I've given this one a lot of thought, as you can imagine. The HabitableZone represents an older online media style, "long form discussion", and the social media bumper-sticker "stream" kicked its ass. Seemingly buried it, and danced on the grave. TLDR.

(If this were Twitter, I'd be breaking my train of thought right about here.)

Even a group as small as the present naturally creates and enforces social norms. Part of what I think of as the Zone's "good old days" is the time when the community was large enough to be able to enforce its own social norms without even requiring registration.

But the Zone was never an anarchy. I've been a kind of "mayor" since shortly after its founding, with Justin PBUH, and I always recognized that the role I occupied was a useful focus for the community. Another social norm we had was to designate somebody who could be held accountable, and who could be expected to protect the community. It was symbolic, of course, as all these social things are, but then, it's social we're talking about.

Mark Zuckerberg heads Facebook, Inc, the corporation. But he's not head of the Facebook community. Facebook has no community. It's only a network. That's like saying sewers make a town into a community.

All of which seems to contradict my subject line, placing the blame squarely on human nature, this contrasting the different technical architectures of long-form versus streaming social media. But the application of technology to human society is never neutral, and it always changes us. Bad technological choices hurt us; sometimes technological choices are good and beneficial for a while, then turn sour, like the internal combustion engine.

The standard architecture of social media is based on on an algorithm feeding the stream, and the algorithms have as their basic input a single bit: Like. Or the absence of Like (there's bias in that-there asymmetry). It's the speed, fractured focus, and enforced brevity of the stream, powered by the mindless Like bit, that gives the current popular model of social media its toxic flavor.

We got "fake news" because people Liked it. Nobody asked if they thought it was true or credible, or whether it appeared malicious or hateful...all that mattered was that it goosed the imp of perversity and thereby sold advertising. People could make a "statement" by Liking and propagating hateful fake news. People could piss off their political opponents by clicking the Like button. Advertisers could get rich from Like buttons, and isn't that the important thing?

How is this good? It's not good. We dropped a really bad hit of technological acid, and we may never come back from the bad trip. Humanity's brain damage may be permanent.