Shaped into SNARF to spread
I should imagine many people who read Thought Shrapnel also read Stephen Downes' OLDaily, so may already have seen this by Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed. What interested me was the acronym SNARF, which is as good as any for being a short way of differentiating between centralised, for-profit, highly algorithmic social networks, and their opposite.
The quotation below comes from the The Anti-SNARF Manifesto, which is linked from the sign-up page for a new social network which features an illustration of an island. That’s interesting symbolism; I wonder if it will use a protocol such as ActivityPub (which underpins Fediverse apps such as Mastodon) or ATProto (which is used by Bluesky)? It would be a bit of a ballsy move to start completely from scratch.
Given the number of boosts and favourites I’ve had on my Fediverse post asking people to add a content warning for things relating to US politics, I’d think that moderation is something which is a potential differentiator. People neither want a completely straight reverse-chronological feed, it would seem, but nor do they want to feel manipulated by an opaque algorithm. I’ll be following this with interest and I have, of course, signed up to be notified when it launches.
SNARF stands for Stakes/Novelty/Anger/Retention/Fear. SNARF is the kind of content that evolves when a platform asks an AI to maximize usage. Content creators need to please the AI algorithms or they become irrelevant. Millions of creators make SNARF content to stay in the feed and earn a living.
We are all familiar with this kind of content, especially those of us who are chronically online. Content creators exaggerate stakes to make their content urgent and existential. They manufacture novelty and spin their content as unprecedented and unique. They manipulate anger to drive engagement via outrage. They hack retention by withholding information and promising a payoff at the end of a video. And they provoke fear to make people focus with urgency on their content. Every piece of content faces ruthless Darwinian competition so only SNARF has the ability to be successful, even if it is inaccurate, hateful, fake, ethically dubious, and intellectually suspect.
This dynamic is causing many different types of content to evolve into versions of the same thing. Once you understand this you can see how much of our society, culture, and politics are downstream from big tech’s global SNARF machines. The political ideas that break through, from both Democrats and Republicans, need to be shaped into SNARF to spread. Through this lens, MAGA and “woke” are the same thing! They both are versions of political ideas that spread through raw negative emotion, outrage, and novelty. The news stories and journalism that break through aren’t the most important stories, but rather the stories that can be shaped into SNARF. This is why it seems like every election, every new technology, every global conflict has the potential to end our way of life, destroy democracy, or set off a global apocalypse! It is not a coincidence that no matter what the message is, it always takes the same form, namely memetically optimized media that maximizes stakes and novelty, provokes anger, drives retention, and instills fear. The result is an endless stream of addictive content that leaves everyone feeling depressed, scared, and dissatisfied.
[…]
But there is some hope, despite the growing revenue and usage of the big social media platforms. We are beginning to see the first cracks that suggest there might be an opportunity to fight back. A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the majority of respondents would prefer to live in a world where TikTok and Instagram did not exist! There was generally a feeling of being compelled to use these projects because of FOMO, social pressure, and addiction. A large portion of users said they would pay money for TikTok and Instagram to not exist, suggesting these products have negative utility for many people. This challenges traditional economics which posits that consumers choosing a product means it provides positive utility. Instead, social media companies are using AI to manipulate consumer behavior for their own ends, not the benefit of the consumer. This aligns with what these researchers suspect is happening, namely that “companies introduce features that exacerbate non-user utility and diminish consumer welfare, rather than enhance it, increasing people’s need for a product without increasing the utility it delivers to them.”
Source: The Anti-SNARF Manifesto
Image: cropped from the background image on the above website