People saying things like 'this large account is our Algorithm' or 'this big account is our Starter Pack' does not exactly bode confidence in the whole decentralisation thing tbh
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People saying things like 'this large account is our Algorithm' or 'this big account is our Starter Pack' does not exactly bode confidence in the whole decentralisation thing tbh
No shade to these accounts, they do impressive and hard work and have massively contributed to the community.
Its just that promoting single accounts for a specific purpose of either content or account discovery is hugely centralising around them?
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@laurenshof that's interesting. I see your point, but that doesn't feel the same as a truly centralized system - alternative "big accounts" can arise & be used/recommended *without* users needing to migrate to a new system and lose/recreate social links, & no middleman is able to control association.
It's a different kind of centralization where (it seems to me) the vast majority of harm is mitigated.
But you clearly know and think about this much more than I do - maybe I'm missing something?
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Jared White ✊ RESIST 🙅🏻♂️replied to Laurens Hof last edited by
@laurenshof @reiver I tend to trust human-powered curation over algorithms, and it’s much more transparent. You can ask people about the things they promote. You can't ask a black-box algorithm why it's promoting or downranking something.
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Laurens Hofreplied to Jared White ✊ RESIST 🙅🏻♂️ last edited by
Sure, human curation is awesome and should be promoted. Its the current tendency to use extremely few curators here on fedi that I'm concerned about.
I care about decentralisation as a way to combat the aggregation of power, and that can happen with both technology (algos) as well as with human systems
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Its the difference between 'we have the technical systems in place for it to happen' and 'its actually happening'.
Like, theoretically it should be quite easy to have multiple groups of people regularly recommending accounts to follow, but in practice we have only one.
Its that discrepancy that fedi often struggles with. Sure the protocol is decentralised and all that, but in the end a number of important decisions that affect everyone are made by a self-styled dictator-for-life
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Jared White ✊ RESIST 🙅🏻♂️replied to Laurens Hof last edited by
@laurenshof @reiver I know what you mean. There are a few writers which get widely shared all the time. I like some of them. But that may just be due to celebrity culture which is hard to shake, even in fedi.
