Solving social media

I had a very counter intuitive idea on how to solve the problem of social media polarizing people and making everyone miserable: >make more of it (sounds stupid at first I know) I'm somewhat of a koder™ myself thus my first impulse is to try to kode the problem away. There already is open source social media such as Mastodon and Pleroma but unfortunately it's often "less than great". Yes, you don't have the algorithm turning you into an extremist but you still have to deal with a tsunami of information and a hoard of retards that our brains were not meant to deal with. It would be nice to automatically filter those fools. But there comes the problem: you need a lot of text and even more pictures and video to train any effective model. Twitter allows you to scrape its content, Instagram doesn't, in either case you can't redistribute the content and without the training set the model is effectively proprietary :( Why is that? Historically copyright and intellectual property laws have been justified on the basis of: "we as a society would like to forego the immediate gratification of downloading a car so people can build business that provide us with Avengers films in the future". This is obviously not working so well for social media. Here is where my counter intuitive idea enters. Maybe if we didn't have such strict copyright enforcement for social media then hackers would be able to build alternatives, some commercial, some community oriented, some proprietary, some FOSS. People could for example locally run recommendation models trained on twitter or youtube and share the results with their friends/followers. We could have open source proxies like Nitter that only recommend cute/wholesome/motivational stuff and not mexican beheadings. This occurred to me while listening to the Joe Rogan podcast with Tristan Harris and Daniel Schmachtenberger. I had read and listened to other related things but they were all stuck between "we should leave things as they are" to "we should control everything like china". If you think all recommendation systems are inherently evil please consider: You've probably been recommended interesting youtube channels. You've probably been recommended an answer to a problem that you would never have found yourself because you had no clue as to what the right keywords were. Even for things you already know, it would be good to be able to filter it. Very often my RSS feed is mostly uninteresting stuff that I have to C-p through. Here is a tangentially related RMS talk on the history of copyright: (Botnet libre version) http://upptokur.ru.is/stallman2012/ (Algorithm overlords version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eginMQBWII4

>>53766 >You've probably been recommended interesting youtube channels. Nope. I have never ever seen a single youtube channel that I found interesting. >You've probably been recommended an answer to a problem that you would never have found yourself because you had no clue as to what the right keywords were. I have no clue what the right keywords were, then I had no idea what I was looking for. I'd not even be able to find since the best search engine, google, only gives the worst sites on front page and I'll not waste my time looking for what I have no idea in N pages. Libgen has answered all my questions since it has books and books are superior to anything when it comes to learning things. There is no way how to solve social media and that is because social media brings normal people and they destroy everything they touch. The internet was great until eternal september and it got even worse in 2007.

Google stopped showing me relevant search results after I signed off and deleted my account in 2014. Applying boolean operators renders no effect if you're not on public (non-residential or mobile) IP, it just spits what it feels like at the moment. Any other search engine besides maybe Yandex which has formal boolean operators documentation is utter garbage since they feed the specs of Bing and Google at aforementioned baseline. I'm not sure what's your problem, you mention some TV celebrities you see in ads, how is this relevant to filtering out Pleroma posts? Hide images and set up a word list. Maybe you should look into how filtering is done in Dollchan Extension and 4chanX. There is also some algorithmic frogpost detector, but I'm not sure how it works, apparently it needs external server to recognize color areas which is no-no: https://github.com/FishHeadswg/Frog-Killer/ You could probably re-write software to detect anime avatars, soyaks and similar degenerate posters.

My recommendation is less Joe Rogan and more going outside. WOM is still king, that's why if you are hot or funny or talented enough to make it pass a decent number on those social networks brands will actively recruit you. You won't improve that with FOSS at all, you won't even beat the google algos if you're going to make the same mistake of training a model to give you a black box that you have no idea how to control.

Problem isn't social media it's the increasing centralization and corporate control of the internet where they design things to intentionally cause conflict for profiteering.

I deleted this comment to fix a typo and now it's triggering the spam filter. Here is an extra line. >>53770 That's the entire point of my post. >>53780 >if you're going to make the same mistake of training a model to give you a black box that you have no idea how to control. The first step is having freely available datasets to train the models and share the results under a libre license.

To save social media, you have to make it about ordinary people again. Just think back to Myspace and its tagline "a place for friends". Back then, connections between people were always two-sided: if you wanted to see someone's stuff, they had to agree to see your stuff as well. This meant that the two of you had a chance to influence each other. It also meant that you were mostly connecting with people you actually knew, whether IRL or from another place online. If you tried to add someone who didn't actually know you, chances are your request would get denied (unless they were a friendwhore). Compare that to Twitter and other modern sites, where connections can be and almost always are one-sided. People can add you, but you don't have to add them back, so you can spew whatever bullshit you want without having to see their ideas. Your voice has a chance to affect the people that follow you, but the inverse isn't true unless you're following them back. This is what drew in corporations, celebrities, politicians, and similar entities. They were used to old media where they could say anything without having to even know what other people think. This gave them a chance to reclaim the social hierarchy that the internet was sapping from them. Of course, getting people to return to friend-based social media is next to impossible. Not just because of the network effect, but also because people are too addicted to the parasocial relationships caused by follower-based sites. And the people up on top are going to fight tooth and nail if their precious platforms get threatened. It inflates their ego to have all these followers who will believe whatever they say, and they're addicted to that feeling of importance.

>>53766 >i found the way to stop some advertising websh_t from existing because i think politics did not exist before it stopped reading there. w*gger

>>53849 Very good point. Most of social media is what they would call "parasocial" these days. A poor substitute for real social interaction. FWIW the solution isn't to hide out in image boards either. This is unhealthy in its own way. Ironically I think Discord is the only major social media platform that is actually useful for being social. Matrix is an abortion of a protocol (probably because it was designed from the ground up to be webshit) but its going in the right direction of becoming a "Discord Killer". As for recommendation models: I could get behind something that was FOSS and ran on my own computer. The algorithms involved don't actually require access to the whole dataset AFAIK, its also not very computationally intensive.

>>53864 >>53766 Have you heard of the Web Of Trust approach? It is perferctly suited for even loosely friend-based social media. Freenet is a great example, its social platforms have had to deal with pseudonymous moderation since its inception, in fact some social media like Mastodon are currently studying their approach. https://github.com/freenet/plugin-WebOfTrust >The Freenet plugin Web of Trust (WoT) tries to solve the problem of spam being an important threat to address in an anonymous, censorship-resistant network: Where an attacker cannot take down content they will attempt to get rid of it by drowning it in spam. >Conventional spam filters cannot work in such an environment: >An attacker is anonymous like everyone else so they cannot be blocked by e.g. an IP address. >Because Freenet is a peer-to-peer network its available bandwidth is scarce and thus spam must not even be downloaded before filtering it out in order to avoid denial of service - filtering spam by e.g. lists of bad words won't work. >WoT deals with these issues by allowing each user to create so-called identities which can assign trust values to the identities of other users and optionally publish these. >These constitute a democratic vote among users, where the distance of other users' identities in the social graph is used to weigh their votes in your local WoT. This is similar to the concept of subsidiarity in democracy. >The result of this poll decides if a particular identity is considered as legitimate or as a spammer. The content of spammers is completely ignored then, it won't cause any network traffic. >Thus each user has their own view and final decision on what they consider as spam, depending on who they voted for or against. >While WoT does have a user interface of its own which can be used to manage identites and trusts, it is intended to be used as a general-purpose library to allow actual Freenet applications to be built upon it. As of 2019 these are: >Sone - social networking >FlogHelper - blogging >Freemail - email >Freetalk - forum systems (in development)

>>53867 Interesting that while they're not fixing the opennet mode's deanonymization issues, they are making progress on some other things. This is incidentally also relatively similar to the way Gnunet seems to envision traffic management and bad peers.

>>53871 update https://github.com/freenet/wiki/wiki/Opennet-Attacks They've also been updating their documentation, the wiki is fairly decent.

>>53867 While this is interesting, it's also very niche. My point was more on the lines of: intellectual property laws are curbing innovation and competition in the social media market. I would prefer if every pleroma instace or client could have a smart recommendation or filter system similar to youtube (for example).

honestly just make sites like livejournal cool again and a huge chunk of the idiocy that current platforms encourage will fade out: >filter who sees what posts, even down to filters for specific people on your friendlist >entries are longer so you have to take time to reflect on what you wrote instead of spewing the first retarded dogma that comes to mind >no retweets/reblogs >users can only engage with a post through comments, and see all other users comments >comments can also be screened/private >incentive to learn css if the default themes bore you >default themes still enable more creativity than PROFILE PIC + BANNER CHOOSE DAY OR NIGHT MODE Man. Those were the dayz. >mfw it still exists russian owned sure but everyone migrated and prefer cancer sites Diaspora basically nailed it, other than normal person feed interface, but nobody uses it

>>53954 You literally just described Facebook, nigga. Fine, for blogshit snowflakes with duck syndrome like you there is DreamWidth. This does not solve anything, blogshit is turd on it's own, only kept by high IQ people who tried to not use it as a blogshit. You may as well read Chris Langan and Robin Hanson on FB instead of subscribing to dumb meme groups and your second cousin's valuable political opinions.

The problem isn't algorithms, it's social media itself. During the transition from forums to social media, we went from "the most popular users and crowd-preachy posts will be the ones most people agree with" to "the most popular users and crowd-preachy posts will be the ones anyone ever sees". At least with the former, everyone had a roughly equal chance to be heard. Seriously, try posting on social media when you have few/no followers; no one will see it. Doesn't matter how interesting your post is, you've wasted your time. You may as well not have even posted. Better get good at gaming the system. Now post on a forum or imageboard. Everyone reading the thread will see it. You might even get replies! Now sure, if the thread is moving too fast then you're probably not going to be seen, but you won't be alone in that. Either way it's fair.

>>53766 You can't solve social media. Social media and it's relatives are products of years of behavioral psychology and web development that has been hyperspecialized to extract as much attention from you as possible. There's no hope in solving social media, we've made a wrong turn on that. >You've probably been recommended interesting youtube channels. You've probably been recommended an answer to a problem that you would never have found yourself because you had no clue as to what the right keywords were. Most of the stuff that I enjoyed out of youtube and whatnot were recommended by other users who have written good reviews about it. I enjoy that bit, reading about how a youtube channel or a film or a piece of music moved someone so much that it made him write a good recommendation and, at times, directly suggest it to me. Most of these recommendations are lateral as well, something that algorithms are bad at doing.

>>53864 >>53849 Not gonna happen, the whole social media crap has become a cult and people are drawn into it so much, there is no way to draw them out now. People have embraced the cult like structure of it all, only the opinons of the few matter and the rest only follow. >>54140 >>53980 Pretty much this, it was designed from the ground up to be an addictive type of pyramid scheme that slowly erodes real life connections and communities. I never understood social media, maybe i cant, but it seemed to me it was always just about making circles of simulated social environments.

I really don't get why you all mention same circular talking points which you've probably read in some clickbaint blogshit article "ugh, facebook bad because evil white men with long noses made algorithms and AI to make you addicted that's why m-mkay." Shit' I'm addicted to chans, my whole social life consists of chans, boards, jabber and IRC. I read and post online 7 hours every day. Does that mean chans and IRC are made by malicious AI capitalists or simply because I'm an idiot with nothing to do in my life?

>>54185 >addicted to chans that's completely different, lain. imageboards don't recommend you specific people or topics and allow you to follow specific people. It's the pseudo-anonymity that protects from influence. social media today is filled with algorithms to keep you in a certain topic. the rabbit holes you can find are really not great

>>54186 >imageboards don't recommend you specific people or topics and allow you to follow specific people. Instead, you get a small group of posters anonymously posting regurgitated talking points so that discussion stays to a few narrow topics. Just look at the coronavirus threads here.

>>54199 >anon complains that discussion in a topic thread is narrow and limited to the topic at hand Is this what it is like to have autism?

>>54199 >Instead, you get a small group of posters anonymously posting regurgitated talking points so that discussion stays to a few narrow topics. If their arguments are so weak you should have no problem destroying them instead of complaining about it in an unrelated thread.

the anti-thesis of social media is the real-life party, the conferences, the meetups which creates the possibilities for real friendship or relationships but post-virus society this is going to be harder to achieve and since most people now have online presence and it's proven by the fact most ISPs upgraded their throughput by early 2020, the metaverse is just a double down on this world disconnect (and online communities). the only way to have an engaging community online is if these are focused on certain hobby, let's say there already exist some kind of community, the gaming community is one and there's an umbrella of these people making content or supervising some server they own, the same way you can implement this but make it "less than that of a game" so you have a discord clone and a server clone for games and what you get is actually something similar to "metaverse" so that's the problem, they're already ahead of such idea. just make something similar, it doesn't have to be "just another project where you throw blockchain in the model" but just some kind of alternative. your only problem is content moderation since there will be a bunch of people who abuse their right to speech but the problem is just an illusion to begin with, there's already millions of websites that do the same thing, it's just that their discovery is less known, there's already communities that exist for certain types of hobbies or communities, you just need to find them. The solution then would be then just "a way to find places which you might actually have strong preferences over". Mapping the internet is probably the hard part since it's all domain names but it's probably not hard to do (in case you have an idea on how to map internet addresses easily by domain name, let me know)

>>54508 >the anti-thesis of social media is the real-life party, the conferences, the meetups which creates the possibilities for real friendship or relationships but post-virus society this is going to be harder to achieve I've been to conferences and tradeshows in the Before Times. They were notorious as plague-pits even well before covid, especially the Vegas ones like CES. Good riddance to them all.

>>54640 Most of real life meetings of any kind have been breeding grounds for disease, be it school or parties. Most people have had little to no respect for the space or health of others before and just because they put on a mask now does not make them it any better. Let alone the fact that most meeting places are stinking pits of exhaust fumes and worse with little to no plantlife or healthy natural things to actually buffer out some of all that filth. Not to mention those types of events are often stressy and noisy, which absolutely has an effect on your health. Most of humanity lives in its own filthy literally, im honestly amazed at how many people actually expect not to become sick.

>>54459 I don't take any pleasure in "destroying" people who wouldn't accept that they're wrong no matter what. Anyway, it's relevant because imageboards can be swayed just like social media. Anonymity is not a panacea.

>>54655 when image boards become social media im selling my pc and becoming a fisherman

>>53779 I find google to be pretty baffling. Like you said, it just suddenly started ignoring explicit instructions for some vague guess of what you mean. Likewise, I think youtube got pretty bad. It was fun when it showed related videos. Now it just shows the same old garbage no matter where you are. I miss the rabbit hole.

>>54794 I've been using a blocking addon for TheirTube for awhile, the algorithm functions suprisingly well when you remove half of the entries on a page and it strains itself trying to find more content. >>54655 If that's your atitude then what's the purpose of arguing anywhere online? or do you have some third-eye, sixth sense so discerning that it tells you exactly whenever someones position is immutable, somehow, without any context beside it being typed by someone, from somewhere, on an anonymous imageboard... Or maybe your points are just soykaf and your having a whine about it in a completely unrelated thread. just maybe... In any event... In what situation is anonymity not a magic bullet to any problems caused by malformed recommendations and ranking systems? What problem are you trying to solve? Because it sounds more like your fed up with human nature rather than any social media system.

>>54654 I believe word plague was used figuratively, in a social sense. I don't remember people falling sick after mass conferences in last 40 years. >>54792 You plan on having a smartphone, though? To sell fish through one of Uber-style apps, like they do it in Vietnamese villages. >>54794 Youtube is a free video hosting for high-definition video. Right now it's possible to download videos thanks to hackers behind youtube-dl. Why do you want it to "recommend" you anything? I just come looking for what I need, grab it then leave. One doesn't even have to touch Google's servers for this, there are plenty of invidious proxies. >>54797 git back to nanochan (a website on the darknet, created in 2018)

>>54903 oh that sounds pretty convenient, yea ill just sell my current phone and buy a cheap chink phone instead then

I was thinking about this because I recently got depressed how little online communites there are outside of walled gardens. What made me interested is discord because it's pretty new to the web, being released just 6 years ago, yet managed to get a big user base. So there's still potential to build software people prefer to use instead of the big social media. After a few minute of using my smooth brain, I think the way to actually decentralize the web again is to make it easy to build personal online communities. It's basically what discord did. I thought about writing a small software that basically packages a chat, a feed, and some way to find people you would be interested to talk with in one easy to use package that can be hosted independently and still can communicate with other hosts running the same software. Few issues with it though. Cost: Lot of online services thrive on young people, and young people aren't poeple who would pay money for a host to run this app. Privacy: A host of the network could basically snoop everyone's messages and images pretty easily. Changing the source code of the app and luring users into a false sense of security isn't hard. Any ideas on this? Am I dumb for even thinking about this?

>>55607 This is basically what the fediverse is.

>>55607 Focus on the Internet and not the WWW. Appealing to the masses like this is hopeless; don't build for the masses, build for others. >chat Look at this: http://www.loper-os.org/?cat=65

>>55610 >Appealing to the masses like this is hopeless; don't build for the masses, build for others. This is though why I think project like Mastodoon are hopeless though. They aren't made for regular people, but for tech geeks. It's basically a worse version of twitter and it's userbase pretty much will only ever be other tech geeks or conspiracy schizos. Which is fine, but I am more interested in taking away power from tech giant than I am for creating niche spaces, since if that doesn't happen, these niche spaces will die out anyway in time. >>55609 like I said above, I don't think Fediverse offers anything really interesting to most people. The other issue I have with these services is they never actually lead anything. They just take existing apps and make them decentralized, which again makes it so the only people interested in it will be people who really, really value privacy. I had a friend who was against social media and what it stands, and you know what she did? She just make an instagram profile with an avatar and a nickname instead of meatspace info and continued with her life. To me the only service that actually has something going for it and is semi-popular is neocities. But then again, isn't it just a nostalgia bait? Like I enjoy it and browse it in my free time for fun, and I feel some change in it's forumula is needed to make it really attractive. Not sure what that could be though yet.

>>55610 >loper-os Did this guy ever make any real-world useful software? All I can see is endless irc LARP and blogshitting since 2007.

>>55612 This is like trying to compete with a fast-food chain restaurant by making the same kind of product, instead of competing by cooking real food. It will appeal to nearly no one, whereas cooking real food is inherently valuable, and its mere existence may eventually sway some of the livestock from their pre-fabricated sandwiches. >>55613 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1913

>>55612 For one, Mastodon-style forums are better than twitter in sense that they allow longer posts. Tiwtter have developed inane short form newspeak that seeps into other forums and real life already, the constraints that limited it, a length of text message on cellular network, are decades in past. It's a pain to read people who have actually something to say in form of message chains, aka "threads". For the rest, I'm not sure. Of course, the "fediverse" can be seen through visual representations similar of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram-styled front ends, but it's not what people go for. Masses gravitate towards masses, and not necessarily through conscious decision. There are no masses on "fediverse" since there is no marketing campaign or regular people with regular interests making their regular communities there. For most of them, a customized forum seems like a better place to settle than questionable value Usenet-twitter amalgam about nothing in particular.

>>55614 tl;dr, it doesn't say what it does and why I need it in first three sentences.

>>55616 I could copy and paste the paragraph after the Table of Contents, but won't. Read it or don't; I don't care.

>>55614 Your allusion to fast food is fallacious. More people outside of USA eat home-cooked food than fast food. Simple meals have their appeal and are offered as catering options for parties. There are "home cooked cuisine" restaurants and cafes around the world. You can even see grandmas selling their home pickles and jams on instagram these days, man you're severely out of touch. Are you that "Verisimilitude" guy by chance? Your autismus is showing.

>>55618 It was a simple analogy. Don't try to beat social media companies at their game. >Are you that "Verisimilitude" guy by chance? Yes. >Your autismus is showing. This is just a vapid insult.

>>55614 I don't really want to beat them exactly in their own game. I want to make something that gives ability to an, let's say, average kid make a cool place on the interet for him and his friends. It's why discord got actually popular, it's painfully easy to use for non techy people and I saw through few people in my family how useful it is. Kids make whole small communities about the stuff they like, add their own emojis to it, even import small games in the chat. While I have not exactly a fully formed solution on what is needed. I think giving the average person the ability to make both a personal and social place on the web that he himself can put his heart in is what is needed. It would also make sure that people stick around more and show it to other people, since they've already put effort into it. There are millions of same instagram pages, but a personal page is only truly yours. Also I think it needs to be mobile first, and I know some lainons are already filled with hate reading this, but most people's personal computing in 2022 happens through their mobiles and no one frankly will buy or use a desktop just for this. Desktops and laptops basically became work machines in recent years.

>>55620 For what it's worth, MySpace and Tumblr were essentially a personal homepage combined with normal social media features (friends/follows, posts, private messages, etc).

>>55620 >Also I think it needs to be mobile first, and I know some lainons are already filled with hate reading this, but most people's personal computing in 2022 happens through their mobiles and no one frankly will buy or use a desktop just for this. This is a fundamentally losing strategy: >We need to empower people. >We need to let them use their phones. >Hostile companies control both of the phone systems. >We need to capitulate to these companies. >We need to make changes based on what we're told. >What were we doing again?

>>55626 You are right in so far keeping people on the phones owned by big tech will never completely free them, but no one starts anything with perfect conditions. Google started operating in a space where majority of tech followed whatever microsoft said, but with time they became probably the biggest player in tech and started influencing microsoft. They didn't full on make a in-house os, own protocols and what not when they started. They just choose strategically what to do that would make the most impact short term. Same thing applies here. I think making it mobile first would just mean the least resistence at the start. I know trying to run a non-corporate project as a corporate one is unusual, but if there's one thing that corporations are good at is ensuring that they have a broad audience since their livelyhood depends on it. There's nothing really wrong in trying to take that as inspiration since this is from where their power comes from and this is from where it could be taken.

>>55628 >no one starts anything with perfect conditions. There's a large difference between perfect and completely unacceptable. >Google started operating ... Am I supposed to care? >I think making it mobile first would just mean the least resistence at the start. Well, it's important to empower people in a way that allows them to do almost nothing, but feel good about it. I keep trying to tell people I know that wisdom and freedom won't come in the form of a phone program. >There's nothing really wrong in trying to take that as inspiration since this is from where their power comes from and this is from where it could be taken. There's, and I've already explained it well enough. This will amount to nothing anyway, we know.

> a smartphone > a pocket computer with cellular modem What's the difference, again? Are you un*xbeard autismos battling against semantics for the NNNth time?

>>55609 It's been hamstrung by the browser-as-OS model >no trivial way to run private group chats >users will never be independent; each ActivityPub node at minimum needs a techie to acquire DNS, VPS, and keep the thing updated, make administrative decisions such as who to defederate, and fix the software if it breaks is any capacity Facebook dropped about a gorrilion dollars advertising "Groups" last year (yes, literally advertising about Facebook groups); discussion groups with the option for privacy are the killer feature people need, and why Discord has become the ur-platform. The closest approximation to that you can get with Pleroma or Mastodon at this time is either private instances (which, at that point, you might as well just run PHPBB) or consensual mentioned-users-only quasi-hellthreads (which, as the name connotates, the UX doesn't really make a pleasant workflow at this time)

>>55607 If you can run this on a tor node you wouldn't even have to think about paying to host this. But being on tor means that it should be light and fast but it should also be easy to run and deploy. Think of just running an exe file that does everything so that even the smoothest of brains can't say that "it's too hard to use bruh".