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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • To risk being serious here for a second- when Google+ launched, I remember being super bumbed out about how empty it felt and the fact that my friends couldn’t be on it yet because it was invite only. All the way back then, I had the idea that it would be really cool if there was a way for different social media websites to talk to each other directly instead of just users sharing links, so I could kind of take my friend group with me to Google+ even though they were still on Facebook. At the time I didn’t recognize either of them as really evil, I just though Google+ had a better interface. So all the way back then, 10+ years ago, I personally felt the lock in that established social networks had was way too strong for even well funded newcomers to overcome, and if there was some kind of standard for them to communicate with eachother, it would allow for a lot more innovation.

    Today, not only is my vague idea a reality in the form of ActivityPub, the largest social media company in the world is actually embracing that open standard and funneling it’s users towards it. In the future, other huge corporate backed social media companies might feel pressured to build around it as well. We might be heading towards the commodification of social media, where you give put your social handle like an email address, and anyone who wants to follow you can do so from Kbin, Mastodon, Peertube, Threads, Tumblr, etc…

    Today, I really do think of Meta and Mark Zuckerberg as genuinely evil. But I don’t look with suspicion on everything they do just because of that. For example, they typically do pay some amount of taxes. While I am suspicious that they aren’t paying enough, I don’t think theirs something inherently tainted about the money they pay with. That’s how I think about threads. It’s not currently federated. If I was suspicious of anything, it would be that being federated was a bold claim that brought a lot of attention to them, and that they might stall and even back out of ever doing it. That’s the play if you’re evil. If they actually federate, I view it as the fediverse has created such a great value proposition that supporting it enhances the value of Threads. Just because they are evil, it doesn’t mean everything they do is wrong and the opposite is right. Them being evil means they don’t do right reliably.

    I think we need to accept the fact that we live in a world with Big Companies and think about how they can be better than they were before. Right now, I think Meta is actually making a socially good decision to support ActivityPub. And it might also be good for them. But just because it’s good for them, it doesn’t mean it’s bad for us. If we can find a way to structure incentives so big company’s interests end up aligning with ours, we’ll be in a much better place. Better than just saying anything Meta does is automatically wrong and nothing will be good until they are totally gone.






  • Yeah, this really doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. The way a commercial lease is written, you owe all rent for the agreed upon term, to be paid monthly. If you want to break the lease, early termination may have some slight benefit or a way to mitigate having to pay out the entire term- for example you may be able to find a new tenenat and negotiate a smaller fee for breaking the lease since the landlord will have no loss in income. If you just stiff them on the payments, they will obviously just sue you for the full amount with no way to mitigate that. Who would write a lease that let one party unilaterally out of their obligation when they break the terms of the contract?



  • I think the thing that blows my mind about the pricing model is- AI using reddit for training data doesn’t need to up vote, downvote, subscribe, comment, or constantly ingest new data. They could ingest everything on Reddit once and be done, or come back every 6 to 12 months for an update. 3rd Party App developers need to download the same posts from the front page for every user, multiple times a day, constantly. They actually interact with a website. A $1 billion LLM ai might pay $1 million to download all the reddit data they need. Meanwhile Apollo might be worth less than $1 million as a business and is being hit with $20 million per year as operating expenses. The pricing model is set up in such a way that LLM’s are in a much better position to either pay a pretty insignificant fee to get all the data, or just build a scraper since they don’t need to support multiple users or website interaction. Meanwhile the price to app developers is impossibly high.