This a fantastic read. You dropped a lot of graphs I have been looking for but haven’t found. ++ for connecting social ailments to political distrust and polarization, which might be the most important part of it from a long-termist perspective.
I still think another healthier kind of online community is imaginable.
Imaginable yes
The internet does not need to be joined at the hip to a permanent social recession like it is now.
Not so sure about this unfortunately.
Focusing specifically on social networks, there is a really tragic market shape. Social networks have, well, network effects. The value of the network goes up as more people join. This makes them natural monopolies. Sadly, this means that once a clear winner emerges (insta, tiktok, tinder, youtube etc.), they can provide a relatively bad service, excluding the value of the network, and still win. This allows, or gives additional leeway to these companies hamster wheeling us.Considering this phenomena, and how big a deal out social health is, I think it’s at least a possibility that the government should consider nationalizing social networks.
Even worse, people don’t actually know, care, or care to know that these companies have perverse incentives. We have all collectively become dopamine addicts. The types of algorithms that are probably bad for us also make these apps popular (speculating more on this claim).
I think tinder is a pretty good case study.
Tinder has basically 0 incentive to help people match up in real life, outside of market competition. If you actually successfully go out and like someone and start dating, then you don’t need tinder anymore. Moreover, if they artificially restrict the ease of matching with people, they can charge for the unrestricted service. And in fact, this is exactly what they do. This is classic monopolistic behavior. The value of their network is too high. Of course there is not a single “widget” that represents what everyone wants in a dating app, and hence competitors (plus tinder might really be so shitty that they have enabled the success of competitors), but these competitors to have natural monopolies over their respect domains and can basically engage in the same behavior. Running a dating app at scale should basically be free. It’s a spreadsheet with a UI. Marginal costs are almost 0.
And as I mentioned earlier people might join facebook for the network, or tinder to try to find dates, but they stay for the dopamine. They quickly lose sight of what their goal was and just get on the hamster wheel. It’s probably unrealistic to think we could convince the average person that if they just switched over to this new app, which was open source, but had no one on it yet, eventually we would all be a lot better off.
As I see it we are probably stuck in this sinking equilibrium unless either the government steps in and regulates these monopolies with strict standards that are set by social psychologists, or a medium sized group of good natured technologists make it a goal to break up these network monopolies by using new, open source versions at a cost to themselves, until the network value is such that the rest of society is willing to hop on the train.
This a fantastic read. You dropped a lot of graphs I have been looking for but haven’t found. ++ for connecting social ailments to political distrust and polarization, which might be the most important part of it from a long-termist perspective.
Imaginable yes
Not so sure about this unfortunately.
Focusing specifically on social networks, there is a really tragic market shape. Social networks have, well, network effects. The value of the network goes up as more people join. This makes them natural monopolies. Sadly, this means that once a clear winner emerges (insta, tiktok, tinder, youtube etc.), they can provide a relatively bad service, excluding the value of the network, and still win. This allows, or gives additional leeway to these companies hamster wheeling us. Considering this phenomena, and how big a deal out social health is, I think it’s at least a possibility that the government should consider nationalizing social networks.
Even worse, people don’t actually know, care, or care to know that these companies have perverse incentives. We have all collectively become dopamine addicts. The types of algorithms that are probably bad for us also make these apps popular (speculating more on this claim).
I think tinder is a pretty good case study.
Tinder has basically 0 incentive to help people match up in real life, outside of market competition. If you actually successfully go out and like someone and start dating, then you don’t need tinder anymore. Moreover, if they artificially restrict the ease of matching with people, they can charge for the unrestricted service. And in fact, this is exactly what they do. This is classic monopolistic behavior. The value of their network is too high. Of course there is not a single “widget” that represents what everyone wants in a dating app, and hence competitors (plus tinder might really be so shitty that they have enabled the success of competitors), but these competitors to have natural monopolies over their respect domains and can basically engage in the same behavior. Running a dating app at scale should basically be free. It’s a spreadsheet with a UI. Marginal costs are almost 0.
And as I mentioned earlier people might join facebook for the network, or tinder to try to find dates, but they stay for the dopamine. They quickly lose sight of what their goal was and just get on the hamster wheel. It’s probably unrealistic to think we could convince the average person that if they just switched over to this new app, which was open source, but had no one on it yet, eventually we would all be a lot better off.
As I see it we are probably stuck in this sinking equilibrium unless either the government steps in and regulates these monopolies with strict standards that are set by social psychologists, or a medium sized group of good natured technologists make it a goal to break up these network monopolies by using new, open source versions at a cost to themselves, until the network value is such that the rest of society is willing to hop on the train.