On 08/18/2018 02:41 PM, J.B. Nicholson wrote: > Aaron Wolf wrote: >> The argument by individuals that they will benefit by following the >> crowd is not circular. > > They're not following crowds, they're joining a service to distribute > their work.
Unless the service is completely irrelevant and neutral (like a hosting service that hosts your website and is irrelevant for the visitors), then it is indeed about a crowd. There's a network effect. In cases where you and your audience meet on a *platform* run by a third-party that brings together many people, then there's a network effect and a larger audience to reach wherever larger crowds happen to go. > They're no more likely to be found than if they used a > service that respects their users wishes for increased privacy and > control over their own computers. The likelihood to reach an audience is more about all the details, the network effects, how people discover things, etc. In practice, there's a correlation *today* between increased success in finding audiences and going to where they are and those being not-so-respectful services. The same video posted on YouTube already gets much more chance of audience on that platform than one posted just to Archive.org or self-hosted somewhere. > People don't pay attention to them > because they're on a service, people pay attention because they have > something others want to read, hear, or see; something they could offer > on any or multiple services. People today largely notice things because some awful dark-pattern, unethical, intelligent, well-funded people have created addictive silo'ed platforms where people pay attention to a mix of things they are shown without otherwise knowing what they are looking for. It changes from case to case. > They argue in terms of losing a popularity > they don't have but simultaneously seek to gain by joining a service > which doesn't actually give them the popularity they desire (which most > of the time doesn't happen). The loop continues for as long as they > remain on the service despite clear evidence of their continued > unpopularity. > Well, if you're talking about people who are failing to get any attention, then arguing about their unrealized potential attention is obviously nonsense. If you're talking about people who *are* getting successful attention, you're just wrong here. People get more attention by going to where the crowds are and going to the unethical platforms. This is a fact of our reality and we'll do better fighting it by acknowledging the facts than by just being in denial about it. _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss