[derefr]

I think of this as the Dark Forest problem of social networks.

The original "Dark Forest hypothesis" is the idea that alien civilizations are silent not because they're not out there; and not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions; but rather because they've all concluded — from evidence or pure logic — that there are likely to be scary things "out there" listening; and that, by trying to draw attention to themselves to make friends, they would also draw the attention of these scary predators.

Modern social networks have the "dark forest problem" insofar as your mom, or your boss — or the HR departments of random companies you might in the future apply to work for — might be able to join, follow you, and see your posts. In this analogy, your mom/boss/bigcorp-HR are the predators lurking in the Dark Forest. Knowing they're there makes you go silent, refusing to "make yourself known" / "make yourself vulnerable" in any way these predators might potentially latch onto.

The analogy does break down a bit, because unlike alien civilizations in the cosmic void, there are signals we as individuals can send out on a social network that "make us known" at least somewhat but don't "make us vulnerable." These are the "performative, groomed" posts you see shared on Facebook, posted on public Instagram accounts, blogged on LinkedIn, etc. (I suppose a more-precise name, that incorporates this consideration, would be the "chaperone problem" — but that's less evocative.)

Social networks are good and fun and easy — possibly even a net positive for mental health — when they either inherently or coincidentally avoid becoming a dark forest.

In real-world terms:

• Interest-based activity groups (think "knitting circle" or "D&D group"), and community [not professional] sports leagues, are great social networks.

• Conventions, youth summer camps, and adult workshops [think "pottery class"] are all also great — though ephemeral — social networks.

• Group therapy sessions are good social networks.

• A high school is — perhaps shockingly — a decent social network. (It has failure modes, yes, but it almost never fails in the dark-forest sense of "nobody ends up making any friends because everyone's too scared to talk.") And a college is a slightly better social network — not as good at producing friendships, but the friendships are more likely to last beyond the years you spend there.

Good online examples of social networks are mostly older: the single-interest phpBB forums; early online games, before ELO-based matchmaking; and, yeah, old Facebook. (And MySpace, too.)

• I think Tumblr is probably the oldest major "modern" social network that hasn't yet succumbed to the dark forest problem. Not sure why. (Maybe it's just never attracted the right sort of celebrity posters to give moms or bosses any reason to join, I guess. Or maybe the fact that Tumblr posts (used to?) have public web URLs, meant that viral-meme Tumblr posts could simply be linked to, without that then forcing visitors to join the platform? Or maybe the fact that Tumblr lets users have multiple blogs each — sort of like how YouTube accounts can have multiple YouTube channels each; so Tumblr users can have one "clean" blog tied to their identity, that they can show people, and then other blogs that they post more outré — yet meaningful and vulnerable — stuff to. But without these being true "alts", as account DMs can still only originate from the main-blog identity.)

• BlueSky has also avoided the dark forest problem for now, but that's likely temporary; there's nothing in its design that makes it any less "for everybody" + "for public performance" than Twitter is/was.

Everything else is either a ghost town save for its performative stage (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, even HN somewhat); or it's an archipelago of out-of-band-formed groups of mutuals who are otherwise private and undiscoverable through the platform itself (Instagram, all group-chat apps); or it's not a "social network" at all, in that there is an expectation of anonymity / creating alt accounts / being able to (Reddit, 4chan, modern online games.)

It'd be interesting to design a social network from the ground up with the goal of making it inherently impossible for the network to devolve into a dark forest.

[xp84]

I think this is really insightful. I would add that modern Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok add another dimension in that they try as hard as possible to discourage interactions among friends, by focusing on algorithm-based curation (and push everyone to vertical-video-swipe-mode for all but Twitter). It seems obvious that someone did the math years ago and determined ad dollars are better when people see friend posts nearly 0% of the time, replaced by posts from random mysterious “Pages” you don’t follow, celebrities you don’t follow, and viral public posts by complete strangers. People’s posts are increasingly for nobody to see, because unless they are public and go viral, they’re invisible.

So it’s like most of these “social media” sites are no longer social. They’re more like “targeted media feeds.”

[derefr]

True, but – at least for the networks born in the "organic era" — I don't think the shift to algorithmic curation is a causal factor for the disappearance of organic traffic on these networks.

I think, for these older networks that had an "organic era", it's the reverse: the falloff was due to the space becoming a dark forest for organic interactions; and then a curated global engagement sphere was implemented to fill the void / decrease user churn.

I know this was true at least for Facebook. I recall a clear 5+-year gap, after a lot of the original FB core demographic had already left, but before FB adjusted its recommendation engine, where FB was just... a ghost town.

My impression of this gap time, was that back in the "organic era", FB had implemented some sort of damping, ensuring that posts by commercial posters got "promoted" to only a small fraction of that poster's subscribers, and preventing multiple posts from the same commercial poster from making it to the same user's feed at once. (Presumably to prevent something they saw as "advertising" from overwhelming the organic posts they considered the user to be "there to see.")

The gap ended once they shut off this now-vestigial damping, and opened the floodgates to commercial posts showing up in feeds, being shared to non-subscribers the same way organic posts could be, etc.

Other social networks seemed to "follow the trend" on both counts — previously having tuning parameters in their algorithm to protect users from commercial posters flooding their feeds; and then later suddenly "opening the floodgates" in response to organic engagement decline. But (IIRC, correct me if I'm wrong) they didn't all do it at once; each network changed only at the point that that network needed to change to retain metrics in the face of declining organic participation.

Networks like Tiktok, meanwhile, that were born entirely after this sea-change among networks, just let brands into users' FYPs from the start. That was half the point.

[Velorivox]

You’ve misrepresented the core of your argument. Wikipedia on dark forest hypothesis:

“The "dark forest" hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat…”

> not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions

Not sure where you got this adaptation from.

[CRConrad]

No, the argument was exactly the standard form of "Dark Forest."

> > not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions

> Not sure where you got this adaptation from.

It's not an "adaptation", just an elaboration / amplification / clarification.

N.B, it's written in the negative. And, AIUI, the "Dark Forest" hypothesis does indeed not say that the reason we're not hearing from any alien civilisations is that they're all absolutely uninterested in establishing contact with other alien races (like us), but just fear that some of them would be hostile. So yes, the silence is not "because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions"; only because they're afraid some of those interactions would be distinctly negative-sum.

[WaltPurvis]

> Not sure where you got this adaptation from.

Perhaps they got it from the experience of being a human being. I and many other human beings would love to meet an alien civilization and form positive-sum interactions, yet at the same time I'm not sure the risks outweighs the benefits. It doesn't seem like a very far-out addition to the theory to me.

[danlugo92]

It's just seeing it from the other side, still applies IMO. E.g. not talking about politics ("making yourself 'dark'").

[Velorivox]

[flagged]

[CRConrad]

[flagged]

[derefr]

I mean, it's arbitrary, but it's not like it's a contradiction. In both instances, you can start with an assumption of mutual interest in positive-sum interactions, and still end up with a universal threat-assumption.

(And it's also kind of definitional to the meaning of "positive-sum." A positive-sum interaction is better than no interaction. Insofar as a civilization is optimizing for... basically anything, it would prefer positive-sum trade [from which it acquires resources, information, etc] to no trade. At the very least, all else being equal, the resources and information would increase the civilization's odds of survival.)

Let's assume that the vast majority of alien species would like to have positive-sum interactions with other alien civilizations, if that were possible. But they can't assume a guarantee that there isn't at least one civilization that defects into being predators, and would come to destroy them (and any other civilization they could discover through them) if they caught that predatory civilization's attention.

As such, the civilization goes silent, hiding from such predators; and, as such, the civilization immediately punishes any other civilization that may reach out to them, trying to "shut them up" before that other civilization's directed communications reveal their own location. Which means that, in effect, due to simply being aware of the existence of the possibility of such predators, every civilization becomes the very predators they're imagining.

And because every alien civilization can work this out, every civilization can conclude that even if there weren't predators at first, the equilibrium state is for everyone who wasn't a level-1 predator to have become this type of level-2 predator.

(And yes, there is a social-network equivalent of the level-2 predators — these are the "cringe reaction" accounts that get attention by punishing the violations of the performative-perfection norm.)

---

Or, to be formal about it: the dark forest hypothesis is essentially timeless decision theory applied to the game-theoretic tit-for-tat strategy. The same logic that argues that Roko's basilisk can force you to enable its existence before it exists to enforce that, argues that the structure of "the lawless cosmic void"-as-social-network can force your own civilization into choosing "defect" over "cooperate" before you ever actually meet any aliens who could enforce that. Even if your civilization really wants to choose "cooperate"!