What could the future of social media look like?
Social media is broken. Instead of bringing us closer together, it's driving us apart and contributing to social ills like addiction, brain rot, anxiety, depression, loneliness and polarisation.
We have lost control. Opaque algorithms decide what content we see, and what we don’t. Moderation is in retreat and has been replaced by community notes, meaning the volume and reach of misinformation and disinformation is increasing.
We are still the product, and our data the thing that monopolistic platforms sell to advertisers. Most of the information we share and transmit is not encrypted, to the extent that the US Government wants to ban Tik Tok because it sees it as an organ of the Chinese Communist Party that could be used to harvest sensitive data at scale, and wage cognitive warfare on its population.
And if that wasn’t enough, our focus is being stolen and our thoughts interrupted because, as Chris Hayes argues in his new book The Sirens’ Call,
Every single aspect of human life across the broadest categories of human organization is being reoriented around the pursuit of attention.
We can do better than this
The good news is that future of social media is already here, if you know where to look for it. In a post a few weeks ago I suggested that middleware - an intermediary layer between monopolistic information platforms and their end users - could be the answer.
But after speaking to Paul Capestany, a self taught developer who is part of the Nostr community, which calls itself “a decentralized censorship resistant social network”, I am beginning to think we need to go a step further, and reinvent social media completely.
The name NOSTR officially stands for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays but more revealingly it also means “ours” or “us” in both Latin and Portuguese. This signals that its objective is to help us take back control from over-dominant, centralised, profit-hungry big tech companies. (Jack Dorsey, the Twitter founder is onboard and it’s the brainchild of a reclusive crypto developer who goes by the handle @Fiatjaf).
TL;DR
Below I have edited a wide-ranging two hour conversation I had with Paul earlier this week into a series of digestible short videos.
Each video covers a specific aspect of the 'future of social media'.
You can watch them in the order they are presented or jump to the sections that interest you most.
In summary, we deconstructed the various elements of social media as we know it today and talked about rebuilding it from scratch.
The “composable” elements we discussed were:
Algorithms: That determine what content we see, and don’t see in our feeds. In the future we should be able to choose from a suite of algorithms that give us more control over what we filter out and opt into, and build in fact verification.
New Business Models : Moving away from a business model built around advertising revenue - and attention hacking - to one built around micropayments that rewards content creators and app developers.
Privacy : Enhancing privacy through the use of relays, private and public keys and end to end encryption. This is one way to guard against censorship overreach.
Verifying information : Building a web of trust with clear information audit trails to combat misinformation and disinformation in a more scalable way than traditional content moderation and community notes. This could develop into a composite “truth score” that helps us to better sift fact from fiction.
So without further ado, here are some snippets for you to enjoy.
1. Why the ad revenue + black box algorithm model is broken
2. Taking back control of the content we consume with a marketplace of algorithms
3. Enhanced privacy, less censorship and a throwback to the Cypherpunk manifesto of the 1990s
A quick note here, we talk briefly about A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto which was written in 1993 by Eric Hughes, an American mathematician and computer programmer. It is a foundational text for the online privacy movement. As Hughes writes in the opening line : “Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age”.
Here a few additional and important statements from the manifesto:
Privacy is not secrecy.
Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.
We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak.
We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography.
4. Examples of why an autonomous, private network (including payments) is required to speak truth to power
5. Combating misinformation and disinformation by building a web of trust
This is the area Paul is currently working on. It’s a really meaty and important section and addresses the “hard problem” that social media needs to solve in the age of AI generated deep fakes.
6. How composable elements might create “Roblox for Social Media”. And cross the chasm from early adopters to an early majority.
Parting thoughts
I left this conversation feeling optimistic that where there is a will there is a way to building a better version of social media.
And I felt that our conversation challenges the belief that we are caught in a Gramscian interregnum, where “old” social media is dying but the new cannot be born.
Nevertheless, I still have a few doubts and concerns, and its with these questions that I want to end :
How do we avoid recreating echo chambers and filter bubbles on new platforms? Blue Sky, for example, has attracted mostly like minded progressives fleeing X, but it means everyone is in violent agreement with one another. Ditto Truth Social which caters to the alt-right. I think one of the big missions of Social Media 3.0 should be to help reduce levels of polarisation by creating shared spaces where we can disagree agreeably.
How do we encourage a more open, tolerant discourse? People say things they would never dream of saying to someone's face at home behind a screen. Could we make 'online behaviour' part of the web of trust, so that those who misbehave pay a price for their abuse?
Can we do more to merge online and offline communities? Social media addiction and loneliness are major social problems we are failing to tackle. I would like to see us make more efforts to encourage people who interact online to meet up offline, where possible and desirable, so that social media finally makes us more sociable.
As ever, I would love to hear your thoughts. Don’t be shy and contribute in the comments section below :-D