The Social Graph is Neither
A solid post from the guys at Pinboard on the problems with our existing model of the “social graph”, and the social networks we’ve built on top of it.
Some good quotes:
This obsession with modeling has led us into a social version of the Uncanny Valley, that weird phenomenon from computer graphics where the more faithfully you try to represent something human, the creepier it becomes. As the model becomes more expressive, we really start to notice the places where it fails.
(As anyone who’s organized a G+ circle will tell you)
Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.
Because their collection methods are kind of primitive, these sites have to coax you into doing as much of your social interaction as possible while logged in, so they can see it. It’s as if an ad agency built a nationwide chain of pubs and night clubs in the hopes that people would spend all their time there, rigging the place with microphones and cameras to keep abreast of the latest trends (and staffing it, of course, with that Mormon bartender).
We’re used to talking about how disturbing this in the context of privacy, but it’s worth pointing out how weirdly unsocial it is, too. How are you supposed to feel at home when you know a place is full of one-way mirrors?
A big part of why I’m uncomfortable using Facebook.
My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button. It’s just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online.
They’re making a few different points here:
Our social connections are too varied, ambiguous, and evolving for one “graph” to accurately capture all that nuanced activity, at least with current methods;
A lot of the activity on “social” networks isn’t inherently social from the user’s perspective (asking people to explicitly define relationships, for example);
Social networks these days are designed around getting you to broadcast as much information as possible in order to mine that data (and store it forever to use as they like)— that’s troubling.
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tl;dr: The social graph (modeling our offline relationships online) obviously has value. With current implementations though, it’s tough to model a completely “accurate” pervasive single social graph, and even tougher to build something meaningful on top of that graph. Here’s to figuring it out.
