Social junk is a feature, not a bug

Moving beyond ads will take more than pay-for-content

My early career was spent building a pretty successful banner network, coding the algorithms that attempted to pick the most engaging and highest-grossing ads to display. I am, therefore, to blame for what we’d like to fix. This is post 2 of 3 which introduces credo — our new platform that reinvents social around credibility. I highly recommend you read the first post before this one.

Twitter fire lights up a room full of problems

Wherever you stand on Musk’s time at the helm of Twitter since he famously, loudly, and perhaps unwillingly finally acquired it earlier this year, you cannot deny Twitter is 🔥 right now.

Oh, it takes a lot of fires to keep it going, and the fires are getting more bizarre. Just last week, Musk seemingly set Twitter on fire with an ill-conceived ban of bare mentions of other social networks, just to reverse it 24h later, only to follow up with a kind of self-enkindling by offering to step down according to the results of the Twitter poll he ran and that he promised to honor.

These fireworks might seem like shots of adrenaline to revive a stale platform, but they serve yet another purpose. My own conspiracy theory is that Musk wanted to wiggle out of the deal because he realized how bad the business of Twitter actually was. That would explain the immediate, seemingly indiscriminate sacking of the critical workforce, the radical (or panicky) swings in strategy and policy, the doxxing and then banning whatever he thought doxxing meant, and of course, the tiresomely *trumpesque* jostling with the media. Whether you believe it’s random or reason, I think it’s time to admit it — these pyrotechnics distract us from the real problems of social business models.

The problems are neither new nor unique to Twitter, but they are illuminated brightly here by all the furor of Musk’s rather public “throw and see what sticks” experimentation to try to rescue it.

In fact, Musk bemoaned at least one of the major symptoms just before being in charge: the feed algo.

The central issue is how to make it appear as serving the user while making it actually serve the company. That algo is evidently failing on both fronts.

It comes down to the problem of selecting the most useful — or — the most engaging content to fill the precious little real estate of our mobile viewports and keep our attention on it. Because that’s the gold — our attention is the precious resource all major social networks today are harvesting for profit. The method is engagement, and the force-feed-algo is the instrument.

Of course, harvesting isn’t a perfect analogy — attention is spent in return for something. The model today builds on the model that’s as old as ad-based media, where you are promised information and entertainment in return for your attention to the ads. Adding connectivity, belonging, and status, platforms today have more to offer in that trade, but there’s also more competition for our attention. Hence, the platforms need to at least appear useful. Still, the prerogative to generate profits from our attention ultimately wins.

You might argue that it should be possible to solve for multiple goals, and I would agree it’s possible for a while. Still, the pursuit of profits (yes, greed) eventually wins over all other things like ethics, ideals, and even morals.

This truth is evident as you consider that the Big (evil) Tech didn’t start out that way — Twitter, Facebook, IG and Reddit didn’t start out to manipulate us to become addicted; they all started out focusing on the utility, but let’s face it, they are now well into the monetization phase. These businesses are competing on how effectively they are grabbing the share of our attention, at whatever the cost.

The robots are not for us

By now, the sophistication of behavior forming by these companies has reached state-of-the-art; we’re no longer talking about irksome interruptions of “commercials” but far more sinister approaches. I’m not breaking a story here; it’s already been well covered and argued well: addiction-forming is the primary mechanism for usurping our attention. The substance is the brain juice (serotonin? Oxytocin?) that makes our brains pseudo-happy, even if it makes us our lives actually miserable.

This probably taps some DNA hardwiring in all of us. Just observe a tired parent give an iPad to a restless child and watch the child suddenly transfixed by whatever video or game usurps their attention. You can then feed such children vegetables, dress them without them kicking, and they quit annoying you with their “are-we-there-yet”’s. Their rebellious volition is suddenly subdued, their attention usurped, and, if only for a time — they do what you want.

The social force-feed engagement algos are tuned to generate addictive engagement that also passivates our minds. The endless scroll and pull-to-fetch trans fuelled by the mixture of vague-to-acute FOMO, desire for limelight or for just mind-numbing entertainment, while the ads and propaganda are pecking at the subconscious, shaping opinions and desires. And just like children who have too much iPad time begin to misbehave, their self-control ability sharply diminished, we also feel irritable and annoyed when we don’t get our feed-fix or not enough of it.

This explains why the algorithms that are supposed to be so bright are also so bad at filtering out the noise: the noise is by design — both to annoy us a little and to give an illusion of content-richness, streaming of the need-to-know goodness. Somewhat perversely, it lowers the bar of expectation and makes encountering even mildly useful content seem so much more satisfying.

Of course, no illusion would be complete without the illusion of agency and control. Social networks let you have plenty of agency: follow people, hearts and likes, etc. The illusion is that doing so leads to predictable results: surely, the algorithm will improve your feed if only you “train it.”

But we really don’t. Partially it’s the ego anxiety: as Elon recently realized, people are anxious about public displays of affection (likes), but the main reason is that we instinctively know this is just feeding the monster — they are just inputs in the same addiction-forming engagement algorithm, which isn’t ultimately interested in making your feed useful. Its’ primary job is to make it addictive.

Quit the feed

Most platforms now let you switch to the chronological feed as advocated by Musk (before he bought Twitter), but we‘ve already established this is simply not a viable solution unless you’ve blocked out, as some have, most of Twitter and are just there to hear from a handful of sources.

So that makes our options: a) use the feed that keeps you glued or b) glue yourself to the app and scroll through all the updates ourselves. Guess who wins.

Social media AD-based revenue models are essentially adversarial; they juxtapose, instead of aligning, the goals of the actors in the system.

We need a system that aligns our goals equitably. Credibility makes this possible like never before. This is the topic we’ll explore in the next blog.

Culture of credibility vs tabloid takes

Once the incentive alignment is achieved, the platform can focus on providing the best utility, replacing force-feed algo that wants to own your time with something that gives you back control, and time.

We’re building credo so we can all spend less time on social,
but get more out of it.

Credibility enables that. Not only does it help us skip the noise, but being integrated into the very dynamic of how we engage with content and one another, it nurtures a different culture on the platform, a healthier, more respectful, and more collegial atmosphere.

When we are no longer liking and hearting for posterity, we’re creeding privately — so that your credograph gets better, and in the process, we’re building a collective graph that also builds accountability. As we covered in the last post, this is critical to support accountable pseudonymity, which, in turn, enables genuine interactions.

We can’t wait for you to see it in action.

As always would love to hear your thoughts here (at least for now), and if you think credibility matters or want to learn why — sign up for a pilot, it’s only a couple of weeks away!