Image via Lucas Crespo.

How to Build a Better Social Network

We just need to think of it like an economy

78 20

Comments

You need to login before you can comment.
Don't have an account? Sign up!
Georgia Patrick over 1 year ago

Uh oh. I wrote a comment and then the Every log in again message popped up. You might want to fix that to HOLD the comment instead of losing it. Maybe you can fix it to recognize the subscriber needs to log in again before accepting any keystrokes in comments? Glad to see Dan and Nir teamwork on this piece.

Dan Shipper over 1 year ago

@[email protected] oh no!! we will add something to our backlog. sorry about that. thanks for reading and commenting!

@goldsdk over 1 year ago

"Proposing solutions" Nice JOB Every.

Dan Shipper over 1 year ago

@goldsdk w00t!!

Malcolm Ryder over 1 year ago

Every week, in the NFL, the poorest team and the least effective team has to perform live against other teams. That performance may be recorded, but on game day the only thing that matters is taht day's performance. Two or three days later that performance is obviously over but also in most respects "gone". The attention to last week's performance, whether it was good or bad, is dissipated. But at the end of the season, the NFL draft explicitly conducts an enormous correction in the probable distribution of future opportunity to perform and recapture attention. The worst teams get the best future-facing choices for renewal and improvement. What's different about this is that it is disconnected from Social Preference. The League and the Media are a networked platform and people who are consumer/users literally invest time and money into being participants for hyper-personalized benefit yet still become "cheeseheads" or join Raider Nation.

The problem with Social Networks is not that they are darwinian, it's that the networking part does not shy away from the social part. The difference between a "social" network, a "news" network, a "knowledge" network, and so on, is a profound difference. No "social" network should be forced to satisfy the requirements of a different kind of network. What is "quality" in social terms? Mainly, the problem to solve is to not conflate different kinds of networks. Not to get argumentative, but DK is not a model of a social network. It's a different kind of network.

Dan Shipper over 1 year ago

@malcolmryder this is an interesting point. is your idea that, essentially, social networks should map social preferences—which don't follow the simple Darwinian performance measurements as NFL teams? therefore, DK would work simply as a media site like Digg but not as a traditional social network?

Malcolm Ryder over 1 year ago

@danshipper Hi there. In my NFL analogy, Raider Nation is the social network; the league is not a social network, and the game audience isn't either.. But I want to be careful and not arbitrary in saying that. I'm not so much concluding as I am hunting.

A la DK, since a poster watches the audience gradually file out of the arena a while after the posting, the poster has no recourse but to prep and come back and perform again if they want the audience to come back. But even with poor attendance and/or shoddy performance, an NFL team has a baseline support system called "League" -- the league makes sure they come back to perform again, and it maintains the opportunity to improve as well. In effect, there's a subsidy in place for league members.

In comparison, where does the subsidy come from that puts a sustained floor under members of a social network? Mostly, it's in marketing one member to another. Social is way different from "free to the public". Yes, I do think that the conceptual distinction of a social network is that it "maps TO" social preferences, without externally judging those preferences.

But I think social networks were just allowed to become containers of any kind of attractor individual persons wanted them to contain, and there's no incentive to have another "equal opportunity" mechanism for the individuals who show up with an attraction.

I've always wondered if charging a dollar a day to use a "social network" would almost immediately verticalize that network into a special interest network, wherein suddenly the quality of the content supercedes the cheap thrill of getting and giving attention that is already "good enough" for a "general" social network. Looking at LinkedIn, what do we think the answer to that question is? The behavior shows enormous pressure to market popular and trendy ideas, and most of the rest of it mimics remote socializing -- i.e., turning a special interest network into a social network. I assume you already looked at this more closely than I; it's interesting to me that (in my view) DK's mechanism of artificially producing supply-side scarcity in an open source environment does not imply that the demand side will get more choosey... and I do get that the algorithms that turn suppliers into a power curve do a lot of what we're now wanting to call "hallucinating"...

@psymplescience over 1 year ago

@malcolmryder kind of agree... this is the old model with [poorly] tweaked tools. Everybody forgot what a free market looks like... A decentralized social platform with P2P ad space and minimal barriers to monetize and a star is born. I call it the social 'homestead act'...

Ernest Oporto over 1 year ago

That recalc done every 10 minutes for every account across the userbase - is that realistic at millions of users?

Dan Shipper over 1 year ago

@ernieoporto almost certainly, yes. something similar has to happen for algorithmic feeds

Avery Simms over 1 year ago

Amazing posts. During 2020 I made a trademark for ppleport. This "idea" was similar to your description for a social media site where users on the network get points and give points from their passport. The more stamps on your passport the better. The global feed resets every 24hrs. You get more points if you go to different countries. I even pitched this to 1 small VCs. Never developed it though. Would like to work on this with ya!

@jimhull over 1 year ago

Nir's approach seems to encourage _quantity_ rather than quality: Unless creators post every hour or so, they fall off the leader board and are never seen again. Just getting onto the leader board would involve an enormous release of content.

Dan Shipper over 1 year ago

@jimhull agreed, that was my feeling on it as well. it's an interesting idea—but lots of potential unintended consequences

@psymplescience over 1 year ago

Still designed in the fragile control model... So much of modern business punishes. You create 'quality' or you will be punished in this manner... Points/rewards/earning should merely be a barrier free option.. Someone may just want to log in and see their grandkids in another state, at their local sporting events... Having a centralized 'point' system will maintain the fragility... In order to create an antifragile system, it needs to be a free market. Also, too much focus on the algo's instead of the king [content creators of any quality and scale; antifragile]
Not being a good academic, I couldn't write out the solution well so I built the prototype instead; i love being in the game anyway. If i demo it (because the new tooling needs to be understood) and you cannot poke holes in its ecosystem/functionality, will you write an article...?

@elwiemo over 1 year ago

I don’t see how DK won’t just reward popularity exactly like the existing SoMes? A scientist posting the cure for cancer will still get drowned out by Taylor Swift’s photo of her breakfast.

Also, what about bots? You could just buy points the same way you can buy followers.

Jeff Dazé over 1 year ago

My concern is that this assumes good faith actors -- this would most certainly be gamed with bots to keep some particular content artificially 'present' which would be self-reenforcing: people would see the 'boosted' content first and as other studies show, people tend to favour what's popular vs what's good. Additionally, those who can afford to buy a bot army will have a massive advantage as they are 'buying' the sustaining points from bots that will remain dormant (and would reduce the 'value' of a point). It's a super interesting concept but the bigger issue is: how do we get people to act in good faith? If you have that then even the most rudimentary system could produce quality results.

@keyhell over 1 year ago

This is a very good idea. It’s entertaining, logical, appealing by its seemed justice, but it not gonna work :-)

Reddit Canvas is simple example of how fanboys will crack the algorithm — coordinate, create multiple accounts, find proper timing, arrange shifts, and boost their nonsense to the top.

I think it’s a very cool idea, but I’m not sure the points system is fundamentally different than distributing likes on Twitter (which Twitter slowly devalues over time as well)

im more interested in solutions that change the sharing mechanic itself so that posting ≠ broadcasting (eg https://plexus.earth)

My ever-growing cynicism suggests that the current stars of social media and a majority of users are uninterested in self-balancing systems, preferring the momentous advantage of incumbents and the feeling of domination that accrues to their various factions.
The ideal network described here is attractive to the minority of users who are actually interested in high quality content vs affirmation of their current mind-set or click-bait titalation.
While I and many readers here would be delighted with a network where attention must be continuously earned, the current social media denizens are unlikely to support it.

@tomskyrme22 over 1 year ago

An alternative concept is to allocate a portion of the financial reward of posting to the value voter. So if the post had a value of $1 (say through ads) then the platform gets $0.25, the poster gets $0.50 and the $0.25 gets distributed to voters.

This distribution is based on the consensus value. So if I rate the post an 8/10 and then the average rating is 8/10 I get a bigger share of the $0.25. If I voted a 4/10 I'd get little to nothing based on how many people voted the post to be an 8/10.

There's more to it but that's the crux of identifying true value through small financial returns that are paired with reputational factors on a social network.

I'm working on a professional network for health and it is something we're going to trial