Could transparency/openness of information be a major factor?

I've noticed that video games become much worse as a result of visibility of data. With wikis, build-in search, automatic markets, and other such things, metas (as in meta-gaming) start to form quickly. The optimal strategies become rather easy to find, and people start exploiting them as a matter of course.

Another example is dating. Compare modern dating apps to the 1980s. Dating used to be much less algorithmic, you didn't run people through a red-flag checklist, you just spent time with them and evaluated how enjoyable that was.

I think the closed-information trait is extremely valuable as it can actually defeat Moloch. Or more accurately, the world seems to be descending into an unfavorable nash's equilibrium as a result of optimal strategies being visible.

By the way, the closed-information vs open-information duality can be compared to ribbonfarm's Warrens vs. Plazas view of social spaces (not sure if you know about that article)

So you read Three Body Problem but not Dark Forest. Now that I think about it, that actually goes quite a long way to put the rest into context. I'm going to go read about conflict/mistake theory [? · GW] and see if I can get into a better headspace to make sense of this.

Let us suppose that social media apps and sites are, as you imply, in the business of trying to build sophisticated models of their users' mental structures. (I am not convinced they are -- I think what they're after is much simpler -- but I could be wrong, they might be doing that in the future even if not now, and I'm happy to stipulate it for the moment.)

If so, I suggest that they're not doing that just in order to predict what the users will do while they're in the app / on the site. They want to be able to tell advertisers "_this_ user is likely to end up buying your product", or (in a more paranoid version of things) to be able to tell intelligence agencies "_this_ user is likely to engage in terrorism in the next six months".

So inducing "mediocrity" is of limited value if they can only make their users more mediocre while they are in the app / on the site. In fact, it may be actively counterproductive. If you want to observe someone while they're on TikTok and use those observations to predict what they will do when they're not on TikTok, then putting them into an atypical-for-them mental state that makes them less different from other people while on TikTok seems like the exact opposite of what you want to do.

I don't know of any good reason to think it at all likely that social media apps/sites have the ability to render people substantially more "mediocre" permanently, so as to make their actions when not in the app / on the site more predictable.

If the above is correct, then perhaps we should expect social media apps and sites to be actively trying not to induce mediocrity in their users.

Of course it might not be correct. I don't actually know what changes in users' mental states are most helpful to social media providers' attempts to model said users, in terms of maximizing profit or whatever other things they actually care about. Are you claiming that you do? Because this seems like a difficult and subtle question involving highly nontrivial questions of psychology, of what can actually be done by social media apps and sites, of the details of their goals, etc., and I see no reason for either of us to be confident that you know those things. And yet you are happy to declare with what seems like utter confidence that of course social media apps and sites will be trying to induce mediocrity in order to make users more predictable. How do you know?