Alex Schroeder 🐝 is a user on octodon.social. You can follow them or interact with them if you have an account anywhere in the fediverse.
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Once more regarding: "The Scale Is Just Unfathomable" by Tarleton Gillespie. I read it as a giant admission that social media at scale is fundamentally broken. It cannot be fixed. We need smaller communities. I am hopeful about the Fediverse. I also read it as a criticism of capitalism: in order to make money off massive scale, we reduce the number of moderators. Because we can. Because of profit. And then we are distraught by the result. Don’t do that, then!
https://logicmag.io/04-the-scale-is-just-unfathomable/
@rick_777 I'm not sure ads (which I also don't like and which lead to wasted bandwidth maybe to surveillance when targeted) play into this. I think anything that makes money at scale must run into this.
@kensanata
Eventually it had to come to this. The ad-supported model for social media is unsustainable. With malvertisements it's just not wise to allow ads in your browser, and websites can't survive of good intentions.
User supported (or subscription-based) sites are the only reasonable choice. And in fact, we already had this with newsgroups.
The problem was leechers who wanted everything for free, and big sites who provided services "for free" while selling their data to ad companies.