iteratethis

Some people think billionaires should be more heavily taxed, which they call a redistribution of wealth. I think that is a bizarre take because the original distribution is conceptually absurd to begin with.

Think about it. You create a thing, a useful thing. We value that at 100K and given your outsized role in bringing it into existence, you have an equity of 40%. In absolute terms, you'd have 40K at this point, which seems perfectly fine.

Next, you (help to) scale this company up to a valuation of $100B. Your stake is now $40B.

The percentage is the problem here. It's a wild concept to be a procentual owner of a thing of an indefinite size which can only typically be scaled up by the labor of thousands of others.

It's a concept we made up. It does not exist in material reality. You did not produce the value from $40K to $40B, yet you're rewarded it anyway.

You did produce some value, quite a lot even, which would justify a (very) high salary. Equity sure is a great way to get rich quickly and I know a lot of you are in the game, but it's a strange concept regardless.

Perhaps it's due to English being my second language, but I equate the situation of a call for genocide as a direct call to violence, or something extremely close to that.

There's examples in other parts of the world where this has led to actual deaths. When you speak those words, you're green-lighting the action. The target now has to hope that nobody is crazy enough to actually do it.

These are life or death matters.

I accept that freedom of speech is more generous in the US, but it still does not add up. If this is mere (extreme) bullying and not disallowed, it should apply to all. Meaning, you can call for the death of anyone, any group, and the consequences are the same: none.

We all know that's not the case, and that's what should be fixed in institutions.

This entire series of articles is surely well intended, but so delusional.

Personal blogs were killed with the arrival of social networks. Enthusiasts still blog, which is great, I'm just saying it doesn't move any needles. The typical information consumer is on their phone, has 1 or 2 social media apps, and checks their feed with minimal effort to optimize it, largely relying on algorithms, which is the entire reason people keep coming back.

The typical user of HN will be different, but the point is that you're the exception.

Mastodon is similar to the personal blog situation. A charming attempt, but nothing more. It's a delusion to think that it will fundamentally change the nature of social networks.

It's an enthusiast network of misfits. 80% is left-wing Twitter refugees. Federation is broken (it can't even sync likes or replies), there's constant moderation wars, and the ever-present danger of your account, your followers and all your content getting lost. The network can't scale because bills sky-rocket at the first sign of popularity and that doesn't even include the fact that most social media is video content these days.

If you like Mastodon, good for you. But stop with the delusions.

Looking in from a European perspective, the congressional hearing blew my mind in several ways.

Calling for the genocide of a demographic is permissible?

When such a thing happens, it's "bullying"? Bullying!? Are you kidding me? Imagine being the target demographic, attending school every day. A mob is outside calling for your death and everybody like you. I would not experience that as a case of "hurt feelings", I'd be terrified. Fearing for my life.

By comparison, this type of speech likely lands you in jail in many countries.

And the inconsistency. These universities are well known for being supremely protective of their favorite minorities. Less favorite minorities though can be threatened to be eradicated just fine? It's an open admission that identity politics is very real.

It doesn't have such policy. It's the lowest ranking university with a free speech score of 0. ZERO.

When people are free to decide how many children they want, this amounts to 0, 1 or 2 typically. Which averages out to about 1.5-1.8 in most developed nations, which is significantly below replacement rate. Japan is an extreme case.

People often blame the cost of living. Whilst it doesn't help, it's not the root cause. The root cause is straightforward: people simply do not WANT more children.

Those that want children, will often have 2. There's very little reason to have 3, 4, 5 or more once you have 2. Two children already dominate your life so there's little incentive to just let the number grow arbitrarily. And having more than 2 children has very real consequences. For your home, your car, your schedule, your sanity. Even most millionaires will not have a huge amount of children.

Bottom line: most people still want children and will have 2. Which is not enough to cover the replacement rate. No policy, monetary or otherwise, will significantly move the needle.

Japan's issue is the above universal behavior combined with additional local constraints. As also seen in South Korea and China, the "work yourself to death culture whilst also financially supporting your ageing parents" means your culture as a whole ultimately goes extinct. It makes family formation near-impossible.

Instead of working more we should work less if we're interested in continued existence. The world won't move in that direction though it's "all hands on board" to deal with the current ageing society.

Mass immigration doesn't solve this. It's a brain drain for those countries, but also consider that a giant population of young people will turn into a giant population of old people, requiring even more young people. Which won't happen because also in developing countries the birth rate is in decline.

A very dark conclusion you could make is that people get too old.

It's not just the raw numbers, it's the ratio between old and young that is absolutely essential which you're not including.

Say we're below replacement rate and the first "halving" has occurred. The replacement rate now no longer is 2.1 (as it currently is), it would be perhaps 3-4. Which won't happen, so then it becomes 5. Which won't happen so then it becomes 6. And so on.

Once the serious decline sets in, it cannot be stopped.

I'm going to go against the popular narrative and say that the current fragmentation of streaming services is a net positive.

The problem is that hard-core users are very vocal and dominate the conversation.

My normie take is that most households will do just fine by having max 2 stream services, which they can regularly switch up. Many may have additional ones via account sharing. That should give you plenty of high quality stuff to watch, "high quality" meaning better than TV.

Multiple streaming services fighting for your eye balls and them not being guaranteed of your business is a good thing. It's how a market is supposed to work. Competition. It's frightening how easily consumers would want to give that up for slightly more convenience of having everything under one roof.

Everything under one roof would mean total price control on the supply side, even more flat repetitive content, the providers having total leverage over producers, etc.

Our behavior enables monopolists. Stop doing that.

Although it's early days, Bluesky has promising features regarding feed optimization. Users can build custom feeds and share them, you have control over sorting, etc.

I like their moderation approach as well, at least its potential. You can indicate yourself how comfortable you are regarding various potentially harmful topics: hide/warn/show.

I think this type of user control is exactly what social media needs. The power placed in the hands of users.

No, we don't need to go back to this because it simply doesn't work.

In my country, the top rate of 50% sets in around 70K of income. The top rate is hated so much that it actively curtails people's ambitions. People feel its pointless to level up beyond this point. They won't fight to reach bonus targets because the bonus is cut in half. If they continue to grow in income, many consider working a day less per week, as supplemental income becomes largely useless.

A 92% tax rate, at whatever threshold you set it, means anything you do beyond that point has no point at all.

Further, for organizations to richly reward top leaders, which whilst not popular is very much needed, how do you figure they pay them a high net income? Just do up the gross costs by a factor 10?

Finally, surely you realize true wealth doesn't come from labor?

I do not believe people whom say property is theft as it would mean I can randomly take your personal items as they're not your property, since you don't believe in the concept.

But should you genuinely believe that and walk the talk, fair enough. I'm more of a pragmatist myself.

I'd say that most people do not buy a house for the investment. They actually live in it and any value appreciation is a side-effect. A pleasant one, but not the primary goal of the purchase.

I believe in a variation of your statement: we should stop making already dense places ever more dense.

It's that dynamic that makes it an impossible problem to solve. Even if you temporarily add new supply, it will immediately be consumed, and new demand keeps coming in. Every small step of new supply will be ever harder to achieve, and the quality of life will get ever worse.

It's a total dead-end.

Instead, reorganize society. Instead of 3 mega cities, have 20. Have a 100, across different tiers. Reconsider where work is organized.

Do you not see the contradiction in your statement?

Houses are built by developers whom by definition only build a project when it's a sound investment. They immediately stop building when this isn't the case.

Stop with this fake morality.

When young people get hold of a home, then later sell it, none of them will be giving a "social" discount on the price.

Private property is private.

80% of the Mastodon userbase are Twitter refugees, the other 20% of hardcore users are misfits and nerds.

You can't really say that Mastodon is a neutral network, like all networks it has a vibe. The vibe on Mastodon is progressive orthodoxy, doomer-culture, endless dunking and virtue-signaling.

It sucks. Even if you look beyond its depressing culture, it doesn't deliver for news, sports, or frankly anything popular.

Nothing will be taken away from small instances with strong opinions.

Saying that the larger instances are poorly moderated is highly subjective. Most social media users want to connect to people and content without limitations.

"Uh, instance mods don't have more power than admins on other platforms"

False. Instance mods have 100% power over you, which is not true for other multi-community platforms. HN is not a multi-community platform so a poor comparison.

To compare with Reddit: a sub admin can ban your account from a sub, but it cannot do anything with your account at network level. A sub admin cannot decide what you see or do not see outside of the sub. A sub admin cannot nuke your account. A sub admin cannot nuke your followers.

A Mastodon admin can do all of those things to your account.

"But really the core issue is that most people on mastodon are there specifically to avoid corporate social media."

This statement cuts to the heart of the matter and is at best a half-truth. "Most people" on Mastodon are Twitter refugees. Well over 80% only joined after November 2022. This is a fundamentally different group from the much smaller longtime users.

I do agree that the hardcore users dictate the culture and that this culture emphasizes privacy, safety-ism, is anti-corporate, and so on.

That's fine, but this same mindset pretty much ensures that the status quo of the Fediverse (or Mastodon) remains: niche, tiny, anti-growth.

I suspect Threads will enable it in phases, but assuming a full implementation...

Yes, using the Threads app you could then follow somebody from i.e. a Mastodon instance if that instance does not have the Threads domain blocked and the particular instance user also does not have it blocked. So it's going to be hit and miss.

And no, I don't think you can log into another server using your Threads account.

This is the default "just move to another instance" take of Mastodon. It's impractical if not hostile.

It masks the reality of the situation which is that instance moderators have too much of a say in what individual users get to see or do.

This attitude is exactly why there's a trend towards ever larger instances.

Open data is actually very interesting as it comes to ActivityPub. A naive implementations means any motivated actor can suck up the entire Fediverse, using it for AI, ad profile building.

I remember the RSS times. But let's be honest. Even then it was only tech enthusiasts using an RSS reader. Probably the same people now experimenting with the Fediverse.

Do I trust Meta regarding federation? No. But I'm thinking it's an afterthought for them. The Fediverse isn't a threat to them at all, just like RSS never was.

I totally understand that some instances have strong opinions about this and self-isolate to a degree. And that will cement what Mastodon is: a set of small for-purpose communities.

It will not compete with the scale of Big Tech and maybe it shouldn't. Mastodon is to stay in their marginal role, a niche network. For sure exactly those strong-willed instances will agree to that.

I'm fine with that as well. I'm just pointing out that an anti-growth mindset produces a small network.

Nothing complicated about it. The UK has an aging population, and older people tend to watch TV a lot.

As soon as Meta turns on federation for Threads, they are the largest Activitypub server, about 10 times larger than all of Mastodon combined.

At the same time, Meta cannot stop non-Threads instances from organizing as they already do.

So I don't see the threat, really.

I agree that it's a loud minority complaining about Threads but that loud minority is quite powerful in the Mastodon community.

I think the "embrace, extend, and extinguish" fear is hilarious. The Fediverse is tiny and useless to Meta. Threads as a really crappy Twitter clone is just launched and many times the size of the Fediverse. By federating, they're losing algorithmic control and monetization possibilities. Honestly, I think it's just a "do good" afterthought for the sake of PR.

When your instance moderator makes the choice to block Threads at domain level, you're fully blocked from seeing any Threads content or interacting with any Threads user.

It could be that as an instance user you like this decision, but it does take away your choice to moderate Threads users and content yourself.

Meme pages and other "aggregate" accounts reveal a flaw in the internet in that credit is rarely attributed to the original content owner. This is unrelated to AI specifically.

You'll have an account "Amazing science". You follow it and it does post interesting videos. You believe the account provides a valuable service.

In reality, these accounts never credit the original source, and even if they do, in a disconnected way. The actual person that made the content does not get the views, likes, reshares, and follows.

It's all done under the disguise of "fair use" but it's a great injustice that these accounts profiteer from effectively "stealing" content. Or at least stealing exposure.

And yes, AI would be the next evolution to make the production of original content increasingly pointless.

Threads is also testing federation, it supposedly is close to being enabled.

Interesting dynamic is that Mastodon's community is such a sour bunch that likely most instance owners will block federation with Threads at the domain level. Because "Meta evil".

This takes away choice at the user level. Normal people that just want to connect with people and content no matter where it is hosted, which is the very purpose of ActivityPub, have no choice but to move to instances that do federate.

...which will be the large instances, like mastodon.social. It's already the default instance and by far the largest. For maximum connectivity and the biggest chance that it doesn't go under, it is the primary choice for most users. So this dynamic of too much instance-level moderation effectively undermines the idea of the fediverse. There will always be tiny for-purpose instances, but the idea that many small instances will grow the fediverse to Big Tech scale is invalidated.

Come to think of it, one might as well create a Threads account. It's a community almost a 100 times larger than all of Mastodon combined. So if you just want to connect to people and find content, Mastodon offers few tangible benefits to normies.

This has the typical "man dead, woman most affected" energy of modern feminism.