As I retreat from the socials, something I have been wondering about is how much of the frenetic, restless, too-much feeling I get from them is a product of the algos and the corporate incentives, and how much of it might just be something we’re doing. Here, Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy consider a related question:

Quite often—for good and bad—changes are driven by or originate in user innovations that either increase frequency or intensity of social interaction or widen the scope of what people can do in a particular setting. Platform owners and application developers repeatedly find enthusiastic users “overflowing” the application, pushing the product to do this rather than that, changing its character and purpose in the process.

Fourcade & Healy, The Ordinal Society, page 60

I’m thinking here of the ways in which a host of now very common design patterns—retweets, quote tweets, replies, mentions—are all behaviors that users originated, and which where then captured by Twitter. Fourcade and Healy, again:

Often, users introduce wider aspects of sociality and social practice into this world, and then the company realizes this is behavior that might be fashioned into something more delimited, organized, data-generating, and ultimately profitable: something that can generate a manageable order, fit for an algorithm to digest, analyze, and sell to advertisers.

Fourcade & Healy, The Ordinal Society, page 62

But what I’m still chewing on here is how those aspects of sociality don’t seem to have been limited to the profit-seeking platforms. You see the same design patterns on Mastodon, where the incentives are entirely different. But then, it was we—the users—who established these patterns, and perhaps we are the ones carrying them forward:

[I]n some ways social life is anything but scarce and people are anything but reasonable. From this point of view, human societies are driven by reckless profligacy, impulse, and rivalry rather than prudent saving, coolheadedness, and self-interest.

Fourcade & Healy, The Ordinal Society, page 67

Which makes me want to spend time with a few different questions: what would it mean to build design patterns that respond to, or counter, or engage with those impulses, in some way? I’m not interested in paternalistic nudges or vapid prompts to think twice, but rather, something like the way a well-designed park creates space both to gather and to wander—quiet benches tucked under trees alongside open fields fit for games, pathways for walking in ones and twos, blooms and birdhouses that invite a moment of rest. What if our social spaces had more ways to get lost? More places to sit a spell? What if we brought more intention to the way we contribute to these patterns? To the way our own choices overflow the container, and push on what’s possible. What is it that we are making together?