The evolution of social platforms gives us a glimpse at what we didn’t yet know about ourselves. There’s been a lot of progress changing and tweaking specific behaviors over the last 5-10 years.
Social platforms are fertile ground for this, and their positive achievements are often under-appreciated. Because of how much of modern experience is mediated through platforms, this is worth some discussion.
Here are some prominent examples:
- Community Notes is an exceedingly well designed solution to the problem of adding context to posts on X. It’s additionally impressive that the system is self-contained and that the ranking of any particular note are reproducible independently by anyone outside of Twitter.
Also read the original paper, and Vitalik’s great explainer of the algorithm. - Youtube hid the dislike count, but kept the dislike feature, to prevent people piling on on videos because they were already unpopular.
- Faced with lynchings in India, WhatsApp throttled the message mass-forwarding feature that was used to spread rumors among communities.
- Gas was an app where teenagers “gassed” each other up by voting on a set of polls that complemented each other, and became briefly very popular before being acquired.
What other experiments are waiting to be tried? Can some future experiment reveal some new, wonderful facet of human behavior, or are we mainly patching up the downsides of large groups of people? For instance, what would the impact of great language understanding be on the problem of moderation and ranking?