I don't really see the fediverse taking off because it's only really pushed by a specific set of people. Normal everyday people don't care about how a social media website is hosted they just care that the website works.

I know that open-source communities rely on a crowd-funded model to run large organizations. It's interesting how in a new environment there was a strong push for a more open/democratic governance model.

What's interesting about the Friedman doctrine is that while it's commonly said that the CEO of a company must maximize shareholder value, there's nothing that legally compels a CEO to maximize short term profit. As long as the majority of shareholders believe that a CEO is doing a good job at running the company, the CEO can lead the company in whatever direction they like.

What's interesting is that Jermery Schneider's original tweet garnered significantly more quote tweets compare to his subsequent apology. Fundamentally people seem to like outrage and are more willing to engage with something that they deem morally incorrect. However because of how small scale most moral outrage is, it can quickly leave their conscience.

It's interesting how the mechanisms social media use to increase user engagement means that now small things are being blown out of proportion. This connects back to the idea that user engagement is not really a metric social media sites should be using as a measure of quality.

Harassment only really seems justified when you're punching up. And that's only if the reason for doing harassment is based on facts.

At bare minimum they should get medical benefits to cover needing therapy.

Probably one of the best ways for social media companies to be better for their user's mental health is to stop pressuring them into interacting with their platform. Which is antithetical to how social media companies make money so it's never going to happen.

I understand why social media focuses on driving engagement because it's how the platform makes money. However, I feel like the pursuit of only driving engagement doesn't always result in a better experience for users which should be what social media platforms should be striving for.

It would be interesting to see what other countries/areas did for social media. It seems that other social media platforms for example are based on US social media platforms probably because the US made the internet.

I feel like one of the reasons why this is so prevalent is because there are so many injustices and issues in the world that it's easier for people to ignore inconvenient truths as long as they are a couple of degrees removed from the truth. It's significantly easier for people to choose a small subset of issues and go with that.

What's interesting is that the internet is very US centric probably because the biggest internet companies were founded in the US. But online forms pigeonhole the rest of the world into a US centric limitation like for example addresses assuming City, State, Zip Code even if the user is from a country where States aren't a thing.

I'm curious as to whether or not this would happen again with new machine learning models from OpenAI. I know that ChatGPT for example tries it's best to not be "bad".

What's interesting here is if you take INFO 350, this point is viewed as incorrect. Ethical relativism is argued to be an untenable position because it allows a person to justify anything they do. Nazi's during the Nuremberg account tried to justify the atrocities they committed because they're values said that they were in the right to do what they did.