linkspam!

[merelydovely]

I've been holding on to these random links for ages.

I Was Wrong About Mastodon got shared around on Mastodon a while back, and I realized I vaguely recognized the name of the author—Marcus Hutchins.

Marcus Hutchins is known as the guy who saved the internet from a major cyberattack, WannaCry, and who then got arrested not long afterward for stuff he had done in his past. WIRED wrote it all up and it's a pretty interesting story.

Also, for something completely different, I was looking up a former coworker to see what they were up to, and apparently they have a blog about how to paint Kindness Rocks; it's quite frankly adorable.



It's a rock!

Comments

[hebethen]

That is one delicious-looking rock.

> Mastodon is not an ad-driven platform. There is absolutely zero incentives to let awful people run amok in the name of engagement.
This seems a bit... "the internet will be an information superhighway and liberate us"-ish in its pollyannaishness. I've been in plenty of non-ad-driven communities and there are a lot of incentives to let awful people run amok, it doesn't have to be for ad engagement.

[merelydovely]

Agreed. But it does at least mean that if you let awful people run amok, you can't retreat to any sort of "think of the shareholders" defense - and likewise you can't claim to be banning people "because the advertisers don't like it". You have to just admit that this is the community you want to create because this is the community you want to create. And I do appreciate that aspect.

[yourlibrarian]

The crucial mistake of social media was trying to force people with wildly incompatible views to co-exist in the same space.

Well, yes and no. Trying to build huge platforms so that you could entice big advertisers to spend with you was definitely a problem. But user ignorance has a lot to do with it as well. After all, no one had to use those platforms, most of them chose to do so.

And early on when FB was trying to be the one stop shop for everyone, a lot of people liked it for that very reason. Many of them were newcomers to the Internet and these choices came about because it meant they didn't have to really learn about how the Internet worked or use different software to get around and interact. At one time they would have been happy AOL users.

The people who "got" the fact that having your family, friends, co-workers, potential bosses or customers, fellow hobbyists, etc. all in the same place was a terrible idea, as was always being identified by your wallet name, tended to ditch the site or diversify their use of different platforms.

So it wasn't really the viewpoints thing, it was the fact that the userbase was not the customer, they were the product. If you need to keep your users happy to succeed, then that's whose needs you'll try to understand so that you can give them a good enough experience for them to continue their support.

[merelydovely]

Yeah, it's probably not a great analysis of social media to identify its mistakes as though it was trying to be social media for the sake of socializing, as opposed to for the sake of making money.

[jo_lasalle]

Those painted rocks are fascinating. So cool!