Quantity Is Socially Determined

As a child, I once heard a sermon built around the following story. A preacher is hired to minister to a church in a town he has never been to. Everyone is anxious to see whether he is good at delivering sermons. Luckily, he knocks it out of the park with an incredibly touching sermon about loving each other and treating each other with charity. The town is well pleased.

But the next week he delivers the exact same sermon, word for word. His congregants are a little puzzled, but they assume it is a glitch and that once he has settled in he will deliver some new sermons.

But the next week he does it again. Now everyone is worried. Is this guy a lunatic? Or is he a one-hit wonder who took years to hone this one good sermon, but who can't actually deliver new material?

The fourth week he does it again. The worshipers go into open revolt. They approach him after the service and demand to know why he is delivering the same sermon over and over.

"Well, I had another sermon ready to go for the second week, but throughout the week I saw that people weren't being loving and charitable, at least not as much as the Bible teaches them to be. So my policy is to deliver each sermon until you really hear it."

I thought about this sermon (the sermon about a sermon) because this is a little bit how social media works. There are a lot of things said on social media that are not really objectionable in isolation. What makes them annoying is quantity. "Oh, so you only care about sexual harassment because you have daughters?" The first time you see this on Twitter, it is provocative and might inspire some reflection. By the time you've seen it 100 times, it begins to feel rude and pointless, and by the time you've seen it 1,000 times you wonder why people are such tiresome jerks.

But of course no individual controls the overall quantity or frequency at which a tweet (or type of tweet) is posted. That's a collective decision that emerges from the decisions of millions of individuals (the people doing the tweeting, and the people retweeting them, and the people following either of those). And for some of those individuals, it's a novel (or near-novel) tweet! Everyone should see that tweet once. But no one should see it very often.

This suggests an architectural problem, but no architectural solution occurs to me. You could try to use clever machine learning or something to shield people from too many near-identical tweets, but that doesn't sound workable. You can ameliorate it somewhat by giving people the ability to tailor their experiences, but you probably lose a lot of serendipitous interactions that way.

And I think the example I gave above is one of the mildest ones I've seen. The experience a lot of people, especially women, have is that at any moment a torrent of criticism can come out of nowhere. Some of it is abusive and unacceptable at any level, but a lot of it is criticism that, at an appropriate level, might be tolerable and even healthy. But it's not experienced that way, it's experienced as a deluge.