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Social Media Systems and Democracy (Patreon)

Published:
2017-10-15 20:08:46
Imported:
2026-06

Content

Today I gathered and posted some stuff I've written about social media systems over the years, including a lengthy treatise from 2015 which I never finished or published before now.

I'd like to write up a 2017 update sometime, though unless this Patreon suddenly gets vastly more popular I'm not going to have the time until at least 2018 (I can see from my April 2015 calendar that even that unfinished draft took 10 hours to write, and that's without the giant pile of social media data regarding the 2016 election etc that one would have to spend weeks researching to do a proper job of it now...)

It's nice to think though, that if this crowdfunding thing works out, maybe I'll be able to spend more time on stuff like this, rather than squeezing it in on weekends when I can.

Anyway! Thanks for being here, and I'd appreciate your thoughts on the piece, and what in particular you think would be a fruitful direction to look in if I were to do a 2017/2018 update.

Files

Social Media Systems and Democracy

There's an article I've been meaning to write for 4 years. Every time I read another headline about fake news or social media and democracy, I once again say to myself "I've really got to write that thing I've been meaning to write!"

Comments

Anonymous

When I read posts like these my immediate reaction is to wonder what can we do to make it better. I know a lot of people game social media systems for evil. Should we game them for good? One good example I think is the vlogbrothers youtube channel. They noticed that good comments on their videos tended to get a lot of thumbs up (people expressing agreement) but unthoughtful trolling comments tended to get a lot of replies (people arguing back). You see this on twitter too. Good tweets tend to get a lot more RTs than replies. Trump's tweets on the other hand get a way higher reply to RT ratio. Anyway vlogborthers found that youtube's algorithms favored replies over likes so those unthoughtful comments were the ones rising to the top. To fix this they asked their viewers to reply to comments with '+' if they liked them as well as giving a thumbs up. This boosted comments that people actually liked. Their viewers have now been doing it for years I believe and it works. I'm not sure if the vlogbrothers are the only channel that does that but they're the only ones I've noticed. So basically I'm just hoping we're not completely powerless in all of this and we can find a way to make these systems, as flawed as they are, work for good.

Anonymous

big topic. still thinking :)

vihart
>>7769949

I use the "+" example often! On the one hand, there's sometimes ways to game the system a little bit... on the other hand, that kind of "gaming" shows something about the company and its goals... if something as easy as making likes count as much as comments would make comments substantially more thoughtful and intelligent, yet Google chooses the other way, then it's clear thoughtful and intelligent comments is not their priority. Given their entire business model is ads, it's not surprising that only engagement metrics matter. So something to make it better is to move away from ads... which is one reason I don't have them! (And of course people who support adless content also are doing something to help the incentives be for meaningful engagement rather than ad-driven-business-model engagement, so that helps!)

vihart
>>7769949

And if I ever work on an update/followup of my social media systems thoughts, I definitely mean to get more into incentives and what that means for the system, and ads in particular. I think about advertising, and what it does to our culture, a lot more than is healthy probably