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.
@danluu also that they don't seem to understand how little the cost of a lot of the server part of the infrastructure has gotten to be over time. A single modern box can do amazing things and be acquired relatively cheaply...
Ads are a tool to make money / sales by raising awareness and getting people in a funnel/path to monetize with the real "product". Communities have events, fundraisers, ... All of that can exist in a non-centralized infra without as much of a cut taken off the top...
@mischief_sf @danluu That right there is a big part of the equation — most of the people who can't understand how this decentralized open system can scale w/o for-profit model don't know what the costs are. It doesn't matter to them how cheap servers and storage are now compared to the past, they simply don't know anything about servers at all.
/1
@mischief_sf @danluu There are also a LOT of assumptions made conversely by those who insist the (unspecified) costs are low — how much of the current system replies on volunteers versus paid labor? Are both sysadmin and mods in the equation?
I've volunteered as a moderator for a website for the last dozen years. I'm not a security risk to that site; can that be said if *all* labor for Masto servers is volunteered?
@femme_mal @danluu Agreed. I've run websites for businesses and social groups and stopped because of the time commitment, not the infrastructure cost (which was < $40/month).
Part of what I like about the instance I'm on is it documents a lot of the thoughts/policies/plan around these pieces (https://blog.woof.group/docs/donations, https://blog.woof.group/docs/growth). For hard numbers https://runyourown.social/#funding looks covers some (Originally $31/month, now $76/month but gets $107/month in Patreon pledges).
@reido @mischief_sf @danluu I've done community management since 1996, moderation for one site since 2010. It's definitely not easy, somebody's angry about it roughly 20% of the time.
I think of the story about the bartender who kicks out the 'nice' Nazi-lite: mods need to boot the trouble early, but they have to know the server's values well and recognize potential trouble promptly.
How to scale that with consistency *with volunteers*? Needs much discussion.
@femme_mal @mischief_sf @danluu Only 20% of the time?🙂
Thank you for this; I agree wholeheartedly. I think in the spirit of what you're advocating, acknowledgement that mistakes will be made and must be speedily rectified and, where appropriate, called out as racist, is a far cry from what we are sometimes seeing here and on that Other Platform, people screaming, "Here there be racists!" and predicting doom. Mastodon will be tested by this huge influx of users and must respond accordingly, but to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater seems to me a gross overreaction.
@mischief_sf Up/down voting by community members is one means of volunteer moderation, but it can result in a form of sanctioned brigading as well.
I'd also like to know more about Reddit's and Twitch's demographics which can affect community moderation outcomes, but even demographics can be difficult to pin down depending on r/subject-matter or stream. /1
Dan Luu
Cody Mischief
Femme Malheureuse
Reido