Peak social media: Building better platforms

This is an audio transcript of the Tech Tonic podcast episode: ‘Peak social media: Building better platforms’

Benj Edwards
I remember thinking, like when Twitter became popular, you know, this is a horrible thing to think, but like, is this how, like, God feels? You know, knowing everything at the same time? Like, what kind of gift yet curse is it? To know everything happening at the same time all around the world.

Elaine Moore
Benj Edwards is a technology writer and tech historian. He remembers a world long before social media platforms, when the online world felt much smaller.

Benj Edwards
My first experience going online, my dad brought home this little black box and he said, “This is called the modem”. And at the end he hooked it up and told my brother how to do it. My brother’s five years older than me, so he was, he jumped right into it and I just thought it was absolutely magical.

Elaine Moore
Edwards was a 10-year-old living in North Carolina when he first went online in the early 1990s. Back then, not only were there no social media platforms, the internet wasn’t widely available. To go online you had to connect your computer to a phone line and dial something called a BBS.

Benj Edwards
A BBS is a bulletin board system, a way for people to call and leave messages that other people could read later, like a bulletin board. So imagine outside a grocery store or something where there’s a, you know, like a corkboard or something where people could post notes. This is an electronic representation of that.

Elaine Moore
These electronic bulletin boards looked like primitive websites. People could dial into them from their personal computers and leave messages on discussion boards. They functioned a bit like social media platforms.

Benj Edwards
I called, the place called Baxter BBS, that was a cool place. Every, you know, every system had its own vibe to it. There is another called Octopus’s Garden, that I really liked a lot. There’s the Fast Lane BBS. There are sort of like discussion groups where people would talk about computers or politics or religion or all kinds of crazy things that people would argue about, or games or the latest movies. There are like a firearms discussion or something. And you have, like, that’s a hobby in America, you know. So there are always people arguing about these things, and you know, anyone could read those messages and anyone could post a reply. And you know, usually if it’s really active, you could have like 100 people or more, like, calling and trading messages.

Elaine Moore
Edwards says the BBSs often built up a group of regular callers and they had a local feel to them. In ‘90s America, it was really expensive to make anything except a local call. So you tended to stick to the BBSs in your area code.

Benj Edwards
Everyone you talked to was, even though they seemed like strangers, you actually had a lot in common with them because they went to the same stores, the same schools, same universities. And the BBS users who were, you know, late teenagers, early twenties and stuff, would have these parties and get together. They would actually get together at somebody’s house and hang out, you know, in person every once in a while.

Elaine Moore
At their peak, in the early ‘90s, there were thousands of BBSs all over the United States. But then the internet arrived and brought the BBS era to an end. Suddenly you could connect to the world wide web and through it, communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world. Edwards says that opened up an even bigger world to teenagers like him. But he also thinks that something valuable got lost along the way. The genuine sense of community that came with the BBS era.

Benj Edwards
You have to get along with the people who are there, just like a small town or somebody, you know, you can’t, you know, you’re all stuck in the same place together. You have to learn to live with them instead of just go and get whoever you want anywhere around the world to talk to, you know? Imagine you’re stuck on a boat with everyone on Earth. You know there’s gonna be fights. ‘Cause not everybody has the same culture. Not everybody gets along.

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Elaine Moore
This is Tech Tonic from the Financial Times. I’m Elaine Moore, and in this season of the podcast, I’ve been asking whether we’ve hit peak social media. There are lots of reasons to think we have. There’s the stagnation of big platforms like Facebook. There’s Twitter’s struggle to break even. And there’s the growing sense that social media today may be doing us more harm than good. But the internet has also given us the opportunity to make valuable connections, to stay in touch with our friends and engage with people that we never get the chance to meet in real life. So the question is, can we take the positive bits of social media and get rid of the bad? What should the social platforms of the future look like?

Ethan Zuckerman
Social media continues to be very popular because humans, at our base, are social creatures.

Elaine Moore
Ethan Zuckerman is an academic who studies social media. He says we’re always going to find a way to use technology to connect with each other.

Ethan Zuckerman
We want to maintain a large number of social relationships. We don’t live in physical structures that allow us to maintain dozens or hundreds of relationships in physical space, so we maintain them in virtual space. So long as we have had digital communication, we have found ways to build digital community on top of it. If we did not have these existing social media platforms, we would do it through other means. Social media is just something we do.

Elaine Moore
The only question, says Zuckerman, is whether the social media we have today is really the best that we can do. He thinks our current batch of platforms have some very serious flaws. The first is that they spread divisive content and misinformation that is having a damaging effect on our societies and our politics.

Ethan Zuckerman
Social media is incentivised to capture as much of your attention as possible. The algorithms tend to favour extreme, angry, attention-grabbing content — content that provokes, content that starts arguments leading to real division within these spaces.

Second, social media is controlled by a small number of companies that get to make these decisions about what’s allowable on a platform and what gets amplified on a platform. Elon Musk right now has done us an enormous favour because he’s basically shown us how dangerous this is.

Elaine Moore
And the third problem, says Zuckerman, is that the social media platforms today are just too big.

Ethan Zuckerman
I think a global conversation is a fallacy. I think one of the things that has been so challenging about networks in a Facebook or Twitter age is that, on the one hand they are for you and your friends. At the same time, it also tries to act as a big room. It tries to use the same set of rules for people in the UK, people in the Philippines, people in Thailand, even if you’ve got very different users, very different societies associated with it.

Elaine Moore
The result is a social media landscape full of division, toxicity and fights. So what’s the solution? Zuckerman says social media needs a radical rethink. At the University of Massachusetts in the US, he runs the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure. It’s a lab researching how to build better social media platforms. One of the ideas it’s working on is social networks that function more like public services.

Ethan Zuckerman
Some of the work that we do in my lab is trying to get to the idea where a town, a neighbourhood, a coffee shop, a public broadcaster might own and operate a local social network around local issues. These are the spaces in which we have conversations about politics, about civics, about our collective futures. And we believe that these spaces should at least in part, be public spaces that work on the logic of public goods rather than work on the logic of surveillance capitalism.

Elaine Moore
To try and put this idea into practice, Zuckerman’s lab is building an experimental social network called Smalltown that’s designed for small communities. And he points to examples that already exist, like Front Porch Forum, a social network in Vermont that’s been running for decades, connecting people with their neighbours. But he says social networks don’t need to focus on worthy-sounding things like local community issues or politics in order to be a positive experience.

Ethan Zuckerman
Probably my single favourite social media network is one that I’m guessing most people haven’t heard of, which is called An Archive of One’s Own. This is a social media network that was built by people in the fanfiction community. These are people who continued writing stories with the Harry Potter characters. Or they’re extending Star Trek. Or they’re writing another season of the TV show Firefly. And it allows the authors and readers of these to connect with one another. It hosts something like 5mn users every month. It is built and maintained by these authors, some of whom learned how to code so that they could build the system. And for me, it’s a wonderful example of what a group of people organised by a common interest capable of building their own space online might be able to do, not just in creating a healthy conversational space, but actually building something of a scholarly community and social movement out of it.

Elaine Moore
What makes social media networks like this work, Zuckerman argues, is that they’re smaller. They’re designed for a specific group of users with a specific shared interest, instead of being for everyone in the world to talk about everything and anything all at the same time. And they’re policed by the users themselves rather than by a tech company or distant billionaire deciding what is and what isn’t allowed. Zuckerman says that this could be the model for building a healthier, less divisive and more positive social media experience.

But is he right? Will smaller networks moderated by the people who use them really be better?

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Ethan Zuckerman has been studying social media for years, and he says one of the ways to make social media better is to have smaller social networks where people can get together to talk about specific topics and where the users have more say in how those networks are run. It’s the type of model that’s already being used today on platforms like Reddit.

Ethan Zuckerman
One of the things that Reddit does quite brilliantly is that the site is broken up into hundreds of thousands of subreddits. They’re organised by topic and they’re moderated by members of that community and they make the rules quite strict. When you enter a community, here are the rules. This is what we talk about. These topics are off-topic and your post will be removed if you do it. If you don’t like it, either start your own community or become one of our moderators and help govern it. So very, very different way of organising a conversational space than essentially, say, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk will tell you what the rules of the road are.

Elaine Moore
Reddit is not new. The platform has been around almost as long as Facebook. But what makes it different is the way that it groups users, not by who they know, but by what they’re interested in. And it’s moderated by those users.

Sarah Gilbert
Reddit really kind of came out of this idea where, you know, sunlight is the best disinfectant for bad ideas. The community will take care of it. And that was really also built into its design.

Elaine Moore
Sarah Gilbert is a researcher at Cornell University, and she’s also one of the moderators of a subreddit called r/AskHistorians.

Sarah Gilbert
They have rules, really strict rules around, you know, sort of civility and basically like, you know, don’t be a jerk, don’t be hateful, and anything else, you know, that kind of falls under that gets removed. So individual communities can provide these really unique spaces for people to sort of come and find and build a home.

Elaine Moore
What kind of things are people discussing on r/AskHistorians?

Sarah Gilbert
History. (Chuckles)

So r/AskHistorians is actually kind of new. There’s a lot of places on Reddit where you can go and talk about history. But the unique thing about r/AskHistorians is that it’s got this mission of public history. And so the idea is to get people in-depth, comprehensive, academically informed answers to questions that they have about history. So the things that they’re reading are a little bit more trustworthy than they might see in other spaces, where people tend to at times co-opt history for all kinds of reasons, to push all kinds of, you know, agendas. And so the way that r/AskHistorians does this is by leveraging the moderation style, right?

Elaine Moore
Gilbert helps to make the subreddit better by promoting the really good content, the best informed, most comprehensive answers to history questions. That’s instead of an algorithm, which you might imagine picking responses that will stir up an argument. She also spends a lot of time policing the users, keeping posts on-topic and stopping people from posting abuse. It creates a positive social space on the internet where people with a common interest can get together and build a community around a topic.

You can see why this kind of social media experience will be better than the flame wars of Twitter, for example. But it’s far from perfect. For one thing, Gilbert says, Reddit is as bad a place as any major platform for propagating hate, harassment, abuse and misinformation or disinformation. In 2020, for example, Reddit shut down thousands of subreddits promoting hate speech. And keeping the hateful and toxic content off the platform is a mammoth job. Even moderating something as innocent-sounding as r/AskHistorians puts her in constant contact with the worst of the internet.

Sarah Gilbert
I see a lot of, like, hate-based history, so things like racism and antisemitism and Holocaust denial and that kind of thing. And it’s really interesting when you talk to other moderators, sometimes they’ll be like, “Man, I do not know how you moderate r/AskHistorians, you must get exposed to so much, like, terrible stuff.” You know, meanwhile I’m talking to them and they might moderate a community that’s designed as sort of a safe space for, you know, queer or trans people. And it’s like I’m thinking the same thing, like the amount of hate that you must get exposed to must be so terrible. The other thing that’s different as a community moderator is actually interacting with abusive people. On Reddit, you are in direct contact with the people whose content is being removed or they’re being banned. And so that exposes you to a lot of direct harassment and direct abuse, which can sometimes get really bad. We’ve had moderators on our team be doxxed, be threatened. One moderator one time removed somebody for engaging in Holocaust denial, and they proceeded to send this moderator over the course of the next 40 minutes, over 200 messages threatening to dismember and eat him.

Elaine Moore
It’s a lot of work that you’re doing and a lot of potentially horrible things that you’re being exposed to. Why do it for Reddit? Why do it for free? What’s in it for you?

Sarah Gilbert
The community, for a lot of the moderators particularly on r/AskHistorians, it’s that mission of public history. Reddit provides a really unique space to be able to do this. And so being able to actually, you know, help users out and, like, make that mission happen and give back to a community is incredibly rewarding to people. And when it comes out well and it happens really well and you know that you’ve protected people from getting hurt or you know that you’ve gotten rid of, you know, this horrible Nazi content, like that is, that feels very rewarding and very important.

Elaine Moore
The idea of having message boards with moderators goes right back to the early days of the internet. You can see its origins in the BBS era of the ‘80s and ‘90s, and the model is about to get a lot more attention as Reddit attempts to go public. After being around for nearly two decades, it’s now hoping to list on markets. So is Discord, another platform that splits its users into siloed groups. But there are challenges.

Whether a particular message board, Discord server or subreddit is a positive or negative social experience depends almost entirely on an army of enthusiastic and committed moderators who are all working for free. And a recent fight between Reddit and its own moderators shows how fragile that arrangement can be.

Reddit wants to make changes to the platform that would raise revenue, but which gave moderators less control. Moderators protested by essentially going on strike. By restricting access to content then showed that vast swaths of Reddit went dark.

The social media researcher Ethan Zuckerman acknowledges that platforms like Reddit are far from perfect. But he says the social media landscape of the future needs to offer users these sorts of options. Smaller networks better tailored to their users. This could be the future. And he says that building this is a better bet than trying to fix all the problems that exist in social media today.

Ethan Zuckerman
I actually think it’s much easier to build small communities and demonstrate that they could work very, very differently and then over time get people to live in a hybrid universe where they’re interacting with some of these very large corporate platforms but increasingly interacting with smaller platforms that they may be involved with controlling. It’s very unlikely that I’m gonna convince the US government to disable Facebook, break it apart and turn it into a community-owned conversation spaces. But it’s perhaps realistic to try to build those community conversation spaces, demonstrate their utility, and have them exist side by side (inaudible) these giant monopolies.

Elaine Moore
This idea that social media is fragmenting into smaller networks is one that we’ve heard a lot about. After Elon Musk took over Twitter, there were a handful of Twitter alternatives that people began to talk about migrating to. And over the last few years, there have been dozens of social media platforms that have been promoted as the next big thing, like Clubhouse, Yo and BeReal. They’re popular for a while, but then they tend to peter out. People get bored quickly and we want to be where our friends are. It’s hard for a platform to challenge the domination of Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. In Silicon Valley, investors say we’re still waiting for the next really big idea in social media that will shape the future of the industry.

Jonathan Abrams
I haven’t really gotten a pitch for something new in social media that has that sort of level of innovation and new thinking. A lot of it is really just like “Eh, people don’t like Facebook anymore. It would be better.”

Elaine Moore
Jonathan Abrams is a venture capitalist in San Francisco. He says he’d love to invest in a new social media platform, but no one’s coming up with ideas that impress him and he should know what he’s talking about. He helped to invent the modern social media era when in 2002 he invented a platform called Friendster.

Jonathan Abrams
When I had that original idea for Friendster, there were a lot of people who thought it was pretty crazy that people would use their real name or photo on the internet. That’s how, I guess, counterintuitive and weird an idea it was at the time.

Elaine Moore
Friendster came about before Facebook. It was revolutionary because up until that point, people didn’t really share their identities on the internet. Jonathan Abrams was part of the BBS era in the ‘90s when everyone used pseudonyms to chat with each other, and he was fascinated by technology that could be used to connect people.

Jonathan Abrams
You know, what if instead of being anonymous or pseudonymous on the internet, what if it was a little bit more like real life where you’d go to a party and you’d go to your friend’s house and there’d be people you know, and there’d be people you didn’t know, but those would be friends of friends. And what if I created a web experience that was more like that?

Elaine Moore
It turned out that people were ready to bring their real-world lives and friends into the online world. Friendster exploded in popularity, and it laid the groundwork for Facebook and much of the social media era that followed. But since then, he says, there hasn’t been much innovation at all in social media.

Jonathan Abrams
If you looked on Facebook today, it’s not that different than Facebook 10 years ago. And I’m kind of surprised we haven’t evolved more. I think the concepts of Friendster are still pretty much some of the main features of social networking today, and it hasn’t innovated as much as I would have expected after so many years.

Elaine Moore
So investors like him are waiting for the next big thing in social media, and he says that it could be completely revolutionary in the same way that Friendster was. But he says it’s unlikely to be just a nicer, healthier version of the platforms that we have today. Part of the reason, he says, is that healthy platforms just aren’t good businesses.

Jonathan Abrams
You know, a lot of what we see is people who think, “Oh, you know, Facebook’s too toxic.” We want something that’s healthier for people and I get a lot of pitches like that. I kind of use the analogy of me starting a business where I go around the country slapping the french fries out of people’s hands and giving them broccoli. And that would probably be a good thing, probably be good for more Americans to eat less french fries and more broccoli. But I don’t think it’s a great business. And the problem is, right now, the toxic stuff is, generates a lot of clicks and attention and engagement. And that’s why it’s been winning. So I think that there will be something new, but it’s not going to be just somebody saying, “Oh, I don’t like Facebook so, you know, so I’m gonna create, you know, another Facebook”.

Elaine Moore
There are lots of things to dislike about modern social media, but there’s far more appetite to change the way it works than to stop using it altogether. The likes of Facebook and Twitter didn’t invent socialising on the internet. The model they use is not necessarily the one we’ll all be using in the future. Nostalgia about the early days of the internet when communities were smaller suggests one way that things could change.

Benj Edwards, who we heard from at the top of this episode, first discovered the thrill of socialising online in the BBS era of the early ‘90s. When he was still a young teenager, he started his own BBS called The Cave. He had a dozen or so regular callers who would post messages. One of his regular contributors, another teenager who lived across town, even became his best friend. They’re still best friends today, 30 years later. Edwards believes in the power of bringing people together online. But he says that the dominance of large platforms has also taught us some lessons about the limits of connecting everyone around the world.

Benj Edwards
I think we’re already seeing a sort of Balkanisation happening. There is this broad trend to centralise everything on the internet through massive networks like Twitter and Facebook that just churned everybody up together in one place. And I think the lesson from that is we are healthier, honestly, if we silo ourselves to a certain extent. And there is no such thing as a global monoculture and there can never be, because the realities of living are different in different places. So I feel like we’re going to break up into smaller groups, social groups, like Discord has really gotten huge. You know, you post one thing on Facebook, everyone in the world sees it. Now they’re siloed off on these Discord servers, which are kind of like their own BBSs in a way. So it feels like we already are returning to BBSs, you know? (Chuckles)

Elaine Moore
On the next and final episode in this season of Tech Tonic, I’ll ask my expert FT colleagues what they think the future of social media will look like.

Cristina Criddle
I do think there is a bit of a reckoning now where people realise that they’re going to these platforms but not necessarily for authentic interactions with people that they know or might meet in the real world. They’re not the most social of apps anymore, and perhaps people are seeking those interactions elsewhere.

Elaine Moore
And could artificial intelligence spell the end for the social media landscape as we know it?

Evan Henshaw-Plath
You have all these bots whose job it is to be as friendly and supportive and engaging with you as possible. And we can’t tell who’s real and we can’t tell who’s not real. In which case, the idea that we could get the world together might be fundamentally flawed because you can’t trust anything you see out there on the open networks.

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Elaine Moore
We’ve made some articles related to this episode free to read on FT.com. You can see links to those articles in the show notes, including a recent Lex column I wrote on Reddit’s business prospects.

This has been Tech Tonic From the Financial Times. I’m Elaine Moore. Our show’s senior producer is Edwin Lane. Our producer is Josh Gabert-Doyon. Executive producer Manuela Saragosa. Mixing and sound design by Sam Giovinco and Breen Turner. The FT’s global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley.

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