We have a lot of options for all social media and other apps, but it is hard to catch people’s attention. How can we make more people use these platforms rather than a platform that p.dophiles run
We have a lot of options for all social media and other apps, but it is hard to catch people’s attention. How can we make more people use these platforms rather than a platform that p.dophiles run
(1) Network effects. People want to use social media that everyone else is using. Once a site achieves a critical mass of users it becomes the obvious choice to join. It also becomes difficult to leave because if you have built up a personal network on most sites, you can’t take it with you.
(2) Convenience. Most sites don’t require a lot of effort to use. In the past few years this one has surprised me a bit. The level of effort most people are willing to put in to trying a new site is basically 0. Using something like lemmy requires you to read a few paragraphs and make a decision about a home instance. That is too much effort for a lot of people.
For convenience, it also doesn’t help that OSS is extremely hit and miss and inconsistent between developers.
This includes:
At the end of the day, regular people want something that just works™. They don’t want to have to dig through
ancient tomesold form posts to figure out that a depreciated version of an app has been supersceeded by a slightly differently named version by a completely different dev that requires some weird dependencies that conflict with another app’s dependencies and everything just breaks at some point… It’s a pain in the ass.Lemmy is a good example of non-obvious usage, even for seasoned redditors, let alone the general public. At first it presents familiar, but the nuances aren’t intuitive.
Social media networks without attention based algorithms also aren’t quite as addictive.
Our own minds really do screw us over sometimes, eh?
(Just kidding, the people exploiting our mind’s vulnerabilities screw us over. But still…)
Both. Obviously platforms with attention based algorithms are worse.
But platforms like Lemmy, Ao3 and xkcd are plenty addictive. Oh and Wikipedia. Wikipedia is one of the worst offenders! I don’t think the people that developed any of those want to exploit us.
Hell, it isn’t even a major decision since moving instances is so easy now. Yes, it impacts the initial experience, but every social media app starts with a default experience and usage refines it from there.