I recently joined Twitter and I have to agree that Retweets are the most cancerous part.
Accounts with many followers act like schoolyard bullies with their gang of yes men.
I still see federation as being too niche, but it doesn't have to be that way! I think in an ideal situation, federated servers would rely more on physical location than on deviant niche hobbies or addictions.
The Smith family should have a server (or your neighborhood should) rather than cyberpunk.furry.foxes. Because the reality is that people are more than just one thing and the concept breaks down when you start discussing action movies or cryptography on your @steve@luddite.peace account.
I think secure-scuttlebutt goes for more of the real world location-based server concept a bit. But I think most people prefer the peace of mind of some kind of administration being possible if needed.
ISPs could even provide the federated services like they provide e-mail. Another way it might work is companies that sell people federated service servers as products that they can deploy for example in their home or let the company host it. In any case maintenance must be included. I don't see how federated will take off without commercial support. The Smiths might be technically capable but I doubt the Jones's who are not are willing to let the Smiths control their service. That kind of defeats the point.
Yes, and it keeps people locked in to their ISP because switching would involve updating the email address in all of their online accounts and notifying all of their contacts about the change.
I finally convinced my parents to bite the bullet and switch to Gmail so they can switch to a better ISP. It's a real problem.
There is at least one[0] company providing mastodon hosting as a service. There really should be more though. The more Mastodon becomes compliant with Activity Pub, the more you could potentially replace all social media with it. Then both email and social media would be properly federated.
I agree that the Jones' wouldn't want to be hosted by the Smith's instance. But I can forsee something like a local co-op managing an instance for all neighbors. But personally, I'd rather just pay a company that I know is subject to various laws and consumer agreements, etc.
> As a result, Mastodon users basically never boost toots to say how wrong they are, and there isn't an issue with armies of followers descending on the original author.
Because Mastodon is full of like-thinking people, and the ones they'd strongly disagree with aren't joining.
This isn't a bad thing (it's the "local" point this post makes), but it's important to emphasize this as the primary factor responsible for people being nicer, above any design decisions the author is complimenting. Keeping people civil is easy when there are ten thousand times fewer and they all voted socialist.
I checked the mastodon.social local timeline and fewer than 1% of posts were tagged, so I don't see how that's going to make a big difference to my experience.
> Twitter is a public company, funded by investor money; they thus owe a legal duty to make as much money for their investors as they can.
False. This isn't a legal obligation, it's what the investors want because they're toxic scum.
>Because Mastodon is full of like-thinking people, and the ones they'd strongly disagree with aren't joining.
or they're on other instances. there's some far-right political instances, for example (that the leftist crowd of the larger majority of early adopters don't really talk to, although they could in most cases)
>Finally, with instances, you keep control: if you find that you don't like the moderation policies or culture of a particular instance, you're always free to pick up and move to a different one.
Last I heard, Mastodon didn't support migration between instances while still keeping followers, etc. Instead, you have to essentially start from scratch with a new account on a new instance. This is a serious problem because it strongly discourages exodus; Twitter itself shows that people will put up with a lot of nonsense before leaving to alternatives because they've cultivated a brand and a following and don't want to lose it all. Moderators of instances are not a static thing; like any political system it shifts with whoever is in charge over time. An instance that seemed friendly to a user initially can over time become more oppressive to them, but the user has invested so much into that instance that they would have to leave behind that they'd put up with it when they shouldn't have to.
You can export the lists of people you follow, block, or mute, and then import them into your new account at your new instance.
With regards people that follow you, you can mark an account as migrated and leave a forwarding address. People are starting to do this, and it seems to be working reasonably well, although it's obviously not ideal.
This is a difficult problem to solve and people are actively working on it. If you have a suggestion as to how one could create and sustain a presence on one instance, gain a body of followers, and then migrate all that to another instance, then I'm sure people would be interested to hear your thoughts and suggestions.
Would it be interesting to have sort of a signed "302 moved permanently" message that signals to other clients to automatically follow the other account?
In any kind of distributed system there are failure modes you can't protect against, the best you can do is create a mechanism that will work in most cases and go with that.
When you leave you can export the people you follow, and it's likely that without too much trouble you can get the list of people who follow you. I've just done so, and it didn't seem to hard. There isn't really a simple interface for it - I just listed them and saved the HTML, then extracted them from that.
Having got your list of followers you can then ping them to let them know you've moved, and I suspect someone somewhere is working on a way of doing that semi-automatically.
Yeah, I spent a few weeks (months?) on Mastodon, and even though I was on a cooperatively owned and operated instance[0] it just wasn't a substitute for a fully p2p social network.
I found another network called Scuttlebutt[1] that I've been using almost daily. It has a few neat features:
- your account is just your public key
- your profile is an append-only feed of JSON messages, each cryptographically signed
- when you follow people you replicate their profile on your device
- messages are transmitted with an eventually consistent gossip network, which is fast and resilient
- you can assign nicknames to yourself and others, and since there isn't a central naming authority (if you have two friends named Matt, you get to disambiguate however you would in real life)
- all data is downloaded locally, so you can view all the same content whether you're online or off-grid
- you can reply while offline and your messages will sync when you peer again (again, think gossip networks)
- there are tons of different clients and implementations and applications running on the network
- Twitter-like posts
- IRC-like chat
- blogging
- Signal-like private messages
- image search
- chess (!)
- secret sharding among friends (!!)
- mutual credit
- by far the best community I've ever been a part of
Anyway, if you want to love Mastodon you might look into Scuttlebutt.
This is delightful. Scuttlebutt appears to be very much the sort of approach that I was talking about in another thread about 90s app-centric approach.
And here we see the downside of that approach: “it doesn’t support my platform.” The irony being that the unsupported platforms are arguably the last bastions of “I expect a native app.”
All told, I think I’m coming around to the idea that this problem is better than the problems of walled services. This one is fundamentally technological, while the Facebook / Twitter service problem is corrosive to individual privacy and society.
Giving scuttlebutt a try - thanks! Here are my experiences:
1. App seems quite unpolished for Windows, it looks best not maximized. I was asked to provide a name and was a little disconcerted by the message that this is going to be public and cannot be deleted.
2. I've now joined a public server. This required going to a github page, following a link and copying and pasting an "invite" into the Patchwork application. The first one I tried threw and error that I didn't understand, but the second one worked and connected me to over 700 people.
3. The channels page is completely empty.. it seems like all I can see is a feed of people following one another.
4. Problem above solved by re-starting the app! Now taking a long time to download information, but I can see actual content.
5. I posted my first reply to someone's message. You get the prompt reminding you that everything is public and forever every time it seems.
My overall impression after about 30 minutes doing the above is that this is potentially really cool, but a few steps away from being immediately usable by someone who isn't tech oriented. Going to try a few more Scuttlebutt apps as I'm curious how well my identity can transition across different clients.
I'm not a user, but I have been watching it (and its related projects on github). I believe Patchwork[0] is the social network you joined, and it is based on scuttlebutt[1].
It seems like very early times for most people even considering the downsides of centralized 'social media,' and it will take time and hand-holding to demonstrate the alternative possibilities. A great client app that could unify the user experience, but offer power-user features could go a long way. Most people that I know (older) are not overtly interested in participating in any public social network (i.e. Twitter).
I wonder if one could build a more closed, private, white-list-default (triple opt-in!) type of social network on top of SSB with the right client software?
Yep, Patchwork is a Scuttlebutt client that implements some of the most common funxtionality: pubs, following, blocking, posts, likes, replies, and some profile data.
Other clients like Patchbay do that plus more experimental features, but it's all running on top of Scuttlebutt and you can change clients at any time.
If you're familiar with cryptocurrencies, these clients ate like wallets -- there are a ton of different ones with all sorts of pros and cons, but you're still on the same network with the same append-only feeds.
With that said, these are rough around the edges, especially when it comes to entering the network for the first time. We've got a lot of work to do. I appreciate the feedback!
The system should be called Trumpet/Bugle, fits well with toots. "Toot" is a childish term for a fart; but most words have some downside and it's quite a fun word, much better than a wanking-professor (masto-don).
that's just a bad point to make? I mean of course a newer platform will have fewer.
UI is a good point (although I prefer it this way). But there's Pinafore[0] or Halcyon[1], or Brutaldon[2] that allow you to change the UI layout if you log in with those.
The posting from a few days ago that reimagined email as a social network really got me thinking how much our approach to social networks has been led by the webbification of everything.
The spirit-of-the-nineties approach to recreating mastodon would probably look like one or two dominant native apps and something like a newsgroup server. Or maybe something like a really great RSS reader.
Questions about federation vs a walled controlled servive would be silly, because technologists are fighting it out to sell the best app. And of course a walled-in service is stupid because that would be as obsolete as Compuserve.
We’re all fighting it out on the web now. Well, except possibly on iOS and (grudgingly) Android. In some ways I think the web was how we geeks made survival on Linux possible, as we never had the mass to demand desktop apps.
Part of what I liked about the reimagining of email as social media was that it allowed for the return of the app. In the case of Mastodon, the protocols are presumably open and don’t preclude interaction via apps. So here the question of web or heavy client is not technical but one of point of view or preference.
This is all to say I kind of miss when we were chasing “the killer app” as opposed to competing for service share. When the focus was on the user’s desktop, any associated service was more or less seen as boring plumbing—-certainly nothing to have brand affinity for.
EDIT: Case in point, there’s another comment explaining that Mastodon doesn’t let you move instances and retain followers. In the 90s app-centric view of the world this is a non-issue, because following other people is the client’s job, for better or worse. Your computer crashes, you lose who you were following. If you want to publish who you’re following that’s you or your client’s job.
Giving up your social network graph to the service provider isn’t an issue in the heavy client model, because the 90s service isn’t going to pay to store that information on your behalf anyway. It wasn’t because the service viewed that personal information as “oily rags”; it was because they simply didn’t want to expend the resources to store it.
I’ve been saying the same for a long time. Email gives you both a distributed delivery mechanism to unlimited users and a data storage platform. If you want things available in more than one place, leave it on the server and sync with IMAP.
All you really need to turn it into a social network is an app that can read it, parse it and arrange it in a more convenient manner than clicking on individual messages.
In the 90s app-centric view of the world this is a non-issue, because following other people is the client’s job, for better or worse.
In the 90s, if you moved from your universities' mail server to Lycos, you also lose all the people who you were following, since they still had the previous email address.
Mastodon just happens to work in the reverse (you have a list of people you follow, rather than of people who follow you, as in email), but the issue is the same.
Yes, though it was hypothetically possible to buy a domain and host your own email. Not a solution for most people in those days, certainly!
That’s gotten harder and easier today. It’s never been harder to properly manage a mailserver yourself. On the other hand, registering a vanity domain and hosting with a neutral 3rd party like (my current) Fastmail has never been easier.
Someone should make a startup that suggests and registers a vanity domain on users’ behalf and then configures the email hosting provider of the user’s choice, spelling out the costs and tradeoffs of each. Work out the billing with a handful of providers and take a small monthly cut. It’s probably a beer money startup :-)
Come to think of it, given this problem is so old, I’d be surprised if nobody has made this.
Many webhost deals will include a domain and a webserver. I guess the main thing they lack is marketing: people in the market for a vanity email will not now to look for those deals.
> In the 90s app-centric view of the world this is a non-issue, because following other people is the client’s job, for better or worse. Your computer crashes, you lose who you were following. If you want to publish who you’re following that’s you or your client’s job.
If all the state related to following is on the client, then the client has to either consume the stream of all messages (on a push model) or regularly poll its sources across its entire follower set (on a pull model), both of which are extremely inefficient. Some pressure in the direction of centralization is intrinsic to the problem.
I can’t quite get over this critiquing of Twitter’s Retweet system. I totally understand how it’s misused but all the benefits are overlooked too. I love retweeting with commentary for positive reasons. I find they are a great way to validate and engage people who reply. I never think of using them as a tool for shaming, so I would be sad to see the feature go.
There's two issues I'm concerned about. As you mentioned, one is yanking retweets because 'it can be used for ill'. I doubt that would make any real difference in toxic behavior, but would hurt positive commentary more.
The other concern is the "block posts by tag" (e.g. ban all #politics). This could cause an even greater problem where it allow stronger social bubbles to form because one side could outright block the other (people blocking #dems or #gop). It could become like a Black Mirror episode where people literally do not know what's happening outside of their group/tribe because they've blocked entire groups/topics/nodes. We have this problem today to an extent, but I worry about new platforms that provide more tools for group isolation.
> There's two issues I'm concerned about. As you mentioned, one is yanking retweets because 'it can be used for ill'. I doubt that would make any real difference in toxic behavior, but would hurt positive commentary more.
> The other concern is the "block posts by tag" (e.g. ban all #politics). This could cause an even greater problem where it allow stronger social bubbles to form because one side could outright block the other (people blocking #dems or #gop). It could become like a Black Mirror episode where people literally do not know what's happening outside of their group/tribe because they've blocked entire groups/topics/nodes. We have this problem today to an extent, but I worry about new platforms that provide more tools for group isolation.
In that case, couldn't the opposing side just use the other tag? Who could enforce proper tagging in this case?
That's a fair point, but I'm thinking of this more in principle. Is it a good direction for platforms to reduce toxic behavior by imposing more communication limitations and providing topic/group isolation systems?
Let me know when Mastodon can take RSS, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and etc. feeds as inputs. The platform needs to have a way to import content to bootstrap an instance without having a lot of friends.
I don't know, my current experience is that the system lacks content I want to see and there's no easy way to import that. It's just my honest opinion about the system in the current state.
I think the term "toots" is spectacularly bad, and could majorly hinder broader uptake of their service.
Word of mouth (or 'word of text') is a major way services like this spread. Imagine discussions of Twitter in the media but where the words "tweet" and "tweeted" are replaced with "toot" and "tooted".
It's an onomatopoeic term for briefly sounding a horn, but I almost never hear it used for that. In my experience, there are two primary uses of the word in American English:
1) In the expression toot [one's] own horn, which means to praise oneself. Often in the form "I don't want to toot my own horn, but [...]".
2) A cutesy word for a fart, used primarily when talking to young children.
Notably, an elephant using its trunk to make noise is said to be trumpeting, not tooting.
So I'm born and raised in the US Midwest, and in my entire life 'toot' was never used as euphemism for 'fart' except in the context of the elementary school rhyme. I can perfectly understand people not liking the sound of the word or even how it looks, but the fart connotation seems like a manufactured rationale to me. Actually, for the population that would possibly use the word that way, i.e. 8 year-olds, the usage would be a positive feature, not a negative.
It's clearly an attempt to make people think about "tweet" without infringing copyright/trademark, much like the way the generic Dr. Pepper at the grocery store might be called "Dr. Skipper". Mastodon should come up with its own concepts.
I love open source software, I hate Facebook and I dislike twitter. People in my community want to know what I think about technology, and I’m strongly inclined to recommend stuff that isn’t FB, Google, Apple, etc.
But a mastodon “tweet” is called a “toot”? Honestly? Am I insane? Is it just in the USA that that means “fart”? It truly is spectacularly bad. Branding and naming matters, and it’s not shareholders that care. Users care.
Surely a short message is a tweet, I can tweet you on Twitter ... but also on FB messenger. You could also just call it a "message" if it's not got a low character limit.
The main dev of Mastodon is not American. Toot just means the noise that is made with a trunk, like tweet is supposed to be the same for birds. It's only in the U.S. that 'toot' is some kind of synonym of 'fart' or whatever and I'm honestly tired of Americans imposing their own cultural thinking on everything, instead of trying to actually understand it. The majority of people do not live in the U.S.
It's not just the U.S. I'm from Australia and it's the same here. I would imagine it's also like that in other countries.
In any case, even just considering the US market, it's clearly a very large and important one for any software system. And, what a word means there has nothing to do with Americans imposing things on others.
Why is nicknaming Richard as Dick ok, but toot isn't? Seems way more offensive to me.
I hate cockroaches and yet have deployed CockroachDB in production. The insistence on being puritan seems shallow to me, considering the real problems this world is facing, but to each their own.
In the context when you're clearly referring to a person, it's clear the meaning is "Richard". It's common for words to have multiple meanings and it's easy to navigate those from the context. With "toots" as a verb describing what someone does "Joe tooted about his plans", for many people, the meaning of that word in such a context would normally mean that bodily function. So the difference is in the kind of context-sensitive meaning that comes to mind.
> In the context when you're clearly referring to a person, it's clear the meaning is "Richard".
It's not anymore clear than toot - if I say, "Hey Dick", it might be the insult depending on the context. Now it's unlikely to be if the name is Richard, but since you can't really fart about stuff, it's unlikely that you're farting about your plans.
Ever wonder why "git" isn't very objectionable? Because it is an obscure British insult, not an American one.
In every one of those cases the context makes the meaning clear.
Nobody uses the phrasing "Hey Dick" for the insult. That would be either "Hey, you dick", or "Hey" followed by a long pause and then "Dick".
"Git" -- as a name for the software -- is unobjectionable because it's obviously not calling anyone a git. The term "git" by itself isn't offensive.
All very different from saying that someone tooted, or referring to their toots.
Even if it's "Richard tooted about politics" the thing is that the only prexisting use of the verb "tooted" that applies to a person is the bodily function, so that association is always going to come up -- and remember also that for Mastodon to grow it has to bring in new people who are not familiar with it or its terminology, and first impressions are important.
Nobody is imposing anything, but I don't think publishing something that about half a billion people would read as "I just farted about history of labor relations in 19th century UK" is a very bright idea. The majority of people indeed do not live in the US, but a lot of people do, and even more people share enough of cultural context to know what the meanings of "toot" are to completely overshadow any original intent. If the word has several meanings and one of them is bad, that's the one people would remember.
If I were targeting a global audience, I would still avoid words that are completely benign in the US like "bloody" and "fanny". It's just common sense to make your language more globally accessible.
> Twitter Is in the Outrage Business; Mastodon Isn't a Business
I need to spend way more time thinking about this, but I feel like in some scenarios there is a competitive advantage to not needing to care about stuff like stock prices or insane prices.
If you can get a business or a project to the point where it's stable and competitive and it's funding you enough to keep going, then there's a whole bunch of stuff that you don't need to care about. That's obviously not universal, but there are clearly downsides to large businesses. There are things that large business will always be worse at then a small business or personal project.
Again, I haven't thought enough about this to make a cognizant point, but... it feels like something I want to think about more. Being a nonprofit or a small business or a completely non-commercial entity should in some instances give you a competitive advantage over other businesses. Facebook can copy every single feature and then some of Snapchat.
But Twitter can't really copy everything that Mastadon is doing, because some of the stuff that Mastadon is doing is completely contradictory to Twitter's entire business model. I feel like there's something to be said about (if you're in Mastadon's position) figuring out some way to tie at least a few public-facing features into that nonprofit model that you know, 100%, your largest competitors will literally never be able to do.
It's worth noting that one of the supporting points here
> And Twitter doesn't have any choice in the matter, either. [...] Twitter is a public company, funded by investor money; they thus owe a legal duty to make as much money for their investors as they can
is not, strictly speaking, true. This has been discussed a few times on HN recently. (And this book The Shareholder Value Myth is well worth reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17529520 .) There's no categorical legal requirement for a company to make share value the absolute, #1 priority. On the other hand, it may be that enough people believe this duty exists that it has a sort of ipso facto existence.
If investors feel that profit is not being maximized, they can sue or take other actions to punish those they see as not focusing on profit etc.
I mean, the point is that "you aren't prioritizing profit" has legal standing for investors. And "we don't prioritize profit in cases that involve harming the world" does not is not a legal stance for the company unless the harm itself is illegal or the entity is a Benefit Corp or similar.
"Legal standing" isn't quite the right phrase. I think you're saying the board does in fact have a legal duty to prioritize profit above all else?
If so, are you sure, and do you have sources? wool_gather said that "There's no categorical legal requirement for a company to make share value the absolute, #1 priority", despite a widespread belief to the contrary. And you seem to be just flatly contradicting him, without making any argument or providing any sources, which is... not the most helpful way of moving the conversation forward.
The investors have actions available to it than can punish executives for not pursuing profit opportunities sufficiently aggressively. Many of these don't involve the court, but some may.
Conversely, a founder that loses his/her business because investors punished them in this manner has no legal basis to fight to retain the business.
Well, your wikipedia link seems to confirm my layman's understanding of the term "standing", which is that it is about a party's right to participate in a court case. I am no closer to seeing how the English phrase "you aren't prioritizing profit" could "have standing". I think quadrangle is confused in his phrasing, if not in his underlying ideas.
Of course investors may do various things. But we're particularly interested in the question of whether the company must legally maximize profit, even if not directed to do so by a majority of shareholders. wool_gather says no, quadrangle says yes, I wonder whether quadrangle in fact knows what he's talking about.
You say "Many of these don't involve the court, but some may." But the "some may" is kind of what we're trying to get into: if you like, the question is "can a shareholder successfully sue the company for not maximizing profit, even if a majority of shareholders haven't directed it to do so?". As far as I know, that's equivalent to asking whether the company has a legal duty to maximize profit.
To have standing you need to show that you are an injured party. I believe the original commenter was saying that not attempting to maximize shareholder value is in some cases an injury that is sufficient for an investor to bring a suit. I don't know whether this is true or not, but I believe that's what they were thinking when they referred to standing. In the case of a fiduciary, investors do have recourse to legal action if the fiduciary fails to put your financial interests first.
In general, I agree that a company is not legally obligated to make a profit. For example, there are many little shell companies whose main goal is not to turn a profit but to do something else. There are also B Corporations that have special legal protections for investors pursuing goals that are not strictly financial.
So in that sense, wool_gather is correct. A company is not legally obligated to maximize profit. But as a practical matter, if you raise money from professional investors, the strength of agency theory and the norms of ordinary business suggest that you can get into legal or financial trouble if you don't put the financial interests of the investors over nearly all other interests.
> A company is not legally obligated to maximize profit.
Well, if we agree on that core point - which I think is all the point that wool_gather was trying to make - then that's great! And I think there's no point in the two of us investing any more time in picking over quadrangle's slightly confused reply.
I'm afraid I can't resist pulling on one more little thread, though :-) You've sort of hand-waved "legal or financial trouble" together, but it seems to me that legal consequences are very different from other consequences, in that there has to be a legal basis for legal consequences. "agency theory and the norms of ordinary business" can't condense and resolve themselves into a law: there either is a law on the books or there isn't.
I understand that shareholder lawsuits are a thing that can happen under some circumstances. But if the law doesn't make "not maximizing profit" sufficient grounds, then it doesn't, surely?
Thanks for the deeper back-and-forth. I did mean "standing" as brought out here. I.e. simply that failure to focus on profit can create a situation where investors can file a suit that won't just be thrown out.
I'm saying that there's enough legal premise around the idea that the business is working for profit. The investors buy stock with the premise that the business is aiming to provide a return. If they don't aim for that, they can be accused of not running the business in good faith or of misleading the investors…
I'm not saying there's an absolute legal imperative to maximize profit. I'm saying that investors are given enough legal tools in our bureaucratic world that they really can use the legal system along with other tools to bully companies into focusing on proift above other values.
A company just saying in court, "X would bring more profit, but that wouldn't be as good for the world" isn't going to get a suit dismissed if the suit is based on a bunch of complex legal allegations about the company misleading investors or I don't know what other wide range of possible legal arguments are available…
But for Benefit Corp or similar, investors would have less have legal standing to bring suits based on the companies following the social priorities laid out in their Benefit Corp bylaws etc.
Well I think taken literally, "not maximizing profit" can't possibly be sufficient grounds for an action. Nobody really has any idea of whether any particular strategy is profit-maximizing, so it's hard to believe a company can be sued for not following a profit-maximizing strategy.
But shareholders can sue over alleged harm to a corporation. I'm not a lawyer, so I really have no idea what the standard is here. But purely speculatively, I suppose someone could be sued for repeatedly missing obvious profit opportunities because the executives objected to them on ethical or other grounds.
I get the impression, though, that shareholders are more likely to sue for committing an active blunder (like selling off a division for an insanely low price) rather than for missing an opportunity.
More charitably, I think what people like quadrangle are really meaning to say is that there is a significant legal framework that very strongly incentivizes and is inspired by the idea that the first obligation of a corporation is to maximize profit. And if that was the point, then I think that's pretty close to the truth.
Sure, you won't be arrested for not maximizing profit, but remaining in business without attempting to put profit first is sufficiently hard that it typically requires special legal protections (as in B corporations).
Ah, I finally begin to see what you mean. Sorry if I've been a bit boneheaded in this thread. I finally started googling instead of speculating, and I found this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/3pv8bh/is_it_really_tr...
which seems to confirm your ideas about the significance of benefit corporations. It looks like the key legal case happened surprisingly recently - 2010.
Apologies again: you were right and I was blinkeredly literal.
I agree that investors may sue management for fraud or corruption. "Not maximizing profit" is neither fraudulent nor corrupt.
Investors who feel that profit is not being maximized can sell their shares or can vote to replace management. They can also buy sufficient shares from other unhappy shareholders to let them take control of the company altogether, and manage it themselves.
What evidence do you have that any shareholder has ever won a lawsuit against a company on the basis that the company was not maximizing profits?
It's true that investors can sell if profit isn't being maximized, but how often does that happen in privately held companies?
E.g. if startup X has the tech to take over a market, but is insufficiently pursuing a profit opportunity because of moral squeamishness, chances are relatively good that investors in X will simply replace the executives with somebody that will pursue those opportunities since that's vastly cheaper than building up competitive tech in a new investment.
Similarly with publicly traded companies, not pursuing profit opportunities can result in large sell offs of a stock. You see a lot of animus against short sellers that suggests that the "businesses must maximize profit" norm is thoroughly ingrained in investor communities even if it's not legally mandatory.
Similarly with publicly traded companies, not pursuing profit opportunities can result in large sell offs of a stock.
That isn't obviously true. Eg, Amazon spent years actively doing everything possible to avoid making profits.
If investors don't like a company's strategy then they can try to get management changes or they can sell. But company strategy goes way beyond the blind pursuit of profit.
E.g. if startup X has the tech to take over a market, but is insufficiently pursuing a profit opportunity because of moral squeamishness, chances are relatively good that investors in X will simply replace the executives with somebody that will pursue those opportunities since that's vastly cheaper than building up competitive tech in a new investment.
That maybe true sometimes, but it is a lot rarer than you seem to believe (especially with early stage companies). The team running the company is a very large part of what people invest it. As a good counter example: Uber. Few would say that Travis wasn't pursuing profit every way possible, and it was the investors that moved against him because of his bad moral judgment.
With early stage companies, often what happens is investors subsidize an investment precisely because they know what the profit strategy is and because they think it's strong.
With Uber, Travis was attempting to undercut competition. Investors subsidize rides because when there is no competition they are in a better place to profit. Amazon (I believe?) was reinvesting the money in the business while subsidizing prices and package delivery to gain loyal customers. Many times an investor will subsidize a no-advertisement experience to gain an audience, and then switch on ads when the network effects are strong enough to retain the audience.
This is basically Machiavelli's advice that new princes should give favors to the masses when they rise to power, so that their positions are stronger later. But the real goal is always to turn profit aggressively, even if investors are patient for a few years while they maneuver into the right position.
Also just to be clear, no investor wants a business to pursue every profit opportunity. They want the business to focus on a strategy that will maximize profit given their strengths, and that always involves focus rather than being distracted by every possible opportunity.
Do you agree, then, that there is no legal requirement for a company's management to maximize profits, and that you know of no cases where a shareholder prevailed in a lawsuit against management for failure to maximize profit?
You can always be fired for doing a ‘bad’ job, however your employer/shareholder defines bad. The law gives management really broad authority to define “good” and “bad,” though typically that’s easiest to measure and quantify through profit. (Especially for shareholders, who have alternative uses for money —- if the shareholder cares about Cause A, he has less to give to it if his investment underperforms.)
You can’t intentionally waste assets, you can’t put personal interests above the company’s interests, and there’s another set of rules when you sell the company — but “prioritizing profit” is an economic argument about what’s good and best, not quite so much a legal standard.
Not, as far as I know, with any likelihood of success, no. There's a doctrine called the "Business Judgement Rule", which says that -- generally speaking -- boards/officers are not liable for bad stuff happening to the company as long as they act in good faith, without conflict of interest, and using their honest judgement of what is best for the company -- which doesn't mean the shareholders.
If they sacrifice what is "best for the company" in order to do better for the world, they can be accused by investors as not acting in good faith on the premise of pursuing business success etc.
Exactly correct. The federated model is what makes this possible. A centralized service like Twitter has huge operational costs to serve their audience. But by distributing the load on thousands of independent operators like Mastodon does, each instance keeps their costs low and can easily be funded by their users. It has a local community feel, not a corporate mass-appeal feel.
You would think that non-profits could be more competitive than corporations. Imagine a non-profit Facebook clone that shared its advertising profits with the users. How could Facebook compete with that?
This may be a culture thing more than anything else, and more deeply how certain environments affect culture.
For example, in my career I’ve seen nonprofits, large and small, being very hawkish in competition for government contracts. So much so that I developed a saying - “Nonprofit is a tax status, not a business model.”
I think Wall Street is another business environment that creates these very hawkish business cultures, even in (relatively) smaller businesses (biomed for example).
Just thinking along with you here... not sure where I’m going with it. But I know I’ve worked with nonprofits that were very hawkish and sharked the competition all the time.
Most of the time I see “nonprofit” and “not for profit” being used interchangeably. Profit, or “fee” in the government contracting world, is almost always being earned. It’s a question of purpose.
Theoretically nonprofits focus on some other purpose first (but not exclusively). “For profits” businesses have the primary purpose of making profits.
That’s the theory. In application, lots of nonprofits are loaded with business people trying to make money under the tax shelter of that tax status.
Beyond incentivising revenue and profits, it also incentivises growth. Twitter gets punished when it’s account growth or activity numbers drop (or fail to meet expectations). Which leads to perverse incentives for the platform such as tackling spam accounts / low value interactions, high volume / low value mobile notifications (I find twitter the worst for this), the whole re-ordering of the timeline controversy. This is what I feel turns products into skinner boxes, because the need for growth incentivises those kinds of features, and the numbers go up. Those numbers can mask the decline in quality. That’s where I see mastodon having a huge advantage.
In the case of Mastodon, not really, it's main advantage is federation and investors are not going to want to give many to any app that people can host themselves. They want centralization for ad tracking etc. so at most said team would end up with a Twitter clone.
The competitive advantage to "X is a protocol versus a license" is it's inherent proclivity to being bootstrapped. It's no different than Bitcoin spawning a million nodes from a single white paper.
The big worry is how do you maintain that early adopter culture as the service scales. Some will adopt invitation-only gatekeeping. Others an onboarding process that emphasizes customer development.
Mastodon makes its culture explicit up front and in its design. And it seems to be working.
understanding the money flows and their influence on the direction of the business/non-profit/managing entity - are really really important here (and non-trivial imho).
The money flows that direct mastadon's development and subsequent proliferation could be very good for its competitive edge (vis-a-vis twitter) or they could land it right in the same "outrage" territory as twitter. If they don't really have a good set of hypotheses on how twitter ended up where it did, they won't be able to test solutions that solve for those.
Its really hard to say what will happen from our current perspective and at this point in time. I hope the mastadon maintainers are developing a strategy to keep it in the problem-solving territory they desire.
> Well, Mastodon doesn't have retweets; it has "boosts". Boosts are essentially like retweets, with one key difference: there's no option to add your own commentary.
I disagree. Retweets can be an issue but they have their place as well
What all "timeline" social networks are missing is the underboost, the downvote button, call it as you want.
People will boost good stuff but they will boost crap.
Networks need the contrary signal, they need the "WTF are you thinking posting this crap here" signal.
Not censorship, but a "tone down" indication.
Twitter has been cutting down and restricting/banning accounts which I'm not fundamentally against it but they are focusing on one side of the political spectrum. With that, I can't agree.
Does the admin of your server saying "hey people on other Mastodon servers sure are reporting you a lot, stop doing that shit" count as a "wtf are you thinking posting this crap here" signal?
Because Mastodon has a "report" button, and because of the way Mastodon scales, reports actually get acted on by humans who have a vested interest in keeping their users civil, lest their server get a reputation as That One Server Full Of Jerks and find other admins telling their servers to ignore it entirely.
I am interested in joining a Mastodon instance but I don't know how to find the right one to join.
Every pro-Mastodon article mentions I can pack my bags and leave for a new instance but if you do research you find that that feature isn't built yet and the community can't agree on how it should work. So picking the right server is currently a very heavy decision.
I've tried some of these instance finder tools but they reveal that Mastodon instances are like 25% furry communities and other fringe fetishes and I really just want a place to talk tech, philosophy, and video games.
There are many, many out there. I suggest you join one with a deliberately "throw away" account and start following a few people. Then see where they are, and after a time export the list of people you follow, and move.
Then again, maybe you will neither need nor want to move.
A quick web search for "mastodon instance tech video games" has produces a few pages listing some instances with comments about what sorts of things they cover:
This is a useful set of instructions (thanks!) but it points to the biggest challenge Mastodon/ActivityPub will have in gaining a network. It's taken decades for people to "get" email, en masse (and many still don't understand CC/Bcc).
Twitter and FB have been mainstreamed faster in part because the onboarding/acquisition UX is so easy. It's necessary to think this through (if widespread adoption _is_ the goal).
I spent an hour looking and gave up. They all either get banned, don't take registrations, or they ban content too aggressively, especially under categories like racism/sexism/xenophobia/nationalism/socialism/etc, wherein the SJWs leave the terms undefined so that they can ban any opinion they disagree with. I'd love to find a server that is committed to the Chicago Principles.
Here's an invite to my closed instance that any HN user is welcome to take advantage of: https://cmpwn.com/invite/7CA9J3mq This is good for 25 uses, if it runs out and anyone missed it just let me know.
For the most part it's tech folks talking about tech, though the federated timeline is naturally more diverse. If a bunch of HNers join up, even more so. It is what you make of it, you shape the local culture as much as anyone else.
Thank you for all the thoughtful replies everyone. It's helped me understand Mastodon a little better. I think what I want for my primary instance is to immerse in a culture of makers and then I can follow my interests like tech, philosophy, and games, by following ppl in other instances
I guess I don't understand why so much effort is put into these federated social networks rather then starting with a blog and rss perspective to build the same kind of network.
I'd like things to go in this direction as well, but with slightly different tech than rss. What you really want is the notification layer of social networks as a standard, so that ppl who follow you are merely alerted that they should visit your site. RSS can be used for this of course, but it's really meant for content syndication rather than as a notification transport layer
You're describing ActivityPub, which is a W3C recommendation[0], which happens to be what Mastodon uses. At least one blogging platform is set up to interact with the fediverse[1]. Hopefully many more one day.
RSS was/is a good idea, but it wasn't implemented by browsers that well. I actually think the rise of social networks like Facebook/Twitter were partly due to RSS's usability issues, given that they provided users with functionality similar to RSS's but with much less technical terms. "Following" someone is an easier to understand idea than "click to use my RSS link into your feed reader".
We should remember that the retweet feature was originally created by the community, like, years before twitter implemented it officially. You'll compose a tweet with the format "RT @username <quote post>" and broadcast it to all your followers. There's no reason mastodon users can't do the same. Right?
Slightly off-topic but important mention about the RT feature. RT was definitely not the first "feature" and there were many other ones which existed. There were some factors that led to the adoption of the RT convention [0].
> The inventors of these variations were not the typical user. They posted more tweets, had higher network degree, and were more likely to describe themselves with words like “geek” and “founder”; in other words, they were the core members of the Twitter community. The early adopters were also more active and innovative. The variations spread through densely connected networks, bouncing from person to person in a way that meant most adopters of the varia- tion were fewer than two hops from someone who had never been exposed to the variation on Twitter when they first used it. This could be a general finding, that social conventions are more likely to arise in the active and densely connected parts of a community.
Could anyone share their thoughts about the attractiveness of a platform that says how many characters long your posts can be?
What I see on Twitter is that people are constantly fighting this limitation by writing several tweets in a row (sometimes marking them as parts of a whole message). I would think that’s an annoyance. So what’s the attraction?
I would say the majority of tweets on my timeline (>95%) are single-post messages. Knowing that everything on twitter will be relatively short means I can check it when i only have 2-3 minutes to kill for example.
It's not mentioned but it depends on the instance how long the character limit is (as in, it's configurable). default is 500, but there's some with a limit of 5000, or 666 (some witchy instance iirc)
Isn't the concept of local servers making it easier to create a bunch of echo chambers?
I haven't even tried Mastodon because my understanding of identify is tied to a server rather than an email or a gpg key... so outside of your control (unless you run your own server). My understanding is that when the server you are currently using disappear, your current identity, history, etc... disappear too.
You can export most of your data and move to another instance. It's not the most elegant process, but it seems to work out fine in the long run. You just tell people where you went.
Exports are fine for when you want to move, but typically too late when the server you use and its data disappear. Do Mastodon evangelists advertise the fact that you need to do frequent export?
I follow a lot of people on twitter because I came across one of their tweet, check their history, and found them interesting. They have no idea who I am, they don't post often enough that I could remember their names. If their data and metadata were to disappear, how could they know how to contact me to let me know they have changed server, and therefore identity? Even if I remembered them and did noticed they had disappeared (two huge assumptions), how could I find them on their new server?
In practice I think most people just don't care if ancient posts are lost. They aren't exactly the cultural cornerstones of the internet. This isn't a problem often enough that your history is going to be empty most of the time. I think I only know of one occasion where an instance with ~20 users shut down with little warning.
I completely and utterly disagree with your “work out fine” sentiment. It is embarrassing that something set up like Mastodon was from the beginning did not plan for people to move between instances from the start.
Oh hush. What's the Most Important Killer Embarssing-Not-To-Have feature to one person isn't a priority for someone else. If you want it, add it. Mastodon is open source.
That's not my job, and that dismissive, terrible attitude is exactly why open source has such a bad reputation. When the people you're trying to recruit to use your service are saying there's a problem, saying, "Then you go do something about it!" is not going to endear you to users.
I don't feel the need to endear myself to users. It's not my job, either, nor is it anyone else's but yours. If you want something, you need to make it happen. What arrogance of yours to think that someone else should volunteer their time to accomodate for your whims!
If Mastodon doesn't suit your needs, then fix it or don't use it. Either way that doesn't make it "embarassing" or otherwise bad. It works great for millions of users.
And this is why commercial social networks tend to be so much more user friendly. They actually put effort into acquiring me as a user, because they can then monetize my eyeballs.
> One of the most pernicious parts of Twitter is how people will retweet something dumb, offensive, or awful that an opponent said, along with a message mocking that opponent. Over time, this leads people on all sides of an issue to see only a distorted caricature of their opponents, comprised of an amalgam of all the worst features of that group.
> How does Mastodon solve this issue? Well, Mastodon doesn't have retweets; it has "boosts". Boosts are essentially like retweets, with one key difference: there's no option to add your own commentary.
I think "Right problem, wrong solution". The reason people mock bad ideas on Twitter is probably because Twitter has a character limit. Refuting bad ideas often takes longer than 240 characters. In fact, putting forward bad ideas takes less time and energy than refuting them. This is why, usually, burden of proof is placed on the one making a claim. Otherwise people who value truth will be exhausted from the approximately 10 times the effort it takes to refute false claims and truth will never win out.
Showing bad ideas to be bad is very important in civil discourse, not being able to point out bad ideas by "retweeting" them with commentary will likely make this social network an echo chamber devoid of intellectual curiosity
Twitter didn't used to have retweets with comments but people did basically the same thing using manual retweets or . replies. I imagine if Mastodon develops a big partisan political community the same thing will happen there.
> Refuting bad ideas often takes longer than 240 characters.
Not necessarily true.
> Showing bad ideas to be bad is very important in civil discourse, not being able to point out bad ideas by "retweeting" them with commentary will likely make this social network an echo chamber devoid of intellectual curiosity
Theoretically yes, but the problem with Twitter is not "properly" refuting ideas, because there is no such thing as absolute truth when it comes to human interactions. People will tend to believe whatever they want, independent of facts. Furthermore, people may interpret the same fact in completely diverging ways, depending on their prior conceptions.
Not allowing awfulness to spread could be more efficient than helplessly trying to refute it.
> Not allowing awfulness to spread could be more efficient than helplessly trying to refute it.
Didn't you just basically say that what is "awful" is subjective? You're basically saying "maybe echo chambers are better".
I generally agree with "people will tend to believe whatever they want", but many people do change their minds, especially as they age. Pushing people into the underground just makes them more extreme.
Also, don't underestimate the power of public mockery. What makes Nazism most unattractive isn't the fact that it's abhorrent from some moral perspective (that not everybody shares), it's the fact that most actual Nazis are total losers by every measure.
> Didn't you just basically say that what is "awful" is subjective? You're basically saying "maybe echo chambers are better".
Yes, I did. Instead of retweeting, you let the awfulness die out instead of getting more attention, i.e., don't let opinions escalate. Awfulness here doesn't have to be what I consider to be awful.
And I don't see what this has to do with "maybe echo chambers are better".
Now, I don't know whether that would be more efficient or not - it could, right?. Neither of us know, so perhaps the Mastodon experiment may teach us something.
> I think "Right problem, wrong solution". The reason people mock bad ideas on Twitter is probably because Twitter has a character limit. Refuting bad ideas often takes longer than 240 characters.
It's not even the right problem.
The problem is not mocking people, disagreeing with them or whatever (incidentally the twitter character limit doesn't preclude external links or tweet chains, which are extremely common at least in science twitter). It's that doing so through a retweet (or a boost) is a signal to followers, and that can send hordes harassing a single person, because it's very easy for followers to click on the RT/boost and reply, and they're not going to see that thousands of people already did exactly that.
And the person at the other end of the pipe has to deal with a flood of burning garbage.
And more generally that kind of crap is easily weaponisable, twitter provides few tools to deal with it, and they don't usually apply their own rules. I don't know that Mastodon is any better.
Fundamentally, social platforms are only good so long as they've not reached their eternal September yet, or are actively prevented from doing so through active and unforgiving moderation — which can have its own issues.
Is this really such a big problem, especially for the average user, to make it a key feature of the platform?
Sure, occasionally an otherwise obscure person might find themselves at the end of an unexpected shitstorm, but otherwise it generally affects more prominent users, who are well aware that anything mildly controversial can turn into lots of angry replies.
Is that even a real problem? Isn't it actually valuable information to know that people get really angry about this-and-that? Aren't researchers able to use this data to learn something about human behavior?
Seems to me like people want to blame technology for something that's really amplified human nature. A rehashing the old story of the "basically good" human corrupted by some foreign evil.
It might be human nature and interesting from some perspective, but that doesn't mean it's good or fun to be a part of. It may be human nature for everyone in Thunderdome where a sign says "only one man leaves alive" to choose to fight brutally to death, but that doesn't mean we should continue or promote hanging out in Thunderdome over alternatives that encourage other parts of human nature instead.
>Sure, occasionally an otherwise obscure person might find themselves at the end of an unexpected shitstorm, but otherwise it generally affects more prominent users, who are well aware that anything mildly controversial can turn into lots of angry replies.
People often join social networks to follow, interact with, or become prominent people, so it is a problem for them if all of those prominent people are continually sacrificed.
> Sure, occasionally an otherwise obscure person might find themselves at the end of an unexpected shitstorm, but otherwise it generally affects more prominent users, who are well aware that anything mildly controversial can turn into lots of angry replies.
And that's supposed to be a good or even neutral thing… how?
> Is that even a real problem?
Very much so.
> Isn't it actually valuable information to know that people get really angry about this-and-that?
Not really, and that isn't even relevant to the issue of it actively harming people.
> Seems to me like people want to blame technology for something that's really amplified human nature. A rehashing the old story of the "basically good" human corrupted by some foreign evil.
You're the only one talking about "basically good human". The amplification of human nature is the very issue at hand, "human nature" has not evolved in that context and while it may work at small scales it demonstrably does not at the scales we're involved in. As a result it is ethically and functionally necessary for the tool to mitigate human nature since they're the ones amplifying it to downright and outright harmful levels.
> And more generally that kind of crap is easily weaponisable, twitter provides few tools to deal with it, and they don't usually apply their own rules. I don't know that Mastodon is any better.
The key difference here is that, once we've noticed that this lack of context (ie..."has someone already made the point about $G_OUTGROUP_MEMBER_23049 or $G_OUTGROUP_234 that I'm going to make?")...we can actually change the code to Mastodon/whatever fediverse server/client to provide solutions to it(see, for example, pleroma's "did you type 'open source' when you mean 'free software'?). Technical measures could be considered and tested in small instances and then scaled up as they are found to work/not work.
With birdsite you just throw up your hands and say "well, the corporation doesn't think it's a priority. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ "
The number of people that will take the time and effort to verify the things that they read or hear pales in comparison to those that cherry pick whatever fits their biases, and everyone is limited in time and attention span. It's a signal to noise problem, and while technical people have a mental model of this problem in the concept of DDoS attacks, I would guess that many people lack awareness of how bad information can simply clog their attentional pipeline and exhaust motivation to verify.
The gist is that pithy, low-effort strawmans of an opposing tribe are highly attractive and contagious memes.
I don't think it has anything specific to do with Twitter. You see similar issues everywhere: Facebook, Reddit, and of course meatspace. It's a human problem.
Twitter and the short character-limit may magnify it a bit, I'll admit that. But the actual problem can't be solved on Twitter or Mastodon. Each individual needs to be aware of this human problem and to constantly make an effort to notice and counteract it in their own brain (which is very difficult and error prone). Perhaps if enough people start doing that more, then cultural change will take place. I don't know.
>But the actual problem can't be solved on Twitter or Mastodon. Each individual needs to be aware of this human problem and to constantly make an effort to notice and counteract it in their own brain (which is very difficult and error prone). Perhaps if enough people start doing that more, then cultural change will take place. I don't know.
Twitter has a profit incentive against people solving this problem. Places like Mastodon at least have the possibility of designing against the issue or somehow encouraging education about it.
> I think "Right problem, wrong solution". The reason people mock bad ideas on Twitter is probably because Twitter has a character limit.
Well, I didn't mention it in the post, but Mastodon also ups the character limit to 500 characters (really, even more, because links always count as 24 chars, regardless of actual length). So if you're right that that's part of the problem, then it's also partly addressed.
But I think the bigger issue is that retweets encourage you to try to refute/mock/engage with bad ideas in a tweet. With Mastodon/boots, users tend to just ignore bad ideas (or, if they're really bad, respond at length in a blog/medium post)
You're right that it could become too much of an echo chamber, but it will at least avoid becoming a rage-generator.
Mastodon defaults to a character limit of 500. Instance maintainers may change this - mine's got the highest limit of any I know at 7777, for instance. (And mechanisms I won't get into to make it so that you can't spam someone with really long toots.)
You can talk about bad ideas without retweeting them, too, you know.
I think that Mastodon has a lot going for it, and indeed It think an open source federated system is a great idea I hope to see succeed, but I don't think that RT is the main problem with Twitter.
Maybe I'm lucky that few pay attention to me, but I haven't had a lot of trouble making Twitter incredibly, if not the most, useful social network. Its easy to find your interests and fairly simple to ignore/block things you don't care about.
I also don't think that "there are people I disagree with also using this space" === "this place is toxic" which seems to be the lazy default these days. I prefer Twitter, being a US company, tread as close as it can to the 1st Amendment. I think that people need to engage with views they are unfamiliar with or misunderstand -- though there's certainly the echo chamber problem, to never face ideas that challenge you is to never grow yourself and understand what you believe as most often reflected in classrooms that now boycott professors or require everything come with some trigger warning.
Twitter has a ways to go to provide tools for dealing with trolls but it's making its way there in a way that seems more methodical and less reactionary than something like FB, and while I find characters like Alex Jones offensive, I find the rush for people (particularly some journalists and 20's something safe-space-mobists that are every bit as vocal as the mobs on the right) to default to the ban hammer more offensive.
These companies have immense power over speech in a way that should frighten us, not encourage us to have the centralization as an excuse to circumvent the 1st amendment. True, no platform is obligated to host someone, but given they are effectively monopolies (extremely responsive to legislator outrage that would otherwise have to fight the 1st) this should give everyone more pause than it appears to.
Jones fell like a domino once Apple removed him first. When Spotify removed the reprehensible music it did, the other companies fell in line and the immediate reaction was for activist groups to demand more and more be removed to varying degrees of things being actually offensive (do we now remove old NWA tracks?)
This is all an incredibly slippery slope, and to me the sign of the times is that the trolls have made it so that any difference of opinion is now something everyone flees from and that the default is to assume the worst of someone who might have a different point of view than you do.
If you follow people on Twitter based on the quality of their activity then Twitter is incredibly valuable. My problem has never been about people tweeting things which were offensive, it was about them tweeting things about their dogs and cats all day long.
If you follow people because you like them, because you are friends with them, or because you hope they will follow you back, Twitter is a fucking disaster. There are people I really wanted to follow, but if I see 30 tweets/likes/retweets in my feed for every 1 incredibly useful tweet, they have to be unfollowed. Unsurprisingly, this approach pretty much cleans out all of the off-topic annoying non-sense, irregardless of your political views or lack there of.
The flip side to all of this is, if a lot of people follow you, the very open nature of Twitter can certainly be a problem. If you are a celebrity or a well known person and are not able to ignore what I imagine is basically a hate stream, then for your own well-being you probably should not use Twitter.
There are plenty of people who are addicted to the algorithm drip feed of content now. Snapchat and Instagram/Facebook have turned this in to a compulsive behavior and the ad revenue has followed. My guess is that as a "solution" to whatever is going on now, Twitter is going to move toward this model. When they do, I sincerely hope that Mastodon or some other open ActivityPub platform is good enough that all of the really smart people who post fantastic content to Twitter, like John Carmack and Tim Sweeney, will follow.
"there are people I disagree with also using this space"
Claiming that is what people mean when they claim something is toxic is just as lazy, if not more so. And you’re basically saying that it’s on minority and underrepresented groups to be the one to engage, rather than those that are antagonizing them.
Alex Jones is an even more egregious case because he’s gotten in trouble not just because he “said things people disagree with”, but because he sent a harassment mob against the parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook, claiming it was a “false flag operation.” Several of them now are not able to visit the graves of their children, the harassment is that bad.
I’m sorry, but I just do not see this as anywhere near the “slippery slope” you’re complaining it is.
I understand the bad things Jones does, like the doxxing and maybe that is sufficient enough to ban him (and reasonable in that case), but he's just an extreme example for the slippery slope for speech and censorship that IS already here (and which takes almost no imagination to predict where it will ultimately go) https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1031544806823141376
Additionally, I would rather US companies try to favor behavior honoring the Constitution generally, even though they don't have to.
What I find amusing about all these "solutions" to "online outrage" is that they are invariably made by comfortable centrists, with a smattering of libertarians. I can say this with some authority as both of these terms would have aptly described myself, before I lost my career, my home, and everything else in gender transition, and ended up working three minimum wage jobs instead of coding for 2 years.
Let me tell you where the outrage is coming from. It's not coming from UX decisions. It's coming from mind boggling suffering. It's coming from exhausted and starving bodies who are disrespected and discarded, repeatedly. It's coming from a lack of opportunity and a lack of services necessary for survival. It's coming from a parlous minimum wage and no safety net. It's coming from addiction and the homelessness and precariousness that so often drive it.
Those prone to conservatism interpret their pain as an attack on them from people who look different. Those prone, like myself, to systems level thinking about social structures view it (correctly) as an induced state, effectively selected for because the alternative was selected against.
The pain and outrage leaks onto social media, but it is not from there.
It is all around you, and it is nearly big enough to blot out the sun.
Mastodon has a very large and thriving gender-nonbinary / non-normative population. There's a very large East Asian population (mostly Japan, though with Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and China represented). I've seen Indian, Indonesian, Arabic, and other voices. European representation is strongly weighted to France, though with numerous countries and languages represented.
North-American usage tends to tech-early adopters (male, white,some others), and tends to be light on traditional minorities that I've observed (note; personal observation on social networks tends to be exceedingly self-selective and nonrepresentitive).
Libertarian viewpoints don't seem particularly prevalent, or well-received.
I'm sure it does. I was not replying to Mastodon-the-platform, I was commenting on the cognitive bias present in the OP. Mastodon may well be the cat's pajamas, but not for the reasons given; namely, that centralized social media somehow synthesize outrage ex nihilo.
Which got downvoted, because pointing out that class and privilege are lens aberrations in the minds of technologists does not sit well with technologists.
Dorsey's response has to be the funniest; showing folks countervailing views in their feeds via sentiment analysis is a hysterically funny move, equivalent to trying to put out a fire by spraying it with gasoline.
I can get behind or at least validate the concerns of everything here except "…bodies who…"
If this language aims to show the blunt physical way that others dehumanize the people in question… well, that's not clear. Maybe exploitive actors see others as just "bodies", but that's not a good way to see people.
The concept of a "person" is bigger than just their physical body, in the same way that this sentence is bigger than just a bunch of binary numbers.
If you want to highlight the dehumanizing, objectifying way that power sees people, it would be "…bodies that…"
Using "who" makes it seem like you think you can refer to people as "bodies" in a way that is non-objectifying…
Thanks for clarifying. So, if you are writing from the perspective of the dehumanizing system that sees the precariat as mere "bodies", then it is "bodies that…" not "bodies who…"
The lead point is about misuse of quote retweets. I don't disagree that quote retweets can be misused in the way that the article says, but I don't think that's the primary use. And Twitter didn't invent the quote retweet, users did and Twitter adopted it as an official feature. If people really want to use it, they will without official support.
The points about moderation I found much more interesting, and I wish the author had led with that.
Too bad the Mastodon devs hate SRV records so much. The reliance on WebFinger for federation is the biggest blocker for me deploying an instance on my personal domain.
Can you expand more on why WebFinger is the blocker for you? I've been considering running a server lately on my personal domain and didn't even consider SRV vs WebFinger.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadI really like the “Boost” approach to the retweet-with-snark problem. And I like to see Mastodon addressing Twitter’s outrage-as-a-business problem.
Accounts with many followers act like schoolyard bullies with their gang of yes men.
I still see federation as being too niche, but it doesn't have to be that way! I think in an ideal situation, federated servers would rely more on physical location than on deviant niche hobbies or addictions.
The Smith family should have a server (or your neighborhood should) rather than cyberpunk.furry.foxes. Because the reality is that people are more than just one thing and the concept breaks down when you start discussing action movies or cryptography on your @steve@luddite.peace account.
I think secure-scuttlebutt goes for more of the real world location-based server concept a bit. But I think most people prefer the peace of mind of some kind of administration being possible if needed.
I finally convinced my parents to bite the bullet and switch to Gmail so they can switch to a better ISP. It's a real problem.
I agree that the Jones' wouldn't want to be hosted by the Smith's instance. But I can forsee something like a local co-op managing an instance for all neighbors. But personally, I'd rather just pay a company that I know is subject to various laws and consumer agreements, etc.
[0]: https://masto.host/
Because Mastodon is full of like-thinking people, and the ones they'd strongly disagree with aren't joining.
This isn't a bad thing (it's the "local" point this post makes), but it's important to emphasize this as the primary factor responsible for people being nicer, above any design decisions the author is complimenting. Keeping people civil is easy when there are ten thousand times fewer and they all voted socialist.
I checked the mastodon.social local timeline and fewer than 1% of posts were tagged, so I don't see how that's going to make a big difference to my experience.
> Twitter is a public company, funded by investor money; they thus owe a legal duty to make as much money for their investors as they can.
False. This isn't a legal obligation, it's what the investors want because they're toxic scum.
Clearly you haven't spent much time with actual socialists!
or they're on other instances. there's some far-right political instances, for example (that the leftist crowd of the larger majority of early adopters don't really talk to, although they could in most cases)
Last I heard, Mastodon didn't support migration between instances while still keeping followers, etc. Instead, you have to essentially start from scratch with a new account on a new instance. This is a serious problem because it strongly discourages exodus; Twitter itself shows that people will put up with a lot of nonsense before leaving to alternatives because they've cultivated a brand and a following and don't want to lose it all. Moderators of instances are not a static thing; like any political system it shifts with whoever is in charge over time. An instance that seemed friendly to a user initially can over time become more oppressive to them, but the user has invested so much into that instance that they would have to leave behind that they'd put up with it when they shouldn't have to.
With regards people that follow you, you can mark an account as migrated and leave a forwarding address. People are starting to do this, and it seems to be working reasonably well, although it's obviously not ideal.
This is a difficult problem to solve and people are actively working on it. If you have a suggestion as to how one could create and sustain a presence on one instance, gain a body of followers, and then migrate all that to another instance, then I'm sure people would be interested to hear your thoughts and suggestions.
When you leave you can export the people you follow, and it's likely that without too much trouble you can get the list of people who follow you. I've just done so, and it didn't seem to hard. There isn't really a simple interface for it - I just listed them and saved the HTML, then extracted them from that.
Having got your list of followers you can then ping them to let them know you've moved, and I suspect someone somewhere is working on a way of doing that semi-automatically.
I found another network called Scuttlebutt[1] that I've been using almost daily. It has a few neat features:
- your account is just your public key
- your profile is an append-only feed of JSON messages, each cryptographically signed
- when you follow people you replicate their profile on your device
- messages are transmitted with an eventually consistent gossip network, which is fast and resilient
- you can assign nicknames to yourself and others, and since there isn't a central naming authority (if you have two friends named Matt, you get to disambiguate however you would in real life)
- all data is downloaded locally, so you can view all the same content whether you're online or off-grid
- you can reply while offline and your messages will sync when you peer again (again, think gossip networks)
- there are tons of different clients and implementations and applications running on the network
Anyway, if you want to love Mastodon you might look into Scuttlebutt.[0]: https://social.coop
[1]: https://scuttlebutt.nz
EDIT: having trouble formatting the list, did I mention that Scuttlebutt supports full Markdown?
And here we see the downside of that approach: “it doesn’t support my platform.” The irony being that the unsupported platforms are arguably the last bastions of “I expect a native app.”
All told, I think I’m coming around to the idea that this problem is better than the problems of walled services. This one is fundamentally technological, while the Facebook / Twitter service problem is corrosive to individual privacy and society.
1. App seems quite unpolished for Windows, it looks best not maximized. I was asked to provide a name and was a little disconcerted by the message that this is going to be public and cannot be deleted.
2. I've now joined a public server. This required going to a github page, following a link and copying and pasting an "invite" into the Patchwork application. The first one I tried threw and error that I didn't understand, but the second one worked and connected me to over 700 people.
3. The channels page is completely empty.. it seems like all I can see is a feed of people following one another.
4. Problem above solved by re-starting the app! Now taking a long time to download information, but I can see actual content.
5. I posted my first reply to someone's message. You get the prompt reminding you that everything is public and forever every time it seems.
My overall impression after about 30 minutes doing the above is that this is potentially really cool, but a few steps away from being immediately usable by someone who isn't tech oriented. Going to try a few more Scuttlebutt apps as I'm curious how well my identity can transition across different clients.
It seems like very early times for most people even considering the downsides of centralized 'social media,' and it will take time and hand-holding to demonstrate the alternative possibilities. A great client app that could unify the user experience, but offer power-user features could go a long way. Most people that I know (older) are not overtly interested in participating in any public social network (i.e. Twitter).
I wonder if one could build a more closed, private, white-list-default (triple opt-in!) type of social network on top of SSB with the right client software?
[0] "A decentralized messaging and sharing app built on top of Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB)." https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork
[1] "A database of unforgeable append-only feeds, optimized for efficient replication for peer to peer protocols" https://github.com/ssbc/secure-scuttlebutt
Other clients like Patchbay do that plus more experimental features, but it's all running on top of Scuttlebutt and you can change clients at any time.
If you're familiar with cryptocurrencies, these clients ate like wallets -- there are a ton of different ones with all sorts of pros and cons, but you're still on the same network with the same append-only feeds.
With that said, these are rough around the edges, especially when it comes to entering the network for the first time. We've got a lot of work to do. I appreciate the feedback!
I'm as anti-marketing as the next person but that doesn't mean I'd call my child Shithead.
that's just a bad point to make? I mean of course a newer platform will have fewer.
UI is a good point (although I prefer it this way). But there's Pinafore[0] or Halcyon[1], or Brutaldon[2] that allow you to change the UI layout if you log in with those.
0: https://pinafore.social/ 1: https://halcyon.toromino.de/login 2: https://brutaldon.online/about
The spirit-of-the-nineties approach to recreating mastodon would probably look like one or two dominant native apps and something like a newsgroup server. Or maybe something like a really great RSS reader.
Questions about federation vs a walled controlled servive would be silly, because technologists are fighting it out to sell the best app. And of course a walled-in service is stupid because that would be as obsolete as Compuserve.
We’re all fighting it out on the web now. Well, except possibly on iOS and (grudgingly) Android. In some ways I think the web was how we geeks made survival on Linux possible, as we never had the mass to demand desktop apps.
Part of what I liked about the reimagining of email as social media was that it allowed for the return of the app. In the case of Mastodon, the protocols are presumably open and don’t preclude interaction via apps. So here the question of web or heavy client is not technical but one of point of view or preference.
This is all to say I kind of miss when we were chasing “the killer app” as opposed to competing for service share. When the focus was on the user’s desktop, any associated service was more or less seen as boring plumbing—-certainly nothing to have brand affinity for.
EDIT: Case in point, there’s another comment explaining that Mastodon doesn’t let you move instances and retain followers. In the 90s app-centric view of the world this is a non-issue, because following other people is the client’s job, for better or worse. Your computer crashes, you lose who you were following. If you want to publish who you’re following that’s you or your client’s job.
Giving up your social network graph to the service provider isn’t an issue in the heavy client model, because the 90s service isn’t going to pay to store that information on your behalf anyway. It wasn’t because the service viewed that personal information as “oily rags”; it was because they simply didn’t want to expend the resources to store it.
All you really need to turn it into a social network is an app that can read it, parse it and arrange it in a more convenient manner than clicking on individual messages.
https://delta.chat/en/
In the 90s, if you moved from your universities' mail server to Lycos, you also lose all the people who you were following, since they still had the previous email address.
Mastodon just happens to work in the reverse (you have a list of people you follow, rather than of people who follow you, as in email), but the issue is the same.
That’s gotten harder and easier today. It’s never been harder to properly manage a mailserver yourself. On the other hand, registering a vanity domain and hosting with a neutral 3rd party like (my current) Fastmail has never been easier.
Someone should make a startup that suggests and registers a vanity domain on users’ behalf and then configures the email hosting provider of the user’s choice, spelling out the costs and tradeoffs of each. Work out the billing with a handful of providers and take a small monthly cut. It’s probably a beer money startup :-)
Come to think of it, given this problem is so old, I’d be surprised if nobody has made this.
If all the state related to following is on the client, then the client has to either consume the stream of all messages (on a push model) or regularly poll its sources across its entire follower set (on a pull model), both of which are extremely inefficient. Some pressure in the direction of centralization is intrinsic to the problem.
The other concern is the "block posts by tag" (e.g. ban all #politics). This could cause an even greater problem where it allow stronger social bubbles to form because one side could outright block the other (people blocking #dems or #gop). It could become like a Black Mirror episode where people literally do not know what's happening outside of their group/tribe because they've blocked entire groups/topics/nodes. We have this problem today to an extent, but I worry about new platforms that provide more tools for group isolation.
> The other concern is the "block posts by tag" (e.g. ban all #politics). This could cause an even greater problem where it allow stronger social bubbles to form because one side could outright block the other (people blocking #dems or #gop). It could become like a Black Mirror episode where people literally do not know what's happening outside of their group/tribe because they've blocked entire groups/topics/nodes. We have this problem today to an extent, but I worry about new platforms that provide more tools for group isolation.
In that case, couldn't the opposing side just use the other tag? Who could enforce proper tagging in this case?
Word of mouth (or 'word of text') is a major way services like this spread. Imagine discussions of Twitter in the media but where the words "tweet" and "tweeted" are replaced with "toot" and "tooted".
Kids impersonating the noise a train horn makes.
A word for farting.
The only context in which you'd normally say that someone "tooted" is the latter.
1) In the expression toot [one's] own horn, which means to praise oneself. Often in the form "I don't want to toot my own horn, but [...]".
2) A cutesy word for a fart, used primarily when talking to young children.
Notably, an elephant using its trunk to make noise is said to be trumpeting, not tooting.
So if Mr Trump was on Mastodon would we say he was tooting or trumpeting?
And, for many people, it's the only meaning that naturally comes to mind in phrases like "I tooted" or "Joe tooted".
https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/100419966679180204
Not everything is a cynical ploy. There are still pure and wholesome things in this world.
But a mastodon “tweet” is called a “toot”? Honestly? Am I insane? Is it just in the USA that that means “fart”? It truly is spectacularly bad. Branding and naming matters, and it’s not shareholders that care. Users care.
You don't need a new name on every new service.
In any case, even just considering the US market, it's clearly a very large and important one for any software system. And, what a word means there has nothing to do with Americans imposing things on others.
I hate cockroaches and yet have deployed CockroachDB in production. The insistence on being puritan seems shallow to me, considering the real problems this world is facing, but to each their own.
It's not anymore clear than toot - if I say, "Hey Dick", it might be the insult depending on the context. Now it's unlikely to be if the name is Richard, but since you can't really fart about stuff, it's unlikely that you're farting about your plans.
Ever wonder why "git" isn't very objectionable? Because it is an obscure British insult, not an American one.
Nobody uses the phrasing "Hey Dick" for the insult. That would be either "Hey, you dick", or "Hey" followed by a long pause and then "Dick".
"Git" -- as a name for the software -- is unobjectionable because it's obviously not calling anyone a git. The term "git" by itself isn't offensive.
All very different from saying that someone tooted, or referring to their toots.
Even if it's "Richard tooted about politics" the thing is that the only prexisting use of the verb "tooted" that applies to a person is the bodily function, so that association is always going to come up -- and remember also that for Mastodon to grow it has to bring in new people who are not familiar with it or its terminology, and first impressions are important.
> Twitter Is in the Outrage Business; Mastodon Isn't a Business
I need to spend way more time thinking about this, but I feel like in some scenarios there is a competitive advantage to not needing to care about stuff like stock prices or insane prices.
If you can get a business or a project to the point where it's stable and competitive and it's funding you enough to keep going, then there's a whole bunch of stuff that you don't need to care about. That's obviously not universal, but there are clearly downsides to large businesses. There are things that large business will always be worse at then a small business or personal project.
Again, I haven't thought enough about this to make a cognizant point, but... it feels like something I want to think about more. Being a nonprofit or a small business or a completely non-commercial entity should in some instances give you a competitive advantage over other businesses. Facebook can copy every single feature and then some of Snapchat.
But Twitter can't really copy everything that Mastadon is doing, because some of the stuff that Mastadon is doing is completely contradictory to Twitter's entire business model. I feel like there's something to be said about (if you're in Mastadon's position) figuring out some way to tie at least a few public-facing features into that nonprofit model that you know, 100%, your largest competitors will literally never be able to do.
> And Twitter doesn't have any choice in the matter, either. [...] Twitter is a public company, funded by investor money; they thus owe a legal duty to make as much money for their investors as they can
is not, strictly speaking, true. This has been discussed a few times on HN recently. (And this book The Shareholder Value Myth is well worth reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17529520 .) There's no categorical legal requirement for a company to make share value the absolute, #1 priority. On the other hand, it may be that enough people believe this duty exists that it has a sort of ipso facto existence.
I mean, the point is that "you aren't prioritizing profit" has legal standing for investors. And "we don't prioritize profit in cases that involve harming the world" does not is not a legal stance for the company unless the harm itself is illegal or the entity is a Benefit Corp or similar.
If so, are you sure, and do you have sources? wool_gather said that "There's no categorical legal requirement for a company to make share value the absolute, #1 priority", despite a widespread belief to the contrary. And you seem to be just flatly contradicting him, without making any argument or providing any sources, which is... not the most helpful way of moving the conversation forward.
The investors have actions available to it than can punish executives for not pursuing profit opportunities sufficiently aggressively. Many of these don't involve the court, but some may.
Conversely, a founder that loses his/her business because investors punished them in this manner has no legal basis to fight to retain the business.
Of course investors may do various things. But we're particularly interested in the question of whether the company must legally maximize profit, even if not directed to do so by a majority of shareholders. wool_gather says no, quadrangle says yes, I wonder whether quadrangle in fact knows what he's talking about.
You say "Many of these don't involve the court, but some may." But the "some may" is kind of what we're trying to get into: if you like, the question is "can a shareholder successfully sue the company for not maximizing profit, even if a majority of shareholders haven't directed it to do so?". As far as I know, that's equivalent to asking whether the company has a legal duty to maximize profit.
In general, I agree that a company is not legally obligated to make a profit. For example, there are many little shell companies whose main goal is not to turn a profit but to do something else. There are also B Corporations that have special legal protections for investors pursuing goals that are not strictly financial.
So in that sense, wool_gather is correct. A company is not legally obligated to maximize profit. But as a practical matter, if you raise money from professional investors, the strength of agency theory and the norms of ordinary business suggest that you can get into legal or financial trouble if you don't put the financial interests of the investors over nearly all other interests.
Well, if we agree on that core point - which I think is all the point that wool_gather was trying to make - then that's great! And I think there's no point in the two of us investing any more time in picking over quadrangle's slightly confused reply.
I'm afraid I can't resist pulling on one more little thread, though :-) You've sort of hand-waved "legal or financial trouble" together, but it seems to me that legal consequences are very different from other consequences, in that there has to be a legal basis for legal consequences. "agency theory and the norms of ordinary business" can't condense and resolve themselves into a law: there either is a law on the books or there isn't.
I understand that shareholder lawsuits are a thing that can happen under some circumstances. But if the law doesn't make "not maximizing profit" sufficient grounds, then it doesn't, surely?
I'm saying that there's enough legal premise around the idea that the business is working for profit. The investors buy stock with the premise that the business is aiming to provide a return. If they don't aim for that, they can be accused of not running the business in good faith or of misleading the investors…
I'm not saying there's an absolute legal imperative to maximize profit. I'm saying that investors are given enough legal tools in our bureaucratic world that they really can use the legal system along with other tools to bully companies into focusing on proift above other values.
A company just saying in court, "X would bring more profit, but that wouldn't be as good for the world" isn't going to get a suit dismissed if the suit is based on a bunch of complex legal allegations about the company misleading investors or I don't know what other wide range of possible legal arguments are available…
But for Benefit Corp or similar, investors would have less have legal standing to bring suits based on the companies following the social priorities laid out in their Benefit Corp bylaws etc.
But shareholders can sue over alleged harm to a corporation. I'm not a lawyer, so I really have no idea what the standard is here. But purely speculatively, I suppose someone could be sued for repeatedly missing obvious profit opportunities because the executives objected to them on ethical or other grounds.
I get the impression, though, that shareholders are more likely to sue for committing an active blunder (like selling off a division for an insanely low price) rather than for missing an opportunity.
There's a list of some famous shareholder actions here: https://www.dandodiary.com/2014/12/articles/shareholders-der...
More charitably, I think what people like quadrangle are really meaning to say is that there is a significant legal framework that very strongly incentivizes and is inspired by the idea that the first obligation of a corporation is to maximize profit. And if that was the point, then I think that's pretty close to the truth.
Sure, you won't be arrested for not maximizing profit, but remaining in business without attempting to put profit first is sufficiently hard that it typically requires special legal protections (as in B corporations).
Apologies again: you were right and I was blinkeredly literal.
Investors who feel that profit is not being maximized can sell their shares or can vote to replace management. They can also buy sufficient shares from other unhappy shareholders to let them take control of the company altogether, and manage it themselves.
What evidence do you have that any shareholder has ever won a lawsuit against a company on the basis that the company was not maximizing profits?
E.g. if startup X has the tech to take over a market, but is insufficiently pursuing a profit opportunity because of moral squeamishness, chances are relatively good that investors in X will simply replace the executives with somebody that will pursue those opportunities since that's vastly cheaper than building up competitive tech in a new investment.
Similarly with publicly traded companies, not pursuing profit opportunities can result in large sell offs of a stock. You see a lot of animus against short sellers that suggests that the "businesses must maximize profit" norm is thoroughly ingrained in investor communities even if it's not legally mandatory.
That isn't obviously true. Eg, Amazon spent years actively doing everything possible to avoid making profits.
If investors don't like a company's strategy then they can try to get management changes or they can sell. But company strategy goes way beyond the blind pursuit of profit.
E.g. if startup X has the tech to take over a market, but is insufficiently pursuing a profit opportunity because of moral squeamishness, chances are relatively good that investors in X will simply replace the executives with somebody that will pursue those opportunities since that's vastly cheaper than building up competitive tech in a new investment.
That maybe true sometimes, but it is a lot rarer than you seem to believe (especially with early stage companies). The team running the company is a very large part of what people invest it. As a good counter example: Uber. Few would say that Travis wasn't pursuing profit every way possible, and it was the investors that moved against him because of his bad moral judgment.
With Uber, Travis was attempting to undercut competition. Investors subsidize rides because when there is no competition they are in a better place to profit. Amazon (I believe?) was reinvesting the money in the business while subsidizing prices and package delivery to gain loyal customers. Many times an investor will subsidize a no-advertisement experience to gain an audience, and then switch on ads when the network effects are strong enough to retain the audience.
This is basically Machiavelli's advice that new princes should give favors to the masses when they rise to power, so that their positions are stronger later. But the real goal is always to turn profit aggressively, even if investors are patient for a few years while they maneuver into the right position.
Also just to be clear, no investor wants a business to pursue every profit opportunity. They want the business to focus on a strategy that will maximize profit given their strengths, and that always involves focus rather than being distracted by every possible opportunity.
Do you agree, then, that there is no legal requirement for a company's management to maximize profits, and that you know of no cases where a shareholder prevailed in a lawsuit against management for failure to maximize profit?
You can’t intentionally waste assets, you can’t put personal interests above the company’s interests, and there’s another set of rules when you sell the company — but “prioritizing profit” is an economic argument about what’s good and best, not quite so much a legal standard.
> they can sue
Not, as far as I know, with any likelihood of success, no. There's a doctrine called the "Business Judgement Rule", which says that -- generally speaking -- boards/officers are not liable for bad stuff happening to the company as long as they act in good faith, without conflict of interest, and using their honest judgement of what is best for the company -- which doesn't mean the shareholders.
For example, in my career I’ve seen nonprofits, large and small, being very hawkish in competition for government contracts. So much so that I developed a saying - “Nonprofit is a tax status, not a business model.”
I think Wall Street is another business environment that creates these very hawkish business cultures, even in (relatively) smaller businesses (biomed for example).
Just thinking along with you here... not sure where I’m going with it. But I know I’ve worked with nonprofits that were very hawkish and sharked the competition all the time.
Theoretically nonprofits focus on some other purpose first (but not exclusively). “For profits” businesses have the primary purpose of making profits.
That’s the theory. In application, lots of nonprofits are loaded with business people trying to make money under the tax shelter of that tax status.
If you don’t have funding, a team will get some and blow your bootstrapped app out of the water.
The big worry is how do you maintain that early adopter culture as the service scales. Some will adopt invitation-only gatekeeping. Others an onboarding process that emphasizes customer development.
Mastodon makes its culture explicit up front and in its design. And it seems to be working.
The money flows that direct mastadon's development and subsequent proliferation could be very good for its competitive edge (vis-a-vis twitter) or they could land it right in the same "outrage" territory as twitter. If they don't really have a good set of hypotheses on how twitter ended up where it did, they won't be able to test solutions that solve for those.
Its really hard to say what will happen from our current perspective and at this point in time. I hope the mastadon maintainers are developing a strategy to keep it in the problem-solving territory they desire.
I disagree. Retweets can be an issue but they have their place as well
What all "timeline" social networks are missing is the underboost, the downvote button, call it as you want.
People will boost good stuff but they will boost crap.
Networks need the contrary signal, they need the "WTF are you thinking posting this crap here" signal.
Not censorship, but a "tone down" indication.
Twitter has been cutting down and restricting/banning accounts which I'm not fundamentally against it but they are focusing on one side of the political spectrum. With that, I can't agree.
Because Mastodon has a "report" button, and because of the way Mastodon scales, reports actually get acted on by humans who have a vested interest in keeping their users civil, lest their server get a reputation as That One Server Full Of Jerks and find other admins telling their servers to ignore it entirely.
Every pro-Mastodon article mentions I can pack my bags and leave for a new instance but if you do research you find that that feature isn't built yet and the community can't agree on how it should work. So picking the right server is currently a very heavy decision.
I've tried some of these instance finder tools but they reveal that Mastodon instances are like 25% furry communities and other fringe fetishes and I really just want a place to talk tech, philosophy, and video games.
I'm on https://mathstodon.xyz/ and https://fosstodon.org/ if you want to start on either of those.
Then again, maybe you will neither need nor want to move.
A quick web search for "mastodon instance tech video games" has produces a few pages listing some instances with comments about what sorts of things they cover:
https://thefishcrow.com/2017/04/08/mastodon-instance-content...
https://instances.noct.zone/
Visit one of those pages and Ctrl-F for the things you're interested in. Again, a couple of minutes searching has suggested https://elekk.xyz/about and https://mastodon.gamedev.place/about
Twitter and FB have been mainstreamed faster in part because the onboarding/acquisition UX is so easy. It's necessary to think this through (if widespread adoption _is_ the goal).
mastodon.technology? Been on it for past couple of weeks; feels quite ok so far.
For the most part it's tech folks talking about tech, though the federated timeline is naturally more diverse. If a bunch of HNers join up, even more so. It is what you make of it, you shape the local culture as much as anyone else.
[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ [1] https://discuss.write.as/t/activitypub-support/64
Much simpler to remember, also connects directly to personal website.
> The inventors of these variations were not the typical user. They posted more tweets, had higher network degree, and were more likely to describe themselves with words like “geek” and “founder”; in other words, they were the core members of the Twitter community. The early adopters were also more active and innovative. The variations spread through densely connected networks, bouncing from person to person in a way that meant most adopters of the varia- tion were fewer than two hops from someone who had never been exposed to the variation on Twitter when they first used it. This could be a general finding, that social conventions are more likely to arise in the active and densely connected parts of a community.
[0] https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM12/paper/view/...
What I see on Twitter is that people are constantly fighting this limitation by writing several tweets in a row (sometimes marking them as parts of a whole message). I would think that’s an annoyance. So what’s the attraction?
I haven't even tried Mastodon because my understanding of identify is tied to a server rather than an email or a gpg key... so outside of your control (unless you run your own server). My understanding is that when the server you are currently using disappear, your current identity, history, etc... disappear too.
Exports are fine for when you want to move, but typically too late when the server you use and its data disappear. Do Mastodon evangelists advertise the fact that you need to do frequent export?
I follow a lot of people on twitter because I came across one of their tweet, check their history, and found them interesting. They have no idea who I am, they don't post often enough that I could remember their names. If their data and metadata were to disappear, how could they know how to contact me to let me know they have changed server, and therefore identity? Even if I remembered them and did noticed they had disappeared (two huge assumptions), how could I find them on their new server?
If Mastodon doesn't suit your needs, then fix it or don't use it. Either way that doesn't make it "embarassing" or otherwise bad. It works great for millions of users.
> How does Mastodon solve this issue? Well, Mastodon doesn't have retweets; it has "boosts". Boosts are essentially like retweets, with one key difference: there's no option to add your own commentary.
I think "Right problem, wrong solution". The reason people mock bad ideas on Twitter is probably because Twitter has a character limit. Refuting bad ideas often takes longer than 240 characters. In fact, putting forward bad ideas takes less time and energy than refuting them. This is why, usually, burden of proof is placed on the one making a claim. Otherwise people who value truth will be exhausted from the approximately 10 times the effort it takes to refute false claims and truth will never win out.
Showing bad ideas to be bad is very important in civil discourse, not being able to point out bad ideas by "retweeting" them with commentary will likely make this social network an echo chamber devoid of intellectual curiosity
Not necessarily true.
> Showing bad ideas to be bad is very important in civil discourse, not being able to point out bad ideas by "retweeting" them with commentary will likely make this social network an echo chamber devoid of intellectual curiosity
Theoretically yes, but the problem with Twitter is not "properly" refuting ideas, because there is no such thing as absolute truth when it comes to human interactions. People will tend to believe whatever they want, independent of facts. Furthermore, people may interpret the same fact in completely diverging ways, depending on their prior conceptions.
Not allowing awfulness to spread could be more efficient than helplessly trying to refute it.
Didn't you just basically say that what is "awful" is subjective? You're basically saying "maybe echo chambers are better".
I generally agree with "people will tend to believe whatever they want", but many people do change their minds, especially as they age. Pushing people into the underground just makes them more extreme.
Also, don't underestimate the power of public mockery. What makes Nazism most unattractive isn't the fact that it's abhorrent from some moral perspective (that not everybody shares), it's the fact that most actual Nazis are total losers by every measure.
Yes, I did. Instead of retweeting, you let the awfulness die out instead of getting more attention, i.e., don't let opinions escalate. Awfulness here doesn't have to be what I consider to be awful. And I don't see what this has to do with "maybe echo chambers are better".
Now, I don't know whether that would be more efficient or not - it could, right?. Neither of us know, so perhaps the Mastodon experiment may teach us something.
It's not even the right problem.
The problem is not mocking people, disagreeing with them or whatever (incidentally the twitter character limit doesn't preclude external links or tweet chains, which are extremely common at least in science twitter). It's that doing so through a retweet (or a boost) is a signal to followers, and that can send hordes harassing a single person, because it's very easy for followers to click on the RT/boost and reply, and they're not going to see that thousands of people already did exactly that.
And the person at the other end of the pipe has to deal with a flood of burning garbage.
And more generally that kind of crap is easily weaponisable, twitter provides few tools to deal with it, and they don't usually apply their own rules. I don't know that Mastodon is any better.
Fundamentally, social platforms are only good so long as they've not reached their eternal September yet, or are actively prevented from doing so through active and unforgiving moderation — which can have its own issues.
Sure, occasionally an otherwise obscure person might find themselves at the end of an unexpected shitstorm, but otherwise it generally affects more prominent users, who are well aware that anything mildly controversial can turn into lots of angry replies.
Is that even a real problem? Isn't it actually valuable information to know that people get really angry about this-and-that? Aren't researchers able to use this data to learn something about human behavior?
Seems to me like people want to blame technology for something that's really amplified human nature. A rehashing the old story of the "basically good" human corrupted by some foreign evil.
>Sure, occasionally an otherwise obscure person might find themselves at the end of an unexpected shitstorm, but otherwise it generally affects more prominent users, who are well aware that anything mildly controversial can turn into lots of angry replies.
People often join social networks to follow, interact with, or become prominent people, so it is a problem for them if all of those prominent people are continually sacrificed.
And that's supposed to be a good or even neutral thing… how?
> Is that even a real problem?
Very much so.
> Isn't it actually valuable information to know that people get really angry about this-and-that?
Not really, and that isn't even relevant to the issue of it actively harming people.
> Seems to me like people want to blame technology for something that's really amplified human nature. A rehashing the old story of the "basically good" human corrupted by some foreign evil.
You're the only one talking about "basically good human". The amplification of human nature is the very issue at hand, "human nature" has not evolved in that context and while it may work at small scales it demonstrably does not at the scales we're involved in. As a result it is ethically and functionally necessary for the tool to mitigate human nature since they're the ones amplifying it to downright and outright harmful levels.
The key difference here is that, once we've noticed that this lack of context (ie..."has someone already made the point about $G_OUTGROUP_MEMBER_23049 or $G_OUTGROUP_234 that I'm going to make?")...we can actually change the code to Mastodon/whatever fediverse server/client to provide solutions to it(see, for example, pleroma's "did you type 'open source' when you mean 'free software'?). Technical measures could be considered and tested in small instances and then scaled up as they are found to work/not work.
With birdsite you just throw up your hands and say "well, the corporation doesn't think it's a priority. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ "
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
The gist is that pithy, low-effort strawmans of an opposing tribe are highly attractive and contagious memes.
I don't think it has anything specific to do with Twitter. You see similar issues everywhere: Facebook, Reddit, and of course meatspace. It's a human problem.
Twitter and the short character-limit may magnify it a bit, I'll admit that. But the actual problem can't be solved on Twitter or Mastodon. Each individual needs to be aware of this human problem and to constantly make an effort to notice and counteract it in their own brain (which is very difficult and error prone). Perhaps if enough people start doing that more, then cultural change will take place. I don't know.
Twitter has a profit incentive against people solving this problem. Places like Mastodon at least have the possibility of designing against the issue or somehow encouraging education about it.
Well, I didn't mention it in the post, but Mastodon also ups the character limit to 500 characters (really, even more, because links always count as 24 chars, regardless of actual length). So if you're right that that's part of the problem, then it's also partly addressed.
But I think the bigger issue is that retweets encourage you to try to refute/mock/engage with bad ideas in a tweet. With Mastodon/boots, users tend to just ignore bad ideas (or, if they're really bad, respond at length in a blog/medium post)
You're right that it could become too much of an echo chamber, but it will at least avoid becoming a rage-generator.
I've been calling certain social platforms and areas "hate lasers" for a while.
You can talk about bad ideas without retweeting them, too, you know.
Maybe I'm lucky that few pay attention to me, but I haven't had a lot of trouble making Twitter incredibly, if not the most, useful social network. Its easy to find your interests and fairly simple to ignore/block things you don't care about.
I also don't think that "there are people I disagree with also using this space" === "this place is toxic" which seems to be the lazy default these days. I prefer Twitter, being a US company, tread as close as it can to the 1st Amendment. I think that people need to engage with views they are unfamiliar with or misunderstand -- though there's certainly the echo chamber problem, to never face ideas that challenge you is to never grow yourself and understand what you believe as most often reflected in classrooms that now boycott professors or require everything come with some trigger warning.
Twitter has a ways to go to provide tools for dealing with trolls but it's making its way there in a way that seems more methodical and less reactionary than something like FB, and while I find characters like Alex Jones offensive, I find the rush for people (particularly some journalists and 20's something safe-space-mobists that are every bit as vocal as the mobs on the right) to default to the ban hammer more offensive.
These companies have immense power over speech in a way that should frighten us, not encourage us to have the centralization as an excuse to circumvent the 1st amendment. True, no platform is obligated to host someone, but given they are effectively monopolies (extremely responsive to legislator outrage that would otherwise have to fight the 1st) this should give everyone more pause than it appears to.
Jones fell like a domino once Apple removed him first. When Spotify removed the reprehensible music it did, the other companies fell in line and the immediate reaction was for activist groups to demand more and more be removed to varying degrees of things being actually offensive (do we now remove old NWA tracks?)
This is all an incredibly slippery slope, and to me the sign of the times is that the trolls have made it so that any difference of opinion is now something everyone flees from and that the default is to assume the worst of someone who might have a different point of view than you do.
If you follow people because you like them, because you are friends with them, or because you hope they will follow you back, Twitter is a fucking disaster. There are people I really wanted to follow, but if I see 30 tweets/likes/retweets in my feed for every 1 incredibly useful tweet, they have to be unfollowed. Unsurprisingly, this approach pretty much cleans out all of the off-topic annoying non-sense, irregardless of your political views or lack there of.
The flip side to all of this is, if a lot of people follow you, the very open nature of Twitter can certainly be a problem. If you are a celebrity or a well known person and are not able to ignore what I imagine is basically a hate stream, then for your own well-being you probably should not use Twitter.
There are plenty of people who are addicted to the algorithm drip feed of content now. Snapchat and Instagram/Facebook have turned this in to a compulsive behavior and the ad revenue has followed. My guess is that as a "solution" to whatever is going on now, Twitter is going to move toward this model. When they do, I sincerely hope that Mastodon or some other open ActivityPub platform is good enough that all of the really smart people who post fantastic content to Twitter, like John Carmack and Tim Sweeney, will follow.
Claiming that is what people mean when they claim something is toxic is just as lazy, if not more so. And you’re basically saying that it’s on minority and underrepresented groups to be the one to engage, rather than those that are antagonizing them.
Alex Jones is an even more egregious case because he’s gotten in trouble not just because he “said things people disagree with”, but because he sent a harassment mob against the parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook, claiming it was a “false flag operation.” Several of them now are not able to visit the graves of their children, the harassment is that bad.
I’m sorry, but I just do not see this as anywhere near the “slippery slope” you’re complaining it is.
Additionally, I would rather US companies try to favor behavior honoring the Constitution generally, even though they don't have to.
Let me tell you where the outrage is coming from. It's not coming from UX decisions. It's coming from mind boggling suffering. It's coming from exhausted and starving bodies who are disrespected and discarded, repeatedly. It's coming from a lack of opportunity and a lack of services necessary for survival. It's coming from a parlous minimum wage and no safety net. It's coming from addiction and the homelessness and precariousness that so often drive it.
Those prone to conservatism interpret their pain as an attack on them from people who look different. Those prone, like myself, to systems level thinking about social structures view it (correctly) as an induced state, effectively selected for because the alternative was selected against.
The pain and outrage leaks onto social media, but it is not from there.
It is all around you, and it is nearly big enough to blot out the sun.
Get ready.
North-American usage tends to tech-early adopters (male, white,some others), and tends to be light on traditional minorities that I've observed (note; personal observation on social networks tends to be exceedingly self-selective and nonrepresentitive).
Libertarian viewpoints don't seem particularly prevalent, or well-received.
Which got downvoted, because pointing out that class and privilege are lens aberrations in the minds of technologists does not sit well with technologists.
I can't wait to get doxxed.
If this language aims to show the blunt physical way that others dehumanize the people in question… well, that's not clear. Maybe exploitive actors see others as just "bodies", but that's not a good way to see people.
The concept of a "person" is bigger than just their physical body, in the same way that this sentence is bigger than just a bunch of binary numbers.
If you want to highlight the dehumanizing, objectifying way that power sees people, it would be "…bodies that…"
Using "who" makes it seem like you think you can refer to people as "bodies" in a way that is non-objectifying…
We are warm bodies. Useful for interfacing with other warm bodies. When those bodies cool, they are discarded.
Yes, it really is like this. If you doubt me, by all means, come check it out.
Oh please. It's like you don't even recognize how privileged you have to be to spend all day on Twitter whining about stuff.
The points about moderation I found much more interesting, and I wish the author had led with that.