Comment by pfraze | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pfraze | Hacker News Reader

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Going to reshare a comment I made 3 days ago

Authenticity is dependent on the rules of social-media. You believe the information is authentic if you believe the rules of the game are being followed. These controversies are related to breakdowns in either the rules or in the quality of outcome that the rules are giving us. "Russian bots" are a rules issue, a state actor manipulating the 1-person-1-voice assumption of the system. Individual misinformation by conspiracy theorists, credulous or otherwise, are an outcome issue. They feed into each other and are difficult to disentangle.

I would argue the censorship debate is an indicator of game-rule collapse in social media. The platforms are reaching for top down control because they can't cook up a better way to reduce fraud and misinformation. As you say, this method reduces the overall authenticity of the platforms and counteracts the intent of the censorship, and thus you get game-rule collapse.

If somebody's playing a basketball game and one team is dominating the other, you don't solve it by having the refs take points away from one of the teams. You adjust the rules of the game to keep it competitive.

I never played EVE Online, but a friend of mine told me a fascinating story. When players exploited a "loophole" in the rules, the game didn't change the rules. They introduced new tools.

Mining is an inherently risky operation, because mining ships are poorly armored, and generally defenseless. One risk is that someone can destroy your ship, and steal your hard worked for cargo. However, attacking someone in a civilized system would brand the attacker as a pirate, and NPC police would instantly warp in to execute justice. Even if they were able to escape, it would be difficult to return.

The pirates got clever, though. What if we were to load up a ship with explosive material, fly next to a mining ship, and detonate? The mining vessel would still be destroyed, but since it's an "accident", it won't summon the police. A partner in crime can scoop up the debris, and we can share the profits.

Now, EVE admins could have simply said, this is cheating, and you can report players who do this to our administration. But EVE has a famously hands-off approach to their game, to the extent that when a clan decided to declare war on a high traffic area, the administrators thanked them for the heads up, and promised to allocate additional server resources to handle the load.

Instead, EVE created a new class of ship that would prevent warping within a certain range of your vessel. This would create a buffer zone between you and hostile pirates, giving you equal footing.

I may have some of the details wrong, but hopefully you can see the point I'm illustrating. One strategy is to say, "Trying to circumvent the rules of the platform will result in a ban." However, this requires a moderation team. Furthermore, such decisions are subjective, and even the moderators can be gamed.

And finally, the spammers have an asymmetric advantage that Facebook will simply never be able to beat. Posting something is easy. Identifying things to take down is hard, and requires ten moderators to every one spammer.

Facebook should take a lesson from EVE Online. Instead of setting up censorship rules they can neither enforce or maintain, they should invest their energy into introducing game mechanics that accomplish the goal for them.

So in effect, yes -- I definitely agree!

While you're correct about the general philosophy of EVE, your example is incorrect. Evading police retribution is one of the few exploits explicitly forbidden by game rules, whether through a known or unknown exploit: https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/204873262-Kn...

> It is also considered an exploit to commit a criminal act and prevent ship loss to CONCORD by any means.

It's likely you're thinking of "suicide ganking", where the attacker is destroyed by police but still turns a profit due to the loot their partner can take from the victim.

You also mention ships capable of preventing warping. Those ship can only be used in "null sec" space, where there are no police ships. And even if they could be used in "high sec", preventing warping would not prevent a pirate from moving up to a target using normal engines and destroying them.

> your example is incorrect. Evading police retribution is one of the few exploits explicitly forbidden by game rules

But his example was not about evading police retribution. It was about mechanics related to self-protection from suicide ships.

Too bad that story isn't quite right, but a few tweaks and it's still a good anecdote.

I disagree about "quite" since almost every game mechanical statement in it is incorrect. I'd suggest focusing on the lack of social rules in the game, which allow for completely unrestricted scams, corporate espionage and treachery.

It might end up illustrating the opposite point though, since players who lose everything to these scams are often surprised and driven away, which is the opposite of what social networks want. In comparison, the possibility of losing a ship to a pirate is pretty clearly advertised.

To complete the analogy, I would think social networks should try to prevent the dogpiling and cancelation effect that shock and destroy people, while allowing them to be occasionally exposed to different opinions. Unfortunately it seems the opposite is more often the case, as in EVE.

The way to handle something like this is to turn the "surprised and driven away" into "prepared and motivated to solve it," which is what the anecdote conveyed^1. You give players tools to counter-act negative outcomes, and, in the case of social media, you do your best to make tools which amplify truth, signal, and positivity.

Suicide-ganking sounds like it needed something like a cooldown timer on picking up loot in high sec.

^1 Trying to move the conversation back into the useful territory - I'll concede the anecdote is likely to be wrong, since you know more about EVE than I do.

There is an interesting field in Game Theory called mechanism design, that exactly studies the things you talk about.

For example, game theorists have tried to find an electoral system that disincentivizes strategic voting. It turns out to be impossible for any system where certain fairness conditions holds. This is called Arrow's theorem.

It would be interesting to see if we can formulate Facebook's problem mathematically.

I really like the Wikipedia introduction to the article on Mechanism Design which describes it as taking:

"an objectives-first approach to designing economic mechanisms or incentives, toward desired objectives, in strategic settings, where players act rationally. Because it starts at the end of the game, then goes backwards, it is also called reverse game theory."

Also, I think you are overstating Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. It only applies to voting systems where voters can rank candidates, and where the result of the election is desired to be a consistent community-wide ranking of all the candidates.

Solid blogpost material there. It's often said that product designers should learn from economics, but competitive games have just as much to offer. Eugene Wei's "Status as a Service" [1] deserves a mention here; it's some very clear-eyed analysis of how social networks function as competitive games. (I must have re-read this post 5 times, in full.)

In a way, your comment highlights my deepest frustration with Facebook's product philosophy! They froze the premise of what Facebook could be at some point in 2012 and haven't expanded on the tools and mechanics. Thinking of social media as a game with rules and an evolving "meta" would not only have helped them innovate out of their current local maximum, it would have kept the experience fresh and fun. As any gamer can tell you, it's just not fun to see the current meta get gamed to its endpoint and stagnate.

1. https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service

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