“You know,” Noah Smith quipped, “fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now the real world is an escape from the internet.”
When I first got access to the internet as a kid, the very first thing I did was to find people who liked the same things I liked — science fiction novels and TV shows, Dungeons and Dragons, and so on. In the early days, that was what you did when you got online — you found your people, whether on Usenet or IRC or Web forums or MUSHes and MUDs. Real life was where you had to interact with a bunch of people who rubbed you the wrong way — the coworker who didn’t like your politics, the parents who nagged you to get a real job, the popular kids with their fancy cars. The internet was where you could just go be a dork with other dorks, whether you were an anime fan or a libertarian gun nut or a lonely Christian 40-something or a gay kid who was still in the closet. Community was the escape hatch.
Then in the 2010s, the internet changed. It wasn’t just the smartphone, though that did enable it. What changed is that internet interaction increasingly started to revolve around a small number of extremely centralized social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and later Instagram.
From a business perspective, this centralization was a natural extension of the early internet — people were getting more connected, so just connect them even more.
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Putting everyone in the world in touch through a single network is what we did with the phone system, and everyone knows that the value of a network scales as the square of the number of users. So centralizing the whole world’s social interaction on two or three platforms would print loads of money while also making for a happier, more connected world.
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It started with the Facebook feed. On the old internet, you could show a different side of yourself in every forum or chat room; but on your Facebook feed, you had to be the same person to everyone you knew. When social unrest broke out in the mid-2010s this got even worse — you had to watch your liberal friends and your conservative friends go at it in the comments of your posts, or theirs. Friendships and even family bonds were destroyed in those comments.
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The early 2010s on Twitter were defined by fights over toxicity and harassment versus early-internet ideals of free speech. But after 2016 those fights no longer mattered, because everyone on the platform simply adopted the same patterns of toxicity and harassment that the extremist trolls had pioneered.
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Why did this happen to the centralized internet when it hadn’t happened to the decentralized internet of previous decades? In fact, there were always Nazis around, and communists, and all the other toxic trolls and crazies. But they were only ever an annoyance, because if a community didn’t like those people, the moderators would just ban them. Even normal people got banned from forums where their personalities didn’t fit; even I got banned once or twice. It happened. You moved on and you found someone else to talk to.
Community moderation works. This was the overwhelming lesson of the early internet. It works because it mirrors the social interaction of real life, where social groups exclude people who don’t fit in. And it works because it distributes the task of policing the internet to a vast number of volunteers, who provide the free labor of keeping forums fun, because to them maintaining a community is a labor of love. And it works because if you don’t like the forum you’re in — if the mods are being too harsh, or if they’re being too lenient and the community has been taken over by trolls — you just walk away and find another forum. In the words of the great Albert O. Hirschman, you always have the option to use “exit”.
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They tinkered at the edges of the platform, but never touched their killer feature, the quote-tweet, which Twitter’s head of product called “the dunk mechanism.” Because dunks were the business model — if you don’t believe me, you can check out the many research papers showing that toxicity and outrage drive Twitter engagement.
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Humanity does not want to be a global hive mind. We are not rational Bayesian updaters who will eventually reach agreement; when we receive the same information, it tends to polarize us rather than unite us. Getting screamed at and insulted by people who disagree with you doesn’t take you out of your filter bubble — it makes you retreat back inside your bubble and reject the ideas of whoever is screaming at you. No one ever changed their mind from being dunked on; instead they all just doubled down and dunked harder. The hatred and toxicity of Twitter at times felt like the dying screams of human individuality, being crushed to death by the hive mind’s constant demands for us to agree with more people than we ever evolved to agree with.
I love to quote-tweet approvingly. I suppose that’s one of my eccentricities.
What happened? Monetization won:
To quote a random schmuck from Slashdot.
I really want my web 1.0 back. And a phone made of bakelite!!!
Fifteen years ago, men were the only large language models on the Internet.
This website could plausibly be seen as the Internet’s biggest quote-tweet.