Humans are emotional beings and often make decisions based on emotions rather than logic. Expecting users to migrate to a platform that doesn’t manipulate their emotions just because it’s open source is delusional. Therefore, I believe we should prioritize adding better features that have proven to be effective on other platforms rather than trying to emulate Reddit, Twitter, etc., to make the platforms as pleasant to use as we can, even if it’s only for a fraction of the users.
Here is a video that I like on this topic.
Context of what gave me the idea for this post.
My question:
Do people here want the fediverse to become as successful as mainstream social media?
Personally I don’t. If I wanted to be on Twitter/reddit/insta/fb/etc/etc/etc/ad nauseam, I would be.
Success for me is for the people who are here, want to be here and engage with the community.
The last thing I want this site to become is a karma farming wasteland of repost bots and low effort trolling. I could get plenty of that on Reddit.
I have already seen a few examples:
There was someone using multiple accounts a few weeks ago and mass up voting everything on their main account.
People upvoting and boosting every post or comment they make.
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I definitely do not wish to see a push towards content that is created for the purposes of trying to monetize or self promote for the purposes of making money. The shilling is the worst part of lot of plarforms because of corporate interests that need to recoup costs or want to have a successful IPO so leads to inevitable ways to monetize users and monetizing users.
Leave the popular crowd drawing shills on the corporate platforms. While it would be nice for the fediverse to have more niche thriving communities if it means becoming filled with shills then at that point why even bother with the fediverse.
I mean, I’d like this to become as successful, but not at the price of manipulating users.