Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Recommendations for video chat on mobile phone

[Aaron Wolf]

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.