Eaton
Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that a safe and inclusive social network simply isn’t something that can be created by architecture or feature selection, any more than something like “allyship” is a specific set of voting positions.
If you have a place where people congregate you have to accept that you will have to evolve it in realtime to address threats. There are anti patterns you can avoid, but abuse and exploitation are APTs, not bugs.
Dana Fried
@eaton You've got to constantly anticipate new attack vectors ("what would 4chan do?") and be ready to react to vectors you didn't anticipate.
But you also have to design and add features with an eye towards the sociological impact. A LOT of the problems we've seen on social media are due to network operators either not thinking or not caring about the perverse incentives and opportunities for abuse their (seemingly sensible) choices are creating.
Eaton
@tess absolutely agreed. I want to be clear that I don’t think architecture and system design is unimportant, rather that they aren’t the fate of a network or its insurance.
I think a previous generation of us bought into the idea that sufficiently well crafted rules enforced “correctly” could solve it; now I see a lot of insistence that architecture (federation, personalized algos, composable moderation) will do so.
Dana Fried
@eaton yes, *and*:
Subtle differences in how features are implemented can make a huge difference in how they impact culture, and open up different threat vectors.
An example I love to cite is quote-posts. Both top and bottom posting can facilitate dunking, but top posting is much more likely to create a culture of it (compare old Twitter vs. Tumblr).
Bluesky chose top-posting but also disabling quotes and detaching quoted posts, because they anticipated people using QPs for harassment.
Eaton
@tess i think that anticipation and navigation is exactly what I’m trying to articulate, and the approach to quoting is a great example. It’s not “Quoting is per se bad, because we see what it leads to,” rather (as you said) an ongoing assessment, anticipation, and engagement to change parts of the system that have become attack vectors or turned into negative incentives.
Dana Fried
@eaton precisely. You can't create a community with laws or code alone.
Eaton
@tess and — although I didn’t say it earlier, I think this is what’s really digging at me — you can’t create a good community without owning up to what you believe is good.
The neutrality and objectivity and customizability and federation etc etc is (sometimes) a way of sidestepping that, and that’s where the really exploitable cracks in the foundations can be found by those who want to abuse them
Seth A. Roby
@eaton is "APTs” an acronym I'm not familiar with, or an abbreviation for “appointments”?
Eaton
@TALlama ah! No, as @DireVole mentioned, it’s “Advanced Persistent Threat,” the idea of some party that isn’t just opportunistically rattling the door on a network to see if it’s unlocked, but consistently and purposefully trying to exploit it on an ongoing basis
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.