ann-arcana

Annie D

@ann-arcana

Queen of Burgers 🍔

Writer, game designer, engineer, bisexual tranthing, FFXIV addict

OC: Anna Verde - Primal/Excalibur, Empyreum W12 P14

Mare: E6M76HDMVU
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ann-arcana
@ann-arcana
lexyeevee
@lexyeevee
vogon
@vogon

over the past few days you can imagine that a lot of computer guys over on twitter have been envisioning futures of social media

and I think that, in general, if you conceptualize of an idealized future of social media as a "technology" or a "protocol" rather than an "organization" or a "society" you are already thinking about it in the wrong way

this post directly inspired by a guy who talked about how the future of social media MUST1 be immutable and have verifiable personal identities

  1. emphasis his, probably inspired2 by years of reading RFCs3

  2. RFC 2119: "MUST: This word, or the terms 'REQUIRED' or 'SHALL', mean that the definition is an absolute requirement of the specification."

  3. which are, themselves, merely a semi-standardized format in which people can write open memos describing a system to each other, so you think he'd be smarter than this

lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

i think if you are into computers then there eventually comes a point where you find yourself thinking "all the world's problems could be solved if only we forced the world to look more like a database", and in that moment you have to decide whether to let go or become a reply guy

ann-arcana
@ann-arcana

I have often in my career as a tech person bemoaned that I do not seem to have that part of my brain that sees a problem and says, "Oh I will use a computer to solve it."

In fact I begin at times to think that perhaps there are not any problems in my life that have ever really been solved by technology, so much as technology has sometimes enabled new modes of operation that did not exist, and those modes have brought new problems.

I didn't need the internet. I existed without it. Having it opened some doors, and some of those doors had fun prizes behind them, but some of them had goats, or worse. Much worse. And now I have all these goats to feed just to live, and just like a goat, they are stubborn and difficult to maintain.

It's the jwz regex joke all the way down, like fractal trees of turtles stretching into the infinite void. I've spent my career trying to find the better mousetrap, and it doesn't exist. It's all just different breeds of goat. Sometimes you just find one you like better.

The reality of it is that my life already has enough problems, why would I make "and now a computer is involved" an added layer to any one of them, having seen them for all the trouble they bring?

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in reply to @vogon's post:

vogon
@vogon

tyyyyyyy

footnotes were one of those things that @jkap and I originally realized we had added to cohost almost by accident and then realized that we would be using them constantly because we have a similarly parenthetical writing style

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widr
@widr

kind of a really dumb idea, taking absolutely the wrong lessons away from the challenge of trying to decouple poster identity from the server on which it is found

i also have thought a lot about this problem and worked a lot towards it and if the thinking isn't that this is a secondary problem arising from the solution that also needs to be solved you're going about it wrong

immutability is very easy to do and has a lot of incredibly useful properties. deleting data is the harder problem to solve. if this weren't true why has so much blood and sweat been poured into memory allocators and filesystems, bozo?

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mcc
@mcc

So the thing is, I don't want to live in a society. Like, I don't think I want to solve the problem of how to make a discussion network that can incorporate everyone, because there are people I just flat don't want to be in the same network of. I want to live in some kind of Cohost-style treehouse with my fun friends I trust and never have to worry about interacting with homophobes.

But that part is actually kind of easy to get, because small communities are easier to build than big ones, so from there a question comes up: How can I get the benefits of society without having to live in it? If I'm in my treehouse and I make a cool image or I make a post promoting a video game I made I want to be able to set it free like a bird into the parts of the Internet where the people who might pay me money for a video game are. If someone is posting really cool stuff in another community I want to be able to follow it without actually having to join their community which might have Republicans in it. In other words what interests me is how to enable interactions between or across communities rather than how to create one big community. And that is... not exclusively a technical problem, but it's more of a technical problem than the problem of Replacing Twitter, there's a technical component to it and that part isn't quite solved. (ActivityPub ["RSS with push notifications"] was supposed to be the solution but somehow instead of turning into a means of throwing content between social networks it just turned into a social network, and I'm not completely certain what went wrong there.)

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mcc
@mcc

Actually, I really liked Google+, and I think it might have both become successful and solved some of the problems of the Twitter peak era if they hadn't started making rapid, arbitrary and damaging changes six months to a year in.

Apparently the project lead for Google+ was someone who'd been hired away from Facebook, and he brought with him a lot of damaging Facebooky ideas (like the "real name policy"). I wonder how it might have gone with slightly different leadership.

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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

TalenLee
@TalenLee

when I talk to students who don't care about games, I pitch them as incentive systems; and once you understand games you can design incentive systems to make it possible to make anyone do anything.

The followup is 'these incentive systems may wind up being deeply immoral but that's a different problem.'

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