Why Radiopaper?
Radiopaper’s mission is to be the best possible home for the internet’s most interesting conversations.
Everything we do follows from that.
In this post I’ll talk about one thing a social network needs to support interesting conversations: it must provide an emotionally tolerable environment for interesting people.
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There are a lot of interesting people on the internet. By “on the internet,” I mean they have a public presence of some kind online: they share their thoughts, in some internet medium or another, and their interestingness is publicly accessible. Plenty of people use email, read the news online, etc, without being “on the internet” in this sense.
There are an even larger number of interesting people who aren’t on the internet. Why?
Various reasons. Some people are too busy with their non-internet lives. Some people don’t like screens. But one very big reason is that the internet can be pretty hellish.
I admire the willingness of the interesting-online people to put up with this hellishness. Some of them possess a special force field that repels it. They walk through the fire and are not burned. Patio11 is just the right mixture of friendly, informed, and irrelevant-to-the-culture-war such that his posts have a very high ratio of real engagement to random vitriol. Visa defangs trolls by responding to them sincerely. Leah Libresco Sargeant is insistently, even defiantly, oriented to truth-in-kindness.
The force field is a skill, though, and evidently it takes a lot of time to cultivate. You need to put in the hours. Interesting people who only half live on the internet haven’t put in the hours, and they never develop one.
There is another strategy, which is to have thick skin, and just power through the misery. Some interesting people online do this well. God bless Ross Douthat for logging on now and then in spite of his replies.
Thick skin is also a resource, however, and it is not evenly distributed. Not everyone can or should be an emotional rhinoceros.
Lots of interesting people don’t have a force field, and lots of interesting people aren’t rhinoceroses. They are just burned by the hellfire. Those people stay off the internet (or they should, at least).
That’s a shame. I know some of those people, and some of them are the most interesting people I know.
Radiopaper is for those people. Not only for them — it’s for anyone who wants to talk about stuff online without getting mad / losing their soul — but it is especially for them. Actually, what it’s most for is for introducing them, the interesting-offline, to us.
There are so many interesting people who don’t use social media. Slavoj Zizek is not online. Carlos Eire, Yale historian and the author of a recent book that went quasi-viral on Twitter, is not on Twitter. Noam Chomsky and Donna Tartt are not active on any social networks.
I don’t know if they will join Radiopaper (and they don’t have to join Radiopaper to be involved in Radiopaper conversations; more on that later), but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands of people I’ve never heard of, who, if they were on Twitter, would be among the most reliably fascinating posters on the site. I want to lure those people out of their offline nooks and into conversation with the rest of us. Radiopaper is designed to do that.
So, how do you build a non-hellish social network?
Not with a moderation policy, for one thing. It’s an easy mistake to make: just spray more herbicide on the weeds, and the garden will grow. But there are deep problems with moderation as a way of shaping network character. Most importantly, we do not know what the weeds are. The interestingness of social media arises from discovering new ideas. At its best, social media is a memetic wet market. No one can predict in advance what kinds of weird/horrible/amazing hybrids will emerge from the unsanitary chaos.1
So, Radiopaper has a fairly normal moderation policy. What makes Radiopaper different from other social networks is different mechanisms.
It’s a bit weird how little innovation there has been in the basic mechanisms of online discussion since Facebook invented the feed and the like button. Over the last ten years there has been a heated public argument about how social networks should be moderated, but these issues are deeply political, and difficult to resolve. It is much, much easier to tweak the mechanisms of online discussion.
I’ll get into the details of how these mechanisms work in my next post, but I’ll end this one with an analogy:
It used to be that to travel from one end of the United States to the other required extreme personal hardiness. Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea could do it, but the average person certainly could not. Most people who tried to do what they did would simply have died along the way.
This meant that, back then, only adventurers could make the trek. Lewis/Clark/Sacagawea were explorers, not geologists, poets, botanists, or prospectors. Right now, everyone on social media is a bit of an adventurer. There are plenty of scientists and poets, of course, but if they’re really online they have a bit of adventurer thrown into their personalities, too.
The first properly trained geologist to see the Columbia River Gorge arrived there some time after the Lewis and Clark expedition. The way had gotten a little easier. A bit less personal hardiness was required. As the hardiness requirement eased up, the ability to get geological knowledge on site increased.
I’d like to get some more geologists, etc, on site, which in this case is online. I’d like Radiopaper to be like the first railway over the Rockies. Where once only wilderness-hardened adventurers traveled, now you can drink coffee in the dining car.
Other issues: Moderation doesn’t scale. It has fundamentally unfavorable unit economics, compared to posting.
Also, the collateral damage caused by moderation is severe. Moderation is indeed like herbicide. Sometimes you absolutely do need it, but it’s still poison. Groups of adult humans moderate themselves. This is one of the things that makes us who we are — something you have to learn as a kid in order to grow up. Sometimes this moderation breaks down, and some kind of higher power or force is necessary, but invariably this process destroys good social dynamics, too. “Just spray more roundup” does not get you a healthy, diverse ecosystem, and neither does just ramping up the moderation.