Facebook in their infinite wisdom have just decided you're no longer allowed to have chronological conversations — all conversations will be arbitrarily re-ordered.

I'm sure this is as good for engagement as it is bad for rational human community.

If you still work there, why?

Like, I'm assuming many of you are probably at least somewhat socially-aware, sensible individuals. Are you just completely blind to the costs? Do you actually care about anything but money? Are you still lying to yourself that you can do more good on the inside?

Because lemme tell you — this level of sabotage to what is literally a planetary structure — the scope and scale of the damage to our collective intellectual capacity, across however many billion users — in that one code push is a crime against humanity.

I hope you hang.

And yes, I do, in fact, take it super-personally when folks like all y'all at Facebook literally attack my community's ability to have coherent conversations among ourselves to make more money. This is literal evil in the purest sense, intentionally wrecking the social fabric.

To attract attention as a provider of social infrastructure is to accrue responsibility as a caretaker of that attention. Attention is not a resource to be mined, it is an obligation to society. You do not own a platform, you care for a platform.

As a caretaker, of course, you can (and often should) charge for your services, but you have an onus to act in the interest of the society that bestows its attention upon you. You can of course try to shape the attention you want, but you retain the onus regardless.

Any deviation from this model represents a platform caretaker actively and maliciously undermining the social good for their own gain. Facebook represents a singular inversion of the ethical obligation of a provider of social infrastructure.

The invention of the locomotive was the invention of the train crash and, in short order, the train robbery. The invention of social media is the invention of malicious social infrastructure inversion — and yes, we need proper names for new crimes like this.

(We can get into the nuances of criminality vs. the abolition of the state later; also, yes, Twitter is also guilty of this, but this new FB change does much more real damage to conversation on the platform)

But seriously, to what end? Where does it stop? Must we literally march to the Valley and rend ever white man wearing a hoodie limb from limb, or can we have some coherent compromise wherein we agree that you don't actually get to actively harm society any more?

Ahem.

So yeah, no, expecting folks to throw away network effects and undermine their own lives with no functional alternative isn't how we're getting out of this. Job zero for these systems now is to make it impossible for any competitor to climb the network effect curve.

They will use every dark pattern, every design tool, and every ounce of polish they have to make this hard. The free software social network projects are lovely, but nothing I've seen has had anyone who understands humans in the design loop — we're ok at 1:1 messengers only.

In the end, all of this lives and dies on social affordances. First, you have to ship something with meaningful affordances that can attract real scale, and then you have to continue to be a good caretaker. Our society currently puts these two in direct opposition.

There are regulatory fixes would could deploy — mandating adversarial interoperability for large systems, say, and liability for direct damages for breach or bias if you engage in targeted marketing, and right to repair/continuity. It's unclear if they'll work.

As always, the underlying issue is in large part the financial abuses of the oligarchs, and the way the VC funding model, with its insane growth demands, has co-evolved with them. With that power structure in place, regulation is hard. Without it, it might be overkill, even.

Economic extraction systems are necessarily adversarial. Oligarchy forces social infrastructure into a maximally adversarial model. It is impossible to create positive sum systems within a maximally adversarial model.

It's close to impossible to even maintain systemic coherence for any social structure not explicitly organized along the adversarial frame — e.g. either extracting capital or (as a minor echo) resisting that extraction. All else falls apart.

Here (and moreso on FB) we now can't even have conversations on a text-based platform where most of us go to have conversations. Those aren't the thing that drive the money funnel, so they can be discarded. As long the optimization structure continues, so do the problems.