I find it fascinating how communication channels are subject to some form of Goodhart’s law. Channels that are recognized as valuable by subscribers become more desirable by publishers, receive more noise, and then cease to be useful.
I worked for an academic support program at a college once. They used texting to communicate with their small population of target students. It worked so well that the institution started texting. For everything. Everything.
After about three weeks, students blocked all texts from the institution's numbers.
We can't have nice things because there are so many of us to ruin them. Ever read the Consul's Tale in Hyperion?
The reaction is that people disable notifications. Only, it’s really hard to get data on this as a publisher. You just, silently, get decreasing click-through rates on subsequent messages.
“This app would like to send you push notifications!” -> Deny. “It’s just for (legitimate reason)!” Fine. “And marketing!” -> Uninstall app. “Are you sure?” - I’ve never been more sure in my life.
There’s a setting in chrome & Firefox to block websites from even being able to ask for the ability to send notifications. It’s one of the first things I set when I setup a new computer.
It's funny because in a group crowded channel there is feedback so long as you are part of the channel. But I think even in those circumstances, the feedback you get from the noise of everybody else, you don't interpret that as the same thing as you sending just "your one message".
Humans are really bad at understanding distributed harms.
Honestly the idea of a valuable communication channel getting abused for selfish purposes feels like it needs its own law. I'd happily call it csharps law. Maybe it's already got a name. We have the idea of spam, but it's vauge, nebulous, and doesn't concretly identify the systems and forces in place that lead to this innevitable outcome. It casts this outcome as not even a problem of individuals, but something like "the problem is someone sent me a message I didn't want." As if that person had not done that, then this wouldn't be a problem.
I think this is important because it feels like an endless surprise to everyone that this keeps happens. It feels like we have to cover the same ground again and again in discussions about it, and it feels like if we could tackle this problem more generally, the benefits to society at large would be massive.
Product reviews are valuable, producers capture reviewers, spam fake reviews.
Email is valuable. Spam nearly destroyed it until we migrated the entire decentralized system to Google.
Public discussions like these are valuable, and God knows how much work Hacker News does to moderate all this.
None of this feels like it's designed to resist this problem.
