Have you ever actually convinced someone of something on social media? I think I may have, once or twice, but it's by far not the most common outcome.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the importance of shared context in communication. It's a lot more difficult to get a point across when the person you're talking to can't relate it directly to their own prior experience. I've experienced this recently when trying to explain to a few friends how a hypothetical object-capability system for infra deployment might work. Several folks in my friend group are very well-acquainted with infra deployment tools (many of us are in the same field) but I'm the only one who's really dove into the ocap rabbit hole thus far. So we had a conversation in a chatroom in which I tried to explain how such a system could work, and I don't think I was really able to convey what I was getting at at that point.

This culminated in me writing a blog post walking through a prototype implementation. And this was much more successful! My friends still had some questions to clarify things afterwards, but I think the post was able to provide enough context to effectively convey the core concepts.

It's struck me since then that social networks focused on short-form communications, like microblogging or various comment systems, don't really provide that much context. This can be okay if you share enough context with everyone who might read or respond to what you're writing (this might be the case in a small or topic-focused chatroom), but I feel like it frequently causes problems when you don't (and I would argue this is the general case).

The same thing comes up outside technical topics too. In active transportation advocacy, I've felt that conversations on social networks have been almost entirely unproductive, and I think I know partly why this is. Even assuming for a moment that everyone in a conversation is acting in good faith and genuinely trying to understand each other (which certainly isn't always true, but let's pretend for now that it is), it's impossible to fully describe what you're aiming for in a short post to someone without your context. They say a picture is worth a thousand words:

(Credit: BicycleDutch)

...but I think that only applies if you really take the time to study it. With some time I could explain in more detail, for example, that the continuous sidewalk and cycle track at the intersection on this street make it safer and more pleasant to walk or bike on. I could tell you that this protected cycle track makes it possible for both children and those relying on mobility scooters to get around independently in a way that isn't possible where I live. I could tell you that the land-use pattern in the immediate area is part of why this particular street works the way it does, and that you may need to modify the design to work in another context.

But there's yet more that I could elaborate on, and such brief comments probably don't mean much to you if you haven't spent much time looking at this stuff. And I couldn't talk about all of this at once; the above paragraph is already too long to fit in a tweet or a toot. And we could have reasonable disagreements about all of the above, but those would also be too long to fit in a tweet or toot!

What's more, as you're scrolling through most social media platforms today, what you're typically seeing is a series of short takes unrelated to each other. You only have a small amount of space to say what you want to say, and posts to a large extent have to stand on their own. They can and will be shared independently without their surrounding context - potentially with some snarky commentary attached, if the platform allows for that. (This is related to the idea of context collapse.)

You can of course chain multiple messages together (a la threads on Twitter or Mastodon, or just rapid messages in a chatroom), but people will potentially see each message as you're sending them. This adds a constraint on time on top of the constraint on space: you have less time to think about each message you're sending, and others seeing the message have less time to think about how they'll respond to each one if they're aiming to respond in real time. And thinking less carefully about what you're about to say is a good way to get yourself into trouble. There's a reason a common piece of advice for avoiding conflict is to slow down and listen!

On a related note, a Vermont-based social network named Front Porch Forum seems to have landed on something that might work pretty well, with delays before new messages and replies show up on the site:

Front Porch Forum structures its conversations differently than the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Nextdoor, slowing the pace down to prompt users to think a bit more about what they’re saying before their community. There’s no news feed with rapid-fire updates to check every couple of minutes. You can fire off an angry reply to a neighbor over something they wrote — but it will show up a day later on the site. Wood-Lewis said that they’ve had more than one user write to the site directly, asking to retract a comment written in haste. It’s harder to get in a flame war when each exchange takes 24 hours to respond to, at least on the platform itself.

(How a Vermont social network became a model for online communities, The Verge)

All of the above is especially a problem when you're talking about something political, because potentially you and the people you're talking to (or who are reading your posts) have very different views!

This has all lead me to believe that short-form social media is probably antithetical to productive conversations. It doesn't give you the space to sufficiently expound on what you're saying, instead encouraging what are effectively soundbites. And it doesn't give you the time to think about your response before sending it.

As Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message. I think it's as true now as it ever was.

So what can we do about it? Well, I certainly don't have all the answers, but I have some possible suggestions at least.

At an individual and a collective level, retreating to more long-form styles of communication might help to some extent. It's part of why I restarted blogging recently: I feel like it gives me more space to think about and develop ideas than you otherwise find on social media. If more of us started blogging again and posting less on social media, maybe it would help us be more thoughtful online.

And I think those of us working on social networking systems in any capacity need to think a lot more carefully about what behaviors the systems we're building encourage. Maybe we can try incorporating more friction at certain points, like delaying messages for a day as seen on Front Porch Forum. Maybe we should build more systems to help local or close-knit communities and less that combine everyone's messages into a single global context.

And maybe we can build up a body of knowledge about what sorts of social dynamics that different designs lead to, to help future designers avoid some of the mistakes of the past.

I don't know, I think it's worth a shot!