A Useful Social Network

Let's be honest, these days calling someone "extremely online" is not a compliment, and for a good reason. It's just so rare that much good comes of spending way too much time on the internet, and so common that much bad does come of it. We would all be better off if we spent way less time online and more time in the real world.

The internet is at its heart a communications tool. We have become very addicted to sending and receiving much more communication than we need. Social media apps figured out a long time ago that they can give their users little dopamine hits when someone else "likes" their content.

Brendan's leaflet article got me thinking about this topic because it calls for the best possible social feed for an audience of one. He seems to want a social feed for Bluesky that would be much better and more individualized than the existing ones. I racked my brain trying to find ways to make this in theory, but all my ideas just ended up with the product looking very similar to Google search. Google search is or was pretty well optimized to be the ideal feed for an audience of one. Whatever piques your interest at any given moment has a chance of being found with the right search term.

What makes something social though isn't about what one particular person wants, it's about what other people want as well. Because humans are intensely social animals, the question of what is the ideal social arrangement in varying contexts has yet to be answered in all those contexts.

We need to stop asking questions in terms of "what do I want" and start asking them in terms of what we need. This speech by Alan Watts got me thinking about this topic of individual versus group needs. I only came across it because of this Antix song that I quite enjoy. In the speech, Alan Watts says:

"What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?... But it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like, in order to go on spending things you don’t like, doing things you don’t like and to teach our children to follow in the same track. See what we are doing, is we’re bringing up children and educating to live the same sort of lifes we are living. In order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing, so it’s all retch and no vomit. It never gets there. And so, therefore, it’s so important to consider this question: What do I desire?"

The problem with this philosophical point of view is that what I desire is not usually the most important thing at any given time. Any human life, even the most ideal human life, is at least partially dedicated to doing things that that particular human might not enjoy doing. A social life as a member of a group that depends on each other for survival means we will all end up performing tasks that we prefer not to do sometimes.

A social network or website should be judged by how well it helps humans communicate and govern as groups, not by how well they satisfy an individual's need for dopamine hits.

My ideal social network would have badges and rewards for the quietest members who post the least number of times per day or month. If an online society has 300 million or 3 billion members, and everyone writes 5 posts per day, then zero people will have time to read and review all those posts. But the quiet people could vote for which loud people should have their points of view heard.

Everyone wants their dopamine hits, we shouldn't need to get them by posting and possibly wasting other people's time for no real reason.