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Another important factor, imo, is size. Quality on platforms like Twitter, Reddit, HN, Mastodon is inversely proportional to their size. If a platform gets big
by jerbear4328 3y ago
Another important factor, imo, is size. Quality on platforms like Twitter, Reddit, HN, Mastodon is inversely proportional to their size. If a platform gets big enough, regardless of its motives or polish, there will be more incentive to game it.
Platforms like HN and Mastodon are great because they are small. They cater more towards a smaller, more technical community, which it isn't worth it to game with spam or whatnot because they're small and more aware of this kind of manipulation. Smaller "gems" in bigger platforms (think a small, old subreddit) can be good for the same reason.
I guess this advocates more for the small web, which I'm all for, but there's less money in that. I wonder what could practically what incentives could make the web smaller and more useful.
- hollerith 3y agoHN is not small and hasn't been for many years. Your comment is item (comment or story) number 39 million 425 thousand 162.
- csallen 3y agoTwitter gets 500 million new tweets every day. HN has 39 million comments after 17 years. HN is small.
- hollerith 3y agoI wonder how many non-spam human-written tweets every day.
- Ringz 3y agoAbout 42.
- rezonant 3y agoWell, quality over quantity.
- jerbear4328 3y agoYeah, it's not some ten-person forum buried in the annals of the old Internet, HN is popular enough, but does a random person sitting in a Boston cafe know what HN is? Probably not, but they sure know what Twitter is.
- spartanatreyu 3y agoI don't see Mastodon getting worse by getting larger. You only see who you follow, and there's no like/karma/upvotes algorithm. Everything is sorted chronologically, and if anyone tries to "game" that by posting too much, they'd get unfollowed and/or banned. Mastodon is a nurtured cultivated twitter. Personally I follow the CSS/JS/TS community (for work), the gamedev community (for fun), and the space community (for passion)
- jerbear4328 3y agoOh, I don't mean that scale is the only factor. Clearly, the structure of Mastodon is way better than the structure of Twitter. But, I'd bet that if Mastodon was as big as Twitter, if it was that juicy of a target, it would have way more spam than it does today.
- Ghexor 3y agoI both agree and disagree, in that; - the amount of spam on Mastodon will surely increase in amount proportional to the size of it's network. And - Mastodon users won't usually see that new spam by the dynamics of the current system because we're only shown content from sources we explicitly follow.