Against Trendism

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: John Ohno <john.ohno () gmail com>
> Date: May 4, 2018 at 10:14:09 AM EDT
> To: ip <ip () listbox com>, Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
> Subject: Against Trendism
>
> For submission to the IP list
>
> Originally posted here: 
> https://medium.com/@enkiv2/against-trendism-how-to-defang-the-social-media-disinformation-complex-81a8e2635956
>
> Against trendism: how to defang the social media disinformation complex
>
> There’s an essential mistake that almost every social media platform makes — one inherited from marketing (where it 
> makes some sense), and one that is mostly unexamined and unaccounted-for even in otherwise fairly socially-conscious 
> projects like Mastodon and Diaspora. In almost every one of these systems, incentives exist that confuse popularity 
> with value.
>
> I call this ‘trendism’ — the belief that an already-trending topic deserves to be promoted.
>
> In marketing, because the piece of information being spread is intended to sell a product, the spread of that 
> information is, in fact, theoretically proportional to its value. In social media, the information being spread is 
> not a piece of advertising, and while most of these systems have revenue models based on advertising, that 
> advertising is generated on the fly based on the viewer’s browsing history and has nothing to do with the content of 
> the piece of information being spread.
>
> The thing is, ideas travel in packs. When we encounter one idea, we tend to see its nearest neighbours also. When we 
> find out something new, our friends hear about it too. So, trending posts are rarely surprising: by the very nature 
> of their popularity, they are already familiar in their essence to most of the people who are directed toward them.
>
> The information content of a message, in Claude Shannon’s formulation, is proportional to its deviation from 
> expectation — information is surprise. Kolgorov’s formulation is similar: information content proportional to the 
> smallest possible message that could say the same thing (which, of course, includes references to earlier messages or 
> prior knowledge as a possible tactic).
>
> In other words, from an information-theoretic perspective, a post that  only tells you things you already know is 
> worthless. Yet, trending content is almost always composed solely of things the viewer has already seen.
>
> There’s one piece of information that a copy of a viral post actually has — the association between the content of 
> the post and the person posting it. We share posts we’ve already seen as a way of expressing our identity, both 
> personally and within a group. That is the only form of information valued by trending-oriented systems: tribal 
> affiliation.
>
> If we want to force our social media platforms into information-rich environments and lower the amount of tribal 
> rivalry we are exposed to, there are a couple general-purpose solutions, and they all come down to kneecapping the 
> machinery of trendism.
>
> Rather than block political content (only one kind of tribalist content, and one that is at least theoretically 
> grounded in genuine philosophical differences about the ideal shape of the world, rather than geography or social 
> groups), we should block all shared content. Remove retweets and shares from your feed entirely. Most of them are 
> things you have already seen, and most of the rest don’t contain meaningful or useful information.
> Emotionally-manipulative posts get the most engagement, and are therefore ranked higher in feeds. (I don’t want to be 
> emotionally manipulated. Do you?)* To defeat this ranking, force your feed to reverse-chronological order. To filter 
> out emotionally-manipulative posts, filter out anything with more than a set number of interactions.
> Avoid being part of the problem. Before sharing, determine: is the  information true? Is it new? Is it playing mostly 
> on my emotions? If possible, delay your sharing for a long period of time — read an article, and then wait a few 
> hours, or even a few days, before deciding whether or not it is of sufficient quality to actually re-post.
> Identify when you are being drawn into heated arguments, and ignore them. In the heat of the moment, you’re not 
> actually making good points anyhow, and you’re more likely to misunderstand or misrepresent your opponent. The 
> suggestions from #3 apply here too for comments — make sure your comments are accurate, informative, and cool, even 
> if that means waiting several days to respond. Never let the system rush you.
> Visible metrics gamify trendism. Remove them.
> Most social media platforms don’t make it easy to follow this advice. Mastodon is closest — it hides metrics from the 
> timeline by default, supports only reverse-chronological post ordering, and allows you to filter all boosts from your 
> timeline. For everything else, you will need to use browser extensions.
>
> Facebook Demetricator and Twitter Demetricator hide metrics like number of notifications, retweets, and likes. F. B. 
> Purity has a variety of options for hiding post types, and allows you to permanently force your timeline order to 
> reverse-chronological. New XKit does the same for Tumblr. I wrote a greasemonkey script to grey out Tumblr posts with 
> more than 1000 notes.
>
> If you’re looking to simply spend less time on social media, there are several configurable blocking extensions, as 
> well as Intent, which merely records and displays how long you’ve been using particular sites.
>
> *Emotion is important, but good communication comes after emotional reactions are understood and contextualized.
>
> This message was sent to the list address and trashed, but can be found online.



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