The Prosocial Network

You Don't Get to 500 Million Friends Without It Being an Unmanageable Nightmare of Anti-Social Activity

He’s getting ready to tell you that you should kill yourself because you have a minor disagreement.

One of the perils of Substack is audience capture. Basically, because we’re indebted to our readers and not a publisher, we can fall prey to just telling you what you want to hear. Although I do not make any money from this, I love each and every one of my readers so much¹ that I admit I am guilty of this. I find myself self-censoring and not being a brave truth teller. How many subscribers would I lose if I told you that dancing is silly, and we’d be better off banning it like in Footloose? What kind of reader exodus would I see if I told you that McDonalds is the most popular restaurant on Earth because it has the best food? So, I hide those opinions. But for today’s newsletter I need to share my most unpopular opinion: I quite like social media.

To the few dozens of you who did not immediately unsubscribe, thanks for sticking around. One thing I don’t like about the modern internet is how it rewards negativity. If your schtick is how everything sucks, you will never be without an audience. But I like things (except dancing) and one of those things is social media. I may not enjoy all of it – I avoid Facebook and I have never downloaded TikTok – but I otherwise find social media a fun and informative part of my life. I’ve been exposed to great jokes, brilliant thinkers, and – thanks to Instagram’s brilliant ad targeting algorithm – some wonderful purchases. It is probably the number one target of hate on, ironically, social media, but I don’t believe there’s any reason that social media can’t be fun and useful for adults.²

Social media isn’t perfect. Clearly, a lot of people struggle with using it. But, as I’ve written about before, I think those can be chalked up to two things. One, the internet breaks our brains because it conflicts with how we evolved to understand the world. Not just on its own, but as the culmination of a few generations of hypercharged innovation. We’re processing our social media interactions through the only prism our brains can handle, which is our real life. But they’re not the same thing.

The second – and related – problem is that we haven’t created new norms for interaction online, we merely imported in our offline ones. But often nonsensically. For example, let’s say you work in an office. Let’s say you have a coworker who every time you walk past their desk, they insist on showing you pictures of their children. For some of you, this is wonderful. You love pictures of children. It’s a little ray of sunshine in your day. Now let’s say there’s another coworker who always wants to talk about the game last night. This is such an annoyance for you, since you don’t care at all about sports. Why do they keep insisting on talking about this thing you don’t care about?

But, what if it’s the opposite? What if you love talking about sports but you also think every picture of a baby you’ve ever seen is just the same picture? Walking past one of those desks is going to be a nice break in the drudgery of the workday and the other is going to force you to feign being amused by the allegedly amusing thing the child did or said.

Most people who have worked in offices figured this out. You just avoid the desk of the person you don’t want to interact with. So long as you’re not actively rude to them – “Shut up, I don’t care about your kids!” – no one is going to think there’s something wrong about picking one person to chitchat with and not the other. But on social media, you have to walk past both desks, and the desks of the ten people in your office who want to talk about politics 24/7. Not doing so is considered rude. But this makes no sense. We structured something in an unreal way but make people interact in a real way that is not analogous. We imported the concept of “you should be friendly to people you know” but not the concept of “you don’t have to sit down and talk with everyone you know.”

This is just the most obvious example, but I think it gets across the idea that we just made things worse online by not treating it as a new thing deserving of its own way of acting. Blocking, muting, and unfollowing are the best sources of happiness on social media, but they’re still stigmatized, particularly when dealing with people you actually know.³

But just because I enjoy social media and think it receives unfair criticism doesn’t mean I don’t think it can and should be improved. To be really controversial, abuse on social media falls under the category of “change your norms.” We imported the norm of reacting as if someone walked up to us in real life and started saying horrible things, which is an extreme occurrence (outside of Philadelphia). But we could’ve imported the norm we use in sports. When I yell that an opposing player or referee sucks, he doesn’t take it personally, because he knows its meaningless talk from a distant stranger.

Of course, social media abuse is still quite bad. Antisocial behavior is bad. And if we want some big ideas, a truly modern big idea is creating social media networks that actually make us better people. Social media networks that encourage pro-social activity. Social media networks where we act like our mom is there, instead of ones where we simply had to accept her friend request and she likes all our stuff and leaves embarrassing comments. But how?

First, let’s rule out what I don’t mean: greater moderation. I’m not philosophically against moderation, I’m philosophically against things that don’t work. And there’s no feasible version of moderation that works, with the very persuasive argument that, at scale, it is impossible. Early return on algorithms is that they do a terrible job of this, so much that YouTube is retreating from them. Plus, moderation is typically focused on weeding out undesirable speech. What I’m proposing is social networks that encourage us to act like better persons.

There are a few ways to think about this. The first is what’s already being attempted, which is going all Richard Thaler on everyone and nudging them to act differently. Social media is already constantly nudging you to do things like use the app more, post more status updates, not share stories from outlets they don’t like, and most importantly, buy more things. And dating apps have been working to nudge users away from the pernicious act of “ghosting” – for those of you who never dated in the app age, this is the dehumanizing act of just ignoring someone after you’ve begun interacting with them.⁴ Twitter already has nudge features like asking if you read an article and the “hey, this conversation is getting muy caliente” prompt. But the problem – to anyone who has gotten the latter – is that it’s nonsensical and often just means “we don’t like this topic.” Again, this is well beyond what algorithms can understand.

What we probably need is more than just nudging. What we probably need is a redesign of these systems. There’s a common joke – which I’ve heard from many people who would be the butt of it – that social media networks were designed by people who are anti-social. Like most jokes, there’s an element of truth. Social media does not replicate how we interact socially. Either we need to all agree to new norms, or we need new networks that match how we really act. So how do we make them more like real life?

A major problem of the early social media apps was the One App to Rule Them All mindset. That’s not how life is. A healthier direction for social media is nichification. Digital communications slaughtered the monoculture, but generalized apps like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram tried to bring it back. That was a mistake. You may know everything your partner, best friend, or roommate is thinking or doing. But you don’t have hundreds of them. People naturally create niches in their real social networks because most of them are based on shared interests or experiences. I don’t talk to my friends back home about Texas law and I don’t talk to my work friends about Philly sports. I interact with them through our shared prism. You do too. There’s already a wonderful example of a social media network that does this: Twitch. People use Twitch to interact with others because they share an interest in video games. If a coworker asks you to follow them on Twitch, it’s acceptable to say “sorry, I’m not a gamer.” There should be social networks for people to share pictures of their kids, talk about travel, complain about sports, and yell very loudly their opinions on Donald Trump (pro or con), and never the twain shall meet.

Similarly, there’s other ways the structure of social networks can mirror real life ones. Ideas such as limiting the amount someone can post each day and – perhaps most importantly – limiting the amount of people someone can interact with.⁵ The sheer size of social media networks is not only impossible for our brains to grasp but also encourages the kind of anonymity that makes abusive behavior easier. But it’s not a one-way street. People are more apt to commit a wide spectrum of horrific acts towards the dehumanized, things we wouldn’t do when we think of someone as a person.

(If you’re unfamiliar with Silicon Valley I assure you this clip has language that is not appropriate for all audiences)

And what is more dehumanizing than social media? You have no physical proximity to the other person, they’re just pixels on a screen. In fact, there’s evidence that the biggest problem with people acting antisocial online is the lack of eye contact. I wonder if the answer to all of this is to make people type replies with a big picture of the other person’s face looking at them.

I don’t think forcing people to use their real names online is the lesson here, and not just because my real last name is not T.⁶ It would take thirty seconds on Twitter to see people heaping disgusting abuse on people with real names, and people with real names heaping disgusting abuse. You may know their name, but they don’t feel real. Meanwhile, anonymous forums can become closely knit because they’re infinitesimally smaller than Facebook or Twitter, and repeated interactions with the same people can make them real to you. Even if you only know then as Buttsoup420.

That shouldn’t be surprising. Why do you think everyone from the Olympics to America Ninja Warrior do videos about the personal struggle athletes overcome? Why do movies like Hotel Rwanda move us but we don’t do a thing to help people in Yemen? Why would someone on your block dying affect you much more than 17 people dying on a bus in Pakistan? We have different emotional responses when we feel like we know someone. It’s basic psychology, it’s propaganda 101. Why do we expect people to act differently online?

For all the incessant complaining about social media, there’s no magical solution where billions of people just decide it’s dumb now and delete their accounts. It’s here to stay. Which means whether you enjoy it or just enjoy using it to complain about it, this is exactly the type of thing we need big ideas about. Unfortunately, there’s no big idea to end all social media abuse or make it a virtual utopia. Much like the poor, the assholes will always be with us. That doesn’t mean we have to maximize social media to create as many as possible.

1. This is not a bit. Every time someone reads, likes, or comments on these it feels amazing and I feel so indebted to all of you. Thank you.

2. Not a parent so I am not going to talk about how it works for kids. I’m over 18 so I’m fine with making anything restricted to 18 and over.

3. A lot of the other complaints about social media are just real-life complaints. Yes, everything on social media is fake because people put out fake versions of themselves and this causes envy. That’s different from the past when people weren’t fake and other people got envious? Yes, social media can cause people to have body image issues. Your beef here seems to be with Louis Daguerre. Putting Chris Pratt in movies causes body image issues and you don’t see people trying to ban that.

4. Incidentally, dating apps are a form of social media where moderation is actually a good idea. It’s quite a bright line to determine if someone has sent an unsolicited picture of their genitalia, and I don’t think anyone would not consider this anti-social behavior worthy of banning.

5. There may be proposals for this. I devoted hours to searching but our search engines are so broken there’s some topics it is impossible to find information on. No, I don’t care about “curbing my social media addiction” or “using social media like a pro.”

6. I hope some of you thought it was and I was Mr. T’s son. But sadly, my father never main evented WrestleMania, fought Rocky, or was convicted by a military tribunal for a crime he didn’t commit.