Topical Takes: "Has social media reached its saturation point?"
The evolution of chess, MMA, and social media.
A Hacker News poster writes:
Looking at how big social media companies are operating , their R&D and their stated plans about the future..can we infer that such phenomenon has reached its saturation point?
Zuck changed the company name and is now fixated with the metaverse, which is something nobody can really define or understand. Cartoonish characters used as avatars and the other elements put forward in his keynote leave people wondering what will the actual improvement be.
Twitter is making the transition towards a "free speach" platform which will now ask people to pay to play, somehow creating synergies with Tesla and SpaceX (what???) given the cult of personality surrounding the new owner.
Seems to me like we are really splitting hairs with regards to future improvements and innovation from both those companies, the plateu of the S-curve is in for both of them.
This question got me thinking about the nature of evolution and progress; namely, how are new insights discovered?
There’s an intuition many discoveries are accidental; that what we think of as the most seminal contributions initially start out with an observation about something curious or unexpected. This exploration, combined with tedious trial and error, is what creates novel technologies and improvements. And you can see this play out across multiple domains.
To use a tortured analogy, look at how many centuries it took for the meta-game of chess to develop where it is today. With the advent of supercomputers, this process has sped up considerably, but even still, it took a lot of trial and error to map out the landscape of optimal moves prior to the 21st century.
Part of this is because there’s a certain irreducible complexity to our Universe. You cannot predict every event like it’s a physics equation, skipping to the end without doing all the work in the middle. Just because you know where a billiard ball may go when you initially hit it, doesn’t mean you can feasibly predict the 9th time it hits a ball. You have to calculate every move, the perturbation of each atom past a certain point. Same with the digits of pi. Same with the little progress bar whenever you download something from the Internet. Same with the shape of an ice cube as it melts on a hot concrete sidewalk. Hard to predict until you run the actual “simulation” in the real world.
The other reason it took a while for chess to develop is that information dissemination wasn’t efficient. Making paper wasn’t exactly easy or always widely available. Some people didn’t know how to read. It took time for technology to develop to the point where it could facilitate how to play the game. (Much of human memory is improved with a simple paper and pen).
But chess isn’t the only example. MMA had a similar trajectory. There are certain non-intuitive moves that take time to discover. Some techniques, like the calf kick, have only been recently refined and started to be perfected, despite kicking being more or less a move any human could perform for over 200,000 years. Yet we don't seem to have a history of it in the “fighting literature”. The Greeks certainly wrestled, but there’s no calf kicking on any of their pottery1.
To be fair (and this is just pure, widely uninformed speculation), it’s possible one of the reasons this didn’t occur was because 2,000 years ago, you couldn’t risk a small injury to your body. Antibiotics and all the others luxuries of modern medicine didn’t exist back. Conor McGregor would’ve died of a staph infection after his first fight. Perhaps there wasn’t much opportunity for experimentation with fighting that would leave you crippled or dead. Maybe that’s why fist fighting itself was relatively rare, with humans historically favoring fighting with tools or wrestling over fists for various complex, multi-variate reasons.2
But calf kicks were certainly possible to discover in 1993, when the first UFC event occurred. And they were certainly known in Muay Thai schools in the 1980s. But it took time for this information to be discovered and spread. A long time.
And I suspect social media is probably similar. It has a “meta-game” of its own we’re just beginning to discover. We probably don't know what an "optimal" site would look like. Twitter doesn't even have an "Edit" button yet, which is a fairly simple mechanism that would unlock a lot of new interactions. Just because events are moving slow, doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve reached the end game.
A human life is rather short when talking about the trajectory of technology. There, events are better measured in decades than seconds.
If there is, let me know. The oldest reference I could find to a kick in ancient combat sports was a 12th/13th century thigh kick on a Cambodian wall sculpture.
Buckner, W. (2021, October 21). The Invention of Fistfighting. https://doi.org/10.32942/osf.io/mbsyf