@onymous I think what you're noticing is the difference between a "social network" and "social media". One connects you to private communication from specific people you know, or people they know (#FOAF). The other one hooks you up to a firehose of public posts from all sorts of people.
"Most #blockchains behave like expensive, slow databases that sacrifice efficiency for immutability and global consensus. Blockchains are logically centralized, exerting great effort to make many untrustworthy computers behave like one computer. Even if next generation blockchains become much more scalable, they still seem ill-suited to store social media content which is mutable, ephemeral, and does not require global agreement on its state." - #JayGraber
"... a downside I’ve observed in social networks where content is monetized is that user behavior becomes transparently driven by monetary incentives in ways that feel less genuine. This applies to influencer culture on Instagram as well, but cryptocurrency social networks bake it in from the start. This may be the inevitable result of replacing intrinsic with extrinsic motivations, or there may be an incentive structure that strikes the right balance that has not been achieved yet" - #JayGraber
It seems to me that trying to monetize #SocialNetwork posts is solving the wrong problem. The only reason money needs to be involved in social network platforms is that servers have to be paid for. Get rid of servers with a pure #P2P network (even one with #supernodes) and money doesn't need to be involved at all. This seems to be working pretty well for #Scuttlebutt and #Aether.
#SocialMedia is a different story, at least when it comes to works like long form articles, music, or films, which take some work to produce and often require the creators to spend money to produce them. As Jay Graber says in her article, #blockchains don't seem like the best solution for storing this sort of media, something like #IPFS (or #SAFE, or #Holochain), is probably a better way of distributing these. But using blockchains as a distributed monetization layer for them could work.
"Accounts cannot be deactivated or deleted, since they are permanently stored on the Steem blockchain. In order to reduce spam, new account creation requires an email and phone number, and must go through a review process." - #jaygraber
Funny, that's what people used to say about Titter, and before that IRC, and before that, old school BBS networks like #FidoNet. The common denominator is early adopters, it was said about each when they were small populations using relatively unknown platforms.
@onymous it's a fantastic podcast, I highly recommend working your way through the back episodes. There is one that focuses on Scuttlebutt and interviews a developer working on it. @icedquinn
@onymous fair enough ;) I'll be more impressed if the community is still amazing if it manages to scale up to 100 or 1000 times its current user base. But you have raised an issue I've considered but never really discussed, that sometimes the choice of network software is more about the cross-section of people currently using it, than the particular features it has. It might be worth putting up with an inferior UI to connect with an amazing community ;) @icedquinn
@onymous having said that, for me, #Pinafore is a much better UI than the vanilla web client Titter offers, so I'm here for that as well as the community ;) @icedquinn
@icedquinn > In this case the problem is they did not understand the need for enveloping
Have you raised these issues on their repo? I've heard there are reimplementations underway in a range of languages, and I figure being made aware of ways the current protocol workings are stuck in JS-land would really help those efforts. @onymous
Even if they were to completely abandon SSB and re-engineer Scuttlebutt apps on a different protocol, the work done on the UI and moderation would not be wasted.