[Discuss] Mastodon?

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

Mike Small wrote: 
> pulled in some serious undesirability by aping twitter. People who hate
> tinfoil hat stuff should stop reading at the next punctuation mark, but
> I was imagining a team of unscrupulous behavioural psychologists working
> at Twitter Inc. to make their site maximally addicative, by having it
> tweak but never fulfill whatever lack sends people like me to the
> computer in search of connection or whatever else. That's what I thought
> mastadon inherited and why it's something to avoid.

You don't need to invoke a big conspiracy when the ordinary kind
of profit motive will do: I'm sure that every feature manager at
Twitter is being incentivized to increase market share and
eyeball time, so even if they aren't particularly knowledgeable
about doing that, eventually they will evolve techniques.

People who think they are basically doing good-to-neutral work
are quite responsive to relatively small payments; people who
have compartmentalized evil are capable of consciously working
more evil in exchange for larger payments.

-dsr-