> At their core, social networks are primarily about one thing: Building social capital through signaling.
Maybe for the author.
People also use social networks without expecting or requiring any net social "capital" benefit through "signalling".
Examples:
- keeping in touch with people (privately or publicly)
- inform others about something they may be interested in (without needing or requiring acknowledgement)
- lessening loneliness
- gathering or dispensing intel on a topic
- filling in time / looking for entertainment
I can readily think of many more reasons than the singlular one of signalling to heighten social status. I'm sure that occurs, but listing it as a primary reason cast the article immediately in disfavour for this reader.
The problem with "signalling" theories is that they can explain nearly anything. Why did you do X? Why, to show other people that you are the sort of person who does X. Even if you didn't know it at the time.
It's hard to see how you would go about falsifying it. It's way too convenient as an explanation for whatever you want. It's less a theory and more a very particular lens to view the world through. Nearly anything can be slotted into it.
Any theory that can't be invalidated is not worth seriously debating. It may be true or it may not - what difference does it make if it's impossible to know?
Person A: "Social signalling explains all of human behavior!"
Person B: "But how do we know that's true?"
Person A: "Who cares? It explains everything."
Person B: "So what can we do with this knowledge?"
Person A: "Explain things we already observed to be true."
Person B: "So what have we gained from this information?"
Person A: "A theory that explains everything."
Person B: "But that theory doesn't actually teach us anything new?"
Person A: "Yep! We already know everything! Wooo!"
There are very real situations where signaling actually explains something. Mostly they involve people doing something that seems irrational or hypocritical on the surface; the hidden variable is of course social approval. In other situations, however, 'People do X to signal they do X' really is just a complicated way of saying 'People like to do X'. Once you have the action, it really doesn't make any sense to bother figuring out why.
It doesn't explain porn. Most people watch porn in isolation and never talk about it so it can't be based on signaling. Hence it doesn't explain everything.
It's valuable because it explains some actions that may be foreign to the observer. It may not be particularly common in most people's lives, and it may not occur to some people at all, but it's especially true in some politics or business relationships that are incomprehensible if you don't have it as a tool.
I really don't see how a theory that can't be invalidated is useful for anything, other than a rhetorical device. Apart from a thought experiment along the lines of The Flying Spaghetti Monster, what good is a theory that can never be tested? It's a tautology.
Well, you can also use it to transmute your feelings of inadequacy into feelings of cleverness and insight.
It's not that life's passing me by as I punch a keyboard at a big multinational, no siree, it's those those people posting pictures of themselves having fun who are the real fools.
This is not equivalent since it is reliant on the existence of the FSM, which is not usually taken to be proven, unlike (hopefully) the existence of other people.
How is the existence of other people proof of signalling theory? I believe you exist. Signalling theory could, for example, say I am holding up this argument on the internet because I want to show others how persistent I am. How does your existence prove or disprove why I am saying what I am saying?
But it doesn't explain anything. It's ability to explain is entirely unproven.
The social sciences for a long time were just ancient white men writing ever larger treatises "explaining" everything. None of it had any explanatory power and fell apart at the slightest mention of an actual experiment.
Sure, but it's not to hard to think of examples of things which signalling theories would say shouldn't happen. For example, people should not be impressed by signals that are known to be easy to fake or that are in no way impressive in the first place.
This may seem trivial, but it does have implications. For example, if you claim "I did X over the weekend" and I reply with "I call bullshit", it implies not only that I doubt your claim, but also that at least to some extent I care whether it is true, and also that you care whether I believe you or not (or at least that I think you care).
> For example, if you claim "I did X over the weekend" and I reply with "I call bullshit", it implies not only that I doubt your claim, but also that at least to some extent I care whether it is true, and also that you care whether I believe you or not (or at least that I think you care).
This doesn't refute anything, in fact it reinforces the theory! Why did I make a claim about what you did over the weekend at all other than to signal to you about it? And of course I care what you think, because that's the entire point of social signalling.
I could say your entire response was a signal itself, and you're not consciously aware of how signalling is driving your behavior. At this point the theory becomes useless.
A good theory has hypotheses that can be (in)validated.
The point is that you might as well just not do the thing and say you did it, because nobody will ever verify it. So the doing of it can't have been motivated entirely by signalling; it would have been easier to do something else and just lie.
Before we had a theory of planetary motion, epicycles were used. While obviously we stopped adding circles everytime a planetary prediction was off, the fact that some waves can approximate any reasonable function *is* interesting in it’s own right. I take a similar stance with signaling.
Every theory can be invalidated by analysis or empirical verification, the latter is not the only criterion of truth even for the most empirical epistemologies.
I think the difference is in how extensively you broadcast it. I like gardening, but I don’t care if nobody knows that I do. I think this is evidence that I’m not doing it for signalling reasons. So in that sense it’s falsifiable.
But if you do post about it (perhaps you're hoping to find like-minded gardeners in your community?) and I say you're just doing it to signal, how would you falsify that?
Isn’t sharing it publicly already a counter argument to “I don’t care if nobody knows about it”? Thus you wouldn’t have to falsify.
We could think of a scenario where his neighbor shares information about his (the authors) garden. In this case, if the author would seek measures to delete these posts, it might be interpreted as “signaling that he does not care and even doesn’t want others to know”.
I agree with you that signaling always shows intention (ie wanting something). You can “want not to want something”, though (:
I think if you define "signaling" as "wanting someone to know about it" then of course any social media communication is "signaling," but then is any communication at all. Oviously when I speak I want to be head, so it's not "I don't care if nobody knows about it."
But I think that's far too broad a definition of "signaling." The original article says "Building social capital through signaling."
When you post about your gardening to see if there are any other gardeners you can connect with, I don't think it's necessarily to "build your social capital," yet you can prove that it isn't.
The theory has one big problem, but you are misdiagnosing it.
> Why did you do X? Why, to show other people
Try this approach instead:
Would X ("a trip to Athens") happen if there was no perspective to ever mention X in any future communication between humans? (Yes/No)
In this take the theory can become verifiable with some work.
Alas, the assumption is that you know you'll be cut off from transferring* bits of information from your brain to other brains. As humans are very social, this is almost useless. In actual world, even if you're going solo to Mars one-way, you probably will communicate back to Earth and more colonists may come join you (think => social status). If I am sailing around the world alone, I can still expect to return and write memoirs. So the only remaining things are the most shameful i-am-never-telling-that-anyone personal secrets. And that's quite a narrow use.
So, saying that Ivy League wouldn't happen in <some out-of-this-world scenario where humans do not socially interact> is very impractical.
[*] I'm saying the theory doesn't judge whether the signal (the information that flows) is to be trusted or untrusted. I think most commenters here wrongly conflate "signalling" with "slightly lying".
I agree with your assessment and honestly, it's refreshing to see. A lot of writers/podcasters have made their name by diminishing issues as being purely about signaling alone. It's not possible for some to imagine someone has certain beliefs for their own value. For example, they believe people support issues, not because they believe in them, but purely to show people in their social circles that they are a part of the club. While this may be true in some cases, I find it hard to believe it''s large enough to be of any particular concern. Also, it's a pretty boring non-issue to make ones name on.
You’re both right. In philosophy, you call this an “ultimate” cause, vs. a “proximate” cause.
You push a marble with your finger, and it moves. Why? Because the momentum from your finger was transferred into the marble when you touched it (proximate cause); equally correctly, it moved because you pushed it (ultimate cause).
People are complex. Maybe you post for more than one reason.
None of your examples are unique to social networks. There are many ways to keep in touch with people and many ways to gather information. These methods are usually superior in most respects too. What social media, like facebook, does do, though, is bundle it all together. It's like a supermarket.
But it goes beyond just being a supermarket. It has a unique selling point: the ability to signal. In my experience, the number of people who use social networks merely as email/news/entertainment replacements without succumbing to status signalling is very small.
My impression is that the author is analyzing the successful social networks. Think about all the ones that died in the process of Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, etc getting to where they are? All of those lacked ways to "building social capital through signaling".
I might be wrong though, didn't put a lot of thought on it, but friendster, orkut, myspace, and many others were not quite as good in signaling or proof of x as the ones that are now well stablished.
while i agree with the sentiment, if you are viewing this through a 'mass media theory' kind of lens, it can still hold true / be useful, even in the given examples
For this new trend of monospaced fonts on a blog - just keep in mind that proportional fonts and the entire study of kerning exists to improve readability. Monospaced fonts, while not bad, aren't optimal for reading long form text.
I don't know what to think of that. In one way the articles of Julian are always interesting articles, but in another way it just shows that even on HN bruteforce-posting works
And I've seen it for the first time. I think it's beneficial if it gets reposted (as long as there is sufficient time in between) as it will reach more readers.
Through the short lifetime of entries on the first page, only a small part of HN readers will likely see it.
I don't think that's the goal of HN to let anyone know about all interesting stuff that exists. Newsletters are better for that I think.
This one may interest you https://hnblogs.substack.com/ daily blog posts of HN (disclaimer I'm the owner) and this specific article was included in the 6 august 2020 post
OP here. This was my second time submitting this article but only because the mods emailed me inviting me to do it. I got this link for context on the resubmitting feature: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380
> Has anyone built a multiplayer version of Anki yet? Flash cards would be a perfect proof-of-knowledge mechanism and could easily be turned into a game where you compete against friends.
Isn't this basically Duolingo? Complete with internet points, leaderboards, and reinforcement mechanisms for signing up your friends.
I don't mean to be the typical "stick-in-the-mud" HN poster here, but the concept of "proof mechanisms" is absolute nonsense. Anything can be a proof mechanism, and therefore nothing is. See that Benz? It's proof that she's got money. See that guy's biceps? It's proof that he lifts heavy weights. See my clean apartment? It's proof that I just spent 4 hours cleaning it.
"Proof mechanisms" are vacuous. It would be more interesting to see why some social networks nail building feedback loops that give us that sweet dopamine hit and compel us to come back for more (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) and why others suck at it (Google+, MySpace)
Author asks for "Strava for reading". Goodreads already has this functionality. You show off which books you have read, rate and review them, and set goals for books read per year, then compare with your 'friends'.
The implementation is a constant source of complaints here and other places, but it does have the basic idea the author wishes for.
A smaller network that more obviously encourages creative production is streak club. [1] Not altogether different from the mainstream networks, but the clear expectation of both content creation and categorisation boosts the signal to noise ratio. Not affiliated and can't personally speak to it's effectiveness to motivate, but certainly an interesting example.
It's clearly a myth put about by the people who want to signal how rich they are!
It's funny, to me, the only things a Patagonia vest signals are (a) a lack of style (b) a lack of understanding of how heat escapes from the body and (c) a craven desire to fit in to a particular social scene.
I can't comment on vests for fashion, but for outdoor activities they're a nice big of kit to have, particularly when it's cold but you're exerting yourself. They add warmth while keeping your arms mobile and preventing you from overheating.
> The cost to participate in TikTok’s status game is a lot higher than Instagram’s (compare a well-made dance choreography on TikTok to your median Instagram travel post)
TikTok is dominated by teenagers dancing in their bedrooms. What does he mean by "cost"? Because if it's financial cost, making a viral TokTok costs nothing, whereas taking an instagram photo with your partner on a hill in Athens at least costs two tickets to Athens. It's not technical skill either, most TikTok stars have not studied for years.
I believe he means time. Taking a picture such as the example takes a few minutes while on vacation. Tiktok dances are made after entire days of training.
I am attempting to build a social network that is designed to generate truth, or at least emphasize expertise rather that simply attention.
I think of social networks like brains. They're both a graph of interconnected nodes that pass messages. The problem with our networks now as I see it is that the social networks are set up to maximize message transmission (i.e. attention) rather than truth.
We need a layer on top, like the neocortex, to connect the nodes and give them different weights to generate reliable outputs like a machine learning model does. That's what I'm building.
The problem with Quora, as I see it, is the question-answer format lends itself to a restricted form of dialogue which can't really serve the "sense-making" function for society.
Imagine if in the past, journalists could only write about what their readers asked them about. It wouldn't have generated the best result.
We need a system that allows people to put forth their ideas and let them be evaluated by peers. We need the scientific method at scale.
I'm of two minds about this sort of analysis of social capital.
1. It's interesting; a lot of human behavior involves presentation to other human beings, and social media platforms can definitely be seen as a medium for signalling.
2. It's dismal and reductive and other words that signal that I don't like it for personal reasons.
I find it weird how no one here in the comments acknowledges this signalling behaviour. I identify to this, see it as a problem and fight it every day. It's present everywhere, I realise that I always want to signal that I'm doing something nice to others or cool that people could/should envy me for.
I'm aware of it but it's not enough to make it disappear. How did you handle it?
I've been thinking about signalling a lot lately as well. I guess we're hard wired to some degree to do this sort of stuff? It's a way to express yourself and who you are in many ways, but doing it excessively is narcissistic?
Maybe for the author.
People also use social networks without expecting or requiring any net social "capital" benefit through "signalling".
Examples:
- keeping in touch with people (privately or publicly)
- inform others about something they may be interested in (without needing or requiring acknowledgement)
- lessening loneliness
- gathering or dispensing intel on a topic
- filling in time / looking for entertainment
I can readily think of many more reasons than the singlular one of signalling to heighten social status. I'm sure that occurs, but listing it as a primary reason cast the article immediately in disfavour for this reader.