The strangest thing to me about our social tools and networks is how super-limited their feature-sets and philosophies have been in human terms.
It feels like designing a house entirely around the best use of new light-switch technology. How can we reinvent the bathmat???
It's weird.
@kissane Good stuff. The death of Twitter has got me thinking about this. Twitter was always so basic!
But I think one of the challenges is that social behavior is so rich and complicated that humans will channel richness into a basic text box much more effectively than developers can create rich tooling that really meets people where they are.
Not to say people shouldn't try. But I think there's a big uncanny valley between pretty basic tools and ones that really show an understanding of human socialization. And that's before we get to how much people's implied purposes differ from their self-narratives. Or the extent to which power is not only unexpressed, but socially inexpressible.
@williampietri Maybe! I would have said that awhile back, for sure.
But I think it's the difference in being like "we just invented rooms with lots of chairs! have fun!" and then hot-gluing on increasingly baroque layers of global-level curation and moderation when a billion people arrive
vs building something that can either specifically serve (or be adapted to suit) uses as different as voting locations, ceramics workshops, town halls, Kindergarten classes, AA meetings, and strip clubs
@williampietri so less about, like, Clippy and more about things like gradients of intimacy vs. gradients of visibility (but for maybe a dozen major factors)
a lot of this stuff won't matter all that much at the protocols-and-pipes level, although some will, but they matter a lot at the feature-design level
@kissane I hope so. I look forward to people succeeding here in ways that I didn't see coming.
But I think your physical architecture analogy helps illuminate the difficulty. A big room and a bunch of folding chairs can work for a lot of things. But the really good spaces are generally specialized in very thoughtful and usually expensive ways via a lot of expert labor. Which cuts against the sort of broad usage I think we both want.
I hope it's possible to find ways for virtual socialization that break that constraint, especially at scale. But I'll be pretty skeptical given the decades of past failures.
@williampietri Actually that brings up my big question, which is who has tried this stuff (socially skillful feature design) earnestly and at scale and failed? That seems like a good starting point.
Also, I think I'm not being clear—I don't think most of this stuff is about getting away from text boxes, it's about applying a lot more EQ to how we assemble them and what we build around them. I think eg Meta has done of ton of work on this, but their goals are ultimately antisocial.
Erin Kissane
William Pietri