes I'd get called on to say what I thought about a particular topic, and I'd need to answer straight-away, I couldn't just say "I don't know", it was a bit stressful. Async chats give me time to think through what I want to say.

---

But there's a particular implication of async chat I'm interested in here - when you send something to someone in an async chat (it could be a text message, an audio clip, like a voice note on Facebook, or a video like on Snapchat), that message has to get stored somewhere so that the other person can read/listen to/watch it. And if you send a few of them, they get added to a list, so the other person can see the last 5 messages you've sent them, or the last 10 minutes of audio, etc.

Lists of things are incredibly each to make on computers:

feeds of content are the result of long ago engineering conventions, not really related to how we consume content. It's just really easy to get stuff by its "last modified" date and database systems will return your queries in date order and so we got time sorted feeds

It's so easy, in fact, that getting a list of things, or showing them to a person on a computer, a lot of the time takes a software developer no extra work at all. Everyone understands what a "list" is.
The posts you make on Facebook are stored in a database as a list, you read them in a list, ordered by the time you posted them at; you look at tweets in a list, again ordered by post creation time. You can even think of people in Zoom calls as being in a list.

Even how we code webpages is naturally geared towards looking at things in a list - to make a webpage look like this, with 2 things in a list, 1 after the other:

takes no work at all for a web developer - this is the code you need to write (ignoring the colours):

<html>
<body>
    <div>Red</div>
    <div>Blue</div>
</body>
</html>

Even if you've never seen code for a webpage before, hopefully you'd agree that's not much. Any web developer can do that in their sleep.

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Walter Ong explains that we think in lists when we learn to write:

A chirographic (writing) culture and even more a typographic (print) culture can distance and in a way denature even the human, itemizing such things as the names of leaders and political divisions in an abstract, neutral list entirely devoid of a human action context. An oral culture has no vehicle so neutral as a list. In the latter half of the second book, the Iliad presents the famous catalogue of the ships — over four hundred lines — which compiles the names of Grecian leaders and the regions they ruled, but in a total context of human action: the names of persons and places occur as involved in doings. The normal and very likely the only place in Homeric Greece where this sort of political information could be found in verbalized form was in a narrative or a genealogy, which is not a neutral list but an account describing personal relations

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But nowadays, we don't need to limit ourselves to the most basic data and user-interface format, we can do so much better than lists - just take a look at what you can do with D3.

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When you're listing things, you have to list something, so if you're making a social network, it's only natural to list people's friends, and their posts - but then, you need to know who people's friends are, and record a list of them somewhere.

So, in social networks now, you need to have a list of people you want to talk to, people whose words you want to read, topics you want to be informed of; websites all do it a bit differently, with different names:

• Facebook and Snapchat have friends, that's bidirectional - you can see what they post, they can see what you post - I'd guess this is the most common choice social networks have made. When I still had an account there, most of my Facebook "friends" weren't friends at all, just people whose posts I wanted to see. Do you add and remove people constantly from your friends list as you drift apart or become closer again? I've only done it twice, I think.
• Twitter has people that you follow, and people that follow you - they're different, you can follow someone and see what they say, without them seeing what you say
• Reddit has subreddits that you subscribe to, and see posts that are made in them

Social networks are binary, either you can talk to someone or you can't, IRL is much more analog, less cut and dried - you don't need to explicitly specify your relationships to people exactly. You don't need to ask yourself "is this person a friend? what does friend mean to me? are they just an acquaintance?", you can happily talk to someone every week without giving them a label like that, and if you do call them a friend, that might just be inside your head, they can be in a kind of ambiguous position that's not really defined between the two of you. That doesn't happen with social networks, if you call someone a friend on Facebook, they're going to know that.

I can go round to my friend's house every week, and say hi to her flatmate and chat with him for a while, play games with him, without having to give him some sort of publicly visible label.

Maybe it's not a thing where you're from, but a joke when I was growing up was when a couple would become "Facebook official", calling themselves boyfriend and girlfriend for all their Facebook friends to see.

---

Flickr is a good example; inside this very good writeup of their demise (which you should read for the rest of the article, not just the bit I've copied), they talk about how a big part of their initial success was how they let you specify relationships with people, and other sites didn't. I don't want to go as far as saying this is a bad thing, but I think it's bad that you have to do it, you can't avoid it:

Flickr's best feature isn't what you think. It's not photo-sharing at all. Just as photo sharing was a feature hidden within a game, there was another feature hidden within photo-sharing that was even more powerful: social networking. Flickr was, nearly a decade ago, building what would become the Social Web.
The first point in Flickr's two point mission statement is to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them. Flickr had—and still has—excellent tools for this. Flickr was an early site that let you identify relationships with fine grained controls—a person could be marked as family but not a friend, for example—instead of a binary friend/not friend relationship. You can mark your photos "private" and allow no one else to see them at all, or identify just one or two trusted friends who may view them. Or you can just share with friends, or family. Those granular controls encouraged sharing, and commenting, and interaction. What we are describing here, of course, is social networking.

IRL, if you want to show someone your photos, you just get out the photo album and show it to them, you don't need to decide whether they're a friend, a family member, or a trusted friend, and mark them as one (maybe publicly, possibly to the entire planet).

Blocks and mutes tend to be permanent, like in this Black Mirror episode - IRL you might decide to not talk to someone and then change your mind once you come across or hear about them again, but if you block or mute someone, that's not likely to happen.

I asked people on Twitter how often they review their blocks and mutes: 4 out of 7 said "Very occasionally", 3 "Never". This doesn't seem great, conversation-wise. In-person, I'd sometimes change my mind about a person when I come across them again, but that won't happen with a block or a mute, and until I made that poll, I'd never checked my block and mute lists, and I'd had an account for 4 years then.

---

Some people have recognised this, and try to come up with fixes, but I think that sort of thing is kinda only fixing a symptom, not the underlying issue. It's caused by how the social networks are structured, with their followers and feeds and posts.

From here:

Twitter blocking is really a dangerously overpowered feature, in the sense of how a response to a minor disagreement can shut off all future conversation in a way that might not be possible to have happen IRL.
It’s too easy for people to turn off outside information at the slightest hint of discomfort. In that respect I suppose social media is a forerunner of what our IRL social environment might start evolving into once ex. wireless in-ear headphones becoming truly ubiquitous, and the results are bleak & undemocratic in terms of ex. how powerful people can shut out anything they don’t want to hear.
These thoughts are motivated by a disagreement I had a few years ago on here with someone who may (?) be influential & doing work relevant to my interests. Happened b/c of a misunderstanding that would have been unlikely to occur in an IRL unabridged conversation to begin with, but the reality of the situation doesn’t matter since now I’m blocked and deprived of further avenues of engagement or even being able to (immediately & effortlessly) see public content that person shares, and there’s no recourse since I’m not in a position of power.
(This wasn’t AFAIK one of the accounts which might come into many people’s minds as having a reputation for blocking people.)
It’s as if (at least whenever you’re not personally feeling annoyed in the 5 mins after someone just blocked you) there’s an assumption that blocking acts as a kind of one-way valve that primarily alters the flow of power & influence in only one direction but never the other.
Anyway, I‘ve been trying to only block accounts which are engaging in the most obvious and aggressive types of belligerent/disruptive behavior. I assume I’m not being too picky by having a particular tendency to block such accounts when they have blatant alt-right affiliations.
For all I know there may be some accounts I have blocked for less justified reasons before I started thinking about these issues, and maybe at some point (not that it would be likely to be a good use of time) I should see if there’s any old/forgotten decisions I should revisit.
But mostly I tend to just aggressively mute people, esp. if they‘re unlikely to potentially disrupt the experience of other people I’m in conversations with.
Anyway, I know I shouldn’t be thinking now about one experience I had of being blocked a few years ago, and I especially shouldn’t tweet that I was thinking about it. It wouldn’t have stuck in my mind if the underlying cause of the disagreement hadn’t been so frivolous.

And when you have a long list of messages to read, a lot of the time people just don't:

• when I don't look at the Interintellect chat for a while, I miss hundreds of messages, and don't take the time to catch up.
• I was talking to a friend on Snapchat recently, and she said something like "you sent loads of videos!", and initially I thought "I didn't send loads, what are you talking about?", but then I thought about it - the way Snapchat works, you send videos to someone that are up to 10 seconds long, and they can watch them at least twice, but most people only watch them once I think. So, I sent her a few minutes of videos, maybe 3 or 4, and that could easily have been 25 10 second videos. Then, for her to reply to all of them, she has to remember what I said 3 or 4 minutes ago, think of something to say, and say it cleanly enough to the camera. If she makes a mistake (like I do, far too often!), she has to try again, and again. Doing all that, while remembering everything I said across 4 minutes, is just too hard - you're going to forget some things, you won't reply to everything the other person said, that's just not feasible, the way the platform works. If you forget something they said, you could ask them to repeat it, but since it's async chat, that might have said it days ago, and forgotten themselves!
• It's the same on Facebook, I have a few groupchats with friends, and if some of us get talking for an hour or 2, we can easily pile up hundreds of messages in a row, and when other people come back to it, they get overwhelmed, and perfectly understandably, don't want to read through all of them to catch up. As I was writing this, a friend literally said "I haven't read the chat, too many messages" (she said she wanted to see her name in the references, so, Kat, it was you).
• Even in my work Slack group, it happens - a team talks about their project for a while, asking our QA/head customer support/tester/requirements gatherer/boss liaison questions, but she's busy with one of her other hats, and doesn't see them - when she joins later, she might ask "what did I miss?", or "is any of that important for me?", and maybe we'll remember what we said, maybe we won't
• Kat made a very good point yesterday about this - if you want to say something that will take quite a lot of explaining to get across, and you do it in text, you'll end up sending loads of messages, maybe a dozen in a row. Sending a dozen one after the other can make it look like you're freaking out about something, whereas if you had sent them in audio messages instead, it'd look far more normal, no different to a normal conversation where you're explaining something. How often have you opened a long message from someone and thought "oh here we go again, I don't want to deal with this"? And it's not just uncomfortable for you to read it, it's uncomfortable for the sender too, they know how it'll be received by someone else, and that discomfort makes them less likely to say what they wanted to say - text messages discourage deeper conversation that way

Funnily enough, it seems to be against chat etiquette to reply to messages that are hundreds-of-messages upthread, people don't do it, even if they read them. (at least in single-threaded conversations; on Slack, people do reply to old messages occasionally, maybe because they don't pollute the main channels?).
It makes technically async chats actually slightly sync, in practice, I think.

Most social networks store their data forever, and you can look at it forever.

Snapchat is a major exception, you can only look at videos at most twice there, then never again.

-> If communication is async, the text/audio/video has be stored somewhere, so you need to choose how long you store it for and how long people can see it for.

If it's sync, it's not stored anywhere, it just goes over the wire, then disappears.

You probably aren't the same person now as you were when you were 10 (unless you're 10 now! Hi, if you are! You must be pretty precocious).

But if what you say is retained forever, stuff you said when you were 10 can give people the wrong impression of today!you:

Another dimension of this is anything you have shared on internet becomes a permanent artifact. People change their minds and their personas frequently enough in real life. There are both internal and external inhibitions to this online.

I think you should be able to be a different person now than you were 10 years ago, but infinite retention doesn't let you. It's basically context collapse across time, rather than between people.

Here's a very good example - regardless of whether that information was correct at the time, we know it's not correct now, but anyone who wants to discredit the new evidence can point at that tweet forever (assuming they don't delete it, which is very unlikely - only particularly scrupulous and conscientious journalists delete tweets when they're proven incorrect, there's no general norm here that makes people remove incorrect tweets).

I remember being told growing up that I should be careful what I put on the Internet, because any can see anything I put up years later. We seem to have forgotten that.

I couldn't leave this essay without a Marshall McLuhan quote:

Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know.
The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions- the patterns of mechanistic technologies- are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank - that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early 'mistakes'

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Even embarrassment can be permanent now:

"Before social media, embarrassing behavior, while likely gossiped about, was visually undocumented. Therefore, the embarrassed person was unlikely to have to face up to their behavior in any meaningful way," Dr. Rutledge says. "Social media increases accountability for one’s actions. People like to control their public image on social media since it is permanent rather than ephemeral. Embarrassing 'moments' are no longer moments, but posted in perpetuity for all to see without engaging in damage control."

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And here's Zeynep Tüfekçi discussing this in her interview with Antonio García Martínez:

Okay, so here’s the thing, you didn't have privacy per se in the same way [in the past]. But you had an elaborate set of human rituals designed to protect us from a world in which we have less of what we now call privacy, for example, face saving. This is something that's super important in human interactions. We pretend not to see lots of things, because that's the only way to be in close quarters all the time with people. You just lie and pretend; it’s not even a white lie, it’s a ritualized thing that you do.

Whereas with social media, I think the problem is the screenshot lives forever. So there’s no ritual for face saving where we all pretend it didn't happen. It's not that we didn't have privacy, and now the 20th century invented privacy, whereby you could just move to a city and nobody knew who you were. Now we’ve sort of gone back to the village thing, but without the ephemerality and also the rituals of face saving. For example, to give an unfortunate a recent example [Jeffrey Toobin and his penchant for Zoom impropriety] if something like what happened—somebody you'd walked in on doing something we all do—you’d just close the door and never speak of it.

It wouldn't become like a public thing that would be acknowledged, or you might laugh about it a few drinks in, among close friends and family. But that would not define their life that they got walked in on. The ephemerality isn't there, but the screenshot is there. So you lost the things that make certain things manageable.

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Nadia Eghbal on the difference between technical privacy (what we normally focus on), and social privacy (h/t Saffron Huang for bringing my attention to it), quoting Jane Jacobs (the whole thing is well worth reading):

Window privacy is the easiest commodity in the world to get. You just pull down the shades or adjust the blinds. The privacy of keeping one’s personal affairs to those selected to know them, and the privacy of having reasonable control over who shall make inroads on your time and when, are rare commodities in most of this world, however, and they have nothing to do with the orientation of windows.

The typical conversation about internet privacy today is almost exclusively concerned with technical privacy: keeping your data safe, preventing others from hacking into your stuff, addressing phishing and other social engineering scams. These technical underpinnings are essential to prevent malicious strangers from breaking into our things and ravaging our homes, but they are different from social privacy.
Social privacy is the expectation that we shouldn’t want to pry into each others’ lives. When a friend types their password into their computer, it’s expected that I look away. If someone I don’t know is working next to me at a cafe, it’s considered rude to glance at their laptop screen.
An emerging practice that highlights the tension between technical and social privacy is the resurfacing of incriminating social data from public figures - everyone from New York Times journalist Sarah Jeong to comedian Kevin Hart. The data is public. There is no technical privacy breach. But to many people, it feels transgressive to want to snoop into a stranger’s life, even if they are able to. These are the social privacy norms that Jacobs is concerned with. [..]

Defining social privacy in an online context is difficult because it’s not clear what our “public face” really is. Unlike our physical environment, our online world contains layers of our past, present, and future selves, all occupying the same timespace. We are all time travelers, navigating multiple realities at any given moment.
How do others know when something we wrote ten years ago has passed into the shadow of our “past self”, rather than our present, public identity? Simply referencing the timestamp is not enough; some people proudly point to old blog posts written in 2005 as “the best thing I’ve ever written”.

Social networks exist IRL - you're friends with Alice, she's with Bob, he's with Charlie, etc.
But on the Internet, a lot of the time, you've marked people as friends, followers, followees, family members, and that can sometimes be seen by the entire world.
Your social network is legible - this is a graph of friends on Facebook:

Paul Revere could be found very easily these days.

Here's an example from the always-fantastic Zeynep Tüfekçi:

I used to teach intro to sociology and it's a big lecture class, because that's how those things work. So I would assign little group assignments to break up the lecture. What if you were born a different gender? Or what if you were in a different family? Just very simple, simple stuff for students. And they got a passing grade so long as they turned in something.

So my TA at one point notices that a bunch of them have the same handwriting. Why on earth are they cheating, what is going on? So I called the group into my office, and they say: What a coincidence we all have the same handwriting! And I ask: Do you know each other? No, we don't know each other, they say. And I did something that I don't ever do: I looked them up on Facebook. And of course, they were all friends with each other, so I just showed them Facebook and I said: Look, you're lying to me, you're all friends with each other. They almost fainted in my office because the idea that their friendship could be documented and be visible to the outside world and that Facebook would be a vehicle for this was a completely alien and incomprehensible thing to these kids.

The most interesting thing to me was how could they not imagine the obvious thing that this is going to scramble their visibility and ruin their denial. They just had no idea.

A lot of that interview with Antonio García Martínez is very relevant to this essay, and worth reading - for example, they talk about what I've called "context collapse across time":

we'll have probably new social media….there's just no way people can live with stuff trailing you your whole life

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From Buzzfeed:

BuzzFeed News found President Joe Biden’s Venmo account after less than 10 minutes of looking for it, revealing a network of his private social connections, a national security issue for the United States, and a major privacy concern for everyone who uses the popular peer-to-peer payments app.

On Friday, following a passing mention in the New York Times that the president had sent his grandchildren money on Venmo, BuzzFeed News searched for the president’s account using only a combination of the app’s built-in search tool and public friends feature. In the process, BuzzFeed News found nearly a dozen Biden family members and mapped out a social web that encompasses not only the first family, but a wide network of people around them, including the president's children, grandchildren, senior White House officials, and all of their contacts on Venmo.
[..]
Even if a Venmo account is set to make payments private, its friend list remains exposed. There is no setting to make this information private, which means it can provide a window into someone’s personal life that could be exploited by anyone — including trolls, stalkers, police, and spies. [me: regardless of whether a friends list can be made private, it will never be private to the software developers - Venmo will still know who you're friends with]
[...]
Using public friend lists and transaction feeds, BuzzFeed News found two members of Congress who were roommates in Washington, DC, as well as reporters who were on friend lists with Trump administration officials, potentially exposing sources. BuzzFeed News also has also spoken with survivors of domestic violence and abuse who suspected that former partners used Venmo to track them and therapists who use Venmo to receive payment from clients who were unaware that their friend lists showed who they were working with.

This is what explicit relationship management lets happen.

If everything you say can be seen by everyone, by all your friends, or your family, forever, you can't be one person to your family, and a different one to your close friends, a third to your acquaintances, or a fourth to your coworkers.
If you make a dick joke to your friends, oops, your mum has seen it too. If your mum posts "love you xoxo" on your Facebook page, now all your friends can make fun of you in the school playground.

Apparently, this is called context collapse:

When you have Facebook friends numbering in the thousands, your audience becomes a little difficult to speak to all at once.
Sophia Goodman described it as “trying to comfortably chat with your mother, bar buddy, work colleague, and ex-boyfriend at the same time.”
In a place where parents, colleagues, bosses and friends all congregate, you can find it difficult to be yourself. Or, rather, to decide which self to be.

This reminds me of a party the company I work for held, to celebrate the company being 21 years old - my close friends and my colleagues collided, and I wasn't sure how to act, I kept running between my friends (who all stuck together), and my colleagues. Luckily, apart from when one (drunk) woman sat down on the stairs beside my friends and started gushing about how nice I was, they didn't interact much.

Here's Daniel Howdon complaining about it:

A couple of months ago someone who I'm pretty much professionally in awe of followed me & only follows a couple of hundred people. Every time I tweet a dril mashup, or something about Steve Bruce having a lettuce heed, I think "oh god they've seen that haven't they". Hate it.

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For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law) so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, so that I might by any means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.
Paul the Apostle, 1 Corinthians 9:19-23

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Walter Ong beautifully describes the issue in his Orality and Literacy:

[I have avoided the term "media" because it] can give a false impression of the nature of verbal communication, and of other human communication as well. Thinking of a ‘medium’ of communication or of ‘media’ of communication suggests that communication is a pipeline transfer of units of material called ‘information’ from one place to another. My mind is a box. I take a unit of ‘information’ out of it, encode the unit (that is, fit it to the size and shape of the pipe it will go through), and put it into one end of the pipe (the medium, something in the middle between two other things). From the one end of the pipe the ‘information’ proceeds to the other end, where someone decodes it (restores its proper size and shape) and puts it in his or her own box-like container called a mind. This model obviously has something to do with human communication, but, on close inspection, very little, and it distorts the act of communication beyond recognition.

Human communication, verbal and other, differs from the ‘medium’ model most basically in that it demands anticipated feedback in order to take place at all. In the medium model, the message is moved from sender-position to receiver-position. In real human communication, the sender has to be not only in the sender position but also in the receiver position before he or she can send anything.

To speak, you have to address another or others. People in their right minds do not stray through the woods just talking at random to nobody. Even to talk to yourself you have to pretend that you are two people. The reason is that what I say depends on what reality or fancy I feel I am talking into, that is, on what possible responses I might anticipate. Hence I avoid sending quite the same message to an adult and to a small child. To speak, I have to be somehow already in communication with the mind I am to address before I start speaking. I can be in touch perhaps through past relationships, by an exchange of glances, by an understanding with a third person who has brought me and my interlocutor together, or in any of countless other ways. (Words are modifications of a more-than-verbal situation.) I have to sense something in the other’s mind to which my own utterance can relate. Human communication is never one-way. Always, it not only calls for response but is shaped in its very form and content by anticipated response.

This is not to say that I am sure how the other will respond to what I say. But I have to be able to conjecture a possible range of responses at least in some vague way. I have to be somehow inside the mind of the other in advance in order to enter with my message, and he or she must be inside my mind. To formulate anything I must have another person or other persons already ‘in mind’. This is the paradox of human communication.

Communication is intersubjective. The media model is not. There is no adequate model in the physical universe for this operation of consciousness, which is distinctively human and which signals the capacity of human beings to form true communities wherein person shares with person interiorly, inter-subjectively.

---

Essentially I'm arguing exactly against Mark Zuckerberg, as quoted by Michael Zimmer:

"You have one identity,” [Zuckerberg] emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, “The Facebook Effect.” “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Like I just said about Snapchat, sending people long lists of audio or video messages doesn't really work - you need to remember what someone said maybe minutes ago, think of a reply, and remember to say it, maybe minutes after that. Too many possibilities to lose the response.
Sometimes you can even end up having multiple conversations with the same person at the same time!

Without being able to interrupt them in real time ("can you elaborate/repeat that?" etc), I'm pretty sure you're going to miss things.

Even if you technically could repeatedly listen to that 8 minute audio clip, you probably won't bother to.

I talk to my friend Alanna on Facebook with voice messages, and we seem to have naturally limited them to about 2 minutes long, without talking about it - any more than that and we're not going to remember everything the other person says, or what we wanted to say.

---

Also, with big blocks of text, you can at least quote specific lines, that's not so easy, or so naturally supported, with audio or video.

Async communication, when a lot of people are involved (I've found "a lot" can just mean "more than 2), kinda turns into a sync a bit - if you don't look at what someone has said within a few minutes, maybe an hour, of them sending it, you might never see it if lots of messages are sent soon afterwards. If you weren't there when it was said, you'll never see it - that sounds like sync to me.

So, I've asked people questions in group chats, but they're asleep or working, and they open it 6 hours later, which would be perfectly fine if it was 1-to-1 chat, but it isn't, and there are a dozen messages after my question, so they miss it.

There's a particular failure mode of async communication I've noticed myself and others fall into, and it goes like this:

1. Alice sends Bob a message
2. Bob sees that he received a message, but doesn't reply immediately for whatever reason
3. Bob forgets about the message
4. Possibly: Later, Bob remembers the message, but too much time has passed, he feels awkward about replying x days later, so he doesn't reply
5. x+1 days pass, and he just feels more awkward, and wants to reply even less now
6. Bob never replies

I think most online sync conversations are planned - to talk to someone on Zoom, you have to either schedule a meeting, or send them a link and explicitly ask "hey, can I talk to you about x?". This reminds me of how most text signals are explicit and intentional - there's no room for ambiguity, the other person will know you want to talk to them.
But more importantly, this doesn't allow for unplanned interactions with someone, and for friendship to happen you need lots of small unplanned interactions (see Simon Sarris' tweets above on friendships from repeated interactions). It cuts off another way to start being friends with someone. Thinking about it, I can't remember I time I started a sync conversation with someone over the Internet with someone I wasn't already friends with.

Noah Smith, talking about the audio-only social app Clubhouse:

Two months ago, it seemed like everyone was excited about Clubhouse. People were getting in touch with me every week to schedule rooms. I was getting invited to various clubs. Dozens of people were DMing me on Twitter to ask for invites.

---

Uses nouns like "meeting" sounds quite stilted, cold, a bit unhuman - you have to "schedule" a time for someone so you can "fit them in your calendar" - in person, you wouldn't have a "meeting" with a friend in a park. you'd just happen to come across them and start chatting. Maybe you'd organise to get together for a coffee later on in the week or something like that, but the original chance encounter wouldn't happen on Zoom.
There's much less spontaneity and serendipity. Maybe not none, but less.
I doubt kids will make friends with other kids in school, if their classes are on Zoom.

Alexander's 152nd pattern, Half-private office talks about the same thing, in an office environment:

The totally private office has a devastating effect on the flow of human relationships within a work group, and entrenches the ugly quality of office hierarchies. At the same time, there are moments when privacy is essential; and to some extent nearly every job of work needs to be free from random interruption.

Over the last seven years we moved our offices on several occasions. At one point we moved to a large old house: large enough for some of us to have private rooms and others to share rooms. In a matter of months our social coherence as a group was on the point of breakdown. The workings of the group became formalized; easy-going communication vanished; the entire atmosphere changed from a setting which sustained our growth as a group to an office bureaucracy, where people made appointments with each other, left notes in special boxes, and nervously knocked on each other's doors.
For a while we were virtually unable to produce any interesting work.

It gradually dawned on us that the environment of the house was playing a powerful role in the breakdown. As we started to pay attention to it, we noticed that those rooms which were still functioning - the places where we would all gather to talk over the work - had a special characteristic: they were only half private, even though the workspaces within them were strongly marked.

As we thought it out, it seemed that almost every place where we had found ourselves working well together had these characteristics: no office was entirely private; most offices were for more than one person; but even when an office was only for one, it had a kind of simple common area at its front and everyone felt free to drop in and stay for a moment. And the desks themselves were always built up as private domains within and toward the edges of these offices, so that doors could always be left wide open. Eventually we rearranged ourselves until each person had some version of this pattern.

You can begin to see a solution to the problem forming here.

---

And if you don't just happen to come across people, if you only meet a friend when you both pre-arrange it, this can happen (paraphrasing Dunbar's paper):

If someone is contacted less often than the defining rate (once a week for the 5 people you're closest to, once a month for the 15 closest people, once a year for the 150 people you know closest) for more than a few months, emotional closeness to that individual will inexorably decline to a level appropriate for the new contact rate.

Basically, if you don't talk to people as much, you will grow apart. Fairly obvious.

The rate at which relationships decay when we fail to contact the person is so rapid that,
following a period of reduced contact, we often compensate by talking to the person con-
cerned for much longer than would normally be the case. In effect, absence really does
make the heart grow fonder

Another thing about Zoom and video calls like it - at least to me, compared to normal audio calls, they feel a lot more mentally taxing, probably because you can always see the other people and they can always see you (a bit like a panopticon). I've heard some of my friends and other people say the same. Sometimes when I use it I hide the window so I can still hear people, just not see them, and that helps.
The odd thing is it actually feels worse than in-person conversation, that way. It doesn't feel as taxing, probably because you look away from them and they don't stare at you the whole time.

Here's a paper about it.

Earlier, I said this when comparing the social presence theory and media naturalness theories of communication:

The main problem with [social presence theory] is that a medium can have too much social presence - you can be too socially present for it to feel natural

Describing Zoom as a "panopticon" that it feels like you can't look away from and everyone else stares at you, that sounds to me like you're too present in a Zoom call - weak real-life evidence in favour of media naturalness theory there.

Because of the lack of shared-context with people you get with Twitter or Facebook - how the entire world can read what you say - a lot of the time now people retreat to private messages, where only the other participants in the chat can see what you say. Funnily enough, these are "planned" too, in a sense, if you squint.

I have a few different private chats with friend groups on Facebook Messenger and on Signal, but those are with friends I met and know outside of Facebook Messenger and Signal. We didn't initially meet in a private chat group - I definitely have to thank them for us continuing to be such good friends over the years (we can talk to eachother wherever we are in the world, instantly, and we do, whether we're in the same city or in different countries), but I can't thank them for bringing us together in the first place; we met in real-world classes, in a club, or through mutual friends.
Private chats rely on existing relationships for their existence, without the existing relationship they wouldn't happen.

In one of those chats, in a few days one of our friends will be inviting her flatmates (that none of us know) to join in on our weekly pub quiz that we have on Facebook Messenger video calls, but, again, she met them in person, and only invited them along afterwards. She herself doesn't know everyone in the chat.

I suppose this is a (rare?) exception - when someone you know invites you into a chat with people you don't know, and you get to know them through that, but it doesn't seem to happen fairly often.

---

Private/public social networks are a bit like the explore/exploit tradeoff - public networks are used to explore for new relationships, and private ones to deepen existing ones.

Private Facebook Messenger groups, at least, seem to be mainly used for existing relationship - I have a private chat with 2 very good friends (Amelie and Kat) that's been going the last 2 and a half years or so, and we talk pretty much every day on it, but the chat only exists because we're such good friends - if we weren't friends, it wouldn't exist. But, since it's private, no one else will ever join it, it won't get new people in it, we don't want it to.

In the previously mentioned weekly quiz we've been running, we've added 2 of Amelie's flatmates and her boyfriend, and Kat's boyfriend too. One of Amelie's friends, Hanna, has brought her flatmate along too.
She's only been added to the quiz because she has an in-person friendship with Hanna, and it's the same with everyone in the quiz - we only do the quiz together because of our in-person relationships, if we didn't have those, the quiz wouldn't exist.

---

The exact same point applies to private accounts: I have friends with private Instagram accounts - how can anyone that doesn't already know them follow them and see what they post? They must follow blindly, hoping that their request gets approved by someone that doesn't know them or anything about them.
Imagine if more and more people keep retreating to private accounts, we'd live in an undiscoverable online world where you never talk to anyone you don't already know.

---

Maybe you could consider an IRC chatroom a private chat? This doesn't apply then, I don't think - IRC can be very much public.

---

These private chats are good, and perfectly do what they're designed to do, but they're not discoverable - again, by design; you wouldn't want anyone to be able to find a list of every person you've talked to on Facebook.

At least when I follow someone on Twitter, that's because I've liked the last few things they said to me, or the last few things they've said generally, and I want to see more of that, so I follow them.
But that's not what following means, what following means is "I want to see every single thing this person says, no matter what it's about". If I followed them because I liked what they said about programming, and then they start posting about politics, I'll probably get annoyed and want to stop following them. I think this "I want to see what Alice posts about x, but nothing else/ not what she posts about y" issue is because she didn't say it to me, she just posted it for all her followers to see, and I think it's an unsolvable problem with the followers/followee model of communication.

Twitter specifically, if you follow someone, you see everything - say you like someone's knowledge of clementines, so you follow them, but then they start talking about rockets, which you don't really care for - then, worse, they start having opinions about tangerines that you can't just tolerate, you can't only see what they say about clementines, you must read the tangerine opinions too - people broadcast everything, see Gracie Cunningham and the history of maths video.
Chris Paika started following me recently because of what I said about Seeing like a State. Will he still want to follow me when I inevitable start complaining yet again about the ridiculous state of the UK housing market? Probably not, but he can't choose to only hear my opinions about books.
In person, you might talk to Alice about clementines, and Bob about your shared hatred of tangerines, but, with broadcast you see everything everyone says, there's no shared topics of interest for you to actually talk together about.

Some people try to solve this by muting words and phrases, so they won't see anything containing that word or phrase, e.g. "Trump", but I don't think that works.
For a start, it suffers from the Scunthorpe Problem - you might block "Trump" because you don't want to hear the latest news about the Top Trumps card game, but you'll also block everything about the 45th American President, too.
Also, more generally, this isn't how conversation works - it's forming everything you want to hear about by blocking everything you don't want to hear about, a blacklist. That's just silly, you'd be a long time listing everything you don't want to hear about - instead, you only talk to specific people about specific topics, you don't start with everything possible and whittle it down.
And maybe you don't want to talk about Top Trumps with the whole world, only with your friend Bob, and you can imagine these filters needing to get more and more granular and complicated - mute "Trump" from everyone except Bob etc. This is more explicit relationship management.

Here's Qiaochu Yuan trying that strategy:

i mute the shit out of things that makes me mad for the most part so twitter can be a happy place for me, makes a huge difference

maybe i just need to do another purge 🤔 it’s unfortunate because there are mutuals i like a lot who interact with content i’d rather not see on the TL

Here's Richard Nicholl saying the same thing:

I don't want to have very much politics on this account, so I have to unfollow even people whose output I like if they go on about it too much.

This is a light-hearted instance of the problem:

WHY THE FUCK IS MY TL FULL OF CARP

Or maybe, instead of muting, Twitter forces all its users to pre-emptively label their tweets with a category, and you subscribe to categories. This is still unworkable, there's an unlimited number of possible categories and can't be expected in advance to manage your interest in all of them or to label every tweet, it's like a worse version of Reddit's subreddit model.

The followers/followee model of communication is fundamentally wrong, and isn't how humans actually communicate. We need to get rid of it.

---

This is Wiskerz's following policy - it nicely illustrates one possible way of handling this issue:

I follow and unfollow people dynamically. Unfollowing you is often not personal, it has to do with the content you are recently posting. The content most likely does not align with what I am interested in seeing on my timeline. That said, I often re-follow later when my interests align with what you are posting. Either way, following does not imply endorsement, and unfollowing does not mean I do not like you as a person or I do not like your content. It could simply be, that your content is not what I want to see for now.

It's a lot of work.

---

Occasionally, you see people mocking or laughing at old people who see someone else's Facebook post in their feed, and they don't understand why it appeared, because they don't get how Facebook works. I'm beginning to wonder if they implicitly assume that they should only see what they want, when they're already talking to someone or something like that, more like how face-to-face conversations work. Maybe how they should work.
Here's a recent example: a woman has her grandmothers be her bridesmaids at her wedding, and posts it on Instagram:

Pictures of Megan and her nans got lots of attention when she posted them on social media but she said her grandparents "don't really get it."
"If we tell them they've got 5000 likes on a wedding blog, they're just like, 'who are the people liking it?'
"They have no concept of how many people have seen their picture."

This fits - 5000 people, most of whom Megan probably had never heard of, liked her photograph. Bewildering to 80 or 90 year olds.

Many social networks feel private, but are also as public as they could possibly be - you can take a video of yourself in your bedroom, alone, but once you post it on Youtube, anyone in the world can watch it, with everything that implies: you can become far more popular, or unpopular, than you ever wanted to be.
Michael Wesch has a great lecture that talks about this issue a bit which you absolutely should watch, but through the lecture, he put me onto one of his students, Becky Roth, and she made this very important point in one of her videos (you should watch the videos, not read my quotations, they're just here in case the videos go down):

This [camera] is what I'm talking to. Not you. This. Well, you, but this. I'm talking to you, but for the time being I don't know who you are.

Wesch talks a bit more about her point here:

Every time you talk to a webcam, you're talking to some place that's unknown, you actually don't know who's going to be talking back to you, you sort of have an "invisible audience phenomenon. It's asynchronous, so you never know when they're going to watch you. [..] Every time you talk, you're sizing up the context, and in this case, you actually don't know what the context is, you can be launched into many different contexts, [..] this is what we came to call context collapse, and we started watching first vlogs, and doing our first vlogs ourselves, it's this deep experience of context collapse - the moment you look into a webcam for the first time, and you try to start talking, you don't know who you're talking to, and you come out sounding all awkward.

(I like what Roth says about the camera here (skip to 23m30s) as well, that fits in with me complaining about the lack of tone in text messages.)

And context collapse in vlogs is bad enough - there, you'll probably realise that the context has collapsed, that you're not really talking to anyone, maybe that anyone can see what you've said - but in text conversations, you don't feel that! You, or at least I, don't realise the context has collapsed, that I'm not really talking to anyone, or even that I'm also talking to everyone on the planet, at the same time.

And Wesch explicitly says this later, I can't take any credit here:

you're trying to form your identity, in a space where it seems like everyone is watching, and yet nobody's there. It feels like at once the most private space, because it's your own bedroom (or wherever it might be), but it's also quite possibly the most public place on the planet, when you think about the number of people that could actually see this.

---

Take this conversation I had with Chana Messinger (hi Chana!) - I don't know where she was, but I was in my bedroom when I was talking to her, and to me it felt like a completely private conversation. But in reality, it wasn't, not at all - the entire world can read what each of us said. And in this specific case, it's not really a problem, we were only talking about mathematics teaching, not a particularly controversial topic.

But you can imagine when it is a problem - when you have a conversation with someone that you thought was private, and it explodes in (un)popularity.
The more I write here, the more think "going viral" is itself not desirable.

I don't know whether I should actually reply to someone's tweet, if it's not directed at me - I always worry something like "I am intruding, an I talking to them too much, are they getting annoyed?" - e.g. when I read this tweet, I didn't know if I could I say something there - it wasn't directed at me.

That's why I asked this - apparently I've curated a nice section of Twitter, because no one minded my replies (though there might be some selection bias there - if you do mind, maybe you wouldn't tell me).

Text isn't embedded in the world, not like audio or (especially) video is - it's "disembodied", if that's the right word.
It's hard to explain, but when I type like I am now, it doesn't feel like I'm typing in a specific place, but when I record audio or video, I do feel like I'm recording in my bedroom, or wherever it is.
For example, when I was sending audio messages to my friend Hanna, I noticed a cat across the street, and pointed it out to her; I wouldn't have done that if I was just typing text messages to her instead - audio and video is a lot more serendipitous.

Here are some more examples:

• this tweet, where someone says how they love Luci's chatting-while-cutting-tomatoes vibe
• Luci again, she mentions how she likes to record videos while doing something with her hands - this makes me think the embedness of audio & video is because they are more flexible than text, you can use them for other stuff (like cooking!), not just typing to a person.
• Gracie Cunningham of maths video fame, is talking about aftershave here, but at the same time she's cooking herself a potato
• Here's a great example of the embedding - I'm not going to tell you what happens in her video (that would defeat the point of the entire article), you'll just have to watch it :)
• This video of Daniel Greenberg talking about the Sudbury Valley school (from 7m38s) - watch what happens
• This video of the Lumineers playing at NPR (from 19m05s), the same as above, something happens in the real world that you can hear and see, which you wouldn't know if he was writing rather than speaking; not explicitly, anyway.
• Luci yet again - if you were interested in baking, you'd have just learned a recipe for lentil pancakes, even though you were in the middle of a video of someone talking about her experiences with religion. I very much doubt that would ever happen with text
  I didn't intend of most of my examples to be from 1 person, but not too many people record unedited videos of themselves, it is what it is.

One aspect of not being physically embedded (it might be more correct to think of social networks as not having positions), maybe, is that you can't be doing something beside someone and start typing a message to them, and begin talking to them completely incidentally.
Back when I played Runescape, an MMORPG, I could fish for lobsters on Musa Point on Karamja, and start speaking to people that also just happened to be fishing beside me.

---

Walter Ong talks how about people that can't read speak closer to the "human lifeworld" than we, people in a literate culture, do, and "[assimilate] the alien, objective world to the more immediate, familiar interaction of human beings":

In the absence of elaborate analytic categories that depend on writing to structure knowledge at a distance from lived experience, oral cultures must conceptualize and verbalize all their knowledge with more or less close reference to the human lifeworld, assimilating the alien, objective world to the more immediate, familiar interaction of human beings. A chirographic (writing) culture and even more a typographic (print) culture can distance and in a way denature even the human, itemizing such things as the names of leaders and political divisions in an abstract, neutral list entirely devoid of a human action context. An oral culture has no vehicle so neutral as a list. In the latter half of the second book, the Iliad presents the famous catalogue of the ships — over four hundred lines — which compiles the names of Grecian leaders and the regions they ruled, but in a total context of human action: the names of persons and places occur as involved in doings. The normal and very likely the only place in Homeric Greece where this sort of political information could be found in verbalized form was in a narrative or a genealogy, which is not a neutral list but an account describing personal relations

and later on, about how sound is unifying, harmonising, groups you with others, but text is dissecting, solitary, splits apart:

Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects, as Merleau-Ponty has observed (1961). Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or a landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every direction at once: I am at the centre of my auditory world, which envelopes me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence. This centering effect of sound is what high-fidelity sound reproduction exploits with intense sophistication. You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound. There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight.

By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart (Descartes’ campaigning for clarity and distinctness registered an intensification of vision in the human sensorium). The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together.

In a primary oral culture, where the word has its existence only in sound, with no reference whatsoever to any visually perceptible text, and no awareness of even the possibility of such a text, the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings’ feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word. For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous in psychic life. The centering action of sound (the field of sound is not spread out before me but is all around me) affects man’s sense of the cosmos. For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its centre. Man is the umbilicus mundi, the navel of the world. Only after print and the extensive experience with maps that print implemented would human beings, when they thought about the cosmos or universe or ‘world’, think primarily of something laid out before their eyes, as in a modern printed atlas, a vast surface or assemblage of surfaces (vision presents surfaces) ready to be ‘explored’. The ancient oral world knew few ‘explorers’, though it did know many itinerants, travellers, voyagers, adventurers, and pilgrims.

It will be seen that most of the characteristics of orally based thought and expression discussed earlier in this chapter relate intimately to the unifying, centralizing, interiorizing economy of sound as perceived by human beings. A sound-dominated verbal economy is consonant with aggregative (harmonizing) tendencies rather than with analytic, dissecting tendencies (which would come with the inscribed, visualized word: vision is a dissecting sense). It is consonant also with [..] situational thinking (again holistic, with human action at the centre) rather than abstract thinking, with a certain humanistic organization of knowledge around the actions of human and anthropomorphic beings, interiorized persons, rather than around impersonal things.

Think of people looking at their phones (I had to resist saying "staring at their phones", I didn't want to prejudice you, but even that is suggestive - you "stare" at a phone, but not a book), they're absorbed in their own world, and it feels a bit rude to interrupt them. The same happens with a book, only less so; when I was at my cafe last week, a woman asked me what book I was reading, and I'm sure she wouldn't have if I was looking at my phone instead.

Sight isolates [..] with analytic, dissecting tendencies

Now compare that to sound, maybe to music playing on the radio - everyone nearby can hear it (see how you get annoyed at people on the bus that play music without headphones, even that annoyance is a sign), maybe you gather around it to listen (like buskers on a city street), maybe you talk about it a bit. A bit like a fire, really. So we get

The auditory ideal [..] is harmony, a putting together
the unifying, centralizing, interiorizing economy of sound

I'm writing this section in my parents dining room, on the 27th of February 2021, by myself, no one else is here. I'm embedded in a context when I write. (funny, it's taken me so long to write this essay that any references to "last week" or "recently" don't really pin down a specific date anymore, "last week" could be "6 months ago")
I don't know how many other people will read this, maybe no one ever will, but I hope some will. Those people, you, won't be in my parents dining room, on the 27th of February 2021. I'm writing so that you, when- and wherever you are in the future, can read what I write today, even if you're not in the room with me right now.
I might be embedded in a context when I write, but my writing isn't - that's the entire point of writing! I write so that people who aren't in the same context as me can read what I've said. The asynchronous nature of writing is why we write.
This entire essay could only have come about by writing - speaking, revising and remembering 30000 spoken words is nigh-on impossible, as would be quoting dozens of people like I have!

There would be little point to writing if it required readers to be in the same context as the writers, you could just speak to them then. (Writing a diary is a non-central example, I'd say, and even then, you are writing now so that a different future you can read what you thought today, it's still a different context).

The only real context that writing can stand on is the other words in the text you've already written.

Even if I describe my context to you, like I did above, you've not lived it, you can't experience it, only imagine it. With writing, "taking something out of context" is inevitable.

Ong:

The condition of words in a text is quite different from their condition in spoken discourse. Although they refer to sounds and are meaningless unless they can be related—externally or in the imagination—to the sounds or, more precisely, the phonemes they encode, written words are isolated from the fuller context in which spoken words come into being. The word in its natural, oral habitat is a part of a real, existential present. Spoken utterance is addressed by a real, living person to another real, living person or real, living persons, at a specific time in a real setting which includes always much more than mere words. Spoken words are always modifications of a total situation which is more than verbal. They never occur alone, in a context simply of words.

Yet words are alone in a text. Moreover, in composing a text, in ‘writing’ something, the one producing the written utterance is also alone. Writing is a solipsistic operation. I am writing a book which I hope will be read by hundreds of thousands of people, so I must be isolated from everyone. While writing the present book, I have left word that I am ‘out’ for hours and days—so that no one, including persons who will presumably read the book, can interrupt my solitude.

Extratextual context is missing not only for readers but also for the writer. Lack of verifiable context is what makes writing normally so much more agonizing an activity than oral presentation to a real audience. ‘The writer’s audience is always a fiction’. The writer must set up a role in which absent and often unknown readers can cast themselves. Even in writing to a close friend I have to fictionalize a mood for him, to which he is expected to conform. The reader must also fictionalize the writer. When my friend reads my letter, I may be in an entirely different frame of mind from when I wrote it. Indeed, I may very well be dead. For a text to convey its message, it does not matter whether the author is dead or alive. Most books extant today were written by persons now dead. Spoken utterance comes only from the living.

He talks about it as the difference between writing and speaking (that's the whole point of the book!), but I think it's actually the difference between asynchronicity and synchronicity that causes a lot of the context collapse - asynchronous speech, transmitted between 2 places, would have the same problems (though they'd not be as severe, it's obviously much easier to hear someone's mood than to read it, it won't come across in text as naturally and unconsciously as it would in speech, so it's less work to "fictionalize [their] mood"); an "oral presentation to a real audience" is a synchronous presentation.

I wonder if writing on the Internet is even worse than physical writing, because when you write a book or a letter, you might have interiorized that the reader won't be in the same context, you won't say something that relies on the reader being in the same context as you to understand what you meant in the way you meant it to be understood, but on the Internet, maybe we haven't (yet) interiorized that, so our writing escapes its context.

This is a good article on this subject, but, for the third time, I'd ask you to focus on the meta-level, and not on the object-level issue: Sue communicates one way, Charlie another way, one that conflicts with Sue's. Normally, when you talk to someone, you'll have already established how you talk to them, what communication style you'll use together, but on somewhere like Twitter where every is smashed together, that doesn't happen - you can just start talking to anyone, with no friction whatsoever.

I think that in-person you might kinda "negotiate" a communication style between both of you, so that you'll both go in-between "respectful silence == listening" or "high-engagement", or recognise that the other person just communicates in a different way.
But online, we don't seem to practice that initial "I'm talking to this person for the first time, I don't know how they communicate, I'll figure it out and negotiate a communication style with them" behaviour as much.
(I'm not as sure about this point, it doesn't feel completely solid)

While it would flatter me greatly if the vast majority of the people in my out-group turned out to be malicious and/or stupid, it seems more reasonable to conclude the groups communicate differently and as a result have a difficult time communicating with each other.

Again, Adam Elkus gets it completely right:

the technical architectures underneath modern social networks build-in intractable moderation conflicts

This article explains the issue well, but here's a little preview:

Getting 99.9% of content moderation decisions at an "acceptable" level probably works fine for situations when you're dealing with 1,000 moderation decisions per day, but large platforms are dealing with way more than that. If you assume that there are 1 million decisions made every day, even with 99.9% "accuracy" [..], you're still going to "miss" 1,000 calls. But 1 million is nothing. On Facebook alone a recent report noted that there are 350 million photos uploaded every single day. And that's just photos. If there's a 99.9% accuracy rate, it's still going to make "mistakes" on 350,000 images. Every. Single. Day. So, add another 350,000 mistakes the next day. And the next. And the next. And so on.

And, even if you could achieve such high "accuracy" and with so many mistakes, it wouldn't be difficult for, say, a journalist to go searching and find a bunch of those mistakes -- and point them out. This will often come attached to a line like "well, if a reporter can find those bad calls, why can't Facebook?" which leaves out that Facebook DID find that other 99.9%. Obviously, these numbers are just illustrative, but the point stands that when you're doing content moderation at scale, the scale part means that even if you're very, very, very, very good, you will still make a ridiculous number of mistakes in absolute numbers every single day.

---

I need to thank Adam Elkus yet again for bringing up another aspect of this: when a social network gets millions of users, and is used for different purposes, the different purposes will probably need to be moderated differently - like Twitter being used for

1. friends talking together
2. random users commenting on some unknown person's tweets
3. companies' PR announcements
4. government weather warnings
5. international relations

Twitter will need to treat each of those differently, moderate them with different rules, or maybe even not at all.
For example, say someone in 2 threatens to kill someone else; Twitter will probably want to take that seriously and report it to the relevant authorities, maybe ban the user.

But imagine this story, except it's on Twitter - the UK's Prime Minister, rightly or wrongly, says she is prepared to kill possibly millions of people. Twitter's rules ban

threaten[ing] violence against an individual or a group of people
[Y]ou can’t state an intention to inflict violence on a specific person or group of people. We define intent to include statements like “I will”, “I’m going to”, or “I plan to”, as well as conditional statements like “If you do X, I will

I'm sure Twitter wouldn'tve banned May for tweeting that.

And look at the fairly belligerent tweet in 5: Global Times is a newspaper controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, and that threat to "wipe out" Tsai Ing-Wen is a real one - in a war with Taiwan, she would be immediately targeted.

I don't want to use a very political and salient example, but you can also look at the banning of Donald Trump from Twitter recently. He was not banned despite repeated violations of the Twitter rules, most likely because he was the head of government of a country. The same rules do not, in reality, apply to politicians as apply to normal people, despite them applying in theory.

And users of Twitter know this - they can see the inconsistency - and they say things along the line of "why haven't you banned Trump yet? You banned my friend Jimmy last week for something nowhere near as bad as what he said on xyz".
This inconsistency probably makes the rules less legitimate in users' eyes, as well.

How can 1 single website treat all different situations in the same way? Does it even make sense for Twitter to be moderating the speech of what is essentially a national government?

I don't think its possible for one set of moderation rules to cover such a variety of uses.
Like Elkus said at the start of this section, modern social networks build in intractable moderation conflicts.

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Interestingly, countries other than the US have some different views on the banning of elected officials:

“The [German Chancellor, Angela Merkel] sees the complete closing down of the account of an elected president as problematic,” Steffen Seibert, her chief spokesman, said at a regular news conference in Berlin. Rights like the freedom of speech “can be interfered with, but by law and within the framework defined by the legislature — not according to a corporate decision.”

The fact that the capability exists for [leaders of countries other than the US] to be silenced by an unreachable and unaccountable executive in San Francisco is all that matters

---

This is similar to what Benedict Evans says here:

Facebook has close to 2bn users, posting over 100bn things each day. The global SMS system, at its peak, had 20-25bn messages a day.
This is not a ‘publisher’, in the sense that a newspaper or radio station are publishers - or if it is, then we’ve stretched the word ‘publisher’ so far as to become meaningless. A human editor chooses ten stories for the front page of a newspaper, and ten stories for the 9 o’clock news, but there is no-one sitting in Menlo Park choosing a hundred photos for your Instagram feed each morning.
But on the other hand, a phone company does not write rules about what you can say, and social network do write rules, or try to, and they make decisions about what kinds of things should be in your feed, and why. This is not a publisher, but it’s not a phone company either, nor a restaurant.

This one is fairly self-explanatory, but I'll explain what I mean anyway.
If you were talking to some friends, and they started talking about something very controversial or whatever, you could steer the topic back onto a safer ground. If they were talking about how much they love clementines for ages, and you didn't particularly care for any type of orange, you could gently nudge them away from citrus fruits (or say "hey, we don't really care about about oranges, can we go back to xyz" if you're start kind of friend group :)).

A few weeks ago, in the middle of one of our now-weekly quizzes, some of my friends started arguing about everyone's favourite controversial-political-topic-that-no-one-is-actually-involved-with-but-still-has-very-strong-opinions-about-anyway,a new Cleopatra film - you can guess what the controversy was yourself.
I was sitting there bored, and slightly embarrassed that they were derailing our quiz to argue amongst themselves about a film no one is going to watch, so I said something like "if you want to argue, can you do it on your own time?", but in a nicer way, and they stopped.

You can't really do that in online social networks.
You can't message someone on Twitter and say "don't tell me about x", because they didn't tell you, they probably just posted it to the world, they didn't specifically reply to you with it.

Last week, at my bowling club, someone mentioned that what we were allowed to do in the future depended on what the politician in charge of the country would decide, and a man said "politics, Stuart!" and Stuart apologised. That's in-person moderation.

Sometimes it feels like you need a sort of "reason" to talk to someone. I don't necessarily mean a thing you want to talk to them about, but also a circumstance where you come across them, too.

That might be a little too abstract, so I'm thinking of 2 sorts of things:

1. Something you want to talk to them about: say you're both interested in soccer, and Liverpool have just shockingly lost 7-2 to Aston Villa on the weekend, you could message them and say something like "What was Klopp thinking, sending Van Dijk on that early?? Liverpool always try to walk it in!" and that's normal. If I had to name this, it'd be "shared conversation topics you're both interested in".
2. Crossing paths with them, and then starting to chat (just being in the same place, basically). This is like what Simon Sarris said about unplanned meetings, and I think it's something soaps get right, and they show you how necessary unplanned meetings are: lots, maybe even most, of the conversations characters have are just because they happen to meet on a walk about town, in the shop, when they're out for coffee, ...

#2 is something Houseparty seems to have built in as a pretty central feature of their app, from what it sounds like: every time you login, all your friends get notified, so that they can chat with you. Even their marketing says

Where being together is as easy as showing up.

You can think of that notification as #2 here, a kind of signal that you can talk to them.

In short, you need a topic, or an opportunity.

Maria Górska-Piszek, talking about how she can't plan way in advance to meet her friends anymore, now that she has a young daughter:

This also might be one of the reasons friendships fall apart when only one side has kids, the expectations of what it means to have fun time together and how to organize and communicate around it are suddenly so vastly different.
Some of my friends assume they’d better not disturb me when I’m busy with the baby, and so they never reach out, or give up if I don’t respond at the first try.
Which I kinda understand, having been before in that situation I’d guess that person just doesn’t want to interact.
I do want to interact, I just can’t be proactive about it anymore because I have several wake up calls each night, constant interruption all day, and the attention span of a goldfish.
And that’s okay, this is just how it is at this stage of life.
It probably was easier when everyone just lived together in a village and bumped into each other randomly without any planning.
But suddenly if meeting someone becomes An Event for which you have to plan in advance, I have no capacity for planning.

When I lived in a student dormitory we would just roam around each other’s rooms uninvited and hang out together through our best and worst.
Now meeting the same friends requires coordinating two weeks in advance, cleaning up the whole place and ideally cooking something special

Take Gracie Cunningham, when she became famous a while ago. Yet again, I don't want to get into the object-level issue here (but I like Elle's sentiment here), please try to focus on the meta-level; her Twitter bio says this:

went viral accidentally for trying to ask my friends about how math came to be

This is the perfect example, I think. She posted a video on Tiktok, asking her friends how maths exists, and someone took the video and reposted it on Twitter, mocking her a bit.
It spread far and wide, from Tiktok to Twitter to round the world, with lots of people making lots of comments. From what was originally a girl asking her friends a simple question about maths, thousands of people that have never heard of or talked to her get drafted in to have their say.

It's important to note here that the man that posted the video on Twitter probably didn't even intend for there to be a pile-on, it could've very easily happened by accident, just because of how Twitter works, and how people saw the video, and dis/agreed with the mocking, so they spread it further, like the Toxoplasma of Rage.

It's all very Internet of Beefs. It makes me think of the relationships subreddit, where (currently) 2,993,819 people (+ anyone that comes across it, like from this Twitter account, which itself has 427k followers) get to gawk at your relationship problems, and weigh in with their opinions.

I can imagine someone watching that video, then showing it to their friend in-person and going "look how stupid this girl is", the friend laughs and then they all go about their day. That's a perfectly normal thing that I'm sure happens thousands of times a day and no one gets hurt by it at all. But it's different on today's social networks.

Cunningham doesn't even need a Twitter account for this to happen (she does have one, but that's beside the point) - someone took a video she posted on Tiktok, and shared it on Twitter. Someone could talk a video of you IRL then post it on whatever social network, and you couldn't do anything about it.

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You know how people say "I can't be in 2 places at once!"? That's not true online.

I noticed a while ago that I identified specific people as making particular tweets on Twitter, but I didn't on Reddit - basically, I just opened Twitter there, and the first tweet that came up was this one from Luci, when I read it, I immediately thought "Luci wrote that, this is what she thinks" etc etc, you can guess the rest.

That sounds extremely obvious, but (to me, at least), and maybe this is just me, but I don't identify posts or comments on Reddit as being written by a specific person. Take this post from the /r/casualUK subreddit, one of the best subreddits - when I opened, I didn't care who wrote it, in the slightest. I don't look at their username, I don't think "oh, donnakim82 made a cake", at best I thought "a person made a cake using a recipe from a Great British Bakeoff judge". When I read the comments, I don't care who wrote them either - for all it matters to me, every single comment could be written by the same person.
Only the comment itself is important - 99% of the time, who wrote it isn't:

One thing I really like about Reddit is you can say something that will piss off a lot of people, get tons of downvotes, and people telling you you're full of shit. And then when it's all over you just fade into obscurity and you can just continue to comment like it never happened. Someone has to be a regular asshole on a sub before they start to get a reputation.

The other 1% where it matters is situations like this, where narcohippo asked newf68 a question, so I had to look at the replies to narcohippo to see if it was newf68 replying to them.

Someone on reddit made this point for me:

the quality & quantity of online-first-social-relationships has also gone down.
It takes a decent effort on Reddit even NOTICE the usernames you see around, let alone start to attach an identity to each one. Forum posting, with its thread-bumping, signatures, and avatars, might have had many downsides...but it did a lot for quickly establishing identities of the people you interacted with.
Twitter is a sort of blend today of that experience, but the platform's limitations make it much less welcoming to newcomers

---

I'm not sure why I don't associate posts and comments on Reddit with their authors, but I have a few guesses:

1. the author's name is far more prominent on Twitter compared to Reddit, and they have a photo
2. on Reddit, you make posts to subreddits, but on Twitter, you just post them, and you reply to people, kinda having a conversation. On Reddit, you're posting to a subreddit about a specific thing instead, the "focal point" of posts (I'm not really sure what to call it), is the subreddit, not the Twitter account

it's odd, Twitter seems a lot less anonymous than somewhere like reddit, even though you can still use pseudonyms here. I don't really associate comments with accounts over there, but here, there's a lot of "oh look @eigenrobot said something"
Never happens on Reddit
Why?

To have a relationship with a person, you need to see them as a specific person, not just as "another user". Even if that "specific person" is anonymous, they're still a specific person, you just don't know their name.

This is important, and it explains why I've become more friendly with people on Twitter in the month before I started writing this post than with anyone on Reddit in the 10 years I've had an account there - on Twitter, I'm talking to actual real-life people like Luci and Kirsten, and to me it feels like I'm talking to Luci and Kirsten - but there's none of that feeling on Reddit.

I got a bit sad when I realised this, that I've never become friendly when anyone on Reddit, and probably never will.

(though, this isn't entirely a negative - the interpersonal issues that plague Twitter interactions aren't anywhere near as bad on Reddit)

---

Clay Shirky yet again:

The first thing [designers of group software need to design for is] handles the user can invest in. Now, I say “handles” because I don’t want to say “identity”; identity has recently become one of those ideas where, when you pull on the little thread you want, this big bag of stuff comes along with it. Identity is such a hot-button issue now, but for the lightweight stuff required for social software, it’s really just a handle that matters.
It’s pretty widely understood that anonymity doesn’t work well ingroup settings, because “who said what when” is the minimum requirement for having a conversation. What’s less well understood is that weak pseudonymity doesn’t work well, either, because I need to associate who’s saying something to me now with previous conversations.
The world’s best reputation management system is right here, in the brain. And actually, it’s right here, in the back, in the emotional part of the brain. Almost all the work being done on reputation systems today is either trivial or useless or both, because in most human situations, reputations aren’t easy to make explicit.
If you want a good reputation system, just let me remember who you are. And if you do me a favour, I’ll remember it. And I won’t store it in the front of my brain; I’ll store it here, in the back. I’ll just get a good feeling next time I get email from you; I won’t even remember why. And if you do me a disservice and I get email from you, my temples will start to throb, and I won’t even remember why. If you give users a way of remembering one another, reputation will happen, and that requires nothing more than simple and somewhat persistent handles.

Daniel Cook makes the same point in his "Game Design Patterns for Building Friendships" talk (16m43s and 17m35s) .

As North Korean Liberation Front says:

Ought to be a law against changing username handle and profile pic all at once I can't keep track of half of you potlickers

There's another interesting dimension to popularity too, I think:

Friendship requires lots of small interactions with people, like Simon Sarris said. If you have x thousand followers on Twitter (I'm sure the same sort of thing applies on Facebook too), you'll probably get dozens or maybe hundreds of people replying to your tweets, too many for you to conceivably read, and you won't be able to form relationships with any of the people that try to talk to you. But if you have 200 people following you, the same relatively small number of people will pop up over and over again, and you'll get to know them. Like Kirsten said here:

I'm not surprised [that Twitter is a platform where literally anyone can join in any conversation, but it still feels cliquey]! It's really hard to have large numbers in your community. So if I'm on a small forum with 25 active users and one more joins, I'll be happy. If I'm on Twitter with literally millions, it's hard to tell if someone who interacts with me once is gonna stick.

Look at this tweet (I tried to pick a completely-non-political example here) - it has 76 replies, is he really going to read all of them? I doubt it. And Yglesias has 488 thousand followers, that's almost more people than live in my city. You need to be able to spread your attention thickly across a small number of people - he won't be able to.

And there's the flipside of this, too - if you follow too many people. If you do, you'll get hundreds of different people pop up all the time, you won't see the same people repeatedly, you won't get to know them properly.
Back when I still followed more than a thousand people on Twitter, I watched Luci's first video, and I knew she was going to make another one soon, but I didn't come across it. I was following too many people then, all their tweets got in the way and pushed her off the feed. I think I'd seen her mention it somewhere, something like that, so I knew she'd posted it, but I couldn't see it. Eventually, I just went to her account and scrolled down, and there it was. But since I only missed it in the first place because I followed too many people, I started unfollowing hundreds afterwards, and I'm down to 705 now. Most people don't post too often, so that's not actually as many as it sounds like, though still too many to get to know them properly.

As Wesley Yang says:

If you follow someone’s Twitter feed closely over time, you get to know who they really are, as their risk tolerance, integrity, and character under duress all are revealed.

Unfortunately, I follow too many people to follow any one account closely.

This is something Branch have complained about - they talk about not having chance meetings in your office anymore, when everyone in your company works from home - their whole business is about talking to your coworkers when working remotely.
But I'm also concerned about not being able to just happen to talk about the environment you're in, or just coming across normal people (not just colleagues) and starting to talk to them.

To explain what I mean, say you go to a coffee shop every day, and you keep seeing the same person there, eventually you'll have something to talk about - the cafe! The two of you have a shared context, and you can talk about.
Or, even more obviously, say you're at a football match, and you don't know the person beside you, you can strike up a conversation about the game.

Without the serendipitous effect of walking past people, or being near them, it must be slightly harder to form friendships with people, because you don't come across them as often, and you don't have your shared environment or context to talk about.

Tumblr, as described by Scott Alexander:

Tumblr’s interface doesn’t allow you to comment on other people’s posts, per se. Instead, it lets you reblog them with your own commentary added. So if you want to tell someone they’re an idiot, your only option is to reblog their entire post to all your friends with the message “you are an idiot” below it.
Whoever invented this system either didn’t understand memetics, or understood memetics much too well.

What happens is – someone makes a statement which is controversial by Tumblr standards, like “Protect Doctor Who fans from kitten pic sharers at all costs.” A kitten pic sharer sees the statement, sees red, and reblogs it to her followers with a series of invectives against Doctor Who fans. Since kitten pic sharers cluster together in the social network, soon every kitten pic sharer has seen the insult against kitten pic sharer – as they all feel the need to add their defensive commentary to it, soon all of them are seeing it from ten different directions. The angry invectives get back to the Doctor Who fans, and now they feel deeply offended, so they reblog it among themselves with even more condemnations of the kitten pic sharers, who now not only did whatever inspired the enmity in the first place, but have inspired extra hostility because their hateful invectives are right there on the post for everyone to see

Katherine Dee:

Tumblr, an open platform where everything is available to everyone, where filters are all but non-existent, where all you need to do is log-on, brought fan culture, en masse, to teenagers.
[..]
Tumblr’s user interface made it very difficult to avoid certain topics without serious curation. One might be able to reasonably argue that it was this mindset becoming ingrained in teenagers that created the “trigger/content warning” fad of the 2010s. On Tumblr, if someone you follow reblogs something, you’re going to see it—hence the necessity of trigger warnings. You couldn’t easily mute a topic away, so if someone was discussing something sensitive, it was easier for everyone if they put a trigger or content warning, then, optionally placed the content under a “cut,” which would hide the content from your main feed.
This quirk in design also made Tumblr famous for cross-pollination. The most iconic instance of this was with “SuperWhoLock,” which is the marriage of the Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Sherlock Holmes fandom to create one monster fandom, but this happened with a lot of other things as well. Namely ideas.

Helena:

we must understand that these noxious conditions are a result of the site’s fundamental building blocks and not purely a reflection of the character of the individuals who use it. Tumblr seems to be designed for destruction, and it’s incredibly sad that one of the only places so many young people feel able to express themselves is also oriented in a way that seriously compromises their emotional and intellectual development.

I know, that title sounds really banal, but bear with me.
Every social network we use, the developers have had to decide how you're going to communicate with other people, what you can say (I don't mean censoring, more like "reactions" and "likes"), how communication between people is structured.

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Go read that Tumblr section and come back here (there's a link to it above).
The Tumblr developers had to decide how communication between users would work on Tumblr, and they decided it'd be done as reblogging with comments. You can see the results.
Twitter's developers decided on tweets visible to the whole world, retweeting, quote-tweeting, .., and have made so many bad decisions that their users frequently call it a hellsite.

Because the developers of our social networks had to decide that you would reblog other Tumblr users, post tweets, reply to other people's tweets, or retweet them - if they didn't make decisions like that you just wouldn't be able to communicate with anyone. A Twitter without tweets is not Twitter, it's a useless website.
It doesn't even make sense now to think about a social network where the developers don't have to make those sorts of decisions.

But I think that everytime the developers have to make a decision like that, decide to structure communication in some particular way, they can make the wrong choice, one with unintended consequences that they couldn't have imagined beforehand. Again, look at the Tumblr section.
And I think it'd be best to minimise how many of those sorts of decisions the developers have to make, to avoid things going wrong. I wouldn't say it's possible to eliminate them - then you have a website with no communication whatsoever, but you can minimise how many choices you have to make.
A social network where as much as possible, the users decide how they communicate with other people.

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Here's a very relevant quote from Mark Zuckerberg in 2019 (emphasis mine):

Facebook gives everyone a way to use their voice, and that creates real benefits — from sharing experiences to growing movements. As part of this, we have a responsibility to keep people safe on our services. That means deciding what counts as terrorist propaganda, hate speech and more. We continually review our policies with experts, but at our scale we’ll always make mistakes and decisions that people disagree with.
Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree. I’ve come to believe that we shouldn’t make so many important decisions about speech on our own

Funnily enough, Facebook now has their own Oversight Board, pretty much their own court:

The first 10 decisions they make will have more effect on speech in the country and the world than the next 10 decisions rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court. That’s power. That’s real power.

(from here, if you can ignore the slightly apocalyptic framing)

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Clay Shirky again (pdf):

This pattern has happened over and over and over again. Someone built the system; they assumed certain user behaviors. The users came on and exhibited different behaviors. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled. This story has been written many times. It’s actually frustrating to see how many times it’s been written, because although there’s a wealth of documentation from the field, people starting similar projects often haven’t read these accounts.

The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is “learning from experience,” but learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering—that’s not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: “Don’t go in that swamp. There are alligators in there.”

Learning from experience about the alligators is lousy, compared to learning from reading, say. There hasn’t been, unfortunately, in this arena, a lot of learning from reading. And so, the essay "Lessons from Lucasfilms’ Habitat" [well worth reading] written in 1990, reads a lot like Rose Stone’s description of Communitree from 1978 [which seems to be similar to this essay of hers from the 90s, also a pdf].

and again, in Group as user: flaming and the design of social software (pdf):

We have grown quite adept at designing interfaces and interactions between computers and machines, but our social tools -- the software the users actually use most often -- remain badly misfit to their task. Social interactions are far more complex and unpredictable than human/computer interaction, and that unpredictability defeats classic user-centric design. As a result, tools used daily by tens of millions are either ignored as design challenges, or treated as if the only possible site of improvement is the user-to-tool interface.
The design gap between computer-as-box and computer-as-door persists because of a diminished conception of the user. The user of a piece of social software is not just a collection of individuals, but a group. Individual users take on roles that only make sense in groups: leader, follower, peacemaker, process nazi, and so on. There are also behaviors that can only occur in groups, from consensus building to social climbing. And yet, despite these obvious differences between personal and social behaviors, we have very little design practice that treats the group as an entity to be designed for.
There is enormous value to be gotten in closing that gap, and it doesn't require complicated new tools. It just requires new ways of looking at old problems.

The "Lessons from Lucasfilms’ Habitat" document summarises:

a special circle of living Hell awaits the implementors of systems involving that most important category of autonomous computational agents of all, groups of interacting human beings. This leads directly to our next (and possibly most controversial) assertion:
Detailed central planning is impossible; don't even try

I don't know about you, but when I'm talking to someone in-person, sometimes I feel connected to them, I like the conversation, I like them.
I don't think you'll always get that feeling of connection, feeling something for the other person, with async communication.

Maybe if you both have Facebook Messenger open at the same time & are replying to each-other straightaway, yes. But imagine if you only open it once a week, and your replies to them, and theirs to you, are a week apart - will you feel that connection then? I doubt it.

When you just post tweets on Twitter, or a status update on Facebook, you're not sending that to anyone at all. Very often (especially if you don't have many followers), no one will reply, and that can feel terrible for your self-esteem if it happens consistently, constantly saying things or asking questions, and no one says anything.
The amount of times I've wanted to tweet something, but I know, even if people will read it and enjoy it, they'll almost definitely say nothing, not react at all, and I hate it, so much so that I just don't say anything, and my Twitter account lies empty. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, yes, I am of course guilty of it myself, it can be hard to type out what you actually feel.

That wouldn't happen in-person - an equivalent could be speaking in a party, and no one paying you any attention (possible, but hopefully doesn't happen often), or you speaking to someone, and them not reacting at all - I don't think that's likely at all, people would need to be quite dead inside to not react I think, not even a facial expression.
That last bit is partially caused by how with text-based social networks, you can only communicate with text, not with body language or anything like that.
People call this "the void" on Twitter, I think. It's a bit like constantly speaking at Speakers' Corner.

The entire point of posting on social networks is for people to read what you say, and to talk back to you, like Becky Roth says here! And it doesn't feel great when no one does. You make your words public for a reason. The entire thing is worth watching, Roth makes so many good points. Her whole channel, really.
And of course, she'll never know that I said any of this.

---

Similarly, you can spend ages just passively observing what people say, and not actually participate in their conversations, and I doubt that's good for you either.

It can devolve into what would be called "lurking" on forums (just reading other people's posts, and not posting yourself), but it feels worse on social networks, probably because of how much you associate social network accounts with real people.

Following, on Twitter at least, isn't bi-directional - you might follow hundreds of people and so feel like you're part of something, but you won't necessarily be followed BY hundreds of people, so you can post something and get no reaction.

You could frame 1 million people piling onto your tweet and Elle's tweet in "This isn't just a bad thing, you can discover so many people through it" as the same thing, but, I don't think you should, it's not very helpful or productive.

Instead, it'd be better to frame them as "people you don't know coming across what you've said" v.s. "Alice connecting Bob to Charlie", like something you might see at a dinner party.

It's like what Jacob says here (again, please ignore the object-level):

Twitter at its best is when I'm doing bits with my hilarious friends from around the world as if we were in the same room.

Twitter at its worst is when a thousand people burst into that room to shout at us that the glory of rome is eterbal!!1!

"as if we were in the same room" is an interesting hint there.

[MINOR SPOILERS FOR THE WHEEL OF TIME FOLLOW]: Funnily enough, this reminds me of the Black Ajah in the Wheel of Time - there, the Ajah is made up of cells of women ("guerrilla fighter" cells, not "prison" cells), with 3 women in a cell, and each woman knows 1 more woman not in the cell, so that, if they're captured, they don't compromise the security of the organisation, but they still form a (not legible) network of people throughout the group.

Basically, this tweet from Thomas Chatteron Williams explains the better way of thinking about it:

I miss big-ass dinner parties where you sit next to someone unexpected and new.
Everything since Covid is too premeditated and planned.

I know how Kirsten wants her name to be pronounced, even though she didn't tell me, because I happened to come across it on Twitter. If I ever came down to London and met her, would I need to pretend that I didn't read that, and call her kuhr-stin instead? Would it be weird if I knew how to pronounce her name right, despite her not telling me?
I can imagine it being freaky from the other wise - what would you think if someone you don't know and have never talked to, comes up and start asking you questions about things your life that you're sure you've never told them about?

This happens quite a lot - it's like you're permanently eavesdropping on every conversation every made. You know things about people, even though they didn't tell you.

Here's Mason Hartman saying so:

It feels pretty odd to have strangers already feel like you're their friend, because they've read months or years of your stuff online
It's way more bizarre to have strangers already feel like you're their enemy because they've read, like, 3 tweets

Notice it's "they've read .. your stuff", not "they've talked to you".

It's a bit like being a micro-celebrity - people can feel like they know you, when you've never even heard their name - this is something called parasocial interaction, when you "develop illusions of intimacy, friendship, and identification" with someone because you've watched or read them a lot somewhere. In the past, mainly on TV, but these days it's an issue with Youtube too.

Today, security agencies around the world run programs like Boundless Informant, Bullrun, Total Information Awareness, PRISM, ECHELON, XKeyscore, Tempora, Upstream, Optic Nerve, FASCIA, MUSCULAR, Squeaky Dolphin and Dishfire, There are many more programs I've not mentioned, but this post is more than long enough as it is.

It'd take too many words for me to describe them all, so I'll pick a few:

• FASCIA collects 5 billion location data records from phones every day. It collects so much data that it is “outpacing our [NSA] ability to ingest, process and store” data
• Tempora has “secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information, and handles 600 million telephone events every day
• PRISM gives them direct access to the systems of Microsoft, Yahoo (more on this next), Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple. The data received varies, but includes email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, file storage data, VoIP, file transfers, video conferencing, when people have logged in, social networking details, and special requests
• Dishfire collects 200 million text messages a day from around the world, and extracts location data, contact networks and credit card details. GCHQ say it collects “pretty much everything it can”
• Optic Nerve collects still images from Yahoo webcams, in bulk - in a six month period in 2008, it collected 1.8 million photos , regardless of whether individual users were a target or not. These images include “substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications” - an estimated 3 to 11% of images had “undesirable nudity”

I don't think intelligence agencies in the 19th century, if they existed, wouldn't have done any of that because they were morally opposed to it, but because they couldn't. Because every tweet you make is stored somewhere, probably forever, intelligence agencies jobs are much easier - it's very easy for them to read all of your Facebook messages, because they have to be stored somewhere. Because your communication is async, surveilling you will always be possible. 5 years after you send a message, they can just ask Facebook to send them what you said.

Many of the programs above are the NSA or GCHQ recording data as it flows "over-the-wire" from one person to another, and that's unavoidable - it will happen in sync and async communication, but async communication has another inherent flaw, too.

Of course, it's not just government intelligence agencies that can read tweets you made 10 years ago; normal people with an axe to grind can, too.

To wit, here's a recent tweet from the Nieman Lab:

Clubhouse poses major challenges for fact-checkers since it doesn't keep old posts, audio files, or allow users to record conversations.

Ari Schulman has talked about this in relation to what a "community" is:

Another way to state the predicament, then, is to ask whether any of the platforms with intractable speech moderation problems—particularly Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Google—really are communities. Despite the language of their executives — Mark Zuckerberg speaks regularly of “building global community”— it is difficult to find any sense in which this is so. A globe cannot be a community. A community has some shared understanding of the boundaries of acceptable speech, and some legitimacy to enforce them. But it is impossible to imagine either of these things ever being the case on today’s online speech platforms.
It is because a universal public square cannot be a community that the parameters of the online speech debate are stuck. The conflict between the “marketplace of ideas” framework and the “communal norms” framework seems irresolvable because it is irresolvable. At least, this is so for the platforms we have now, which are an experiment with no obvious historical precedent: forums for discourse and information discovery that are not communities, or at best are failed communities. It is only in a forum that is a community that these two viewpoints can be reconciled, even mutually sustaining.

This is a fantastic and extremely relevant article, you should read all of it; despite the start of it being a bit political, it makes a lot of important points (I promise I started writing this whole thing before I read his article, I've just made a lot of similar points to him). Like how you need a community to have norms:

Any kind of legitimacy requires communal norms. Ironically, despite the language of the platforms — all that talk of community standards and norms — it is precisely in the ways they have failed to form coherent communities that they have been unable to find the legitimacy to enforce norms of speech
Community has been a sacred value since the Internet’s earliest days, and interpersonal and group communications have been essential to every step of the Internet’s evolution. In the beginning, the Internet itself could be a community because your ability to access it at all meant you were probably educated and nerdy. As it grew, the Internet fractured into subcultures, forums, and chats, each embedded in its own tight-knit network.
Precisely as the platforms became more universal, they became more destructive of community. Communal inclusion relies on exclusion: some notion of who is and is not a member of the group, and some ways of enforcing that boundary. On the early Internet, this consisted of having many forums with different interests and aims, moderators [..] who could enforce forum norms

How community speech norms have worked, and why they do:

As intractable as the speech problem seems to be on the platforms, we should recognize that there are myriad examples from recent history of the same problems being addressed by and large successfully. Many of these examples come from earlier eras of the Internet, but there are many aside from Hacker News that are still active now. They include the world of newspapers and magazines that dates back long before the Internet; threaded bulletin boards like Usenet and PhpBB; personal journaling platforms like LiveJournal and Xanga of the late 1990s and early 2000s; the blogosphere of the Bush and early Obama years; and Reddit today

• Limitations of scale: The simplest explanation for why the speech problem is intractable on the platforms as they exist now is that they have too many users for general consensus on moderation norms to be possible. As Antón Barba-Kay argues, legitimate moderation decisions require some context by which the decisions can be judged reasonable or not. But such a context cannot be secured for a single forum that spans the entire globe. By contrast, all the examples cited above have inherent structural features that place significant limitations on the number of speakers in a particular forum

• Barriers to entry
• Response calibration
• Neutral engagement affordances

His last point here is very similar to Brian Earp's thread on how hard it is to slightly disagree with someone on Twitter.

On Twitter, since context has collapsed and everyone can see everything you see, you can't show different sides of yourself to different people.
So to do that, people have to make alt accounts, which let them show different facets of their personality, or talk about things they'd rather not associate with their main account.

As biblically accurate devil says:

seeing how funny and vulnerable ppl are on their alts really has me thinking we need to go back to a more anonymous, fragmented internet instead of acting like its normal to show everyone in the world the same side of yourself

Sonya Mann:

I should make an alt for posting rap lyrics in all caps

Some of the people I've mentioned or quoted here (like the first quote you just read) are alt accounts (or anonymous ones, at least).

Sometimes when I send people text messages, and I feel a bit embarrassed by them later on, I know that what I said will always be visible to them. I can be embarrassed by them pretty much forever.
This only happens because the messages are stored forever.

In person, if you say something to a friend you're embarrassed by, the day after both of you will probably have forgotten about it.

But with text messages, you say something embarrassing and both of you can keep seeing it over and over again, just if you scroll up.

Even with audio messages, this wouldn't be as much of an issue, since you have to click on them to listen to them, they're not as in-your-face as text ones would be.

Do you ever look back at what you said 10 years ago (or even 10 minutes ago) and cringe?

At least for me, I don't feel anywhere near as connected with people when I talk to them with text messages, compared to when I call them, or use audio messages. Audio just feels so much more alive that text.

That's one of the most important points in this entire essay, I think, even though it's so short.

Walter Ong talks about how oral cultures, compared to literate ones (like the one you live in), are far more "empathetic and participatory", rather than "objectively distant":

For an oral culture learning or knowing means achieving close, empathetic, communal identification with the known, ‘getting with it’. Writing separates the knower from the known and thus sets up conditions for ‘objectivity’, in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing. Treating another primary oral setting over two thousand years later [than Homer and Plato], the editors of The Mwindo Epic (an oral story told by the Nyanga people in the Congo) call attention to a similar strong identification of Candi Rureke, the performer of the epic, and through him of his listeners, with the hero Mwindo, an identification which actually affects the grammar of the narration, so that on occasion the narrator slips into the first person when describing the actions of the hero. So bound together are narrator, audience, and character that Rureke has the epic character Mwindo himself address the scribes taking down Rureke’s performance: ‘Scribe, march!’ or ‘Oscribe you, you see that I am already going.’ In the sensibility of the narrator and his audience the hero of the oral performance assimilates into the oral world even the transcribers who are de-oralizing it into text.

And how they're extremely agonistic (meaning combative, or violent competitions, attacking):

Many, if not all, oral or residually oral cultures strike literates as extraordinarily agonistic in their verbal performance and indeed in their lifestyle. Writing fosters abstractions that disengage knowledge from the arena where human beings struggle with one another. It separates the knower from the known. By keeping knowledge embedded in the human lifeworld, orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle. Proverbs and riddles are not used simply to store knowledge but to engage others in verbal and intellectual combat: utterance of one proverb or riddle challenges hearers to top it with a more apposite or a contradictory one. Bragging about one’s own prowess and/or verbal tongue-lashings of an opponent figure regularly in encounters between characters in narrative
The other side of agonistic name-calling or vituperation [abusive words] in oral or residually oral cultures is the fulsome [offensively excessive] expression of praise which is found everywhere in connection with orality. It is well known in the much-studied present-day African oral praise poems as all through the residually oral western rhetorical tradition stretching from classical antiquity through the 18th century. ‘I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him’, Marcus Antonius cries in his funeral oration in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and then proceeds to praise Caesar in rhetorical patterns of encomium which were drilled into the heads of all Renaissance schoolboys and which Erasmus used so wittily in his Praise of Folly. The fulsome praise in the old, residually oral, rhetoric tradition strikes persons from a high-literacy culture as insincere, flatulent, and comically pretentious. But praise goes with the highly polarized, agonistic, oral world of good and evil, virtue and vice, villains and heroes

I know it's not exactly the same as the point I'm trying to make, I just thought it was cool it was slightly similar.

---

Above, I said

Audio just feels so much more alive that text

But I think there might even be an even more fundamental difference between audio and writing: when I hear someone's voice in an audio message, I feel like I'm talking to them, that I'm talking to a person, that they are a person. With text, "they" are just words on a page, it's harder (but not impossible!) to see the person writing the words as a person.

This essay is itself just words on a page - do you feel like I'm speaking to you right now? I imagine you would far more if I had spoken this instead.

Above, I said

I doubt kids will make friends with other kids in school, if their classes are on Zoom.
talking about how online, if you want to have a sync conversation with someone, 99% of the time you have to plan it.

But I think there might be another reason you're not likely to form friendships with people over Zoom: you need something that I can only call a "moment" between you for that. "Intimacy" feels like it's necessary (not in a "dating relationship" kind of way), which you won't get in a big group.

The closest physical analogue I can think of to Zoom calls might be talker to the speaker at a conference, through a microphone. Later on, you might go up to them privately and start chatting, because even though you might've talked to eachother in a Q&A, it isn't a "moment", not in the way it needs to be to build a relationship on.

Sorry, this is quite hard to describe in the way I want.

Maybe it can only really happen in a conversation with max 4 people in it?

What I mean is, when you post a tweet on Twitter, or a status on Facebook, it feels like you're taking part in something bigger than yourself, something that exists outside of you, which people have taken to call the so annoying-to-me phrase "the discourse" - that each tweet is just a small part of a bigger whole.
People comment on and complain about "the discourse" all the time (I'm aware of the irony), many tweets are about Twitter, about tweets themselves.
This is a bit vague and wooly, I know.

And there's a self-consciousness that comes from that, too, in the "self-aware" sense, not the "embarrassed by yourself" sense - Google calls it "[doing something with] deliberate and with full awareness, especially affectedly so". When you tweet, you're conscious that you're tweeting.

Memes are extremely self-conscious in this way, I think. People that make memes know they're making memes, and even make them in reaction to and against other memes, sometimes even directly. And it's not just image macros, the many gorilla warfare copypasta is a prime example. Now, even the biggest newspaper in the world writes about them, as does xkcd.
Would memes have taken off the way they have without this self-consciousness, without the broadcast?

Actually, as I write this, it's occurring to me that it might not be broadcast that causes the self-awareness, not with memes anyway. Broadcast is one-to-many, but I have a feeling it's you seeing many different posts from different people all together in fairly short succession, recognising that they're all referencing the same thing, which causes the self-consciousness - that's many-to-one, the exact opposite.

Part of that is being aware that there is a whole, that there's a discourse that exists regardless of whether you take part in it.

---

But contrast this with in-person conversation - I bet you don't consider talking to someone face-to-face as a small part of a bigger whole, that you're "contributing to the discourse" when you talk to a friend.
Last weekend, I had two friends over for drinks - I certainly didn't think of it as part of the discourse.

If you need to display all of your users posts/tweets/comments in a list somewhere, so that people can look at them after they've been posted, you'll need profile or account pages, like Twitter and Clubhouse have; even Snapchat kinda has profiles that you can look at, though it only shows you people's names and how many photos or videos they've sent, you can't see the actual media.

The asynchronous nature requires profiles to exist.

So, we have 2 separate points:

To have a relationship with a person, you need to see them as a specific person, not just as "another user"

and

when I hear someone's voice in an audio message, I feel like I'm talking to them, that I'm talking to a person, that they are a person. With text, "they" are just words on a page, it's harder (but not impossible!) to see the person writing the words as a person

But them together, and you get "it's easier to have a relationship with a person when you can hear them, because you will see them more as a person then".

You make an Internet friend through text, and later on you start talking on Skype, and that's a big step in the friendship? Dating apps start with text messages, don't they, and when things get more serious, you might move onto phone calls?

If you talk to your friends over Facebook, why do you make sure to hang out with them in person too?

Most of the time when people pick up their phones throughout the day and start typing away, start scrolling, they'll be typing and scrolling on async platforms.
You look at a photo your friend posted to Instagram 2 hours ago, yesterday, last week - they don't need to have posted it right when you've opened Instagram.
All the photos on Instagram, they're always there in the background, waiting for you to look at them, always ever-present (it's making me think of the cosmic microwave background). Any time (unless you're in a mineshaft, actually going through a tunnel, or in my bathroom), you can pull out your phone and there they all are, millions of photos and tweets just waiting for your attention. Instagram is always there, always just in the distance, calling for you to pay attention to it. Reminds me of the Amigara Fault.
It's the async nature of the platforms that makes this possible - because you can look at any tweet, or any photo, regardless of when it was originally posted, time doesn't matter (not completely, anyway - you're less likely to see a tweet posted a year ago than you are one 5 minutes ago).

In effect, with async platforms, every user is online at the same time as you. Daniel Cook, in his "Game Design Patterns for Building Friendships" talk (13m56s) would say async platforms have a concurrency ratio of 1:1 - generally, 10% of players of MMO games are online at any one time (10:1 ratio), but only 0.67% of players of an individual console game are (150:1). So, if you have 10 friends and you're playing a game with a 25:1 concurrency ratio, there's a 33% chance 1 friend of yours will be online too - it's likely that most of the time you play a game, you'll have no friends to play with. (even this is an over-estimate, most people only have 5 to 7 friends on their friends list, not 10).
But this is irrelevant for async platforms, it doesn't matter if a friend is on Instagram the same time as you, you can see their photos from last week anyway.

---

Also, I feel like async platforms being ever-present, them being always available, that can distract you from the physical world. Not even "you pull your phone to look at Instagram", that's obvious, we've all seen the people that take their phone out at the slightest hint of downtime, and the newspapers that complain about them; it's also the possibility that you can pull your phone out, that too can distract you from your physical conversations, can make you pay less attention to people you're with. I know, personally, that when my phone is sitting beside me, I can feel a pull to pick it up and see if I have any Facebook Messenger notifications. I've recently started leaving my phone in a different room or in my bag, so I'll pay full attention to people I'm with.
In short, maybe the ever-presence of async communication means you're less present in the physical world?

I can imagine, and I think I've read, that some people have complained about phone calls, because getting called forces you to stop whatever you're currently doing, and only pay attention to them - almost like they think them wanting to talk to you is more important than whatever it is you're doing. Getting called on a phone might be a bigger intrusion, a bigger disruption, than async communication's ever-presence, but it's very time-limited - once the phone call is over, that's it, you can forget about it. Slack may be a smaller-in-magnitude disruption, but it's always there, in the back of your mind, waiting for you. I think it might be worse.

[this isn't finished yet, I've jotted down loads of thoughts but not filled them out yet! read it if you want, but bear that in mind]

So, I've somehow written (and very liberally quoted) 35 thousand words on the problems with current social networks - what could one without so many problems look like?

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Christopher Alexander explains in "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" how we don't decide whether something is a good fit by seeing if it's good, we decide that instead by seeing that it's not a bad fit.

PDF here
He says (page 15 onwards) that every design problem starts by trying to achieve a good fit between 2 different entities, the form (what you're designing, the solution to the problem), and its context (what defines the problem). You can't think of the form alone, you need to think of the ensemble of the form and its context together, you can't separate them.

The biological ensemble is the most obvious example - there, we call the fit between an organism and its environment well-adaptedness. Similarly, a tie and suit is an ensemble - "is this a good tie?" isn't a very useful question; "is this a good tie for this particular suit?" is. A kettle must fit the context of its use, and the technical context of how its made - the perfect kettle that's made out of unobtainium isn't very useful either.

How right a form is in these ensembles depends on how much it fits the rest of the ensemble, its context. There's not necessarily one correct division of ensemble into form and context, so having a good fit across one division doesn't mean you're done.

For example, say we have an ensemble of a kettle plus everything about the world outside the kettle that's relevant to using an making kettles. You'd think that you could divide the ensemble into the kettle and everything else, but you can change that division pretty easily, but the boundary somewhere else - if you say the kettle is the wrong way to heat drinking water anyway, you could redesign the entire house, you've pushed the context back to things outside the house that influence the house's form; you can zoom out. Or, maybe you don't need to redesign the kettle, maybe you need to change how the kettle is heated, so now the kettle is part of the context, the oven the form.

You can see how some designers end up wanting to redesign entire cities when they're asked to make a simple object, their difficult constraints can be loosened by stretching the form-context boundary.

The possible form-context boundaries could get very complicated, so we'll stick to the simplest possible division - the form is the part of the world we have control over, what we change while not touching the rest of the world, the context is the anything in the world that put constraints on the form. Fitness is how well these two things relate - we want to satisfy the mutual demands each makes on the other.

We don't tend to decide how well a form fits its context positively; instead, we think "is there anything that stands out as being wrong?"

Rather than making a list of requirements it'd need to follow, features it should have, we could instead think of negative requirements, things it shouldn't do, problems it shouldn't have.
Helpfully, that's exactly what I've been writing! I'm not going to bother linking to them as I talk about them, that'd be counter-productive, I'd end up linking to every single section on the page.
So, we want our new system to exhibit as few of the above problems as possible. I'm sure it wouldn't be perfect - it'd have its own social pathologies, but they'd be different social pathologies.

We could try to fix every problem I've identified individually, but that could lead to having to play whack-a-mole with the software, anytime you fix one problem you could cause another, and fixing that causes another etc (funnily enough, Christopher Alexander also talked about this in Notes on the Synthesis of Form from pages 38 to 45). We can't fix each issue one at at time, we should try to fix them all at once, one structure, one design, that will sort them all out.

Imagine how global synchronous audio would work - Twitch/ Youtube stream comments, but at a global scale with audio - "nightmare" isn't a strong enough word, you need to structure it somehow, make it not completely global.

Clay Shirky again, in Group as user: flaming and the design of social software (pdf):

Once you regard the group mind as part of the environment in which the software runs, though, a universe of un-tried experimentation opens up. A social inventory of even relatively ancient tools like mailing lists reveals a wealth of untested models. There is no guarantee that any given experiment will prove effective, of course. The feedback loops of social life always produce unpredictable effects. Anyone seduced by the idea of social perfectibility or total control will be sorely disappointed, because users regularly reject attempts to affect or alter their behavior, whether by gaming the system or abandoning it.

But given the breadth and simplicity of potential experiments, the ease of collecting user feedback, and most importantly the importance users place on social software, even a few successful improvements, simple and iterative though they may be, can create disproportionate value, as they have done with Craigslist and Slashdot, and as they doubtless will with other such experiments

John Donne, Meditation XVII, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and severall steps in my Sicknes:

No man is an island entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were;
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

---

Antonio García Martínez again:

The near-term future of social media will involve recreating the oral dynamics of analog human culture in digital form, and reverting the mistakes of the worst-of-both-worlds hybrid we have now.

and

We're evolving from social media that combined the worst of textual and oral culture--impromptu immediacy with real identity but no human connection and infinite searchable memory--to better models that more closely mimic our social hard-wiring and saner real-world norms.
Corollary: The reason why [Clubhouse] works is that the real person is there, quivering voice and all. And most humans can't or won't say 'fuck you' to someone's face, as they would in a RT (which features the emotional gut-punch of orality, but the distance of textuality, exactly wrong).

A reply:

It's amazing how much more respectful Clubhouse is when people have to actually talk to each other.

Everything from everyone all the time is too much. It's unnatural and it's unhealthy. We weren't built to listen to hundreds if not thousands of people every day.
Tools that let individuals publish, but do not seek to amplify them or force them viral, give us that natural, human scale.

What is the "natural, human scale"? -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network#Properties_of_small-world_networks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_structure

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC122977/

real community vs this:

A message to the Army Community about recent events
A community is much more than a "subset of the population that happen to share some traits", the entire US Army can not be a community.

The necessity of feedback to conversation - without that, the ability to scan back through the past and re-perceive previous information compensates a bit, but not enough. See how much easier that is with async text, v.s. listening to an async podcast; so, being taught complex information is best in sync conversations, preferably audio (if you work in a currently-remote office, when you're discussing something difficult, do you switch to Zoom from Slack? I do), then text, with async video third, and podcasts listened to while walking a distant fourth. I tried once to listen to Quanta Magazine's podcasts while walking, and the amount of times I had to stop walking, guess where to skip back to, skip back and try to understand what was said, it all just made it not worth the hassle.

When you talk, you shouldn't be talking to the whole world, to an infinite number of people - you should know (in the "be able to identify the specific person" sense, not the "acquaintance" sense) the limited number of people you talk to.

Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having. What Speakers' Corner (where the law applies as fully as anywhere else) demonstrates is the tolerance which is both extended by the law to opinion of every kind and expected by the law in the conduct of those who disagree, even strongly, with what they hear.

From the condemnation of Socrates to the persecution of modern writers and journalists, our world has seen too many examples of state control of unofficial ideas.

A central purpose of the European Convention on Human Rights has been to set close limits to any such assumed power. We in this country continue to owe a debt to the jury which in 1670 refused to convict the Quakers William Penn and William Mead for preaching ideas which offended against state orthodoxy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redmond-Bate_v_DPP

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-25/forget-tiktok-clubhouse-is-social-media-s-next-star

A game?
1km*1km resolution world map, people are actually there, they're little sprites that can move about - pretty much Runescape chat, but with spatial audio instead
Pretty much a game
https://mobile.twitter.com/CaYD4D/status/1246563401196810240
You can only hear people physically close to you
"Globally local", or something like that - similar to the real world in that you can go anywhere, but you can only hear people near you
Supports sync natively, but also async, maybe?
You "publish" files/images/audio etc into the space around you - kinda supports explicitly async
Daniel cook's video says events can keep people in a place for longer, allows for more synchronous players, very much like needing a reason to talk to someone, possibly a function of Karamja fishing
A key part of the attraction of Twitter etc. is the number of people you can talk to - that number is far higher with async than sync, so a sync platform could easily die out because you check it out, there's no one around to talk to, so you close it - not an issue with async. Kids only play outside when other kids are outside too, that's a coordination problem (you could call it the self-sustaining critical mass problem) very similar to that in sync communication platforms - Christopher Alexander describes the problem, in his pattern 68, Connected Play, which I've quoted above:

A typical suburban subdivision with private lots opening off streets almost confines children to their houses. Parents, afraid of traffic or of their neighbors, keep their small children indoors or in their own gardens: so the children never have enough chance meetings with other children of their own age to form the groups which are essential to a healthy emotional development.

Last week I spoke at the New_Public festival in an “online park” where designers, urbanists, and artists explored how to create better “digital public spaces”. While preparing for the session I hosted, I started questioning how we came to understand our social media platforms as the “new public square” in the first place. The road to widespread internet adoption was paved with spatial metaphors, which helped non-technical people wrap their heads around this brand new technology. We drove down the information superhighway, we visited cyber space, we navigated to web sites. Software designers were known as digital architects who built virtual places for work and play. We talked about the internet as if it was outside of us — an environment to wander around in, an ocean to surf.
_{https://aaronzlewis.com/blog/2021/01/17/inside-the-digital-sensorium/}

^ is ironic, we use spatial metaphors to describe the internet, but very very few websites actually encode space or place

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/structurally-induced-acedia

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Can you (temporarily?) fence off a small area, like Makespace's "Rooms"? Also Houseparty, each person could have their own house where they can choose to let someone in or not, when they come to the door, less explicit relationship management. You could permanently let your friends come into your house whenever they want, like giving them a key. You could get notified when someone logs in and is in your house, like houseparty does.
The further someone is from you, the longer your message takes to get to them?
Friendship like Black Ajah cells, 3 people in each, but you know them 2 and 1 other person, also that bit in APL on communal eating & friendship

Clay Shirky talking about a conference call with a chat window & wiki at the same time, work zoom calls with slack open, you need text chat alongside to reference stuff, online material since everyone is already online and you can't just show them your phone in person
Proximity based text messaging in a single tab, like runescape does - when anyone near you posts a message, it stays until there are x messages total

Twitter has "main characters", accounts that become infamous for a day or two, like "bean dad2 earlier in the year. I'd say a goal of this new platform would be there not being any main characters, you don't hear about the latest blowup on y, how everyone is talking about x and how stupid the whole thing is; hopefully the only thing you'd hear is "y is such a nice place to be, it doesn't have any of the nastiness like that other place".
This is basically what Venkatesh Rao says here:

A positive sign about substack is that I was largely unaware of what seems to have been some big culture war skirmish around it last week... despite writing two newsletters on it. It seems to lack the contagion dynamics of more public media.
The substack audience does not feel monolithic the way patreon and medium did/do. The platform is the backend, the writer is the middle, the reader is the edge. With other media, platform feels like the middle topologically.
I would guess the subscription patterns are rather random since they are writer driven rather than platform driven
It feels like I literally don’t have to care who else is on the platform, kinda like I share roads with people whose politics I can be indifferent to. It’s commodity infrastructure.
Possibly deplatforming as a tactic does not work on commodity infrastructure. The platform brand has to add distribution amplification for deplatforming to be a credible attack surface
I suspect this is because the “excess” attention you might get on other platforms is a capturable mechanism. Either regulatory or mob capture.

It wouldn't need to replace anything, all platforms have their uses, this would just be somewhere suited to conversations

Ideal content moderation: you don't need it, similar to how you don't have to moderate what people say in their own homes - if you don't want to see something, you don't need to explicitly say "I don't want to see this", you just don't talk to people about that kind of stuff. Moderation, blocking, etc just isn't needed in the first place, because the system is local, not global.
Blocking is a permanent negative decision, letting someone into your house is a temporary positive decision -> coheres with context collapse across time, people aren't necessarily the same year later, so you can admit them now and not in a year.
Temporary/ephemeral vs permanent groups, permanent groups need higher barriers

Technically you don't even need profiles, if everything is local - what this tweet shows could be impossible. It could be not possible (for a user) to know what someone has said unless you directly heard it, or even whether they have an account in the first place.

Pattern #193, half-open wall http://www.iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl193.htm
Pattern #183, workspace enclosure http://www.iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl183.htm
Pattern #148, small work groups http://www.iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl148.htm

The above is just on the social design, I've not touched how it'd work technically yet. This might be a good place to start, if possible.

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It turns out this sort of thing already exists! Branch and Gather both look pretty good. You can see they focus more on the lack of serendipity you get without audio and positions, but there are more problems than that. Some text on Branch's website:

Walk in and out of conversations just like real life.

"walk" being the operative word there.

Funnily enough, you probably wouldn't call what I'm describing here a "social network", and that seems like a sign pointing to something important. Branch again

Branch is a virtual office where you can move around like a video game

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My special circle of living Hell awaits.