Post AhpDBaeYyyITT227Pc by poiseunderchaos@sonomu.club
(DIR) More posts by poiseunderchaos@sonomu.club
(DIR) Post #AhpBiGOV7tBgHayLIG by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-05-12T19:24:34Z
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The problem with federated alternatives to centralized services (and also one of the main problems *with* centralized services which lead people to look for an alternative) is Discovery. Etsy and Twitch and YouTube provide an audience, supposedly. With the right pitch (and the right advertising dollars) you can get your own slice of that audience. (For as long as the algorithm graces you, and as long as you're willing to stomach the other things your viewers will be algorithmically suggested.)
(DIR) Post #AhpBxPahDPsb9KtqAS by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-05-12T19:27:18Z
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I'm reminded of this story about digg. https://mastodon.social/@danluu/110499275521277590And a similar story which I can't currently find about etsy.
(DIR) Post #AhpCJniqAz7UMXNwZ6 by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-05-12T19:31:21Z
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The reason people flock to centralized services is to have an easier time finding the the thing that they want. They often don't even have the chance to bounce off of indie services, but rather never find them to begin with. When they do find them, the discovery problem creates a high bounce rate. This is why things like peertube struggle. Creators think their audience isn't there. Audiences can't find creators. No one makes any money. On the flip side, youtube and facebook are built to maximize engagement, which means maximizing outrage in most cases, which turns them in to machines for turning people in to reactionaries.
(DIR) Post #AhpCVLuzNQGvbYZkuG by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-05-12T19:33:26Z
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Independent creators on YouTube or Etsy live or die on the whims of a faceless and unaccountable algorithm. Independent creators on Independent platforms live or die on their ability to carve off an audience from centralized platforms. In the meantime, bigots and sweatshop dropshippers rise to the top.
(DIR) Post #AhpCZd1Bk1gnnWVwrQ by ieure@retro.social
2024-05-12T19:34:13Z
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@ajroach42 I worked at Digg, can confirm most of this. The Google offer was most like $120-$150m, though, not $200m. I didn't have much inside info there -- they did walk, but they also made everyone in eng go through a Google Interview. I sort of suspect that the offer was never genuine, and they just wanted to see what made Digg tick so they could replicate it.I worked with philovivero, but Owen was long gone by the time I started. One database situation I discovered and raised with him ended up in my stock interview question repertoire for years.I have the extremely dubious honor of having made the very first commit to what became Digg v4.
(DIR) Post #AhpCk9SLzYpHIaEqiu by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-05-12T19:36:05Z
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I've been working on an article about this for #ImpracticalComputing ( https://impractical.computer ) and ... I can't figure out how to end it.I don't have a suggestion. I don't have a solution. Connecting people with the things they want to find is not a problem that scales. The solution is human curation. Word of mouth. But then how do the people doing the curation find the things? (At digg, it meant working 18 hour days.)
(DIR) Post #AhpClh8UG1ya2lgL5M by poiseunderchaos@sonomu.club
2024-05-12T19:36:04Z
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@ajroach42 There's also something that looks like "Independent creators who try to co-exist on both are...even more stressed, as it turns out."
(DIR) Post #AhpCuCgOqnEmCYbMbw by mariyadelano@hachyderm.io
2024-05-12T19:37:47Z
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@ajroach42 I can help actually. This is something I think about constantly and have been working on content exactly to answer that final part of how to scale curation and word of mouth.I’d be happy to get on a call or set up an email thread to help you workshop this. Feel free to email me - Mariya(at)kalynamarketing.com
(DIR) Post #AhpD8M7gY7A3X972Om by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-05-12T19:40:27Z
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I don't think there is an answer to this question. I think scale is a trap. I think that the fediverse, a bunch of small neighborhoods through which things bubble around and eventually reach escape velocity, is the closest to a real solution we're likely to find in the real world. (Hell, I wrote about hyperlocal BBS systems as a potential solution for content discovery 8ish years ago, and then ended up on the fediverse and updated the article to indicate that it was working.)
(DIR) Post #AhpDAEO0Hl8i7LdhwG by alcinnz@floss.social
2024-05-12T19:40:32Z
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@ajroach42 As best as I can tell from existing examples: Community groups! Letting their best work spread beyond their community.Still there's the problem of finding these communities, & today that tends to happen on these centralized services...
(DIR) Post #AhpDBaeYyyITT227Pc by poiseunderchaos@sonomu.club
2024-05-12T19:40:37Z
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@ajroach42 Present tally from what I'm finding = 14 hour days, but it's finally starting to level a bit, fwiw. If I was creating a new platform on top of that, yikes, who even knows. Can you futures leverage hours? /s
(DIR) Post #AhpDMZuO5kaqLJfs7k by djsundog@toot-lab.reclaim.technology
2024-05-12T19:43:01Z
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@ajroach42 so, hot take, but I think the answer is "other human curators" and I think it can work even though it sounds like an ouroboros type impossible system.the trick is that the curation focus of one curator needs to source from curators with slightly different yet often (for various definitions of often) overlapping foci, and at least some curators need to be sourcing from direct sources - the people making the thing that needs discovering.
(DIR) Post #AhpDY4w94MeRlEyqLw by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-05-12T19:45:03Z
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@djsundog This piece from 2016 agrees with you, I think. https://ajroach42.com/how-to-fix-new-content-discovery/
(DIR) Post #AhpDfyGFm0I7ND9J5M by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-05-12T19:46:32Z
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Here is the piece I wrote in 2016 about this problem https://ajroach42.com/how-to-fix-new-content-discovery/I don't agree with everything I said there, but human scale networks have certainly helped the problem! The issue at hand today is how to facilitate those connections, strengthen them, and make sure that everyone in the chain is being treated fairly.
(DIR) Post #AhpDhNhYfipIZ5aqDw by poiseunderchaos@sonomu.club
2024-05-12T19:46:32Z
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@ajroach42 @djsundog curator A trusts curator's B-n's taste, with varying levels of direct access, distributed over curators(n);
(DIR) Post #AhpENJ7e5UySWcmsDY by travisfw@fosstodon.org
2024-05-12T19:54:19Z
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@ajroach42 search, crawling, curation, and rendering of interfaces to those systems needs to be disintermediated. Individuals need to each have powerful tools for navigating the world they are connected to.
(DIR) Post #AhpEWoAA35xZOzUhPc by whitneymcn@mastodon.xyz
2024-05-12T19:44:57Z
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@djsundog @ajroach42 Webrings? 😉
(DIR) Post #AhpEWohU3CcB4L5JLs by whitneymcn@mastodon.xyz
2024-05-12T19:49:44Z
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@djsundog @ajroach42 And I'm only partially joking.
(DIR) Post #AhpEWpAuHo9OXaqoDI by djsundog@toot-lab.reclaim.technology
2024-05-12T19:51:07Z
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@whitneymcn @ajroach42 webrings are absolutely a reasonable model for human-scale discovery and definitely a form of curation-based discovery - someone somewhere is deciding which sites get added to any given ring, based on whatever basis they choose.
(DIR) Post #AhpEWpZ0qBQtkM83mq by djsundog@toot-lab.reclaim.technology
2024-05-12T19:52:32Z
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@whitneymcn @ajroach42 add a "directory of webrings" layer (of which there should be multiple directories obviously) and promote strong local per-site search capabilities and you're well on your way to a decentralized yet discoverable web imho.
(DIR) Post #AhpEWq86jhVPVCY5UO by djsundog@toot-lab.reclaim.technology
2024-05-12T19:54:21Z
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@whitneymcn @ajroach42 directories are just curation too! but I feel like directories should probably have a lighter touch than a webring? like, opt to add more pertinent listings rather than find more ways to limit the scope. but maybe that way lies madness and web crawling again, and I'm not convinced we really need much of that.
(DIR) Post #AhpEWqeMnlJH7Fdqls by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-05-12T19:56:00Z
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@djsundog @whitneymcn dmoz was nice when it existed.
(DIR) Post #AhpElmT2dQSoUHSsgC by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-05-12T19:58:42Z
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Human curration is what makes bookstores and record stores work. Staff picks move books, even at a big chain. Reviews move books on Amazon, and get people to theaters.But what incentive is there for people to undertake the act of intentional curration? Film reviewers get paid to publish in magazines, but most magazines aren't turning a profit anymore. No one gets paid for Amazon reviews. Rarely does anyone make money on their zine or their blog. How can we support the people who help us find things?
(DIR) Post #AhpF7zqjYqbYMW8kHg by GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai
2024-05-12T20:02:48Z
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@ajroach42 Good question. I think a means to tip and transact fluidly, especially in the fediverse is a missing element. Tricky when payment comes into play, but it’s as essential to a digital world as commerce and press freedom is in its physical equivalents.
(DIR) Post #AhpFYJTRDlfykrnBYG by knowprose@mastodon.social
2024-05-12T20:07:34Z
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@ajroach42 Remember browsing? You could walk into a bookstore and just browse? People don't do that enough. Algorithms feed them based on what they liked in the past, not what they like in the future. That's the key issue with algorithms. Ever get weird recommendations on Amazon? There ya go. But walk into a bookstore, or a hardware (for me), and... there it is. We look for answers all the time, and miss all sorts of fun questions we should answer when we don't browse.
(DIR) Post #AhpFxvBGAIhGwLV5ge by iacore@mastodon.de
2024-05-12T20:12:11Z
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@ajroach42 we tried microtransaction. it didn't catch on. this one observes an innate need for people to share what they find interesting, and they post it on fediverse.i thought of (building) a search engine that archives friends' posts and index through them.i thought of a search engine that relies on friends sharing what they find with machine-readable data. this might me a new activitypub implementation, and a new UI to share stories and feelings.i thought of making a software that helps people record what they like and publish their experiences as static website. then, add federated search (must be local with friends) and activitypub support.
(DIR) Post #AhpGRBUoaGBbwIbK0u by clayote@peoplemaking.games
2024-05-12T20:17:26Z
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@ajroach42 @djsundog @whitneymcn once @Curlie get their site back up, dmoz will rise again!
(DIR) Post #AhpKJjD5kdeC0B0kyG by bamfic@autonomous.zone
2024-05-12T21:00:58Z
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@ajroach42 Well a lot of people are naturally opinionated loudmouths, and will review with no compensation whatsoever. And a lot of p
(DIR) Post #AhpOYaUGrfmV6nO5q4 by lampsofgold@veoh.social
2024-05-12T21:48:28Z
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@ajroach42 tbh human curation is most of the product I’m buying when I hit my local record store, I want to hear what other people like or are listening to, of course I’m also getting my records/cds/tapes/whatever, but I’m not spending so much time listening to everything new, and it’s nice to have a direction
(DIR) Post #Ahpb0esTKlT4HcrKIy by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-05-13T00:08:01Z
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@bamfic and these people deserve to live.
(DIR) Post #Ahpb2XNKCN4XauBbV2 by whitneymcn@mastodon.xyz
2024-05-12T20:21:45Z
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@djsundog @ajroach42 Yeah, I see webrings as social/topical groups that might require approval of members, where a directory aims broader (though moderation, at least, would be necessary).
(DIR) Post #Ahpb2YJ6jXIEU7DkZ6 by whitneymcn@mastodon.xyz
2024-05-12T20:24:42Z
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@djsundog @ajroach42 We're at a point where these things can [still, maybe for the moment] be operated at human-manageable costs, which wasn't really the case before.I only had websites in the 90s because a friend had a server colocated in his company's data center, and his company didn't ask a lot of questions.
(DIR) Post #Ahpb2ZHj69mZW7aA3E by whitneymcn@mastodon.xyz
2024-05-12T20:27:42Z
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@djsundog @ajroach42 The human time/effort is still the big issue, but maybe that's okay.I tend to think of this area as the "human-scale" web, but maybe it's equally accurate to think about it as a return to the "hobbyist" web.
(DIR) Post #Ahpb2aCnfxR6N8Hk0m by whitneymcn@mastodon.xyz
2024-05-12T20:32:15Z
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@djsundog @ajroach42 Pete Seeger once said "normally I’m against big things. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things."I think about that a lot these days.
(DIR) Post #AhpdG2TS5KNZibcN7I by bamfic@autonomous.zone
2024-05-13T00:33:12Z
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@ajroach42 I hope so; I've been either or both most of my life.
(DIR) Post #AhrcuyfbQCka9hB7B2 by dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org
2024-05-13T23:38:11Z
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@ajroach42Knowledge is a public good. It should be provisioned by cooperative grant-making. A combination of UBI and people writing grants and convincing the granting agencies to fund their continued publication of knowledge.
(DIR) Post #AhrdOBVGmpY8M5Gw08 by ajroach42@retro.social
2024-05-13T23:44:06Z
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@dlakelan and what's the path towards that? And what do we do until then?