A few thoughts on social networks

[andrewducker]

One of the most fundamental differences between social media sites is whether posts have comments, or do you use other posts to reply to them.

Facebook and Dreamwidth both let you make posts and then control who can leave comments on them, and will let you moderate those comments. This allows you to build community and deal with abusive/unpleasant passers-by.

Twitter/BlueSky/Mastodon/Threads don't have comments - instead they let you make new posts in reply to other posts. This design tends to mean your discussion circles get larger - by default it's easier for people to drop in and join in any discussions they fancy, and conversations are a lot less structured. While you can choose to make your own posts friends-only it's not really designed for that, and most people don't. Mostly it's one massive conversation with millions of people in it that you then filter to see the bits/people you're interested in.

I think that both options have value. I like being able to have conversations with my friends, and I've gotten a huge amount out of building a place where I can discuss things with friends without awful people leaving drive-by abuse - the Facebook/Dreamwidth model works better for that. But I also like being able to encounter previously-unknown people writing about all sorts of interesting topics, and the Twitter model works better for that.

I have stopped using X so much, because I was seeing more and more unpleasantness, and it felt less and less welcoming. But I could easily transition to BlueSky, where I felt there was a very similar kind of discussion, but less trolling and abuse (although still some, obviously). I even have Mastodon to fall back on (which is fine for chatting to people I know, but doesn't do nearly as good a job at surfacing interesting discussions).

However, Facebook are now saying that they're just fine with appalling behaviour - and that's pushing some people away without there being a great alternative to it. Dreamwidth lets you manage discussions in a similar way, but it's missing one of the other things Facebook does differently - Real Names. And, despite thinking that in many ways real name policies are terrible (great post about that here) they are key for a large chunk of society. Because while my aunts, cousins, and most other people who aren't terminally online are willing to have their uncle John Smith as a friend and vaguely keep up with their updates of their life, they aren't going to add a bunch of people called things like "GreatFire1666", and then try and keep track of who they are in real life, and how they know them. It's a layer of overhead that drives them away.

And so unless an alternative comes along that lets people both see what their real-life friends are up to, in a way that lets them keep their discussions "safe" by letting them keep control of who is in/out of them, I don't see people moving to it. I suspect that they're more likely to just slowly stop using Facebook. Which would be a shame, as I have nearly 20 years of history on it, and I rather like looking back to see what I was up to over the years, and keeping up with what some of my old friends are up to now.

Comments

[sobriquet9]

and then try and keep track of who they are in real life

The point of using aliases like GreatFire1666 or Publius is to prevent such tracking. I'm pretty sure my posts are already illegal somewhere, or will become so in the future. Apostasy is illegal in twenty countries. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley recently said he wants to extradite and jail US citizens over online posts.

[andrewducker]

Exactly. So pseudonym sites are vital - but are never going to work for most people, so you need real name sites to keep in contact with them too (if you want to).

[sobriquet9]

But you don't need the real names of people you only interact with online. Facebook offers no such option because social graph of real identities is their product, not to make Facebook easier to use.

[andrewducker]

But I do need to be findable by various ordinary people who will only talk to people they actually know, using their real names.

[sobriquet9]

You can always use your real name if you want to be findable, like you do here on Dreamwidth. My point was that on Facebook that's your only option.

[andrewducker]

Yes, because otherwise it won't attract the non-online crowd. Which is the vast majority (see how much more popular Facebook is than other social networks).

If you let people have both a pseudonym and a birth name then you've just linked them together and the pseudonym is pointless. If you let some of them only have pseudonyms then you've destroyed the point of the "You can use this to find your real family/friends" approach. If you don't want to connect with your non-nerdy family and friends then that's fine, you can connect with just the nerds on some other site.

[jducoeur]

Yes, because otherwise it won't attract the non-online crowd. Which is the vast majority (see how much more popular Facebook is than other social networks).

I'm skeptical about this line of reasoning. Yes, FB is big, and yes it theoretically requires wallet names. But:

• The wallet-name rule came moderately late, well after it was along the path to taking over the world.
• Many, many people ignore that rule, and always have done.
• It's almost 100% unenforced, which means that people who rely on it can get very badly burned. (Not least, by scammers impersonating real people.)
• Bluesky doesn't have a wallet-name rule, and is growing rapidly. (For that matter, Xitter has never required you to clearly surface your wallet-name.)
• The "non-online" crowd is, y'know, mostly not online. Yes, my mother might be slightly more comfortable with that rule -- but she still just doesn't spend any time on FB, despite her family's attempt to get her to see her grand-children.
• Most importantly, FB has scads of far-more-important features, which I think are the primary reason they largely won in the marketplace.

I mean, for me FB has exactly one remaining use case: communities. When Yahoo Groups slowly declined and died, FB Groups basically won by default, and they're still in many ways the least-bad way to run a social community. I know enormous numbers of people who use FB solely for Groups, particularly more or less everyone under 40. (I hatehatehate this situation -- I want my communities off of there. But it's really hard, especially because of the lack of a clearly-winning alternative.)

And of course, that's not even counting the reality that FB is just part of a suite that they very deliberately bundle, including things like photo sharing (Instagram) and direct messaging (Messenger). They're even trying to muscle their way into micro-blogging, although Threads may be a day late and dollar short for that. But in general, they've refined Network Effects to an artform.

Does the wallet-name rule encourage some people to join? Yeah, I'm sure it does. But I think it repels at least as many, and I don't think it's as important as you're crediting it with.

(Disclaimer: when the Nymwars happened, I was an outspoken opponent of wallet-name policies -- indeed, it's likely the primary reason I never wound up working for Google, because I had a vocal chip on my shoulder about it when I was interviewing there, with the result that the engineers all loved me and the managers very much did not. So I'm absolutely biased here. But I'm still dubious that it is all that much of a draw now, and I believe it's becoming less so over time.)