The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog)
A great critique of current social networking models based on the so-called “social graph.” Here’s a long-ish snippet:
II. It’s Not Social
The social graph project has roots in something called Friend of a Friend, or FOAF (disclaimer: I worked on a rival project called LOAF, and you may feel free to ascribe everything I say here to purest bitterness).
The idea of FOAF was that everyone would create little XML snippets that represented their interests. For example, if you liked burgers and had a huge crush on your neighbor Matt, you could generate an RDF file that said so and stick it in to your Geocities page.
The problem FOAF ran headlong into was that declaring relationships explicitly is a social act. Documenting my huge crush on Matt in an XML snippet might faithfully reflect the state of the world, but it also broadcasts a strong signal about me to others, and above all to Matt. The essence of a crush is that it’s furtive, so by declaring it in this open (but weirdly passive) way I’ve turned it into something different and now, dammit, I have to go back and edit my FOAF file again.
This is a ridiculous example (though it comes up with strange regularity in the docs), but we run into its milder manifestations all the time. Your best friend from high school surfaces and sends a friend request. Do you just click accept, or do you send a little message? Or do you ignore him because you don’t want to deal with the awkward situation? Declaring connections is about as much fun as trying to whittle people from a guest list, with the added stress that social networking is too new for us to have shared social conventions around it.
OkCupid was one of the first social sites to understand that every visible action sent a signal. While other dating sites nagged you to upgrade to an expensive ‘Gold’ status, which branded you as a foreveralone pariah, OKCupid took pains to make sure people had stuff to do on the site that was unrelated to dating. A popular activity was building and taking personality quizzes. The quiz feature removed some of the stigma from hanging out on the site (I’m just a cool guy having some fun with these quizzes!) while creating a whole new avenue for meeting people.
Social graph proponents seem uninterested in the signaling problem. Leaving aside the technical issues of how to implemented, how does cutting ties actually work socially? Is there any way to be discreet, for example, or have connections naturally degrade over time? In real life, all relationships fade naturally if you don’t maintain them, but right now social networks preserve ties in amber until we explicitly break them. Is my sister going to resent me if I finally defriend her annoying husband? Can I unfollow my ex now, or is that going to make her think I’m still hung up on her?
There’s no way to take a time-out from our social life and describe it to a computer without social consequences. At the very least, the fact that I have an exquisitely maintained and categorized contact list telegraphs the fact that I’m the kind of schlub who would spend hours gardening a contact list, instead of going out and being an awesome guy. The social graph wants to turn us back into third graders, laboriously spelling out just who is our fifth-best-friend. But there’s a reason we stopped doing that kind of thing in third grade!
You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols.
But let’s say an inspired mathlete proves me wrong. There’s a brilliant hack that fixes all the issues I’ve raised and we go ahead and build the Platonic social graph. What can you actually do with it?
Well, one thing we’ve seen is that machine-readable lists of friends make it much easier to launch social sites. Letting a thousand startups bloom is one of the big justifications in Fitzpatrick’s essay. But is removing this friction a good thing? It is admittedly annoying to have to re-follow people every time you sign up for something, but it also forces the authors to make the site appealing enough to get us over that hurdle. We’re already starting to see apps whose first act is to suction down our contact list and spam our various accounts with invites without bothering to woo us at all. I can’t imagine having open API access to the social graph is going to improve that.
In other domains, a big graph would be good for recommendations, but friendship is not transitive. There’s just no way to tell if you’ll get along with someone in my social circle, no matter how many friends we have in common.
But one thing you can do is mine a huge amount of information about my friends and infer things about their interests, income, social status and tastes. And then maybe you can use that information to bring them valuable news and offers, or help them digitally engage with their favorite brands.
Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers - that’s the social graph.
Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.
Because their collection methods are kind of primitive, these sites have to coax you into doing as much of your social interaction as possible while logged in, so they can see it. It’s as if an ad agency built a nationwide chain of pubs and night clubs in the hopes that people would spend all their time there, rigging the place with microphones and cameras to keep abreast of the latest trends (and staffing it, of course, with that Mormon bartender).
We’re used to talking about how disturbing this in the context of privacy, but it’s worth pointing out how weirdly unsocial it is, too. How are you supposed to feel at home when you know a place is full of one-way mirrors?
We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage - we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they’ve built to document your entire online life.
Open data advocates tell us the answer is to reclaim this obsessive dossier for ourselves, so we can decide where to store it. But this misses the point of how stifling it is to have such a permanent record in the first place. Who does that kind of thing and calls it social?
III What, then, is to be done?
The funny thing is, no one’s really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done. Games like Eve Online or WoW have developed entire economies on top of what’s basically a message board. MetaFilter, Reddit, LiveJournal and SA all started with a couple of buttons and a textfield and have produced some fascinating subcultures. And maybe the purest (!) example is 4chan, a Lord of the Flies community that invents all the stuff you end up sharing elsewhere: image macros, copypasta, rage comics, the lolrus. The data model for 4chan is three fields long - image, timestamp, text.
Now tell me one bit of original culture that’s ever come out of Facebook.
Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90’s. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet. Looking back now, their early attempts look ridiculous and doomed to failure, for we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good.
But at the time no one knew what it would feel like to have a big global network. We were all waiting for the Information Superhighway to arrive in our TV set, and meanwhile these big sites were trying to design an online experience from the ground up. Thank God we left ourselves the freedom to blunder into the series of fortuitous decisions that gave us the Web.
My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button. It’s just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online.
