Blurts

The secret of success and longevity among social media wannabees is to find a niche and get big. This approach has proven so successful because of the network effect which explains that the value of a social service increases as a function of the number of others in the network. This is often explained using telephones. As more and more individuals own a phone, the opportunities to use your phone grows and this is true for anyone else in your phone network. Your phone network becomes more valuable as others join. The dark side of the network effect when it comes to technology is that even when superior technologies may become available, it is difficult to attract individuals using a competing network because you cannot take the network of individuals you have joined with you. If you are interested in innovation in social media, the network effect can retard progress.

The proposed ACCESS act (EFF description) is intended to increase the likelihood of innovation and to deal with other negative consequences of massive social media companies that have trapped so many in their networks. The act’s solution is to require some level of interoperability among competing networks. Often this is explained again using the requirements of phone companies. If you decide that AT&T better suits your needs than Verizon, you can change companies and continue to use your same phone number to call the same individuals you called when using your original carrier. What if something similar would work with WT:Social and Facebook? What if your data and connections to your friends continued if you left Facebook and moved your hosting service to WT.Social? What if it were possible to maintain an independent list of friends and their social media platform of choice and posts you generated were sent to these platforms pretty much as email “posts” can be sent to different email platforms? Companies would then have to compete based on the qualities of their service rather than how many members they had collected.

Thel pandemic and recent election processes have been very puzzling for me to process. I struggle to understand how people some of whom I know can possible take the positions that they do. I don’t remember having this frustration in years past. Perfectly cognitively capable and logical people willing to believe really ignorant things. The psychologist in me offers some suggestions regarding how this might happen, but persistence of ignorance over time seemed to make no sense from perspectives on personal bias and resistance to abandon flawed beliefs despite solid evidence top the contrary.

Psychology Today has an abbreviated analysis by two scientists (one I have known for years) who have taken a crack at offering ways to understand and possibly change. The Psych Today article is an abbreviated version of their new book which I own, but admit I have yet to read. I didn’t really find much new in the explanation of causes although the organization would be useful for those who have not been focused on what might explain the unexplainable. The suggestions for how to respond to each issue offer some useful things to try.

I write about the Brave browser and ecosystem repeatedly because I support the goals of the company – protecting individual privacy AND compensating online content creators. The success of this company depends on public adoption of the chromium browser, content providers signing up with Brave to receive compensation for viewer visits, and the support of the system by advertisers. I suppose contributions of participants to purchase BAT (the crypto used to compensate viewers and content creators) could be added, but this contribution seems less important that the other variables as the process could work without this component if enough people used the system, accepted the Brave collection of ads, and then used the BAT accumulated from ad exposure to compensate creators.

This recent article from Seeking Alpha summarizes data on these issues.

Take a look at Brave.