I've just combed through my Instagram feed—which now consists mostly of sponsored content that I have no interest in—and I've realised that for me, Mastodon's killer feature is just... being able to see posts from the people I follow, in the order that they were posted.
How did we let it get to the point where that extremely basic requirement is the *exception* across all social media?
@markeebee
It has been my experience that any question of the form:
"Why is [ obviously counterproductive protocol ] the [standard operating procedure]?"
can be answered with:
"Because of the money"
In this case, since micropayments never caught on, corporations were forced to rely upon advertising to monetize their social media websites. Which means sponsored content,
@nyrath @markeebee And for their first decade, they got so much VC money that they barely bothered with ads. Then, they gradually started adding more and more, and getting increasingly forward about messing with feeds.
As depressing as Musk Twitter is, the other option was probably a vulture investor who would've turned the feed into pure ads and killed it just as definitively, but slower and quieter.
@simonbp @nyrath I *almost* added a parenthetical line ("I know how: ads") to the end of that post... but I stopped myself because I didn't want to cut off the conversation.
But yes, you're certainly both—excuse the pun—on the money!
I was never even *offered* a micropayment option on Facebook or Instagram though... they both just morphed into ad vehicles with no other option. Did I miss something there?
@markeebee @simonbp
good question, I wish I knew the answer.
All I know is back around the turn of the Century, micropayments were heralded as the savior of the internet. Then suddenly nobody was talking about them any more.
I get the impression that some company tried micro pay and it was a big flop.
Micropayments were also roundly ridiculed at the time. I don't remember what these first experiments were like, probably very crude as... everything on the 'net back then, but I do remember all the negativity they attracted. Thinkpieces were written about how very small payments made no sense because the "cognitive friction" of assessing them for the user was too high.
Looking back, it's a damn shame. It's also surprising because we were all very familiar with a micropayment system back then: metered phone calls! That we used to get on the Internet, even! (or had just stopped using).
