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   Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:39 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

   in reply to

   And if it grows as an idea, if it grows as a topic of interest, it will connect up people, it will enlist more people, it will drive curiosity, and discovery, and experimentation, and design.

   And it will change the culture in which the people who do make the decisions make them. It will make it a culture in which it is normal to consider questions like "How will we know if we succeed at solving this problem?" and "What prior art is there in this problem space?" and "What sorts of challenges are outstanding problems in the field right now?" and "What is the effect of our platform on the larger society its members belong to?"

   It seems likely to me such a social environment will have beneficial effects on the social media platforms that emerge from it.

   But, I confess, I haven't operationalized that yet.

   (Fin)

   • Embed this notice
     Rimu (rimu@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:39 JST Rimu

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     @siderea Thank you so much for this great thread! You've given me a lot to think about.

     I have been moderating all kinds of online spaces since the early 00s. Forums, FB groups, wikis, etc etc. All of that experience will inform the construction of the moderation tools on the fediverse platform I'm building (https://join.piefed.social/).

     Your thread helped me get more conscious about the bigger picture of those tools, the "social engineering" that is going on.

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:40 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

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     All of you.

     This message isn't just for "the people in charge".

     For one thing, this is a *federated* system. This means the odds that you, personally, might be a "person in charge" in some sense go way, way up. And if not today, maybe tomorrow.

     Furthermore, some instances are straight up democracies. Everybody on them is a person in charge.

     But much more importantly, you have a voice. And if you're on Mastodon you probably use it.

     I am hoping to convince you to use that voice not just to call for remedies you are certain will work to solve problems you haven't really specified. I'm inviting you to engage with curiosity questions like, "I wonder what the pros and cons of this are?" and "I wonder what it is that is giving me that impression, and how I might check out whether or not it is true?" and "I wonder if there are any other social media platforms that came up with a solution to this?"

     🧵

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:40 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

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     I'd like to encourage you to use your voice to ask questions, like "Are we using the same definition of 'unacceptable behavior'?" and "What problem do you see your suggestion fixing?" and "What are the examples you are imagining or remembering when you make that suggestion?"

     And I'd also like to encourage you *not* to use your voice – to remember to listen, to observe, to contemplate. You may have heard that old saying about communication being a two-way street: that is in fact false. Communication is a narrow one-way bridge that traffic has to take turns crossing. If you're sending, you're not receiving. If the teacup of your comprehension seems too full of your prior understandings too preciously savored, nobody else is going to pour you a serving from their own teapot.

     Like I said, nobody's going to come and force clues down your throat. If you seem not to want them, you won't be given them.

     🧵

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:40 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

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     The most interesting thing we can do with our voices is to open up spaces of discourse. And that's what I would most like to enlist you in.

     I would love to see emerge on Mastodon, finally at long last, a discourse about social media platforms that centers social engineering as an actual thing. That is based on the ideas that we should be curious how things actually work and check our hypotheses against reality, that we should take responsibility for how our virtual built environment shapes the society that flows through it and the society in which it reposes, that there are things worth knowing here, things worth finding out, and interesting people to talk to.

     Fundamentally I am hoping to *interest you* in the entire topic of social engineering, in this new sense that I mean it. Because if you are interested in it and if you talk about it with other people who are interested in it, and interest in it grows, then it will feed on itself and it will grow as a field.

     🧵

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:41 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

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     But all the other challenges of connecting those parties aside, there's the one of hubris, that I want to circle back to.

     Part of the reason that so many social media platforms, over and over and over and over again, found themselves shocked and surprised by things happening to them that other, earlier, social media platforms went through (and tried to tell them about) was because they assumed they knew all there was that they needed to know. They assumed their knowledge was adequately complete. They didn't go seeking out information and counsel to guide them, because they thought they didn't need it.

     It never even occurred to them they did.

     And that's a kind of hubris. It's a kind of low-key, chill intellectual arrogance. It's not blustery, it doesn't brag. It just assumes.

     And that's a problem.

     Because here's the thing: the people with the social clues are not going to beat down the door to shove them down your throat.

     🧵

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:41 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

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     The people with these clues – the people who've been involved in social media governance before, the social scientists, the people who do evaluation of social programs, the urban planners and the architects, the psychological professionals – they're going to do the same things they have always done. Write news articles and blog posts and social media threads, give talks conferences and conventions, teach classes and attend symposia and colloquia, conduct scientific experiments and publish in research journals, and generally cast their messages in bottles upon the seas of information in the hopes that they will fetch up on the shores of those who would benefit by them.

     They're not going to come and staple these clues to your forehead for you.

     If you want them, you're going to have to *go get them*.

     🧵

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:41 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     in reply to

     And nobody goes to get these resources, nobody seeks out this expertise, who does not move past the naive arrogance of assuming there's nothing that they need to learn, that they have this social media platform thing all figured out already.

     What I am hoping to achieve by this thread is to tantalize you with the evidence that there are things to know which you probably don't yet know, but would, if you only knew, like very much to know. Things that would benefit you to know.

     I am hoping to enlist your curiosity in tackling to the floor the assumption you might harbor in your breast that this social media thing really isn't all that hard, you just do it in the right way, and which way is the right one is really obvious.

     I am attempting to entice you with the knowledge that is out there (and insofar as there are experts in these things here on Mastodon, in here with us) into wanting that knowledge enough to go looking for it.

     And to ask for it.

     🧵

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:42 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

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     I think of it as sort of like calling one's shots in billiards. You decide what change you would like to see in the system you are designing for, you come up with an "intervention" (based on studying the problem, reading into other people's approaches to trying to solve the problem, and maybe doing a bunch of rounds of iterative experimentation), you decide, up front, how you will determine whether or not the problem has been solved, and then you implement the intervention, and then you check those criteria you previously identified as the ones that will determine whether or not the problem has been solved.

     This is what I mean by rigor. This is pretty sciencey, no? It's not necessarily a controlled experiment, but it does have the form of an experiment. But it's not a *mere* experiment, either. It's not just a trial to see whether or not something will work. It's an attempt to actually do something that will work. With some slightly more rigorous testing as to whether it did.

     🧵

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:42 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

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     Part of what makes it so rigorous is how formal it is, with that business of deciding in advance what the criteria of success will be. That in turn requires a certain amount of serious thinking about social phenomena, and actually getting explicit about things that, frankly, usually just get hand waved through when we're talking about social media platforms. Questions like "what even do we expect our moderators to be achieving?"

     It means doing hard things like asking, "Okay, we want people to 'feel more safe': how will we be able to tell that people are feeling more (or less) 'safe'? If people were feeling more or less safe, how would we know? How would we be able to measure it? To observe it in the data? What is it that we are assuming will change in people's behavior based on how safe they feel?"

     In the social sciences, this is called "operationalizing" an abstraction or concept or feeling.

     🧵

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:42 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

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     One of the things you might notice from the fact that now twice I've mentioned there's other fields that have technical terminology that applies here: Oh hey. There are other fields that have clues that pertain. They have methodologies and other cool toys you might want to play with.

     Engineering is, to a first approximation, applied science. So if you want to engineer socials, you might want to start hitting up the social scientists and people in other fields that apply social science.

     This is something else Mastodon has going for it: it's got social scientists around here somewhere.

     Now, I appreciate what I propose here has a bootstrapping problem. I don't know whether any of the decision makers about code, protocols, or individual instances have the capacity to enlist the help of the people on Mastodon with those professional clues, and I'm not sure Mastodon has the affordances to bring them together.

     🧵

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     Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 17:46:43 JST Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

     We could imagine an ultra enlightened Reddit that actually has opinions about how it wants its social world to function, and actually makes decisions like, "We don't like some things that we think are maybe a product of moderators not providing 24/7 coverage of high volume groups, so we're going to find out if there's some way, or ways, plural, of solving that problem. We'll investigate whether there are things we can do to either facilitate moderators providing 24/7 coverage, or obviating the need for moderators to provide 24/7 coverage, and then we'll evaluate whether or not it worked to remedy the things that we saw as problems that we think are being caused by that."

     In the social services field, this crucial last bit is called "program evaluation".

     🧵