Regarding the state of online discourse

The quality of online discourse on every interactive website is something that me and many others can't help but constantly bemoan. The world is a place of many competing values, ideas, and needs. Everyone values freedom but no one is free of basic needs like air, water, and food. Everyone values education so we created various educational institutions, but the calcified structure of these institutions inhibits educational achievement for many learners because every student has such different needs.

I wrote this Bluesky post six months ago:

"If you're totally enamored with bluesky, you're actually still stuck in Plato's cave.

Twitter didn't save the world and neither will this.

And no I won't stop posting the same thing over and over until everyone agrees with me."

I like the idea of "saving the world" because it seems increasingly clear that the world needs to be saved from its human inhabitants' worst tendencies. Part of the process of saving it is getting people to start behaving in a reasonable manner towards one another, deescalating conflicts, and stopping the wars and genocides that have haunted us for countless years.

Unfortunately, the way online discourse is structured (or not structured at all), has allowed the loudest meanest and most hyperbolic voices to reach the most ears, which has served to ramp up conflict all over the world.

The Plato's cave reference relates to one of my core philosophies, which is that the universe contains infinite information, but the human brain's ability to gather and process that information is very finite. No matter how hard we try, we will never be able to fully exit the cave or fully enlighten ourselves as to what the best course of action in every situation is.

The Goal

If our goal is to improve discourse online and in real life so that it can help reduce conflict, you may be wondering how that is at all related to what Bluesky and Leaflet are attempting to do. That would be a very fair question. If the last 35 years of posting things online has wrecked our ability to reason with one another, what good could possibly come of more online posts?

If you ask the average person (or Google) for an example of a good informational website, Wikipedia is likely to be one of their first answers. What is it that makes Wikipedia good? The answer is that it is both very open and very controlled. No one is allowed to post just anything they feel like on Wikipedia, but anyone is allowed to create or edit pages that meet certain relevance criteria. Wikipedia did this by creating a robust back-end system where editors could debate proposed edits to articles and approve the best edits.

Has Wikipedia reduced conflict at all though? It's possible that it has in many cases, by working to educate people about various topics. The thing is, Wikipedia is not really a decision-making structure that has control over any real-world assets other than parts of our minds.

Building towards the goal

The first step towards the conflict reduction goal is building a place where people can learn from each other in a structured way, a way that is both very open and very controlled. Finding the best course of action in a tricky situation requires evaluating that situation from as many perspectives as possible. I am a big fan of the Chinese saying "换位思考" which means "change places, think". Because of the infinite nature of information, we cannot possibly read or ponder everything there is to know about a complex topic before making a decision. Therefore, useless information needs to be hidden or deleted, and useful information needs to be spread more widely.

The current social media platforms do not do this very well at all. To take Twitter/Bluesky as an example, yes you are more likely to see the information with the most retweets, but very few of the posts on these networks are helpful for decision making. Even the best most useful posts on Bluesky are too ephemeral to facilitate deeper discussion of ideas and ideal outcomes regarding the information they are posting about. Short form posting with strict character limits is fun in some ways, but its usefulness is very limited.

The ephemeral nature of the "feed" way over-emphasizes recency of content and not importance of content.

My apologies for typing too much.

I've typed way too much and haven't yet discussed a single proposed leaflet feature. That's mostly because from what I read in the Leaflet team's article, I want all the proposed features. But I don't want the feature creep of Facebook. I also don't want to be super prescriptive about which features should come next because I know each one will take time and effort to implement, and since I am not the knower of everything, I have no idea which feature will engage and delight users the most.

Stepping out of Plato's cave begins with shattering your world view and experimenting with new informational and social structures. Most of the social network experiments since the creation of the internet have gone quite badly, but if we learn from them in terms of what went well and what went bad and use this new open-source network to iterate better and better possible solutions, I am optimistic that some good could come of it.

We may not end up saving the world by posting on the internet, but we definitely won't end up saving the world by building more nuclear weapons.