X and Facebook are governed by the policies of mercurial billionaires. Bluesky’s C.E.O., Jay Graber, says that she wants to give power back to the user.
Corporations cannot create nontoxic social media, the incentives will always be there to make it toxic.
The only way to do it is something like mastodon where actual people run it and thus can deal with people who are being toxic either by blocking etc because the fear of losing money, or the likelihood of the entire site/platform disappearing etc just isn’t there (obvioiusly individuals sites go down sometimes but the entire network is unlikely to disappear), or by the use of people explaining why what they did was wrong and the toxic people listen.
Edit: If Bluesky actually ever becomes decentralised as in users can run their own servers and federate or block other servers then perhaps it might become good, but until such a time then I do not trust them.
They should also make a non-profit foundation if they want to be seen as trustworthy, so that they can’t ever be sold off.
Those are the only way we and many others will ever trust them.
Corporations cannot create nontoxic social media, the incentives will always be there to make it toxic.
I don’t know that’s true. The incentives to make it toxic come from engagement being the goal, which is a function of advertising being the income. I’m not advocating for it, but if there were a flat subscription and no ads, I don’t think they’d have any economic pressures for toxicity.
We think Minds tried something like this (though it might be different tiers) and it didn’t exactly go well, forcing users to pay one way or the other always leads to economic pressures to keep users around, even if they are being toxic at least from what we have observed.
Yes, I meant more long term but didn’t express that fully. So you are correct, corporate social media will go that way eventually unless they do the things we recommended.
Corporations cannot create nontoxic social media, the incentives will always be there to make it toxic.
The only way to do it is something like mastodon where actual people run it and thus can deal with people who are being toxic either by blocking etc because the fear of losing money, or the likelihood of the entire site/platform disappearing etc just isn’t there (obvioiusly individuals sites go down sometimes but the entire network is unlikely to disappear), or by the use of people explaining why what they did was wrong and the toxic people listen.
Edit: If Bluesky actually ever becomes decentralised as in users can run their own servers and federate or block other servers then perhaps it might become good, but until such a time then I do not trust them.
They should also make a non-profit foundation if they want to be seen as trustworthy, so that they can’t ever be sold off.
Those are the only way we and many others will ever trust them.
I don’t know that’s true. The incentives to make it toxic come from engagement being the goal, which is a function of advertising being the income. I’m not advocating for it, but if there were a flat subscription and no ads, I don’t think they’d have any economic pressures for toxicity.
Social media requires free users to function on to fundamental of a level for that to really work tbh
We think Minds tried something like this (though it might be different tiers) and it didn’t exactly go well, forcing users to pay one way or the other always leads to economic pressures to keep users around, even if they are being toxic at least from what we have observed.
Oh I think they can do it for a while… But then they need to start bumping up the profits.
Yes, I meant more long term but didn’t express that fully. So you are correct, corporate social media will go that way eventually unless they do the things we recommended.
If they never go IPO… I think they can do it. I think people can make money and not be cunts at the same time.
Even if they go IPO… they have the choice.