Mastodawn

Michael 2d ago

@ZachWeinersmith I really like that idea of a "passive barrier"

Zach Weinersmith

@mschfr Has to be passive and not actively judgmental.

Dubi is here

2d ago

@ZachWeinersmith @mschfr I mean we're a little bit that, too.

@ZachWeinersmith It's hard to design something like that: You are trying to exclude "those" people from your nice club without excluding other people, who might fit well into your club. The 90s internet excluded many non-techies who really enriched the net in the 2000s. But it still had a problem with trolls and idiots. Maybe not as bad as today, but that was because the spaces we met were better moderated

@mschfr I think the thing that's really impossible is you need to mostly exclude money. One of my Grand Theories is that corps took a long time to realize there was money to be made online, and then figure out how to get it. So there was this liminal period when people were just there to chat and share, no relentless branding or slot-machine-inspired algorithms.

Dubi is here

1d ago

@ZachWeinersmith @mschfr definitely money is part of it (hence mastodon), but part of it is also sheer size. 90s forums were manageable and moderatable in a way that current ones simply are not - but small size is the opposite of what money wants, so we got a push for more people in fewer spaces.

SlightlyCyberpunk 1d ago

@ZachWeinersmith @mschfr Federation is a huge tool there if you can maintain it. There's a reason the entire Internet is reduced to, like, five websites now. If they can't lock you into their platform, lock you into their ads, lock you into their data harvesting...they have no revenue model.

Nobody really knows how to make money on Fedi so far. All we really have is "donate to your admin!". WTF are the corpos gonna do with that?

gabriele renzi 1d ago

@ZachWeinersmith @mschfr I once saw someone around here suggest we should ban online advertising, and while I think that's impossible, unrealistic etc.. I've been thinking more and more often that, well, it _would_ fix most of the issues of the last decade of the web.

@riffraff @mschfr Yeah, I don't think that's the issue. Like, for all their faults, the youtube and podcast universes seem to me like a modern internet bright spot, and part of that's because their ads pay well and the networks give them a high split.

@ZachWeinersmith @riffraff I think that there is a difference between people doing commercial things and "normal" people just trying to have an uncommercial conversation with other humans. There is room for both - but in the main social networks, commercial content drowns out the conversation between "normal" people

@mschfr @riffraff Interesting example of this: 10-15 years ago if you had a comic about [subject] you could post in the relevant subreddit. But at some point there were so many artists (and spammers, and combinations thereof) that moderation got a lot tougher. I think this was a loss for everyone.

@ZachWeinersmith @riffraff Yeah - if there are tens of thousands of people coming to your place to promote their stuff, you need to toughen the rules. That transforms your little community into a place where you have "users" that are being marketed at and that totally shifts the dynamic.

@mschfr @riffraff Right, and that changed sucked as an artist too. Because the thought process used to be "I made a thing, I'll share it." But once everyone is (reasonably) suspicious, you start pulling back. Like, to me this is the way in which the social internet isn't that social, because in a lot of places people are very guarded.