Thoughts from John Karahalis
In 2008, Michael Pollan coined the following phrase as a simple summary of his nutritional advice:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Maybe we need equally simple advice for this new, “social” (actually, profoudnly antisocial) world we live in. Maybe it should be something like:
Use the web. Not too much. Mostly learn from experts.
The foundational medical advice of the future may sound something like this: eat well, stay physically active, don't smoke, and avoid social media.
I don't want this blog to come off as holier-than-thou. I am guilty or have been guilty of many of the things I criticize, especially when it comes to social media. I also know that I have blind spots. I just hope that my blind spots are different than the blind spots of others. I want to share my perspective and learn from the perspectives of others.
This recipe is adapted from a recipe on the blog Merry Merzville , which is in turn adapted from The Joy of Vegan Baking by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau. My modifications are pretty minor. This recipe would not exist without theirs.
Beyond that, let’s not bury the lede. The story behind these muffins isn’t that interesting. I know what you’re here for.
Social media is a confirmation bias machine. Facebook, for instance, is a great place to hear what we already believe. It's a terrible place to learn from the other and confront the weaknesses of our own arguments.
Is it any surprise, then, that political extremism, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience are flourishing?
I find it strange that we rarely hear the term “publicity stunt” anymore, when they seem more common than ever.
BeReal is interesting. A newly-popular social network, it allows users to photograph and share one moment per day during a randomly-determined, two-minute window. The thinking is that this will discourage curation. Users will see their friends as they really are, not as they pretend to be.
I'm not convinced. BeReal might limit fakery, but I think pretension will evolve rather than perish in this new environment.
Regardless, BeReal doesn't address the vast majority of problems with social media. I predict that users will still suffer from confirmation bias, addiction, misinformation, targeted advertising, privacy degradation, and the myriad other harms caused by social media.
I support Signal's decision to drop support for SMS and MMS. Software maintenance can be incredibly challenging and time-consuming. This decision will likely free up time for more important work.
John Carmack is rumored to have said, “Focus is a matter of deciding what things you're not going to do.” I'm not sure if the attribution is correct, but it doesn't matter. It's a good point.
Contrary to the opinions shared on Hacker News, the world is not going to end. (Hacker News readers often forget that they are not the target market.) If anything, it might be easier to convince others to use Signal now. “Use this app to have private conversations with other people who use the app. It doesn't change how anything else on your phone works.” In a world that remembers rouge software crashing computers, that fact is more important than it might seem.
Besides, abbreviations rarely correlate with usability. Signal needs to reach normal people. Let's keep it simple.
I know many people who maintain “read-only” social media accounts. They have no intention of posting anything, but they want to see what other people are up to.
Years ago, it occurred to me that social media platforms discourage this. Almost all social media accounts include the ability to post content, whether or not the user actually intends to do so. Even my Twitch account, which I created to comment on video game streams, allows me to create my own stream. I have no interest in becoming a streamer.
It's easy to see why platforms do this: tempting users in this way is good for business. Among the millions of people who create read-only accounts, some percentage of them end up posting content anyway simply because it's easy to do so. Something similar happened to me when I created a Facebook account many years ago. I promised myself that I wouldn't like, comment, or post. That promise didn't last very long.
I find this to be so peculiar. There's no law of nature requiring that social media platforms give megaphones to people who would otherwise be passive readers, and yet this design choice is so ubiquitous that we don't even notice it. Would it be going too far to call this a dark pattern?
Perhaps this is another topic for Congress, in addition to requiring that tech companies collaborate on databases of phishing sites. We know that social media incentivizes outrageous and polarizing content. Why are we making it easier for people to yell at each other?