melissasage

So @gaditb and I were chatting on tumblr, and discussing about how it's odd that there isn't more of a general Left presence on F/OSS. There's a general lack of Leftist theorizing about the growth of technology in general and F/OSS in particular, despite the fact that it's a Marxist dream come true.

I think I have a good reason why tho-

May 2, 2017 at 5:18pmWeb
Show threadmelissasageMay 2, 2017
I believe it was @creatrixtiara, a few weeks back, who pointed out that Masto, currently is pretty white. Despite some growth recently, that's still the case, and I think that it boils down to the same things: time and money. ironically, F/OSS, including Mastodon, is more expensive.
Show threadmelissasageMay 2, 2017

Obviously not in terms of cash, but in terms of time and spoons. We who are currently users of Masto are primarily people who are one or more of 1. professional techies 2. computer hobbyists 3. reasonably well-off.

we can afford to spend time learning a counterintuitive interface and dealing with the occasional frustrations that go into learning a new platform. It's even kinda fun for us. But all that stuff has a different name: Bad UX design.

Show threadmelissasageMay 2, 2017

A site like Facebook has every incentive to make a good UX- because the people who use it are the product. They want peopl to use it so they can sell adspace, and they have legions of engineers dedicated to just that.

But Masto is one guy. It's just @Gargron and the handful of people who graciously help him out on Github. UX gets triaged out repeatedly because if it's "good enough" then there are other things that are higher priority

Show threadmelissasageMay 2, 2017

And that's not wrong! It really couldn't be any other way. It's the way that most F/OSS projects I've seen have worked.

But it does create a barrier to entry that causes use of these projects to plateau once it's reached saturation among tech geeks, and that's a real issue to work around when we're talking about a social network. [5/5]

Show threadAccount inactiveMay 2, 2017
@melissasage Compounding this, I think, is the sunk cost fallacy, which causes people to not want to feel like the time they spent learning how to deal with bad UX wasted by improving it for others. So there are multiple generations of engineers who have been taught the attitude that overcoming poor design is a rite of passage. "We learned how," say the dev team. "Therefore so should you, if you want to do what we do."
Show thread★ Kobi LaCroix ★May 2, 2017
@melissasage So–and I might be oversimplifying here–there’s basically a paradox where you have to be somewhat bourgeois in order to effectively do a Marxism.
Show threadmelissasageMay 3, 2017

@kobi_lacroix lmao at least digitally, yes.

It's my best guess as to why F/OSS tends to have more right-libertarians on it than marxists, at any rate. despite the fact that the philosophy behind open source software is pretty damn Marxist.

Show threadTwisted LucidityMay 2, 2017
@melissasage @Gargron UX is easy to make hard and hard to make easy.
Show threadRafał PiątkowskiMay 2, 2017
@melissasage I think it's more related to the fact that people who do free software, are predominantly not UX designers, but programmers, developers, and only occasionally designers. And even then, usually graphic designers.
Show threadmelissasageMay 3, 2017
@crecca i hadn't thought of that but you're right there too! That's an additional important piece, because even when they do get around to UX they don't have experience in the area and so are inferior to the professionals.
Show threadNicolai von NeudeckMay 3, 2017
@melissasage @melissasage is it? it's mostly a way to organise the division of labour in software. and don't get me wrong, that is a progressive thing compared to closed source software. but maybe it is more similar to the doppelt freie software worker. free to run as many servers as they want but on the same hand free of means to run more than a dozen and invest in UX.
closed software is then more like feudalism, free software the republic.
Show threadNicolai von NeudeckMay 3, 2017
@melissasage and there has been theory about this for decades. at least in German and I guess in English too. I'll ask around a bit in some of the Werttheorie circles.
Show threadNicolai von NeudeckMay 3, 2017
@melissasage does anything specific come to your minds @benni @andrej ?
Show threadNicolai von NeudeckMay 3, 2017
@plomlompom ?
Show threadbenniMay 3, 2017
@melissasage @andrej @nicolai keimform.de is a Blog about this stuff. mostly in german gut there are many english stuff, too.
Show threadNo nameMay 3, 2017
@nicolai @melissasage @benni Born out of http://www.oekonux.org/ which was the first time I heard about such a project. This started 1999.
Show threadNo nameMay 3, 2017
@benni @melissasage @nicolai Though I saw that the discussion went a bit in another direction later. I am not sure how much there is about e.g. the social composition and power relations within open source projects.