I think this is selection bias. SUCCESSFUL social networks are very sticky. Startup or trial social networks, however, generally just fail. I don’t know that Twitter’s recent changes will change very much about how people use existing social networks—it may shift some to whatsapp/tiktok/whatever, or even discord servers or the like for small-scale interactions. I suspect Twitter usage will stay mostly in-place once things settle a bit. I doubt a newcomer will move into that niche.
Does anyone have a good reason to see why mastodon or some subset of mastodon servers will actually work? The distributed nature means it’s nearly impossible to curate any part of it—I can’t see how it implements any sort of equilibrium between spam-hell, forgery-hell, and cant-find-anything-good-hell.
“Successful” is an odd concept with it comes to social media. Most people would call Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc, successful. I think that’s like saying oxycontin is successful, or McDonalds is successful, or Doritos is successful. It depends on the point of view you’re looking at it from.
There’s an argument to be made that it’s better to influence a small number of people profoundly, then influence a large number of people negligibly (as you might do on larger networks, where any influence you might have will be almost entirely washed away by whatever is more viral). In fact, that’s why I’m on LessWrong, the scale is more apt.
I think this is selection bias. SUCCESSFUL social networks are very sticky. Startup or trial social networks, however, generally just fail. I don’t know that Twitter’s recent changes will change very much about how people use existing social networks—it may shift some to whatsapp/tiktok/whatever, or even discord servers or the like for small-scale interactions. I suspect Twitter usage will stay mostly in-place once things settle a bit. I doubt a newcomer will move into that niche.
Does anyone have a good reason to see why mastodon or some subset of mastodon servers will actually work? The distributed nature means it’s nearly impossible to curate any part of it—I can’t see how it implements any sort of equilibrium between spam-hell, forgery-hell, and cant-find-anything-good-hell.
Sorry, yes, that sentence was only trying to talk about successful social networks.
“Successful” is an odd concept with it comes to social media. Most people would call Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc, successful. I think that’s like saying oxycontin is successful, or McDonalds is successful, or Doritos is successful. It depends on the point of view you’re looking at it from.
There’s an argument to be made that it’s better to influence a small number of people profoundly, then influence a large number of people negligibly (as you might do on larger networks, where any influence you might have will be almost entirely washed away by whatever is more viral). In fact, that’s why I’m on LessWrong, the scale is more apt.