bruno
@bruno

You're welcome to think Cohost's design is hostile to whatever you want to get out of social media but it's kind of dumb and, at the present juncture, fairly assholish to call the developers 'naive' by saying they should have built something more similar to some other social media platform that is also, at present, wildly unprofitable (they all are!)


Anschel
@Anschel

Yeah the fact is that every social media platform is unprofitable right now. The only real exception is Meta, but they're not making money from social media per se


pervocracy
@pervocracy

I think that even if you're not a right-winger there's a tendency to harbor some "get woke go broke" intuitions about Cohost, like they try too hard to be pure and they should have wallpapered the site with ads and they should have encouraged Skinner-box addiction dynamics and they should have promised not to moderate Free Speech and they should have sucked up to corporate sponsors and then they'd be as financially successful as...

Twitter or Tumblr?

well that's where that line of reasoning breaks down


Anschel
@Anschel

There's an impressive trick right-wing ideas have played, where they define themselves as "tough but practical" and we are in such a rush to point out that "tough" is actually "evil" that we unconsciously concede the point on "practical"


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in reply to @bruno's post:

nothing on the internet lasts forever, and whatever happens to cohost, whenever it happens, i'm really glad someone tried to do this thing. i didn't know how much i would enjoy it! it reminded me of things, introduced me to people, helped me understand what i like and don't like about the internet. what's the point in not trying new things, even if it doesn't always work out.

in reply to @pervocracy's post:

What's bugged me is the sheer amount of misinformation I've seen spread about the finances of the site. I can't tell if people are pretending to not know the difference between salary and payroll or are going into adulthood very confused.

in reply to @Anschel's post:

this is annoyingly true of almost all right-wing arguments about everything: the hidden prong that makes otherwise well-meaning leftists concede ground that doesn't need concession. like "they're letting kids as young as 10 have gender hormones and surgeries! they're putting litterboxes in schools for children who identify as cats!", responding (reasonably) with "no they aren't" implies "we agree those things would be bad"

oh SERIOUSLY

if I never see another argument that's like "don't worry, trans women never win at sports"

is that, like... a promise to the cis world? does it mean that if a trans woman ever does win a major competition we'll be "proven wrong" and have to renegotiate the issue? will we be angry at her for not throwing the game to support the Cause? it goes ugly places.

I've been seeing so many self-satisfied takes on mastodon like "what did they think would happen??" and I can't help but feel these would be the same people who would scoff over every decision because it's not enlightened enough*

But regardless.
I'm sorry if Cohost went bust trying to pursue what they wanted to see in the world. Isn't the whole idea that they're NOT doing the shit to encourage addiction? Maybe some folks in our general lefty, terminally-online circles haven't ever been made aware that being profitable is incredibly at odds with moral choices sometimes.

*aside from a huge messy exception i will not get into but will at least acknowledge