I think this is true: social media has a hard problem to solve because users want to see good and interesting things but users also want to have their stuff get seen.
To date, social media platforms try to solve this with moderators and algorithms. Both of these are akin to command economies. It's like asking a politboro to predict how many loaves of bread to bake or how many nails to manufacture. It's very hard to get right.
I think it is clear that unless social media platforms kyc (which is an even worse evil than moderation in my book), voting or relying on any signal that isn't costly is going to result in a distorted platform -- creating sock puppets is too easy.
So: money is the moderator.
But there's a problem, which you point out further down the thread: it kind of looks like rich rank. Highly motivated people who want to boost their own content can out spend the community who mostly just want to be a casual user of the platform.
I really want to figure out what the root problem is here. Is is that signals on the internet are not costly? or is it that the internet makes the commons too big? (people don't want to be at a party with all 7 or 8 billion other people on the world).
Social media isn't just a bunch of invite-only chat rooms. People seem to want some amount of open public square-ness. But an open public square to which anyone in the world can come is kind of an insane thing to keep pleasant and tidy.
A market solution is interesting because maybe it will allow a better experience to emerge.
Isn't it the case that what a stacker doesn't want to see and how badly they don't want to see it are very valuable signals for the community? possibly as valuable as what a stacker is willing to zap?
I'm probably taking the marketization of social media much farther than it is useful to take it, but I think it's a useful thought experiment, at least.
I think this is true: social media has a hard problem to solve because users want to see good and interesting things but users also want to have their stuff get seen.
To date, social media platforms try to solve this with moderators and algorithms. Both of these are akin to command economies. It's like asking a politboro to predict how many loaves of bread to bake or how many nails to manufacture. It's very hard to get right.
I think it is clear that unless social media platforms kyc (which is an even worse evil than moderation in my book), voting or relying on any signal that isn't costly is going to result in a distorted platform -- creating sock puppets is too easy.
So: money is the moderator.
But there's a problem, which you point out further down the thread: it kind of looks like rich rank. Highly motivated people who want to boost their own content can out spend the community who mostly just want to be a casual user of the platform.
I really want to figure out what the root problem is here. Is is that signals on the internet are not costly? or is it that the internet makes the commons too big? (people don't want to be at a party with all 7 or 8 billion other people on the world).
Social media isn't just a bunch of invite-only chat rooms. People seem to want some amount of open public square-ness. But an open public square to which anyone in the world can come is kind of an insane thing to keep pleasant and tidy.
A market solution is interesting because maybe it will allow a better experience to emerge.
Isn't it the case that what a stacker doesn't want to see and how badly they don't want to see it are very valuable signals for the community? possibly as valuable as what a stacker is willing to zap?
I'm probably taking the marketization of social media much farther than it is useful to take it, but I think it's a useful thought experiment, at least.