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/.