I read an interesting point which I hadn’t realized before. Discussions on current social media are always current, not long term. You open the app or website to see what’s going on now. When you comment, it’s soon lost to history, buried by newer stuff. If you happen on a post more than a day or two old, it doesn’t make sense to comment as it’s already passed and nobody will read your reply. You’re not building anything of long term value. It was not like this in forums that predated social media. You could reply to a years old thread, and it would be bumped to the head of the queue. I suppose both the form of social media with its feeds and the algorithms designed to hook you and make you come for more are to blame.

How could we make kbin or fediverse in general more purposeful long term and less for instant gratification? Going back to old forum form is probably not the answer, but maybe something between feeds and forums or even something entirely new? With fediverse we have the opportunity to build something better and more useful than what we have now, as we are not bound by the economic imperative to make the users hooked.

  • Lee Duna
    2·
    1 year ago

    I suppose both the form of social media with its feeds and the algorithms designed to hook you and make you come for more are to blame.

    Yes, it is possible with big corps involved in the fediverse like meta is trying to do. As it requires large capacity and expensive servers to collect and process huge amounts of data.

    But of course that could kill the fediverse, and jeopardize the privacy of fediverse users.

    https://infosec.pub/post/400702

    Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.

    https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/

    And threads app itself is a privacy nigtmare, it will collect as much of your data as possible to use in algorithms to promote posts.