If you’re new here, we’re New_ Public, and we’re focused on creating flourishing digital public spaces. Welcome to our second Tuesday Open Thread! We miss reading magazines in coffee shops, and going to book readings, and so we decided to celebrate our first magazine issue by connecting the writers with the readers. Today’s prompt:
What do you want to ask our Decentralization Mag writers?
We’re hoping that many of you have read the issue (and if you haven’t, quick! there’s still time to get a question in) and that it’s gotten your mind spinning with ideas, not-yet-fully-developed-thoughts and questions about the rapidly evolving fringes of our internet lives.
Here’s your chance to ask our writers… absolutely anything about their piece.
And our magazine editor, Wilfred Chan’s “Introduction”
Please mention the author by their full name so they can jump in and answer some of your questions.
The first 25 people who drop a question will get a paper copy of the magazine mailed to them (whether your question is answered promptly or not). GO!
We are assuming that you, like us, are looking for more flourishing places on the internet. We want this to be one of those places! Please treat others with openness, generosity and respect.
My question is for Claire Evans (hi Claire! We worked on a project together at Vice a few years back. Great piece here!) How can we marshall the existing forces of this world to support the construction of more "Mother Trees" in the midst of The Great Trust Crisis? Trust in institutions is lower than ever--how can we ensure new online networks of care earn and keep the trust of people they serve? I am looking for practical advice and resources as I am now working in this space.
I'm fascinated by Amelia Winger-Bearskin's piece, Decentralized storytelling, from Native traditions to the metaverse. This sentence really captures the shift in what it means to be an "creator" of a decentralized storyworld:
"And he said, when he created this game, he would feel like a god creating a world. But now he just feels like a janitor, because the players are like, we demand this, we’ve organized and we voted. The players created their own tribunals, their own governance, and then they have their own systems of protests that they will do if they don’t like changes."
My question for Amelia is: for those of us who are interested in immersing ourselves in more of these worlds, who are some of your favorite "janitors"?
@Erik Nicolaus Martin what protocols are available for new social nets besides scuttlebutt. I've been reading hacker news posts about decentralized social media. I'm also interested in looking at DAOs and other decentralized ideas. I'm also fine doing centralized stuff as well. I want to build a climate social net. But it being decentralized would be a cool bonus. Any relevant reading on any aspect you can send my way, please do
Hi Waveballoon! I LOVE the idea of a climate network. I have not seen many other protocols, Scuttlebutt seems to have the largest dev community also which is really essential for a decentralized projects’ prospects. DAOs are super interesting, but it might be tough pitching the idea of a climate network operating on blockchain tech given how notoriously terrible that tech sector has been on climate issues (like running an entire coal plant for mining). I also am in favor of trying to subvert existing platforms/networks for your purpose though, esp if funding is a steep challenge in building something new. I agree technical decentralization would be a cool bonus - but it def doesn’t have to be black and white. Communities can be to some degree “decentralized” even if they’re on a centralized platform.
Agreed on the coal plant metaphor. And on using existing tech. I'm just going to go for it. I would love to hear any ideas you have on building communities if you have them. Especially things you're passionate about
Love the issue and all of your work! Question for Amelia Winger-Bearskin and also Eli Pariser:
I’m wondering how you would define the word “news”?
These two points really struck me:
-“Being a storyteller for the Seneca-Cayuga Nation is something that is a cross between being a historian, being a performer, being a creative writer, and being a leader within the culture.”
-“That way we have them distributed in ways that are not just left to a monolithic interpreter, which is assuming that people in the future will understand what they need to understand through books, or films, or whatever is the archive that we imagine will be the storytellers to the future.”
I’m a writer seeking how we can take back our relationship with the news (book project), and therefore seeking a new definition of it, far away from what was professionalized in Western media. (My working definition is sound, verifiable information that is new to you, and helps you make needs-driven decisions, no matter the source.)
But the richness of a decentralized view of communication makes me wonder what you’d think! What is news and does everyone get to spread it?
People often talk about "decentralization", but I'm not sure they are talking about it in the right sense. It's not simply decentralization of data storage, or dividing our lives amongst a few platforms to be more resilient to failure. The true solution of decentralization comes from solving the inequality of social power on central social networks.
One person can have 100 followers and another can have 10,000,000 followers. There is an inequality of control. It’s control of consensus, control of behavior, control of beliefs. It is not what is true, it is which truth has spread the farthest and fastest. Popular consensus is usually right, but when it’s wrong… it’s wrong bigly. Our problem is that we are TOO connected. Information moves too fast.
So, the question is, have you thought about how a system could be made/upheld/remedied? Can you speak to anything on this subject?
Thanks, I forgot to mention this question is for Wilfred Chan because he talks about it in the introduction.
Especially regarding "the way power is distributed, accumulated, transformed, and dispersed at every layer of society" and "I think these continuities offer us a useful starting point to speculate about what comes next."
Alexander, so true; it's human nature to fantasy project forwards (what's more fun than imaginary life or city planning?) but simply because something has no central point of control does not mean there will be a flattening out of status or voice. We will still need to create living, breathing governance mechanisms.
I think we need a complement to social media, not a replacement, for both each centralized and distributed network to function in harmony. Looking towards the near future of social media, I see an imminent split that is about to occur between our personal lives and our public brands.
I agree that we need complementary networks of trust that serve different functions. I checked out your platform 150.earth and it seems like a smart way to separate some of the functionality of Facebook/insta--I signed up!
Hi Alexander, thanks for the question. To reference New_ Public's urban metaphor for the internet, great public spaces often benefit from diversity and density, so decentralization isn't always a panacea. In that vein I've been thinking of decentralization and centralization as necessarily coexisting forces and in flux, rather than end points or final solutions. That's why it's hard to talk about what an ideal decentralized system would look like. Instead I think we can find a lot of different models in our own lives and communities, each with different lessons. That was, in a way, the approach we took in the first issue of the magazine: not to declare an answer, but to expand the framing of the question.
LOVE IT. Thank you and it's a great start. I'm very excited to see what you come up with next. Personally, I'm curious about exploring the idea of master-designed cities. There's some far out thoughts on this in the echosphere so consider exploring more if you come across them. Our human places online should be familiar to our human places offline.
Hi! Magazine editor Wilfred here. Would love to hear any reactions you had after checking out the first issue of our magazine. A question I’m wondering about: should we have tackled crypto, blockchain, and “web3” discourse more head-on?
No, you're targeting the right part. The rest of the discourse is largely misleading for real solutions. Part of the problem with social media is that it propagates "popular" and "common" ideas unequal to others and thereby slows progress/innovation. It's the embodiment of "if you want the wrong answer, ask everyone".
So thanks for tackling decentralization, or rather distribution, of social networks because that's what we need to really see. Also, I have a question about for you and forgot to initially mention your name. Thanks for all your work Wilfred.
So in the crypto web3 community, there's a ton ton ton of hype and money. Fundamentally most of it is uninteresting to me. What's interesting is what we build on top of it. A decentralized social net is one. There's also decentralized file storage and messaging. If you covered what things were actually being built on top of crypto that enabled people to do things that could be interesting, but those examples are few compared to the bs that is being sold regularly in that community
This might just be me but I feel like those are surface-level topics in a way. Obviously, there are ways to write/talk about them in that context, but the pieces you published largely seemed to look at decentralization in a deeper way. Maybe it would make sense if something about cryptocurrency was framed in a piece about the history of debt and financialism and centralized currencies in general? Or blockchain about how to assure trust across vast distances? I mean, medieval traders -- and even earlier -- sent goods and received payments over distances that took months, if not years, to travel. They had to build trust, too.
Thanks a lot Mary. You are definitively onto something. I have a 17 and a 21 yo and they are definitively fragmenting their usage of social media, not only with their usage of different platforms but also with different accounts in the same platform with different setting and for different groups.
Please consider adding a scroll bar to your site (newpublic.org). It helps to jump back to the top after reading an article and helps me visually gauge how long an article is and my progress within it (so it doesn't feel like an infinite scroll 😉). Thank you.
I'm not sure if this question is for editor Wilfred Chan or New_Public in general, or maybe the nascent community that's forming in this space: I love all of the pieces in here (especially Amelia Winger-Bearskin's!), and have been thinking a lot about Wilfred's points regarding decentralized power. I feel like a lot of these conversations, whether related to social media or AI or politics or "the news," miss out *geographical* decentralization. So many events, in-person conversations, creative work, etc., still happen in a very few urban locations. Which are great places! But I feel like entire societies suffer because people in less-populated areas feel increasingly like they're neither served nor understood by the various structures we have in place. This is a messy, rambling question, but how can these approaches to decentralization start to repair some of those connections?
Claire, assume the following network structure in terms of mother trees:
Our brains are limited to about 150 meaningful relationships at one time (Dunbar's Number) and our real social network is about 3 degrees away because information spread seems to drop off by then.
If we capped connections to 150, and limited to 3 degrees away of connectivity, the only variability of social power (emerging mother trees) would be if a user's network is more homogeneous versus heterogeneous.The mother trees in this structure could have a theoretical maximum of 3,375,000 connections whereas the average user would have maybe 500,000-1,000,000.
Would this be enough to differentiate a mother tree from a normal node, or is there a greater difference needed in order for a mother tree to be effective?
Hi Alexander! Thanks for your thoughts here. FWIW, my piece also addresses the tacit logic of the Dunbar number. In an early draft I was explicitly grappling with it—just as an idea that there are limits, even if we quibble over the number, and Dunbar's larger findings about how we need more deep engagement with fewer relationships for longer-term wellbeing. For me, using a human-scale app for photo sharing starts to get there.
Hey Sara! It warmed my heart to hear you speak about your children. You care about them so much and it's great to see collect their memories in a place that's 100% dedicated to them. When they're older, I know they will greatly appreciate the time and effort you gave.
The idea of calm technology and human-scale apps speak to me greatly. I've spoken to many parents about my project because we would protect kids from the world around them. Much like our big cities have small towns or neighborhoods to complement them - to facilitate a safe nursery of youth growth - our online social networks need to same thing. Our online spaces need to be as human-centric as our offline human places.
Plugging a link so you can follow along. If you know people who would love to work with us, specifically a technical partner, have them email us at hello@150.earth
Oh wow, this is quite technical indeed! But yes, I think that makes sense—in the forest, mother trees are more connected than younger trees, which allows them to intermediate relationships in the larger network across distance and time and helps them to distribute resources across the entire forest. So although younger, individual trees have fewer connections, they still have access to resources beyond their direct connections, thanks to their links to the mother trees. Another essential thing, to me, is the fact that mother trees protect the forest against an uncertain future. By virtue of having survived as long as they have—through drought, fire, and other upheavals—their seeds contain the precious genetic information the forest needs to weather the perils of climate change. I'm not sure (yet) what the direct analogy here might be with networking, but I like the idea of a network that supports fledgling sites/nodes and provides the resources necessary for them to survive and thrive regardless of what's coming next.
Thanks for the response Claire. I've listened to your music before with YACHT btw when it premiered on that Netflix show "How to sell drugs online fast". Stuck in my head for days :D
Do you know of any research or literature I could read that could yield some exact numbers? For example, what are the average connections of younger trees versus mother trees? If we could find that answer, we could relate it back to the social network design above and have an accurate picture of how many connections they'd have.
It's a shame, because Facebook has this information and it's kept secret. Could help advance the world, but it's also a danger to share... so I get it. I'm going the long way by building a social network on this infrastructure to find out :)
Thanks again for the answer, and tell me if you know of any applicable resources!
You could set a wither rate instead of capping connections. If someone doesn't meaningfully interact with a connection in a certain amount of time you maybe stop seeing content from them? But you miss the kind of serendipity of real life a la seeing someone at a cooler. Our real life interactions are basically what we can maintain out of what is accessible to us
We could try this, but I am experimenting with the hard cap to equalize social power across the network, to measure the effects more accurately, and to give people the freedom (or rather the lack of influencing their behavior) to govern their circles as they will because people have different impressions of what a "friend' is. A set wither rate, however close to average, could be highly detrimental to our fringe, unusual thinkers who are already at a significant disadvantage on traditional social networks.
Hey Georgi, sure thing. Think of a bell curve distribution. Popular/common content are in the middle and unusual/uncommon content are at the ends.
On one end are the oddities. This content is raw, unpolished, but seems to miss the mark. It may or may not be forward leaning, but it missed the mark. Sometimes this content is downright crass.
On the other end we have the geniuses. While this too is uncommon content, it's on the leading edge and it's a good idea (in retrospect) but it's hard to discover because it's either counterintuitive, is antithesis of the popular narrative/consensus, or something of this sort.
In the not too distant past, we used to filter these geniuses from oddities with a healthy balance of uncommon to common content, but - as algorithms prescribed us viral content, controversy, and clickbait over a healthy ecosystem of people, opinions, and perspectives - it's very hard to discern the difference because of the centralization of social network connections. We are at the whim of the least common denominator.
TL;DR: They have opinions contrary to popular ones, and they can be good or bad, but this colorful bunch holds the greatest ideas of the future. Without them we are stuck. So, we need a system that helps discover these ideas and gives them enough time to germinate, to experiment, before being viscerally stuck down by the popular opinion of the day.
Hi @Mary Madden! Thanks for your article. What do you think of a dedicated layer over the entire web for young people where they know every person is a real person in good standing yet they can be psuedoanonymous at the same time? Basically the entire web becomes a social network with no unidentified bots, fake accounts, excessive trolls, serial abusers, or throwaway accounts...
Participatory and collaborative storytelling definitely seems to be on the rise with younger generations, and it seems more and more platforms are being built to support the curation and remixing of content between creators. At the same time, the "Passion Economy" is growing and more people are finding ways to make a livelihood by producing content and sharing their view on the world, which feels like it creates an interesting tension around ownership. There is the saying "good artists borrow, great artists steal" and - in an ideal world - artistic creations and stories wouldn't have to fit into a commodified model and could be freely shared without concerns about ownership and IP. However while we are stuck in a capitalist system, it makes sense that artists would choose to commodify their art and try to make a living from it. When it comes to collaborative storytelling (and producing collaborative content), do you have any ideas on how this tension might be solved? Are there principles from indigenous stewardship that could potentially apply to this problem of who "owns" content in an open data world, when much of our world's economic output is derived from that data?
You mentioned finding as early as 2001 that teens were exploring multiple personas, levels of privacy, etc by essentially decentralizing their use of digital platforms. This was definitely my experience at age/time. Have there been follow up studies on that same population? I’m curious to know more about how users age within (and alongside) digital space.
It's hinted that real-name-account millennial users are a lost cause, with more hope for radical change in the current generation of users. (I hope not, and I hope so!) I wonder...is it the fate of any system-challenging teen user to adopt a less critical, mainstream practice by their 30s or did web 2.0 and that particular time period present a substantially unique situation?
Great question. As someone who was age 14 in 2001 I can definitely relate. One thing we haven't explored too much here is some of the other rich and meaningful forms of digital connection that came out of web2.0 besides just contemporary social media. Podcasts are a great example. I think of myself as a member of a community of listeners, even if the majority of the communication is a 1-way broadcast.
-Josh
Email hello@newpublic.org and we can get your address to send you a broadsheet!
My short take--though seriously would love to geek out about this more 1:1 sometime--is that there are enormous changes WRT expectations and requirements that happen as one enters college, the workplace, and family life, etc. Of course the technologies have changed massively over the last 20 years as well. But the foundational preferences and sense of what's possible are meaningfully set in young adulthood in a way that, from my perspective, looks radically different than what was possible a few decades ago.
Thanks for the link and for your take. Expectations set in young adulthood and further shaped by college/work/family norms/etc makes sense. That points to those institutions and community groups potentially having the most power to encourage critical use and positive change. I'm especially interested in how artists use/d the internet as teens then and now, and how that impacts their adult patterns of use. Let's geek out! rachelstuckey@gmail.com
Question: We are surrounded by lists of information which are curated by algorithms in order to maximize company metrics such as engagement. Can we imagine more humane metrics?
Question 2: Do you know of any in-depth analysis of user interface alternatives to the list style-feed? Visualization has come a long way and we can use some of those advances to better display and process information. I'm just not aware of any experiments with non-list-style-feed.
Hi Georgi—thanks for these questions! So interesting. It does seem like a flatly encompassing, unmitigated "engagement" metric is at the heart of the algorithmic distortion machine. First thought is about temporal interventions like those at Front Porch Forum—where your engagement, which is moderated, is also limited per day. So I wonder whether numerical metrics/up-votes would be more humane not by eliminating numbers altogether, but by a time-based friction in the amount of engagement. Like if you're interacting less overall, with the distance and space of time, would your engagement quality will go up with its (temporally extended) quantity? Thus preventing the storm-of-engagement that rapidly dehumanizes? On alternatives to the list-style feed: fascinating, and I don't know of any. Gonna ask some UI/UX friends, though, and will follow up if I see something.
I've been thinking about this. It's a really interesting question. Honestly if you think about how you used to get your information before the internet, certain forums were for specific things (sales in magazines stores and tv, learning in school and books, News in certain places). You'd go to a club for specific information. You had to physically show up so spamming was hard. Say limiting someone to a certain amount of communities a day could be a way of increasing the value of engagement. Open vs closed access. Spam v curation. Not an easy question.
Another thing was that you have or had people that you trust for certain things. One person was good at knitting or you would ask who was good at knitting. You wouldn't text or call every friend ever. Just a few that you thought might know someone and they would hook you up. Now everyone blasts their feed with questions. If linked in's skill endorsements existed on Facebook, would they actually facilitate conversation? Maybe, maybe not.
There's also cross talk that you could kind of tune out. You might have to sit through boring conversations sometimes, but you can also try to change the subject or leave. Not the case with a feed.
Also you have certain friends because they are interesting. Because they are a combination of expected and unexpected.
It's really important to note that boiling these things down into a feed based structure is an oversimplification. When you go to high school you have morning breakfast with family, the bus ride with no real authority figure or a walk, a blank homeroom class breaks in between class, classes, lunch, clubs or sports maybe, hanging out after school, homework, free time, tv, reading, social media, skipping class.
Technically you are consuming information, but the level of trust and kind of information you are consuming is completely different and context dependent. If you remove the context completely, it's really hard to tell what you should and shouldn't be paying attention to
This is a question to Mary Madden. I was fascinated by your description of how the relationship of teens with social has changed from being explorative of multiple identities, to be performative of multiple identities (the larger the audience the better) to be now more restricted to specific uses with specific people. Almost more utilitarian that identity based. Is that a possible reading of your article or identity is still very much at play
Thanks so much for your thoughtful question, Rocio! (And for your patience in my response--I'm new to Substack land...). I would definitely say that identity is very much still at play, but the weight of what's at stake with with more public platforms has made semi-private spaces more desirable as young people navigate all of the social turbulence of adolescence. As one example, something that often gets overlooked WRT youth culture is the importance of humor and satire, which does not always translate well to broad audiences, natural language processing and college recruiters. Sometimes young people want spaces where they can be themselves with friends who understand them. Sometimes they want to "try on" different identities or explore communities that aren't accessible in the town where they live. That might mean hanging with gaming friends on a Discord server or using Snapchat to share awkward or weird moments from the school day. It might also mean producing content for more public performative social spaces (TikTok, YouTube, Twitch, etc.), but the idea of a one-size-fits-all platform for this generation or anything remotely resembling the concentration of social tech that older generations have largely come to accept seems unlikely.
Hi @Claire Evans! What do you think of the canopy metaphor to inspire us to create a meta-layer on the web where people have a presence and content can be connected based on relationships? Being on today's web pages is like being lost in algorithmically weeded field of commercial timber. What if we could be in the canopy, looking down getting better view. In the canopy, there are people who came the webpage and entered the canopy. The canopy is interconnected and full of relationships. In the canopy, there can be contradicting and supporting bridges from pieces of content on the page to pieces of content on other pages. All this is possible with a meta-layer. Could the canopy help us envision the new public space?
Hey Daveed, absolutely! The canopy is a really interesting metaphor to bring into this conversation, and I agree that the meta-layer is something that's sorely lacking online. From a navigation perspective, it reminds me a little of those old-school "webrings" that interconnected early websites sites by affinity or community.
It also reminds me of some of the earlier thinking about hypertext—before the World Wide Web became standard, there existed a large community of scholars invested in building hypertext systems around the principle that hyperlinks themselves could provide a meaningful, and adaptable meta-layer to large bodies of information. I'm talking about systems where links were constructive (built by folks navigating the systems as they went, like information trails), could be navigated in multiple directions, could have multiple destinations and sources, and could be preserved in a separate layer. Because, of course, on the Web, links are contextual, which means that when the destination of a link is taken down, that link rots. We receive a 404 Error, and the piece of information about what connected those two different ideas is gone—forever. And that’s a loss for our culture.
Webrings were such a fun way to wander the web! I've seen a few sprout up in intentionally low-footprint web communities and in the form of "my friends" link pages on artist websites.
Recently I've heard digital gardens and personal/community wikis spoken of in the same way that hypertext once was (I'm especially thinking of Mark Bernstein's Hypertext Gardens - http://www.eastgate.com/garden/Enter.html). But then again, I think the digital garden concept comes directly out of that line of thinking.
Having worked for art orgs that have lots of external web links, it's wild to me how much time can be eaten up resolving dead links. We've taken to preemptively saving linked content (articles especially) offline, which allows for better preservation but really cuts the wandering path of discovery short for users.
My question is for Claire Evans (hi Claire! We worked on a project together at Vice a few years back. Great piece here!) How can we marshall the existing forces of this world to support the construction of more "Mother Trees" in the midst of The Great Trust Crisis? Trust in institutions is lower than ever--how can we ensure new online networks of care earn and keep the trust of people they serve? I am looking for practical advice and resources as I am now working in this space.
Great question. Thanks for surfacing the question of trust!
We're passing along your question. Email hello@newpublic.org and we can get your address to send you a broadsheet!
I'm fascinated by Amelia Winger-Bearskin's piece, Decentralized storytelling, from Native traditions to the metaverse. This sentence really captures the shift in what it means to be an "creator" of a decentralized storyworld:
"And he said, when he created this game, he would feel like a god creating a world. But now he just feels like a janitor, because the players are like, we demand this, we’ve organized and we voted. The players created their own tribunals, their own governance, and then they have their own systems of protests that they will do if they don’t like changes."
My question for Amelia is: for those of us who are interested in immersing ourselves in more of these worlds, who are some of your favorite "janitors"?
@Erik Nicolaus Martin what protocols are available for new social nets besides scuttlebutt. I've been reading hacker news posts about decentralized social media. I'm also interested in looking at DAOs and other decentralized ideas. I'm also fine doing centralized stuff as well. I want to build a climate social net. But it being decentralized would be a cool bonus. Any relevant reading on any aspect you can send my way, please do
Hi Waveballoon! I LOVE the idea of a climate network. I have not seen many other protocols, Scuttlebutt seems to have the largest dev community also which is really essential for a decentralized projects’ prospects. DAOs are super interesting, but it might be tough pitching the idea of a climate network operating on blockchain tech given how notoriously terrible that tech sector has been on climate issues (like running an entire coal plant for mining). I also am in favor of trying to subvert existing platforms/networks for your purpose though, esp if funding is a steep challenge in building something new. I agree technical decentralization would be a cool bonus - but it def doesn’t have to be black and white. Communities can be to some degree “decentralized” even if they’re on a centralized platform.
Agreed on the coal plant metaphor. And on using existing tech. I'm just going to go for it. I would love to hear any ideas you have on building communities if you have them. Especially things you're passionate about
We're passing along your question. Email hello@newpublic.org and we can get your address to send you a broadsheet!
The best piece I've ever read on decentralisation - https://reallifemag.com/reconnected/
Thanks Sarah! Looking forward to reading.
I've just skimmed this and am saving to read for later, but wow this looks really good!
Love the issue and all of your work! Question for Amelia Winger-Bearskin and also Eli Pariser:
I’m wondering how you would define the word “news”?
These two points really struck me:
-“Being a storyteller for the Seneca-Cayuga Nation is something that is a cross between being a historian, being a performer, being a creative writer, and being a leader within the culture.”
-“That way we have them distributed in ways that are not just left to a monolithic interpreter, which is assuming that people in the future will understand what they need to understand through books, or films, or whatever is the archive that we imagine will be the storytellers to the future.”
I’m a writer seeking how we can take back our relationship with the news (book project), and therefore seeking a new definition of it, far away from what was professionalized in Western media. (My working definition is sound, verifiable information that is new to you, and helps you make needs-driven decisions, no matter the source.)
But the richness of a decentralized view of communication makes me wonder what you’d think! What is news and does everyone get to spread it?
I like your definition! We're passing along your question. Email hello@newpublic.org and we can get your address to send you a broadsheet!
Any other takers have thoughts on what "news" is?
May I recommend a great book that talks about this from a network science perspective - about how news spreads:
The Human Network: How Your Social Position Determines Your Power, Beliefs, and Behaviors
https://www.amazon.com/Human-Network-Position-Determines-Behaviors/dp/1101871431
thank you!
Hello everyone!
People often talk about "decentralization", but I'm not sure they are talking about it in the right sense. It's not simply decentralization of data storage, or dividing our lives amongst a few platforms to be more resilient to failure. The true solution of decentralization comes from solving the inequality of social power on central social networks.
One person can have 100 followers and another can have 10,000,000 followers. There is an inequality of control. It’s control of consensus, control of behavior, control of beliefs. It is not what is true, it is which truth has spread the farthest and fastest. Popular consensus is usually right, but when it’s wrong… it’s wrong bigly. Our problem is that we are TOO connected. Information moves too fast.
So, the question is, have you thought about how a system could be made/upheld/remedied? Can you speak to anything on this subject?
Hi Alexander, thanks for chiming in! You may want to check out Claire L. Evans' piece: https://newpublic.org/article/1572/the-word-for-web-is-forest
She proposes some structures inspired by nature that may be relevant to your question!
Thanks, I forgot to mention this question is for Wilfred Chan because he talks about it in the introduction.
Especially regarding "the way power is distributed, accumulated, transformed, and dispersed at every layer of society" and "I think these continuities offer us a useful starting point to speculate about what comes next."
Alexander, so true; it's human nature to fantasy project forwards (what's more fun than imaginary life or city planning?) but simply because something has no central point of control does not mean there will be a flattening out of status or voice. We will still need to create living, breathing governance mechanisms.
I agree - humans are hierarchical beings that require inner and outer circles to be healthy. This book just came out and talks a lot on the subject: Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (https://www.amazon.com/Wanting-Power-Mimetic-Desire-Everyday/dp/1250262488)
I think we need a complement to social media, not a replacement, for both each centralized and distributed network to function in harmony. Looking towards the near future of social media, I see an imminent split that is about to occur between our personal lives and our public brands.
I agree that we need complementary networks of trust that serve different functions. I checked out your platform 150.earth and it seems like a smart way to separate some of the functionality of Facebook/insta--I signed up!
Hi Alexander, thanks for the question. To reference New_ Public's urban metaphor for the internet, great public spaces often benefit from diversity and density, so decentralization isn't always a panacea. In that vein I've been thinking of decentralization and centralization as necessarily coexisting forces and in flux, rather than end points or final solutions. That's why it's hard to talk about what an ideal decentralized system would look like. Instead I think we can find a lot of different models in our own lives and communities, each with different lessons. That was, in a way, the approach we took in the first issue of the magazine: not to declare an answer, but to expand the framing of the question.
LOVE IT. Thank you and it's a great start. I'm very excited to see what you come up with next. Personally, I'm curious about exploring the idea of master-designed cities. There's some far out thoughts on this in the echosphere so consider exploring more if you come across them. Our human places online should be familiar to our human places offline.
I thought a really interesting book was Maverick. It's a business book. It's not a blueprint but a manifesto.
Hi! Magazine editor Wilfred here. Would love to hear any reactions you had after checking out the first issue of our magazine. A question I’m wondering about: should we have tackled crypto, blockchain, and “web3” discourse more head-on?
No, you're targeting the right part. The rest of the discourse is largely misleading for real solutions. Part of the problem with social media is that it propagates "popular" and "common" ideas unequal to others and thereby slows progress/innovation. It's the embodiment of "if you want the wrong answer, ask everyone".
So thanks for tackling decentralization, or rather distribution, of social networks because that's what we need to really see. Also, I have a question about for you and forgot to initially mention your name. Thanks for all your work Wilfred.
So in the crypto web3 community, there's a ton ton ton of hype and money. Fundamentally most of it is uninteresting to me. What's interesting is what we build on top of it. A decentralized social net is one. There's also decentralized file storage and messaging. If you covered what things were actually being built on top of crypto that enabled people to do things that could be interesting, but those examples are few compared to the bs that is being sold regularly in that community
This might just be me but I feel like those are surface-level topics in a way. Obviously, there are ways to write/talk about them in that context, but the pieces you published largely seemed to look at decentralization in a deeper way. Maybe it would make sense if something about cryptocurrency was framed in a piece about the history of debt and financialism and centralized currencies in general? Or blockchain about how to assure trust across vast distances? I mean, medieval traders -- and even earlier -- sent goods and received payments over distances that took months, if not years, to travel. They had to build trust, too.
Thanks a lot Mary. You are definitively onto something. I have a 17 and a 21 yo and they are definitively fragmenting their usage of social media, not only with their usage of different platforms but also with different accounts in the same platform with different setting and for different groups.
Please consider adding a scroll bar to your site (newpublic.org). It helps to jump back to the top after reading an article and helps me visually gauge how long an article is and my progress within it (so it doesn't feel like an infinite scroll 😉). Thank you.
I'm not sure if this question is for editor Wilfred Chan or New_Public in general, or maybe the nascent community that's forming in this space: I love all of the pieces in here (especially Amelia Winger-Bearskin's!), and have been thinking a lot about Wilfred's points regarding decentralized power. I feel like a lot of these conversations, whether related to social media or AI or politics or "the news," miss out *geographical* decentralization. So many events, in-person conversations, creative work, etc., still happen in a very few urban locations. Which are great places! But I feel like entire societies suffer because people in less-populated areas feel increasingly like they're neither served nor understood by the various structures we have in place. This is a messy, rambling question, but how can these approaches to decentralization start to repair some of those connections?
Hi Antonia, welcome back! Great questions.
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Claire, assume the following network structure in terms of mother trees:
Our brains are limited to about 150 meaningful relationships at one time (Dunbar's Number) and our real social network is about 3 degrees away because information spread seems to drop off by then.
If we capped connections to 150, and limited to 3 degrees away of connectivity, the only variability of social power (emerging mother trees) would be if a user's network is more homogeneous versus heterogeneous.The mother trees in this structure could have a theoretical maximum of 3,375,000 connections whereas the average user would have maybe 500,000-1,000,000.
Would this be enough to differentiate a mother tree from a normal node, or is there a greater difference needed in order for a mother tree to be effective?
Thank you,
Alexander
This is quite technical, but it's fun to go into the weeds sometimes. Thanks.
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Hi Alexander! Thanks for your thoughts here. FWIW, my piece also addresses the tacit logic of the Dunbar number. In an early draft I was explicitly grappling with it—just as an idea that there are limits, even if we quibble over the number, and Dunbar's larger findings about how we need more deep engagement with fewer relationships for longer-term wellbeing. For me, using a human-scale app for photo sharing starts to get there.
Hey Sara! It warmed my heart to hear you speak about your children. You care about them so much and it's great to see collect their memories in a place that's 100% dedicated to them. When they're older, I know they will greatly appreciate the time and effort you gave.
The idea of calm technology and human-scale apps speak to me greatly. I've spoken to many parents about my project because we would protect kids from the world around them. Much like our big cities have small towns or neighborhoods to complement them - to facilitate a safe nursery of youth growth - our online social networks need to same thing. Our online spaces need to be as human-centric as our offline human places.
Plugging a link so you can follow along. If you know people who would love to work with us, specifically a technical partner, have them email us at hello@150.earth
150: a place to be personal again
https://150.earth
Love seeing what you're doing; signed up for launch notification!
Oh wow, this is quite technical indeed! But yes, I think that makes sense—in the forest, mother trees are more connected than younger trees, which allows them to intermediate relationships in the larger network across distance and time and helps them to distribute resources across the entire forest. So although younger, individual trees have fewer connections, they still have access to resources beyond their direct connections, thanks to their links to the mother trees. Another essential thing, to me, is the fact that mother trees protect the forest against an uncertain future. By virtue of having survived as long as they have—through drought, fire, and other upheavals—their seeds contain the precious genetic information the forest needs to weather the perils of climate change. I'm not sure (yet) what the direct analogy here might be with networking, but I like the idea of a network that supports fledgling sites/nodes and provides the resources necessary for them to survive and thrive regardless of what's coming next.
Thanks for the response Claire. I've listened to your music before with YACHT btw when it premiered on that Netflix show "How to sell drugs online fast". Stuck in my head for days :D
Do you know of any research or literature I could read that could yield some exact numbers? For example, what are the average connections of younger trees versus mother trees? If we could find that answer, we could relate it back to the social network design above and have an accurate picture of how many connections they'd have.
It's a shame, because Facebook has this information and it's kept secret. Could help advance the world, but it's also a danger to share... so I get it. I'm going the long way by building a social network on this infrastructure to find out :)
Thanks again for the answer, and tell me if you know of any applicable resources!
If you're interested, there's lots of scientific literature to dive into! Here's a good overview of wood wide web architecture:
https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2009.03069.x
You could set a wither rate instead of capping connections. If someone doesn't meaningfully interact with a connection in a certain amount of time you maybe stop seeing content from them? But you miss the kind of serendipity of real life a la seeing someone at a cooler. Our real life interactions are basically what we can maintain out of what is accessible to us
We could try this, but I am experimenting with the hard cap to equalize social power across the network, to measure the effects more accurately, and to give people the freedom (or rather the lack of influencing their behavior) to govern their circles as they will because people have different impressions of what a "friend' is. A set wither rate, however close to average, could be highly detrimental to our fringe, unusual thinkers who are already at a significant disadvantage on traditional social networks.
Can you characterize the fringe, unusual thinker? What are they like? How are they different from the average user?
Hey Georgi, sure thing. Think of a bell curve distribution. Popular/common content are in the middle and unusual/uncommon content are at the ends.
On one end are the oddities. This content is raw, unpolished, but seems to miss the mark. It may or may not be forward leaning, but it missed the mark. Sometimes this content is downright crass.
On the other end we have the geniuses. While this too is uncommon content, it's on the leading edge and it's a good idea (in retrospect) but it's hard to discover because it's either counterintuitive, is antithesis of the popular narrative/consensus, or something of this sort.
In the not too distant past, we used to filter these geniuses from oddities with a healthy balance of uncommon to common content, but - as algorithms prescribed us viral content, controversy, and clickbait over a healthy ecosystem of people, opinions, and perspectives - it's very hard to discern the difference because of the centralization of social network connections. We are at the whim of the least common denominator.
TL;DR: They have opinions contrary to popular ones, and they can be good or bad, but this colorful bunch holds the greatest ideas of the future. Without them we are stuck. So, we need a system that helps discover these ideas and gives them enough time to germinate, to experiment, before being viscerally stuck down by the popular opinion of the day.
Hi @Mary Madden! Thanks for your article. What do you think of a dedicated layer over the entire web for young people where they know every person is a real person in good standing yet they can be psuedoanonymous at the same time? Basically the entire web becomes a social network with no unidentified bots, fake accounts, excessive trolls, serial abusers, or throwaway accounts...
In other words... will you commit to ending Finsta? Good Q!
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This question is for Amelia Winger-Bearskin:
Participatory and collaborative storytelling definitely seems to be on the rise with younger generations, and it seems more and more platforms are being built to support the curation and remixing of content between creators. At the same time, the "Passion Economy" is growing and more people are finding ways to make a livelihood by producing content and sharing their view on the world, which feels like it creates an interesting tension around ownership. There is the saying "good artists borrow, great artists steal" and - in an ideal world - artistic creations and stories wouldn't have to fit into a commodified model and could be freely shared without concerns about ownership and IP. However while we are stuck in a capitalist system, it makes sense that artists would choose to commodify their art and try to make a living from it. When it comes to collaborative storytelling (and producing collaborative content), do you have any ideas on how this tension might be solved? Are there principles from indigenous stewardship that could potentially apply to this problem of who "owns" content in an open data world, when much of our world's economic output is derived from that data?
A good topic to be sure. Intellectual property and copyright law are thorny, but maybe decentralized storytelling can offer some lessons here.
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Hi, this question is for Mary Madden.
You mentioned finding as early as 2001 that teens were exploring multiple personas, levels of privacy, etc by essentially decentralizing their use of digital platforms. This was definitely my experience at age/time. Have there been follow up studies on that same population? I’m curious to know more about how users age within (and alongside) digital space.
It's hinted that real-name-account millennial users are a lost cause, with more hope for radical change in the current generation of users. (I hope not, and I hope so!) I wonder...is it the fate of any system-challenging teen user to adopt a less critical, mainstream practice by their 30s or did web 2.0 and that particular time period present a substantially unique situation?
Great question. As someone who was age 14 in 2001 I can definitely relate. One thing we haven't explored too much here is some of the other rich and meaningful forms of digital connection that came out of web2.0 besides just contemporary social media. Podcasts are a great example. I think of myself as a member of a community of listeners, even if the majority of the communication is a 1-way broadcast.
-Josh
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True! I'd say vlogs are another great example.
Awesome question, Rachel--thank you! I'd definitely recommend following my former colleagues latest and greatest at Pew Research re: social media trends across different age groups. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media-use-in-2021/pi_2021-04-07_social-media_0-02a/
My short take--though seriously would love to geek out about this more 1:1 sometime--is that there are enormous changes WRT expectations and requirements that happen as one enters college, the workplace, and family life, etc. Of course the technologies have changed massively over the last 20 years as well. But the foundational preferences and sense of what's possible are meaningfully set in young adulthood in a way that, from my perspective, looks radically different than what was possible a few decades ago.
Thanks for the link and for your take. Expectations set in young adulthood and further shaped by college/work/family norms/etc makes sense. That points to those institutions and community groups potentially having the most power to encourage critical use and positive change. I'm especially interested in how artists use/d the internet as teens then and now, and how that impacts their adult patterns of use. Let's geek out! rachelstuckey@gmail.com
Hello! My question is for Sara Hendren:
Question: We are surrounded by lists of information which are curated by algorithms in order to maximize company metrics such as engagement. Can we imagine more humane metrics?
Question 2: Do you know of any in-depth analysis of user interface alternatives to the list style-feed? Visualization has come a long way and we can use some of those advances to better display and process information. I'm just not aware of any experiments with non-list-style-feed.
Awesome. Sara's already answered below. Email hello@newpublic.org and we can get your address to send you a broadsheet!
Hi Georgi—thanks for these questions! So interesting. It does seem like a flatly encompassing, unmitigated "engagement" metric is at the heart of the algorithmic distortion machine. First thought is about temporal interventions like those at Front Porch Forum—where your engagement, which is moderated, is also limited per day. So I wonder whether numerical metrics/up-votes would be more humane not by eliminating numbers altogether, but by a time-based friction in the amount of engagement. Like if you're interacting less overall, with the distance and space of time, would your engagement quality will go up with its (temporally extended) quantity? Thus preventing the storm-of-engagement that rapidly dehumanizes? On alternatives to the list-style feed: fascinating, and I don't know of any. Gonna ask some UI/UX friends, though, and will follow up if I see something.
(And thanks to my friends at New_Public for pointing me to Front Porch Forum!
Our pleasure. Here for more info: https://frontporchforum.com/
I've been thinking about this. It's a really interesting question. Honestly if you think about how you used to get your information before the internet, certain forums were for specific things (sales in magazines stores and tv, learning in school and books, News in certain places). You'd go to a club for specific information. You had to physically show up so spamming was hard. Say limiting someone to a certain amount of communities a day could be a way of increasing the value of engagement. Open vs closed access. Spam v curation. Not an easy question.
Another thing was that you have or had people that you trust for certain things. One person was good at knitting or you would ask who was good at knitting. You wouldn't text or call every friend ever. Just a few that you thought might know someone and they would hook you up. Now everyone blasts their feed with questions. If linked in's skill endorsements existed on Facebook, would they actually facilitate conversation? Maybe, maybe not.
There's also cross talk that you could kind of tune out. You might have to sit through boring conversations sometimes, but you can also try to change the subject or leave. Not the case with a feed.
Also you have certain friends because they are interesting. Because they are a combination of expected and unexpected.
It's really important to note that boiling these things down into a feed based structure is an oversimplification. When you go to high school you have morning breakfast with family, the bus ride with no real authority figure or a walk, a blank homeroom class breaks in between class, classes, lunch, clubs or sports maybe, hanging out after school, homework, free time, tv, reading, social media, skipping class.
Technically you are consuming information, but the level of trust and kind of information you are consuming is completely different and context dependent. If you remove the context completely, it's really hard to tell what you should and shouldn't be paying attention to
This is a question to Mary Madden. I was fascinated by your description of how the relationship of teens with social has changed from being explorative of multiple identities, to be performative of multiple identities (the larger the audience the better) to be now more restricted to specific uses with specific people. Almost more utilitarian that identity based. Is that a possible reading of your article or identity is still very much at play
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Thanks so much for your thoughtful question, Rocio! (And for your patience in my response--I'm new to Substack land...). I would definitely say that identity is very much still at play, but the weight of what's at stake with with more public platforms has made semi-private spaces more desirable as young people navigate all of the social turbulence of adolescence. As one example, something that often gets overlooked WRT youth culture is the importance of humor and satire, which does not always translate well to broad audiences, natural language processing and college recruiters. Sometimes young people want spaces where they can be themselves with friends who understand them. Sometimes they want to "try on" different identities or explore communities that aren't accessible in the town where they live. That might mean hanging with gaming friends on a Discord server or using Snapchat to share awkward or weird moments from the school day. It might also mean producing content for more public performative social spaces (TikTok, YouTube, Twitch, etc.), but the idea of a one-size-fits-all platform for this generation or anything remotely resembling the concentration of social tech that older generations have largely come to accept seems unlikely.
Hi @Claire Evans! What do you think of the canopy metaphor to inspire us to create a meta-layer on the web where people have a presence and content can be connected based on relationships? Being on today's web pages is like being lost in algorithmically weeded field of commercial timber. What if we could be in the canopy, looking down getting better view. In the canopy, there are people who came the webpage and entered the canopy. The canopy is interconnected and full of relationships. In the canopy, there can be contradicting and supporting bridges from pieces of content on the page to pieces of content on other pages. All this is possible with a meta-layer. Could the canopy help us envision the new public space?
Hey Daveed, absolutely! The canopy is a really interesting metaphor to bring into this conversation, and I agree that the meta-layer is something that's sorely lacking online. From a navigation perspective, it reminds me a little of those old-school "webrings" that interconnected early websites sites by affinity or community.
It also reminds me of some of the earlier thinking about hypertext—before the World Wide Web became standard, there existed a large community of scholars invested in building hypertext systems around the principle that hyperlinks themselves could provide a meaningful, and adaptable meta-layer to large bodies of information. I'm talking about systems where links were constructive (built by folks navigating the systems as they went, like information trails), could be navigated in multiple directions, could have multiple destinations and sources, and could be preserved in a separate layer. Because, of course, on the Web, links are contextual, which means that when the destination of a link is taken down, that link rots. We receive a 404 Error, and the piece of information about what connected those two different ideas is gone—forever. And that’s a loss for our culture.
Webrings were such a fun way to wander the web! I've seen a few sprout up in intentionally low-footprint web communities and in the form of "my friends" link pages on artist websites.
Recently I've heard digital gardens and personal/community wikis spoken of in the same way that hypertext once was (I'm especially thinking of Mark Bernstein's Hypertext Gardens - http://www.eastgate.com/garden/Enter.html). But then again, I think the digital garden concept comes directly out of that line of thinking.
Having worked for art orgs that have lots of external web links, it's wild to me how much time can be eaten up resolving dead links. We've taken to preemptively saving linked content (articles especially) offline, which allows for better preservation but really cuts the wandering path of discovery short for users.
Check out this draft visual here: https://bridgit.io/home-2. (Nate that the links are not active.)