One of the things that's made it easy to find communities whose discussion I want to see is the linear feed. This is a stark contrast to new social apps I've tried, e.g., Clubhouse, where my feed is dominated by high engagement stuff I don't want.
I understand why companies push that stuff; looking at Twitter's experiments, you get more growth/$ when you switch users who've chosen linear timeline back to ranked timeline.
Fundamentally, this is why most apps don't even offer linear timeline.
At a meta level, something I find mildly interesting is how many people are writing stuff on Mastodon about how it's impossible for Mastodon to scale up without using an ad supported model (b/c server costs), it's better to have ranked feeds because most people want them, etc.
The thing I think is interesting is that the people writing this stuff, implicitly, seemingly cannot conceive of a model where the organization is not growth and profit maximizing.
If I look at my own site, I make $30k/yr off donations and could easily do 10x that with big ads, but I don't currently need the money enough to put ads up.
Likewise, if you do the math on how much it costs to run a Masto server, even if the fediverse gets way bigger and hosting costs go up, you should be able to run a small instance on donations.
Donations aren't profit maximizing compared to have ranked feeds with ads, but it's ok for there to be things that aren't profit maximizing.
It's so obvious that it's ok for things to not be profit maximizing that it's sort of absurd to think that someone would think that someone would say that things must be profit maximizing, and I think that if you asked the people writing the comments I'm referring to, they'd agree in the abstract that it's ok to not maximize profit.
This is the really insidious thing about absorbing values from the environment around you.
As absurd as it seems, a lot of people who've spent a bunch of time in tech really can't imagine what it looks like for something to not be profit maximizing and not switch to an ad supported engagement-boosting feed.
I've been on the lookout for this kind of implicit, general accidental, shift of values (corruption?) ever since I noticed this happened to law students back when I was in school.
As a group, incoming law students and 3Ls have very different goals and values.
Relatively speaking, incoming students are much more likely to want to do "change the world" work and 3Ls are much more likely to want to go into BIGLAW and make fat stacks of cash.
The prestige ladder of law school is oriented around this (most prestigious = clerkship; next most = BIGLAW) and, on average, it's very hard for people to resist having their values corrupted when they're in a system with high/low prestige options.
At the micro level, I think it's really fascinating how this happens. One mechanism that people's values change without realizing it, but there are 2nd order effects as well, e.g., a doctor I know chose a high-prestige career path that they knew they'd hate over the low-prestige one they wanted because "if I did [low status], people would think I couldn't have done [high status]".
It's very hard for people to https://danluu.com/look-stupid/.
BTW, I'm pretty sure this has significantly impacted me. If I look at the kind of work I do the kind of work I find interesting, it's correlated with stuff that's fairly prestigious, which I find highly suspicious.
I hope I'd never make a call as obviously bad as the above doctor, but it's generally difficult (impossible?) to really disentangle one's own interests from environmental influences.
@danluu Second, socially driven changes in values and priorities can be a good thing, it's not always (or even most often?) bad.
The book Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen To Good People was very helpful in thinking a lot of this out, for me: https://academic.oup.com/book/38980
Its main focus is on conspiracy beliefs, but it discusses the social basis of much of what we think of as individual cognition.
The last thing I want to see is for the fediverse to go ad driven, so I agree we need to push back on that.
> a doctor I know chose a high-prestige career path that they knew they'd hate over the low-prestige one they wanted because "if I did [low status], people would think I couldn't have done [high status]".
this person deserves every nanosecond of misery they reap from that decision.
but yes. such people also affect those around them and vote with their dollars (and eyeballs). sad! many such cases
Dan Luu
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