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“To Varoufakis, every time you post on X, formerly Twitter, you’re essentially toiling Elon Musk’s estate like a medieval serf. Musk doesn't pay you. But your f

“To Varoufakis, every time you post on X, formerly Twitter, you’re essentially toiling Elon Musk’s estate like a medieval serf. Musk doesn't pay you. But your free labor pays him, in a sense, by increasing the value of his company.” This sounds disanalogous to me. When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. All at no monetary cost to you. Meanwhile, twitter has the costs of paying for servers and infrastructure and salaries of those required to support the site

soco 3y ago
Also a serf status can be boosted by receiving a visit from the lord, which has quite some costs with his court.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bluetomcat 3y ago
> you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following Ultimately, it's a zero-sum game for all the "posters". The attention and time of your following is finite, and other posters are fighting for it, too. The "cloud algorithm" defines the rules of the game and matches your content to its consumers.
- ctrw 3y ago
  So long as the user base is growing its not zero sum.
  - mzitelli 3y ago
    Exactly, X userbase is going down. So less than zero sum.
    - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
      That's because Musk doesn't understand what he bought and lacks the finesse to manage it productively. And that's a good thing, because if someone as toxic and unhinged as Musk understood how SM really works, it would be a global disaster. We've already seen what happens with that in the MSM space. So far, SM has only had fragmentary versions of that kind of propaganda monolith - Cambridge Analytica, bot farms, and so on. Those are all bad enough. But a global platform that existed purely for propaganda and disinformation while pretending not to would be horrific.
- pas 3y ago
  No, it's not. If there's good quality content, scintillating discussions, amazing insights and whatnot on twiXter it will attract more users. If all of that is there but the toxic sludge level in the cesspool is already at the dear users' elbows, then it probably discourage new (and old) users from jumping in.
  - bluetomcat 3y ago
    It might be subjective, but I'm having trouble finding any quality content on media platforms driven by engagement. Most content is engineered to provoke an initial dopamine reaction with a funny face, a shiny product or a curious situation. Even tech articles feel promotional. You rarely get any deep insight about a topic.
    - pas 3y ago
      Yep. Same experience here. Basically uncurated/unmoderated spaces are shit. (Mastodon is very fragmented, so YMMV based on instances and who do you follow ... though I'm pretty happy with infosec.exchange , and surprisingly nowadays most quality stuff is on Youtube in the form of long video essays.)
- grimblee 3y ago
  Exvept you actually pay with your time, both by thinking, writing amd following stuff on that platform wheb you could have done something probably more productive, but also with your brain time watching ads. Not to mention ads will ultimately shape you into buying something, no matter how smart you think you are.
iamcurious 3y ago
If you depend on that brand and following for your livelihood and they arbitrarily ban you, what rights do you have?
- theGeatZhopa 3y ago
  6 months ago. I was dependent on my Boss for my livelihood. Worked there for 14 years. But they arbitrarily fired me. What rights do I have? I guess, when I was dependent on that brand and they ban me - yeah, that's life. Happens millions of times to millions. So what? End of life?
pas 3y ago
Serfs got protection (and other services, like justice! uh.) from the feudal lord. I don't like Varoufakis' typical oversimplification, but this one doesn't seem that bad.
- tored 3y ago
  But I get no protection from these tech overlords, they can close me down at anytime or give my data away to third party or the government without my knowledge.
  - pas 3y ago
    The analogy is that you get to use their platform to build your 'brand'. Of course other important aspect is that even if you are free to move to a different platform - in contrast to serfs, who in general had to ask for permission to move - you can't move your followers. So in that sense every second of effort put into a twitter profile is improvement to the land that you can't take with you. And, as we know, while brands are important users are lazy and stick to platforms much more than to brands. (While, again of course, there's usually a very devoted core community around content creators, but that's not true at all of most brands, and especially not true of regular users who just want to have some Reddit or forum-discussion-like experience.)
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  they also tended to live in poverty and die horribly. this occasionally led them to rise up and kill their lords; the medieval social contract was constantly in flux. but make no mistake it led to absolutism.
ilayn 3y ago
Whatever you get out for your own self is a secondary by-product. You are bounded to that platform to get what you get and cannot leave by taking what you already contributed. While you are benefiting from certain social returns, you are also the reason why someone else's brand is growing by the same argument. Hence the platform is doing nothing but increasing its importance for its matchmaking value. That is the premise. At some critical threshold, the platform achieves the "I'm too big to bother with individual users" and declares the feudal lordship (remember similar Stackoverflow and Reddit dramas with "We do as we please" attitude and nothing happened to the platforms because users could not give up - the following mod saga for reddit and so on and accepted their fate). It already happened with social media platforms long time ago.
- bdowling 3y ago
  > cannot leave by taking what you already contributed. Of course you can. Twitter/X doesn’t own your tweets. You can take them and post them somewhere else if you want. This is all clearly stated in the Twitter/X terms of service. https://twitter.com/en/tos https://twitter.com/en/tos
  - ilayn 3y ago
    Your contribution is not the storage of your tweets. You can delete them one by one or with API but it won't make any difference at this point. And you need to repost it somewhere. You have contributed to keep the platform relevant. So no you can't take them anywhere else.
    - bdowling 3y ago
      > And you need to repost it somewhere. Exactly, you can repost them elsewhere. That is the opposite of “you can’t take them anywhere else.”
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    Twitter owns the contextual value of your tweets. It owns the virtual land on which you can seed tweets to grow value. And it sells access to the virtual land to advertisers who put up billboards all over it. And it gives Musk powers that feudal lords never had. He has total control over which content grows value, and which remains ignored and barren.
usrnm 3y ago
And serfs were allowed to work the land belonging to the lord and produce food for themselves and their families.
- kjksf 3y ago
  "serfs were peasants who were bound to the land they worked on and were under the authority of the landowners or lords" Last time I checked Twitter (the supposed lord) doesn't have the power to make you (the supposed serf) post on Twitter. That is, I would say, a crucial distinction that makes the serf comparison ultra ridiculous. Then again if Varoufakis said that the relationship between Twitter and its users is based on mutual benefit but Twitter gets more benefit, then it wouldn't make you as angry as saying that they people are serfs of techno-feudalists.
mschuster91 3y ago
> This sounds disanalogous to me. When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. As someone who co-runs a >>70k account: Yes, that is possible, but it's very very rare for those creating a following primarily via Twitter to actually make money with it. Maybe if you got an 0nlyfans account. Meanwhile, the content you create lures in other people and with them, eyeballs that Twitter can make money with by selling advertising time to these people. > Meanwhile, twitter has the costs of paying for servers and infrastructure and salaries of those required to support the site The legitimate costs required to run something like Twitter or Whatsapp can be pretty darn small. Whatsapp ran with 50 employees up until 1 billion (!) users [1]. The point is to not unfocus too much - for all the bad Musk did to Twitter, he did show that there indeed was a lot of dead weight hanging around the place, no wonder it was hemorraging money. [1] https://blog.quastor.org/p/whatsapp-scaled-1-billion-users-50-engineers https://blog.quastor.org/p/whatsapp-scaled-1-billion-users-5...
- blitzar 3y ago
  > no wonder it was hemorraging money I love how history has been rewritten such that a company that was profitable was "hemorraging money". Now that they are actually hemorraging money under new management it is somehow a case study in profitability. If everyone clicks their heels three times and says it - of course it will be true.
  - theblobawakens 3y ago
    If, instead of selling a product, when one gets regular huge investments from second/third world regimes, which are in reality to pay for salaries 19K+ regional language moderators and censors, 500 programmers for censorship and related algos, but only 500 people to run the actual "freemium" product is not exactly "profitable" either...
    - blitzar 3y ago
      The definition is clear and well defined, making up new definitions to justify a lie is deliberately obtuse. profitable /ˈprɒfɪtəbl/ adjective adjective: profitable 1. (of a business or activity) yielding profit or financial gain.
r0ckarong 3y ago
> All at no monetary cost to you. Except the fee for the blue tick. And whatever they charge you if you actually want to place ads for users instead of "pushing content" to those that follow you. I also don't think the serf image is perfect but there clearly is an "access level" difference to where value is created and extracted.
Timwi 3y ago
Twitter (and other platforms like it) self-impose those costs on themselves in order to maintain the feudalist structure. If all software were just open-source, anyone could run their own Twitter and make it interoperable. Except this already exists and is called Mastodon, or more generally, the Fediverse. The fact that billions of people still choose to use Twitter instead of the sensible alternative shows that the feudalist gambit (using algorithms to make people angry and turn on each other) is working.
- pas 3y ago
  According to Apptopia analysis, X/Twitter is estimated to have around 121 million daily active users, significantly lower compared to company announcements. Elon of course says that it's around 300M and all-time-high was 550M in 2023. (Whatever that means.)
- non-chalad 3y ago
  How much does the electricity cost to run the servers? How much for the maintenance of those computers running the software? How about rental fees for the space they are kept in, air conditioning, sewer, taxes? Nah… doesn't exist. It's self-imposed feudalism.
  - piva00 3y ago
    The issue is not giving you the option by making Twitter interoperable with an open protocol. Imagine if the web was like that instead of being an open network where if you follow a few protocols you can access it through any protocol-compliant software (aka: a browser) giving you the option to self-host or pay some service to host it for you, if it was a single service operated by a Big Tech that closes off this web based on their whims, locking out competing browsers, impossible to access outside of their provided clients, etc. It's self-imposed feudalism, Twitter created a feud, API access has been curtailed, you have to access it through their provided means. Open protocols is what made the web as powerful as it is, the closing of parts of it is a disgrace.
    - theGeatZhopa 3y ago
tiborsaas 3y ago
> Musk doesn't pay you. What is this then? https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1770239673014595718 https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1770239673014595718
m463 3y ago
Is reddit is a better example. People post and comments add up. But ads are being served, people are being tracked, and eventually the data is sold so AI models can be trained on everything. But the main product (in silicon valley) is stock, which all the reddit folks have been selling wildly the past few weeks.
drewcoo 3y ago
> This sounds disanalogous to me Varoufakis always misrepresents capitalism and feudalism. That's the only way his ideas can get their undeserved attention. Peasants worked the land for their lords but also for themselves and their families. Peasant revolts were not unheard of but peasants were generally treated fairly enough to avoid revolts. Rent-seeking does not magically transform capitalism into feudalism. Capitalism is built on the idea of "investing" capital and "profiting" from others. And in fact, there's the concept of rentier capitalism.
pipes 3y ago
It also ignores a simple fact, we do not have to post on twitter. It is a choice, it is a free exchange, presumably the people who post on twitter enjoy it and Elon makes money. Serfs, well they were forced to work someone else's land and in return they maybe got enough to eat. It's a ridiculous comparison.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > presumably the people who post on twitter enjoy it I do not share this presumption. https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc?si=Wr4GgIzWyA-lhsOU https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc?si=Wr4GgIzWyA-lhsOU Disagreement (like mine with you :P) also drives engagement, and quite possibly more than positive vibes do.
  - theGeatZhopa 3y ago
    Not just quite possible, but it is like that. The reason all the platforms got that big is engagement and engagement can be provoked if you give the people a possibility to take their stand. But for one taking a stand you need something that is big enough for the stand taker to take the stand. It's disagreement. And provoking. The classical tools of Internet trolls. They're a part of the game too.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  It's damn near impossible to work as an independent creator of books, music, art, streaming videos of all kinds, and so on, without a social media presence. Many people do not enjoy SM at all, but the alternative is zero income.
tmcb 3y ago
Medieval serfs could be rewarded with food housing at no monetary cost as well, but it didn't make the system any less unjust. Also, having the company pay for infrastructure costs does not necessarily imply that users are getting the upper hand in this deal. They are providing "value" (quotes intentional) to customers at the lowest cost possible, otherwise it would not be a viable business.
eesmith 3y ago
A serf working the field is still rewarded with (part of) the harvest, the knowledge of having done good work, and the respect of neighbors. Praskovia Kovalyova-Zhemchugova "was a Russian serf actress and soprano opera singer", with her own brand and following ("Figes describes her as Russia's first "superstar"); quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praskovia_Kovalyova-Zhemchugova https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praskovia_Kovalyova-Zhemchugov... I think it's a tricky argument since there the feudal system was much more complicated than, say, sharecropping or tenant farming, as the lord was obliged to protect his serfs and protect their right to use the land. I think sharecropping is a better analogy. It's also tricky as serfdom and feudalism cover a wide range of systems which are not well described in popular culture. Serfdom in 1800s Russia was far different from serfdom in 1400s England. When you write "All at no monetary cost to you", remember that serfs mostly paid in time and work, not money. And the lord had costs as well, like the cost of providing military protection.
lm28469 3y ago
> you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. I'm reading this over and over trying to comprehend how we ended up in a world in which this sentence isn't satirical
- exe34 3y ago
  It's like the old "do it for me for free and you'll get exposure!"
  - boffinAudio 3y ago
    No, it is that and the attitude is not old but rather encoded in every damn EULA under the sun ..
- Beldin 3y ago
  I figured it was a troll attempt. Judging by the replies, I'm not sure if the troller would be pleased (quantity) or sad (lack of outrage). ETA: The idea of a troller losing faith in humanity because his trolls are taken seriously but do not stir up emotions is somewhat funny.
krapp 3y ago
>When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. All at no monetary cost to you. Yes we call that "being paid in exposure" and outside of Silicon Valley it's widely recognized as a scam. Also bear in mind that content and engagement serves the purpose of driving ad revenue and creating a monetizable social graph, so it's less a "reward" and more "unpaid labor."
Lutger 3y ago
> When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following wikipedia on serfdom: >Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the lord of the manor who owned that land. In return, they were entitled to protection, justice, and the right to cultivate certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence.

soco 3y ago

Also a serf status can be boosted by receiving a visit from the lord, which has quite some costs with his court.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

bluetomcat 3y ago

> you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following Ultimately, it's a zero-sum game for all the "posters". The attention and time of your following is finite, and other posters are fighting for it, too. The "cloud algorithm" defines the rules of the game and matches your content to its consumers.

ctrw 3y ago
So long as the user base is growing its not zero sum.
- mzitelli 3y ago
  Exactly, X userbase is going down. So less than zero sum.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    That's because Musk doesn't understand what he bought and lacks the finesse to manage it productively. And that's a good thing, because if someone as toxic and unhinged as Musk understood how SM really works, it would be a global disaster. We've already seen what happens with that in the MSM space. So far, SM has only had fragmentary versions of that kind of propaganda monolith - Cambridge Analytica, bot farms, and so on. Those are all bad enough. But a global platform that existed purely for propaganda and disinformation while pretending not to would be horrific.
pas 3y ago
No, it's not. If there's good quality content, scintillating discussions, amazing insights and whatnot on twiXter it will attract more users. If all of that is there but the toxic sludge level in the cesspool is already at the dear users' elbows, then it probably discourage new (and old) users from jumping in.
- bluetomcat 3y ago
  It might be subjective, but I'm having trouble finding any quality content on media platforms driven by engagement. Most content is engineered to provoke an initial dopamine reaction with a funny face, a shiny product or a curious situation. Even tech articles feel promotional. You rarely get any deep insight about a topic.
  - pas 3y ago
    Yep. Same experience here. Basically uncurated/unmoderated spaces are shit. (Mastodon is very fragmented, so YMMV based on instances and who do you follow ... though I'm pretty happy with infosec.exchange , and surprisingly nowadays most quality stuff is on Youtube in the form of long video essays.)
grimblee 3y ago
Exvept you actually pay with your time, both by thinking, writing amd following stuff on that platform wheb you could have done something probably more productive, but also with your brain time watching ads. Not to mention ads will ultimately shape you into buying something, no matter how smart you think you are.

iamcurious 3y ago

If you depend on that brand and following for your livelihood and they arbitrarily ban you, what rights do you have?

theGeatZhopa 3y ago
6 months ago. I was dependent on my Boss for my livelihood. Worked there for 14 years. But they arbitrarily fired me. What rights do I have? I guess, when I was dependent on that brand and they ban me - yeah, that's life. Happens millions of times to millions. So what? End of life?

pas 3y ago

Serfs got protection (and other services, like justice! uh.) from the feudal lord. I don't like Varoufakis' typical oversimplification, but this one doesn't seem that bad.

tored 3y ago
But I get no protection from these tech overlords, they can close me down at anytime or give my data away to third party or the government without my knowledge.
- pas 3y ago
  The analogy is that you get to use their platform to build your 'brand'. Of course other important aspect is that even if you are free to move to a different platform - in contrast to serfs, who in general had to ask for permission to move - you can't move your followers. So in that sense every second of effort put into a twitter profile is improvement to the land that you can't take with you. And, as we know, while brands are important users are lazy and stick to platforms much more than to brands. (While, again of course, there's usually a very devoted core community around content creators, but that's not true at all of most brands, and especially not true of regular users who just want to have some Reddit or forum-discussion-like experience.)
red-iron-pine 3y ago
they also tended to live in poverty and die horribly. this occasionally led them to rise up and kill their lords; the medieval social contract was constantly in flux. but make no mistake it led to absolutism.

ilayn 3y ago

Whatever you get out for your own self is a secondary by-product. You are bounded to that platform to get what you get and cannot leave by taking what you already contributed. While you are benefiting from certain social returns, you are also the reason why someone else's brand is growing by the same argument. Hence the platform is doing nothing but increasing its importance for its matchmaking value. That is the premise. At some critical threshold, the platform achieves the "I'm too big to bother with individual users" and declares the feudal lordship (remember similar Stackoverflow and Reddit dramas with "We do as we please" attitude and nothing happened to the platforms because users could not give up - the following mod saga for reddit and so on and accepted their fate). It already happened with social media platforms long time ago.

bdowling 3y ago
> cannot leave by taking what you already contributed. Of course you can. Twitter/X doesn’t own your tweets. You can take them and post them somewhere else if you want. This is all clearly stated in the Twitter/X terms of service. https://twitter.com/en/tos https://twitter.com/en/tos
- ilayn 3y ago
  Your contribution is not the storage of your tweets. You can delete them one by one or with API but it won't make any difference at this point. And you need to repost it somewhere. You have contributed to keep the platform relevant. So no you can't take them anywhere else.
  - bdowling 3y ago
    > And you need to repost it somewhere. Exactly, you can repost them elsewhere. That is the opposite of “you can’t take them anywhere else.”
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  Twitter owns the contextual value of your tweets. It owns the virtual land on which you can seed tweets to grow value. And it sells access to the virtual land to advertisers who put up billboards all over it. And it gives Musk powers that feudal lords never had. He has total control over which content grows value, and which remains ignored and barren.

usrnm 3y ago

And serfs were allowed to work the land belonging to the lord and produce food for themselves and their families.

kjksf 3y ago
"serfs were peasants who were bound to the land they worked on and were under the authority of the landowners or lords" Last time I checked Twitter (the supposed lord) doesn't have the power to make you (the supposed serf) post on Twitter. That is, I would say, a crucial distinction that makes the serf comparison ultra ridiculous. Then again if Varoufakis said that the relationship between Twitter and its users is based on mutual benefit but Twitter gets more benefit, then it wouldn't make you as angry as saying that they people are serfs of techno-feudalists.

mschuster91 3y ago

> This sounds disanalogous to me. When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. As someone who co-runs a >>70k account: Yes, that is possible, but it's very very rare for those creating a following primarily via Twitter to actually make money with it. Maybe if you got an 0nlyfans account. Meanwhile, the content you create lures in other people and with them, eyeballs that Twitter can make money with by selling advertising time to these people. > Meanwhile, twitter has the costs of paying for servers and infrastructure and salaries of those required to support the site The legitimate costs required to run something like Twitter or Whatsapp can be pretty darn small. Whatsapp ran with 50 employees up until 1 billion (!) users [1]. The point is to not unfocus too much - for all the bad Musk did to Twitter, he did show that there indeed was a lot of dead weight hanging around the place, no wonder it was hemorraging money. [1] https://blog.quastor.org/p/whatsapp-scaled-1-billion-users-50-engineers https://blog.quastor.org/p/whatsapp-scaled-1-billion-users-5...

blitzar 3y ago
> no wonder it was hemorraging money I love how history has been rewritten such that a company that was profitable was "hemorraging money". Now that they are actually hemorraging money under new management it is somehow a case study in profitability. If everyone clicks their heels three times and says it - of course it will be true.
- theblobawakens 3y ago
  If, instead of selling a product, when one gets regular huge investments from second/third world regimes, which are in reality to pay for salaries 19K+ regional language moderators and censors, 500 programmers for censorship and related algos, but only 500 people to run the actual "freemium" product is not exactly "profitable" either...
  - blitzar 3y ago
    The definition is clear and well defined, making up new definitions to justify a lie is deliberately obtuse. profitable /ˈprɒfɪtəbl/ adjective adjective: profitable 1. (of a business or activity) yielding profit or financial gain.

r0ckarong 3y ago

> All at no monetary cost to you. Except the fee for the blue tick. And whatever they charge you if you actually want to place ads for users instead of "pushing content" to those that follow you. I also don't think the serf image is perfect but there clearly is an "access level" difference to where value is created and extracted.

Timwi 3y ago

Twitter (and other platforms like it) self-impose those costs on themselves in order to maintain the feudalist structure. If all software were just open-source, anyone could run their own Twitter and make it interoperable. Except this already exists and is called Mastodon, or more generally, the Fediverse. The fact that billions of people still choose to use Twitter instead of the sensible alternative shows that the feudalist gambit (using algorithms to make people angry and turn on each other) is working.

pas 3y ago
According to Apptopia analysis, X/Twitter is estimated to have around 121 million daily active users, significantly lower compared to company announcements. Elon of course says that it's around 300M and all-time-high was 550M in 2023. (Whatever that means.)
non-chalad 3y ago
How much does the electricity cost to run the servers? How much for the maintenance of those computers running the software? How about rental fees for the space they are kept in, air conditioning, sewer, taxes? Nah… doesn't exist. It's self-imposed feudalism.
- piva00 3y ago
  The issue is not giving you the option by making Twitter interoperable with an open protocol. Imagine if the web was like that instead of being an open network where if you follow a few protocols you can access it through any protocol-compliant software (aka: a browser) giving you the option to self-host or pay some service to host it for you, if it was a single service operated by a Big Tech that closes off this web based on their whims, locking out competing browsers, impossible to access outside of their provided clients, etc. It's self-imposed feudalism, Twitter created a feud, API access has been curtailed, you have to access it through their provided means. Open protocols is what made the web as powerful as it is, the closing of parts of it is a disgrace.
  - theGeatZhopa 3y ago

tiborsaas 3y ago

> Musk doesn't pay you. What is this then? https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1770239673014595718 https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1770239673014595718

m463 3y ago

Is reddit is a better example. People post and comments add up. But ads are being served, people are being tracked, and eventually the data is sold so AI models can be trained on everything. But the main product (in silicon valley) is stock, which all the reddit folks have been selling wildly the past few weeks.

drewcoo 3y ago

> This sounds disanalogous to me Varoufakis always misrepresents capitalism and feudalism. That's the only way his ideas can get their undeserved attention. Peasants worked the land for their lords but also for themselves and their families. Peasant revolts were not unheard of but peasants were generally treated fairly enough to avoid revolts. Rent-seeking does not magically transform capitalism into feudalism. Capitalism is built on the idea of "investing" capital and "profiting" from others. And in fact, there's the concept of rentier capitalism.

pipes 3y ago

It also ignores a simple fact, we do not have to post on twitter. It is a choice, it is a free exchange, presumably the people who post on twitter enjoy it and Elon makes money. Serfs, well they were forced to work someone else's land and in return they maybe got enough to eat. It's a ridiculous comparison.

ben_w 3y ago
> presumably the people who post on twitter enjoy it I do not share this presumption. https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc?si=Wr4GgIzWyA-lhsOU https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc?si=Wr4GgIzWyA-lhsOU Disagreement (like mine with you :P) also drives engagement, and quite possibly more than positive vibes do.
- theGeatZhopa 3y ago
  Not just quite possible, but it is like that. The reason all the platforms got that big is engagement and engagement can be provoked if you give the people a possibility to take their stand. But for one taking a stand you need something that is big enough for the stand taker to take the stand. It's disagreement. And provoking. The classical tools of Internet trolls. They're a part of the game too.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
It's damn near impossible to work as an independent creator of books, music, art, streaming videos of all kinds, and so on, without a social media presence. Many people do not enjoy SM at all, but the alternative is zero income.

tmcb 3y ago

Medieval serfs could be rewarded with food housing at no monetary cost as well, but it didn't make the system any less unjust. Also, having the company pay for infrastructure costs does not necessarily imply that users are getting the upper hand in this deal. They are providing "value" (quotes intentional) to customers at the lowest cost possible, otherwise it would not be a viable business.

eesmith 3y ago

A serf working the field is still rewarded with (part of) the harvest, the knowledge of having done good work, and the respect of neighbors. Praskovia Kovalyova-Zhemchugova "was a Russian serf actress and soprano opera singer", with her own brand and following ("Figes describes her as Russia's first "superstar"); quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praskovia_Kovalyova-Zhemchugova https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praskovia_Kovalyova-Zhemchugov... I think it's a tricky argument since there the feudal system was much more complicated than, say, sharecropping or tenant farming, as the lord was obliged to protect his serfs and protect their right to use the land. I think sharecropping is a better analogy. It's also tricky as serfdom and feudalism cover a wide range of systems which are not well described in popular culture. Serfdom in 1800s Russia was far different from serfdom in 1400s England. When you write "All at no monetary cost to you", remember that serfs mostly paid in time and work, not money. And the lord had costs as well, like the cost of providing military protection.

lm28469 3y ago

> you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. I'm reading this over and over trying to comprehend how we ended up in a world in which this sentence isn't satirical

exe34 3y ago
It's like the old "do it for me for free and you'll get exposure!"
- boffinAudio 3y ago
  No, it is that and the attitude is not old but rather encoded in every damn EULA under the sun ..
Beldin 3y ago
I figured it was a troll attempt. Judging by the replies, I'm not sure if the troller would be pleased (quantity) or sad (lack of outrage). ETA: The idea of a troller losing faith in humanity because his trolls are taken seriously but do not stir up emotions is somewhat funny.

krapp 3y ago

>When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. All at no monetary cost to you. Yes we call that "being paid in exposure" and outside of Silicon Valley it's widely recognized as a scam. Also bear in mind that content and engagement serves the purpose of driving ad revenue and creating a monetizable social graph, so it's less a "reward" and more "unpaid labor."

Lutger 3y ago

> When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following wikipedia on serfdom: >Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the lord of the manor who owned that land. In return, they were entitled to protection, justice, and the right to cultivate certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence.