If we assume token providers are becoming more and more of a commodity service these days, it seems telling that OpenAI specifically decided to claw out consumer hardware.
Perhaps their big bet is that their partnership with Jony Ive will create the first post-phone hardware device that consumers attach themselves with, and then build an ecosystem around that?
this would be an incredibly tough play. We've seen few success stories, and even when the product is good building the business around them has often failed. Most of the consumer plays are terrible products with weak execution and no real market. I have no doubt they could supplement lots of consumer experiences but I'm not sure how they are more than a commodity component in that model. I'm a die-hard engineer, but equating the success of the iphone to Ive's design is like saying the reason there were so many Apple II's in 80's homes and classrooms was because of Woz's amazing design.
I’m glad someone called this out. “Let’s just use vanilla rails” — sure, except basically every version of rails for the past 5 years has decided to completely change how they do JS.
So many gems are also still built on sprockets — even when you want to use the “rails” way, you are stuck now with a hodgepodge of JS anyways.
It’s a mess — maybe one day we’ll get it fixed, but don’t pretend it’s not partially rails fault as well.
Another potential self-selection bias -- if people know they are signing up to have a conversation with a stranger, perhaps they are already predisposed to be more "pleasant" in conversations, vs a potential curmudgeon who doesn't ever want to speak to anyone, even for money.
There's also the magnitude of a negative interaction as well to consider.
If I have 99 great interactions with someone, but one REALLY bad interaction (they insult me deeply, or say something irredeemable), that can also sour the whole relationship.
It would be interesting to research commonalities amongst bad interactions -- are there patterns that emerge from certain personality types, politics, etc? What about a few "sour" people that will take any interaction and make it bad regardless of matchup -- if we removed them from the interaction pool, do the stats suddenly adjust quickly?
In my mind this would have big implications for social media sites -- not that all bad interactions need to be quelled, but if you are trying to keep conversations civil, attempt to implement X strategy or Y strategy.
Limiting by referrer seems strange — if you know a normal user makes 10-20 requests (let’s assume per minute), can’t you just rate limit requests to 100 requests per minute per IP (5x the average load) and still block the majority of these cases?
Or, if it’s just a few bad actors, block based on JA4/JA3 fingerprint?
What if one user really wants to browse around the world and explore the map. I remember spending half an hour in Google Earth desktop, just exploring around interesting places.
I think referer based limits are better, this way I can ask high users to please choose self-hosting instead of the public instance.
Limiting by referrer is probably the right first step. (And changing the front page text)
You want to track usage by the site, not the person, because you can ask a site to change usage patterns in a way you can't really ask a site's users. Maybe a per IP limit makes sense too, but you wouldn't want them low enough that it would be effective for something like this.
I hope to have some of the followup posts soon, although you are right that my idea is based around a centralized platform with ID Verification.
RE: How to solve for enshittification, I'd mention two things:
1. I think a good product can _stay_ good over time with strong centralized leadership, aka a "benevolent dictator". Think Steve Jobs at Apple, DHH at 37 Signals, etc.
- Once that power structure changes, however (new leader, etc), that can quickly fall apart, so it's definitely not a bulletproof solution.
2. If incentives from the start are built into your platform to make the "user" the biggest customer on your platform, incentives will make sure that you keep those users happy.
- If you have to choose between customers who give you $0/month and advertisers who will give you $1000/month, you'll eventually choose the advertisers to the detriment of the users.
> [...] Its 100% about getting people to stay on your platform as long as possible and engage with your content. Usually that means creating content that gets people to negatively engage with your content. So much so, its now referred to as "rage bait" where Only Fans women purposely post content that gets men to engage with their posts in order to make more money. Political posts are made to inflame either side and get more shares and upvotes.
An easy way to solve for this is customization -- if no two users have the same "algorithm" powering their feed, it becomes hard for anyone to do this, because perhaps one user's algorithm filters out anything tagged with politics, or with a low Flesch–Kincaid score, or non-text posts, etc.
> An easy way to solve for this is customization -- if no two users have the same "algorithm" powering their feed, it becomes hard for anyone to do this, because perhaps one user's algorithm filters out anything tagged with politics, or with a low Flesch–Kincaid score, or non-text posts, etc.
The problem, and where I strongly agree with the parent's statement that "I feel like social media has changed human behavior", is that the users themselves seek the engagement. Content creators want feedback about their content. You can codify that as "views", "likes", or whatever, but the whole problem here is fundamentally that most creators try and pursue strategies that increase whichever metric they are tracking to get value out of their posting.
I watched Bluesky grow up and become a "real network" and once Bluesky hit a certain scaling point it became the exact same as all the other supposed algorithmic-engagement optimized sites. Posters started posting snippy, sneery comments because it made the Like count go up.
> perhaps one user's algorithm filters out anything tagged with politics, or with a low Flesch–Kincaid score, or non-text posts, etc.
Zuck talked about how Threads specifically filtered out political content [1] and how that decision was reversed [2]. It turns out that users didn't like filtering out political content even though as most of us know, it tends to turn into dunking competitions online.
So I largely agree with what the parent said. The expectations in the game have changed. Content creators want big number to go up. People want to dunk on each other because it's fun and feels righteous. No algorithms or manifestos seem to change this fundamental change in the way folks post and engage with social media. Maybe a protracted education campaign can, though.
Ideally, I think if we could, we'd only get content from the creators or people we care about -- but that content runs out eventually, and yet our minds still want to be stimulated.
To bring it back to your food analogy, if I had a personal chef that made delicious food whenever I wanted it, I'd probably not indulge in fast food very often -- but if I needed a quick bite to eat, I'd probably still jump into a McDonalds.
> I guess we have to assume that Mastodon is not "large" by the author's definition.
It's a fair point that Mastadon was left out, and yet it does tackle some of the problems I mention -- perhaps worth a followup post. That being said, I feel like federated social media platforms are not going to be the answer in the end -- and although its adoption has grown in the coming years, I think it's always going to lag behind others.
> Practically speaking, the existence of a large social media platform requires investors seeking unlimited growth, and that's the predictable recipe for enshittification [...] What's the author's escape route to avoid this trap?
I think reddit, to some extent, can be considered a success story here -- it grew fairly slowly compared to other social media platforms, but now feels like it has quite a lot of staying power (although as it approached its IPO it did indeed start to enshittify).
That being said, I think a lot of problems I mention can be solved just by giving the customer (e.g. the user on the social media platform) more choice. Imagine you had a platform that asked you how you wanted to pay to use it: with your data, with advertisements, or with a membership of $XXX/month, amongst other options.
> I feel like federated social media platforms are not going to be the answer in the end -- and although its adoption has grown in the coming years, I think it's always going to lag behind others.
Care to give an argument to substantiate that? These are pretty strong claims, "in the end" and "always" have a certain finality to them, which indicates you very strongly believe that. Why?
Because eventually bad actors take any decentralized platform / standard and ruin it for the rest of us, leading us to trust the few good players that remain (see: email). Sure, technically you can spin up your own mail server -- but because of the copious amount of spam from people who have done that in the past, you'll go through so many hoops that eventually you'll throw in the towel and probably use GSuite or a known major provider.
As Ben Thompson says:
> [...] centralization is a second order effect of decentralization: when all constraints on content are removed, more power than ever accrues to the entity that is the preferred choice for navigating that content.
> I feel like federated social media platforms are not going to be the answer in the end -- and although its adoption has grown in the coming years, I think it's always going to lag behind others.
Agreed, although as a user that doesn't bother me. I'm satisfied with Mastodon's current size.
> I think reddit, to some extent, can be considered a success story here
I've never considered Reddit to be particularly "social". I'm a daily Reddit user, but I don't have any friends on Reddit. Maybe I'm using it wrong? Unlike some other Hacker News commenters, I don't have a particularly high opinion about the level of discourse on HN, but still, in general it seems well above many areas of Reddit. (Of course that depends crucially on the subreddit.) I think that downvoting, for example (which exists on Reddit and HN), is an inherently hostile, nonfriendly action that's not conducive to being social.
> although as it approached its IPO it did indeed start to enshittify
For example, killing third-party Reddit clients that users loved.
> Imagine you had a platform that asked you how you wanted to pay to use it: with your data, with advertisements, or with a membership of $XXX/month, amongst other options.
Well, X basically has that now. I find it interesting that the "Premium" subscription is only "Half Ads", whereas a Premium+ subscription for $395 per year, out of the price range of most users, is required to be "Fully ad-free", which is still a bit of a lie, because it comes "with occasional branded content in less common areas." The problem is that unless a service is fully funded by subscriptions, the advertisers are still going to make severe demands on the service, and the advertisers don't like it when the service removes user eyeballs from their ads.
An interesting thought (to your point) is what people hope social media can actually become -- in the ideal scenario, is it just us being able to engage with people online in better ways? Is it us being able to consume content from others in the ways we want?
Perhaps their big bet is that their partnership with Jony Ive will create the first post-phone hardware device that consumers attach themselves with, and then build an ecosystem around that?
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