While browsing the fediverse I come across more and more accounts that seem … a bit off, a little uncanny. The stuff they post seems random, their comments slightly weird. What’s going on, is the fediverse being overrun by bots? Or am I as a fanatic anti-AI person just losing my mind and seeing the enemy everywhere?
I hate the fact that I now question every interaction that seems a bit off - it seems such a stupid waste of my time and I’m afraid I might just end up blocking real people who happen to express themselves in a strange way - as a neurodivergent person I know how bad I would feel about being ostracized as ‘too strange to be real’. How would you handle this?
You can’t ignore the technical factors. The reddit model is fundamentally a sort machine. The voting and temporal mechanism means reddit style platforms are always sorting for whatever the outcome ends up being. It’s not the popular opinion nor the correct one. It’s been proven time and again that the machine is easily gamed. Be early to engage with certain types of content and you’re guaranteed to dominate the top of the sort.
What we have are not naive social networks. We’ve arrived at some kind of simulacra. In attempting to “digitize the world” we created a mirror of real life discussion. The mirror has tarnished over time. Distorted and by now taken on a form of itself.
It’s a people problem alright. At times people seem to be playing some kind of social media game. Quite often especially on reddit people say things in ways you never hear people talk in real life. It’s bizarre.
For example making up scenarios to be angry about. What is even that??? When they have the crowd on their side then everyone is in on the game too. A rational commenter can say, “That’s not possible. This scenario is completely fabricated.” But it’s too late. Everyone is upset and communally partaking in the original commenters rumination.
This is a human problem but one that was arrived at by the technical design of social media nudging people into very weird forms of socialization. It’s like people don’t know how to be normal anymore.
Moderators not mod tools are very important… That word moderator doesn’t mean what it used to mean. We need to examine definition of moderation. It means to avoid extreme behaviors. Moderators used to provide community guidance. To be the adult in the room. This does not exist on social media. A pillar of old messageboards were people moderators. Someone who would step in when the users misbehave. When people start talking or behaving crazy. Sometimes it was better to just remove a thread all together. These kind of things are essential in solving the people problem.
There’s no mod tool that does this. And don’t nobody tell me we can throw AI at it. If social networks are to be human then it needs human guidance (aka human moderators). Can’t just throw scripts at the problem.