14 November 2022. Social media | User design
Breaking Twitter. // In praise of ‘anti-viral’ design
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Apologies for the slightly less frequent appearance of Just Two Things recently. Work and other commitments have reduced my writing time.
1: Breaking Twitter
I am one of the thousands of people who have migrated away from Twitter since Elon Musk took over. I have a new identity at the federated social media site Mastodon: I haven’t yet deleted my Twitter account, but the main question at the moment seems to be whether it will go bankrupt or collapse before or after I do that.
I started writing this on Friday, but it turned into 1400 words, so I’m going to split it over two days (which may mean an extra post in this week.)
The second post here today is about Mastodon, notably about the design of its user interaction, but there are some things to say about Twitter first. The main one is: it’s hard to tell whether Musk’s behaviour is driven by malice, mishap, misunderstanding, or miscalculation. This distinction perhaps won’t matter much to the thousands of people who have already been laid off from the business (and in some cases chaotically rehired). All the same there’s evidence for all four.
If mishap, it’s probably caused by misunderstanding the nature of the business. Whatever problems Twitter had weren’t caused by engineering: basically, it’s an unprofitable media company with some tightly defined regulatory restrictions. I’m aware that the response to this is sometimes something along the lines of “Musk billionaire genius Tesla SpaceX blah blah blah blah”, but Tesla and Space X are very different businesses. Specifically they are both in sectors where engineering innovation that drives down costs is of strategic value; and where substantial public subsidies or support have been available.
So all that initial noise about Musk getting engineers to show him the code they had written recently was wasted effort. Certainly watching some of Musk’s posts over the past week has been like watching someone doing Social Media 101–or even the introductory course before that—in real time with a real social network.
In the miscalculation camp it’s hard to imagine which financial genius though it a good idea to buy a company with less than a billion dollars a year in cash flow and then load it with debt that costs a billion dollars a year to service. Or then decided that alienating advertisers would be a good strategy. This surely deserves some kind of investment banking Darwin Award.
Either way, the attempt (now paused?) to use the sales of “blue tick verification” at $8 a month to help fill this gap is definitely going well.
(Image via Artbear on Mastodon)
On misunderstanding, it’s now clear that one of the reasons that a swathe of senior staff left the organisation last week was because Musk didn’t understand the seriousness of breaching the Federal Trade Commission’s Strict Consent Decree.1 How serious? The employees concerned didn’t fancy the possibility of going to jail, as Techdirt reported:
According to the Verge, Elon and his entourage have made it clear that he doesn’t give a fuck about the FTC… So, here’s the thing. While Elon may think he’s not afraid of the FTC, he should be. The FTC is not the SEC and the FTC does not fuck around. Violating the FTC can lead to criminal penalties. I mean, it was just a month ago that Uber’s former Chief Security Officer was convicted on federal charges for obstruction against the FTC. And you wonder why Twitter’s Chief Security Officer resigned?
One of the implications of the Consent Decree is that it simply isn’t possible to rollout new product features rapidly, because they need to be reviewed for privacy implications. In the same vein, the Twitter legal department’s decision, post-Musk, that engineers should ‘self-certify’ compliance with FTC rules and privacy laws, also breaches the consent decree. (Later on, someone mailed Twitter staff on Musk’s behalf to say that Twitter would abide by the Consent Decree).
On the evidence for malice: Saudi money, the strong “free speech” statements that were rightly read as a code for opening the floodgates on hate speech, firing chunks of the content moderation teams and all of the Human Rights team, the mid-term elections tweets last Monday and Tuesday recommending voting Republican, promoting conspiracy theories about the Pelosi attack, are all evidence. It says something when a campaign involving advertisers is called #StopToxicTwitter. (Yes, there’s also a hashtag).
We won’t know for a while which of these it is, or which combination of them. It may be the arrogance of a billionaire surrounded by yes-people. But social networks do die—they just usually die a bit more slowly.
There’s a second post tomorrow on the ways in which social media companies die.
2: The benefits of ‘anti-viral’ design
One of the things you notice, almost immediately, about the social media platform Mastodon is that it seems calmer than Twitter. At first I thought this might be just because it was a bit smaller, and because the people who had joined it earlier were perhaps more committed to the idea of a more diverse and less centralised system, and that this might translate into different behaviours.
But there’s a good piece on Medium by the tech writer Clive Thompson on how a lot of this is done through the way the platform is designed. It turns out that some small tweaks in design make a big difference to user behaviour.
Thompson calls this “anti-viral design”, based on a piece he wrote five years ago about some then experimental sites that
had no social mechanisms for promoting posts: No “like” buttons, no share buttons, no feed showing which posts were the most popular. Txt.fyi even had a no-robots tag on each post, telling search engines not to index them.
Rob Beschizza, who programmed txt.fyi, explained to Thompson then that the reason for these features, or lack of them, was to
encourage people to communicate and be creative — without constantly thinking about “will I get a huge audience for this”? Beschizza (and the other folks making these similarly antiviral sites) all believed that the design of the big social sites had deformed people’s behavior. Twitter and Instagram and Facebook etc. had coaxed people to constantly try to hack the attentional marketplace.
Because Thompson has been spending more time on Mastodon recently, he realised that it, too, was anti-viral in its design:
It was engineered specifically to create friction — to slow things down a bit. This is a big part of why it behaves so differently from mainstream social networks.
Some examples of that in the design: it doesn’t have a “quote tweet” (or “quote-toot”) function—you can re-toot things you like, but you can’t add comments to it. It doesn’t rank posts by popularity or other algorithmic measures; the posts arrive and are displayed in the order they arrive, most recent at the top. It doesn’t let you do a full-text search across the whole database—search is limited to the names of users and hashtags.
Twitter, in contrast:
Twitter’s algorithm creates a rich-get-richer effect: Once a tweet goes slightly viral, the algorithm picks up on that, pushes it more prominently into users’ feeds, and bingo: It’s a rogue wave.
Thompson suggests that the long-term users who have built the Mastodon site prefer it this way, and perhaps with good reason:
This is in part because Mastodon’s earliest communities included many subaltern groups who wanted to avoid the dogpiling harassment they’d received on major social networks — and understood that well-engineered friction would help.
The way Thompson positions this is that many of those Mastodon users were extremely serious about the idea of consent. The federated structure of Mastodon also provides tools that help with this. Although you can see posts and follow people right across the “fediverse”, as it’s called, if members (or admins) of one of the (many) servers find that another server is indulging in what they consider hostile or anti-social behaviour, they can “defederate” them, blocking the whole group rather than just individuals.
At the same time, some groups have used Twitter’s viral properties to massive social effect, and for socially positive outcomes. There’s a reason while we all know the hashtags for #Metoo, #Timesup, and #BlackLivesMatter.
But the fact that Twitter had to invest so heavily in content moderation, and in protecting users, suggests that these were the exceptions rather than rule. And it’s hard to make a case for saying that looking at Twitter’s list of “what’s trending now” has ever provided much insight into the world.
Thompson’s article pointed me to a piece by Hugh Rundle, a Mastodon admin, reflecting on the influx of departing Twitter users (it may be up to a million now).
Rundle has an elegant analogy about a nightclub sitting around the corner from a private house where a sociable host holds house parties (based on some time he spent in Hobart, apparently). The night club is Twitter: people dress up, make a lot of noise, show off. The house party is Mastadon. And from his perspective, what happened this week was that a whole lot of people got fed up with the night club and decided to crash the house party.
Or to use another analogy:
To the Twitter people (Mastodon) feels like a confusing new world, whilst they mourn their old life on Twitter. They call themselves "refugees", but to the Mastodon locals it feels like a busload of Kontiki tourists just arrived, blundering around yelling at each other and complaining that they don't know how to order room service.
It’s a long post, and if you’re interested in this area it’s certainly worth reading. But the relevant part here is about both the way Twitter and other platforms have trained their users, and the cultural rules and expectations implied by that. He notes, for example, that some of the new arrivals re-posted his Mastadon posts on Twitter without asking him:
I hadn't fully understood — really appreciated — how much corporate publishing systems steer people's behaviour until this week. Twitter encourages a very extractive attitude from everyone it touches.
And for Rundle, there’s a political point here, about the control we have over our own voices:
If the people who built the fediverse generally sought to protect users, corporate platforms like Twitter seek to control their users. [My emphasis] Twitter claims jurisdiction over all "content" on the platform... The real problem with this arrangement, however, is what it does to how people think about consent and control over our own voices. Academics and advertisers who want to study the utterances, social graphs, and demographics of Twitter users merely need to ask Twitter Corporation for permission.
This question about “consent” and “voice” floats around this wider conversation without being pinned down. One of the reasons many left Twitter because Elon Musk’s statements about “freedom of speech” sounded like code for allowing disinformation and hate speech free rein on the platform. Yet I’ve seen these same people complain on Mastodon —as they are struggling impatiently to learn a new platform—that things like Mastodon’s “content warnings” are a restriction on speech rather than a courtesy to other users’ time and attention.
Well, obviously you need to be careful what you wish for. As I wade cautiously into the water at Mastodon, I am understanding better the virtues of open source systems built on anarchist principles, and deliberately designed to prevent corporate capture. It reminds me that there are still small corners of the internet that have been designed to emulate the community virtues of the 1990s world wide web.
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If you’re interested in Mastodon, Thompson also has a useful guide to how it differs from Twitter, and how to get started. I’m @nextwavef@mastodonapp.uk. My one tip: enter quietly, watch for a while, learn at least a little bit of the language, and be alert for tips on how the Mastodon communities work.
j2t#392
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This all dates back to a massive data breach in 2011, but more saliently, the FTC also issued a substantial fine to Twitter earlier this year for violating the consent decree, and also tightened up the order.