@mousey The reason I ask is because the two contexts have very different elements around them, very different incentives.

Most importantly, a social media platform requires critical mass. If you are the only person on a social media platform then it's worthless.

But medical decisions are very different. Individuals can benefit from making different choices, so very different approaches to selling it to them.

Yes, you might reply, vaccinations and such do have communal impacts and I recognize that 🙂 but still, it's easier to sell a person on getting a vaccination when they themselves will derive a benefit directly from having it regardless of the communal dimension of it.

There are other differences as well, but this is just one to illustrate the difference between the two contexts.

@codinghorror @jwz

@volkris @codinghorror @jwz

Makes sense. The OP was asking about a social media site, so that's what I was addressing.

I imagine policy outreach *is* different? It might even work to make "democratizing social media" a political platform? That feeds into my "Software is not economic, software is political" philosophy.

As it stands however, people only think "software" and see "billionaires"... Software is stuck in the "market" and not in "community", so value is orthogonal to function.

@mousey so yeah, when it comes to social media my emphatic take is that it is entirely irrational, entirely chaotic, and all anybody can do is at most nudge it one direction or another, and most of the time that won't be successful.

It really comes down to chance. Any platform can roll the dice to see if they manage to get the sustainable ignition, the critical mass at just the right time to keep users engaging with each other and coming back.

You can load the dice, but there's no way to channel the users the way they need to be channeled into a platform.

My favorite example of this is how Facebook really sucks. It is never been anything approaching cutting edge or even interesting, and everything I've ever heard about Facebook management presenting at conferences echoes that they really don't have anything new to offer.

They were just in the right place at the right time to succeed over other projects that were just as good or better.

So that's my take on social media development. It's almost entirely chance. It is chaos by the academic definition of chaos.

@codinghorror @jwz

@mousey no, I'm not saying there's too much data to be useful.

I'm saying success comes down to things beyond the control of platforms, things like timing, interested users just happening to log on at the same time.

A platform can do its best to nudge it to happen, but there's only so much it can do.
@codinghorror @jwz