A Reddit, if You Can Keep It
One way to think about the different kinds of social media, according to “A social network taxonomy” by Ethan Zuckerman, is as animals. This is perhaps more attention than socials deserve, but it is an interesting step towards a generally accessible understanding of dominant forces in our lives and certainly better than understanding them on their maker’s terms, which are chummy and self-serving. Mostly, I find fault with the animals chosen to represent the various socials in the article’s illustration, e.g.: a lion for Facebook-esque systems, a prairie dog (I believe) for Reddit-esque ones, et cetera. Better, I think, would have been an anaconda and rats — which lead me to think that even more appropriate would be to chart these against political systems.
The taxonomy — worth a read if you haven’t seen it elsewhere — insightfully classifies social media structures on two axes, one of ownership and one of rulemaking. Facebook, for instance, is a “big room” owned and powered by one entity, Meta, and has one ruleset for all users; on the opposite end of the spectrum are “very small online platforms” or VSOPs, owned by many entities and each with their own rulesets: think the early days of the web, those delightful hobby sites and last-updated-in-2005 restaurant pages. In between: “many room” networks owned by one entity but with many rulesets within, some varying wildly (e.g., Reddit); “fediverses,” owned by many entities but with generally the same rules (e.g., Discord). In brief, these are the new social polities we should be studying to see how mankind will relate with itself in the coming years.
This is the sort of manmade nuance Silicon Valley delights in. But I am tempted to say the axes can be collapsed further, into one linear measurement of concentration of power, with intensely concentrated autocratic power on one end and widely distributed democratic power at the other. At the risk of oversimplification (something that does well on social media), it suggests some interesting correlations as well some potential inevitabilities in human institutions.
“Large rooms” seem to mirror nations in which power is most greatly concentrated in the owner who is also the rule setter; regular citizen responsibilities are minimal or null and their apparent privileges are vast. As a result, a regular citizen may have a great deal of influence, but it is not power within the system: a nuance Donald Trump found out the hard way on Twitter. Of course, in such a system, bad actors may be able to cause a great deal of damage, unhindered by the necessarily slow internal bureaucratic machinery of the large room (the large room owner itself may also be or become a bad actor, to devastating effect). This might be a modern people's republic in the Eastern style: potential for vast convenience and improvement, mouthwatering amounts of data, as well as abuse by motivated bad actors both internal and external, are all equally high.
“Group hosts” more closely mirror the current U.S. model: a base line of rules decided by the owner which can be further defined, but rarely undone, on by individual rule setters. Power is still weighted towards the owner but distributed somewhat among second-tier admins. Participants, even “regular” users can realistically affect change, but it is a slow process with immediate impact often limited to their immediate surroundings. There is potential still for the state to be a bad actor universally, but external bad actors are generally quarantined within groups and groups have sufficient autonomy to fight or somewhat undo central actor actions.
“Fediverses” are a bit more like pre-Constitution America, or a United Nations. Power is somewhere in the middle with a weak executive able to effect little change and a moderately empowered user base who can easily move from federation member to federation member. Federation owners hold most of the power but are generally obliged to agree to general rules to participate in the system — but the rules are, by necessity, minimal to accommodate a wide diversity of membership. There are general protocols to facilitate intra-traffic and external relations, but higher levels of diversity of opinion and rules, sometimes creating tension.
Finally, VSOPs remind me of the relations of ancient city-states. Power is highly distributed, with rule setters and owners often being the same people. In effect, a smorgasbord of dictators instead of just one. Diversity and independence are arguably at their greatest, although switching “citizenship” is probably more difficult than in a fediverse. And it is the greatest amount of responsibility for the greatest amount of people: a constellation of them is onerous to maintain, both administratively and logistically.
Which, then, is the ideal for online communities? Zuckerman, in his article, concludes that a “pluriverse” or some hodgepodge of the above, will best suit the needs of a digital globe. I think that is a coy answer that history would suggest is unlikely, at least while maintaining a single cohesive society. In fact, I feel there’s likely not a valid answer to that question, though the most like what a classical Western liberalism would prefer seems to be the small groups one, e.g., a Reddit, as a modern day Benjamin Franklin would surmise in an AMA about how the constitutional convention was going. Numerous subsets of users all pursuing their own interests with similarly-minded users in groups built around that connection, with their quirky little rules and languages but a common theme and diction that superseded groups’ need for perfect individuality, seems a pleasant balance that has the greatest respect for individuals while recognizing an individual must give way, to some extent, to the state if other individuals are to be respected.
But it’s the seeming instability of city states or VSOPs that suggest to me that the current is towards centralization, regardless of where your ideal lies, and even pluriverses will gravitate towards the reduced demands and increased privileges (so-perceived) of the “large rooms” Put another way, the digital ecosystem prefers convenience and efficiency over independence and uniqueness. And really, we’ve already seen the digital-first tendency towards single owners and single rulesets, driven by other benefits of great scale: many online sellers to Amazon, microblogs to TikTok, local taxi services to Uber, to name the obvious. This mimics history: in the past we note that city-states gave way to federations, then to republics, then to centralized states. Even the U.S., still a republic/small groups society, is decidedly less so than it was two hundred years ago. In almost each instance, the impetus was a greater advantage in scale or decreased interest in self-governance. Very rarely did the process reverse towards decentralization, or if it did, sustainably.
The question for future tech-taxonomists, then, is not which is best, but which is inevitable?
Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, Benjamin West
