Vitalik Buterin's excellent essay What do I think about Community Notes? is one of the very few articles about social media that has left me feeling extremely optimistic.
Even if less than one percent of misinformative tweets get a note providing context or correcting them, Community Notes is still providing an exceedingly valuable service as an educational tool. The goal is not to correct everything; rather, the goal is to remind people that multiple perspectives exist, that certain kinds of posts that look convincing and engaging in isolation are actually quite incorrect, and you, yes you, can often go do a basic internet search to verify that it's incorrect.
It's clear Community Notes is imperfect, and X does incalculable harm, just as pre-Elon Twitter did. Still, this project is genuinely impressive: a smart, thoughtful, verifiable open-source algorithm that aims to reduce misinformation and that actually stands a chance of decreasing political polarization. As terrible as X can be, I don't see this happening at Meta or ByteDance.
Why do non-technical people sometimes dramatically underestimate the time, money, and effort required to build software? I think it’s because they only see the end result: the app, website, or other product.
If a Martian visited Earth and inspected War and Peace or the encyclopedia, they might assume books were easy to produce. Some paper, some ink… what’s the big deal? How hard is it to scribble on pulp or bang on a keyboard? Of course, the visitor wouldn’t understand what the ink and pages represent. They wouldn’t understand how much research went into the work, let alone reading, planning, conversation, editing, and life experience. Thankfully, most of us have had some writing experience in school, and we understand it’s not so simple.
What makes me “good” with computers? I've wondered and written about this in the past. Recently, I remembered another habit that helps me learn.
When I make a mistake, I try to start over and make it again. That may be unintuitive, but there's no better way of learning how to avoid it. I don't recommend repeating a mistake if doing so would cause additional harm, of course, but even catastrophic mistakes can be repeated safely with some creativity. If you accidentally delete an important file, for example, create an unimportant file and try to delete that one in the same way.
Righteous indignation powerfully affects the world. For that reason, we need to be sure we're actually right before we act on it, or for that matter, before it acts on us.
In addition to the others I've blogged about, here's another mobile game that doesn't suck: There Is No Game: WD. Great graphics, lots of humor, and extremely creative gameplay. The story is surprisingly sweet, and you get to “play” classic games along the way. It even parodies games that are ruined by micropayments. Yes, please!
Thanks to social media, we all know too much about each other. We broadcast opinions to the entire Internet that a reasonable person would never mention at Thanksgiving dinner.
I only fully appreciated the flip side of this phenomenon very recently, however. As Jamie Bartlett writes in You are not an embassy, and as simple observation proves, social media companies work very hard to motivate us to share our thoughts publicly. More people sharing more thoughts means more readers, more commenters, more fights, more addiction, more ad impressions, and ultimately more money for these companies.
I can't claim the moral high ground here. I was guilty, too.
We know too much about each other because we've been manipulated into saying too much about ourselves. We've been convinced that we should say things online that we would never say in polite company. Is it any wonder the world is so divided?
I know this may seem hypocritical at first. I'm blogging right now, after all. However, I consider thoughts, the platform that currently powers this blog, to be a calm technology. It doesn't beg for my attention. I don't get any buzzes in my pocket letting me know that someone thought I was wrong. Nobody can like or comment at all. As a result, I write when I want to, not when the platform wants me to. I say what I want, not what drives outrage and enriches Mark Zuckerberg. We need more platforms like thoughts… and fewer like Facebook.
It turns out that in a country as large and diverse as ours, a certain amount of benign neglect of other people’s odd folkways is more conducive to social peace than a constant, in-your-face awareness of clashing sensibilities. Little is gained when people in my corner of Brooklyn gawk at viral images of Christmas cards featuring families armed to the teeth. And people in conservative communities don’t need to hear about it every time San Francisco considers renaming a public school.
The social corrosion caused by Facebook and other platforms isn’t a side effect of bad management and design decisions. It’s baked into social media itself.
There are many reasons Facebook and the social media companies that came after it are implicated in democratic breakdown, communal violence around the world and cold civil war in America. They are engines for spreading disinformation and algorithmic jet fuel for conspiracy theories. They reward people for expressing anger and contempt with the same sort of dopamine hit you get from playing slot machines.
