Rec | USER OWNERSHIP: TURN PERFECTLY IMPERFECT INTO A COOPERATIVE

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user ownership: turn perfectly imperfect into a cooperative

The best internet platforms enshittify when they take on VC funding, either exiting to the market or a larger acquisition as a result of the pressures of venture capital.
It’s all downhill from there: Investors and leadership will strip the company for parts, enforce mass layoffs, sabotage the user experience, all in the name of maximizing returns.
What if Perfectly Imperfect took a different route, and exited to its community of users, paid subscribers, and workers? What if PI became a solidarity cooperative, or something similar?
Let’s think about how to safeguard the legacy of this clearly beloved platform.

@newjersey

Nov 29, 2024

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I think it is pretty reasonable

What the last two decades of social media and digital platforms made it very clear is that nothing that appears free is actually free. Social media platform users are both consumer and labor of the platform. Whatever you post on Meta (facebook, instagram), X, tiktok etc, can be used by them, it's data to source and sell, made it very clear in the Cambridge Analitica scandal and now highlighted by the rise in AI how every single one of them uses posts as AI training data. And that's not even mentioning how these platforms fight for your attention in order to sell adds, we are reaching a point where even sites that were known for not having adds such as tumblr now features them as one of the few ways to keep the company afloat (though what afloat means can be very discussed as well, since most of them are public companies attending the interest and pockets of a millionaire/billionaire board of directors) Now, not all social media platform are companies, simply take a look at Fediverse, which is a free and open source digital social structure that can be hosted in multiple services and not centralized in a single company or organization. It's a pretty interest alternative to how we understand our online lifes, but a decentralized operation means that there is also no moderation on servers, Mastodon, one of the biggest platforms of Fediverse, is a huge alt-right hub, there has also been cases of CSAM being distributed among the serves. Another complexity of this system is that it demands a certain know-how to start to use it. What can happen in these spaces is that you can find some pretty cool people discussing how to have a free and open internet, at the same time a different server can host the most nasty humans in the world. But if you are expecting a social media network with a centralized domain, that can establish some sort of moderation and is able to be responsible to what it's shared on the platform you're expecting to be labor involved to keep it running, and I think this labor deserves to be reasonably paid. If the service is free, it means that I'm both labor and product, my data is certainly being sold and the page will most likely sooner or later be filled with adds because that is how traditionally these platforms can keep being free. Premium Services that don't hinder the functionalities of the platform seems to me a reasonable alternative to keep a centralized domain working. I think Piffy is being pretty realistic and some what transparent when it comes to the reality of not having adds in a website. The instances when the creative labor of the users has been used, such as the Hinge and A24 partnership could have been more transparent and more detailed on where and how the responses were going to be used, but it was informed that those responses would be featured in adds. In summary, I can't afford Piffy premium, but I would rather my profile looking a little bland compared to other users, that to be bombarded by affiliate links and adds.

@nanabo

4d ago

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this incredibly depressing vox article on everything wrong with social media and hustle culture

anyone on pi.fyi will likely feel seen and heard when reading this. it basically accentuates all the redundancies and senseless aspects of social media and how it’s disrupted every industry and how we are all dominated by the algorithm and have to be our own hype person. i always feel like an idiot after i finish a record or a book that i'm really excited to share with the world, but then have to think about “content“ to promote the art itself. obviously pi.fyi feels likes a refreshing beacon of hope because artists can share their work here in a far more simple and wholesome manner. the article also addresses non-creative jobs like accountants and other professions that are all being forced to become an “influencer” of some sort or build a brand. it’s spooky, yet we’re all feeling the fatigue so hopefully we can see a less algorithmic future soon…

@dakotablue

Feb 8, 2024

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Mourning how capitalist frameworks limit the applications of revolutionary technology

i think that large language models like chatgpt are effectively a neat trick we’ve taught computers to do that just so happen to be *really* helpful as a replacement for search engines; instead of indexing sources with the knowledge you’re interested in finding, it just indexes the knowledge itself. i think that there are a lot of conversations around how we can make information more “accessible” (both in terms of accessing paywalled knowledge and that knowledge’s presentation being intentionally obtuse and only easily parseable by other academics), but there are very little actual conversations about how llms could be implemented to easily address both kinds of accessibility.
because there isn’t a profit incentive to do so.
llms (and before them, blockchains - but that’s a separate convo) are just tools; but in the current economic landscape a tool isn’t useful if it can’t make money, so there’s this inverse law of the instrument happening where the owning class’s insistence that we only have nails in turn means we only build hammers. any new, hot, technological framework has to either slash costs for businesses by replacing human labor (like automating who sees what ads when and where), or drive a massive consumer adoption craze (like buying crypto or an oculus or an iphone.) with llms, it’s an arms race to build tools for businesses to reduce headcount by training base models on hyperspecific knowledge. it also excuses the ethical transgression of training these models on stolen knowledge / stolen art, because when has ethics ever stood in the way of making money?
the other big piece is tech literacy; there’s an incentive for founders and vcs to obscure (or just lie) about what a technology is actually capable of to increase the value of the product. the metaverse could “supplant the physical world.” crypto could “supplant our economic systems.” now llms are going to “supplant human labor and intelligence.” these are enticing stories for the owning class, because it gives them a New Thing that will enable them to own even more. but none of this tech can actually do that shit, which is why the booms around them bust in 6-18 months like clockwork. llms are a perfect implementation of [searle’s chinese room](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/) but sam altman et al *insist* that artificial general intelligence is possible and the upper crust of silicon valley are doing moral panic at each other about how “ai” is either paramount to or catastrophic for human flourishing, *when all it can do is echo back the information that humans have already amassed over the course of the last ~600 years.* but most people (including the people funding the technology and ceo types attempting to adopt it en masse) don’t know how it works under the hood, so it’s easy to pilot the ship in whatever direction fulfills a profit incentive because we can’t meaningfully imagine how to use something we don’t effectively understand.