Sub-Re-Intermediation

Attention conservation notice: 1000-word grudging concession that a bete noire might have a point, followed immediately and at much greater length by un-constructive hole-poking; about social media, by someone who's given up on using social media; also about the economics of recommendation engines, by someone who is neither an economist nor a recommendation engineer.

Because he hates me and wants to make sure that I never get back to any (other) friend or collaborator, Simon made me read Jack Dorsey endorsing an idea of Stephen Wolfram's. Much as it pains me to say, Wolfram has the germ of an interesting idea here, which is to start separating out different aspects of the business of running a social network, as that's currently understood. I am going to ignore the stuff about computational contracts (nonsense on stilts, IMHO), and focus just on the idea that users could have a choice about the ranking / content recommendation algorithms which determine what they see in their feeds. (For short I'll call them "recommendation engines" or "recommenders".) There are still difficulties, though.

"Editors. You've re-invented editors."

Or, more exactly, a choice of editorial lines, as we might have with different, competing newspapers and magazines. Well, fine; doing it automatically and at the volume and rate of the Web is something which you can't achieve just by hiring people to edit.

— Back in the dreamtime, before the present was widely distributed, Vannevar Bush imagined the emergence of people who'd make their livings by pointing out what, in the vast store of the Memex, would be worth others' time: "there is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record." Or, again, there's Paul Ginsparg's vision of new journals erecting themselves as front ends to arxiv. Appealing those such visions are, it's just not happened in any sustained, substantial way. (All respect to Maria Popova for Brain Pickings, but how many like her are there, who can do it as a job and keep doing it?) Maybe the obstacles here are ones of scale, and making content-recommendation a separate, algorithmic business could help fulfill the vision. Maybe.

Monsters Respond to Incentives

"Presumably", Wolfram says, "the content platform would give a commission to the final ranking provider". So the recommender is still in the selling-ads business, just as Facebook, Twitter, etc. are now. I don't see how this improves the incentives at all. Indeed, it'd presumably mean the recommender is a "publisher" in the digital-advertizing sense, and Facebook's and Twitter's core business situation is preserved. (Perhaps this is why Dorsey endorses it?) But the concerns about the bad and/or perverse effects of those incentives (e.g.) are not in the least alleviated by having many smaller entities channeled in the same direction.

On the other hand, I imagine it's possible that people would pay for recommendations, which would at least give the recommenders a direct financial incentive to please the users. This might still not be good for the users, but at least it would align them more with users' desires, and diversity of those desires could push towards a diversity of recommendations. Of course, there would be the usual difficulty of fee-based services competing against free-to-user-ad-supported services.

Imprimatur

To the extent there are concerns about certain content being banned by private companies, those are still there: the network operator, Facebook or Twitter or whatever, retains a veto over content. The recommenders are able to impose further vetoes, but not over-ride the operator.

Further: as Wolfram proposes it, the features used to represent content are already calculated by the operator. This can of course impose all sorts of biases and "editorial" decisions centrally, ones which the recommenders would have difficulty over-riding, if they could do so at all.

Increasi