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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I live in the UK, but am from Norway. I know a few librarians though, and I know that community libraries are usually (or at least often) interested in projects that can connect their communities and help them with outreach. Something like this certainly could do that, and with libraries existing in most communities there is a built in network for broader proliferation there.

    I’m also just very keen on the idea of libraries having a central role to play in the future of the broader fediverse ecosystem.

    Edit: It may be key to pitch this to them not as a platform, but as a decentralised community network.



  • Engagement is merely the ability to, or the degree to which you are able to, maintain interaction with something (a system, a game, a fidget toy, whatever) over time. It has absolutely nothing to do with entertainment, although you can use entertainment as a means of achieving or increasing engagement. However, entertainment is hard. People are entertained by different things to different degrees, and respond to their entertainment in different ways. Engagement on the other hand is a fairly simple behavioural matter and that’s a whole field of science (which is mostly bollocks, to be fair, but its lessons can be very effective when applied at scale).

    Source: I used to be a behavioural engineer, specifically a gamification specialist. Engagement was the oil I was employed to extract, and entertainment the excuse my field used to pretend what we were (and still are) doing isn’t just social manipulation at scale.




  • Gonna ignore all context for the purposes of answering / contributing to a discussion of a kinda valid underlying question:

    There is a disconnect between moderation and membership in an ostensibly democratic social media structure. How could that gap be bridged?

    The way I see it, this is basically the representation vs delegation debate, though here it is arguable whether there is even representation. From this perspective, you can draw on a couple of hundred years of theory and practice to arrive at potential structures.

    For example, you could have a system where members of a community mark themselves as willing to moderate it, and all members select a willing delegate essentially their ‘moderating power’ to. Mods are then selected by number of delegations, which would be a fluid process because users can redistribute their ‘votes’ at any time. This would make mods immediately answerable to the members.

    To make the system less vulnerable to hijacking you would probably need some kind of delay in there so that you wouldn’t suddenly get a mass influx of new users delegating to the same mods to take over the community, and there would likely need to be other measures in place as well. But it would certainly be a neat experiment!

    (Just to note, I am not saying the current moderation model is necessarily bad, just figured it would be interesting to consider alternative approaches and have a look at what possible problems there might be in both the current model and any such alternatives.)



  • It’s pretty well established academically that basically the only way KPIs can actually work toward their intended purpose is if they are changed often and determined by the people doing the work that is ultimately measured. Ongoing measurements should only ever be used as indicators - hence the term *key performance indicators_ - and should never be used as targets. What that means in practice is that you should generally ignore all the individual metrics, and look across all of them instead to see if you can spot trends and anomalies, then investigate these qualitatively with the workers who ultimately produce those data to figure out what is happening and if any intervention is necessary.

    The problem is that the higher up you get in the hierarchy, the less of that kind of work there is to do and you end up chasing the people below you for nice numbers to plot into your presentations to make it look like there’s a point to your job’s existence.





  • Genuinely my favourite comedy TV show of all time. I have lost count of how many times I’ve watched it (it used to run in syndication on Norwegian national broadcast TV), and it’s basically just the same relatively small set of jokes repeated over and over. How they managed to do that so well that it’s still funny today is just absolutely incredible. Just a genuinely hilarious show.