Erin KissaneJun 9, 2023

The strangest thing to me about our social tools and networks is how super-limited their feature-sets and philosophies have been in human terms.

It feels like designing a house entirely around the best use of new light-switch technology. How can we reinvent the bathmat???

It's weird.

https://erinkissane.com/all-this-unmobilized-love

Show threadCyd Harrell
@kissane I think about this a lot (though I wouldn't call myself an expert) just because so few tech axioms from the last couple decades transfer to civic tech. it's interesting to me how many of the assumptions in our large systems - & therefore most of what's written about tech - come from ad-driven engagement models, sales funnels, or to some degree the Amazon book recommendation engine (which was decent for books but got worse as more categories were added)
Jun 10, 2023 at 4:26pmWeb
Show threadDerek Powazek 🐐Jun 10, 2023
@cydharrell @kissane OMG this. I had to unlearn so many ways of thinking when I moved from tech to farming.
Show threadCyd HarrellJun 10, 2023

@fraying @kissane for me the Amazon book rec engine, which seemed from the outside to be about popularity, recency, & similarity...& therefore worked ok for books... is in some ways the deepest one.

once you add commerce onto that you get competition as well.

& the idea that popularity among connections or recency is necessarily a good proxy for salience to me is *extremely* tenuous imo. but it underlies the entire ad-driven & ad-driven-derived internet