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
@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
@danluu it has to be sustaining tho, and I suspect that if you hadn't earned big money from your last jobs, you wouldn't be willing to live on 30K/year from your Patreon. Maybe you anticipate growing to a large enough number that it becomes sustaining (100K/year?).
Sustenance has to include paying a fair wage+benefits to the admins.
@heathborders I can't speak for the admins, but I lived on $12k/yr for a long time when I was making a lot more than that as an engineer I don't have any problem living on that much.
I think an instance needs to be quite large before it really needs a full-time admin. This isn't mastodon, but the lobsters admin is very part time and does a great job with that. And HN is huge (surely larger than the largest masto instance) and gets by decently with basically one full-time admin.
@danluu @heathborders I believe they said they'd recently hired some moderators, not brought on volunteers.
Which seems like the right choice to me - content moderation is hard work, and they have a ton of stuff being posted now.
But I agree I don't think they have a lack of funds. The mistakes they've made recently aren't because they can't afford more moderators, they're because they don't have good enough onboarding, training, and processes.
@danluu @heathborders Can you show your work on HN being bigger than the big Mastodon instances? That seems unlikely to me.
mastodon.social has hundreds of thousands of MAUs, so probably at least in the hundreds of thousands of posts per day (though it's hard to guess that ratio precisely.) That seems like far more than what HN handles.
@gregprice @heathborders I was thinking traffic and not posts or words written. I agree that Mastodon probably has more posts and more words written.
OTOH, I don't know what dang's split between programming and moderation is, so he might be much less than full time.
@danluu @heathborders Cool, thanks for the reply.
For thinking about the scale of the moderation burden, I'd expect the number of posts and of words written to be much more of a driver than the amount of read traffic. So I think that points to Mastodon (and in particular the largest instances) needing more moderation effort than HN.
@gregprice @heathborders Yeah, that's fair. One thing I wonder about is how good the moderation tooling is on HN vs. Mastodon.
My impression is that the moderation tooling is very good on HN. No idea about Mastodon, but from the non-moderation interfaces I can see, I'm going to guess that it's poor, which would really increase the mod burden.
@danluu @heathborders Yeah, that's a good point. I agree.
Another "unfair advantage" I think HN has on moderation is the fact that it's a forum for a specific, limited range of subject matter.
Lots and lots of the sorts of posts that tend to make content moderation hard can be just promptly squashed on HN as off-topic. On a general-purpose social media site, that won't wash.
@danluu @heathborders
Plus, because it's small and also focused, a moderator can read or at least skim a large fraction of all the discussion that happens.
That means they'll have way more context when making a decision on any given post than a moderator would be shown when working for FB or the bird site or, presumably, mastodon.online.
@gregprice @heathborders A question I have is, in the long run, if the fediverse scales, is small instance moderation even possible for instances that don't want to basically defederate without outsourcing moderation to a small set of centralized actors?
I've seen a variety of solutions to this and none even seem remotely plausible to me, e.g., see https://www.facebook.com/dan.luu/posts/pfbid023LoPRovpoprimEhSUSbaCTxKXfzGBgANk2dLr2DwFdHpgUwhSZiyA5C2rLMakrW4l?comment_id=450688213862987 for a discussion where someone proposed some solutions that I think can't possibly work.
@gregprice @heathborders This is a bit fatalistic, but I'm not super worried about moderation in general as things scale up because the entire system seems relatively likely to be unworkable if things scale up.
If there is a good solution, I think it's fairly non-obvious and every solution I've seen proposed pretty obviously can't work. And if we end up with a large fraction of the mod burden taken by some big centralized actors, then small instance moderation should be fairly light work?
@danluu @gregprice @heathborders
do you think fedi is "unworkable if things scale up" because human moderation can't scale, or because the technical architecture of federation itself can't scale?
it seems like there are possible solutions to both
@danluu @heathborders Yeah.
I think the best-case scenario is that there will be centralized actors — basically maintaining some forms of blocklist for instances to subscribe to and contribute information back to — and that they'll have some meaningful degree of collaborative/community governance.
Probably a more likely scenario is that there'll be such lists, but with little accountability except for the option for an instance to do without.
@heathborders @danluu I agree. I think it will be difficult to avoid that.
One possible direction that could help is for some reputation to derive from a Mastodon/fediverse hosting service one uses. So then if your new instance is on e.g. masto.host, it'd get some degree of ability to federate - and masto.host and the rest would exert pressure in turn on their customers to have a minimum level of good behavior.
5/ I remember when we added quote tweet, and we have the receipts. It does *not* increase abuse. (Source: I was the lead designer on the abuse team) You know what increases abuse? Reverse-chron replies without any sorting or algorithm, because someone can say "Kill yourself" as the first response. It becomes a game. It silences people.
@yaxu For me, I don't want to really do monetization oriented things, so I just don't do them.
If I wanted to make money, I think putting out 95% paywalled content with some teasers would be the way to go, and if I was good at video, then that would be the way to go, per the numbers in https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1589775358102212608.
“I'm surprised by how much money individuals make from video. At the bottom of the high end, there are examples like https://t.co/8FAJZZpNZe, where the #137th streamer on twitch has been offered $10M/yr multiple times. More surprising to me are numbers for "normal" streamers,”
Dan Luu
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