Isn't this model a bit outdated with prevalence of likes and retweets?
Users on modern social platforms optimize output to maximize favorable responses, thereby gratification. There are not really ceilings, barrier to entry, or way around the system, so it's resistant to spams and manipulations.
Classical BBS systems did have this problem. It was said that a community beegins with interesting people posting interesting topics, then uninteresting people joins to read interesting topics, and ends when uninteresting people starts posting uninteresting topics.
What was missing was feedback signaling, and social media got past this at some point during 2010s.
>There are not really ceilings, barrier to entry, or way around the system, so it's resistant to spams and manipulations.
I feel like we must be using different internets. Spam and manipulation are rampant on social networks lately, far beyond what they used to be, and while there aren't really barriers to entry there absolutely are barriers to reach: you're not as widely followed as the spammers, your stuff will be drowned out.
As evidence I offer: any cursory glance at Facebook or Twitter, both of which have likes and retweets.
> I feel like we must be using different internets.
I can't shake off the thought that this statement might be more truthful than it deserves to be. Some of social media accounts are closer to what you have described, some are more like what I have. The Dead Internet Syndrome must be not spreading uniformly, but there must be significant disparity across fields and bubbles, deepening divides between common folks without clean freshwater supply and those privileged that has access to spam-immune input source.
My Twitter timeline is... not great, not terrible. Reddit is out of question.
Reddit you have control over your timeline. The comments can be good to. Just stick to your interests.
Twitter turned into garbage when Elon decided to make it pay-to-play. Giving Blue Checks ranking boosts and extra power when they block others ruined every reply section. On any even vaguely political tweet you now have to scroll forever through a bunch of illustrated profile pics hurling insults before you can get to a real discussion.
No. Reddit has zero manipulation resistance. Votes aren't working, and its users are too prone to manipulations too. Tangentially and thankfully, current Internet manipulation frameworks appear to have been built for Reddit and its users; it sticks out elsewhere, and those malicious users at individual levels are easy to bump over edge for anyone with experience in other Internet communities.
Twitter is o-kay. They seem to have largely gave up investments on African-Indian spammer program and it's on its way out. Gratification mechanisms outside of the feedback loop such as paid boosts and reward cash are clearly detrimental to creator performance, so they were destined to be filtered out. Pushing blue check contents is like pushing AI clips in style of Tarkovsky to TikTok junkies, it never works.
I think Twitter users by this point as a collective consciousness must have learned that weaponizing Bluesky/Mastodon transition to trivialize corporate influence is a viable short term strategy, considering how slow and tame changes on the platform has lately been. Twitter had always had such mutually toxic and manipulative relationship between the company and its users.
There are pockets of Internet that are still great, definitely. But "likes and retweets" are long-time major features of basically all of the absolute biggest social sites in the world, and they're also some of the most awful ones that people keep looking for ways to leave. So no, I don't think it's particularly outdated. Predictive, if anything.
GP's point is that organized spamming had defeated algorithms and contributing/consuming organic high quality contents is no longer viable. I think that depends.
No longer viable for many / for new entrants on the majority of the social internet, which is facebook, twitter, etc other giga-sites. You can do it if you have other means to jump-start your followers (pre-existing popularity elsewhere, $$$$$ advertising, interaction-farming bots, etc), but they're all catering for celebrity accounts ("real" and manufactured, i.e. facebook spammers) and drowning out newbies because that's what drives giga-traffic and giga-advertising money.
Nobody likes that they are the biggest social internet sites, but they are unambiguously the biggest, by a very large margin, and they like to copy each other's worst profitable parts.
By the massively higher amount of spam and scams on Facebook, compared to IRL.
I don't step outside on any random day and get immediately blasted in the face by dozens of One Weird Tricks and AI-generated images of Jesus crossed with shrimp.
There’s probably over a million literally deranged people on Facebook.
Even if you only come across a tiny fraction of them, that’s still way more then you could possibly ever encounter in real life, in one physical community, due to simple probability and population density…
And building a thing where you massively increase their reach is a decision, yes.
As an example, it could be Nextdoor-y[1], bound to physical location rather than global. And that's not a stretch either: it's what Facebook was in the early days. They decided to change it, to become what it is now.
[1]: I do not in any way mean to imply Nextdoor is doing things right, just showing that "social network structure" is a decision, not some kind of inevitability.
You are assuming that what was interesting for the initial users is exactly the same that is interesting for the increasing mass of joining users, but as you increase the number of users, things that have mass appeal have more likes, retweets, etc. So an interesting but more niche post will potentially receive less average attention than before. Therefore, a niche community loses its defining qualities as the number of users increase.
For advertisement purposes, total engagement triumphs, so this is perfectly fine and lucrative for the platform itself, but the quality is not necessarily maintained.
Users "optimize output to maximize favorable responses" but favorable to whom? The social platforms define "favorable" as "maximizing attention/engagement" and incentivize accordingly, while users may have a different standard for "favorable." The prior can lead to perverse incentives and aberrant interactions between users.
> Users on modern social platforms optimize output to maximize favorable responses, thereby gratification. There are not really ceilings, barrier to entry, or way around the system, so it's resistant to spams and manipulations.
This is nonsense; there are people gaming the system constantly who have to be actively fought. There are whole industries of gaming the feedback. And the feedback process itself distorts the content: it gave us "clickbait" and "youtube face".
I've been watching evaporative cooling of Twitter happen since the takeover and my move to Bluesky, where new users appear in waves every time some new stupid feature is inflicted on the remaining Twitter users.
> This is nonsense; there are people gaming the system constantly who have to be actively fought.
Twitter has gone past that point years ago, possibly more than a decade ago. It's a warzone of drug resistant attention gamers and wannabes with cash to burn for as long as I remember. Maybe it wasn't as much as it is now during 2007-2008.
IMO, clickbaits and even wooow faces can be considered improvements so long that judgement criteria with presenters and audiences are aligned. Ragebaits are bad, open mouth brainrot thumbnails are disgusting, but a clear and content representative thumbnails would be good - the differences are not in levels of amplification relative to unmodified baseline, but in directions(is the "Inception braaam" bad? I love it and I think it's same thing as clickbaits.)
Evaporative effect as laid out in the article is a situation where "players" of social media as a videogame exhausts motives to play it. The game must continuously supply dopamine release to creators, whether by rewarding ever sillier thumbnails stronger or more insightful comments better, to retain useful players for content supply to continue. Again IMO, Twitter had achieved a near steady state cycle of gratification and content drop by architectural design, careful userbase formation, and useful set-in-stone precedents, relatively resistant to sabotaging and/or manipulation.
Is that entire thing a major net negative to this planet? Maybe. One could just say it and few would differ. It's supercharging scholarly experts across various fields and enabling invasive cultural pressures, so it seems neutral to positive to me.
Users on modern social platforms optimize output to maximize favorable responses, thereby gratification. There are not really ceilings, barrier to entry, or way around the system, so it's resistant to spams and manipulations.
Classical BBS systems did have this problem. It was said that a community beegins with interesting people posting interesting topics, then uninteresting people joins to read interesting topics, and ends when uninteresting people starts posting uninteresting topics.
What was missing was feedback signaling, and social media got past this at some point during 2010s.