Chronotope’s avatarChronotope’s Twitter Archive—№ 96,099

                  1. I'm starting to come to the conclusion that this is impossible. It is impossible to be as massive as Instagram is and avoid becoming a cesspool of harassment. Internet communications was never designed to deal with this level of centralization of users. cwarzel/1051837462736121856
                1. …in reply to @Chronotope
                  See we don't need to restart the internet, we need to act to reinforce its underlying principles and figure out how to make it impossible to build these types of platforms that are Too Big to be Kind. mcwm/1051829669635522562?s=19
              1. …in reply to @Chronotope
                Could and should Instagram have built better controls and moderation from day one? Yeah, for sure. Shoot all the flack at them for that. But it doesn't get at the central problem. To be kind requires we acknowledge the essential humanity of others and...
            1. …in reply to @Chronotope
              Humane doesn't scale.
          1. …in reply to @Chronotope
            Like there simply isn't a solution for the fact that the more abstract the human being on the other end of the communication the less likely we are to treat them humanely.
        1. …in reply to @Chronotope
          Or the larger the platform the less we feel it is watching. sarahjeong gets at this well in her book: "If users feel that the platform is accountable to them, they are more invested in the platform being good and less likely to trash it."
      1. …in reply to @Chronotope
        In "The Internet of Garbage" she also note that even worse the larger the platform the less able people are to 'speak' to it by declining use: "Even when changes in privacy endanger activists, they stay on Facebook."
    1. …in reply to @Chronotope
      The more a platform scales up, the less accountable it is to us, the less accountable we feel to it and then the less accountable we feel to fellow users. This is a cycle. As a platform scales up it essentially is gradually eroding its capacity to ask users be kind.
  1. …in reply to @Chronotope
    How can a platform like Instagram or Facebook possibly ask kindness or humanity of its users when, due to its size, those users cannot receive kindness or humanity from it, as an entity, in the form of support, or in its policies in regard to users as data in its structure?
    1. …in reply to @Chronotope
      There's really only one possible tactic a company the size of Instagram could take to alleviate this problem and that is to hire community managers. Not engineers, not technologists, but people to live in, interact with, and support the community. Hundreds of thousands.
      1. …in reply to @Chronotope
        But even that seems unlikely to solve the problem at such massive scale and even if we *knew* it could the economics of technology companies at scale assures such a hiring could never, ever, happen.
        1. …in reply to @Chronotope
          At the end of the day the economies of technological scale will never translate to the needs of humanity at that scale. We can and should continue trying to alleviate the issue, but honestly...
          1. …in reply to @Chronotope
            ... Large scale social platforms will never have a tool that can force users to acknowledge each other's humanity. The connections between users are just too massive, numerous and all-encompassing.


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