On 12/27/17, 11:33, Morlock Elloi wrote:
This is not to say that forcing a declaration of unconditional love
through 140 characters (let's take the simplest, apparently benign
formatting constraint) is inherently evil. However, that number was
decided by someone else, not you. And just when you got used/conditioned
to it over years, someone (machine? human?) changed it to 280
characters. So what happens with your previous declaration(s) of love?
Are they now inferior? Now you need to learn how to construct and
interpret new, longer ones. A simple change in format will be (slightly)
shaping your synapses.
The same, but in 1500 words (8600 characters):
(from https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/01/12/birdcage-liners/ )
Birdcage liners
My new year’s resolution was to give up on reading Twitter and Facebook.
I gave up on the feeds because they were making me angry. A lot of times
I was angry because of politics, but even on non-political things, the
feeds seemed like they were full of conflict and stress.
I can’t tell you how much happier I am without them. Am I the only one
that hated reading feeds? Do they make everybody unhappy? And if they
make people unhappy why are they so popular?
Since I design social software for a living I feel like I should have a
professional opinion on why Twitter and Facebook made me unhappy.
Let’s start with Twitter. I used Twitter to keep in touch with friends
and colleagues because I cared about them. Unfortunately, those friends
mostly didn’t use Twitter to share happy news and tell me how things
were going. They used Twitter for bumper sticker flame wars. These were
not the thoughtful long essays on blogs of yesteryear. 140 characters is
too short for that.
Here’s what happened with the 140 characters. You would start out having
some kind of complicated thought. “Ya know, dogs are great and all? I
love dogs! But sometimes they can be a little bit too friendly. They can
get excited and jump on little kids and scare the bejesus out of them.
They wag their tails so hard they knock things over. (PS not Huskies!
Huskies are the cats of the dog world!)”
Ok, so now you try to post that on Twitter. And you edit and edit and
you finally get it down to something that fits: “Dogs can be too friendly!”
All the nuance is lost. And this is where things go wrong. “@spolsky
what about huskies? #dontforgethuskies”
Ten minutes later, “Boycott @stackoverflow. @spolsky proves again that
tech bros hate huskies. #shame”
By the time you get off the plane in Africa you’re on the international
pariah list and your @replies are full of people accusing you of
throwing puppies out of moving cars for profit.
Yeah, I get it, this 140 character limitation was just a historical
accident, and now it’s 280 characters anyway, and you can always make a
Twitter Story, but the flame wars on Twitter emerged from the fact that
we’ve taken a medium, text, which is already bad at conveying emotion
and sentiment and high-bandwidth nuance, and made it even worse, and the
net result is a lot of outrage and indignation.
The outrage and indignation, of course, are what makes it work. That’s
what keeps you coming back. Oooh shade. Oooh flamewar. We rubberneckers
can’t keep our eyes off of it. I don’t know what the original idea of
Twitter was, but it succeeded because of natural selection. In a world
where the tech industry was cranking out millions of dumb little social
applications, this one happens to limit messages to 140 characters and
that happens to create, unintentionally, a subtlety-free indignation
machine, which is addictive as heck, so this is the one that survives
and thrives and becomes a huge new engine of polarization and anger.
It’s not a coincidence that we got a president who came to power through
bumper-sticker slogans, outrageous false statements chosen to make
people’s blood boil, and of course Twitter. This is all a part of a
contagious disease that is spreading like crazy because we as a society
have not figured out how to fight back yet.
But Twitter is small potatoes. Facebook is where the action is. Facebook
quickly copied Twitter’s idea of the “feed” as a mechanism to keep you
coming back compulsively. But whereas Twitter sort of stumbled upon
addictiveness through the weird 140-character limit, Facebook mixed a
new, super-potent active ingredient into their feed called Machine
Learning. They basically said, “look, we are not going to show everybody
every post,” and they used the new Midas-style power of machine learning
and set it in the direction of getting people even more hyper-addicted
to the feed. The only thing the ML algorithm was told to care about was
addiction, or, as they called it, engagement. They had a big ol’ growth
team that was trying different experiments and a raw algorithm that was
deciding what to show everybody and the only thing it cared about was
getting you to come back constantly.
Now, this algorithm, accidentally, learned something
interesting—something that dog trainers have always known.
Dog trainers give dogs a treat when they get something right. When they
say “come,” and the dog comes, he gets a treat. Woof. I can train any
arbitrary dog to do that with some reliability. But here’s what happens.
Once, just once, I forget to give the dog a treat. And then the dog
thinks, well, heck this, I guess “come” doesn’t always mean “treat.” So
the trained behavior goes away. It’s technically called extinction: the
trained behavior goes extinct.
How do we prevent extinction? By only giving treats some of the time. So
the dog learns something more subtle. When my master says come and I
obey, I might get a treat. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. That way,
if I obey and don’t get the treat, I shouldn’t panic. I should still
always come when he says come because that’s still the best way to get
the most treats. Intermittent reinforcement works better.
This sounds like what Facebook was doing to me.
Rather than providing a constant stream of satisfying news and
engagement with friends, Facebook’s algorithm had learned to give me a
bunch of junk I didn’t need to hear, and only gave me intermittent
rewards through the occasional useful nugget of information about
friends. Once in a blue moon I would hear about a friend’s
accomplishment or I would find out that someone I like is going to be in
town. The rest of the time I would just get the kind of garbage
newspaper clippings circulated by someone who had too much coffee and is
misattributing the kick from the caffeine to something they just read
online and now MUST share IMMEDIATELY with EVERYONE because this news
story about something that happened to a baby bear is SOOOOO important
to THE ENTIRE WORLD. And so 9 of out 10 things in my feed are complete
garbage—last week’s newspaper lining the birdcage with the droppings
already on it—but then once every two weeks I find out my niece is
engaged or my best friend got a great new job or my oldest friend is in
town and I should make plans to hang out. And now no matter how full the
Facebook feed is of bird droppings I still have to keep going back.
Both Twitter and Facebook’s selfish algorithms, optimized solely for
increasing the number of hours I spend on their services, are kind of
destroying civil society at the same time. Researchers also discovered
that the algorithms served to divide up the world into partisan groups.
So even though I was following hundreds of people on social networks, I
noticed that the political pieces which I saw were nevertheless
directionally aligned with my own political beliefs. But to be honest
they were much… shriller. Every day the Twitter told me about something
that The Other Side did that was Outrageous and Awful (or, at least,
this was reported), and everyone was screeching in sync and
self-organizing in a lynch mob, and I would have to click LIKE or
RETWEET just to feel like I had done something about it, but I hadn’t
actually done anything about it. I had just slacktivated.
What is the lesson? The lesson here is that when you design software,
you create the future.
If you’re designing software for a social network, the decision to limit
message lengths, or the decision to use ML to maximize engagement, will
have vast social impact which is often very hard to predict.
As software developers and designers, we have a responsibility to the
world to think these things through carefully and design software that
makes the world better, or, at least, no worse than it started out. And
when our inventions spin out of control, we have a responsibility to
understand why and to try to fix them.
This blog post has a surprise piece of good news. The good news is that
Facebook suddenly realized what they had done, and today they announced
a pretty major change of direction. They want the feed to leave people
feeling like “more connected and less lonely,” so they have actually
decided to sacrifice “engagement.” Mark Zuckerberg posted, “By making
these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some
measures of engagement will go down. But I also expect the time you do
spend on Facebook will be more valuable.” That’s amazing, but it’s
amazing because it demonstrates that Facebook has finally grown up and
joined the rest of us in understanding that software developers are
designing the future.
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