All about social networks

Structural power isn't always a problem, for instance there is no reason to complain that a game designer will pick the rules of their imaginary world, but there is a large set of cases in which this structural power gives corporations " coercive powers like the state but (...) not subject to the kinds of democratic constraints and accountability... See more

Focusing on the needs of real people isn't something that you can push up to UI design and ignore at the protocolar level. Decentralisation isn't a property of your software or protocol, it's a measure of how much the people who use and are affected by a system can have agency over it — and that agency has to be reflected at lower layers too.

The vast interconnection enabled by digital platforms has ended up creating more of a sense of sameness than diversity. Users are subtly guided toward the same subsets of topics, urged on by recommendations that are designed not to serve their interests but to create profitable attention fodder to sell to advertisers. Instagram doesn’t care that... See more

So what can we do to ameliorate this problem? Making individuals better at thinking and seeing the blind spots in their own individual reasoning will only go so far. What we need are better collective means of thinking. As Hugo, Melissa and I argue here (academic article, but I think fairly readable), much of the work on human cognitive bias... See more

This is not to just be a “things were better in the old days” rant. But I do think in the era of growth teams running wild with machine learning algorithms, we accelerated distribution incentives to drive engagement before we really knew what incentives were being created in the internet economy. And now the larger social networks are grappling... See more