Social network trends
Oct. 9th, 2014 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livIt seems a bit of a perennial thing with me that every so often I pontificate about the current state of social networking. This latest round was prompted partly by everybody suddenly getting excited about a new tech start-up, Ello. I'm pretty much convinced it's entirely pointless, and probably just vapourware. oursin posted pretty much what I was going to say, including a link to ![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
notyourexrotic's clear explanation of why allowing pseudonyms does little for privacy if you don't have any tools to restrict who can view and respond to your content. Lots of other people have been linking to Balkan's very well-written piece pointing out that Ello has already sold its as yet hypothetical userbase for venture capital funding. I think Balkan is over-stating his case slightly; not everything that acquires start-up funding is inherently evil, but it's certainly true that you're just as much the product if the customer is investors as if the customer is advertisers.
Aside from those issues, I see absolutely no advantage to Ello. It offers me literally nothing that isn't already available at more established sites, and in particular it's worse in just about every respect than Dreamwidth! I've been wrong before, probably more often than I've been right; I was enthusiastic about Facebook at first, not knowing how evil it would turn out, and also about Google+ as a FB replacement, which was a complete flop as well as evil, even with the Google behemoth pushing it really heavily. I agree withoursin that if I'm wrong and everybody ends up using Ello as their main place, I'll join it whatever its problems may be; I mean, I have a Facebook account, so I'm in no position to value moral purity over using the same networks my friends use.
I retweetedemceeaich who pointed out
Of course, Ello benefits from being new, not only in that it looks cool and trendy but in that it doesn't have accumulated cruft. People can be pretty sure their employers and their awkward relatives and those vaguely irritating people they met once through work aren't there. And because it's brand new it hasn't yet been taken over by trolls and spammers. I read a great article some years ago pointing out that, much to my sadness, people don't stick with the same websites that work well for them, because simply being old and established is a huge disadvantage compared to starting again with a clean slate where you only friend / follow the people you actually want to know.
One thing that Ello is, I think, getting right, is encouraging establishment of identity through stable pseudonyms. I really do think that's the best way to have good conversation. Give people identities they're invested in, so that it's more rewarding to behave decently and have interesting conversations than to spew insults and trolling. But don't restrict participation to people who can afford to be googlable under the same name that they use at work and for financial transcations (or even worse, to people who can provide a "WASPonym", an anglo-style name consisting of a first name that isn't a dictionary word and a surname describing the appearance or profession of their English-speaking male ancestors). Those people are not more "honest" or more "polite" than average, they just have enough race, class and gender privilege to be less vulnerable to some types of attack than most people.
But it's not enough to encourage pseudonyms. I agree withnotyourexrotic that you also need comprehensive privacy and anti-abuse tools. And further, you need actual evidence that the company behind the website is genuinely committed to privacy; it's all very well to say you're in favour of it, but if you're just going to tamely hand over all your data as soon as you sniff the possibility of moolah or a legal-ish sounding letter, that's pretty useless. And evidence that you have the technical chops to actually protect your users from leaks and hacking; as soon as a site becomes successful enough to benefit from any kind of network effect, it also provides a big enough attack surface that blackhats are going to be trying to get their hands on that valuable personal data. Snapchat was supposed to be all about privacy, claiming that messages weren't being stored at all, but of course they were, and of course they fell into the wrong hands.
One thing that gave Ello a boost was that Facebook managed to do something evil enough to break out of the boiling frog effect and actually give increasingly dissatisfied users the impetus to leave. Namely, they suddenly started demanding documentation from drag queens to prove that their performance names were their "real" names. Which got a lot of trans* folk really scared, because it's bad enough if your use name doesn't match what's on your birth certificate or passport, but if your gender doesn't match either, you're really screwed. And however much I'm grieved to see people getting scared of abuse by the site where many of their friends and communities are, I couldn't help being a bit pleased to see lots of my variously Queer friends starting to post at LJ and Dreamwidth again. I do hope this continues, because it's lovely to have more of you around without having to fight against Facebook to be able to hear what's going on in your lives and talk to you! And interestingly this even quite small exodus made enough of a dent that FB actually backtracked about enforcing legally documented names, to some extent, so it is possible to get a response by voting with your feet.
I'm kind of reluctant to go back to LJ, because I still really hate their advertising-based business model, (and I dislike a lot of the recent directions in design changes, but that's minor). The problem that started to come up half a decade ago is still here, that bad keyword matching is showing "date hot Asian chicks!" adverts on the journals of people who are themselves Asian, which is really horrible. And yes, it's true that you can pay not to see ads, but needing to pay to have a usable site experience really works against the network effect.
However, I am leaning more towards cross-posting to LJ again, because politically even if not aesthetically I like their recent directions. In particular, the recent news post is really pretty encouraging. They actually asked the userbase what they like about LJ, and made an advert based on playing to LJ's actual strengths, not on trying to be trendy. And even more impressively, when they got sued they actually went to bat for their users, refusing to give up personal details even under legal pressure. (I think the site owners are also somewhat disentangling themselves from scary Russian politics and potential censorship, too, but I'm hazy on the details.) That's what Ello doesn't have, an actual track record of defending privacy even under legal and financial pressure.
However, even Dreamwidth (which I'm still convinced is just better than LJ, better business model, nicer community, better technically, properly open source) has real downsides compared to some more modern social networks. It's not purely the network effect, though that's a big factor. Yeah, FB still has the events and calendaring system as its killer app, but that's minor; people could use FB for events and DW for posting about their lives and having discussions! The real problem is that it's a bit of a pain to read DW from a smartphone and compared to other sites near enough impossible to comment. I have always opposed making sites too flashy with widgets and AJAX and stuff, but really, at this point, DW is never going to attract or retain people until you can comment by just starting typing under the thing you want to reply to, and until it has respectable iPhone and Android apps. I think this is partly because it's an American site and data plans are just ridiculously more expensive in the US compared to other economically comparable countries, so the mostly American developer base don't live in the world we Europeans do, where the huge majority of people's web experience is smartphone based, not desktop based. I'm kind of hoping that this will encourage a shift in priorities, but it may already be too late.
There was also an interesting discussion, unfortunately on FB which makes it hard to follow properly and impossible to link to, about whether it's ableist to expect people to socialize anywhere other than FB. And I can certainly see the argument, for lots of people Facebook is literally essential, they need to be able to get social contact and support where their friends and networks actually are, not on some hypothetically better site with a massive learning curve to use, let alone half a dozen different sites which different balkanized groups think might be better. The thing I don't agree with is that I don't think FB is "easy to use" at all; I think people have learned to use it because they had to, but not only is it really short on accessibility features, it's deliberately set up to be hard to use. I've heard rumours that they user tested an optimized user interface and then deliberately broke it, because with a good, clear, intuitive interface everybody could easily avoid the ads and see only the content they actually wanted, which doesn't make FB money. And yes, change is hard, even for neurotypical and cognitively abled people who have leisure time and energy for learning new habits. But FB itself changes everything around all the time, to nudge people into accidentally revealing information they thought was private, or clicking on ads they thought were endorsed by their friends.
I personally find Dreamwidth much easier to use than Facebook or any of the other modern "slick" sites. Because I can make it do what I want! If it doesn't suit me, I can modify it, I can do things that aren't the default template of what the majority of users are expected to be doing. But I know I'm weird, I've been a power user from the early days of LJ (which is where I first discovered user experience concepts like that), and I positively enjoy going through screens and screens of settings and options, positively enjoy learning to write HTML so that I can make my journal look exactly how I want to. I think DW's deep commitment to accessibility counts for a lot, but it's at a huge disadvantage just because of market share; people prefer FB cos they're used to it, not cos it's better, just as for much of the 2000s people preferred Microsoft Windows over any actually better alternatives because it was common and there was a plethora of resources available and people had already been forced to train themselves into the Windows way of doing things anyway. And also there is such a thing as conflicting access needs; for example, some people need high contrast and some people need low contrast, and many people need not to have to choose from six different options just to be able to look at a page in a way that isn't painful.
There is also a problem that the people who care about things like electronic privacy often make it a point of pride that they don't care about usability or design. I mean, Diaspora was a disaster from that perspective; even I got fed up with having to debug each post to make it appear sensibly, and I can quite see why there was no mass-exodus of non-geeks from FB to Diaspora even though the open, federated model of social networking has obvious advantages. I've been vaguely paying attention to Ada Initiative campaigns recently, and Valerie Aurora's feminist kernel programming story kind of horrified me. Like, literally wanting your OS to work reliably is portrayed as some kind of silly little girl or pussy n0ob preference. There's this weird machismo in having stuff that's unnecessarily hard, and needing to know all the kludges and workrounds to be able to use a tool effectively. And if interacting with that culture (let alone the even more toxic manifestations of violence and harassment against women and anyone who objects to said culture) is the only way to get social networks with actually meaningful privacy, well, we're doomed. We're never going to get a replacement for proprietary, walled-garden, sell your personal data to the highest bidder Facebook style model.
DW I think cares about usability, but just doesn't have the manpower to actually make it happen, so we end up with a site where the backend and general principles are way ahead of the user experience. But I do think it's noteworthy that although it was started by exactly the kind of geeks who think it's all about technical effectiveness and doing things the hard way, the stereotypical LJer or DWian is in fact a teenaged girl or young woman who self-teaches HTML, CSS and even coding to be able to make fanworks and prettify her space. That said I very much respect people who explain that DW is just too hard and too confusing to use, whether that's because of disability or because they have better things to do with their time and they're going to use the slicker sites in preference.
I was also going to talk about women using the internet professionally, and misogyny and crowdfunding, but I think that's probably a separate post in fact.
oursin posted pretty much what I was going to say, including a link to Aside from those issues, I see absolutely no advantage to Ello. It offers me literally nothing that isn't already available at more established sites, and in particular it's worse in just about every respect than Dreamwidth! I've been wrong before, probably more often than I've been right; I was enthusiastic about Facebook at first, not knowing how evil it would turn out, and also about Google+ as a FB replacement, which was a complete flop as well as evil, even with the Google behemoth pushing it really heavily. I agree with
oursin that if I'm wrong and everybody ends up using Ello as their main place, I'll join it whatever its problems may be; I mean, I have a Facebook account, so I'm in no position to value moral purity over using the same networks my friends use. I retweeted
emceeaich who pointed out Unlike Ello, Dreamwidth has a privacy model and you don't need an invite, and someone argued with me that DW is ugly and Ello has
visual design appeal. I find Ello extremely ugly and extremely hard to read, but I can't deny that it's trendy. And it's interesting that Ello somehow succeeded in attracting some of my FB friends who are not geeky, who are by no means early adopters of new websites, the kind of people who are sick of FB but don't really know of any alternatives (the same people whose initial response to Google+ was, what's that, it looks like some weird complicated site for computer geeks). So obviously they're doing something right with the marketing and presentation, if they're attracting both bleeding edge Silicon Valley hipsters and middle-aged people who only got online a couple of years ago and rarely venture outside FB.
Of course, Ello benefits from being new, not only in that it looks cool and trendy but in that it doesn't have accumulated cruft. People can be pretty sure their employers and their awkward relatives and those vaguely irritating people they met once through work aren't there. And because it's brand new it hasn't yet been taken over by trolls and spammers. I read a great article some years ago pointing out that, much to my sadness, people don't stick with the same websites that work well for them, because simply being old and established is a huge disadvantage compared to starting again with a clean slate where you only friend / follow the people you actually want to know.
One thing that Ello is, I think, getting right, is encouraging establishment of identity through stable pseudonyms. I really do think that's the best way to have good conversation. Give people identities they're invested in, so that it's more rewarding to behave decently and have interesting conversations than to spew insults and trolling. But don't restrict participation to people who can afford to be googlable under the same name that they use at work and for financial transcations (or even worse, to people who can provide a "WASPonym", an anglo-style name consisting of a first name that isn't a dictionary word and a surname describing the appearance or profession of their English-speaking male ancestors). Those people are not more "honest" or more "polite" than average, they just have enough race, class and gender privilege to be less vulnerable to some types of attack than most people.
But it's not enough to encourage pseudonyms. I agree with
One thing that gave Ello a boost was that Facebook managed to do something evil enough to break out of the boiling frog effect and actually give increasingly dissatisfied users the impetus to leave. Namely, they suddenly started demanding documentation from drag queens to prove that their performance names were their "real" names. Which got a lot of trans* folk really scared, because it's bad enough if your use name doesn't match what's on your birth certificate or passport, but if your gender doesn't match either, you're really screwed. And however much I'm grieved to see people getting scared of abuse by the site where many of their friends and communities are, I couldn't help being a bit pleased to see lots of my variously Queer friends starting to post at LJ and Dreamwidth again. I do hope this continues, because it's lovely to have more of you around without having to fight against Facebook to be able to hear what's going on in your lives and talk to you! And interestingly this even quite small exodus made enough of a dent that FB actually backtracked about enforcing legally documented names, to some extent, so it is possible to get a response by voting with your feet.
I'm kind of reluctant to go back to LJ, because I still really hate their advertising-based business model, (and I dislike a lot of the recent directions in design changes, but that's minor). The problem that started to come up half a decade ago is still here, that bad keyword matching is showing "date hot Asian chicks!" adverts on the journals of people who are themselves Asian, which is really horrible. And yes, it's true that you can pay not to see ads, but needing to pay to have a usable site experience really works against the network effect.
However, I am leaning more towards cross-posting to LJ again, because politically even if not aesthetically I like their recent directions. In particular, the recent news post is really pretty encouraging. They actually asked the userbase what they like about LJ, and made an advert based on playing to LJ's actual strengths, not on trying to be trendy. And even more impressively, when they got sued they actually went to bat for their users, refusing to give up personal details even under legal pressure. (I think the site owners are also somewhat disentangling themselves from scary Russian politics and potential censorship, too, but I'm hazy on the details.) That's what Ello doesn't have, an actual track record of defending privacy even under legal and financial pressure.
However, even Dreamwidth (which I'm still convinced is just better than LJ, better business model, nicer community, better technically, properly open source) has real downsides compared to some more modern social networks. It's not purely the network effect, though that's a big factor. Yeah, FB still has the events and calendaring system as its killer app, but that's minor; people could use FB for events and DW for posting about their lives and having discussions! The real problem is that it's a bit of a pain to read DW from a smartphone and compared to other sites near enough impossible to comment. I have always opposed making sites too flashy with widgets and AJAX and stuff, but really, at this point, DW is never going to attract or retain people until you can comment by just starting typing under the thing you want to reply to, and until it has respectable iPhone and Android apps. I think this is partly because it's an American site and data plans are just ridiculously more expensive in the US compared to other economically comparable countries, so the mostly American developer base don't live in the world we Europeans do, where the huge majority of people's web experience is smartphone based, not desktop based. I'm kind of hoping that this will encourage a shift in priorities, but it may already be too late.
There was also an interesting discussion, unfortunately on FB which makes it hard to follow properly and impossible to link to, about whether it's ableist to expect people to socialize anywhere other than FB. And I can certainly see the argument, for lots of people Facebook is literally essential, they need to be able to get social contact and support where their friends and networks actually are, not on some hypothetically better site with a massive learning curve to use, let alone half a dozen different sites which different balkanized groups think might be better. The thing I don't agree with is that I don't think FB is "easy to use" at all; I think people have learned to use it because they had to, but not only is it really short on accessibility features, it's deliberately set up to be hard to use. I've heard rumours that they user tested an optimized user interface and then deliberately broke it, because with a good, clear, intuitive interface everybody could easily avoid the ads and see only the content they actually wanted, which doesn't make FB money. And yes, change is hard, even for neurotypical and cognitively abled people who have leisure time and energy for learning new habits. But FB itself changes everything around all the time, to nudge people into accidentally revealing information they thought was private, or clicking on ads they thought were endorsed by their friends.
I personally find Dreamwidth much easier to use than Facebook or any of the other modern "slick" sites. Because I can make it do what I want! If it doesn't suit me, I can modify it, I can do things that aren't the default template of what the majority of users are expected to be doing. But I know I'm weird, I've been a power user from the early days of LJ (which is where I first discovered user experience concepts like that), and I positively enjoy going through screens and screens of settings and options, positively enjoy learning to write HTML so that I can make my journal look exactly how I want to. I think DW's deep commitment to accessibility counts for a lot, but it's at a huge disadvantage just because of market share; people prefer FB cos they're used to it, not cos it's better, just as for much of the 2000s people preferred Microsoft Windows over any actually better alternatives because it was common and there was a plethora of resources available and people had already been forced to train themselves into the Windows way of doing things anyway. And also there is such a thing as conflicting access needs; for example, some people need high contrast and some people need low contrast, and many people need not to have to choose from six different options just to be able to look at a page in a way that isn't painful.
There is also a problem that the people who care about things like electronic privacy often make it a point of pride that they don't care about usability or design. I mean, Diaspora was a disaster from that perspective; even I got fed up with having to debug each post to make it appear sensibly, and I can quite see why there was no mass-exodus of non-geeks from FB to Diaspora even though the open, federated model of social networking has obvious advantages. I've been vaguely paying attention to Ada Initiative campaigns recently, and Valerie Aurora's feminist kernel programming story kind of horrified me. Like, literally wanting your OS to work reliably is portrayed as some kind of silly little girl or pussy n0ob preference. There's this weird machismo in having stuff that's unnecessarily hard, and needing to know all the kludges and workrounds to be able to use a tool effectively. And if interacting with that culture (let alone the even more toxic manifestations of violence and harassment against women and anyone who objects to said culture) is the only way to get social networks with actually meaningful privacy, well, we're doomed. We're never going to get a replacement for proprietary, walled-garden, sell your personal data to the highest bidder Facebook style model.
DW I think cares about usability, but just doesn't have the manpower to actually make it happen, so we end up with a site where the backend and general principles are way ahead of the user experience. But I do think it's noteworthy that although it was started by exactly the kind of geeks who think it's all about technical effectiveness and doing things the hard way, the stereotypical LJer or DWian is in fact a teenaged girl or young woman who self-teaches HTML, CSS and even coding to be able to make fanworks and prettify her space. That said I very much respect people who explain that DW is just too hard and too confusing to use, whether that's because of disability or because they have better things to do with their time and they're going to use the slicker sites in preference.
I was also going to talk about women using the internet professionally, and misogyny and crowdfunding, but I think that's probably a separate post in fact.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-10-09 05:34 pm (UTC)But I believe you're substantially incorrect about DW and mobile, especially the motivations you project on the dev team, because you start from an incorrect premise.
I regularly use DW on a mobile device, and DW is far and away the most useable and most attractive such site on my device. When I say "useable" I don't just mean "easy to figure out", I mean "the navigational controls all actually work" (which is not the case for e.g. LJ.)
But my mobile device is not one of the dominant mobile devices, and therein lies one of the real issues: it's not mobile vs. desktop. It's ioS+Android mobile vs. all the other kinds of mobile.
Doing some sort of slick ioS+Android AJAXy interface for DW is totally doable[*], without sacrificing the more democratically accessible (that is, to a much wider range of devices) interface -- but it takes developer time and probably money that I don't think DW is swimming in.
[* In fact, the very templating/skinning theme feature you mention enjoying being able to customize brings the possibility of more AJAXy themes as options for thems that want them more into reach.]
This is a social justice issue in the domain of socioeconomic status: slick AJAXy interfaces work on the more expensive mobile devices. They fail entirely -- and lock users out of using a site at all -- on cheap phones.
If you want to check this out for the US market, you can try the following -- I don't know if it'll show right for a UK user, but if you want to try... Go to tracfone.com. It's one of the most ubiquitous pre-paid phone companies, favored by those looking for cheap phones. Find the link "Shop Phones". Use the US zipcode 02128, which is the impoverished area I work in (East Boston).
Right now, the cheapest Android phone they have is $80. Every other phone on that page that says "Mobile Web" but doesn't mention being Android? You can assume that if it doesn't advertise being Android, it's the manufacturer's in-house OS and browser. And you can reliably assume that it works terribly, if at all, with AJAXy web sites.
Their browsers are typically older, and the capacity to do on-screen partial redraw, which is what AJAX relies on, didn't use to be universal. I also have a hunch that it's processor intensive in a way that the cheaper phones can't support. That's part of what makes them cheaper: less powerful and/or simply less hardware.
And something that is frustrating to me is that most people buying low end phones have no clue about Android vs. not-Android, and don't realize that the price of buying lowest end means you're going to get locked out of a lot of the web. How would they learn this? The way I learn these things is... via the web. Catch-22.
But I disgress.
I assure you, mobile is all the rage in web development in the US right now, but there are serious class issues around it. Developers and their white-collar pals sit at desktops, so the demand from them for mobile accessibility (of any kind) isn't what it is from the rest of the population, who would like to primarily use their handhelds to internet; fortunately, their bosses have smelled the money, and aimed them in the direction of supporting mobile, but, of course, the mobile their bosses are most interested in supporting is that which is possessed by those with the most money.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-10-09 06:42 pm (UTC)I'm really pleased that you are able to use DW on a mobile device which isn't the latest toy. (I think I'd got the impression you were frustrated because you couldn't display journal layouts properly, and I was trying without much success to get some of those issues patched, but that was a long time ago and DW definitely has improved since then.)
I think much of my crowd who turn up their noses at DW because it doesn't work "for mobile" are precisely white-collar, relatively well-off geeks who do have Android or iPhones released in the last couple of years. It's just that the Europeans and Asians in those demographics have those with generous or unlimited data plans, and the Americans are on the whole more dependent on public WiFi and more likely to use their home or work broadband connections (and therefore their full-sized computers) for internet.
My guess is that the compromise is to make a downloadable app for the latest smartphones, while keeping the website as technologically simple as possible. That would hopefully serve both the smartphone dependent geeks and the poor people who only access the internet via cheap basic handheld devices. But as you say, DW lacks both money and available developer time (and interest) for that direction.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-10-09 07:46 pm (UTC)I also find DW the easiest website to navigate on my phone. It doesn't crash the browser, the layout displays well, and things look good. I'm a bit puzzled at 'needing multiple clicks'; suspect that my phone is capable of dealing with AJAX stuff?
A dedicated app would perhaps be useful, but I don't see it as providing basic functionality that we don't already have. I've not gotten anywhere my data limits, either, and my phone's never not on 3G.
For what it's worth, I am a white-collar relatively well-off geek with a three-year-old Android phone.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-10-10 03:07 am (UTC)Oh, I think most of the themes look terrible on the desktop. Profligate waste of white space which makes the nesting (which, as I think you've seen me discuss elsewhere, is terribly expensive of processor time to do, so you want to make the most of it) hard to read. I fussed with my own theme to improve it.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-10-17 08:11 am (UTC)This, this, this! I agree so completely. But for mostly opposite reasons: the designs look cramped, line-spacing is zilch, <--entry/comment padding hovers at or near zero-->, sidebar info is scrunched together, "design" itself consists mostly of color and borders, or lack thereof applied to varying degrees, CSS3 is mixed right into 90ish designs, hiding the text descriptions of various elements (like an entry's tags) is considered a thing, scrollbars appearing on resize, transitions to mobile resizing that feature mind-boggling breakpoints, resulting in no resizing at all until it's too late...just stuff like that. It's why I either roll my own designs or re-roll other people's. I just can't take the pain.
(Also, we inherited every one of these design shortfalls from LJ except for perhaps the CSS3-on-90ish design mismatch. Every single one. Not that it really helps anyone to realize we inherited the source of most of our troubles directly from DW's predecessor.)