Immanence

On giving up social news

Arve Bersvendsen, a virtually unknown blog blog journal ger hipster (not that there’s anything wrong with that, I’m one myself), made a point of blog blog journal ging blog journal -keeping about why he’s giving up Reddit – instead of just posting his dissatisfaction on a “self” link on Reddit itself. That’s kind of odd, both because it assumes his blog journal readers are familiar with Reddit and that it’ll reach significant notoriety on Reddit.

But wait — his post slug, the post-name-in-the-URL, gives him away. It actually says “Social web is dead”. He changed his mind after starting to write the post and saving a draft version. Whoa, dude — not that I’m willing to defend the strong (yet not as strong as that one) that the “social web”, which I’ll be forced to define, is alive and kicking. But that is a strong proposition.

The thing is, his post doesn’t say anything about Reddit or the “social web”, however you define it. It’s just a list of topics that come up often on said social website (his “last hope”) that don’t interest him at all. That’s no evidence that the “social web” however you define it is dead, just that you happen not to belong in the particular speck of land in the internet landscape that is Reddit.

But that’s okay. You actually renamed your article. It’s a lot more adequate as a “giving up Reddit” post than a “social web can’t work” one. So, um, Reddit is not working for you — that’s because it’s a “social website” that has ceased to reflect your “social group”. See, the whole point of the Internet is enabling you to reach a wider group of people that reflect enough your interests, way of thinking and “intellectual self” — be it by reading static blotches of content or by actively participating in interactive websites.

Anyway, if Reddit isn’t doing it for you, let me recommend Google Reader. It’s at first sight just a RSS reader, albeit a good one, but the “share” feature enables you to read whatever your Google Reader “friends” mark as shared. It’s the most popular RSS reader according to many blog blog journal ger hipsters I know who track their feeds, and a lot of your personal contacts probably already use it. Dude, go and find your tribe.

The thing that bothers me in your post is the general sense of superiority implied by the whole idea that Reddit (or the “social web”, according to your original title) “failed” as an abstract project somehow because it tends to reflect “unimportant stuff”. I mean, you didn’t just stop going to the website, you took the time to write a post to rant on how it’s “all wrong”.

Let me return to your original title for my conclusion. The thing is, “the social web” is a recent buzzword, and the general idea that there can be wide-interest content aggregators like Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. is a bet on “emergent intelligence” or something. “Intelligence emergence” is a hot research topic and it might work or not — it probably will for certain domain fields and not for others, much like neural networks, genetic algorithms and suchlike — but “working” implies there’s an objective, well-defined goal to begin with.

So “information markets” like InTrade kind of work because of three things:

1. There are correct incentives. Reddit has a poor incentive system; it won’t reward karmma-wise people who post highly-rated comments and what’s more important, it won’t reward you for voting up articles that will later become popular. That would make the site “better” in that it’d help making the front page more dynamic and giving submissions buried in the “new” section a more fair shot. But that would just aggravate the problem you have with reddit: it’s not a social scene you “fit” into.
2. The “goals” or possible bets are very objectively defined — mainly because the thing involves money, but that’s not a necessary prerequisite. In contrast, making a social website look like something that involves the “general interest of users”, which probably means keeping it somewhat wide and yet focused on a few core subjects of interests.
3. The goals involved are entirely individual. People “win” or are better off it the value of their betting title goes up. The problem is, the internet has always been inherently interactive and there have always been interactive websites (like forums and whatnot), but it’s always catered to individual interests — thus begetting the flood of information that happens, for example, when you subscribe to every RSS feed that might have items of interest to you.There’s an unsolvable problem in trying to aggregate the preferences of a given “social tribe” in a site like reddit. There is no such thing as aggregation of preferences. No, really, there’s a mathematical theorem that says so.

   So the fact that social news websites don’t reflect “our” ideal ordering is just unavoidable. The “collective intelligence” that one hopes to extract from social news is analog to estimating an equation — we’re reducing the “number of dimensions” to preference ordering, or more concretely attempting to reduce the flood of information.

Anyway, the basic response to your complaint has been stated way before the theory outlined in these items, but this gave me the opportunity to post my two cents on the general insatisfaction with what has been termed “the social web” and is often thought to be a recent innovation. Which it isn’t. At all.

As a closure, I’d say that the web might be a good lubricant to social interaction, but it doesn’t erase the basic problems of social interaction — how social groups come to be (Manuel de Landa has an interesting geologically-inspired theory of “social assemblages”), what social groups can’t do (aggregation of preferences) and the existential issue of being in the wrong tribe.

Breadcrumb trails:

Arve, Blogger, Blotches, Dissatisfaction, Draft Version, Google, Interactive Websites, Internet Landscape, Last Hope, Notoriety, Reader Friends, Reddit, Rss Reader, Share Feature, Slug, Social Group, Social News, Social Web, Speck, Way Of Thinking

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