@cloudguy just a reminder that the "town square" went from being globally for everyone, to well the people who pay can go in the town hall, and will rarely hear from the people who are outside in the square. To now well we are thinking about fencing the town square and only letting you in to it if you pay us. That will ALWAYS be the problem with a company looking for profits when they talk about these digital town squares.
@cloudguy
“How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized?”
Billionaire solution:
Step 1 - Build your own surveillance cap social media platform.
Step 2 - Federate with the not-for-profit, non-information gathering social platforms built with donations by volunteers.
Step 3 - Start harvesting information.
Step 4 -
you write you woke up to staggering numbers of shares and favourites. But at the moment of my reply the post had some 50+ shares and 3 favourites. I am surprised these numbers can seem big or even staggering.
@ditol I woke up to a whopping 5 notifications and thought "oh shit what did I say." Everyone has a different tolerance to exposure on the internet, I suppose.
@HarkMahlberg@cloudguy
yeah, this is my world. I've actually had such experiences several times. Including the "what did I do wrong?" part. :)
But I hope we agree that even with some 10 followers (my case) it would be strange to see this as staggering number of interactions. ;)
@cloudguy , in my opinion one of the mistakes of the asshole billionaires who possess some social networks is that they want to take money from the users directly, without ideas, without efforts. But only because you have somewhere an account to pay which is completely UNfair and will not resist in the time as a model.
Instead they have to think how the users can generate value. For ex, with clicking on the apps and in the platform cleating traffic or sth else.
@cloudguy That is the basic contradiction of the current system. It promises to make us happy by selling us stuff. But people who are happy don't need to buy anything. If the system keeps its promise it kills itself.
@mike805 case in point: Instapot. Great product, well built, tons of people love it. Company's going out of business. Why? Everyone who wants one, has one, and they don't need repairs or replacement.
People bought the product, became happy, and then the company died.
@cloudguy I'm only ok being monetized when I pay taxes which, in turn, fund social services for everyone.
For everything else: fuck, no.
Public spaces are meant for socialization and building a community, not for profit. No entrepreneur builds "public" spaces out of their own kindness, it's always for the money.
@cloudguy We're about on the doorstep of the fortieth anniversary of Eternal September and in a lot of ways the Fediverse restored that community feeling the internet had before the corporate silos took over. The Social Dilemma, Childhood 2.0, The Creepy Line, take your pick. Their way was wrong. This is why in a lot of ways I feel a lot of the old wiser internet heads feared the idea of Meta bringing Threads into existence. To me, it's blasphemy.
It puzzles me when apparently intelligent people post stuff on other platforms, like “We should all just move over to threadskystackpost, it’s clearly the best social media platform by far.” Do they not understand that all of those centralized platforms will inevitably become enshittified once the corporate profit goblins take over and squeeze out their pounds of flesh? Do they not remember whathappened to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
@Trendar also Facebook especially seems to attract people who are keyboard warriors. Who need some soapbox and seem to thrive on conflict and ego.
It's being repeated the world over
This week. I had to get a Judge in a court to give a non molestation order against a Facebook user, that if she posts about me again she goes to prison for five years.
Facebook has become a toilet.
I think I'm one of the only people in this thread who has had to use a Judge to resolve a social media issue.
@cloudguy Every time I see this quote, I get a warm fuzzy feeling and repost it. This is what I want social media to be, not some wack-a-mole scare-the-grandmas junk. Just regular folks talking about stuff and enjoying reading about other regular folks posting about their regular lives and celebrating each other. Profit is not the motive.
@cloudguy Sometimes I just want to see a picture of a cat, craft, or charcuterie board to take my mind off the end of democracy and the annihilation of Earth’s atmosphere. I also want a cup of tea.
@cloudguy@dan613@trashcaster The billionaires aren't interested in building a town square; they want to build the mall, own all the stores, and call the mall Town Square Shops 'n' Things.
@dan613 I think what the author was doing was viewing the "town square" from the eyes of a billionaire:
How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? That is a tough question for the billionaires... That doesn't seem like enough to build a town square on.
If billionaires were allowed to own a public square, I mean a real one, I doubt it would be a place many people would want to hang out at. Why would they? It would be chock full of billboards aggressively vying for your attention, performative angry people standing on soapboxes, and so full of random traffic its impossible to find your friends in the crowd. I mean, that's basically what twitter is now anyway.
@HarkMahlberg@cloudguy@trashcaster@dan613 they would have to. Commoners would need to be in that joyless square for at least 8 hours a day and would be forced to starve if they were not to attend. They would call it „work“ and if you were to leave that square only fir a short moment, to, let‘s say, go to the restroom, the punishments would be severe.
@HarkMahlberg@cloudguy@trashcaster@dan613 Bike-, tea-, and sandwich-making companies also have billionaires at the top. This isn’t even about billionaires. It‘s about a different set of billionaires than the article author prefers monetising the “happy people.”
@HarkMahlberg@cloudguy@trashcaster@dan613 sounds like the food court in any mall back in the late 80s. But I’d argue that model grew kind of organically, not with some tech-bro in a board room trying to land investors in a “profit now, fuck the consequences” approach so very popular among the modern set.
@cloudguy Is the author suggesting that the "virtual Town Square," a moniker we often ascribe to Twitter, is actually not a happy place where contented people congregate to talk about bicycles and eat sandwiches? Because if so, a) that's my kind of crowd, and b) I kinda agree with the author.
@HarkMahlberg@cloudguy
There’s the virtual bike club, the virtual craft club, the virtual ham radio shack, the virtual culinary skills space, and so on, a space for everyone.
That idea of the global town square hasn’t really worked out so well, has it?
Even large IRL human conurbations are an aggregation of many smaller places, each with their own identity and public spaces.
To me, the fediverse seems to take the best of the IRL experience while allowing me to reach across the world.
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