What are we going to do about it?
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
Edit: thanks to @Xamrica@lemmy.dbzer0.com for this translation alternative: https://translate.kagi.com/translate/https://www.xataka.com/servicios/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-porque-ahora-todo-reddit-discord-eso-preocupante
I think this is an XY problem.
People keep trying to bring back the old internet ; This is an broken and outdated solution.
The root problem (in my opinion) is that we need to share critical information to the masses, but the masses introduce “tyranny of the majority”. It’s a really tricky problem to figure out, and I really really really want mathematicians working on this.
If you live in the states, the Electoral College exists because they were looking for a practical solution to this problem. Considering the outcomes, it did not work - but there is no shame in this, as I think this is actually a really hard problem to solve.
The only known solution is to not share information to the masses (a.k.a keeping the normies out). In essence, this is what the old internet was - and a large part of what made it great. But this is not correct as it does not meet the criteria of the problem. Nor does it translate well, since your neighbors are apart of the masses.
If anyone has any thoughts on this, please share. If you do math for a living, please gather your friends and make an open-thesis about this.
EDIT
After some discussion in the comments, I have a general hypothesis:
People must be able to distinguish the resource they are accessing - highly recommended this process be easy. This provides consistent “edges”.
Looking at “tyranny of the majority” from a different perspective, one answer is to standardize how people communicate. This means no closed ecosystems nor convoluted protocols. This provides “standard weight” while preventing “infinite weight”.
This eliminates every platform I know of. Servers should not be given any tools to prevent incoming nor outgoing data. People should handle moderation individually - sane UI can of course be made available (BlueSky block filters could be inspiration?). Blocking should only be handled by the “nodes”, this also prevents “infinite weight”.
I find it really funny that this conclusion kind of alludes to the early internet in a lot of ways. Maybe it wasn’t the internet-forums, but the internet itself that has changed.
Only from the perspective of being able to monetize and control communications among large numbers of people.
For more than just angry X type reactions, the standard forum format is really a solved problem and has worked well for a long time. It’s only when these companies want to control what you see and sell the ability to do that do we get the news feeds. Even Reddit limits your direct message counts until you pay money for it.
The old internet was so much better
The problem is engagement - which in turn means building a community.
If someone goes to your forum, hijacks your posts, and them puts them on Reddit; there is no incentive to use your platform, which stifles and dies since no one is communicating on it. This is also part of the tyranny, as people can figuratively walk into your house, eat all your food, and then expect you to restock.
On the old internet, this was not really an issue since there was a better culture. But if all your friends use Reddit, and all the content is reposted there, why use the internet forum?
So let’s repost all of the popular Reddit content here ;D
I would have thought this is already a solved problem.
If you model social networks like a graph, then you can measure certain properties. One property that’s very important for social networks is the “small world index”. The small world index is a ratio of (how many of your friends know about each other(clustering coefficient))/(how many people on average to connect with anyone in the world (average path length)). Basically, in tribal communities, it used to be that everyone knew one another, AND if you really needed to send a message to another community then it would take only a few intermediate people. The former gives you a sense of safety, and the latter gives you the sense of being able to change the world.
With the advent of social media and other things, the small world index has gone way down. The amount of your friends that your friends know on average is gone down, aka, everyone is very fragmented and the clustering index has gone down. This number has gone down faster than the average path length, because the average path length was surprisingly low to begin with. The net effect is that people feel less like they are part of a community.
Social networks always try to tune their algorithms to encourage interactions to raise the small world index in this direction, but it’s very hard. For one, only few percent of users actually generate any content, the rest are lurkers. You can’t have a high clustering if your “potential friends” never talk to each other, if you can call them that.
Another reason is that enabling small worlds inside social networks is sometimes at odds with revenue generation. In general, consuming content/having para-social interactions online is much easier than before the modern social networks. Thus, people have gotten much more picky with their time and interactions, and now the type of content that people expect to see online now must be of the highest quality. High quality content is easier to monetize, but it’s also harder to create. So this puts an artificial floor on who creates content (only people who are in it for the money), and thus we have fewer people who spread/share ideas. This decreases the clustering coefficient. Thus, paid social networks are against small worlds.
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This is interesting perspective.
If I’m interpreting what your saying correctly, this becomes an alternation of the “Traveling Salesman Problem” - where people are the nodes, sending information is the destination, and medium of communication is the weight. The goal being finding the shortest path for two-way communication (go to destination and return).
If this is the case, “tyranny of majority” is indeed a very difficult problem to solve. This phenomena causes the weights of the graph to become change based on the number of surrounding nodes. Higher when less nodes (i.e Lemmy) and lower when more nodes (i.e Reddit).
To go even further, companies are manipulating their weights (creating closed ecosystems, etc) to make is so two-way communication is only viable within their bubble (think an edge of infinite weight). And it would also mean that it truly is unreasonable to expect laymen to “memorize the graph” (know a forum for everything) - it indeed would be just easier to know a subsection (i.e Reddit, Facebook, etc)
I’m just spitballing here, but a lot to interpret if true.
Interesting response!
Yes, the node, edges, travelling salesman, those are my definitions as well.
The only difference is that I’ve always thought about this is with an undirected graph. That models conventional friendships pretty well, but now that I’m thinking about it, it’s probably not a good way to model modern “relationships”. Either way, with two nodes it’s no longer a travelling salesman, as it becomes a much easier problem to solve.
I would argue that the tyranny of the majority unlikely to not be solved with the current form of social networks. I’m not sure if I have time to write out my argument, but it stems from the fact that the most popular people in the world have very uni-directional relationships with most people; everyone knows of Mr. Beast, very few know Mr. Beast.
Yeah the uni-directional relationships are also significant. It also happens to translate well; if Mr.Beast goes to randomcorp.com he is almost guaranteed to pull more people over than if SchmoeJoe went. Those people in turn would cause the website to be a more attractive option (less weight on the edge).
That would mean that there even is nuance within tyranny, which is funny to think about.
There’s also the possibility of cycles! What a fun rabbit-hole. Definitely worth a thesis paper or large-scale open discussion.
P.S. Also agreed that with a “limit” it is not TSP, and is much simpler. It evolves into TSP only when you think about a message originating from a source and making it to everyone - with the same effect for responses.
I don’t think this is a maths problem. It’s a social problem. Monkey brain combined with internet communications is still not a solved problem.
I think part of this is figuring out the values you want to express in the format of any given service (Marshal McLuhan style). You need to figure out what it is you’re trying to build for, and then build systems and tools that optimise towards that. (Corporate social media is failing because it’s only optimised towards profit, and that approach eats itself in the long run).
I posted an issue for mastodon on this recently. I think Lemmy should be asking the same questions.
First off, agreed that monkey brain + internet = unsolved.
Second, I think that this overall is a math problem and what you’re describing is metadata. Before I continue, there are many ways to solve and interpret problems - this is just how I see it.
If you think about this as a graph, it makes a lot more sense as a math problem. People want to communicate and the message has to reach each of them once through the shortest route. In essence, this becomes the “Traveling Salesman Problem”.
Next, imagine the distance between points on the graph become longer (when people group together) and shorter (when people split apart) - we now have described tyranny of the majority.
What you are describing (from my perspective) is the cost of going from one part of the graph to the other. This indeed is a very important part of the problem and directly relates to the tyranny, but does not solve it. Instead to solve this problem, we would have to find a way to standardize the distance between any two points in the graph (i.e it cannot take more than 30 feet to reach any given destination).
I cannot begin to describe how difficult this would be, but my brain is telling me it’s solvable.
The comments (and your github post) helped me think about this a bit deeper. This is why discussion is helpful.
I have a maths major, and think in networks, same as you. I agree that that’s a good start to thinking about the problem. It’s basically similar approach to Jay Forrester’s World model, that used system dynamics to model the global economy.
But what you’re doing is building a model, and then proposing using it to make decisions about how to run the world. This would be sensible, except that any model is necessarily a simplification of the real world, and that simplification process is subjective. What you value and care about and think is important defines what you put in the model, and also what you optimise for, and how you interpret the outputs. So your decisions ultimately end up being subjective too.
There are other issues too, such as the fact that any dynamic model like this exhibits complexity, which makes it analytically unsolveable; and chaos, which means numerical predictions will suffer from unpredictability due to the Butterfly effect, and the Hawkmoth effect.
If you want to get a deeper understanding of this stuff, systems thinking is where you need to head. I would recommend this paper as an excellent introduction to the field as a whole: https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.54120%2Fjost.000051 (Open access, about 50 pages)
For the first wave/system dynamics approach, this article is worth a read too (IMO it presents far to simple a picture though): https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
Reddit was a decent solution, till it enshitified to make money. Before then, it was already flooded by the masses. Clearly their method worked fine. Not perfect, but at least fine. So I don’t see why the masses are the problem. I personaly put all the blame on the need to make money of a vital piece of digital infrastructure.
The tricky part, is that we also cannot put it in the hands of a government, since it can become a tool for propaganda. So the EU hosting something like reddit, would also create a conflict of interrests. I’m curious if we can find a good solution to this problem.
it was great before trumps first term, then everything became to sensitive and you started to get banned for the slightest misconstrued statement. my first ban was in his first term, never before.
remember the purging of SUbreddits the GOP was whining about becoming illegal? shoplifting,etc.
Reddit was is a peculiar position, flooded by the masses isn’t really what I would call old reddit. Known by them yes (for answers), used by them no.
I think that development is fairly recent, maybe from 2019? And around that time, Reddit started to go to shit.
I agree with the government portion. I’m not really sure what the solution would be, which is why I want math folk working on it - but discussion is always helpful.
Reddit was great back in 2012 when I first joined, and it slowly got worse over the years as my patients gradually dwindled down the third time I was banned I didn’t go back. I’m glad that Lemmy is busy enough I can come daily now and not run out of new posts to see.
That’s why I think having a decentralized network where one of the instances belongs to the government is a good idea. If the government is only another player and not the only ruler it’s safer for the network. But it’s the same for every big company. I don’t want another Meta or Google.
But isn’t the government hosting something like reddit better than the current state? The government is elected after all, while reddit isn’t. At the same time, nothing ensures, reddit isn’t used for propaganda.
I think that we need to provide actual alternatives based on constructive discussion and learning instead of based on corporate profits. Institutions like the EU could develop and run something like that, especially with all the federated platforms.
I agree that we need solid alternatives, but this doesn’t really tackle the tyranny of the majority problem. We need people to use the platforms for communication, otherwise it has not solved the problem.
For example, if you use Signal but every single one of your friends use WhatsApp and refuses to switch (which is common), then you are forced to use WhatsApp. This is why it is tyranny.
EU can facilitate thousands of platforms, but if the masses don’t use them it’s pointless.
Federated-platforms are kind of a step in the right direction, but they’re extremely weak to internal bad actors. If lemmy.world gets one million normie users, then cuts off the entire federation - then Lemmy has effectively been hijacked and set back 10 years.
Within the I2P anonymous mix network there was an attempt, at some point around 2015, to build a system named Syndie where everyone would have to be their own censor, and servers would host content without the server operator really knowing or caring about what they host.
It failed to take off, but I’m not convinced if the reason was architecture or the main developer leaving.
Just guessing, it likely failed due to:
These are killshots to this type of service as people need to develop/extend/use it - for it to be viable. It is in the right direction, but (similar to many cornerstoning attempts in FOSS) is not handled gracefully.
The electoral college was an 18th century compromise to slave states. The US constitution is showing it’s age and the whole system is broken now