See https://wiki.c2.com/?RealNamesPlease on what was a pre-social media social media site. Unfortuately it went south due to inadequate bot protection.
I've tried a life without any social media, starting 4-5 years ago. No facething, no twitting, no insta, never touched tic-toc.
Life got better, especially my relationship with life, and people, and I have a large family, and lots of friends all over the world. I've experienced 0 downsides. I love my family but I don't miss seeing them "living the life", or being "blessed", in staged locations, lol. The "look-at-me!" of facething always seemed like more work than it was worth, a bit squirmy.
I sleep MUCH better; I'm less frustrated; I spend WAY more time in real time/the real world; I solve problems more effectively; my collaboration skills are better; I'm a better listener; my focus has improved by an order of magnitude. The use-case is BS... for me. In hindsight, it was snakeoil. Never, ever going back.
p.s. I became a much better stockbroker/portfolio manager when I stopped passively consuming news in 2002, and by better I mean 2 things:
1) my focus remained on the right things, and
2) I was less stressed and a better leader for my clients.
My suggestion: step 1 is to rescind the law that exempts SM companies from the responsibilities of a publisher. That they got away with this in the first place is a travesty; it unleashed harm for money, which a mature society should not accept.
I sound holier than thou above, and I don't want to; it's wrong. I have MANY friends and relatives struggling with addiction to the electronic stimulus. For many people it's as hard as crack cocaine... because it was intended to be so. SM companies used A-B testing, our well-researched weaknesses and biases to devastating effect.
I'm reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for the first time and, wow it's a page-turner! The symbolism of a crowd of pitchfork carrying citizens burning an empty SM office to the foundations is satisfying catharsis for me.
O, bless you. I was fortunate enough to retire from medical practice before I needed a smart phone and subsequently never bought one. Social media has, therefore, never existed for me. I use the internet as a research tool and communicate by email when I need to, but that's it. Everything I've ever heard or read has bemoaned humanity's addiction to SM, which I can understand, but for me it's strictly theoretical in the same way that cocaine use is a problem for some people. It's like Mars: I know it's there but it has zero impact on my life. Again, I recognize that this is pure luck. I applaud you for being able to make the choice to step back.
I have an image of a good friend of mine, we lunch weekly, who is a "leg-pumper" to manage excess energy/anxiety:
right leg pumping, left hand tapping the screen every few minutes for new stuff. Outside a restaurant his phone makes multiple sounds for different notifications every few minutes. He reports not sleeping well, and his digestion is volatile.
There's a lot to think about, especially, I think, about who has agency, and when. I read a book in 2011, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", by Daniel Kahneman that left me quite shaken, lol, about my choices in life.
That poor soul! It sounds like he's been mentally invaded.
My background isn't at all legal, but that really sounds actionable to me. Speaking medically, I would absolutely approach your friend as though he DID have a cocaine habit.
Yes, an apt image, and like a fungal infection his phone's priorities become his priorities, intention or not! He can't see it and, now, he can easily normalize his circumstances by observing the substantial population who are the same.
Maybe I am being pedantic, Matt - but you just wrote an entire article about social media and smartphones, but somehow headlined it as being an article "about" the Internet.
The Internet isn't actually doing ANY of these things. It is a globe spanning network of networks, and it does not have an opinion on what traffic is traversing it. The Internet is literally a collection of routers and fiber optics, and nothing more.
The equivalent would be to write an entire article about how many people are killed by cars every year, but writing the article from the perspective that the material we build our highways out of is the problem. Or complaining about prank calls from the perspective that the phone company should "do something" about it.
The Internet is a VERY neutral medium. Yes, having the ability to communicate instantly around the globe provides a new facet to what humans can do - and like any technological innovation, it has the potential to do good, or evil.
But it isn't the miracle of the Internet dividing us, it is social media, and WHAT we access using the Internet.
Individual human beings could do a lot to improve the situation if we have the will and capacity. Personal posts about our lives or our small businesses only--rather than re-posting without verifying from g-d-knows-what-source. Refuse the 'pay-to-play' and learn organic content growth strategies for small businesses. Spend less time online and go see your friends IRL, start entertaining at home again. And set boundaries online. If you see people re-posting crap: don't argue in the Comments (that supports the algorithms). Instead, silence those folks for 30 days, or unfriend if their posts are consistently egregious. If you still love them, call them on an actual phone to check in, instead. Part of the enshittification of social media is that it preys on the worst social habits folks have always had (yelling over top of each other, spouting political opinions with no receipts, hogging all the attention, re-telling stupid trivia because we're bored and trying to make conversation, being cruel to people you disagree with, etc). If we cleaned up our interpersonal dynamics IRL, we'd likely do a lot of mop-up on social media as well. Probably not going to happen though.
I have always thought that claiming social media is the 'new public square' was incorrect. The internet itself is the modern public square. Anyone can create a website, blog etc. to broadcast their opinions (informed or otherwise uninformed) just like the oddball that used to stand on the street corner handing out flyers of a weird ideology. Social media is simply using someone else's soapbox in the public square.
Yes, I have been seeing so much AI slop that people reshare not realizing it’s AI generated that I have gone from spending too much time a day on Facebook to not even opening the app every day anymore. It’s better for my mental health - but I do wish there was a way to keep the connections with people far away that I don’t necessarily want to give my cell number to.
I think AI will destroy social media though. Or at least as it used to be. But maybe that’s good. We need more face to face interaction and a rebuilding of our communities.
Could the platforms be programmed in such a fashion that you must agree to accept AI generated content? I, for one, would decline, at least then knowing that what I was receiving was human generated content.
There are some AI detector tools. They're imperfect - missing a small percent with false positives being a larger concern. (Especially if someone has used a tool like grammarly to help with their grammar and proofreading - it becomes more likely to be flagged as AI generated falsely.)
The bigger thing is it's not just bots who post it, but genuine people who create an AI prompt and then post something for clicks/likes/etc. I think it's so ubiquitous at this point that it would be hard to stop. I do like this idea - I'm just not sure what implementation would look like. Maybe it starts with removing the bots from facebook?
I liked FB as a way of hearing what is going on with people I didn’t see that often but FB shows me weird stuff that’s not that for like past few years so it was easy to stop FB. But now I’m addicted to Reddit cuz it feel like anything I want to know I can find there and some of the posters seem like they know what they’re talking about. But what worries me is how these sites work to bring together freaky nasty people who would never have connected years ago. Like imagine if Paul Bernardo had been able to connect with others like him.
Great column on evergreen topics (enshittification - feels like two t's is not right, but it is), social media shitt show (yes, I know, there's not supposed to be two t's, but I'm forming a pattern here), and making the internet in general less shitty.
Things I've noted that are increasingly becoming enshittified in my own life:
Politicians At All Levels (self-evident)
My Google Nest Mini (used to love it, now nearly unusable)
AI replacing regular Google Search (please make it stop)
Air Travel (let us count the ways)
Social Media (as you've outlined)
Newer Vehicles (the newest vehicles our family owns are 2008 Toyotas, which are still performing admirably past 300K, but I read so many horror stories of friends with unreliable newer autos)
Smartphone Battery Life (why I have little hope of the long-term reliability of plug-in electric cars)
Microsoft Windows (should have stopped at Windows 10)
Major Appliances (dreading replacing our 10 year old dishwasher, 20 year old gas range, 20 year old fridge-freezer, 30 year old Maytag washer-dryer, and 50+ year old furnace)
Late Night 'Comedy' Shows (please end these soon)
24 Hr News Networks From Anywhere In The World (unreliable, mostly entertainment)
Shoutout to Cory Doctorow, the Canadian author who coined "enshittification" and you should read him if you are interested in this stuff. Start with the short story "Unauthorized Bread" and you'll see how he got this well before we got to this point.
At one level I feel like this is a simple and obvious problem. The private profit motive leads to the dopamine addiction design / rage farming / echo chambers / doom scrolling etc, since the goal is to keep you on the platform for maximum time and therefore exposed to maximum ads, etc.
A public social network (or perhaps several internationally that are federated and can integrate) would take much of that away. I can hear the "you want the CBC to control my internet lol!" comments coming but try to imagine something better. There's lots of different possible governance models, and behind them all would be one very simple premise: total transparency in the code, the algorithms, the decisions about what you are exposed to, when and why. Default "censorship" would be things that actually violate the criminal code / adult material. If you want to filter out things a panel of "wise people" determines are truly misinformation, great, if you don't trust any such people, also great.
You select if you want pretty much family and friends, or some news, and what kind. You can have linear timelines.
None of this would be trivial but at this point I think it would be worth trying. I wonder what the current social network moguls would think of it all if a serious attempt was made.
I think as a first step, I'd eliminate anonymity from the internet and require users to provide proof that they're a real person. Eliminating anonymity is useful in terms of cutting down bad behavior.
People are emboldened when they think they're anonymous, and it's easier to make outrageous statements or utter falsehoods. As the New Yorker cartoon put it, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog!"
How many times do you hear somebody rant and threat behind a pseudonym? It's like the people who'll swear and act aggressive from inside their car, if somebody cut them off, but would never act that way if they were cut off by somebody on a sidewalk. Similarly, it's amazing how many people claiming to be fighter pilots have time to post on chat sites every day. How many viral hoaxes get going because of the benefit of anonymity for the originator?
The trick is verifying that somebody is who they say they are. Bot farms already put a lot of effort into generating enough verisimilitude for their "users" to evade screening tools implemented by tech companies. We'd almost need to tie it to a government registry like a driver's license or passport. However, the idea of having to get a government license for internet access makes my skin crawl when I imagine the possible abuses resulting from politically-imposed "terms and conditions".
I do a lot of hobby information sharing on FB, but it's still a cesspool of garbage. I left all the others. Until some method of weeding out lies and misinformation is accomplished, it will remain effectively garbage. AI will likely make it worse as deepfakes get better. Social media is cancer.
Social media is the cancer of modern society. It’s never ending push to further polarization and rage is why we act like we do. It’s why Trump is president.
I’ll miss parts of it but I’m going to delete FB and instagram. Never got into the others.
What gets me is the torrent of 'offers' that come from companies to 'help you out'. Free for now or for a period of time but then the email comes with the info that they are updating or 'modernizing' the ap and now it will cost you. Bugs me no end.
Having oft opined that future historians will determine that social media was the cause for the destruction of western civilization, and only reluctantly having a FB account for a month in 2021 and using none of the others I would welcome the possibility of a hard stop/reset on that part of the internet.
Steps to limit online gambling and sports betting would also be helpful but with governments now running what used to be criminal enterprises, and making big bucks doing it, that would be wishful thinking I suspect.
Having to use real names would probably be a good start towards accountability.
Agree.
See https://wiki.c2.com/?RealNamesPlease on what was a pre-social media social media site. Unfortuately it went south due to inadequate bot protection.
I've tried a life without any social media, starting 4-5 years ago. No facething, no twitting, no insta, never touched tic-toc.
Life got better, especially my relationship with life, and people, and I have a large family, and lots of friends all over the world. I've experienced 0 downsides. I love my family but I don't miss seeing them "living the life", or being "blessed", in staged locations, lol. The "look-at-me!" of facething always seemed like more work than it was worth, a bit squirmy.
I sleep MUCH better; I'm less frustrated; I spend WAY more time in real time/the real world; I solve problems more effectively; my collaboration skills are better; I'm a better listener; my focus has improved by an order of magnitude. The use-case is BS... for me. In hindsight, it was snakeoil. Never, ever going back.
p.s. I became a much better stockbroker/portfolio manager when I stopped passively consuming news in 2002, and by better I mean 2 things:
1) my focus remained on the right things, and
2) I was less stressed and a better leader for my clients.
My suggestion: step 1 is to rescind the law that exempts SM companies from the responsibilities of a publisher. That they got away with this in the first place is a travesty; it unleashed harm for money, which a mature society should not accept.
I sound holier than thou above, and I don't want to; it's wrong. I have MANY friends and relatives struggling with addiction to the electronic stimulus. For many people it's as hard as crack cocaine... because it was intended to be so. SM companies used A-B testing, our well-researched weaknesses and biases to devastating effect.
I'm reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for the first time and, wow it's a page-turner! The symbolism of a crowd of pitchfork carrying citizens burning an empty SM office to the foundations is satisfying catharsis for me.
I totally agree with your STEP 1 - if Meta was legally responsible for what is happening to its users, I think the world would be a better place,
Check out the book “Careless People” about Facebook before it became Meta. You will double down on your theory!
O, bless you. I was fortunate enough to retire from medical practice before I needed a smart phone and subsequently never bought one. Social media has, therefore, never existed for me. I use the internet as a research tool and communicate by email when I need to, but that's it. Everything I've ever heard or read has bemoaned humanity's addiction to SM, which I can understand, but for me it's strictly theoretical in the same way that cocaine use is a problem for some people. It's like Mars: I know it's there but it has zero impact on my life. Again, I recognize that this is pure luck. I applaud you for being able to make the choice to step back.
Thank you; I actually feel quite lucky!
I have an image of a good friend of mine, we lunch weekly, who is a "leg-pumper" to manage excess energy/anxiety:
right leg pumping, left hand tapping the screen every few minutes for new stuff. Outside a restaurant his phone makes multiple sounds for different notifications every few minutes. He reports not sleeping well, and his digestion is volatile.
There's a lot to think about, especially, I think, about who has agency, and when. I read a book in 2011, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", by Daniel Kahneman that left me quite shaken, lol, about my choices in life.
That poor soul! It sounds like he's been mentally invaded.
My background isn't at all legal, but that really sounds actionable to me. Speaking medically, I would absolutely approach your friend as though he DID have a cocaine habit.
"mentally invaded"
Yes, an apt image, and like a fungal infection his phone's priorities become his priorities, intention or not! He can't see it and, now, he can easily normalize his circumstances by observing the substantial population who are the same.
Maybe I am being pedantic, Matt - but you just wrote an entire article about social media and smartphones, but somehow headlined it as being an article "about" the Internet.
The Internet isn't actually doing ANY of these things. It is a globe spanning network of networks, and it does not have an opinion on what traffic is traversing it. The Internet is literally a collection of routers and fiber optics, and nothing more.
The equivalent would be to write an entire article about how many people are killed by cars every year, but writing the article from the perspective that the material we build our highways out of is the problem. Or complaining about prank calls from the perspective that the phone company should "do something" about it.
The Internet is a VERY neutral medium. Yes, having the ability to communicate instantly around the globe provides a new facet to what humans can do - and like any technological innovation, it has the potential to do good, or evil.
But it isn't the miracle of the Internet dividing us, it is social media, and WHAT we access using the Internet.
I would suggest this is pedantic, yes.
LOL
Fair.
Individual human beings could do a lot to improve the situation if we have the will and capacity. Personal posts about our lives or our small businesses only--rather than re-posting without verifying from g-d-knows-what-source. Refuse the 'pay-to-play' and learn organic content growth strategies for small businesses. Spend less time online and go see your friends IRL, start entertaining at home again. And set boundaries online. If you see people re-posting crap: don't argue in the Comments (that supports the algorithms). Instead, silence those folks for 30 days, or unfriend if their posts are consistently egregious. If you still love them, call them on an actual phone to check in, instead. Part of the enshittification of social media is that it preys on the worst social habits folks have always had (yelling over top of each other, spouting political opinions with no receipts, hogging all the attention, re-telling stupid trivia because we're bored and trying to make conversation, being cruel to people you disagree with, etc). If we cleaned up our interpersonal dynamics IRL, we'd likely do a lot of mop-up on social media as well. Probably not going to happen though.
I have always thought that claiming social media is the 'new public square' was incorrect. The internet itself is the modern public square. Anyone can create a website, blog etc. to broadcast their opinions (informed or otherwise uninformed) just like the oddball that used to stand on the street corner handing out flyers of a weird ideology. Social media is simply using someone else's soapbox in the public square.
Yes, I have been seeing so much AI slop that people reshare not realizing it’s AI generated that I have gone from spending too much time a day on Facebook to not even opening the app every day anymore. It’s better for my mental health - but I do wish there was a way to keep the connections with people far away that I don’t necessarily want to give my cell number to.
I think AI will destroy social media though. Or at least as it used to be. But maybe that’s good. We need more face to face interaction and a rebuilding of our communities.
Could the platforms be programmed in such a fashion that you must agree to accept AI generated content? I, for one, would decline, at least then knowing that what I was receiving was human generated content.
There are some AI detector tools. They're imperfect - missing a small percent with false positives being a larger concern. (Especially if someone has used a tool like grammarly to help with their grammar and proofreading - it becomes more likely to be flagged as AI generated falsely.)
The bigger thing is it's not just bots who post it, but genuine people who create an AI prompt and then post something for clicks/likes/etc. I think it's so ubiquitous at this point that it would be hard to stop. I do like this idea - I'm just not sure what implementation would look like. Maybe it starts with removing the bots from facebook?
I liked FB as a way of hearing what is going on with people I didn’t see that often but FB shows me weird stuff that’s not that for like past few years so it was easy to stop FB. But now I’m addicted to Reddit cuz it feel like anything I want to know I can find there and some of the posters seem like they know what they’re talking about. But what worries me is how these sites work to bring together freaky nasty people who would never have connected years ago. Like imagine if Paul Bernardo had been able to connect with others like him.
Great column on evergreen topics (enshittification - feels like two t's is not right, but it is), social media shitt show (yes, I know, there's not supposed to be two t's, but I'm forming a pattern here), and making the internet in general less shitty.
Things I've noted that are increasingly becoming enshittified in my own life:
Politicians At All Levels (self-evident)
My Google Nest Mini (used to love it, now nearly unusable)
AI replacing regular Google Search (please make it stop)
Air Travel (let us count the ways)
Social Media (as you've outlined)
Newer Vehicles (the newest vehicles our family owns are 2008 Toyotas, which are still performing admirably past 300K, but I read so many horror stories of friends with unreliable newer autos)
Smartphone Battery Life (why I have little hope of the long-term reliability of plug-in electric cars)
Microsoft Windows (should have stopped at Windows 10)
Major Appliances (dreading replacing our 10 year old dishwasher, 20 year old gas range, 20 year old fridge-freezer, 30 year old Maytag washer-dryer, and 50+ year old furnace)
Late Night 'Comedy' Shows (please end these soon)
24 Hr News Networks From Anywhere In The World (unreliable, mostly entertainment)
Netflix-DisneyPlus-Amazon-Etc Streaming (maybe .01% watchable shows)
Hollywood (eventually, something else will eclipse it, we can only hope)
I could go on - please add your own!
Thanks, Matt for a fun column!
The problem isn't the internet or even the social media platforms, the problem is us.
This is the internet we have shown with our actions we wanted and it is the one we deserve.
There is no regulation that will change the internet, the culture must change from within.
Shoutout to Cory Doctorow, the Canadian author who coined "enshittification" and you should read him if you are interested in this stuff. Start with the short story "Unauthorized Bread" and you'll see how he got this well before we got to this point.
At one level I feel like this is a simple and obvious problem. The private profit motive leads to the dopamine addiction design / rage farming / echo chambers / doom scrolling etc, since the goal is to keep you on the platform for maximum time and therefore exposed to maximum ads, etc.
A public social network (or perhaps several internationally that are federated and can integrate) would take much of that away. I can hear the "you want the CBC to control my internet lol!" comments coming but try to imagine something better. There's lots of different possible governance models, and behind them all would be one very simple premise: total transparency in the code, the algorithms, the decisions about what you are exposed to, when and why. Default "censorship" would be things that actually violate the criminal code / adult material. If you want to filter out things a panel of "wise people" determines are truly misinformation, great, if you don't trust any such people, also great.
You select if you want pretty much family and friends, or some news, and what kind. You can have linear timelines.
None of this would be trivial but at this point I think it would be worth trying. I wonder what the current social network moguls would think of it all if a serious attempt was made.
Thanks DMW for referencing Cory Doctorow. One can’t talk about enshittification without Cory. I was dismayed when Mr Gurney omitted him.
I think as a first step, I'd eliminate anonymity from the internet and require users to provide proof that they're a real person. Eliminating anonymity is useful in terms of cutting down bad behavior.
People are emboldened when they think they're anonymous, and it's easier to make outrageous statements or utter falsehoods. As the New Yorker cartoon put it, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog!"
How many times do you hear somebody rant and threat behind a pseudonym? It's like the people who'll swear and act aggressive from inside their car, if somebody cut them off, but would never act that way if they were cut off by somebody on a sidewalk. Similarly, it's amazing how many people claiming to be fighter pilots have time to post on chat sites every day. How many viral hoaxes get going because of the benefit of anonymity for the originator?
The trick is verifying that somebody is who they say they are. Bot farms already put a lot of effort into generating enough verisimilitude for their "users" to evade screening tools implemented by tech companies. We'd almost need to tie it to a government registry like a driver's license or passport. However, the idea of having to get a government license for internet access makes my skin crawl when I imagine the possible abuses resulting from politically-imposed "terms and conditions".
I do a lot of hobby information sharing on FB, but it's still a cesspool of garbage. I left all the others. Until some method of weeding out lies and misinformation is accomplished, it will remain effectively garbage. AI will likely make it worse as deepfakes get better. Social media is cancer.
Well written and thoughtful.
Social media is the cancer of modern society. It’s never ending push to further polarization and rage is why we act like we do. It’s why Trump is president.
I’ll miss parts of it but I’m going to delete FB and instagram. Never got into the others.
What gets me is the torrent of 'offers' that come from companies to 'help you out'. Free for now or for a period of time but then the email comes with the info that they are updating or 'modernizing' the ap and now it will cost you. Bugs me no end.
Having oft opined that future historians will determine that social media was the cause for the destruction of western civilization, and only reluctantly having a FB account for a month in 2021 and using none of the others I would welcome the possibility of a hard stop/reset on that part of the internet.
Steps to limit online gambling and sports betting would also be helpful but with governments now running what used to be criminal enterprises, and making big bucks doing it, that would be wishful thinking I suspect.
Yes, I now realize Idiocracy was actually a documentary of things that were about to happen.
Check out Gander Social. A new Canadian platform being developed ... https://gandersocial.ca/
You have me thinking now...