Rev.Hans@SacredBodies.ca :mstdnca:
Rev.Hans@SacredBodies.ca :mstdnca:  ·  2 months ago
@BorisBarbour @pluralistic Way to go EU!
When it comes to tackling the online Wild West I’m impressed with EU. As a Canadian I’m dismayed at our North American “we’ll let the tech bros figure it out for us” attitude.

ps. IMHO the sale of Twitter should never have been allowed. A “commons” has been privatized in the worst possible way. It could have been so different… Is there the stomach to do different w FB?

#internet #socialmedia #regulation #privacy#mentalhealth

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  2 months ago

Long thread/2

Social media has its own special form of lock-in: we use social media sites to connect with friends, family members, community members, audiences, comrades, customers...people we love, depend on, and care for. Gathering people together is a profoundly powerful activity, because once people are in one place, they can *do things*: plan demonstrations, raise funds, organize outings, start movements.

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  2 months ago

Long thread/3

Social media that attracts people then attract *more* people - the more people there are on a service, the more reasons there are to join that service, and once you join the service, you become a reason for other people to join.

Economists call this the "network effect." Services that increase in value as more people use them are said to enjoy "network effects." But network effects are a trap, because services that grow by connecting people get harder and harder to escape.

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  2 months ago

Long thread/4

That's thanks to something called the "collective action problem." You experience the collective action problems all the time, whenever you try and get your friends together to do something. I mean, you love your friends but god*damn* are they a pain in the ass: whether it's deciding what board game to play, what movie to see, or where to go for a drink afterwards, hell is truly other people.

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  2 months ago

Long thread/5

Specifically, people that you love but who stubbornly insist on not agreeing to do what *you* want to do.

You join a social media site because of network effects. You stay because of the collective action problem. And if you leave anyway, you will experience "switching costs." Switching costs are all the things you give up when you leave one product or service and join another. If you leave a social media service, you lose contact with all the people you rely on there.

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  2 months ago

Long thread/6

Social media bosses know all this. They play a game where they try to enshittify things *right up to* the point where the costs they're imposing on you (with ads, boosted content, undermoderation, overmoderation, AI slop, etc) is just a *little* less than the switching costs you'd have to bear if you left. That's the revenue maximization strategy of social media: make things shittier for you to make things better for the company, but not so shitty that you go.

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  2 months ago

Long thread/7

The more you love and need the people on the site, the harder it is for you to leave, and the shittier the service can make things for you.

How *cursed* is that?

But digital technology has an answer. Because computers are so marvelously, miraculously flexible, we can create emergency exits between services so when they turn into raging dumpster fires, you can hit the crash-bar and escape to a better service.

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  2 months ago

Long thread/8

For example, in 2006, when Facebook decided to open its doors to the public - not just college kids with .edu addresses - they understood that most people interested in social media already had accounts on Myspace, a service that had sold to master enshittifier Rupert Murdoch the year before. Myspace users were champing at the bit to leave, but they were holding each other hostage.

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  2 months ago

Long thread/9

To resolve this hostage situation, Facebook gave prospective Myspace users a bot that would take their Myspace login and password and impersonate them on Myspace, scraping all the messages their stay-behind friends had posted for them. These would show up in your Facebook inbox, and when you replied to them, the bot would log back into Myspace as you and autopilot those messages into your outbox, so they'd be delivered to your friends there.

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  2 months ago

Long thread/10

No switching costs, in other words: you could use Facebook and *still* talk to your Myspace friends, without using Myspace. Without switching costs, there was no collective action problem, because you didn't all have to leave at once. You could trickle from Myspace to Facebook in ones and twos, and stay connected to each other.

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  2 months ago

Long thread/11

Of course, that trickle quickly became a flood. Network effects are a double-edged sword: if you're only stuck to a service because of the people there, then if those people go, there's no reason for you to stick around. The anthropologist danah boyd was able to watch this from the inside, watching Myspace's back-end as whole groups departed en masse:

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  2 months ago

Long thread/12

> When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/12/05/what-if-failure-is-the-plan.html

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  2 months ago

Long thread/13

Social media bosses *hate* the idea of fire exits. For social media enshittifiers, the dumpster fire is a feature, not a bug. If users can escape the minute you turn up the heat, how will you cook them alive?

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  2 months ago

Long thread/14

Facebook nonconsensually hacked fire exits into Myspace and freed all of Rupert Murdoch's hostages. Fire exits represents a huge opportunity for competitors - or at least they did, until the motley collection of rules we call "IP" was cultivated into a thicket that made doing unto Facebook as Facebook did unto Myspace became a felony:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  2 months ago

Long thread/15

When Elon Musk set fire to Twitter, people bolted for the exits. The safe harbor they sought out at first was Mastodon, and a wide variety of third party friend-finder services popped up to help Twitter refugees reassemble their networks on Mastodon. All departing Twitter users had to do was put their Mastodon usernames in their bios.

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