Why Artifact is of the past and what does “social” mean tomorrow?
All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too
Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl 1
Social Networking is 20 years old.
Friendster in 2002, MySpace & LinkedIn in 2003, Facebook in 2004, and Twitter in 2006 started the deluge that we are all swimming in today.
As someone who has been a small part of two of those, I find it intriguing that I am left standing in just the two of them, LinkedIn & Twitter, despite the constant noise we have come to accept as normal. It’s like yelling in a nightclub. Feels normal, but it ain’t.
This is a series of posts, contemplative more than analytical, about what might a ‘social’ app of the future look like today.
ar·ti·fact ˈär-ti-ˌfakt
b
: something characteristic of or resulting from a particular human institution, period, trend, or individual
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Artifacts Die Hard
Just last week, I reacted to a tweet (on a “new” AI news service) from Kevin Systrom, founder of Instagram, who announced a new product he’s building with his former & current co-founder Mike Krieger – called Artifact.
This is a post about Artifact; maybe it’s not. But, let’s start there…
Thoughts on a new ‘Artifact’
In essence, Artifact is Apple News (Lite) to the tune of Bytedance’s Toutiao. 2
The onboarding of Artifact was reminiscent of the model, made famous by TikTok, by gathering your interests in one simple onboarding swoop. Once they have that, we’re off to the races.
We have now replaced social cues with algorithmic heft.
I’m not sure what I expected, but as someone who has tried every “News App” from the early days of Techmeme to the excess of Apple News & Flipboard, there’s nothing new here. Yet another noisy news app, but with the promise of A.I. to curate, which leads one to the question, what do we expect of technology these days?!
What was I hoping for?
Maybe a highly curated high-signal news feed (R.I.P. Google Reader & Nuzzle), instead I got more of the Apple News model (without the free access to magazines or subscriptions), closer to Flipboard (than I’d have liked), all of which I avoid at all costs. And, yet again disappointed to see old tricks from social networks (whether it’s getting access to my address book) or receiving text messages with Artifact invites. Been there, done that!
On reading news: Frankly, I’ve finally steered clear of opinion sites. Ranked below from left to right, are ‘news’ sites that I used to subscribe to from “The Information” the last pure-news site I still subscribe to & Techmeme, and I have successfully unsubscribed from the rest.
Twitter might be the last one standing, as I ease out of the rest of the subscriptions that range from signal to noise (left to right) opinion to speculative fiction, neither of which serves me any good.
SIGNAL --> The Information — Techmeme — The Economist — The Athletic — Paris Review of Books — Esquire Classic — NY Review of Books — The New York Times — Twitter <-- NOISE
To a great degree, I fear news & networking as platforms suffer from the original sin of advertising. Cory Doctorow says it best, explaining how it all ends the same way, as a principal-agent problem. 3
Think of the SEO market, or the whole energetic world of online creators who spend endless hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology, hoping to locate the algorithmic tripwires, which, if crossed, doom the creative works they pour their money, time and energy into
Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won’t tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you’d figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay. Content moderation is the only domain where security through obscurity is considered a best practice.
More intriguingly for me, obscurity through the noise is where I find myself landing, on social apps (news or networking), no matter how many ways we skin this cat in every possible medium (SEO or social or A.I).
Whether it’s search or social or tomorrow’s AI overlords, the end result is the same. Noise as artifact. Or, worse still, news as noise.
… noise is an artifact of human culture, devised to help us ‘navigate’ social networking. 4
This is not an indictment of Artifact. As I mentioned earlier, this is not a post about Artifact.
It’s about whether we are better off with the platforms we have built and trained (with our behavior) for the past two decades. Are these “networks” and “news as entertainment” models, working for us?
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A.I. Everything, Everywhere, all at once and more and more and more!
The floodgates are open.
A.I. has become a catchphrase (!) for all things worth investing our attention into.
Like every wave of technology before and after it, the truth is we are wading into uncharted territory, gleeful like an unleashed dog on a beach. That said, I’m all ears for any technology that stills noise and derives signal.
So far, no luck.
Thoughts on Quora variant, Poe (a more A.I. Q&A)
I briefly tested the waters on a new A.I. Q&A Engine called Poe, from the team behind Quora. 5
One now sees A.I. sites popping up in the news on a near-daily basis. And, some of these are intriguing, to say the least. It’s a terrific sign of creativity & innovation I have not seen since the early days of society. To me, the most interesting thing about Poe is this.
Sure, they might not be the answer we seek, not a panacea, yet. But the energy is thrilling and reminds me of why there is no other place in the world to be – in tech – but here. Sure, there’ll be a slew of them that engender one’s curiosity, but it is going to be a Sisyphean battle for our mind, and it’s clear every one of the tech horsemen is ready to rumble.
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I do find the intersection of A.I. and social intriguing in more ways than one. I was always hopeful that Alexa and the voice UI would liberate us from the tyranny of the feed. I am tired of pruning this never-ending relentless barrage of content I have not asked for. Even the good ones, on LinkedIn, I find myself with no way to select who I wish to receive updates from, and I’m left cherry-picking each update that LinkedIn throws up on my feed.
Google has become, for lack of a better term, a search shit-show, and so it’s great to see new ways to tackle old problems. But I’m afraid, we’re falling back into old patterns. We seem unable to un-see or unlearn the habits of the past. So, I’ve been wondering what it all means anymore. What am I looking for?
Since when did “social networking” become all about “social media.” Where is the social in both cases, and why am I faced with a barrage of algorithmically tuned feeds on topics and people I don’t know much about. Even on LinkedIn, a platform I have the least annoyance toward (and one of the last two remaining social networks I am on), I have no way to fine-tune my feed, so any time I open the app, I’m left unfollowing the people whose updates show up on my feed.
More noise, more problems.
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What is “social” anymore?
Into this seething mind-numbing doom-scrolling apocalypse, enters teenage “social” networking whose growing pangs only worsen with every wave of technology.
One has to ask the obvious if we can step out of our blinkered existence on social platforms (nearly two decades in running), what does “social,” either networking or media mean to us anymore?
Are we truly more social, more insightful, and more clear on the things that matter to us as a society?
Here is what social networks seem to optimize for, as the feed moves from “social” to “media.” And media that gets your eyeballs fastest seems to be the operating word here. So, we’ve become dumb and dumber; fat, not smarter, in the blink of an eye. It’s an arms race to the bottom.
And, I am swimming in noise.
More like, I am swimming in questions: Are these platforms making us more social? What does it mean – to be social on a ‘social’ platform? Is it reading updates on your career, life lows (which seems to be the most viral status updates I see on LinkedIn), 280-character dad jokes (that pervade Twitter), is it, DMing folks you find yourselves close to, you can’t meet otherwise? Why can’t that be done on iMessage or text?
Now, what… whither goes social?
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”
– J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’
After decades now, we come to see that all that likes & RTs do not glitter; are but ephemeral frost. And, ‘deep roots are not reached by the frost.’
Is it possible to build something social with meaning, where features truly make us more social and does one thing and one thing well: deepen good relationships. 6
Can we build something where there’s meaning in every ‘like’? Can one build something of lasting value, or is this a fool’s paradise of thought, as we collectively gravitate toward the loudest common denominator.
Design should not dominate people. Design should help people. – Dieter Rams
One would think we’d want out of this cycle of noise, but habits work the other way around. Nearly 20-year habits die hard. Many of us, myself include until recently (remind me to pen a few words on this sooner rather than later), are hopelessly addicted. This might not have dawned on most of us, yet, but there has got to be a better way.
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There must be some way outta here…
There must be some way out of here
Said the joker to the thief
There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no reliefBusinessmen, they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth 7
- 12 lines, 230 words, 2.5 minutes and one of the greatest poems ever written. Dylan famously said of this poem, Rolling Stone, 1968, ‘There’s no line that you can stick your finger through. There’s no hole in any of the stanza. There’s no blank filler. Each line has something.’ And, that is no mean feat. ↩︎
- I’d hate to compare any artist’s creation to another, but the idea of using A.I. to generate a true news feed has been pioneered by Bytedance, the makers of TikTok, in their original app called Toutiao in the Chinese Market. Here’s an exploration of its technology by Y Combinator’s Anu Hariharan in 2017. ↩︎
- Cory Doctorow’s diatribe on thinking through the shell-game that is online advertising, whether it’s SEO or social optimization is as prescient about tomorrow as it is about yesterday. Just replace SEO with AI optimization, it’s all the same. ↩︎
- This is an indictment of current social platform trends. It does not matter why these were initiated to begin with; both Zuckerberg, 2006 & Dorsey, 2006 seem to have arrived at it for different reasons, but as a society, we seem to have stumbled upon the noisiest way to engage on social platforms, thereby losing all meaning in the process. ↩︎
- Many moons ago, circa 2012 right around my exit from LinkedIn, a social Q&A site called Quora became the hottest technology site around and one I frequented until I didn’t. ↩︎
- One of my favorite recent reads was “The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness” by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz; that is built on an ongoing 80-year (the longest yet) study on what makes ‘the good life.’ ↩︎
- If this post does one thing, I hope it’d be an appreciation of the sublime poetry of Bob Dylan. Nerdwriter does a pretty decent job, breaking down “All Along the Watchtower,” what is arguably one of his most famous compositions. That it lends relevance to my silly writing on the state of social technology over 50 years after its writing is proof-positive of poetry’s incandescence over time & mind. ↩︎
Filed under: A.I., Artificial Intelligence, Best-of, Linkedin, New Products, Product Design, Thoughts, Twitter, What's New in Social Media, Artifact, Bob Dylan, Instagram, J.R.R. Tolkien, Kevin Systrom, social-media, Steve Jobs, The Good Life
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