12 Lessons from WT:Social

Growth has tapered off significantly on WT:Social, the news focused social network from Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame. Usability remains a huge problem. There’s a lot of spam and other noise. It’s still early days, and things may well improve over time, but it’s hard to be optimistic.

So now’s a good time to take a step back and look at what can be learned from the experience so far. Over the years, I’ve done posts like this with Mastodon, Diaspora, Google+, and other social networks. This time, I’m working on news focused social network software myself, so some of these lessons are likely to be especially relevant for me.

To start with, here’s a few I discussed in my 2017 Mastodon post (where I noted “we’ve seen them before with Dreamwidth, Diaspora, StatusNet, Gnu Social, Pinboard, Ello, and others”) that are worth reiterating once again:

A lot of people want an alternative to corporate-owned ad-funded social networks.
A small team of developers can get something usable out quickly.
There’s interest across the world, not just in the U.S.

Moving on to some new lessons ….

People like the idea of working together to help fight disinformation. Perhaps the most encouraging takeaway from the WT:Social experience so far is that a lot of people understand that disinformation is a problem — want to help do something about it. True, WT:Social’s “everybody can edit anything” approach doesn’t work well; no surprises there. Still, it’s worth exploring other approaches involving more nuanced collaboration between paid professionals and “the crowd” (with training available, and perhaps some kind of Slashdot-like meta-moderation), all assisted by solid tools. [1]
There’s a good opportunity for a “better reddit”. Jimmy positioned WT:Social as a Facebook alternative, but as I discussed in Why is an “intellectual dark web” site at the top of my feed? , it’s currently more like reddit … and that’s not a bad thing! On many topics, reddit’s links are mediocre (or worse) and provide very limited perspectives. reddit discussions are often toxic. And while there are alternatives with some traction to Facebook and Twitter (MeWe and Mastodon both have millions of users), none of them have the same news focus as reddit.
Design and usability are key. People understand that a new site won’t be as polished as reddit or Facebook, but if it’s too confusing they generally won’t invite their friends [2] — and are likely to stop coming back. WT:Social would have been better off starting with less functionality (did they really need hashtags right off the bat?) and putting more attention on design and usability.
Help people have good initial experiences. My first impression of WT:Social included getting asked for money, seeing off-topic links that happened to be at the top of the default subwikis at the time, and then getting spam in my email. Hooray! And pity the new user who found stuff confusing: for quite a while, there was no easy way of asking for help or finding the FAQ. Fortunately, it’s not hard to improve “first use experiences” through techniques like better design, simple onboarding screens, and easy access to resources and support. [3]
Focus on accessibility up front or it will be a problem. WT:Social is a horrible experience using a screen-reader, and has many blatant accessibility bugs like missing alt-text and low color contrast that free site analyzers like Axe and WAVE can detect. Many other social networks also don’t do a great job here either, so there’s a big opportunity for a new offering to distinguish itself and a large audience of people whose needs aren’t being met today.
Focus on harassment up front or it will be a problem. WT:Social is filled with mechanisms that are optimized for harassers, doesn’t allow muting or blocking, and doesn’t even make it easy to find the code of conduct or anti-harassment policy. Similarly, Wikipedia, Diaspora, Google+, Mastodon, and Twitter didn’t pay attention to harassment up-front, with the expected results. Y’know, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Think about how different cultural norms and legal systems will interact, including difficult areas relating to content that different people view as art, “porn”, and/or “NSFW”. There are opportunities for innovation here: Mastodon worked through some similar issues, and came up with interesting techniques like tailorable content warnings and a mechanism to deal with images that are legal in some geographies but not others.
Design for everybody, not just the kind of people the founder usually interacts with. Lessons #3-7 are all examples of this (and I talked about another one, the term “subwiki”, in a previous post).[4] I’ve made the same mistake myself. Fortunately, it’s not hard to do better: work with a broad range of people, including those who are marginalized in different ways than you, from the very beginning — and listen to their ideas, suggestions, and feedback.
Consider building on an existing discussion platform instead of rolling your own. WT:Social’s initial discussion mechanism was pretty basic, and even after a couple of months of enhancements the lack of notifications can make it hard to have a good discussion there. Does it make sense to leverage existing open-source commenting platforms like Coral Project or forum software like Discourse, NodeBB, or Vanilla Forums?
Consider leveraging open standards based on decentralized identity and verifiable credentials. Decentralized architectures are more complex but also a much better match for the real world. Credit for this one goes to Kaliya Young (aka IdentityWoman) on Twitter, where she also provided some links to reading material.
There’s a big opportunity for anti-oppressive social networks in general. Today’s large social networks welcome racists, misogynists, alt-righters, and other bigots; Facebook goes even farther, siding with authoritarians and promoting genocide. Most emerging alternatives either appeal even more blatantly to fascists (gab.ai) or strive for “neutrality” (WT:Social, MeWe, Minds). [5] Dreamwidth continues to be a shining exception, and Mastodon’s early positioning as “Twitter without Nazis” is another (and there’s a lot to be learned from its challenges). Still it’s clear that here’s a very large under-served market here.
It’s time for a different approach. What would a news focused social media site look like if it were grounded in design justice and built on best practices and research into anti-harassment, content moderation, online extremism, and amplifying marginalized voices? It’s hard to know, because there aren’t any high-profile examples of this. Seems like an opportunity to me!

One of the things that really struck me as I was working on this list is really striking about WT:Social is how they’ve repeated a lot of mistakes other social networks (including Wikipedia) have made. But even though WT:Social hasn’t taken advantage of its opportunities to learn from other social networks, other social networks can learn from WT:Social.

I’m sure there are other good lessons as well – or aspects of these I’ve overlooked. If you’ve have thoughts, please share them!

Thanks to Deborah, Eve, and everybody else who gave feedback on earlier versions of this post!

[1] As I was working on this post, I stumbled on Amy X Zhang’s thesis, which has some intriguing ideas and prototypes on the tools front. Starbird et. al.’s paper on disinformation as collaborative work, is also relevant. How to apply collaborative approaches to countering disinformation?

[2] The responses to Jimmy’s recent Why Inviting Friends Is Important highlight this.

[3] Indeed, WT:Social has recently made some progress here, thanks to Linda Blanchard’s excellent work on the Beginner’s Guide subwiki.

[4] Another example: the way new users automatically follow Jimmy Wales. Jimmy’s said that this is done to make it more convenient for him to broadcast messages for everybody on the site … but there are plenty of other ways to accomplish this. I get it that Jimmy wants to share the news when Rush’s drummer dies or a Turkish court rules in favor of Wikipedia, but it’s a classic case of assuming that users who haven’t expressed an interest in classic rock or Wikipedia share share his interests.

[5] I talked at length about “neutrality” in WT:Social will have to pick a side. Jimmy’s comment in the discussion on WT:Social is illuminating: he thinks people are “yearning” for technology that “fosters the kind of social activity that promotes truth and civil discourse.” For more on why “civility” is so problematic, see what Ijeoma Oluo, Jamilah Lemieux, Kitanya Harrison, @sassycrass, and @AngryBlackLady have to say about it.

WT:Social will have to pick a side

Over 400,000 people have signed up for WT:Social, Jimmy Wales’ news focused social network. The potential is clearly there: I’ve found some high-quality links on WT:Social that I hadn’t seen elsewhere. There’s also a lot of spam and other kinds of noise, along with usability problems and harassment … still, it’s early days yet; these issues may well get addressed over time. And the problem Jimmy’s trying to solve is a real one: a lot of people want a better way of getting and discussing the news that avoids the clickbait headlines and disinformation that are so common on today’s social networks.

There’s certainly an opportunity here. Even though WT:Social’s often been described as an alternative to Facebook, it’s current functionality is very reddit-like: people can share links to “subwikis” (analogous to “subreddits”) that focus on different topics, and discuss them in comments. Some people love reddit, but there are many topics where reddit’s links are mediocre (or worse) and provide very limited perspectives. Not only that, reddit discussions are often toxic. So it made a lot of sense for Jimmy to do an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) on reddit, as a way of getting the word out and recruiting new users.

The AMA was certainly interesting, with Jimmy answering quite a few questions — including one from me, which I’ll talk about more below. I don’t spend a lot of time on reddit, so it was also a vivid reminder to me of just how bad discussions on reddit often are. At the same time, though, it also highlighted one of WT:Social’s biggest challenges.

One of the first questions Jimmy answered was from me, based on an experience I had on WT:Social a couple of days ago, where the software recommended I join a subwiki dedicated to attacks on trans and non-binary people.

My question had two parts. Was that okay? If not, how will keep things like this from happening in the future? Jimmy replied

I’m sure it was deleted quickly – if not let me know. That’s totally unacceptable.

The key to wikis is genuine community control – putting the power in the hands of the quality members of the community rather than having to wait for someone to do something. As we grow, we plan to have more and more tools to allow that kind of control.

It hadn’t been deleted. So I followed up with a link, and Jimmy (or perhaps another admin) immediately deleted it. To me, that’s a very good thing. But not everybody agreed. For example:

Many of us really don’t want to see anti-trans hate speech — I agree with Jimmy that it’s totally unacceptable. Others think that saying trans people’s existence is “unscientific and unrealistic” and “harmful to society” (as this subwiki did) is just a “non-leftist view of gender”, not an an attack on trans and non-binary people; to them. Asking trans and non-binary people to “collaborate kindly” with bigots who think they or their friends shouldn’t exist isn’t a solution. And who winds up getting treated as a “quality member” of the community?

Another question Jimmy answered, this one from sridc, highlights another aspect of the challenge. The question cited my previous post, Why is an “intellectual dark web” site at the top of my feed? , as an example of “victimhood culture” (I feel seen!) and asked how WT:Social would “encourage members to focus on the content, instead of discrediting a news source.” Here’s Jimmy’s response:

My view is that collaboration and kindness as a part of the culture is a big part of it.

One reason we have a victimhood culture (which goes in many directions) on social media is that you typically have only 3 choices to deal with something awful: block the person so you don’t see them anymore (which doesn’t help the broader community), yell at the person (which is why so many places are poisonous), or report the person (into systems that don’t scale and get it wrong quite a lot).

Better is genuine community control in the wiki way.

There was skepticism in the replies. JoeMobley complained that “the anti-trumpers get together and down-vote any message they object to.” Jimmy agreed that voting isn’t particularly helpful in many cases, and talked instead about a technique Wikipedia uses to try to get consensus. In response to that, sridc complained that his Wikipedia updates to the callout culture Wikipedia page had been edited out by three “leftist editors” who rejected his “reliable sources.” sridc also talked gave another example of “leftists,” relating to a page about antifa, and to bolster his case provided a link to an article from … Breitbart.

Looks like not everybody agrees on what’s a “reliable source.”*

Similarly, in the reddit discussion, funknut described Quillette as “a glorified blog for the alt-right to trade misinformation about the humble city of Portland.” Others objected to this message, and got together and down-voted it. It’s not just an issue with voting, though. On WT:Social, the Long Reads subwiki — which everybody joins by default — has featured a series of links from Quillette and other “intellectual dark web” sites, as well as critiques like Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism and 21 Racial Microaggressions You Hear On A Daily Basis. The discussions there are … very reddit-like. As I said in my previous post:

Y’know, there are a lot of reasons people are looking for alternatives, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard people say “the real problem with Facebook and Reddit today is that there’s not enough arguing about white supremacy and the ‘intellectual dark web’.”

When the community is split on an issue that people feel passionately about, “community control” isn’t a good enough answer. In response to another question, Jimmy shared his viewpoint that “Out of every 1,000 people I think 990 of them are perfectly nice and wonderful.” Whatever the numbers are (your mileage may vary) — and no matter how “nice and wonderful” they are to Jimmy — anti-trans bigots, white supremacists, fascists, and their supporters can ruin a site’s experience for everybody else.

To have any chance of succeeding, WT:Social will to have to pick a side.

* For what it’s worth, Facebook sides with sridc — they’re paying Breitbart a bunch of money for the right include their articles as part of their new “high-quality news” page. But that’s part of the reason that so many people I know are looking for Facebook alternatives, so … let’s just say there’s a range of opinions here, and gab.ai already provides an alternative for people who don’t think Facebook favors the Breitbart’s of the world enough.

Thanks to Deborah and everybody else who gave feedback on earlier versions of this post.

Why is “intellectual dark web” content at the top of my feed? Thoughts on WT:Social

On Friday, I signed up for WT:Social, a news focused social network from Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame. There’s a lot of buzz about WT:Social, and membership is soaring — up from just a few thousand users at the beginning of the month to almost 100,000 when I signed up two days ago. The waitlist is long, but if you get a paid account ($12.99/month or $100/year) you can skip the queue.

Since I’m also working on some news focused social network software, and so am interested to see how others approach the problem, I paid for a month. If you’re also developing social media software, there’s a lot to learn here, so it might be worth it for you as well.

Otherwise, save your money. [1]

Red flags from the beginning

There were some red flags from the beginning, starting with the lack of up-front information about a code of conduct, anti-harassment policy, or content guidelines. As Elisa Camhort Page said when we were discussing this

A site that welcomes any content is inevitably a site that welcomes harassment, hate speech, threats, and misinformation. You cannot stave off one if you will not take a stand on the other.

Yeah really. Eventually I discovered that the Terms and Conditions actually does link out to a Code of Conduct, as well as FAQs on Diversity and Ethics; from the dates on them, they seem to have been written for WT:Social’s previous incarnation as WikiTribune, but presumably they still apply. Still, most people won’t invest the effort to find these, and so won’t know what’s expected of them. It’s much better to make sure that people see these right up front — and explicitly agree to them.

Another immediately-obvious problem: the experience using a screen reader is really horrible. There’s no “skip navigation” link, so the initial experience on the page starts with reading out all the menus and recommended sub-wikis. Then when you finally get to a link, the title of the article is repeated multiple times, and it reads out the complete URL. Yikes.

Also, it doesn’t seem like WT:Social has really thought through about how people might try to game the system, let alone applied structured techniques like “social threat modeling” [2] For example, the notifications are all on by default — meaning new posts get sent to you via email What could possibly go wrong? Here’s a screenshot of some email I got (with the subwiki’s name blanked out).

In this particular case it was an accident [3] but you can certainly see how it could get abused. Mechanisms like this make it open season for spammers, harassers, propagandists, and other unsavory types.

If you have an account there, you can turn the notifications off by going to “My Account” and then “Edit Notifications”. The link https://wt.social/myaccount/notifications also works, at least for now … although, as Kathy Gill points out, the way the notification dialog uses red and green is problematic from an accessibility perspective. Here’s what the initial settings look like via Coblis, the color blindness simulator. Are they on or off?

Even though I’ve turned all the notifications off, I still see some when I check the site. Still, it’s a lot better than it was — and things aren’t showing up in my email.

It’s more like reddit than Facebook

Even though a lot of people are describing WT:Social as an alternative to Faecebook, it’s really a lot more like reddit. Links get organized into “subwikis”, which fill a similar role to reddit’s “subreddits”. You can browse a subwiki, comment on posts there, or join it (which lets you submit links of your own).

The word “subwiki” doesn’t seem like a great choice to me. Subwiki’s aren’t wikis, and they aren’t part of a wiki. In my own informal survey nobody found it a particularly appealing name. But, it probably sounded good to Jimmy Wales and the people he hangs out with.

Your home page is a “feed” of the most recent posts, along with the most recent comments, from any of the subwikis that you’ve joined. There are also some “global links” that the people running the site decide everybody gets to see (no way to opt out yet, sorry, and no information about how they decide on which links to send out). There’s also the additional twist of collaborative wiki-like editing of posts, although I haven’t been able to get it to work yet. [4]

It mostly works. I was able to figure out how to make a post and share a link myself (although I had to hit refresh to see whether it had succeeded or not). I like exploring new social networks, so I hunted around found the FAQ and Known Bugs list. [5] Putting my civil liberties hat on, I created the Section 215 subwiki to share links about the upcoming USA FREEDOM Act reauthorization battle, and seeded it with a post. Then I sent invitation links to a couple of friends.

This was, in retrospect, a mistake. My apologies. If you’ve also signed up, and are considering inviting other people, please read this footnote first.[6]

How I spent my Friday evening

A few hours later one of the friends I had sent an invitation link to asked me

“Why is there an article from Quillette at the top of my WT:Social feed?”

Good question. I went back to check WT:social again and there was an article from Quillette at the top of my feed as well. WTF?

For those of you who don’t know Quillette, it’s an online magazine usually described a a part of the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW), which also includes other prominent members like Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and Jonathan Haidt. Like others in the IDW, Quillette is polarizing.[7] Some people see it as upholding values of free speech against the onslaught of SJWs and snowflakes. Others see it as … not the kind of content they want to be confronted with unexpectedly on a Friday night.

Most of my friends fall into the second category, so I hurriedly circled back to the people I had shared invitations with and let them know that they might be in for an unpleasant surprise if they signed up. Then I looked to see what was going on.

Before we go into that, though, think for a moment about the effect this is likely to have on WT:Social. Lots of people are looking for alternatives to Facebook et al. When somebody like my friend goes to check out a new site and the first thing they see is IDW content … they’re likely to leave, and not come back.

And people who hear about this and don’t want to deal with IDW content might not even bother to check WT:Social out. When I’ve told other friends that if the sign up for Jimmy Wales’ new social network they they might well see IDW content at the top of their feed, their reaction is generally that they’ve got better things to do with their time.

Then again, there are plenty of people out there who actively like IDW content. They’re ones who are likely to stick around, and invite their friends. By placing this content so prominently, WT:Social is going to attract them — and drive away the people like me and most of my friends, who would rather not be confronted with IDW content on a Friday night. This seems like good news for IDW fans who feel like they’re being oppressed by Facebook, Twitter, and reddit. But as we’ll see, even for them, there are downsides.

Why should IDW fans have all the fun?

Once I looked into it, I realized that what had happened to my friend was fairly straightforward:

When they signed up for WT:Social, they were automatically joined to the “Long Reads” subwiki, (along with a handful of other subwikis).
When somebody shared IDW content to Long Reads, all 16,000 people in the “Long Reads” subwiki (including people like my friend, who were automatically joined when they signed up) saw it at the top of their feed. It’s quite possible some or all of them got it in their email as well.

It turned out that I had been automatically signed up for the “Long Reads” subwiki too. When I left it, the Quillette article vanished from my feed.

But wait a second, why should IDW fans have all the fun? So I rejoined “Long Reads” and shared Jessie Daniels’ Twitter and White Supremacy: A Love Story. When I asked another friend to sign up, here’s what they saw at the top of their feed.

Of course, criticisms of large tech companies for helping white supremacists are also polarizing. Some people see this as … not the kind of content they want to be confronted with on a Friday night. One WT:social member appeared particularly incensed that this link was in his feed, and replied with multiple comments objecting to this “obvious nonsense” and “BS sensationalist headline”. And when I refreshed my front page, there was also a heated debate on the Quillette post as well.

Since there isn’t any way to hide posts from your feed, or prevent WT:social from showing you the five most recent comments on every post, now there was something for everybody!

Conservatives looking for alternatives because they feel like they’re being oppressed by corporate social media sites will be immediately irritated by “obvious nonsense.” Why use WT:Social instead of alt-right fave gab.ai?
People looking for alternatives because they feel like corporate social media sites are siding with white supremacists may get a better first impression — but then as soon as they scroll down they’ll see IDW content. Thanks but no thanks.
And people from across the political spectrum will get to see bloviating in comments – with no way to turn it off. Y’know, there are a lot of reasons people are looking for alternatives, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard people say “the real problem with Facebook and Reddit today is that there’s not enough arguing about white supremacy and the ‘intellectual dark web’.”

A good learning experience

People are continuing to flock to WT:Social: 75,000 new members over the last two days, and the wait list is over 100,000. The potential is there; for example, somebody posted a link to a story about sexism in Wikipedia, and there were some really great comments. There’s interesting links on some of the subwikis as well. But judging from the discussion on the site, most people signing up aren’t having good experiences.

Admittedly, it’s early days yet. WT:Social could learn from this, take a step back, and redesign their system yet again to pay more attention to things like harassment, abuse, and hate speech. I’m not holding my breath, but we shall see. I haven’t deleted my account yet[8] , so if you want to friend or follow me, here I am.

More importantly, WT:Social is not the only game in town. Their initial floundering is also a learning experience for other nascent social networks and news-focused social media. True, many of the lessons aout what not to do could also have been learned from Wikipedia’s own history and projects like Mastodon and Diaspora that also set out to provide free speech-oriented alternatives to ad-funded, surveillance capitalism social networks. Still, it’s a good reminder.

And fortunately, there are positive lessons as well. One big takeaway is the huge amount of interest in WT:Social (as well as MeWe, the privacy-friendly Facebook alternative, which is also currently getting a lot of signups[9]). A couple of years ago I wrote about a potential tipping point. Since then, the pent-up demand is continuing to grow — and not just with techies; I’ve seen a lot of activists I know talking about WT:Social.

Another takeaway is that it’s time for a different approach. What would a social media site look like if it built on best practices and research into anti-harassment, content moderation, online extremism, and amplifying marginalized voices?

Hopefully we’ll start to see some examples of this over the next few months.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Shireen, Kaliya, Shasta, Kathy, Elisa, Victoria, Jim, Vicki, Jim, Soren, Deborah and everybody else for the valuable discussion about WT:Social and feedback on earlier versions of this post!

Footnotes

[1] I certainly don’t mind paying for ad-free social media; I’ve had paid subscriptions to Dreamwidth for years, and support a couple of Mastodon instances on Patreon. But these are all sites that I started using for free and have had good experiences — and they are asking for a lot less than WT:Social. Dragos Ruiu describes describes WT:Social’s approach as a “fee extortion waiting queue” which is pretty much how I feel about it too. Also, Wales’ track record is not encouraging; see for example Mathew Ingram’s Wikipedia’s co-founder wanted to let readers edit the news. What went wrong? and Julia Jacobs’ Wikipedia Isn’t Officially a Social Network. But the Harassment Can Get Ugly.

[2] Shireen Mitchell and I discussed social threat modeling in our 2017 SXSW talk. There’s an overview of related work in The Winds of Change are in the Air. My personal experience is that taking a social threat modeling approach early in a project is incredibly valuable. Like so many other security-related issues, this kind of stuff is very hard and expensive to try to patch in after the fact.

[3] Somebody had shared a link to a story from the Financial Times, quite the one about WT:Social, that turned out to be paywalled. So when WT:Social tried get the title of the article, it instead got the paywall message. The software didn’t bother check for this, but just posted it blithely, and sent out the email update to everybody following the subreddit who hadn’t yet turned off notifications. The person who had posted the link realized their mistake, and deleted it quickly … but it was too late: the email had already gone out.

[4] Implementation bugs aside, I don’t understand how this is even supposed to work. The impression I have is that you can set up posts that anybody can edit and people will then converge on a neutral point of view summary. What could possibly go wrong?

[5] Which has some scary stuff, like not being able to deny a friend request.

[6] Invitation links have some very unexpected behavior: everybody who accepts via the same link gets connected as friends, with no option to approve. Once again, what could possibly go wrong?

[7] For example, when I shared an earlier draft of this on Facebook, somebody took exception to my classifying Jordan Peterson as “a mainstay” of the IDW. So for a while the Facebook thread — which was supposed to be discussing WT:Social — turned into an argument about whether or not Peterson aligns with white supremacists, how misogynistic and anti-trans he is or isn’t, what some see as a pattern of passing off bullshit as “scientific studies”, and so on.

[8] Although I’ve cancelled future payments

[9] Of course, MeWe has challenges of its own. See Inside MeWe, Where Anti-Vaxxers and Conspiracy Theorists Thrive.