Glad I can just read your summary and not read the book...
My guess is that tech is effective depending on what it's solving for -- the job to be done. Social networks like Brigade were a disaster -- the people who comment are more extreme. Building feedback for politics just makes it easier to shout at elected officials online and doesn't create a deliberative space for policymaking.
Yeah - a large part of this is building something that can actually be useful. Votizen and Brigade struggled to find that niche with actually building a strong network that could remain healthy and sustain itself.
That doesn't mean that there aren't legitimate ways to create better use of technology generally. Or even that political social networks can't be a thing. But social networks succeeded by building things users wanted not telling users what they should want.
Glad I can just read your summary and not read the book...
My guess is that tech is effective depending on what it's solving for -- the job to be done. Social networks like Brigade were a disaster -- the people who comment are more extreme. Building feedback for politics just makes it easier to shout at elected officials online and doesn't create a deliberative space for policymaking.
Yeah - a large part of this is building something that can actually be useful. Votizen and Brigade struggled to find that niche with actually building a strong network that could remain healthy and sustain itself.
That doesn't mean that there aren't legitimate ways to create better use of technology generally. Or even that political social networks can't be a thing. But social networks succeeded by building things users wanted not telling users what they should want.