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The end of social

When you take the friction out of sharing, you also remove the value.
by Mike Loukides | @mikeloukides | +Mike Loukides | Comments: 17 | 5 December 2011
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Much as I'm tempted to talk about Facebook privacy, I'm going to resist. Plenty has been written about Facebook and privacy, Facebook and "forced" sharing, Facebook and sharing by default, Facebook this and Facebook that. And I'm sure much more will be written about it. Tim O'Reilly has been supportive of Facebook. The company has frequently been clumsy, but it's also been willing to push the limits of privacy in ways that might be potentially creative and in ways that might potentially create more value for us than we give up. But none of the many reactions to Facebook get to the core of the problem, which isn't privacy at all. The real problem becomes visible when you look at it from the other direction. What effect does massive sharing have on the recipients? Let me ask the question in another way. Maybe I care if you see all the music I listen to; maybe I don't. Maybe I'm embarrassed if you find out that I mostly listen to dignified classical music but occasionally go slumming with Beyonce; maybe I'm not. But turn that around: while I might be interested in what you listen to, I have hundreds of Facebook friends; do I really care to be informed about what everyone is listening to? Do I really care to keep up with everything that they're reading? Alittle bit of information (cool, I didn't know that Bert Bates is a Dead Head) is interesting, but a deluge is The Big Snore. The other day, I read a perceptive article, "In Defense of Friction," arguing that "automated trust systems undermine trust by incentivizing cooperation because of the fear of punishment rather than actual trust." That's a profound point. If we rely on computational systems for a trust framework, we actually lose our instincts and capacity for personal trust; even more, we cease to care about it. And there's a big difference between trusting someone and relying on a system that says they're trustworthy. Taking this a couple of steps further, the article points out that, to many people, Facebook's "frictionless" sharing doesn't enhance sharing; it makes sharing meaningless. Let's go back to music: It is meaningful if I tell you that I really like the avant-garde music by Olivier Messiaen. It's also meaningful to confess that I sometimes relax by listening to Pink Floyd. But if this kind of communication is replaced by a constant pipeline of what's queued up in Spotify, it all becomes meaningless. There's no "sharing" at all. Frictionless sharing isn't better sharing; it's the absence of sharing. There's something about the friction, the need to work, the one-on-one contact, that makes the sharing real, not just some cyber phenomenon. If you want to tell me what you listen to, I care. But if it's just a feed in some social application that's constantly updated without your volition, why do I care? It's just another form of spam, particularly if I'm also receiving thousands of updates every day from hundreds of other friends. So, what we're seeing isn't the expansion of our social network; it's the shrinking of what and who we care about. My Facebook feed is full of what friends are listening to, what friends are reading, etc. And frankly, I don't give a damn. I would care if they told me personally; I'd even care if they used a medium as semi-personal as Twitter. The effort required to tweet tells me that someone thought it was important. And I do care about that. I will care much less if Spotify and Rdio integrate with Twitter. I already don't care about the blizzard of automated tweets from FourSquare. Automated sharing is giving Facebook a treasure-trove of data, regardless of whether anyone cares. And Facebook will certainly find ways to monetize that data. But the bigger question is whether, by making sharing the default, we are looking at the end of social networks altogether. If a song is shared on Facebook and nobody listens to it, does it make a sound? Related: On the Internet, you can hire someone to ensure nobody knows you're a dog Tim O'Reilly: My Contrarian Stance on Facebook and Privacy tags: experience, friction, sharing, social, trust
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COMMENTS: 17
Keith [ 5 December 2011 07:40 AM]
Too much noise is just going to remove credibility from social networking, and create more blindness on the part of users to what is being shared around them. Much like banner advertisements in the early days of the web, click will soon drop on social sharing to the point of hardly being relevant.

Paul McManus [ 5 December 2011 08:06 AM]

Insightful post. Sharing everything to everyone is a problem. I would love to be able to control which friends see what updates. I travel a lot and my neighbors keep an eye on my house. I would love it if they could see updates about where I am, without posting it publicly for example.

Dan York [ 5 December 2011 08:07 AM]

Mike, Definitely agree that the "oversharing" of these services renders them increasingly meaningless. I like your music example... if someone tells me occasionally about some awesome song they listened to, that's great and may in fact cause me to go try it out. But all the constant barrage of "frictionless" music updates does is cause me to block updates from that app in my Facebook news feed! :-)

robd [ 5 December 2011 08:07 AM]

The way I see it, the real point of all the sharing isn't so us users can see what our friends are listening to or reading-it's so facebook's paying clients (advertizers) can mine the data to get a clearer picture than ever of what people are interested in.

SamB [ 5 December 2011 08:11 AM]

I agree to an extent on this. I think that *sometimes* the Spotify sharing can be interesting and useful - I've occasionally noticed that one of my friends is listening to something I like, that I didn't realise they'd be into. But there is a lot of overshare, and it's especially clear on Twitter, I find, with automated tweeting. I wrote a blog post on this a year ago, about Foursquare: http://musingopiningandcriticising.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-ihate-foursquare.html It annoys me to have a feed full of posts (on Twitter) of no value, with no thought put into them. It doesn't interest me, and makes me feel that the user doesn't value their own content either. I mind it less on Facebook, strangely, but mostly because it's relegated to the mini-feed, and doesn't dominate like it can do on Twitter.

stephen nally [ 5 December 2011 09:19 AM]

On first reading your your article I agreed with everything you say. Then I went on to Facebook.... My news feed is horrible, worthless junk. I block some of my friends because I get updates about what airport they are etc. But...... I can can click on to a friend and look at only their updates. Which leads to my conclusion that Facebook is a useful micro blogging site. If I ignore the news feed, I have a list of friends' micro blogs managed by Facebook.

Rubn Bjar [ 5 December 2011 09:27 AM]

You can prevent Spotify (or any other facebook app) messages from appearing on your wall (for all your friends). That provides a more than necessary relief... :-)

Richard Hughes [ 5 December 2011 09:30 AM]

I've seen lots of complaints about the Spotify/Facebook integration. I would agree it would be a problem if: (a) the sharer couldn't disable the notifications, or (b) the recipient couldn't hide them, But both of these are very easy to do. There are many things Facebook are guilty of, but this is not one of them. As Clay Shirkey said, there's no such thing as information overload, only filter failure.

Jeremy Head [ 5 December 2011 09:31 AM]

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Yep. But you know about Edgerank don't you? That's FB's attempt to filter this for you. Whether it will really work or not... I'm not sure

Meghan [ 5 December 2011 09:45 AM]

Yes. Thank you for so eloquently verbalizing what I've been thinking for some time. I feel that the whole "frictionless sharing" turns into a vicious cycle of empty digital calories. I often flip through my news feed and leave Facebook wholly unsatisfied.

Chris [ 5 December 2011 02:17 PM]

I gave up on facebook when I started getting updates about people buying rice cookers and even crossing the damn street. I really liked spotify until it integrated with facebook. I keep track of my friends by being friendly with them. That requires more than just a status update on the Internet. Regarding finding music, almost everyone listens to crap music (including me). Want to learn about cool new music? Google-stalk people you think are cool. Trent Reznor, Yo-Yo Ma, whoever.

Zackatoustra [ 6 December 2011 08:33 AM]

Very nice post. The only next step social tools need to focus on now is giving back to the social signals their meaningfulness. And only conscious sharing can give a social, human meaning to what is otherwise just a signal. "If a song is shared on Facebook and nobody sees I've shared it, does it still make it a social signal?"

Doug Hanchard [ 6 December 2011 10:57 AM]

Interesting observations and perspective. There are three dynamic and unpredictable problems with your premise. Agenda - regardless if it's Facebook or the user's individual expression - the agenda is what is at stake. A person's views, ideas, concepts and "likes" are individual and collective. It's a choice, not a demand. Privacy of data is a matter of perspective. It has nothing to do with "social media" as a publication medium, instead it has everything to do with it's validity as a point of reference to the data. Influence is often perceived as where the balance of power is. Is it collective of the agenda, the data points of facts or the mass adoption of an idea, philosophy or entity. Your insights can not answer these questions or perspectives. And that's okay, you're not supposed to able to. There's not a single analytic tool precise enough to build a repeatable conclusion of any data on Facebook or other social media portal. Automate all you want, it's people that make decisions pertaining to direction, mandate and objectives, not computers. A.I. is pretty good interpreting zeros and one's, but it's still only as good as those that programmed it. Human behavior in all its forms is one state that can not be 'factored" or labelled. Take the example of Nielsen ratings. It may show how popular a show is, but it can't interpret the state mind or reasons why some programs are watched more often then others. Extrapolation is a human decision point, not a computer generated one. Social media is literately stated. An environment that enables interaction. Facebook is beyond childhood and is here to stay.

MIke Homoki [ 6 December 2011 11:17 AM]

Then "Noise" that is seen on Facebook is controllable. If you have one person that is creating noise on your page you can choose to filter what you see from that person. I have the Spotify Sharing Feed turned on and I feel that if people don't like to see what I'm listening to then they can choose to change their settings. That may sound selfish but there are a lot of friends that do want to see this and I like to see this from certain friends. Automatic sharing without filters or controls would be bad but automatic sharing with filters and controls is a good thing.

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Jeremy [ 6 December 2011 12:08 PM]

To argue that it's not really automatic sharing because filters are available to stop it is to miss the point. That's like saying it's not cold outside because you can wear a coat. It is still automatic, and if it is up to each individual to turn it off, the overall effect to the social media environment will be far more automatic sharing than non-automatic sharing. People don't tend to use these controls as much as they might in theory want to, and obviously Facebook and Spotify are counting on the fact that most people won't use the filters. The article's overall point remains salient: when friction is by and large removed, the value of the sharing by and large will suffer.

Steve Removal [ 8 December 2011 04:35 AM]

Well, I don't think social media will die in the next few years, I see how people become more and more obsessive so I think this mania will continue to grow bigger and bigger!

Zylun [ 9 December 2011 03:47 PM]

It seems to me that this frictionless sharing is exactly what Google+ targets with its circles (which have now been imitated by FB). I definitely agree with your points, and I think such a high volume of meaningless information can undermine real relationships and turn much of social interaction into meaningless electronic socializing.

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