Social media do not quite give us the freedom of impression. They force us into their often obscure engagement-driven "algorithmic feeds".
Me exercising my freedom of impression would be me writing and controlling my own recommender system, drawing from the 'feeds'.
The idea of freedom of impression seems unfamiliar only because it has been taken for granted. Philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas delineated the emergence around the eighteenth century of the “public sphere” of citizen discourse, in the form of news media, salons, and citizen assemblies – even the grassroots informality of coffee houses – as central to the shift from the subjugation of feudalism to the freedom of democracy. With that, one became free to choose from a diversity of communities. If a citizen did not want to hear what was being said they could leave, to return another time – or find other communities. We had freedom of impression – a corollary of both freedom of expression and of assembly, and an essential component of freedom of thought.
In what way do we lack this freedom today? You have a strictly greater number of options today to choose what to consume and methods to curate your own information consumption than ever before in history. Social media may show you information based on an algorithmic feed but you have the ability to simply bookmark the individuals that you care to hear from and visit their page directly on virtually every platform.
The strongest counter example may be in the fact that defaults are powerful so they determine which works get the most attention, and therefore who may profit the most from an audience. I would argue that any person actively looking for a greater audience will obviously take on multiple personas and styles, one for the masses and one that is more closely aligned with what they care to consume.
>>2575 Just because you theoretically can, it doesn't mean it's practically easy to exercise the freedom of impression.
We've gone from being able to manage your own RSS feed reader to seeing the posts by your friends - to having an algorithmically curated list of content random sources intended to maximize engagement with a lot of targeted advertising mixed in.
Just because you theoretically can, it doesn't mean that an increasing proportion of our society is impressionally enslaved by the attention masters -- and that's a tax on society as a whole.
I want to say more later, but my short comment on this is that i hate individualized algorithmic feeds of all kinds, whether coded by the user or imposed by the eyeball-maximizers. Its the wrong model. The right model is to have discrete named information communities that users can then peruse and subscribe to deliberately. The most important thing is that the names of the communities are public and shared so that we can have discourse about them. So we can talk about what is too “reddit” or how “/pol/ is overrun with shills” and so on, and deliberate socially on our information diet in this way.
It is impossible to be rational about something that has no name, cant be picked out from the background, can’t be discussed with other people because it does not exist for them, and reacts with its own ends to your patterns of attention rather than your deliberate choices. These slippery algorithmic demon-feeds are a form of slavery and are unacceptable for free people. The “for you” tab is inherently for slaves. The only way to have discourse community of free people is that the tendencies and communities in our information diet should have names and reputations, should be able to be picked up and dropped by deliberated choice and action, and ideally should be editorially accountable to a single person who themselves has a known reputation.
I hope the sofiechan tag system becomes this for us. I want to be able to deliberately explore a mappable space of discourse by names, and discuss which ones we like with the rational part of our soul. This I think is the key also to incentivizing user-respecting discourse and raising general sanity waterline.
An alternative to an algorithmic sorting, would be to have content sorted by the market, for most enduring relevance.
The way to do this would be through text inscriptions (on bitcoin) that could serve as store-of-value.
In the same way that the Constitution seems to back the value of the US dollar, an inscription of enduring relevance can back the value of bitcoin and serve as store-of-value.
In that way, the most truthful or timelessly relevant content can serve as the organizational principle for content.
All content would be oriented around comments on the most enduring ideas.
There would be no incentive for someone to invest in bitcoin inscriptions that was not of the longest-term duration or relevance.
I see both sofiechan and Ark as ways of discovering a peer-to-peer truth convergence paradigm for media.
The underlying medium always dictates the incentives for use of the platform, so the design is crucial, I am bullish on both sofiechan and Ark.
>>2631 I'm very skeptical of financial market mechanisms like this. We are not engaged in commerce, but posting. They are different things. I don't want to be thinking about incentives or trying to out-scam some snivelling financier on the other end scheming to take my postbux with dishonest financial manipulations. I just want to post with other anonymous gentlemen, in all senses of that word.
Right, I understand that and I feel the same way. I don't see it as a financial mechanism, but rather as a form of patronage. If the principle is that Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is inherently more valuable than money, contracts, and opinions, then the inscribed knowledge contains is its own organizational principle and motivation, above money or financial gain. It's a distributed convergence towards organic Truth. There would be no reason for someone to "invest" in a post other than as a form of patronage, without expectation of profit since the content is inherently more valuable than money itself. There is no possible expectation of financial profit, given the underlying incentives of the medium itself - immutable, peer-to-peer, distributed, open-source.
In other words, it inherently subordinates financial incentives to the distributed organization in pursuit of Truth. This form of economics is not game-able or corruptible, once the fundamental principle is understood:
It is similar to the concept of a prediction market, except that the questions are not closed or relegated to yes/no responses, and information is not subordinated to money/profits. It makes content inherently convergent on pursuit of Truth, simply because of the nature of the medium, "the medium is the message," only the most enduringly relevant content would rise to the top of such a patronage / crowdfunding model, because of the Truth of its stated principles.
>>2577 one possible recommender system that'd give autonomy or "freedom of impression," I think, is a system which recommends you things based entirely on what you yourself post.
what you spend time on isn't necessarily intentional, what you like is closer, but the meaning of what you write... a system that serves you different things based on the content of what you post would give you a ton of control without asking you to understand the algorithm underneath.