How Likes Went Bad

From 2018, a good history, but no solutions: "Facebook didn’t invent the feature, but they definitely broke it. How can we better regulate future disruptive ideas?".

Brief history

Part of the A Brief History of Attention series, starts with some brief history, culminating with Zuckerberg combining "three core concepts — the social graph, the news feed, and the “like” button" to achieve global dominance, and then looks at each concept in turn:

• "Rather than being limited to a group of connections on one site, Zuckerberg saw the social graph as a new way of connecting everyone on the internet"
• launched soon after Twitter in 2006, "Facebook’s adoption of the news feed radically changed the way social media sites had worked... Instead of publishing to a site that you had complete control over, your content was aggregated ...[and] personalized for the reader, not the creator", viewing users as consumers, not producers, creating "a new kind of media service, mixing updates from friends, celebrities, and brands". The Phone followed the next year - "the perfect tool for browsing those streams... the idealistic vision of web 2.0 empowering everyone as media creators was replaced by ... consumers ... scrolling through streams with their thumbs"

And then, the like: combines multiple attention-metric stories:

• "applause as a culturally conditioned act ... to create money and power" - the like "reduces our complex responses to culture into a simple gesture
• Nielsen's work in "capturing broadcast ratings ... to analyzing audiences" - the like aggregates invisible audiences’ behaviors into analyzable data
• "the music chart was invented to sell advertising ... ended up driving ... the record industry and ... pop culture" - the like "creates markets out of our febrile, emotional responses"

Adding the like to "an already powerful engine, built on the two concepts of the social graph and the news feed" was their killer app for "generating an unimaginably huge amount of personal data by an unimaginably huge number of people... [even] if someone wasn’t on Facebook at all, you could piece together a reasonable profile of them". This profiling powerhouse was enhanced in April 2014 with " the Facebook Audience Network... extended the company’s data profiling and ad-targeting juggernaut ... to the rest of the internet.”

Bottom line: "The social graph and news feed created the core engine of Facebook’s growth, but the like button gave Facebook meaning and changed it from something that didn’t just connect people, but framed the way they saw the world around them."

Then it went bad

"most advertising markets base their prices on audited reach figures produced not by media platform owners but by independent research companies... Facebook and Google... combine both roles... unhealthy for both industry and audiences".

Writing in 2018, the author tried to imagine how the resulting dominance could (be) unravelled: "break up our new digital monopolies ... create new public institutions to responsibly manage personal data... [limit] any single company’s control and monetization of our attention", or not permit any platform "to scale beyond the point where human curation is no longer economically or logistically possible".

He concludes that this form of regulation can't work - there's too much innovation, moving too fast. He'd have liked companies to have acted more responsibly. Read 6 years later, that seems quaint.