Goldkin @Goldkin@awoo.space

I guess I have longer thoughts on this that I need to spend more time studying, and I need step away to do something unexpectedly, so I'll leave it there for now.

But I suspect there are lessons to learn here from earlier social diasporas and migrations of people, in how this cycle to and from larger platforms will play out, and what it means for trying to establish a home and presence online.

Building on kind of the longish thread from a few days ago: larger social media sites, in the absence of scalable moderation practices, have created an ecosystem in which filters stabilize on the loudest and most persistent voices in the room. Which is why "clickbait populism" and associated tribes thrive over on birdsite, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, etc etc etc.

Better moderation, and moderation of smaller federated instances, solves much of this problem.

I've been spending a lot more time off of the main social media sites, and it's really been helpful.

I've been thinking a lot about this observation as I rethink how I interact online (full thread: https://twitter.com/AstroKatie/status/984606232408461313):

Also, the author of the book is definitely not a nice person, and there are multiple cases when I wanted to fling the book across the room.

So, be prepared for that. But, I do not doubt his credentials or experience on this topic.

So, in that context, it may be worth reading by anyone experiencing general weariness towards larger social media sites, while not being able to put a finger on exactly what causes them to be so caustic.

I suspect there is much more to be written on this topic, particularly as folks pull away from Twitter and rebuild primary sourcing methods and good practices in moderation.

Which, in a way, makes me feel good about Mastodon and its forks' future, as these needs are rediscovered.

In total: if not a _good_ summary read on this topic, it is a book to pick up to obtain general familiarity with what is happening to Twitter and Facebook. It is also a good postmortem on what to not do with the direction of Mastodon or the administration of particular sites.

It's also a scathing rebuke of algorithmic moderation techniques and the "wisdom of crowds" as a source of knowledge, when a site lacks an amalgamation of experts and firsthand experience.

So, what is to be done?

Here, the author provides a few cursory suggestions, including policy changes, general preparedness for smear campaigns, and stepping away from sites like Twitter and Facebook entirely and to "rebuild civil society on the ground, not online." I'm inclined to agree, though I think this argument is somewhat extreme, and it ignores the notion of rebuilding these platforms without making them amenable to marketing campaigns and legions of online trolls and bots.

I shy away from calling this a "fake news" problem, because the problem isn't sources of disinformation, but rather the structure of the platforms themselves. And here, the author launches into how adversarial actors -- including incubator fora like 4chan, terrorist organizations, and nation states -- use these ecosystems to push their preferred narratives. Unmoored from other sources of truth, these actors cultivate or create opinion leaders that can weaponize preferred narratives.

The narrative trips over and self-congratulates itself in several places, detracting from what is otherwise an astute observation. Early adopters of online discussion fora and media still had centralized sources of truth to turn to, be they news sites (ie, via RSS readers) or blogs concentrating expertise. This is not true for the current social media environment, with sites like Reddit, 4chan, Facebook, and Twitter instead choosing to elevate the loudest voices in the room.

Specifically, it lays out the premise that, in the context of pervasive attempts to create filter bubbles -- both by social media companies trying to divide marketable segments of a population, and by populist opinion leaders and state-sponsored actors trying to push particular narratives -- social media has come unmoored from the sources of truth that normally bind societies together. Instead, these sites are now creating irreconcilable tribes of self-enforcing confirmation bias.

I have been doing a lot of dark reading lately on social media, which coincidentally, is why I've been so scarce. I've been revisiting my relationship with how I post online and what sources of media I consume, in the context of troll armies and other afflictions over on birdsite and its brethren.

In that context, I ran across this book: https://www.amazon.com/Messing-Enemy-Clint-Watts-ebook/dp/B072HLRW6Y. While provocative and redundant in its narrative, it provides a fair summary of what's happening to online social fora.

@mawr PS: thank you for articulating why I fled SO and Reddit. Same observations, in re, gamification by assholes.

@mawr Oof.

I think we’re learning that scalable moderation vs mobs and bots is A Major Problem, and that explaining this in a way that pierces technocratic “wisdom of crowds” arguments requires having The Talk on how less privileged groups are targeted and intimidated.

Which has a low chance of ever going well, given how far tech filter bubbles deviate from the needs of queer communities.

@frameacloud I’m not sure if the extreme amounts of tribalism both platforms are experiencing are a sign of the times, an untenable privacy landscape, or sweeping popularity of social media in general. But, it factors into how I approach using each platform.

Agency over my private data has become chiefly important until there are better ways to mitigate dox-and-mob scenarios. To that end, and to my surprise, Twitter still has the better tooling.

@frameacloud FWIW, I just deleted the official Twitter app from my phone last week and migrated fully to third-party client software. I cannot deal with Twitter’s ads or algorithmic timeline, so having both filtered from my feed is a huge bonus. It’s also nice to be able to take control over blocking and filtering at the client level.

Unfortunately, abuse scenarios have caused me to pull way back from posting on either platform. Still sorting that out.