Video killed the radio star
Dec. 17th, 2012 02:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livIt's almost a ritual complaint by now, that "nobody" posts to LJ any more, they've all gone to Facebook. I don't think this is entirely true, or at least it's only a very small aspect of the problem. TBH, LJ had a good run; 12 years is absolutely ancient in internet terms! It's only to be expected that something else would be the cool thing by now, and even FB itself is kind of falling out of fashion, the real cutting edge isn't there any more. The question is, why hasn't LJ been replaced with something as much better than LJ as LJ was better than MySpace?
My theory is partly that FB itself has killed the web as I knew it from the early 2000s. The fact that FB is the market leader means that innovations aren't happening in the directions I would like to see, because everybody is trying to be cargo-cult Facebook. But what's really killed the kind of sites that people use to build communities and have good conversations is that we've lost the war on spam. In much the same sense that we've lost the war on terror: the protections we're relying on to keep out the spam are basically worse than the spam onslaught itself. Using the web to create new stuff, letting users take sites in the direction that suits our purposes, is increasingly impossible these days, because any freedom that site users have can (at least potentially) be exploited by spammers.
That is to say, one of the reasons FB became popular in the early days was precisely because people who weren't terribly internet-savvy could be sure that all the posts and comments they'd see came from their actual friends, not Nigerian scammers or people trying to sell them grey market pharmaceuticals. But unfortunately, what we now have is something much more sinister: a horrible arms race with everyone from the marketing departments of large, legitimate companies to the dodgiest of bottom-feeding spammers using all kinds of dirty tricks to get a piece of the trust network that FB's walled garden represents, to give the impression that your friends endorse their products. Everything from posting funny memes which get loads of shares and likes, and then selling the page to the highest bidder, to hiding "Like" buttons so that people click them accidentally, to outright lying that someone's FB friends use or endorse your product or service or social game when they have never had anything to do with it.
At the same time, a side-effect of trying to protect people from the "Cheap V1agra!!!!" obvious and extremely annoying spam, the post-FB web is increasingly forbidding the kind of actions that actually promote community. More and more sites forbid commenting altogether, or only allow comments from users who jump through a ridiculous number of hoops and pretty much tell the commenting system their home address, annual income and mother's maiden name. Or else they let FB handle the commenting, which is certainly one way to outsource the spam prevention problem. But it also contributes to FB's strangehold over the web, and largely eliminates the kind of stable pseudonym based interactions that were the core of LJ and Web 2.0's golden years. I sincerely believe that the best conversations happen where everybody can choose a pseudonym which is then attached to a profile and history. You get much more diversity than if everybody has to use a name that points to their offline identity, including their professional life and their cultural / ethnic / class etc background. Using FB to combat spam is making that harder and harder all the time. (And Google+ had this misfeature built in from the start: their bizarre insistence on names that fit their anglocentric pattern was supposed to ensure users would be able to interact with "real" people and not spambots.)
Another problem is that spammers and Facebook, along with the other social sites that are trying to make FB-levels of big money, have essentially killed the mainstay of the web as originally conceived by Berners-Lee: the URL. You can't post your own HTML on most websites these days, because that gives a loophole that spammers can use to attempt to increase their Google rank. This means that when people want to share interesting content, they end up being forced to click a button that automagically makes a "preview" of the site they're linking to, but the actual URL is hidden or removed altogether. So readers quickly lose sight of where the content originated from, and there's a whole new ecosystem of trying to get more shares. Tumblr is the worst for this, because it's entirely built on the assumption that people repost content at will without any traceable connection to who originated it. But FB isn't a whole lot better, you're very often seeing reshares of reshares of reshares, and it's easy enough for bad actors to insert themselves into the chain and make it look like the latest funny came from a dodgy site. The communities built up around people linking to interesting content, like the communities built up around people having interesting conversations with friends-of-friends or even strangers, are atrophying in this situation. Remember the controversy when LJ introduced those horrible Snap preview things by default? Now the equivalent is everywhere and sites that don't have them look old-fashioned.
The lack of user control over what they post has had another side-effect which I hate: the creeping replacement of actual text with pictures of text or even worse, videos with absolutely no visual content, just a person holding up signs with words on. This I think is partly caused by Twitter, because an uploaded image of a joke or a political rant or whatever fits into the character limit, and is still less hassle than finding and setting up an actual blog on one of the rapidly dying sites that still allow long-form posting. But I think it's a more general effect of the post-FB culture, where everything is trying to be eye-catching, competing for attention with professional designers, yet ordinary web users who are truly creative are really cramped in what they can do because of the anti-spam limitations. I hate pictures and videos of text, because they're high bandwidth for me to actually be able to see them, and they don't have any of the advantages of being searchable, archivable etc. Plus audio or video is a much, much slower way for me to absorb information than reading. Also, pictures of essentially textual information are themselves essentially a way of evading anti-spam measures.
The combination of the web trying to move away from URLs, and the evolutionary pressure to display information as pictures, is one of the things that's basically breaking sensible search, I think. Even the giants like Google are forced to rely on easily gameable metrics like how often stuff gets shared, because the original basis of the Googlerank, how many reputable sites link to a particular document, is not meaningful any more. As a result, search is hopelessly polluted, and the very mechanisms that were supposed to keep spammy black-hat SEO out of the top ranked results are instead contributing to spam and making it harder for both search engines and humans to detect.
This started out as a response to Anil Dash's more measured and more technically knowledgeable article on the web we lost. (Dash was one of the real pioneers of blogging culture, by the way.) I think the problem with the Facebookification of everything goes deeper than what he talks about. It's a problem that most of the people I want to talk to are on FB, and FB as everybody knows has terrible privacy policies and exists to serve its advertisers, not its users. But that's not the whole story. The dominance of Facebook and its model, along with solutions worse than the problem to spam, is making the whole rest of the web worse. It's making it so much harder to meet interesting new people online, and without that, well, communities around existing networks fragment and become dormant, to the point that nobody really posts to LJ any more except to complain that nobody posts to LJ any more.
Obviously, I would like it if Dreamwidth were the answer to this problem. That is in fact why I continue to post actively here even as more and more people are drifting away. But pessimistically, I fear that DW will always be too small to compete with all the sites that are optimizing for getting huge numbers of users, rather than for being actually useful to have conversations.
My theory is partly that FB itself has killed the web as I knew it from the early 2000s. The fact that FB is the market leader means that innovations aren't happening in the directions I would like to see, because everybody is trying to be cargo-cult Facebook. But what's really killed the kind of sites that people use to build communities and have good conversations is that we've lost the war on spam. In much the same sense that we've lost the war on terror: the protections we're relying on to keep out the spam are basically worse than the spam onslaught itself. Using the web to create new stuff, letting users take sites in the direction that suits our purposes, is increasingly impossible these days, because any freedom that site users have can (at least potentially) be exploited by spammers.
That is to say, one of the reasons FB became popular in the early days was precisely because people who weren't terribly internet-savvy could be sure that all the posts and comments they'd see came from their actual friends, not Nigerian scammers or people trying to sell them grey market pharmaceuticals. But unfortunately, what we now have is something much more sinister: a horrible arms race with everyone from the marketing departments of large, legitimate companies to the dodgiest of bottom-feeding spammers using all kinds of dirty tricks to get a piece of the trust network that FB's walled garden represents, to give the impression that your friends endorse their products. Everything from posting funny memes which get loads of shares and likes, and then selling the page to the highest bidder, to hiding "Like" buttons so that people click them accidentally, to outright lying that someone's FB friends use or endorse your product or service or social game when they have never had anything to do with it.
At the same time, a side-effect of trying to protect people from the "Cheap V1agra!!!!" obvious and extremely annoying spam, the post-FB web is increasingly forbidding the kind of actions that actually promote community. More and more sites forbid commenting altogether, or only allow comments from users who jump through a ridiculous number of hoops and pretty much tell the commenting system their home address, annual income and mother's maiden name. Or else they let FB handle the commenting, which is certainly one way to outsource the spam prevention problem. But it also contributes to FB's strangehold over the web, and largely eliminates the kind of stable pseudonym based interactions that were the core of LJ and Web 2.0's golden years. I sincerely believe that the best conversations happen where everybody can choose a pseudonym which is then attached to a profile and history. You get much more diversity than if everybody has to use a name that points to their offline identity, including their professional life and their cultural / ethnic / class etc background. Using FB to combat spam is making that harder and harder all the time. (And Google+ had this misfeature built in from the start: their bizarre insistence on names that fit their anglocentric pattern was supposed to ensure users would be able to interact with "real" people and not spambots.)
Another problem is that spammers and Facebook, along with the other social sites that are trying to make FB-levels of big money, have essentially killed the mainstay of the web as originally conceived by Berners-Lee: the URL. You can't post your own HTML on most websites these days, because that gives a loophole that spammers can use to attempt to increase their Google rank. This means that when people want to share interesting content, they end up being forced to click a button that automagically makes a "preview" of the site they're linking to, but the actual URL is hidden or removed altogether. So readers quickly lose sight of where the content originated from, and there's a whole new ecosystem of trying to get more shares. Tumblr is the worst for this, because it's entirely built on the assumption that people repost content at will without any traceable connection to who originated it. But FB isn't a whole lot better, you're very often seeing reshares of reshares of reshares, and it's easy enough for bad actors to insert themselves into the chain and make it look like the latest funny came from a dodgy site. The communities built up around people linking to interesting content, like the communities built up around people having interesting conversations with friends-of-friends or even strangers, are atrophying in this situation. Remember the controversy when LJ introduced those horrible Snap preview things by default? Now the equivalent is everywhere and sites that don't have them look old-fashioned.
The lack of user control over what they post has had another side-effect which I hate: the creeping replacement of actual text with pictures of text or even worse, videos with absolutely no visual content, just a person holding up signs with words on. This I think is partly caused by Twitter, because an uploaded image of a joke or a political rant or whatever fits into the character limit, and is still less hassle than finding and setting up an actual blog on one of the rapidly dying sites that still allow long-form posting. But I think it's a more general effect of the post-FB culture, where everything is trying to be eye-catching, competing for attention with professional designers, yet ordinary web users who are truly creative are really cramped in what they can do because of the anti-spam limitations. I hate pictures and videos of text, because they're high bandwidth for me to actually be able to see them, and they don't have any of the advantages of being searchable, archivable etc. Plus audio or video is a much, much slower way for me to absorb information than reading. Also, pictures of essentially textual information are themselves essentially a way of evading anti-spam measures.
The combination of the web trying to move away from URLs, and the evolutionary pressure to display information as pictures, is one of the things that's basically breaking sensible search, I think. Even the giants like Google are forced to rely on easily gameable metrics like how often stuff gets shared, because the original basis of the Googlerank, how many reputable sites link to a particular document, is not meaningful any more. As a result, search is hopelessly polluted, and the very mechanisms that were supposed to keep spammy black-hat SEO out of the top ranked results are instead contributing to spam and making it harder for both search engines and humans to detect.
This started out as a response to Anil Dash's more measured and more technically knowledgeable article on the web we lost. (Dash was one of the real pioneers of blogging culture, by the way.) I think the problem with the Facebookification of everything goes deeper than what he talks about. It's a problem that most of the people I want to talk to are on FB, and FB as everybody knows has terrible privacy policies and exists to serve its advertisers, not its users. But that's not the whole story. The dominance of Facebook and its model, along with solutions worse than the problem to spam, is making the whole rest of the web worse. It's making it so much harder to meet interesting new people online, and without that, well, communities around existing networks fragment and become dormant, to the point that nobody really posts to LJ any more except to complain that nobody posts to LJ any more.
Obviously, I would like it if Dreamwidth were the answer to this problem. That is in fact why I continue to post actively here even as more and more people are drifting away. But pessimistically, I fear that DW will always be too small to compete with all the sites that are optimizing for getting huge numbers of users, rather than for being actually useful to have conversations.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-19 04:02 pm (UTC)If I'm saying "I felt emotional at work" or "I went on a date" or "Agh, dealing with extended family is complicated", I can say it to anyone, but it becomes more of an essay, whereas to a restricted filter, it's more of a soap opera, which is actually what's engaging to people most of the time.
In fact, I compromised by setting up an IRL filer but only half-arsedly doing the job of winnowing people out of it. But by filtering it AT ALL I seemed to get the psychological benefit :)