14 ms·

Status Traps: Learning from Web2 Social Networks

50 points by miletus 4y ago

bluelightning2k 4y ago
Just seeing the domain on this leaves me so conflicted. A16z content is excellent but I have a strong distaste for crypto (and those who peddle it).
- notpushkin 4y ago
  Then you'd probably be glad to hear that this particular article has little to do with crypto.
  - aardvarkr 4y ago
    Did we read the same article? They literally mention crypto in the first sentence and then approach social networking as if there's a status token that needs to be distributed to have a working social network. No one talks like this outside of the crypto community.
    - ketzo 4y ago
      > as if there's a status token that needs to be distributed to have a working social network I mean… empirical evidence would suggest that this is true, no? Has there ever been a popular social media/network that didn’t have a very direct form of status token?
      - majormajor 4y ago
        > Social networks tend to elevate content that it expects will get attention. Doing so incentivizes a particular type of behavior that lends status to the users performing said behavior. Typically, there’s a status indicator that people have to try and accumulate. It comes in various forms – karma, follower/like counts, XP, the verified badge, leaderboards, etc. Early forums and then social networks were massively popular before getting algorithmic feeds or basically any of this stuff. Nobody was getting rich or famous off their post count. Honestly, the biggest failure of imagination here is assuming that what's really going to succeed here is a modified (with "UBI" or whatever ideas) form of the status quo. TikTok, for instance, has a wildly different interaction model than FB/Twitter-era networks completely outside of any conception of "modeling statu" in it.
    - demetrius 4y ago
      Yeah, I was really surprised at the idea to equate the number of followers with wealth, and calculate inequality of this wealth distribution Like... Followers are people with their own agency! Even if they tend to read someone more often then the others, you can't treat this in same way as the wealth distribution
      - satyrnein 4y ago
        Libertarians would argue that wealth inequality is the natural outcome of consumers exercising their agency. I recall one asking why progressives are obsessed with income equality but not trying to address inequality in number of sex partners.
    - notpushkin 4y ago
      Yeah, it does talk of “status” as some sort of commodity. It doesn't say it should be a token (how would that be possible!), but it does indeed draw some parallels with financing, although I see even more parallels with online gaming.
- EGreg 4y ago
  Really sad that crypto has such a bad reputation in HN. As hackers we’re supposed to be challenging the entrenched Big Tech monopoly with its silos, but every time someone like IPFS or BitTorrent or MaidSAFE releases a token it’s somehow considered worse than the extremely centralized “cloud offerings” or privately owned networks. It’s crazy. You say “a16z content is excellent” but a16z is the largest VC firm, with the VC industry funding closed source proprietary companies that extract rents and capture the market. People like Peter Thiel who say “competition is for losers, build a monopoly” and make sure Mark Z never builds wirehog, a peer to peer file sharing network, because that wouldn’t extract enough rents. People like Adam Neumann who build money-losing companies and dump the shares on the public, how are they any better than say the folks behind MaidSAFE who have been toiling since 2006 to bring everyone a FREE and open source secure file sharing network? Crypto is cryptography powering open, byzantine fault tolerant protocols. It is the future. People governing things together (currently called DAOs). Code you can trust. And so on. What sucks is blockchain, not crypto.
  - logisticseh 4y ago
    The characterization of crypto stuff as an alternative to Big Tech is, frankly, one of the most bewildering "Emperor Has No Clothes" situations I've seen in my life. And I've seen a few tech hype cycles.
    - EGreg 4y ago
      What do you think byzantine-fault-tolerant networks are? With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to be online regardless of any third party, and so on? For example, everything I've built and given away over the last 10 years has been building towards an alternative to Big Tech: https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf
      - colinsane 4y ago
        > What do you think byzantine-fault-tolerant networks are? With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to be online regardless of any third party, and so on? as for data availability, bittorrent works stupidly well today without any monetization. it turns out that upload/download ratio works as a pretty decent metric to combat tragedy of the commons for larger torrent communities that really want to protect against it. for websites, i've been surprised in the past when i let a domain expire, and then it pops up a month later because somebody who enjoyed it had archived it and brought it back online themselves. that's more satisfying to me than if it had been kept available because i paid some distant/dispassionate person $1 to do so. point is, the future i want is largely one of reciprocity. decrease hierarchy and encourage participants to act as both consumer and producer. financialization doesn't do this: it encourages large, efficient producers to compete with each other to serve consumers. i don't want my 20,000-person retro-arcade community to be served by 5 people who've provisioned 4x10Gbps uplinks charging us for BW. then it's just some extractive thing (these producers are likely directing their proceeds to things unrelated to the community) and the magic's gone. financialization helps when the capital cost of entry is otherwise too high. say, using loans that are repaid by usage-based micropayments as a way to get mesh power/data networks off the ground since these require costly physical equipment. such networks would be beneficial both from the redundancy/fault-tolerance perspective you care about and also from the social angle i care about of being able to participate in more of the things around me. but after deployment, continued monetization works against that latter aspect. the one crypto project which financialized data networks (Helium) completely failed at the participatory aspect. its users (gateway operators) are merely providers for a different set of consumers (LoRa users). you may have good intentions, and you may build something better than FB/AWS, but if it's built around monetization it will only ever be a stopgap. stopgaps are fine and often good, but the places we need them are already shrinking. federated chat/social networks and peer-based media/streaming applications are developed and advancing rapidly enough for me to take them seriously today. another "big tech" alternative -- open SW/HW stacks for mobile phones as an alternative to Apple -- is in a similar state and crypto hasn't even started any parallel project that i know of. search alternatives are the furthest behind, but is anyone using crypto to build an alternative to Google? my understanding of search is that it's a tough problem to solve because of the money incentives (if a click results in profit via commerce or ads, then there's an incentive to pay for more clicks, either via backchannel payments or SEO), and that social ranking of search results is one of the only ways to overcome this.
- exogeny 4y ago
  a16z in particular are on the leading edge of the get-equity-in-tokens-with-no-lockup and then immediately pump & dump scam. Step 1: Find literally any crypto project. Doesn't matter. Step 2: "Invest in it", and immediately receive tokens with no lockup. Step 3: Have Chris Dixon write a breathless tweet about it, call your friends and get press coverage. Get a16z-adjacent influencers involved. Step 4: Price goes up because a16z is leading; immediately dump. Step 5: Project rugs. Yay, crypto. It's the best. It's interesting because most of these projects are absolute dogshit and will go to zero, but since they've already exited, they'll show nice returns to their LPs. But to the average person following it, all they'll see is a16z backing a string of rugs and embarrassing failures; I guess the PR hit is worth it, until Marc starts talking NIMBY shit again.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  I find Crypto/web3 does this weird thing where it sells itself on what people imagine it is (freedom, privacy, decentralization, more fault-tolerant applications, etc.), rather than what it actually can do (same as web2 but slower and more complicated).
  - logisticseh 4y ago
    That's marketing.
yawnxyz 4y ago
I like that HN doesn't emblazon the user's points/status so clearly compared to something like FB/Twitter, where "likes" is front and center. I also like that the quality of the post is reflected in the # of votes in the UI (by graying the post out if it's not good). I wonder if it's useful to add some indicator that a post was "highly voted", or would that create more "status accrual" behavior? I think Reddit is completely designed around status accrual with the badges and votes plastered all over each post — that's probably taking it too far.
- yawnxyz 4y ago
  Another mitigation technique the article missed: Instead of resetting everyone's status to zero, you can create a new status game. E.g. if you've implemented "likes" to your posts, you can add a "voted most helpful" status and highlight "these are the ones voted most helpful". Adding another status game side steps original status game. It could also be interesting to have "status mini games" where different statuses switch out over time, but this probably works better for small communities rather than massive social media sites like Twitter.
- thejosh 4y ago
  The moderation team is also sensible from what I can see. I very rarely see a gray post that is downvoted because it is offtopic, inflammatory, etc, instead of just another point of view.
colinsane 4y ago
"status" occurs 63 times in this 1900 word article. "game" occurs 12 times, "capital" 4 times. may as well call these things "status games". whatever a16z is cooking up this time, there's no way in hell it will resemble or is even designed to resemble anything the ordinary human would encounter (or desire) in their day-to-day social life. hell, they bring up the gini coefficient not once but twice. how the fuck is this relevant to a person's social life? if you're looking for a way to balance a social network, look no further than Dunbar's number: actual social networks are naturally somewhat egalitarian (moreso than the stuff a16z is discussing at least) -- as soon as you stop thinking of them in terms of some hierarchy meant to be gamed.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lkrubner 4y ago
Despite having the advantage of an extra 19 years, I don’t think this essay offered any new insights that weren’t already in Clay Shirky’s 2003 essay on power laws and inequality: https://extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20Three-Shirky.pdf https://extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20Three-Shirky...
mattgreenrocks 4y ago
I’m patiently waiting for the part where we realize all the desperate grasping at Internet Points is collectively pathetic when we could be actually connecting with one another. “But we’re just animals” That Smart Guy inevitably says I’m the comment section. Maybe, but it doesn’t excuse how ridiculous it is to be fighting over Internet Points. Go outside and meet actual people.
- canadaduane 4y ago
  Agreed. I think we are already in the rebellion / response stage. It takes time to build compelling alternatives, though--especially those that care primarily about human needs and not about ROI. I wrote about our search for happiness online (in the context of real relationships and meeting our psychological needs) a couple of days ago, perhaps it will interest you: https://blog.relm.us/finding-happiness-online/ https://blog.relm.us/finding-happiness-online/
quickthrower2 4y ago
Does status matter in a social network? I am almost zero social network status and I can: 1. Find people on LinkedIn and talk to them. 2. Have meaningful discussions on Reddit. 3. Talk to friends. 4. Chat to a random interesting person on Twitter. The only thing I can't do is make a million dollars from my audience. But surely most users don't need that. You can't get rid of status as long as you have people. People will prefer some people to other people. Some will be popular. So I think it is a bit of a non topic. Privacy, security and avoiding addiction and bias are the interesting topics of what we do with social networks.
- insightcheck 4y ago
  I can think of a few specific cases where social media status can have an effect for a regular person (more specifically, a non-influencer), though you're right that status typically doesn't block off main features. - For LinkedIn, there have been cases where certain job positions (typically sales, marketing, and social media management) actually prefer candidates to have a certain number of followers (500+) as evidence they are good at using social networks. - For Twitter, some people in certain social circles allegedly judge potential dates based on their number of Twitter followers. At a less extreme sense, some people judge others with wariness if they have no social media accounts. You can easily avoid having deep relationships with these people, but status can have real-life effects. Separately for Twitter, you may be more likely to get customer support by publicly mentioning a company, if you have more followers. - Lastly for Reddit, having less karma or a newer account raises suspicions you are a bot (some subreddits actually forbid newer accounts). In practice, none of these really matter if you don't work in sales, don't date or befriend people who care too much about social media, don't comment on more mainstream subreddits where there are karma thresholds, and can do without mentioning companies publicly on Twitter for support as a last resort. However, there can be real-life effects from internet points.
Jasper_ 4y ago
"Followers" as a metric exists because Twitter demands a centralized feed that's constantly unstable so you go back to it often. Why can't it be like RSS, where everybody has a feed, and it tracks what posts I've read and which ones I haven't, and I can catch up with all the unread posts? Probably because that way, I could check it once a week, instead of every 30 minutes, and Twitter needs those DAUs to survive. Web3 isn't worth the digital paper I'm writing this screed on, but if there's anything that a decentralized social network should be able to do, it's get us out of hyper-aggressive VC-subsidized optimization for eyeballs and growth, and put us back into humane territory. The mis-step of adding back "status" into the network is just showing us nobody even recognizes the problems here, or more likely, intentionally want to make a worse version of what already exists. also, tbh, the "follow" system is a confusing web of permissions. Primarily it means "I want to see their posts in my feed", but also sometimes "I want the ability to see someone's private feed" and "I want to be able to DM someone", because inexplicably, there's only one relationship available in Twitter... the follower.
- comex 4y ago
  > Why can't it be like RSS, where everybody has a feed, and it tracks what posts I've read and which ones I haven't, and I can catch up with all the unread posts? Probably because that way, I could check it once a week, instead of every 30 minutes, and Twitter needs those DAUs to survive. I use Tweetbot, which approximates this by saving my place in the timeline (though it doesn't let me mark tweets as read/unread/needs-followup on a more granular level, which would be a useful feature). But ironically, I suspect I might be better off using the standard unstable feed, precisely because I only check Twitter anywhere from once a week to once a day. Every day, my timeline gets hundreds of tweets. The actual volume of text is not that high, compared to the long blog posts I'm accustomed to reading at a fast pace. But the tweets are about many different topics, and many of them are tips of icebergs, having links or being part of longer threads. So the timeline feels overwhelming, and I almost never read it all. Given that, perhaps I'd be better off without the pretense. Ditch the saved place; prioritize recent tweets, so that they're still live discussions in case I feel like replying; but rather than solely prioritizing recency, use a filtering algorithm to identify which tweets are most worth reading. But for now I'm stubbornly sticking to Tweetbot – partly out of habit, partly because I don't want to use an algorithm unless it's something open source that I can customize.
numtel 4y ago
James C Scott's Seeing Like a State is recommended (which is great) but surprising that they don't recommend Graeber's Debt. The following quote feels like it should have a citation to the section about jubilees: > To my knowledge, no one has really tried the logical extreme version of this: set all status indicators to zero periodically and reset the network from scratch. Might be an interesting experiment to run! IMO, this mechanism is one of the reasons why the forkability of cryptocurrencies is such a huge feature: invoking a jubilee is within relatively easy reach for the population, something that has been locked away by the state for some time now. With a belief in a cascade of currencies, constantly allowing many opportunities to be an early adopter, the "revolution" will be priced in.

50 points by miletus 4y ago

Just seeing the domain on this leaves me so conflicted. A16z content is excellent but I have a strong distaste for crypto (and those who peddle it).

notpushkin 4y ago
Then you'd probably be glad to hear that this particular article has little to do with crypto.
- aardvarkr 4y ago
  Did we read the same article? They literally mention crypto in the first sentence and then approach social networking as if there's a status token that needs to be distributed to have a working social network. No one talks like this outside of the crypto community.
  - ketzo 4y ago
    > as if there's a status token that needs to be distributed to have a working social network I mean… empirical evidence would suggest that this is true, no? Has there ever been a popular social media/network that didn’t have a very direct form of status token?
    - majormajor 4y ago
      > Social networks tend to elevate content that it expects will get attention. Doing so incentivizes a particular type of behavior that lends status to the users performing said behavior. Typically, there’s a status indicator that people have to try and accumulate. It comes in various forms – karma, follower/like counts, XP, the verified badge, leaderboards, etc. Early forums and then social networks were massively popular before getting algorithmic feeds or basically any of this stuff. Nobody was getting rich or famous off their post count. Honestly, the biggest failure of imagination here is assuming that what's really going to succeed here is a modified (with "UBI" or whatever ideas) form of the status quo. TikTok, for instance, has a wildly different interaction model than FB/Twitter-era networks completely outside of any conception of "modeling statu" in it.
  - demetrius 4y ago
    Yeah, I was really surprised at the idea to equate the number of followers with wealth, and calculate inequality of this wealth distribution Like... Followers are people with their own agency! Even if they tend to read someone more often then the others, you can't treat this in same way as the wealth distribution
    - satyrnein 4y ago
      Libertarians would argue that wealth inequality is the natural outcome of consumers exercising their agency. I recall one asking why progressives are obsessed with income equality but not trying to address inequality in number of sex partners.
  - notpushkin 4y ago
    Yeah, it does talk of “status” as some sort of commodity. It doesn't say it should be a token (how would that be possible!), but it does indeed draw some parallels with financing, although I see even more parallels with online gaming.
EGreg 4y ago
Really sad that crypto has such a bad reputation in HN. As hackers we’re supposed to be challenging the entrenched Big Tech monopoly with its silos, but every time someone like IPFS or BitTorrent or MaidSAFE releases a token it’s somehow considered worse than the extremely centralized “cloud offerings” or privately owned networks. It’s crazy. You say “a16z content is excellent” but a16z is the largest VC firm, with the VC industry funding closed source proprietary companies that extract rents and capture the market. People like Peter Thiel who say “competition is for losers, build a monopoly” and make sure Mark Z never builds wirehog, a peer to peer file sharing network, because that wouldn’t extract enough rents. People like Adam Neumann who build money-losing companies and dump the shares on the public, how are they any better than say the folks behind MaidSAFE who have been toiling since 2006 to bring everyone a FREE and open source secure file sharing network? Crypto is cryptography powering open, byzantine fault tolerant protocols. It is the future. People governing things together (currently called DAOs). Code you can trust. And so on. What sucks is blockchain, not crypto.
- logisticseh 4y ago
  The characterization of crypto stuff as an alternative to Big Tech is, frankly, one of the most bewildering "Emperor Has No Clothes" situations I've seen in my life. And I've seen a few tech hype cycles.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    What do you think byzantine-fault-tolerant networks are? With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to be online regardless of any third party, and so on? For example, everything I've built and given away over the last 10 years has been building towards an alternative to Big Tech: https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf
    - colinsane 4y ago
      > What do you think byzantine-fault-tolerant networks are? With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to be online regardless of any third party, and so on? as for data availability, bittorrent works stupidly well today without any monetization. it turns out that upload/download ratio works as a pretty decent metric to combat tragedy of the commons for larger torrent communities that really want to protect against it. for websites, i've been surprised in the past when i let a domain expire, and then it pops up a month later because somebody who enjoyed it had archived it and brought it back online themselves. that's more satisfying to me than if it had been kept available because i paid some distant/dispassionate person $1 to do so. point is, the future i want is largely one of reciprocity. decrease hierarchy and encourage participants to act as both consumer and producer. financialization doesn't do this: it encourages large, efficient producers to compete with each other to serve consumers. i don't want my 20,000-person retro-arcade community to be served by 5 people who've provisioned 4x10Gbps uplinks charging us for BW. then it's just some extractive thing (these producers are likely directing their proceeds to things unrelated to the community) and the magic's gone. financialization helps when the capital cost of entry is otherwise too high. say, using loans that are repaid by usage-based micropayments as a way to get mesh power/data networks off the ground since these require costly physical equipment. such networks would be beneficial both from the redundancy/fault-tolerance perspective you care about and also from the social angle i care about of being able to participate in more of the things around me. but after deployment, continued monetization works against that latter aspect. the one crypto project which financialized data networks (Helium) completely failed at the participatory aspect. its users (gateway operators) are merely providers for a different set of consumers (LoRa users). you may have good intentions, and you may build something better than FB/AWS, but if it's built around monetization it will only ever be a stopgap. stopgaps are fine and often good, but the places we need them are already shrinking. federated chat/social networks and peer-based media/streaming applications are developed and advancing rapidly enough for me to take them seriously today. another "big tech" alternative -- open SW/HW stacks for mobile phones as an alternative to Apple -- is in a similar state and crypto hasn't even started any parallel project that i know of. search alternatives are the furthest behind, but is anyone using crypto to build an alternative to Google? my understanding of search is that it's a tough problem to solve because of the money incentives (if a click results in profit via commerce or ads, then there's an incentive to pay for more clicks, either via backchannel payments or SEO), and that social ranking of search results is one of the only ways to overcome this.
exogeny 4y ago
a16z in particular are on the leading edge of the get-equity-in-tokens-with-no-lockup and then immediately pump & dump scam. Step 1: Find literally any crypto project. Doesn't matter. Step 2: "Invest in it", and immediately receive tokens with no lockup. Step 3: Have Chris Dixon write a breathless tweet about it, call your friends and get press coverage. Get a16z-adjacent influencers involved. Step 4: Price goes up because a16z is leading; immediately dump. Step 5: Project rugs. Yay, crypto. It's the best. It's interesting because most of these projects are absolute dogshit and will go to zero, but since they've already exited, they'll show nice returns to their LPs. But to the average person following it, all they'll see is a16z backing a string of rugs and embarrassing failures; I guess the PR hit is worth it, until Marc starts talking NIMBY shit again.
quickthrower2 4y ago
I find Crypto/web3 does this weird thing where it sells itself on what people imagine it is (freedom, privacy, decentralization, more fault-tolerant applications, etc.), rather than what it actually can do (same as web2 but slower and more complicated).
- logisticseh 4y ago
  That's marketing.

yawnxyz 4y ago

I like that HN doesn't emblazon the user's points/status so clearly compared to something like FB/Twitter, where "likes" is front and center. I also like that the quality of the post is reflected in the # of votes in the UI (by graying the post out if it's not good). I wonder if it's useful to add some indicator that a post was "highly voted", or would that create more "status accrual" behavior? I think Reddit is completely designed around status accrual with the badges and votes plastered all over each post — that's probably taking it too far.

yawnxyz 4y ago
Another mitigation technique the article missed: Instead of resetting everyone's status to zero, you can create a new status game. E.g. if you've implemented "likes" to your posts, you can add a "voted most helpful" status and highlight "these are the ones voted most helpful". Adding another status game side steps original status game. It could also be interesting to have "status mini games" where different statuses switch out over time, but this probably works better for small communities rather than massive social media sites like Twitter.
thejosh 4y ago
The moderation team is also sensible from what I can see. I very rarely see a gray post that is downvoted because it is offtopic, inflammatory, etc, instead of just another point of view.

colinsane 4y ago

"status" occurs 63 times in this 1900 word article. "game" occurs 12 times, "capital" 4 times. may as well call these things "status games". whatever a16z is cooking up this time, there's no way in hell it will resemble or is even designed to resemble anything the ordinary human would encounter (or desire) in their day-to-day social life. hell, they bring up the gini coefficient not once but twice. how the fuck is this relevant to a person's social life? if you're looking for a way to balance a social network, look no further than Dunbar's number: actual social networks are naturally somewhat egalitarian (moreso than the stuff a16z is discussing at least) -- as soon as you stop thinking of them in terms of some hierarchy meant to be gamed.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lkrubner 4y ago

Despite having the advantage of an extra 19 years, I don’t think this essay offered any new insights that weren’t already in Clay Shirky’s 2003 essay on power laws and inequality: https://extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20Three-Shirky.pdf https://extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20Three-Shirky...

mattgreenrocks 4y ago

I’m patiently waiting for the part where we realize all the desperate grasping at Internet Points is collectively pathetic when we could be actually connecting with one another. “But we’re just animals” That Smart Guy inevitably says I’m the comment section. Maybe, but it doesn’t excuse how ridiculous it is to be fighting over Internet Points. Go outside and meet actual people.

canadaduane 4y ago
Agreed. I think we are already in the rebellion / response stage. It takes time to build compelling alternatives, though--especially those that care primarily about human needs and not about ROI. I wrote about our search for happiness online (in the context of real relationships and meeting our psychological needs) a couple of days ago, perhaps it will interest you: https://blog.relm.us/finding-happiness-online/ https://blog.relm.us/finding-happiness-online/

quickthrower2 4y ago

Does status matter in a social network? I am almost zero social network status and I can: 1. Find people on LinkedIn and talk to them. 2. Have meaningful discussions on Reddit. 3. Talk to friends. 4. Chat to a random interesting person on Twitter. The only thing I can't do is make a million dollars from my audience. But surely most users don't need that. You can't get rid of status as long as you have people. People will prefer some people to other people. Some will be popular. So I think it is a bit of a non topic. Privacy, security and avoiding addiction and bias are the interesting topics of what we do with social networks.

insightcheck 4y ago
I can think of a few specific cases where social media status can have an effect for a regular person (more specifically, a non-influencer), though you're right that status typically doesn't block off main features. - For LinkedIn, there have been cases where certain job positions (typically sales, marketing, and social media management) actually prefer candidates to have a certain number of followers (500+) as evidence they are good at using social networks. - For Twitter, some people in certain social circles allegedly judge potential dates based on their number of Twitter followers. At a less extreme sense, some people judge others with wariness if they have no social media accounts. You can easily avoid having deep relationships with these people, but status can have real-life effects. Separately for Twitter, you may be more likely to get customer support by publicly mentioning a company, if you have more followers. - Lastly for Reddit, having less karma or a newer account raises suspicions you are a bot (some subreddits actually forbid newer accounts). In practice, none of these really matter if you don't work in sales, don't date or befriend people who care too much about social media, don't comment on more mainstream subreddits where there are karma thresholds, and can do without mentioning companies publicly on Twitter for support as a last resort. However, there can be real-life effects from internet points.

Jasper_ 4y ago

"Followers" as a metric exists because Twitter demands a centralized feed that's constantly unstable so you go back to it often. Why can't it be like RSS, where everybody has a feed, and it tracks what posts I've read and which ones I haven't, and I can catch up with all the unread posts? Probably because that way, I could check it once a week, instead of every 30 minutes, and Twitter needs those DAUs to survive. Web3 isn't worth the digital paper I'm writing this screed on, but if there's anything that a decentralized social network should be able to do, it's get us out of hyper-aggressive VC-subsidized optimization for eyeballs and growth, and put us back into humane territory. The mis-step of adding back "status" into the network is just showing us nobody even recognizes the problems here, or more likely, intentionally want to make a worse version of what already exists. also, tbh, the "follow" system is a confusing web of permissions. Primarily it means "I want to see their posts in my feed", but also sometimes "I want the ability to see someone's private feed" and "I want to be able to DM someone", because inexplicably, there's only one relationship available in Twitter... the follower.

comex 4y ago
> Why can't it be like RSS, where everybody has a feed, and it tracks what posts I've read and which ones I haven't, and I can catch up with all the unread posts? Probably because that way, I could check it once a week, instead of every 30 minutes, and Twitter needs those DAUs to survive. I use Tweetbot, which approximates this by saving my place in the timeline (though it doesn't let me mark tweets as read/unread/needs-followup on a more granular level, which would be a useful feature). But ironically, I suspect I might be better off using the standard unstable feed, precisely because I only check Twitter anywhere from once a week to once a day. Every day, my timeline gets hundreds of tweets. The actual volume of text is not that high, compared to the long blog posts I'm accustomed to reading at a fast pace. But the tweets are about many different topics, and many of them are tips of icebergs, having links or being part of longer threads. So the timeline feels overwhelming, and I almost never read it all. Given that, perhaps I'd be better off without the pretense. Ditch the saved place; prioritize recent tweets, so that they're still live discussions in case I feel like replying; but rather than solely prioritizing recency, use a filtering algorithm to identify which tweets are most worth reading. But for now I'm stubbornly sticking to Tweetbot – partly out of habit, partly because I don't want to use an algorithm unless it's something open source that I can customize.

numtel 4y ago

James C Scott's Seeing Like a State is recommended (which is great) but surprising that they don't recommend Graeber's Debt. The following quote feels like it should have a citation to the section about jubilees: > To my knowledge, no one has really tried the logical extreme version of this: set all status indicators to zero periodically and reset the network from scratch. Might be an interesting experiment to run! IMO, this mechanism is one of the reasons why the forkability of cryptocurrencies is such a huge feature: invoking a jubilee is within relatively easy reach for the population, something that has been locked away by the state for some time now. With a belief in a cascade of currencies, constantly allowing many opportunities to be an early adopter, the "revolution" will be priced in.