All you people getting excited that Jack Dorsey's new social media site no longer requires invite codes are like those people tearing off their masks and throwing them in the air as soon as they weren't legally required.
You have learned nothing.
And you are making the world worse.
@jwz hard agree, but I have learned that scolding people just doesn't work
This is great news, so do you happen to know the answer to what *does work*? because I think we collectively need to know, and so far all I hear is what doesn't work.
Scolding doesn't work for me either.. Living by example works great for me, but doesn't enable discouraging my mom/dad/kids/pastor/neighbors/workplaceapproximateacquiantence/friends/family from making the stupid choices for the big billionairistas...
So what works?
@mousey are you asking what works for social media or for health policy?
They are very different problems.
Oh, i was just wondering what works to spread the use of Technologies-That-Don't-Exploit-Users..
I mean, even health policy.. If it ends in "policy", it doesn't have a marketing department.
Marketing works, but I don't see a lot of Kickstarters/GoFundMes for Advertising/Marketing of Open Source alternatives to corporately marketed data plantations (where you're the cotton).
I've been told scolding doesn't work either. True, but it's cathartic.
So, what works?
@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.
@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.
Hm, assuming you're saying you think there's too much data to be useful, in that chaos, the companies which own these platforms, and the data people feed them, actually DO shape opinion and culture on a mass scale, been automated a while.
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/17/1224955473/social-media-algorithm-filterworld
OTOH,
If you're saying it's chaos and any individual platform has to sail crazy headwinds, to find unlikely success, fine sure. But you're saying in on a big network of instances with millions of users.
@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
@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.