Coping with the Web of Information overload

Social experience design 🎭 Hedonic peer production
#1

In the Social experience design chatroom @serious_fun wrote:

Bookmarks is one more of those design elements where from personal experience I feel “its all wrong”, but its not easy to pinpoint factors. Over the years I have built a large collection, neatly arranged in deep hierarchies, sharing across devices via firefox etc. But I have found myself gradually using them less and less, to the point of forgetting them altogether. One factor is probably the purposeful demotion of bookmark functionality by the browser gatekeepers. Hidden several clicks away in ‘clean’ interfaces, users are encouraged to use the search bar to type again and again what they want, which is then helped with predictive autocomplete etc. (designs that earn google and indirectly mozilla money rather than help the user get on top). But there is probably more at play. For example the lack or some sort of “reminder” function. One way to reinforce using one’s own classification of the internet content via bookmarks would have been an integration with rss. So the bookmark manager could automatically indicate if the website where you bookmarked something has something new. But of course rss was also the enemy of the adtech empire and demoted as well. Now only vivaldi seems to support discovery.

I think there’s a deeper issue. The web brought us in a new information era and we are still learning to cope with that.

We became information hoarders

We say the web has enshittified, became a Corporate Web. But there’s still too much quality information out there. So much so that in our daily habits we have become like “information snackers”, grazing the rich meadows of the web. And when we encounter good quality stuff that is aligned with our interests, we file it away and become like true “information hoarders”. We think “If I ever get to address that interest, then this information will sure come in handy, and I will process the many valuable points in this article”. But for most of the stuff, that time never comes, and the information gathering has only added a kind of pressure, a cluttering of the mind where we feel discontent about the inefficient library organization we created. This information hoarding is addictive, and the info gathering compulsive.

In addition to that, I agree that any bookmark manager I’ve ever seen felt incomplete, not sufficient, or just not it. I think in some ways in the product development they dropped the ball, or bookmarking just wasn’t core domain. Web 2.0 gave vendors an incentive not to give us the power tools. “Come to our platform instead”. But now with note-taking tools I have similar thoughts about their usefulness for me. I think we want those tools to have a close alignment with how our memory models / strategies work, and offer ‘seamless extension’ support in just the right areas. Which is so personal that for hardly anyone the existing tools are a perfect fit.

So I think there are some nice and very interesting improvements to be made, which are research areas for Social coding movement in her quest to “Reimagine social”. Think of Semmy for instance.

Mindful just-in-time information

In another approach, more on the socio-philosophical side of things, SX is focused on how to personally deal with the information overload that bombards us. And here the Mindulness principle kicks in, and tells us to “Just relax, let it go”. Don’t hoard the information. Be content that you cannot follow it all. And that, should the time come, you fill find the information you need. Perhaps not that one resource, but other quality info that is abundantly out there.

I was once in a management role and received hundreds of emails a day. I thought to categorize it all and place in a hierarchy. Took me 2 full days. To never use the hierarchy afterwards. A single inbox and search are most productive for me. Perhaps imperfect recall, but good enough recall. Recently I closed the backlog of 404 open tabs in my laptop browser, of ‘things to process’. What a relief. They accrued in a couple months. Right now I have 100 or so tabs open again. In my mobile phone there’s probably well over a 1,000 waiting. On Github and Codeberg I have a gazillion starred repo’s as bookmarks. I have a long list of favorites on hacker news. Etcetera.

Simple solutions still exist

Under SX philosophy the slogan “Simple solutions still exist” refers to the realization that all the common wisdom, common knowledge, common sense, and life experience is out there, to solve our wicked problems. The info isn’t the issue. It is taking people’s 2 cents and adding them up to amount to something, where the shoe hurts most.

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#2

Something that surprised me as I went searching for practical tools to help mitigate information overload (both being in the receiving end of existing channels and thinking of software that does not inflict it on others) is how loosely defined and vague everything is. I guess the wikipedia entry is typical in this respect, some interesting pointers but very far from a “manual”. E.g., I would have expected some sort of rough quantification: we can juggle so many bits per hour/day etc., some sort of “budget” of mental energy is that is exhausted and then needs rest, sleep to replenish. In turn, if you count how many devices one uses, how many different programs in each, and how e.g. how many tabs :grinning: on each, you can sort identify how the budget gets exhausted, which causes the overload. While a bit naive in the simplification this gives you some guiding lights as to how to organize things.

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#3

Reducing the number of distinct channels one tracks is a fairly obvious strategy and you hear that all the time: people want their devices to be “synced”. The browser on the laptop to be essentially the same window as the browser on the mobile. To some extend thats possible. But there are many other channel fragmentations that are less reducible: every social media platform, every chat app etc. is it own distinct firehose. And finally the biggest problem within each one of the platforms, where we have limited control of the interface. In the proprietary adtech platforms for obvious reasons, but the design of decentral media is not particularly better in this respect. An endeless random timeline to scroll, with random bits of information, media, videos, out of context text thrown at the reader, who could possibly think this is a sane interface :cold_face: So there are many layers on which to work on, both in terms of self-diagnozing and changing behavior, but also by better software that nudges in the healthy direction by default.

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#4

I’m going to throw in a mention to Logseq as a handy knowledge base tool that, while imperfect, does a good job of keeping interlinked notes of any kind. I’m still learning how to wield its power for optimal use, as I only recently discovered it when looking to move away from Notion (due to it being proprietary and centralised).

Doubtless, this is no magical cure to our problems of information hoarding. Maybe the concept of a second brain / knowledge base itself enables those same issues in some ways. I would personally give it a few more months before claiming a more well-rounded opinion on how effective this really is.

Whether this solves the problem of timeless knowledge management or not, even more recently I found another tool that deals with the problem of daily internet curation (something I found very awkward to do on Logseq) → Readeck

I’m yet to try Readeck myself, but it does look to solve exactly what I’d been struggling with: manually curate relevant, valuable content (text, video, etc) by skimming social platforms such as Matrix, Mastodon and forums, and then consume it without distraction, which I prefer to be sliced in pomodoro sessions.

(Sidenote: I’m currently using Solanum for that, although there must be a ton of substitute pomodoro apps)

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#5

This reminds me of the Spoon theory. Or perhaps related Miller’s Law. In other words: I’d search in the direction of psychology or UX. I recall that after reading something Steve Jobs went subsequently with his pullover day-in-day-out to have more budget for decision making available (there was a reference in the biography, but I had only borrowed it and therefore not at hand).

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#6

I think this is certainly kind of possible. The current Center for Humane Technology started as Time Well Spent movement, focused more on our own healthy habits around the use of digital technologies, and how software could be designed for that. This was also at a time where there was a lot of focus on tools to help avoid repetitive strain injuries (RSI), by collecting various metrics about computer use.

The thing with info overload is how personal it is. One person thrives in a flood of information, while another needs deep focus on singular tasks. Different kinds of activities have different needs for such focus. So any software support should facilitate a large extent of personal tweaking. Create something akin to an “Attention profile”.

As a community facilitator and weaver in public (and now “weaving in commons”), I willingly accepted a big info overload flooding in from countless different channels. Dealing with that to an extent is essential part of the tasks of any community facilitator / commons janitor. Even knowing that it comes with detrimental effects, like losing an ability to focus (unless carefully planning time for this).

Coding is social. Different stakeholder roles in the software development process require different levels of information density and attention. This recognition exists insufficiently, esp. in FOSS movement, and where big gains can be made by better supporting these individual roles.

Given the breadth and scope of the FSDL, there is no prescriptive way to move in the good direction, but everything depends on preference and circumstances. Every initiative favors their own tailored approach. That is the level where SX should accommodate, and then the strategy you propose becomes more of a tactical pattern in a crowdsourced library of good practices.

Social coding commons by means of hedonic peer production offers a solution for facilitating the crowdsourcing process. By ensuring that contribution is intricate part of people’s own improvement process, thus providing the necessary intrinsic motivation to contribute. These contributions over time aggregate more and more value to the FSDL and SX methodology, creating a feedback loop.

Since probably numerous best-practices exist, Social experience design has the concept of SX Instrument sets, which are categories of best practices to be filled with SX Instruments, the good practices themselves, packaged for direct application and use.

Today, in a different context, I wrote the following in the Social experience design chatroom, that relates to this:

What a Social coding commons and any movement for change should do, is facilitate incremental improvements and value being added all the time to evolving solutions across the full holistic scope. And be able to breakdown the many intricate solution aspects and delegate to the appropriate motivated interest groups who can deal with them.

One of the things that SX brings along is the notion of “growing software” through a timeless evolutionary process (bottom-up), where a solution gradually matures, boosted by spikes of (top-down) active software development that occur during its lifecycle.

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#7

When thinking of the above in the context of concrete applications we might use to access online information we can split the relevant design choices into the following:

  • features that enable us to self-assess where we are (or where we want to be!) in the information overload spectrum. The concept of an Attention Profile is very suggestive in this respect and likely the most pragmatic to implement. It is already implemented as an attribute of the Use profile in Haystack, with tentatively Intense, Casual or Protect as flags that can be set to indicate appetite for lots of data, desire to keep it to essentials or some middle ground. Though how these flags will translate into modifying application behavior will only unfold over time and relates to the next points.
  • features that structurally reduce the overload by judicious choice of how information is presented: The way old / new information is presented on screen, the kind of notifications issued etc. Here a key strategy is to explore alternatives to the raw timeline, that seems about as bad as it gets in most cases.
  • features that dynamically modulate application behavior, on the basis of our above choices but possibly combined with algorithmic evaluation of usage patterns. E.g., already displaying simple indicators like: you’ve read 20 articles today, you have 100 tabs open, or you’ve already spend 3 hours etc. :sweat_smile: could be enough of a nudge.

This is clearly a very rich field that requires both research and experimentation. The overall reasoning and design choices will be documented in an ongoing fashion the “Principles” section of the documentation.