Unfortunately I think intentionally or not the mental stimulus of "winning" - getting lots of likes and retweets, is baked into how these companies have very profitable business models. People feel like they are playing a game for social status, maybe one of the most primal human instincts and they tap into that to drive profit.
When the net was young, it was programmers who put counters in front of content - the urge and obviousness to do so, is so banal and basic that the lack of a counter is comment worthy, not its presence.
Imagine a pristine social network without any counter - how many seconds before one of us posts "I made a small change to the site, which looks like this".
Metrics are such a basic extension of the programming mindset that without a corporations will being imposed to remove them, I cant imagine a site without a like counter of some sort. (Not that firms will remove them, but their absence can only be achieved by a force from above imposing its will on normal human nature.)
Since you mention the early internet, some of the earliest websites I remember would have a 'number of visitors' counter usually in the footer. Which in and of itself is an early form of that validation you speak of. When you found a site with lots of visitors, it validated the site, made it seem more legitimate. And lots of early web site owners would react the same way to a new visitor to their page as a user reacts to a like today.
Validation culture has always been in some ways a part of the internet. Even before the things I spoke of. But I agree though, today it's taken over too much of culture in general. Whereas back in the day, someone may be happy or excited, chances were it didn't affect their life much. Now people's entire lives and fortunes exist because of those validating likes.
It's also keeping people from rebelling against the companies (elites) gaining all the profits (I say this as a business owner).
It's like not collaborating with another skateboarder or ecologist because they don't share the same political team as me. "Internet teams" is a complete mental construct, taking advantage of xenophobic, tribal tendencies we have innately to protect us in the physical world.
I tend to lean towards low-tech anarchist and I have a lot in common with socialists, fascists, and jeffersonian-democrats (anti-federal govt, pro-working man), and even muslims where I'm against central banking or charging interest. But nobody could ever talk about it because "teams".
I agree, the ranking algorithms should be based off genuine engagement in a discussion, not opaque votes or likes. I'm working on a new discussion site https://sqwok.im, with the intent to foster open, frictionless, and accessible conversations with anyone, where the relevance is determined by other signals including activity. There are different issues to work around with that model but it more closely resembles how we interact irl (real world "vote" is usually just walking away).
I'm interested. When you mention activity do you mean something like "total active engagement on a post" or "how active is one particular user relative to others". Also is it your intention to maintain fully anonymous participation with or without moderation? Also one thing I think could be a cool feature would be a reddit style "subreddits" but created by users who then collectively decide what it's going to be about by their participation. Good work.
By activity I mean chat activity in a given post. Right now the ranking algo for "hot" is based on how many people are chatting + decay time function. It's somewhat simplistic for now (still mvp), but I have ideas for other signals that could be used to determine how relevant a particular conversation is. It's certainly vulnerable to being gamed, but I think there are ways we could try to limit that, and filter out noise etc.
One of my goals is to focus as much as possible on the conversation and build features around that. For instance instead of a "like" button, it could require a user to _write_ something relevant (just idea). I think the key is that we try new things, hopefully learn from ideas that have been tried elsewhere, and build a place for high-quality realtime conversations.
The site does follow the twitter/IG/twitch model where it's a flat user(nest) hierarchy, but I have considered later enhancing it to allow multiple users to manage a single nest which would allow both community-led or single-entity led. Right now the goal is just to get mvp features and start getting feedback! So thank you :)
Interesting. I wonder if you could factor in “views” for measuring activity, like how many people have visited a thread and for how long. It’s my understanding that most big websites are extremely interested in minutia like where someone spends most of their time on the page, where their cursor is etc. that may be a useful metric for determining engagement.
yes! I think there are a few potentially interesting data points along this thread, such as time spent viewing, conversion from viewer -> active participant, and more. I like measuring the view bounce rate because I envision someone listening to others speak, and then either walk away or step closer to engage further. Cursor position could be interesting, maybe to see if they scrolled and read the content description?
I think it even encourages reading the content. “Six hundred other morons ‘liked’ this comment so I might enjoy reading it.” Without that social proof, how do I figure out which comments are worthwhile and which are kooky bullshit?
I’m being only partly sarcastic here, the social proof is real. But I find it interesting because on Reddit I’ll deliberately read downvoted comments, on YouTube I will not bother with anything below the top 10 presented to me, here I’ll read almost everything (obviously if the thread interests me).
