Threadgoblin

Archived thread by robin on Rosegarden

Well, the twig I posted yes­terday about the weird-sounding crow went a bit viral, by Rosegarden standards, and it got me thinking … 

On a social media plat­form in 2024, a mes­sage from a single human can fan out, unfiltered, and reach thou­sands of others in min­utes.

This is a very strange super­power!! It can be fun, but there’s an edge of danger to it, too … a run­away train kind of feeling.

(That’s why I deleted the weird-sounding crow)

Some­times, it’s not fun at all. A sentence, poorly chosen, calls down a storm of bile. An army of bots glam­ours a divi­sive meme into a mil­lion minds.

What we hear from the oper­a­tors of social media plat­forms is that mon­i­toring com­mu­ni­ca­tion at this scale, pre­venting that harm, is an unprece­dented tech­nical chal­lenge.

That’s true. However … no one asked for com­mu­ni­ca­tion at this scale!

This is a chal­lenge these com­pa­nies designed for themselves; a chal­lenge they enlarged through relentless, inge­nious growth; a chal­lenge they now invoke as if it’s some long­standing problem in fun­da­mental physics.

Like heating a pot to a boil, then com­plaining the water’s too hot to drink 🤔

“What can we do about this scalding substance??” the oper­a­tors of social media plat­forms exclaim … as the burners roar on their highest setting.

Here’s a simple solution:

Cool it down.

No rea­son­able human needs more than 10,000 other humans to read their words within twenty min­utes of writing them.

If someone — a journalist, a celebrity, a pres­i­dent — insists they do need an audi­ence that big, that fast, well … they can start an email newsletter.

There’s no imper­a­tive for any plat­form to pro­vide this strange super­power to the pres­i­dent of the United States or anyone else.

“Start your own” is inter­preted as a killing curse, but really, it’s not. People do it all the time, with newsletters, websites, even apps. Sure, it’s difficult, but reaching a very large audi­ence very quickly ought to be difficult.

(It should require an offering.)

I hear the objection: some­thing some­thing free flow of information … some­thing some­thing mar­ket­place of ideas.

But the people who are really serious about mar­kets know better! Stock exchanges have “cir­cuit breakers” that halt trading when prices move too fast. Some­times the halt lasts a few min­utes; other times, it’s the whole day.

Slowing things down lowers the stakes and reduces the poten­tial for harm.

You know about feed­back, right?

When a PA system screeches, that’s positive feed­back. A voice flows into the microphone, out of the speaker, back into the microphone, out of the speaker again, and again, and again, picking up a bit of ampli­fi­ca­tion each time around, until it becomes an ear-splitting wail.

The master metaphor for social media might just be the PA screech.

There’s another kind of feed­back, called neg­a­tive feed­back. A ther­mo­stat uses neg­a­tive feed­back; so does a human body. When your tem­per­a­ture rises, you sweat, which cools you down. When your tem­per­a­ture dips, you shiver, which warms you up.

Neg­a­tive feed­back is the feed­back of sta­bility and health.

These plat­forms could add neg­a­tive feed­back a hun­dred dif­ferent ways.

Maybe … there could be an upper limit on the audi­ence for any single mes­sage. 10,000 humans? 100,000? (THAT’S STILL A LOT)

Maybe … mes­sages could dif­fuse without limit, but slowly. You want to reach a mil­lion people? Sure! It’s just going to take six months.

Maybe … the same algo­rithms that presently iden­tify pop­ular mes­sages and pro­mote them could have the oppo­site effect, like those cir­cuit breakers in stock exchanges. They could be wired to the brakes instead of the gas.

I can see a future, very clearly, in which all social media plat­forms include mech­a­nisms like these, as a matter of common sense and also of law.

Here and now, I think Rosegarden demon­strates how many prob­lems can be nipped in the bud (SORRY) just by slowing things down.

Besides, titania says the lack of real-time updates makes this site easier for her to maintain. I think that’s telling. Infor­ma­tion doesn’t “want” to flow quickly. The engi­neers who built T could tell you: it’s actu­ally a pain in the ass!

I’m going to put these twigs in the queue now, but they won’t actu­ally appear on Rosegarden until tomorrow. How pleasant.

(This is robin checking in, two hours later. I thought better of one par­tic­u­larly snide com­ment in this thread and came back to delete it before any­thing was even published. See? Slower.)

In the future, we’ll regard today’s net­works run amok the way we regard the scenes you see in classic movies, clouded with cig­a­rette smoke. Sil­icon Valley will be bashful about the wealth it amassed in this reck­less period.

Like the old tobacco towns.

Social media plat­forms should run small, and slow, and cool to the touch.

That’s all I wanted to say.

I’ll go back to posting twigs of crows now.