edit: I share this post because it discusses the history of social networks getting bought out in a way that I found insightful. be aware that it is quite angry; I generally have a fairly strong “you are angry, and I am over here” response, so I am able to comfortably take in another’s anger without automatically agreeing; I fairly soberly agree with the direction of anger, and it is the direction I have interest in sharing. In particular, it has a call to action at the end that I think is sweet and good. Folks in comments suggested not copying full posts (contrary to the instructions on the linkpost form?) so I edited that out; recommend reading the last quarter particularly much more, though the whole post is interesting to me.
She mentions many vanished or withered social networks. The three examples that she focuses on are Prodigy, LiveJournal, and Twitter, though she also mentions many others. Prodigy was a pre-Internet dialup service, where she first saw the clash between community and profit. LiveJournal is a blogging service that was bought by a Russian company. And Twitter was the “microblogging” town square of the world, now under new management and future unknown.
Regarding the relationship between community and profit… Her theme is that community keeps springing up online, only to be destroyed by ignorant profiteering. Maybe that does happen. But let’s also consider some other factors. First, it’s actually expensive to operate and administer a social network. Second, the users are constantly at risk of migrating on to new territories. Third, communities have internal, purely social dynamics too, that affects their viability.
Ideally, someone would fact-check her narrative by asking to what extent these other factors were also at work in the rise and fall of the networks she names. For example, are Friendster and Myspace ghost towns because the executives mismanaged them, or is it simply that most of the users migrated to Facebook?
I would like to mention two other virtual communities. One is The WELL. This is an Internet community almost as old as Prodigy, that’s still running because it remained based in an actual community of Bay Area techno-intellectuals, rather than wanting to be everything to everyone. Thirty years is a long time for an Internet community to survive, it might be worth studying.
The other is the far more obscure Quillette Circle. Quillette started out a few years ago as part of the “intellectual dark web”, the vague alliance of a few conservative and classical-liberal thinkers against the rise of progressive “cancel culture”. Quillette posts essays and then allows comments. A few years back, they tried adding a full-fledged forum. But by then, it was the Trump years and you now had conservative populism and the alt-right in the mix too. The forum began to be dominated by unwanted opinions from the right, like “anti-vaxers” and “election deniers”. Eventually they were driven away by heavy-handed moderation, but after that the forum was a ghost of its old self, and was finally shut down entirely.
I mention this because it touches on a different aspect of her narrative, Internet community being affected by politics. In the case of LiveJournal, the claim is that agents of the Russian state bought it because Russian opposition was using it, and then also wrecked it for e.g. western LGBT users by imposing conservative Russian rules on content. Maybe this is what eventually happened. The purchase of LiveJournal happened just before the Medvedev interlude, and several years before Putin’s return as president and the increasingly conservative turn in Russian society; I remember thinking of it mostly as Russia keeping up with Internet culture by buying a readymade western network rather than developing one of its own. I think Russian-language LiveJournal is still quite lively… Also, the purchase happened just as Tumblr opened up. Again, I would want to check her account of events. Did English-language LiveJournal die off because of Russian policies, or because the users were attracted by Tumblr, or was there are interplay between the two?
Finally we have the ongoing saga of Twitter, which includes both the economic and the political/cultural themes. I remember being astonished that Musk would want to take on the thankless responsibility of overseeing one of the biggest social networks; at the time, I theorized that maybe the core agenda was to keep corporate tax rates down by defeating the Democrats in the mid-term elections… But, he did always have that “X.com″ idea for an “everything app” (and the Chinese Internet now offers real-life examples of this), and maybe he’s actually earnest in his fears that threats to free speech (“woke mind virus”, Covid-phobia) will cause civilizational stagnation.
Valente seems to have two complaints about the new Twitter regime. One is economic, that it will “take away the livelihoods of millions of people”. The other is cultural and political, that it will “welcome monsters” and “turn against” a long list of things (Ukraine, vaccines, Jews, LGBT, welfare programs, liberal democracy).
On the economic side, Musk actually talks about making it possible for Twitter content creators to make money, although for now we don’t know what that means. When Valente says all these ordinary people will lose their livelihood, I can only think she means that they or their audiences will leave Twitter because it has become inhospitable or intolerable. And this seems to hinge on everything in the second complaint. Social interactions in the old Twitter were curated according to particular cultural and political agendas, in addition to the bare legal minimum of restricting scams, libel, etc. Musk retained that legal minimum but stripped away the higher curatorial apparatus. Some new system of standards and practices is going to replace it, but perhaps it will be a “liberaltarian” one rather than a “progressive” one.
So, you weren’t certain about the appropriateness of posting this here, and I agree that it’s not in the usual style of current LW content, but I think the message is important (and the tone requires a little detachment to read), and is something for any tight (online) community to be mindful of. Personally I found it to be a very good read, so thank you for bringing it to my attention!
I would normally delete a post downvoted below zero; this one is
relatively important[edit: in review, I think I mean is on a relatively important topic, though it could be improved upon], so I’ll leave it. though if it gets downvoted more, I will in fact delete it. comments about why it’s downvote-worthy/delete-worthy would be appreciated, if you’d like me to delete it.I wouldn’t like you to delete it and haven’t downvoted it, but my guess is that the main reasons for downvoting it are (1) it’s not particularly LW-ish content, (2) it has rather a “here is a sociopolitical phenomenon I would like you all to be angry about, and look how some of the people involved are Bad People you ought to feel angry about too” vibe, which tends to be a thing LW tries to avoid, and (3) probably some downvoters have an opposed sociopolitical position and are angry in the opposite direction.
makes sense. 2. aha, I wondered if there was something like that going on. My “anger adblock” is very strong and generally takes verbal anger to be a statement, rather than a demand, in large part because verbal anger has no mechanical impact on me; as such I easily forget others do not respond the same way to reading others’ emotions. Clarification appreciated, edited!
I am voting on this post in such a manner as to keep the karma as close as possible to 0.
On the one hand, I don’t think this content is exactly suitable for lesswrong (for reasons mentioned by gjm).
On the other hand, I do wish there was a sort of… less competitive, higher slack version/section of lesswrong, where people can air their honesty, babble, compose speculative hot takes, shitpost, share cool stuff they made or found online, etc., without having to incur extrinsic incentives but still interact with a culture that is close to the personality of lesswrong. Your post would be fine in that sort of community, and since there is no such community I don’t want to hurt your karma.
(I tried the ACX discord server for those purposes. It was and continues to be a very bad experience; that place is full of sneery sarcastic jerks, and at this time such jerks occupy the moderation positions (with some exceptions; I think Zenbu is nice); it’s a festering wasteland of bullying and uncharitability and I really think Scott Siskind should pay closer attention.)
Oh, please do not do this! If you think something is good, upvote. If you think something is bad, downvote. That’s what the votes are for. If you have no preference either way, abstain from voting.
The way you described it, your vote is equivalent to “my opinion is the opposite of other people’s opinion, whatever that is”. That’s just throwing sand into the gears. Other people express their preferences, and you are just trying to cancel that. Imagine if many people started doing the same thing.
Also, this kind of voting is time-sensitive. Imagine that there are 5 people who want to upvote an article and 3 people who want to downvote it. Regardless of the order, the final karma will be +2. Now add three more people who want to make the result close to zero. Now, depending on the order of the votes, the result can be anything between −1 and +5.
If there is an article on an important topic written in a bad way, I think a good approach would be to write a summary (written in a good way) and a link to the article.
Posts like “this is an article that does not belong to LW, and I do not even bother to write a summary” should be downvoted without a second thought. Anyone who thinks otherwise is free to post the article again, with the summary.
relative voting—disagree; if I want to state preferences in terms of what a posts karma should be, not in terms of what direction it should move, that seems to me like a reasonable thing to say.
re: don’t belong on lw—sure, but commenting to say it needed a summary is honorable. in general I think it’s slightly dishonorable to downvote without explanation if you push a post further below zero, and I make sure to comment on posts I heavy downvote with an explanation of what would have changed my vote.
being reviewer #2 is bad enough, I don’t want to be reviewer #3!wait that’s actually great, if you ask me. that’s exactly what I do, it’s exactly what I’d suggest, and I don’t think karma 0 should be shameful. I have a habit of deleting heavily downvoted posts because in my emotional view, “downvoted far below zero” means (and in particular, mechanically causes) go-away, whereas “downvoted to zero” means “oh geez I’m not sure about that one chief”.
One point is that the convention is to link to other people’s content with some quotes and motivation for relevance to LW, not to copy it outright.
edited. the post form requests that you copy the whole thing, so I figured it was probably a good idea to do that; I have gone back and forth on when to copy whole posts and not done it before, so this being the first time, I guess I won’t do it again. whoops!
My preference is that (1) you not delete it, even if it gets downvoted (2) you don’t have a copy of the whole essay here. (1) is the more important thing, the point being to preserve whatever discussion takes place.
to clarify, now that there are substantive comments other than “this doesn’t belong on lw”, I wouldn’t delete.
All the comments at this moment are meta (whether it was or wasn’t okay to post this here, and whether it should be upvoted or downvotes or deleted), nothing about the article. So if you deleted this article with the comments, nothing of value would be lost.
Furthermore, the fact that no one discusses the article itself is a weak evidence against it belonging here.