It's only a design choice to an extent. Email was higher friction. It lost because of it, but still had all the pathologies social networks do today.
-
-
Email did not have all the pathologies! Speed, friction, visibility, targeting, surveillance all matter. Email is.. email. Not everything is the same in its effects. I'm not disagreeing the transition is gonna be hard. But speed and scale really matter if we get a chance.
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
I do think all of the pathologies we see today in social media were present in email. Disinformation, the pileons, flamewars. They were just less important because people engaged less in total, but they were a similar proportion of the total activity.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
But regardless, it's an evolutionary process that causes low friction networks to beat high friction ones, and thus to become irrelevant. You can't create a world in which high friction networks win in the market.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Yes yes you can. We don't let the most polluting cars win in the market (they would accelerate better, though). We don't use lead in paint (it is an awesome anti-corrosive).
2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes -
Lead, NOx, particulates are all measurable and concrete. You can define a spec around them. This is different. You are trying to restrict the very property that causes social networks to succeed, and so any gap between the spec and that property will be successfully exploited.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
That's just not true. Lemme at it, maybe starting ten years ago. The things to restrict were pretty measurable. Not saying you get something neat. We're not going to legislate eating vegetables; we're going to make it expensive to serve ice cream for breakfast lunch and dinner.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
I'd love to see what you come up with, but I think even social media companies themselves, with all the understanding they have, would struggle to define something that cut around mostly the behavior to disincentivize. It's too fundamental to what makes networks work at all.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
My point is they rarely understand what they are unleashing till it's too late. They're too localized, too small, too narrow a slice-of-humanity.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
I don't think that's the issue. The fundamental problem is that a lot the things people *want* to do online are bad. People want to send articles to their whole address book without reading them. People want to yell at people they don't like.
2 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
Nah. People want to do people things online. It's not better or worse than people anywhere else. Players are the same, the gameboard is different.
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.