Almost any flawed org, coffee klatch, or chat group is going to have more social ROI and less disinformation than mixing it up with fake accounts and targeted marketing on the big platforms.
If you have to rely on community notes self-policing on platforms, why give that energy and labor to tech billionaires so they can make even more money – not just on our personal data, but on your hard work of moderating the space? None of this makes sense.
I find myself more and more opting out of social media platforms. I’m not interested in clout chasing and “building a brand” and even if I wanted to, you can’t effectively compete with billionaire funded PR operations with endless money to spend on the social media landscape, and if you’re honest or have a pro-social agenda, the con artists offering exactly what people want to hear win out most of the time. Talking about problems and issues is often viewed as wet blanketing, and even warning people about imminent dangers is often seen as an unwelcome imposition at best. People really flock to hopium and also things like sick burns. That’s why influencers won’t save us. Because when it comes down to it, most are trying to sell something. Content is a product too, and propaganda manufacturing consent, or muddying the discourse, can be lucrative for some. Anyone who stops and reflects will notice this happening, but many don’t stop and reflect, of course.
The Muckrake Political Podcast Our Moment is Approaching Dec. 31, 2024 We saw even like a blue sky that opened up as like a leftist progressive alternative to Twitter. It’s been infiltrated by God knows how many operations that have taken place. There is a scurrying attempt to try and get these permission structures into place because the wealth class wants what’s coming and it wants to go ahead and inoculate the mass majority of people from understanding what’s occurring. And so there is a scramble on, which is where organizing comes in. We have our work cut out for us and we have to do that work very, very quickly to talk to other people and get them on the same page.
And as for a social space, I just don’t find a lot of social media to have a big return on emotional investment frankly. I rather smaller groups of people with similar interests. That’s how it’s been done for thousands of years really. Join your local astronomy club. Get involved in some social movement organization or political issue or even candidate campaigns if that’s your thing. Invite a couple people with a particular interest into a group chat. The internet of fakes can be tricky, but it’s the most accessible option for many. That shouldn’t be an excuse to accept completely anonymous interactions where some groups online exist as little more than people staging boosting operations on social media, and others exist just to promote products and generate community around brands. Online community should be similar to that as in-person community — and it can be when the participants are genuine.
Research on human interactions seems to indicate groups of 8 regular participants or less are just more amenable in several ways. And the bigger the group, the more clear rules and goals are needed. In my experience it’s best to avoid larger groups that don’t have an articulated specific purpose and firm transparent rules. Anywhere that spam and bullshit is allowed, will be filled quickly with spam and bullshit, that’s just the reality.
Edward Hall: The perfect group size = 8-12 Matt 28 Jun 2006 “Research with business groups, athletic teams, and even armies around the world has revealed there is an ideal size for a working group. This ideal size is between eight and twelve individuals. This is natural, because man evolved as a primate while living in small groups…Eight to 12 persons can know each other well enough to maximize their talents. In groups beyond this size, the possible combinations of communication between individuals get too complex to handle; people are lumped into categories and begin the process of ceasing to exist as individuals.”
Harvard Business Review – The Most Productive Meetings Have Fewer Than 8 People by Paul Axtell June 22, 2018
Wheelan, S. A. (2009). Group Size, Group Development, and Group Productivity. Small Group Research, 40(2), 247-262. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496408328703
No organizations or groups out there are perfect no matter how big or small and some orgs have serious problems. Many organizations get infiltrated regularly. Some communities get co-opted. And there’s the whole non-profit industrial complex issue to deal with, and clientelism. It’s also possible to get waylaid by groupthink and risky shift, or kettled into some culty silo.
The Cognitive Crucible – #212 Libby Lange on Algorithmic Cognitive Warfare Information Professionals Association Dec 17, 2024 John Bicknell: “so the idea here is o try to get people into smaller cocoons of their own maybe their own information echo chambers or something like that and then as a cocoon it’s easier to influence the cocoon of people but at a society level you have all these disparate groups of people that don’t necessarily align very well with one another anymore” Libby Lange: “yeah and you know in one of the articles that goes through a cognitive operation kind of stage by stage the goal of moving people into groups is also that people will sort of self-police within the group and sort of self-police behavior thus kind of making each group controllable depending on sort of how you insert content that is targeting that group which is kind of a weird sort of wonky way to think about it but essentially creating these groups that are I guess you could say more manageable almost where if you have a really cohesive society where people are really working together then as sort of an outside adversary that’s not a very manageable population right but if you have people split off and you understand kind of the workings of that group or why that group comes together the way it does what their sort of central organizing issue is or their central organizing beliefs then they may be easier to kind of manage John Bicknell: “divide and conquer” Libby Lange: “exactly”
But many of these places are at least viable ways to meet people with similar interests that you might find compatible for social interaction. The trick is to use all these platforms as a tool, not a means, and certainly not an end point.
Curmudgucation The End of the Public Cyber-Square Peter Greene Jan 08, 2025 It’s hard to say how close we came to an internet public square. There were always limitations, the FOMO was always greater than what you were actually missing, and if twelve people sign up for an online community, the thirteenth person is going to be some kind of troll. But the dream is hard to release. There may be real benefits. Social media often gives us the feeling that by engaging in an on line debate about an issue, we were really Doing Something. If the collapse of the public cyber-square gets more folks to log off and Do Something in their own communities, that’s probably a net win. Also, once the dream dies, we can make use of the tools we have.
But just like there are no actually liberal tycoons, there are no progressive social media platforms – they’re all problematic, and invites the watering hole effect in that the bad actors will go where the people are, obviously.
The grass is not that much greener on the blue sky. Don’t Wait For Everybody – Episode 013 Chloe Humbert Nov 20, 2024
And there’s also no liberal media. There’s very little media, even independent media, that isn’t beholden to corporate whims in some fashion or form. You have to just sift through it for facts and important information.
Dispatches From A Collapsing State | Jared Yates Sexton Preparing for the Storm: A Brief Guide to Getting Ready for What’s Coming We’re close to the inauguration and the beginning of something very dangerous. It’s time to get ready. Jan 01, 2025 “Resolve today to view our media and politics through this lens. This means giving up on finding just one trustworthy place to find your news and, instead, starting to read between the lines of all news you come across. This take rhetorical skill and critical thinking, which has largely been exorcised from American education. Ask yourself when reading every article or viewing every video, who is this for? What is the purpose? The idea that our media is unbiased is ludicrous. You make decisions with every story, with every sentence, every word.”
Sifting through fake accounts and fake interactions driven by corporate interests and political propaganda is just a real drag. And the fake isn’t a bug exactly from the perspective of the tycoons who own these social media platforms, it seems to be a feature. Bizarrely, in some cases perpetrated by the platform company itself as apparently Facebook has deliberately deployed NPCs (Non Player Characters).
Dead Internet Theory is Facebook’s New Business Model Bryan Lunduke Dec 31, 2024 AI Bots will soon across all of meta’s property Facebook and Instagram and whatnot will soon have profile pictures and bios and quote this is not a joke exist on Facebook kind of in the same way that accounts do you so you’ll be able to interact with them and pretend like they’re people throughout Facebook this is basically business-ifying the dead internet theory.
This is happening at the same time AI slop and scams are rampant there, and while I can’t even recover access to my cat’s old facebook account because I can’t prove identity with government identity documents… for the cat. But year after year I periodically get a flurry of emails stating someone else is attempting to reset the password for the account. (Someone actually suggested to me that it might not be someone trying to break into the account, but that it could be a tactic Facebook deploys to try to lure people back to abandoned accounts.)
And even within the social media platform, bigger doesn’t mean that power is spread over a larger amount of people. Silos develop where people consolidate power and rule with carrots and sticks and often nurture information cocoons for various reasons. Often because somebody is paying them to moderate the space, and more often that money probably isn’t coming from allies centering humanity.
Communities have been, and continue to be, manipulated. This likely won’t get better any time soon. Chloe Humbert Dec 16, 2024 Many pandemic related groups today are sadly largely places where the members are used as a captive audience of eyeballs given to vendors by admins who’ve consolidated power. They’re too often filled with MLM stuff and target marketing of pseudoscience covid products. People join groups for support and are offered opportunities to buy expensive products with no good evidence of safety or efficacy. People join advocacy groups thinking they’re getting involved in activism, only to find that they’re expected to hype someone’s project on social media, and help them gain attention to get funding from some cryptocurrency source or other. And that’s along with an endless parade of infiltration by trolls, operatives, reporters, scammers, spammers.
There are ways around this stuff though, and the pro-social among us should not have an excessive amount of trouble finding our way around this, and through it. Right?