There’s been increasing scrutiny placed on social media over the past decade, from all angles. Criticisms of their practices of election meddling, attention-stealing, data collecting, and generally being cesspools of humanity. Many of these companies have created walled gardens that discourage platform departure and have been optimized to be as attention-grabbing as possible. After all, more usage generates greater revenue, even if it’s at the detriment of a beneficial experience for the user.
One of the major issues I have with these massive social networks I can tie directly to the capitalistic system they operate within. The incentives between what’s good for business and what’s good for humanity simply aren’t perfectly aligned. There is no denying that our society has been propelled by this self-sustaining system technologically. But the byproduct of that accelerated output is rife with exploitation, given that the system is about generating money, not helping people.
These social networks may, at one point, have had the intention to connect people in novel, interesting, and beneficial ways for their users. The issue is that working within the capitalist framework, these networks must lean into their money-generating measures. Since ads run all of these free networks, and as ordered by the shareholders, you must increase the data collected by increasing the number of data points and the amount of time spent on the platform.
I don’t have any love for these platforms, and I mostly feel that they cultivate more negative effects on society than positive ones, but I can’t entirely blame their creators for simply taking advantage of the system that exists. Still, I believe that the downsides are so severe that it’s worth dismantling the grasp they have on most of us. But it also takes us to realize that these are not the contracts we want to have and maintain.
After the recent, slow crumbling of Twitter as a platform, it’s become at least a little more publicly obvious that these aren’t networks that exist to benefit any of us. Even as critical as I’ve been, still have felt beholden to different social networks until recently. I think the recent boost to decentralized platforms like Mastodon is encouraging, especially since they radically change and move away from the incentives of other platforms. The difficult part is reconciling with the idea that most people seem to pursue what is most convenient, rather than what is most beneficial.
It makes sense, given that the brain is wired to follow the path of least resistance, and for good reason. We want to conserve as many resources as possible. That creates a challenge for any new platforms that seek to change our current contract. These centralized networks are not only free, but they compile and recommend, putting everyone together in one place and allowing you to find anything or anyone you want.
However, it’s worth considering that those “features” may not be nearly as useful as we’ve been led to believe. There are certainly major benefits to this structure — many people have found communities and people who accept them in a world where otherwise they are looked down upon or persecuted. I believe that these communities can develop and exist without these centralized databases of people. In fact, having smaller, more focused communities might provide greater safety than being exposed and easily found by the entire internet.
The issue then is creating a platform (or protocol) that is convenient, making it easy to find others, and divorced from financial incentives. Even sites that avoid the trap of ad revenue with paid subscriptions have an incentive to push increasing membership and viewership. As these platforms become more enshittified, with more ads and more content that is simply scraped from other platforms, it’s slowly reducing the convenience factor. Unfortunately, this usually only occurs in the mid to late stages of a social network, when we’ve already invested our friends, photos, messages, and more. This is likely a strategy to maximize our investment before slowly adding inconvenient systems meant to extract value.
I’m hoping this is a phase in internet history that fizzles out as our disillusionment and distrust are further sowed with companies that are probably too large and certainly know too much. I suspect that this has been one version of convenience and that a better answer either exists and that it’s currently just a matter of exposure, or it has yet to be developed but can maximize the beneficial incentives I’ve laid out. It’s an idea that I’m planning on researching and exploring more over time.