Thesis: a web of trust based social network wouldn't have a reliable "global" follower / like / etc count -- it would only be the ones you've seen -- and this would be a feature.
Some of the most toxic behavior on Twitter comes from people trying to become "the most popular person in the room", which also leads to a lot of social messaging which isn't about being constructive, but differentiating yourself in a way that makes you look better than others.
@cwebber And *THAT'S* why everyone on WitchesTown has ⛧666⛧ followers. ^_^
@Alda @cwebber I try to figure out whether to follow back based on potentiality of mutual interest, or at least whether or not I would be interested in what they have to share. However, I did just follow back a person with 2 posts total. They didn't seem like a dick though, so I'm giving it a shot.
I have a theory that the Fediverse gets stronger the more folks follow each other. But it's a 2-edged sword.
@cwebber it also encourages some people to try and keep amount of people they follow smaller than amount of people following them. And of course talking people not doing that having "wrong ratio"
@tuturto Could you imagine a world where you decided to not subscribe to 20 comic rss feeds or a few more podcasts because you were afraid it would screw up your follower ratio?
@cwebber or where you decide listen to fewer people than you talk to, for the same reason?
BTW some of my recent thinking on this was prompted by @nolan's recent blogpost https://nolanlawson.com/2017/11/15/why-im-deleting-my-twitter-account/
@cwebber I think I agree. I can't say i know my follow count either way here except that the network is much smaller than elsewhere, but if follow count display was an option I'd disable it (leaving the ability to browse my network; if someone wants to count, whatever, and it might help others discover each other!)
Thanks for interesting thoughts
@cwebber Twitter is just a reflection of cultures that favour cut-throat competition over cooperation. If popularity is equated to profit and power, and maximum profit is accepted as the ultimate goal, at some point things snowball beyond human scale.
It could have never resulted in anything different under the framework Twitter was constructed, but especially so after they took the IPO money.
@cwebber Part of the reason I'm highly skeptical of the Buy Twitter initiative. Even with the best of intentions, Twitter can't be reformed.
It is what it is.
@cwebber devaluing follower count helps emphasize the creation of organic relationships instead of ones generated by "good content"
@cwebber A web of trust that works would necessarily have to define what different types of trust relationship mean.
And for that, to work you would need to build a distributed ontology.
Which is why in past years I've been doing some thinking of how an "Ontological Web" should work.
The "semantic web" can't be semantic and doesn't mean anything if you don't have mutually intelligible ontologies.
@h The semantic web *is* mostly about mutually intelligible ontologies?
@cwebber What I see is construction of massive ontology silos in walled gardens.
The web as it stands is definitely not ontologically translateable, and therefore not semantic.
@cwebber I think the construction of a different kind of web will be necessary, based on the ontological, the semantic, and the epistemological.
Some authors have already explored the semantic and the epistemic, but there's very little written, and even less constructed that accounts for all three aspects.
Webs of trust will necessarily depend on understanding what is being trusted exactly, and to do what exactly. Meaningless semantics without ontologies we can agree on.
@cwebber And if we don't allow everyone to build such ontologies independently, we will only be reproducing the ontological hegemony of the status quo as it stands today.
@cwebber like, everyone keeps saying that, and i never knew birdsite so i've never seen the possibly destructiveness. but, like, if i'm going to post, i wanna make sure i'm reaching people. irl we get feedback based on seeing who's listening, and how they look when reacting. i want the equivalent on the internet. i want follower counts
@cosine There's nothing wrong with you having *your own* follower count and seeing likes to your posts come in and etc. We should have that!
The danger is in having a central place of authority where you can *compare* your follower count to others. That's where you enter into all the problems of popularity contest / differentiation-centric toxicity.
@cwebber AH, that all makes sense now. AAIK witches.town censors your own follower count as well though :(
On Twitter the desire of some users or companies to have lots of followers to appear popular also results in a toxic economy of bots and selling followers, so it would be wise to try to avoid that as much as possible.
@cwebber tumblr doesn’t have public follower counts at all and I’ve always seen that as a feature in the context of that platform
Your suggestion seems like it’d work similarly well for mastodon
@cwebber Seconding. "Singular" identities are a fiction of convenience, anyway. Goodness knows I'm not the same person I was five years ago, never mind twenty.
@cwebber
wild idea: only display the following to followers ratio.
@cwebber
Additional thesis: a social web that resembles human social webs as close as possible shouldn't scale well.
@cwebber @technomancy For me, this makes me dislike being on a small instance. I feel totally alone when toots rarely have boosts / likes / etc.
@cwebber I've occasionally thought that a social medium would be better if there were _NO_ means of effort-free interaction, like favoriting or reposting, but it's been pointed out to me that these mechanisms offer a way for people who don't feel up to a verbal response nevertheless to be able to interact and express sympathy
but I do think it'd be better if favoriting were essentially private (i.e. the user you favorited saw that you did it, but nobody else could)
@kara having a "like" button also dramatically reduces noise. The reason GitHub added the emoji response things was to reduce the amount of noise in issues of people saying "yes please" and "+1"
@cwebber ah, that's a good point. a strong argument!
@cwebber I feel like there's a Navy Seal Copypasta meme that can be done off of this ... with like "and I have over 300k verified followers" and all...
By having a public follower count, *everyone* (yes, even you, yes even me) is gamed into comparing whether your follower count is higher than others, whether others got more likes / shares / etc than you.
This isn't a good basis for thoughtful communication.