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Any parasocial relationships[1] have to be one way to be effective at mass scale. You can't have all of a person's fans talk at the same time. Podcasts are a fo

Any parasocial relationships[1] have to be one way to be effective at mass scale. You can't have all of a person's fans talk at the same time. Podcasts are a form of social audio that scales well. Anything that lets someone talk 1:1 with their fans is going to have to have a rate throttling mechanism. For a while, the obscurity of a platform itself serves as that rate limiter. However, once it kicks off something must replace it, such as pay to meet, or recreating obscurity by random un-announced appearances, etc. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction

dredmorbius 4y ago
Ding ding ding!!! This. There are two fundamental problems in mass communication. One is easy, the second is hard. The easy one is transmission at scale. That is, how does one voice reach many. The forum, the printing press, radio, and television all address this problem. The hard one is feedback at scale. There's a profound truth hidden in the adoption of the term "broadcast" to describe radio and television, adopted from agriculture, in which a farmer cast seed grain broadly, and, after some cultivation and tending, harvests the result. The fact that this applies most especially to staple grain crops, in which the key to harvesting is to not treat each individual plant as its own special snowflake. For broadcast media, the harvesting mechanism eventually turned out to be advertising. It's also interesting to see how scaling feedback has been an ongoing problem with the tech sector. It's easy for a small team to create a tool used by millions or billions of people. It's hard to assimilate feedback from that community in ways that truly add to the value of the product. Mechanisms such as A/B testing often cannibalise long-term value to provide a very short-term, small-scale boost. In live-lecture formats, I find Q&A sessions to be hugely variable. The best seem to come from small and cultivated audiences, most especially where questions are submitted (usually in writing) and selected for presentation. The worst are both general audiences (questions seem to reflect shallow familiarity with the topic), or `cultivated but politicised groups, in which questions are far more often grandstanding performance art presentations. Wikipedia's article on scholasticism has a description of the lecture format used at the time, which has long struck me as one that would be interesting (and challenging) to implement in an onlyline sense: - Lectio: the reading to be considered. - Meditatio: a time for contemplating what was read. - Questiones: a discussion of written submitted questions, with controvertial questions being addressed in Disputationes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism#Scholastic_instruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism#Scholastic_instr... These were probably sessions with a small group of ~10--15 students, roughly the size of a modern college seminar. Intimacy and familiarity seem key to this, and are the precise opposite of scaling.

dredmorbius 4y ago

Ding ding ding!!! This. There are two fundamental problems in mass communication. One is easy, the second is hard. The easy one is transmission at scale. That is, how does one voice reach many. The forum, the printing press, radio, and television all address this problem. The hard one is feedback at scale. There's a profound truth hidden in the adoption of the term "broadcast" to describe radio and television, adopted from agriculture, in which a farmer cast seed grain broadly, and, after some cultivation and tending, harvests the result. The fact that this applies most especially to staple grain crops, in which the key to harvesting is to not treat each individual plant as its own special snowflake. For broadcast media, the harvesting mechanism eventually turned out to be advertising. It's also interesting to see how scaling feedback has been an ongoing problem with the tech sector. It's easy for a small team to create a tool used by millions or billions of people. It's hard to assimilate feedback from that community in ways that truly add to the value of the product. Mechanisms such as A/B testing often cannibalise long-term value to provide a very short-term, small-scale boost. In live-lecture formats, I find Q&A sessions to be hugely variable. The best seem to come from small and cultivated audiences, most especially where questions are submitted (usually in writing) and selected for presentation. The worst are both general audiences (questions seem to reflect shallow familiarity with the topic), or `cultivated but politicised groups, in which questions are far more often grandstanding performance art presentations. Wikipedia's article on scholasticism has a description of the lecture format used at the time, which has long struck me as one that would be interesting (and challenging) to implement in an onlyline sense: - Lectio: the reading to be considered. - Meditatio: a time for contemplating what was read. - Questiones: a discussion of written submitted questions, with controvertial questions being addressed in Disputationes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism#Scholastic_instruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism#Scholastic_instr... These were probably sessions with a small group of ~10--15 students, roughly the size of a modern college seminar. Intimacy and familiarity seem key to this, and are the precise opposite of scaling.