Renata 🇨🇦🐈Newsflash: boring white guy thinks fedi is bad because people here are not interested in his AI content
Anyway, Happy First Contact Day everyone.
I don’t even TRY (not my goal in life, I use mastodon for fun) and never had a problem with “engagement”
I have said this before:
A lot of journalists, influencers, etc have a problem with fedi because they don’t bother understanding the format
They’re used to platforms that work like this:
- share hot take
- receive likes
The fedi works differently:
- Engage with the community
- Connect with like minded folks regularly so they see you as a peer
- Eventually share your hot take
- Get responses
- Interact
And there you have it. That’s how you make friends instead of just followers.
Mauricio Teixeira🐧
@renata
No lies detected.
No lies detected.
datum (n=1)@renata And doing so in good faith (and blocking bad faith folks!) makes fedi-conversations meaningful exchanges of ideas, instead of just outlets and sites of parasociality!
Yora@renata It's not even about reach. It's about monetization.
Without ads, there's no real money to be made other than advertising the things you made and are selling.
Without ads, there's no real money to be made other than advertising the things you made and are selling.
@yora Yes! If you’re not buying something then what’s the point
Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏@renata It's funny, that's how Twitter worked in the early days, and all but a very few of the friends I made in that era tried Mastodon for a while and then went back. Some of this I understand, they've built businesses around the platform, but others I fear have become addicted to being enraged, and rage farming has an incredibly short half-life here.
@alan It sure makes people addicted and it’s very scary to think about it. I also know people who had the same behaviour and it makes me sad.
@renata Sad and frustrating. I've tried to pry a few from the clutches of the dopamine feedback loop, and what I get is "I can't. All my fellow dopamine feedback loop addicts are here with me." 🤦
Don't Sweat The Technique ✊
Gaëtan Perrault@renata I think this goes both ways though. Journalists and influencers are inherently on these platforms to generate some form of monetization.
Typically this is some form of advertising revenue share. Otherwise they have to use this platform as marketing. Which is also really just advertising.
Doing those things well requires algorithmic control and reliable metrics. Both things which this fediverse platform doesn't support.
The lack of those things makes this a kind of useless platform for influencers and journalists. Not only do they have to do community engagement, but they can't use those numbers for advances on their next book.
You can do Cory Doctorow numbers, but you can't do Kim Kardashian numbers.
We could say some of those people have problems here, but I think it's more accurate to say that this place just isn't really for them.
@gatesvp They were on Twitter before those things were available so I wonder why it it’s only a requirement now, and why they can’t use the fedi as an extra outlet - many of us aren’t asking them to abandon everything else, just to diversify?
(But no matter the reasoning I judge people who publish on pedo platform)
@renata totally agreed that they can be judged for publishing on Twitter.
But if they were on Twitter before the rise of ads, they also existed in a different environment. If you were a journalist in 2010, your core revenue came from the website / publication. Twitter was a marketing channel, not your revenue base. YouTube was a supplement, but not your core income.
But if you're a journalist today, most people have ad blockers and nobody is subscribing. Your website isn't paying your bills. So you suddenly depend on Substack and YouTube and Instagram for revenue sources. Your sponsors need externally validated view counts, they need reach numbers, and they're the ones paying the bills.
I wonder why it's a requirement now...
It's all the stuff above. Unless you have an independent funding source, you cannot really execute on the functions of an influencer using this platform. This platform won't help you pay your journalist bills. 🤷🏻♂️
PS: I'm obviously okay with this setup, that's part of why I'm here. 🎉
But I also understand a lot of people who aren't here, because this place is just not for them. 🤷🏻♂️
Petra van Cronenburg@gatesvp @renata This. And it's especially a problem for smaller, independent media. We have them here on Mastodon but as well we have more people here sharing "archive"-links to cut their paywalls. That's a "culture" you don't find so much on Bsky, e.g. And the smaller the media outlet, the harder to survive.
@gatesvp This. We have a lot of journalists on Mastodon who communicate and search mainly for getting readers. They can do it because they act as one person or freelancers. But for media publishers social media is one part of monetization. Some did tests and left for better alternatives - so many left for Bluesky.
Same problem for artists:they often need different platforms to survive selling their art. They can't survive with communication only. We should accept different expectations.
@renata
Same problem for artists:they often need different platforms to survive selling their art. They can't survive with communication only. We should accept different expectations.
@renata
Deb Nam-Krane
Kriszta Satori@dnkboston thanks, Deb ❤️ @renata
Arnd Layer@renata
I believe it’s not only about likes. I remember that Twitter also showed a view count and I felt a little withdrawal when I switched to mastodon. So as long as there aren’t servers that offer this statistic, it could be another factor.
Especially if you factor in a corporate environment where only things you can measure are valid.
Referrals may also be harder to measure because of the multitude of servers.
WTL
Transbian_Arsonists (Seraphine)@renata when the social media platform is about being social and not parasocial
- posted by rose
- posted by rose
@Transbian_Arsonists I love this
Robotistry@renata I don't think it's an understanding problem.
I think it's a fundamental goal incompatibility - by definition, journalism and influencing are one-way streets, with the creator on one side and the recipients (success measured by how many) on the other.
If your job performance is measured by "how many people saw this" because you are paid based on "how many people saw this," a platform that measures success in "how interesting was the subsequent conversation" and that is incapable of establishing a reliable proxy for "how many people saw this" simply isn't going to be a good fit.
I don't think journalists and influencers are looking for social interaction on social media. They're looking for an audience.
Nike Leonhard@Nike_Leonhard @renata I'm torn on that. In practice, what politicians want is an audience. But in theory, they succeed or fail on how well they reflect voters' wants, which means they need to establish channels to gather information on how well they're reflecting that and what things they're missing.
Traditionally, polling and fundraising success have been the main mechanisms to collect feedback before elections, with advertising and rallies that attempt to modify peoples' wants through fear and belonging so they align with the group. (Trump has been unusually successful by using trial and error with rally responses and social media posts and doubling down on whatever resonates.)
There are scale and permanency problems too. Instead of a temporary army of door-knockers during elections, you'd need a semi-permanent staff on Mastodon establishing a conduit to the politician.
Dave bauer@renata Yes, interestingly this is how I have interacted in online communities since the 1980s! I naively thought that's what everyone did. Well at least I made a lot of friends.
Ellejay 
Oblomov
Estarriol, Terrorist Dragonthey don't want friends, they want drones and followers and worship, and the fediverse does not really do the cult of personality.
bajki o materii@renata fedi is such a fantastic enclave of healthy interaction patterns that I am genuinely surprised no one bothered to sabotage it at scale yet; perhaps they do not consider us dangerous
Aubrey De Los Destinos
Łukasz G.@renata You can’t even blame journalist for that, much (well, actually you can, but they too need something to eat from time to time). They all come from mass media these days, so their jobs are not about making relevant connections or engaging with communities, locating painpoints, unearthing truth, but about keeping the reader interested long enough for them to see the next commercial. (1/2)
Izzy 
Arcane Roops@renata This experience reminds me of (some of) the bulletin boards, and conferencing services such as BiX and CiX, which were based of University of Guelph's CoSy, before they became infested by wallies in the mid-1990s.
acb
luca@renata Didn't know there were instructions for use.
I just logged in and start reading anything I like, eventually adding silly and weird comments. Being happy when someone, even a single one, finds funny my ungrammatical notes. I even had to search for "ungrammatical" in a dictionary.
Poor me.
I just logged in and start reading anything I like, eventually adding silly and weird comments. Being happy when someone, even a single one, finds funny my ungrammatical notes. I even had to search for "ungrammatical" in a dictionary.
Poor me.
Steven Heywood@renata
Much of the problem is that the way that social media has evolved it looks and feels like broadcasting and many people have adopted the same "just look at those big numbers" approach to reach. Just the same way that it didn't matter that the viewers used that segment of a TV news programme to go to the toilet so long as it was shown on x million TV sets, so it doesn't matter that most of the views and likes are bots.
Much of the problem is that the way that social media has evolved it looks and feels like broadcasting and many people have adopted the same "just look at those big numbers" approach to reach. Just the same way that it didn't matter that the viewers used that segment of a TV news programme to go to the toilet so long as it was shown on x million TV sets, so it doesn't matter that most of the views and likes are bots.
น้อย คงคะดี@Jilly5 this is so true!
…either that I’m getting old, too old for clickbait 😁
millennial fulcrum@renata well put.
a one way flow is the behaviour of the blood parasite. which people who want followers for profit and to bolster their own influence basically are.
a two way flow is like love. which really is how the fedi works.
this is an unpopular view but I think we are genuinely lucky to have so many rich hearts and so few mosquitos. the day will definitely come when we will look back with tremendous fondness upon this fedi era without mainstream media journalists and influencers.
Ray Gulick, he/him/wtf 🇺🇦 ❌👑I don't have many rules for deciding who to follow on Mastodon, but I have one:
If their feed is nothing but their own posts and they don't boost or comment on others' posts, they don't get a follow from me.
william.maggospretty strongly disagree.
this is social media and it's about followers. journalists and influencers want that. need that. we just lack the numbers to provide that. but we're slowly building. we also lack the algo that can help them but that's a prison they don't yet see. ultimately human boosts are the way to go. most people need to boost more here.
social networking tools are for friends etc but are different. more private. group functionality. this needs work but I like matrix.
Noah Mittman 
@renata yup, you hit the nail on the head: they need a broadcasting platform, not an actually social one