The problem with social media is that it doesn't cost anythingThe problem with social media is that it doesn't cost anything
Obviously, it does cost something: all the major social media platforms serve you ads. You end up paying for your posts and your likes and your follows whether you choose to call it a payment or not: you pay with your time.
But we aren't used to thinking about this as paying for our social media use, so we don't treat our time like we treat our money. We aren't very careful with it -- especially online.
Money is a better moderatorMoney is a better moderator
Markets are great because they help people arrange things in ways they couldn't have otherwise fathomed. No one of us knows what the front page of SN should like at any given moment, but our hope is that if all the signals are costly, what will emerge is an "optimal" front page.
Moderators and algorithms suck because these are like central planning. The mods and algo designers can't figure out what the community values as accurately as the community itself, acting on costly signals.
Hayek says it more clearly (#1468415):
[A market] can use the knowledge of all participants, and the objectives it serves are the particular objectives of all its participants in all their diversity and polarity.
This is why paying to post is more important than getting zaps. Getting zaps is great (it's what attracted me to Stacker News in the first place) but paying to post is what keeps me around because it's the best chance we have at a reasonable space for user-generated content without kyc.
It works...as long as things have a cost.
Free lunches ruin marketsFree lunches ruin markets
The things that don't have any cost don't get included in the market and that means we as a group don't benefit from the
Just like a non-profit is more likely to allocate money to goals that are less sustainable than the goals a profit-driven business might choose, things that don't have a cost in social media can distort the signal.
Interestingly, there are a lot of things you can do on Stacker News for free:
The following ideas are just my own castles in the sky -- there's no plans to implement any of these things
- Bookmarks are free. Just click on the three dots next to a post title and select bookmark. Now it's saved in a list. The problem here is that the rest of the market misses this signal because no one knows if a post has been bookmarked by hundreds of Stackers. Interestingly enough, we do have another bookmarking system that does cost money: zaps. I've often thought it would be cool to be able to search and sort my previous zaps. I'd love to see all the things I zapped more than 10k sats or more than 1000 sats. And it wouldn't be hard to use a specific number of sats as your "bookmarking number" -- my bookmarks could just be every post I've zapped with a zap of exactly 451 sats.
- Subscriptions are also free. You can subscribe to a stacker and it doesn't send any signal to anyone. What would it look like if you had to pay a stacker to subscribe to them? Maybe you'd have to zap them a certain amount every day (which could be automated) or subscribing set up an autozap system where you zapped each one of a stacker's posts some small amount. This sounds a little crazy, but in the spirit of trying to make signals costly, I think the case can be made.
- Mutes don't cost anything, either. What this means is that lurkers and people who don't log in get to suffer the full force of unpleasant users who most stackers have muted. When you mute a stacker, you don't see their posts or comments anymore. Mutes are really handy, but they allow a signal to get missed (or at least blunted) in the market. If you had to pay 100 sats to mute a user, perhaps that cost could get incorporated into the market. This probably would make more sense as just attached a default mute to downzaps (ie. downzapping a post means it's muted and you don't see it again).
- Usernames are first come first serve. But you can see how it might make more sense for such a signal to be costly -- indeed the connection between territories (which do have a cost) and usernames is pretty easy to express: just like a territory owner can make a territory their own and (hopefully, maybe, someday) get some sats from the territory, so a user hopes to make a few sats from the username they claim and develop for themselves. Maybe we should all be renting our usernames.
The mental transaction cost of micropayments rears its ugly headThe mental transaction cost of micropayments rears its ugly head
A lot of this would probably be too fiddly and annoying and would likely just irritate people. Just like pay to post wasn't really fathomable before Bitcoin (who wants to use a credit card to pay for a post?), all of these ideas only work if the payment is tiny. Who wants to spend all their time thinking about tiny payments?
Zaps are elegant because it's a single button and easy to wrap your head around. And zapping can achieve a result similar to all the above suggestions. For instance, instead of muting a user, you might consider zapping posts from other users more. The effect will still be less visibility for the post you don't want to see.
So, it's possible the true and only solution to making money the moderator is just zapping a lot more than you think you should. h/t @Undisciplined
Are there other things on SN that are free?Are there other things on SN that are free?
Reading is free. But I'm pretty strongly of the opinion that paywalls break the internet, so perhaps I'm just on a wild goose chase here.
Exactly. But, I think you should put it in perspective of "the commons" as @k00b puts it. Is who I mute relevant to the commons (scarcity in the form of
litandtop)?I don't think it is, but maybe I missed something there. My rationale would be that who I choose to not see does not influence the top ranked posts overall, it just changes my perception of it, but only mine.
The only thing you miss is my downzap. So it is better to not mute stackers, and mute posts, imho.
Yes, because that mute is something you don't have in common with everyone else.
If you can protect yourself from an insult to the community, you will (most likely) not take further action against the insult, leaving others exposed to the insult (until they each take action against it themselves).
Forgive me. I know this is a subtle and abstract thing.
Still suffering fever so do bear with me here, I may hallucinate, lol. Regardless, something feels off about that statement.
I think that just like my view of the top content, my sats, my time and my state of mind aren't something I have in common with everyone else either, as they are mine. So expanding the commons to include each individual may be dangerous. The individuals interact with the commons but aren't part of it, as this isn't communism (I hope, lol.)
There has to be a distinction between the resource that is part of the commons, and the user of said resource, or the user becomes enslaved to the system. Take away individual preference on what to interact with, and life will quickly become hellish, because then everything is a chore. Must downzap, must interact with people I dislike, must be pissed off all the time, must be insulted... sounds pretty nasty to me.
So I'd turn it around: if the system cannot protect me against being insulted, then the system is broken. If the system needs me to spend money after being insulted to not be reminded that I was just insulted, then the system is broken. Because the system does not have my back. It is rigged against me, and in favor of my adversary; after all, I am forced to read their insult, so they have guaranteed success, whereas I become the eternal plaything being messed with, as I'd have no defense.
I agree that there are tons of wrong ways to solve this problem. I'm not proposing a solution and I get that no one wants what harms them.
This problem: how do we share your (and others') defenses against insults with lurkers and new stackers?
THE problem: how do we scale sharing without resorting to trust (or as you say, the evil of oligarchs) or more personalization (ie sharing less)?
What I'm learning, I think, is that we/people don't want to share in the absolute sense. We/people want the benefits of sharing but only to the extent that it isn't too costly.
If this makes sense, and absolute sharing is wrongunism, then I think SN needs to either:
Okay, but what if "insult" is subjective? Note, I'm not talking about spam here, because that's a different issue by nature, and every wave of it should eventually wear off as long as there's a cost to it.
Take the war topic as an extreme. Some people are interested in it. Others are explicitly not. Yet again others are not for or against the existence of the topic in general (probably/hopefully the majority.) So from where I'm sitting, in a commons there must be a place for it. Doesn't have to be at the top and it definitely doesn't have to be in "my top", for me, but since there are people interested in the topic, it should have a place. Not be downzapped until no one can ever see it unless they have the item id/link - that's also disrespectful of the time (and sats) someone put into posting something.
Can you explain this particular point a bit more? How is more personalization (on the consumer side) equivalent of sharing less (on the producer side? Or as in sharing less sats?)
It is. Arguably everything is. How many subjects experiencing something as an insult are required to consider the insult objective? 51%? 100%?
How much of a place should it have if it's one person interested in a
topicparticular piece of content?Best I can do is a crude metaphor. On the same night, each k00b and Elon Musk are throwing a party. They've invited 1,000 people to consume media in their homes.
Elon's theme is "personalization": Everyone at Elon's party gets an iPad and can consume whatever media they choose.
k00b's theme is "sharing": Everyone at k00b's party gets a remote control to a single TV.
As you'd expect, people at k00b's party complain that someone(s) are aggressively changing the channel to rage bait war slop and they'd like to mute that channel. k00b obliges and, now, depending on the remote control in your hand, you see something other than the shared, default channel.
Hence, the TV is no longer shared. The channel you see is personalized based on the channels you've opt'd out of.
Further, k00b and his guests have declared global defaults biased against one channel or another "evil" and "wrong" because it is subjective. Thus, new people joining k00b's party are forced to watch rage bait war slop - everyone who knows better muted the rage bait war slop, ceding the default shared channel to rage bait war slop. New people who are not interested in rage bait war slop must find the channel mute button (and personalize their experience) before they decided to leave.
They'll most likely choose to leave, won't they?
This is a nice one, but I think we cannot make a subjective thing objective by democracy, that is exactly what makes me shudder in life for a long time now - we're still a pre-truth civilization as we have not been able to consistently separate fact from fiction in day-to-day life. This is why we haven't reached the information age; we're still tribal, territorial primates with a long evolution ahead of us.
What you can do is measure consensus. But that is also not what is happening on SN now, as "money is the moderator", not "stackers' collective opinion is the moderator". The distinction being that SN is open loop, so there is no limit to moderation power other than Bitcoin's built-in limits (assuming that there is no paper bitcoin, and that assumption is likely faulty.)
In my personal utopian scenario: in a decaying position in global
new, a slower decaying position in territorynew, and since no one is interested in it, the bottom of all ranked views. If everyone muted the author, then it will never rise to prominence because it won't get zaps.But if you were asking: how much of a place does it have right now? Then the answer is: the place the author is willing to buy. And this is the issue here. We don't want people manipulating their own ranks with sockpuppets, so instead we gave everyone a button to manipulate their rank. Let me apply that to your metaphor:
The root cause of this problem isn't the mute. The root cause is the boost (or sockpuppet upzapping in lieu of boost - same outcome) and the root enabler of that is open loop money being the unbounded moderator. The muting is just a personal defense mechanism, and I think that undue weight is given to the usage of it. I counted less than 10 stackers (maybe even less than 5) that were actively trying to selflessly counter the big downzap war earlier this year. If it doesn't happen organically, it won't happen as a forced mechanism. If forced, the established base may leave, which is even worse than the new stacker leaving, as the established base provides the content. This will only make it harder to fight "rage bait war slop".
I wish I were better at math, so that I could define a formula that shows the impact of unbounded open-loop. The soothing effect of
sum(log10())ranking we had before no-trust is truly missed, but I suspect that it simply masked the problem by flattening the curve, instead of solving the underlying problem.sum(log10())was great but it relied on counting people, because it favors sybils, and we counted people via trust, which is not perfect either.I think we all want something democracy-like. As media/news consumers, we want to know what consensus is. Whether we realize it or not, we want algorithms to count people. On the internet, absent KYC, there are few if any objective ways to do that.
Bitcoin's consensus relies on bottom-up economic activity to achieve consensus but, unlike SN, economic activity is the point of bitcoin.
My point in bringing this up was to note that there are a number of signals that currently don't get captured by SN's money is the moderator system. If money is the moderator truly isn't working, might it not be because of this?
I've fallen pretty hard for thinking about SN as a market because I think it is true that no one knows what the front page of SN should look like. The problem of what the feed should look like feels like a classic example of something that only a market can solve well.
When I look around at the world, things that distort markets seem to be the source of so much trouble -- why would it make sense to add things that distort the market for visibility on SN?
I admit I am susceptible to prioritizing theory over reality. Sometimes people need to say, "Scoresby! That isn't how the world works! Stop it!"
I think this is true: social media has a hard problem to solve because users want to see good and interesting things but users also want to have their stuff get seen.
To date, social media platforms try to solve this with moderators and algorithms. Both of these are akin to command economies. It's like asking a politboro to predict how many loaves of bread to bake or how many nails to manufacture. It's very hard to get right.
I think it is clear that unless social media platforms kyc (which is an even worse evil than moderation in my book), voting or relying on any signal that isn't costly is going to result in a distorted platform -- creating sock puppets is too easy.
So: money is the moderator.
But there's a problem, which you point out further down the thread: it kind of looks like rich rank. Highly motivated people who want to boost their own content can out spend the community who mostly just want to be a casual user of the platform.
I really want to figure out what the root problem is here. Is is that signals on the internet are not costly? or is it that the internet makes the commons too big? (people don't want to be at a party with all 7 or 8 billion other people on the world).
Social media isn't just a bunch of invite-only chat rooms. People seem to want some amount of open public square-ness. But an open public square to which anyone in the world can come is kind of an insane thing to keep pleasant and tidy.
A market solution is interesting because maybe it will allow a better experience to emerge.
Isn't it the case that what a stacker doesn't want to see and how badly they don't want to see it are very valuable signals for the community? possibly as valuable as what a stacker is willing to zap?
I'm probably taking the marketization of social media much farther than it is useful to take it, but I think it's a useful thought experiment, at least.
I don't think you should have to pay for mute, that's like forcing someone to be notified of a troll or something.
Pay-for-block makes more sense to me, especially if you want conversations in a post to stay on-topic.
This is a good distinction.
Downzapping is currently a little bit like paying to block: if you downzap a comment below the default threshold for most users (10 sats for a post, 1 sat for a comment) the comment will be collapsed and show up at the bottom of the comment list.
So if a comment is off topic and hasn't received any zaps and you downzap it 100 sats, users with default settings won't see that comment.
Down zapping already works.
Also if you are like me and mute a lot, having to pay for that on SN would be hellish.
ATP I would just create a nym and not share my thoughts publicly anymore.
"Good fences make good neighbors.” check out Mending Wall for understanding how I am thinking through this if you are curious.
What is the difference between how you use mute and downzap?
What if downzaps also produced a mute (of the post/comment at least, but potentially of the user)?
What is the difference between how you use mute and downzap?
I don't use downzaps hardly ever, mostly just mute on SN but haven't had to mute someone in a long time.
What if downzaps also produced a mute (of the post/comment at least, but potentially of the user)?
I mute, so right now in this current environment I would never will have this problem.
How often are you downzapping?
I look for bots that are posting slop comments on threads. I subscribe to them, and then I downzap every single comment they make. So, I'd say I'm downzapping 10 or so comments a day.
But I hear your point about mutes.
ah well that makes sense, can't that be automated somehow? or brought into the community as a wanted poster that be fun
A wanted poster would be fun. I'd need to figure out how to make it apply to any slop bots. But I like the idea.
I would def pay to mute Jimmy, his takes have been dull and wrong such as the Hapsburg empire, at least get your dates right
No you shouldn't have to pay to mute.
I think you are right, but I'm curious if you think this because of the cost or because if the complexity?
I haven't read the article yet, but I'll say yes, you should. muting provides value. v4v.
what is the price you would put on muting?
Both. I think it is a solution in search of a problem. I don't see this as an issue on SN at all.
hah this reminds me of libertarian economists' tendency to want to slap a price on everything
I don't think anyone else sees it as a problem, either. I mostly wanted to think about how it would look if market prices were attached to things we generally don't see as market actions.
The question is- Is SNs viable as an economic unit as it is?
Is it generating sufficient surplus to continue and grow as a viable project?
If not then some way of increasing revenue or reducing costs is surely required.
Perhaps a subscription model in addition to the V4V function is required?
With free access remaining but with reduced options to non subscribers.
I suspect many find the V4V model too easy to game and see SNs as an arsemilking opportunity more than a V4V pay for content social media alternative.
No free lunch, commie!
I love all of these ideas, although implementation would require a lot of thought.
Another one that I know k00b is keen on is paying for mentions.
Whenever you guys are ready to hire a Chief Economist, I’d love to throw my hat in the ring and help sort it all out.
One thought I have about how to integrate some of these things relatively unobtrusively is to deduct the sats from rewards payouts. That way there aren’t a bunch of new micropayments that people have to make.
Paying for mentions would kind of suck for our contests.
It would be set by each stacker.
We could say that participants have to set their mention fee to zero if they want to be mentioned.
Well you guys have fun with your little experiment in finding ways to make SN more annoying to use. Haha
Oh, we will.
mentions is an excellent example, especially if it was more like a zap with sats going to the mentioned user.
We really need to convince Szabo to check SN out. I'm so curious what he would say about the mental transaction costs here. I like to think they are relatively light, but I may just not notice it anymore.
They become no heavier than their alternatives on other platforms but do require some getting used to.
You’ve actually really piqued my interest, so expect a post tomorrow about how to do some of this stuff.
Looking forward to it!
That Hayek article I posted about last week is what got me thinking on this.
#1468415
not true, it cost attention, people pay attention, and like it or not, that's much more valuable than sats.
I agree! The next line after the image:
For a while I went down the attention economy rabbithole: could attention be a currency? You are right that many of the terms we use around attention are monetary terms.
Ultimately, though, I don't think attention works like that. It is something people want, but talking about it as "more" or "less" valuable than money doesn't quite make sense to me.
Attention is valuable. One way we might talk about that is by putting prices on it. And I would say that most social media has been designed to hide the price of attention, whereas SN makes it easier to see.
It's hard to capture, and there's no interest in making such info public in traditional media. It's reflected in the ROIs and financial reports and I'd not say that attention is reflected with sats value on SN. That's just the value expressed in sats by some users.
The art measuring value is a tricky one and relying in only one scale is risky, not accurate anyway. I'd, for example consider time spent on a page, global views and single users views too as I doubt all visitors are zappin'
And here we are again, putting a prize tag on time.
nono, the central planner of the internet knows
I hadn't really thought of Facebook or X as command economies and central planning before SN. But it's a very apt description, I think. Algos and moderators are anti-free market.
You pay for everything in life, either with money or with your time (which is far more valuable).
So why not pay for the mute too? 😀
The sats wallet on SN is free.
No way! If everything's gotta be paid for, even those willing to pay for some stuff are gonna give up eventually.
Good point. Also, most wallets are free-ish (I don't think the Phoenix LSP model should quite count as free -- if you can only make a channel with the wallet provider and they set the fees, they effectively can charge you on every transaction).
It's interesting to think about it that way. We end up paying a cost for everything one way or another (perhaps the cost is that the signal of mutes doesn't get included in how SN orders things, and so lurkers see a front page that is full of people all the regular uses have muted -- and so we don't get very many new stackers).
Also, I think if I'm arguing for anything, I'm arguing for a normalization of micropayments. This has already occurred a little on SN: I hardly notice the payment for posting a reply (unless it's shockingly high). It's not like paying is inherently bad (especially in cases like SN where it's all going into the reward pool anyway).
Same thing happens to me. I wouldn't mind paying 1 sat to mute, subscriptions, etc... But I think other people, especially from poorer countries, will think twice about it.
Experiencing the might of your brain prowess is free 😆
i like the signal-quality angle. my only caution is charging the mute itself can punish people for setting boundaries, which backfires. i'd rather see mute as a costly action only when it materially changes distribution, maybe bundled with downzaps or territory-level filters. keep the friction on the feed, not the user.