Discussion question: If you were sent back to the year 2000 with the goal of positively steering the trajectory of social media, what would you do?
This came up in a discussion with Olivia Jimenez at ICML. The point is that this is supposed to mirror our current situation with respect to AI. I think it’s interesting both from a “What would the ideal global policy be if you were world dictator?” perspective and from a “How would you steer towards that policy?” perspective.
(I’ll post some of the answers I’ve heard in a comment.)
Here are the two most interesting answers I’ve heard to this question:
(From David Bau, who told me this a few years ago, not in response to this particular discussion question.) Force social media platforms to federate or adopt open protocols. “Federate” means that they all serve the same content; e.g. different email servers are federated in the sense that Gmail users can send emails to Outlook users and vice versa. Web browsers all serve the same internet using open standards (HTTP/HTML). David argues that in this world—since social media providers wouldn’t have a content moat,—there would be low barriers to entry, which would cause a race-to-the-top on user experience (including e.g. content recommendation engines that actually make users happier). I’m personally pretty unsure—maybe instead low barriers to entry would cause a race-to-the-bottom on addictiveness.
(From Olivia Jimenez.) Avoid the advertising model. The argument is that the subscription model has overall better incentives, since platforms are competing to provide users something that they would pay for (and therefore presumably provides them value, according to them), in contrast to the advertising model, where the incentive is to compete for user attention.
(From David Bau, who told me this a few years ago, not in response to this particular discussion question.) Force social media platforms to federate or adopt open protocols. “Federate” means that they all serve the same content; e.g. different email servers are federated in the sense that Gmail users can send emails to Outlook users and vice versa. Web browsers all serve the same internet using open standards (HTTP/HTML). David argues that in this world—since social media providers wouldn’t have a content moat,—there would be low barriers to entry, which would cause a race-to-the-top on user experience (including e.g. content recommendation engines that actually make users happier). I’m personally pretty unsure—maybe instead low barriers to entry would cause a race-to-the-bottom on addictiveness.
We can sorta compare podcasting and youtube here. It seems to me that youtube has the better user experience, but is also much more addictive. More generally, comparing open source/free software versus proprietary software, proprietary software is very often much more “out to get you”, while free software usually has absolutely horrible user interfaces[1].
This can also be seen in RSS, and as far as I know there was minimal work on content discovery algorithms there.
Note also that email has a pretty bad UI too, despite it being supported by many otherwise pretty good at UI companies. Horrible in this sense means that sending & opening emails is actively repulsive to many in a way that (say) sending or reading a slack message is not.
You can also compare Mastodon to Bluesky while people were leaving Twitter/X. Mastodon is squarely in the open protocol camp[2] and existed for far longer than Bluesky did (and therefore had a content moat compared to Bluesky), yet more people joined Bluesky than Mastodon. I’m not sure the reason, but I think it adds to the trend of open source protocols being very very hard to get regular consumers to like. So I’m not sure how useful moats actually are when it comes to social media.
This is not to say the proposal (assuming it’d even work) would fail (not being out to get you is a very strong positive), but I don’t think you would see many of the positive aspects of social media that we do see.
Horrible not in the sense that its disgusting to the nerds who built it, or nerds in general, but in the sense that it is often unusable unless you are willing to read sections of the manual, which nobody who is not a nerd is.
I think the basic problem of social media is that if you have a lot of data about user behavior, you can train AI systems which goodheart on some metric to get the user to do stuff they don’t self-endorse.
The questions, in my opinion, are therefore
How do you prevent the companies from getting that information
How do you prevent the companies from using that information
How do you prevent the companies from goodhearting on user behavior
Social media is also useful, and we’d like to preserve that aspect. Here is a list of things we’d like to preserve about social media
Ease of information and content discovery
Networking
Maintaining network connections
Therefore solutions like “ban companies from storing user information” seem a priori suboptimal, as they make content discovery harder.
I don’t think it’s correct to describe the optimization social media companies do as Goodharting. They’re optimizing for exactly what they want: money. It’s not that they want what’s truly best for their users and are mistaking engagement for that—I think it’s pretty clear at this point social media companies don’t care at all about their users’ wellbeing.
Discussion question: If you were sent back to the year 2000 with the goal of positively steering the trajectory of social media, what would you do?
This came up in a discussion with Olivia Jimenez at ICML. The point is that this is supposed to mirror our current situation with respect to AI. I think it’s interesting both from a “What would the ideal global policy be if you were world dictator?” perspective and from a “How would you steer towards that policy?” perspective.
(I’ll post some of the answers I’ve heard in a comment.)
Here are the two most interesting answers I’ve heard to this question:
(From David Bau, who told me this a few years ago, not in response to this particular discussion question.) Force social media platforms to federate or adopt open protocols. “Federate” means that they all serve the same content; e.g. different email servers are federated in the sense that Gmail users can send emails to Outlook users and vice versa. Web browsers all serve the same internet using open standards (HTTP/HTML). David argues that in this world—since social media providers wouldn’t have a content moat,—there would be low barriers to entry, which would cause a race-to-the-top on user experience (including e.g. content recommendation engines that actually make users happier). I’m personally pretty unsure—maybe instead low barriers to entry would cause a race-to-the-bottom on addictiveness.
(From Olivia Jimenez.) Avoid the advertising model. The argument is that the subscription model has overall better incentives, since platforms are competing to provide users something that they would pay for (and therefore presumably provides them value, according to them), in contrast to the advertising model, where the incentive is to compete for user attention.
We can sorta compare podcasting and youtube here. It seems to me that youtube has the better user experience, but is also much more addictive. More generally, comparing open source/free software versus proprietary software, proprietary software is very often much more “out to get you”, while free software usually has absolutely horrible user interfaces[1].
This can also be seen in RSS, and as far as I know there was minimal work on content discovery algorithms there.
Note also that email has a pretty bad UI too, despite it being supported by many otherwise pretty good at UI companies. Horrible in this sense means that sending & opening emails is actively repulsive to many in a way that (say) sending or reading a slack message is not.
You can also compare Mastodon to Bluesky while people were leaving Twitter/X. Mastodon is squarely in the open protocol camp[2] and existed for far longer than Bluesky did (and therefore had a content moat compared to Bluesky), yet more people joined Bluesky than Mastodon. I’m not sure the reason, but I think it adds to the trend of open source protocols being very very hard to get regular consumers to like. So I’m not sure how useful moats actually are when it comes to social media.
This is not to say the proposal (assuming it’d even work) would fail (not being out to get you is a very strong positive), but I don’t think you would see many of the positive aspects of social media that we do see.
Horrible not in the sense that its disgusting to the nerds who built it, or nerds in general, but in the sense that it is often unusable unless you are willing to read sections of the manual, which nobody who is not a nerd is.
Read this wikipedia section for why Bluesky isn’t fully open, as they like to claim.
I think the basic problem of social media is that if you have a lot of data about user behavior, you can train AI systems which goodheart on some metric to get the user to do stuff they don’t self-endorse.
The questions, in my opinion, are therefore
How do you prevent the companies from getting that information
How do you prevent the companies from using that information
How do you prevent the companies from goodhearting on user behavior
Social media is also useful, and we’d like to preserve that aspect. Here is a list of things we’d like to preserve about social media
Ease of information and content discovery
Networking
Maintaining network connections
Therefore solutions like “ban companies from storing user information” seem a priori suboptimal, as they make content discovery harder.
I don’t think it’s correct to describe the optimization social media companies do as Goodharting. They’re optimizing for exactly what they want: money. It’s not that they want what’s truly best for their users and are mistaking engagement for that—I think it’s pretty clear at this point social media companies don’t care at all about their users’ wellbeing.