Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Today it feels like we’re living through another important cultural shift—the decline of Twitter—and a new generation of networks is experimenting with new structures to try and capitalize on it. If we want to understand what’s next, it helps to ask: what caused the culture shift? What new structures would be better? And what will it feel like to... See more
Nathan Baschez • Twitter Is Fragmenting
Early internet activity was characterized by large-scale, distributed online communities: mailing lists, online forums, membership groups. These communities operated as a cluster of villages, each with its own culture, history, and norms. Social platforms brought all these communities to one place and smashed them together like Play-Doh. In doing
... See moreNadia Eghbal • Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
Because the mainstream social networks have been designed by a tiny number of people, we have been prevented from experimenting and creating new knowledge about what sustainable community management online looks like. Start erasing the line between operators, customers, and community members disappears, and squint; you begin make out the shape of a... See more
Toby Shorin • Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool
... See moreThe problem with non-hierarchical models is human beings are not non-hierarchical creatures. Like all anarchist ideals, the dream of infinite digital liberty turned out to be more corporate talking point than reality. We took the agenda-setting function away from individual power brokers and gave it to trillion dollar tech companies, whose faceless
The web hasn’t had its artisanal moment. Right now, giant, ad-based networks created by six men that everyone begrudgingly uses with diminishing emotional returns, control the vast majority of the web.
Sari Azout • Notes on Scale + Quality
Or consider Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s plan, announced in late 2019, “to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media” — one in which Twitter as we know it would be a mere client. Dorsey said that he saw potential in spreading out responsibility for moderation, recommendation and other processes that were becoming unwieldy under the... See more
Nathan Schneider • Exit To Community | NOEMA
It recently occurred to me that the really obvious comparison for what’s going on here is the open source software community back in the 90s. Eric S Raymond’s essay Homesteading the Noosphere, a reference text on the social norms and incentive structure of the free software movement, explains exactly what’s going on. We’re no longer dealing with a... See more
Alex Danco • Homesteading the Twittersphere
all the signal loss is in the collapse, not in the expansion
Clay Shirky • Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
