How to Start Creating a Better Internet
The Next Generation of XR, Part 4
Welcome back to the 5th installment of The Next Generation of XR! It’s been a crazy start to the new year, but I am even more excited to build something better because of it.
This article will provide some initial ideas for practical steps we can take to design an extended reality.
TLDR;
I think change starts with transparency and localization.
- Digitize community centers for greater transparency
- Emphasize small, intimate communities over large, cluttered ones
- Play to our evolutionary strengths with spatial awareness
- Share reputations across platforms
Part 1 talked about the hardware.
Part 1.5 revised my assumptions about that hardware.
Part 2 spoke about the business models.
Part 3 discussed some content use cases.
I spent a long time creating this article because I kept finding more things to talk about and more people interested in this problem as well. I considered delaying this by yet another week so that I can review everything that was talked about in the New Public Festival, but no! It’s far too easy to get into a habit of consumption and never do much of anything becauses there’s always more to learn and see and read.
Learning is an active process that is only halfway complete if you only ever consume. So in this article, you will find some of my ideas on how I think we can begin to improve the internet (and society). This entire series is just my own ideas in the ocean of ideas out there… but I hope it helps to inspire others and spark conversation nonetheless.
How to Re-invent the Public Square
In today’s society, we have essentially eroded the idea of having town centers. Most ‘town squares’ and ‘community centers’ of today are used for recreation or complaints. We don’t have central areas in most neighborhoods, cities, states, or nations where we all care to come together to socialize, make decisions, or just communicate clearly and with empathy as a community.
The few town centers we do have are often behind-the-times, full of empty talk, or just boring.
Social media is a poor… no, terrible stand-in for this.
What if we could create virtual town squares that are just like real ones — where folks in your neighborhood or community can come together to discuss things about your community… but be armed with actual data? And be able to have actually meaningful conversations?
1) Bring our community centers online
Our community centers are often not digitized. People talk in circles and often base decisions off allegorical stories and rhetoric rather than quantitative (or even proportionally qualitative) insights. When decisions are made, there are very poor records kept about the how and why that is all but inaccessible to the average person. Even in small neighborhoods, it may be difficult to find out why X money was spent on Y service.
With XR, we can record, communicate, and store relevant data far more effectively. It can be pinned to an easily accessible noticeboard, sent to each community member, and updated automatically, all without paper or people.
A virtual center does not have to worry about juggling transportation, covid, discrimination, or schedule issues because it can be asynchronous, decentralized, and anonymous.
We can fuse the best parts of forums, chat rooms, and game worlds into a tool where people can actually see what’s going on in their community.
We can even use these virtual worlds to test out various designs for the community.
Want to see what might happen if you add a new lane? Turn traffic lights into turnabouts? Replace that abandoned area with a public park?
You can do that! And So much more.
Virtual communities provide an incredible opportunity to create far more transparency and experimentation.
2) Foster close-knit communities
Dunbar's number shows the limits of intimate relationships one can have:
According to the theory, the tightest circle has just five people — loved ones. That’s followed by successive layers of 15 (good friends), 50 (friends), 150 (meaningful contacts), 500 (acquaintances) and 1500 (people you can recognize). People migrate in and out of these layers, but the idea is that space has to be carved out for any new entrants.
-BBC Article
Even opponents to this theory recognize that there is an upper limit on the number of quality relationships any one person can have, and it is far below the thousands of followers and ‘friends’ one may strive for on social media.
The best organizations and communities are often those that respect this limitation and instead have a number of interwoven small groups that work together.
For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors lived very egalitarian lives with each other and the environment thanks to small, democratic hunter-gatherer communities. It was the rise of agriculture that tied people to specific parcels of land that led the way to neolithic cities, authoritarian governments, and mass inequality. There were certainly incredible benefits to urbanization, but the huge downsides also makes it very clear that we should be reassessing our sedentary lifestyle.
Many of our modern-day issues with authoritarianism, inequality, xenophobia, wars, and myriad of health issues all date back to the centralization of resources and people due to agriculture.
In a world where you are living with hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people who you will never actually see, much less get to meet or befriend, these issues crop up as a result of scale.
In short, we shouldn’t be trying to force everyone into the same community. The worst part about Reddit is the default public area where everyone and anyone can post stuff. Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and so on are all fairly chaotic in these areas. It is only when you take the time to curate a healthy personal feed or private micro community of diverse yet shared beliefs that you can see the appeal of these platforms.
Globalization has destroyed many small towns, intimate communities, and simple ways of life. Diversity is good, but you can’t force people to adapt or die, at least not if we want to maintain our moral standards of actually caring for each other.
We can once again localize communities, while also benefiting from globalization, through virtual small towns made of people with shared interests from around the world.
These virtual towns can create small marketplaces where they exchange goods, services, and ideas that make sense to them, in the way that works for them.
And because these are digitized, they can actually make data-based decisions on what will make their community better for them. They can see the harms of being a monoculture, or the risks of being too diverse (ie sharing the space with people who don’t share your basic values).
In a community where everyone knows each other:
- It is far less likely you’ll have bad actors, and you can punish them according to a shared code of conduct
- You will be able to have meaningful conversations even around disagreements thanks to sharing base values
- There will be tons of other communities, allowing for an easy solution to hard disagreements (ie making your own community is actually possible)
We see this already with subreddits, Discord servers, forums, and more. They work fairly well, but they just don’t provide the same level of presence or interactivity as real-world communities. It’s difficult to figure out how to buy/sell things reliably on discord for instance, or to see each other ‘face to face’ on a subreddit, or to just feel like the community is made for you, by you.
The point is, we can turn these flat internet communities of today, into much more comprehensive systems of tomorrow.
3D) Build virtual communities with spatial awareness
All of this can be built more easily if we start building more spatially-aware (ie multi-dimensional) virtual environments.
Why use 3D virtual environments instead of sticking with what works today?
Because most internet communities don’t work well today. Even the best Facebook groups, Reddit pages, and discord communities all struggle with things we have already figured out how to deal with IRL. Trolling, harassment, Ponzi schemes, etc are all more common on the internet. Don’t get me wrong, of course these all happen in the real world too, but we have intrinsic systems to minimize it. They are the exception and not the rule in meatspace.
Somebody much smarter than me pointed out how the design of social media is too ambiguous to be intuitive. (So sorry! I don’t remember where/how I first heard this from, but you can hear very similar ideas covered in the podcast episode below)
The design of these sites don’t make it clear what kind of space we’re in.
How many times have you been in one of these communities and someone (or something) just starts advertising/self promoting? Or is harassing someone? Or not ‘reading the room’? Or any number of issues we all deal with on the internet?
Many of these behaviors are a result of there being no intrinsic structure to the web. When we walk into a library, we know to be quiet. When we go to a park and see a playground, we know what to expect. When we go into a bank or a school or a workplace etc, we automatically adjust our expectations and behavior based on the cultural and physical constraints of the location.
Likewise, when we go into someone else’s home, we know to give them a certain level of respect, and we can expect the same in return in our own home. Furthermore, each of these spaces has their own ‘authority’ that we defer to in case of disagreements or trouble.
But on the internet, what is the expectation when you go onto someone’s twitter profile?
Is this akin to entering their home? Did you knock on the door? Are you snooping through their window? Was this really an open invitation to do whatever?
What kind of behavior do people typically exhibit when they go to a celebrity’s Instagram post? How about YouTube comments? What level of respect is warranted? Whose authority do you defer to?
Do you understand now?
The way in which we create our environments play a LARGE role in how we constrain our behaviors. Even the most annoying people tend to respect the unsaid rules of the environment in the real world. (At least they are more likely to fear the consequences than in a completely free-form, invisible internet environment)
In the real world, we have practiced things like architecture, landscaping, and urban planning for millennia. For the most part, we know how to act in real spaces and how to create spaces that subconsciously encourage certain behaviors.
===<PSA>===
It is incredibly difficult to abstract these real-world lessons into ambiguous boxes and typefaces and pages. No matter how well designed a social media site is, it will never be better suited to social situations than the spatial environments those social behaviours evolved with for hundreds of thousands of years.
Web pages were designed to present pure information clearly and concisely. A feat that has only recently been developed in humanity with the advent of writing. We have constrained our ability to present information to others on two-dimensional planes since we invented cave paintings. But we never evolved ourselves to socialize within those paintings.
Social interactions involve a number of intuitions, emotional context, evolutionary habits, and incredibly nuanced psychological phenomena that we still have not fully studied.
What we are doing with social media today is like trying to fit the full breadth and complexity of human interaction onto a cave painting.
The fact that you can read a distilled version of my thoughts on your screen right now is already amazing. But let’s please stop trying to distill all of humanity onto a flat surface…. at least until we can simulate the black hole holographic principle. ;)
===</PSA>===
4) Balance anonymity with accountability
The other piece to constraining/influencing the right behavior is reputation.
As we know, being anonymous comes with a lot of pros and cons.
The obvious pros is that it allows many of us who are too timid, non-confrontational, or just ‘antisocial’ to have an outlet to express ourselves. Not to mention the most important benefit of being a place for oppressed, disenfranchised, and underrepresented people to finally have a voice without (direct) fear of physical harm.
But of course, the cons include people taking it as a license to harass, bully, and troll others without consequence. Businesses use it to obfuscate their misdealings and thus steal from people in the guise of being ‘free’. Bad actors use it to con or hack people far more easily than they could in person.
We certainly don’t have all this figured out in meatspace either.
In the physical world, we can more easily tell if someone is just joking, or actually trying to peddle bull crap through body language and facial expressions and a number of other nuances. We can quickly ascertain emotional cues to decide how to best communicate more effectively. We use things like appearance to see if we should take someone seriously or not.
Yet those same intuitions and contextual clues can of course be used against us by our very own minds to negatively discriminate, emotionally manipulate, or just misjudge people as well.
Technology allows us to take the best of both worlds by tying reputations to virtual, transferable avatars.
Platforms like Reddit incentivize good behavior through the use of upvotes, downvotes, and the more prestigious ‘gold’ or ‘silver’.
If we reward people for good behavior on one platform, it stands to reason that person will continue that behavior on another. Therefore, some platforms can require a certain level of reputation to partake in discussions, or weight those over others.
These transferable reputations can be selective between platforms, so platform A doesn’t have to accept a person’s reputation if they don’t trust platform B where that person got their reputation. This gives agency to the diverse nature of different communities, where the definition of ‘good behavior’ differs between them.
Check out this study about ‘Unlocking Online Reputation’ for more insights.
Because one’s avatars have a much more universal application, people will be less likely to exhibit behavior that would lower their reputation.
It’s important to note that these do not and should not have to be tied to real-life identities! They can still be ‘anonymous’ (one person can even have many avatars), but the cross-platform nature of avatars will make it easier to hold people accountable for their actions. Getting banned with an avatar that has accrued a lot of rep will hold more weight, especially if platforms require a certain level of rep to interact with the general public.
(In the interest of keeping platforms accessible and welcoming, people should still be able to interact with select private or public communities even without rep)
This is by no means a perfect idea, but it is likely better than the current state of things.
If we want to create a better internet and world, we need to create better virtual environments that benefit from the hundreds, if not thousands of years of experience we have building and living in them.
In fact, as I was writing this, there happened to be an entire 3-day ‘festival’ talking about this exact problem of virtual public spaces!
(I highly suggest you take a look at their research and sign up to their newsletter with the recap of everything)
Here are some of my favorite ideas mentioned:
- Build public, decentralized spaces that foster federations of small but diverse communities
- Design more intentionally and consciously in respect to thousands of years of human evolution
- Don’t be afraid to try radical new ideas to break out of the current limits
Thanks for reading!!
I’ll share examples of people building sites with spatial awareness (outside of games) in the next article. Furthermore, I’ll share concrete ideas for how we can build better social media through the use of ‘spatial media!’
Please hold that clap button and share this around if you appreciate these ideas. The more people that are thinking about this problem, the more likely we are to build a much better internet, and society. 😄
