This vision of social media future is meant to
complement and clarify the vision behind many of my other works (such as this, see list of selected pieces at the end). It assumes you
have come here after seeing at least one of those (but includes enough
background to also be read first).
Business opportunity – start now, and grow from there:
●
Managers
of the NY Times, small local news services, or any other organization that has
built a strong community can use the following model to build a basic online
middleware service business, starting now.
●
For
example, Bluesky could be a base platform for building initial proof-of-concept
services along these lines that could develop and grow into a major business.
It is clear that social media technology is
not serving social values well. But it is not so clear how to do better. I have
been suggesting that the answer begins in learning from how we, as a society,
curated information flows offline. (These issues are also increasingly relevant to emerging AI.)
This piece envisions how an offline curation
“brand” with an established following – like the New York Times, or many
others, including non-commercial communities of all kinds – could extend their
curatorial influence, and the role of their larger community, more deeply into
the digital future of thought. (Of course, much the same kind of service can be
built as a greenfield startup, as well, but having an established community
reduces the cold-start problem.)
Building on middleware – the
Three Pillars
I and many others have advocated for
“middleware” services, a layer of enabling technology that sits between users
and platforms to give control back to users over what goes into each of our
individual feeds. But that is just the start of how that increased user agency
can support healthy discourse and limit fragmentation and polarization in our
globally online world.
The pillars I have been writing about are:
- Individual agency, the
starting point of democratic free choice over what we say to whom, what
individuals we listen to, and what groups we participate in.
- Social mediation, the
social processes, enabled by an ecosystem of communities and institutions
of all kinds that influence and propagate our thoughts, expression, and
impression. (For simple background, see What Is a Social Mediation Ecosystem?)
- Reputation, the quality
metrics, intuitively developed and shared to decide which individuals and
communities are trustworthy, and thus deserve our attention (or our
skepticism).
Middleware can sit on top of our basic social
networking platforms to support the synergistic operation of all three pillars,
and thus help make our discourse productive.
In the offline world of open societies, there
is no single source of “middleware” services that guide us, but an open,
organic, and constantly adjusted mix of many sources of collective support.
People grow up learning intuitively to develop and apply these pillars in
ever-changing combinations.
Software is far more rigid than humans. Online
middleware is a technique for enabling the same kind of diversity and
“interoperation” – of attention agent services for us to choose from, and to
help groups fully participate in them – so we can dynamically compose the view
of the world we want at any point in time.
Bluesky currently
offers perhaps the best hint at how middleware services will be composed,
steered, and focused – as our desires, tasks, and moods change. Just keep in
mind that current middleware offerings are still just infants learning to
crawl.
As we may think …together
Vannevar Bush provided a prescient vision of
the web in 1945 (yes, 1945!) – in his Atlantic
article “As We May Think.” Its technology was quaint,
but the vision of how humans can use machines to help us think was very
on-point, and inspired the creation of the web. Now it is
time for a next level vision – of how we may think together – even if the details of that vision are still crude.
Current notions of middleware have been
focused primarily on user agency, and just beginning (as in Bluesky) to
consider how we need not just a choice of a single middleware agent service,
but to flexibly compose and steer among many attention agent services. Steve
Jobs spoke of computers as “bicycles for our minds.” As we conduct our
discourse, middleware-based attention agent services can give us handlebars to
steer them and gear shifts to deal with varying terrain and motivations. They
can give us “lenses,” for focusing what we see from our bicycles.
To build out this capability, we will need at
least two levels of user-facing middleware services:
●
Many low level service agents that
curate for specific objectives of subject domain, styles, moods, sources,
values, and other criteria.
●
One or more high level service
agents that make it easy to orchestrate those low level agents, as we steer
them, shift gears, and change our focus, creating a consolidated ranking that
gives us what we want, and screens out what we do not want, at any given time.
Just how those will work will change greatly
over time as we learn to drive these bicycles, and providers learn to supply
useful services – “we shape our tools and our tools shape us.” Emerging AI in
these agents will increase the ease of use, and the usable power of the
bicycles – but even in the age of AI, the primary intelligence and judgment
must come from the humans that use these systems and create the terrain of
existing and new information and ideas (not just mechanically reassembled
tokens of existing data) that we steer through.
====================================================
Here is the business opportunity:
====================================================
Branding – a “handle” for
intuitively easy selection -- and signaling value
Yes, choosing middleware services seems
complicated, and skeptics rightly observe that most users lack the skill or
patience to think very hard about how to steer these new bicycles for our
minds. But there are ways to make this easy enough. One of the most promising
and suggestive is branding – a powerful and user-friendly tool for reliably
selecting a service to give desired results. Take the important case of news
services:
●
If we try to select news stories
at the low level of all the different dimensions of choice – subject matter,
style, values, and the like – of course the task would be very complex and
burdensome.
●
But many millions easily choose
what mix of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, PBS, or less widely used brands they want to
watch at any time. The existing brand equity and curation capabilities of such
media enterprises are now being squandered by digital platforms that offer such
established service brands only rudimentary integration into their social media
curation processes. With proper support, both established and new branded
middleware services can establish distinctive sensibilities that can make
choice easy.
Importantly, branding also serves marketing and revenue functions in powerful ways that can be exploited by middleware services. Once established and nurtured, a brand attracts users on the basis that it offers known levels of quality, and as catering to selective interests and tastes. "It's Not TV, It's HBO" encapsulated the power of HBO's brand in the heyday of premium TV.
The New York Times as a branded
curation community:
Consider the New York Times as just one
example of branded curation middleware that could serve as a steerable lens into
global online discourse. It could just as well be News Corp, CNN, Sports
Illustrated, or Vogue – or your local newspaper (if you still have one!) – or
your town or faith community, a school, a civil society organization, a
political party, a library, a bowling league – or whatever group or institution
that wants to support its uniquely focused (but overlapping and not isolated)
segment of the total social mediation ecosystem.
Consider how all three pillars can work and
synergize in such a service:
User agency comes in by our
participation as readers, and as speakers in any relevant mode – posts,
comments, likes, shares, letters to the editor, submissions for Times
publications. This can be addressed at at least two levels:
●
Low level attention service agents that find
and rank candidate items for our feeds and recommenders. This is much as we now
choose from an extensive list of available email
newsletters from the Times.
●
Higher level middleware composing agents would
help compose these low-level choices – and facilitate interoperation with
similar services from other communities – to build a composite feed of items
from the Times and all our other chosen sources. They could offer sliders to
decide what mx to steer into a feed at any given time, and saved presets to
shift gears for various moods, such as news awareness/analysis,
sports/entertainment, challenging ideas, light mind expansion, and
diversion/relaxation.
(Different revenue models may apply to
different services, levels, and modes of participation, just as some NY Times
features now may cost extra.)
Social mediation processes come
in to our user interface at two levels of curation:
●
User-driven curation: Much like current
platforms, the Times low-level services can rank items based on signals from
the community of Times users – their likes, shares, comments, and other signals
of interest and value. This might distinguish subscribers versus non-subscribing
readers. Subscribers might be more representative of the community, but
non-subscribers might bring important counterpoints. Other categories could
include special users, such as public figures in various political, business,
or professional categories. As such services mature, these signals can be
expanded in variety to be far more richly nuanced, such as to give clearer
feedback and be categorized by subject domains of primary involvement.
●
Expert-driven curation: The Times editorial
team can be drawn on (and potentially augmented with supportive levels of AI)
to provide high quality expert curation services in much the same way, in
whatever mix desired. This could include both their own contributions, and
their reactions to readers’ contributions.
Reputation
systems that keep score of quality and trust feedback
on both users and content items – that arise from those mediation processes –
can also be valuably focused on the Times community:
●
At a gross level, we might make
gross assumptions that differentiate the editorial and journalism staff,
subscribers, and non-subscribing readers (as part of the basic mediation
process), but a reputation system could distinguish among very different levels
of reputation for quality of participation in many dimensions, such as
expertise, judgment, clarity, wisdom, civility, and many more – in each of many
subject domains.
●
Reputation systems might also be
tuned to Times reporters and editors, and their inputs to reputations of
content items and users. But the true power of this kind of service is its
crowdsourcing from not just the Times staff, but from its unique extended
community. One could choose to ignore the staff, and just turn their lens on
the community, or vice versa.
Enterprise-class community
support integration – and simple beginnings
To fully enable this would require new
operational support services that integrate the operation of open online social
media platform services (like Bluesky now, or maybe someday Threads) with the
operations of the Times. As the technology for multi-group participation is
built out beyond current rudimentary levels, it can integrate with the
operation of each group, including the enterprise-class systems that drive the
operations of the Times. This might include the kind of functionality and
integration offered by CRM (customer relationship management) systems for
managing all of the Times’ interactions with its customers, as well as the CMS
(content management system) used to manage its journalism content, and the SMS
(subscription management systems) that manage revenue operations.
Doing all of this fully will take time and
effort – but some of it could be done relatively easily, such as in an
attention agent that ranks items based on the Times community members signals
as distinct from those of the general network population. The Times could begin
a trial of this in the near term by exploiting the basic middleware
capabilities already available by creating a Bluesky server instance (using the
open Bluesky server code and interoperation protocols) and their own custom
algorithms.
A large, profitable (or otherwise well-funded)
business like the Times could develop and operate middleware software itself
(if the social media platform allows that, as Bluesky does), but smaller
organizations might need a shared “middleware as a service” (MaaS) software and
operations provider to do much of that work.
A user steered,
intuitively blended, mix of diverse sub-community feeds
Even at a basic level, imagine how doing this
for many such branded ecosystem groups could enable users to easily compose
feeds that bring them a diverse mix of quality inputs, and to steer and adjust
the lenses in those feeds and searches to focus our view as we desire, when we
desire.
Similar middleware services could be based all
kinds of groups – for example:
●
Local news and community information services
– much like the Times example, for where you live now, used to live, or want to
live or visit.
●
Leadership and/or supporters of political parties or civil society
organizations – issues, platforms/policies, campaigns,
turnout, surveys, fact-checking, and volunteering.
●
Professional and/or amateur players and/or coaches for sports – catering to teams, fans, sports lore, and fantasy leagues.
●
Faculty, students, and/or alumni from universities – selecting for students, faculty, alumni, applicants, parents.
●
Librarians and/or card holders for library systems – selecting for discovery, reading circles, research, criticism, and
authors.
●
Leaders and/or adherents to faith communities
– for community news, personal spiritual issues, and social issues.
Consider how the Times example translates to and complements any of these other kinds of groups (most easily if enabling software is made available from a SaaS provider). Users could easily orchestrate their control over diverse sources of curation and moderation – selecting from brands with identities they recognize – without requiring the prohibitive cognitive load of controlling all the details that critics now argue would doom middleware because few would bother to make selections. New brands can also emerge and gain critical mass, using this same technology base.
By drawing on signals from expert and/or ordinary members of groups that have known orientations and norms, users might easily select mixes that serve their needs and values – and shift them as often as desired.
Context augmentation
 |
| Peter Steiner in The New Yorker |
"On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog" -- or a lunatic, or a bot. Famously observed by Peter Steiner's 1993 cartoon, this became known as "context collapse," broadly understood as a core reason why internet discourse is so problematic. Much of the meaning derives from context external to the message itself -- who is speaking to whom, from and to what community, with what norms and assumptions. That has largely been lost in current social media (and in emerging AIs).
Consider
how the kind of social mediation ecosystem processes envisioned here differ from what current major platforms offer in the way of community support -- and thus fail to provide essential context:
- They let you create a personal set (a unidirectional pseudo-community) of friends or those you follow, but increasingly focus on
engagement-based ranking into feeds -- because they want to maximize advertising
revenue, not the quality of your experience.
- They
rank based on likes, shares, and comments from a largely undifferentiated
global audience, with little opportunity for you to influence who is included.
- They
may favor feedback from rudimentary "groups" that you join, but provide very limited support
to organizers and members to make those groups rich and cohesive.
- They
may cluster you into what they infer to be your communities of interest, but
with out any agency from you over which groups those are, except for the
rudimentary "groups" you join.
- And, even if they did want
to serve your objectives, not theirs, they would be hard-pressed to come
anywhere near the richness and diversity of truly independent, opt-in, community-driven
middleware services that are tailored to diverse needs, contexts, and sustaining revenue
models.
Doing moderation the
old-fashioned way – enabled by middleware
Instead of being seen as a magical leap in
technology, or an off-putting cognitive burden on users, middleware can be
understood as a way to recreate in digital form the formal and informal social structures people have enjoyed for
centuries – individually composed interaction with the wisdom of organically
evolved social mediation ecosystems and intuitive informal reputation systems.
What at first seems complicated, from the
perspective of current social media, is at core, little more complicated than
the structure of traditional human discourse – building on key functions and
elements of the social mediation and reputation ecosystems – all legitimized by
choices of individual agency. Yes, that is complicated, but humans have learned
over millennia to intuitively navigate this traditional web of communities and
reputations. Yes, make it as simple as possible, but no simpler!
Creating an online twin of such a web of
community ecosystems will not happen overnight, but many industries have
already built out online infrastructures of similar complexity – in finance,
manufacturing, logistics, travel, and e-commerce. Middleware is just a tool for
enabling software systems to work together in ways similar to what humans (and
groups of humans) do intuitively. The time to start rebuilding those ecosystems
is now.
____________________
Related
works:
●
My November 2023 post introducing the pillars framing – A New, Broader, More Fundamental Case for Social Media
Agent "Middleware" – introduced the Three Pillars framing,
and embeds a deck that adds details and implication not yet
fully addressed elsewhere.
● Core ideas addressed more
formally in my April 2024 CIGI policy brief, New Logics for Governing Human Discourse in the Online
Era.
● Very simply -- What Is a Social Mediation Ecosystem? (and Why We Need to Rebuild It).
● Other related works are listed on my blog.
