(a repost of some hastily formatted thoughts in the form of discord messages in the Website League planning server. feels like the sort of thing the cohost community would appreciate)
- there is no technical solution to social problems, so we design social structure to avoid those problems as best as possible, instead of mitigating them with techological measures
- and social stucture will influence our choice of technology instead
- that's my perspective at least
- you can mitigate social issues with technology, but you cannot actually fix the root problem with it
- technology is just a tool - people determined enough will either find a way to bend the tool to their will, or work around the tool
- only social structures that sufficiently disincentivize and provide mechanisms to fight against said people will actually solve the issues
- it's still good to think about the technology side, so we know what our options are and what's actually feasible to implement
- focusing on technology first often locks you into a particular sort of social structure without even realizing it - the way tools are designed influences how people are likely to use those tools, and social structures do coalesce around the most frictionless way to use the tools given to the community
- but focusing on social structure first doesn't have as strong of a lock-in effect - it informs what techology is available to you yes, but instead of converging onto a local minimum, you instead end up with a set of criteria you can evaluate tools against, and determine if they're something we can use, something that can't be used, or something we can take parts of, but not the whole. there's more options