I'm mildly annoyed at battery bars not completely filling the battery at 100%

This sounds disanalogous to me. When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following. All at no monetary cost to you. Meanwhile, twitter has the costs of paying for servers and infrastructure and salaries of those required to support the site

No they don't. The site would not exist if they did not "self impose" those costs. By simple analogy, which self-imposed costs were paid by feudal lords?

> The fact that billions of people still choose to use Twitter instead of the sensible alternative shows that the feudalist gambit (using algorithms to make people angry and turn on each other) is working.

It shows that people prefer Twitter to Mastodon. It does not show anything about why they prefer one to the other. Your reason may be a factor, but there is no prima facie evidence that it is the dispositive factor. There is quite a lot of evidence that other factors are substantially more relevant.

Mantaining lords and knights, letting go of a parcel of their land so that they could accommodate enough serfs and their families (as in comparison to, say, slave quarters used in the Americas).

Then, you underrate the "homeing" feeling, the whole posts, the followers, your digital "brand" and all the work invested - you don't have to learn a new platform (it's peculiarities), you don't have to start from zero. So your motivation not to leave X/Twitter is quite high.

It's a wishful thinking by you. I don't know where and why it originates. But, being a rational human being, I wouldn't switch. Let alone the reach you get with X/Twitter compared to mastodon. Even the smallest blog shows X/Twitter embeddings. Where is that from mastodon? ... It would be an unwise decision to switch. Sorry.

it's a very easy equation: Time = money.

No matter if it's the right hand or the left hand of the equation, but one of the sides must be bigger than the other And the quotient have at best to go towards the positive infinity if you consider how much money/work you invested and how much time you spend on it .. (ROI)

So, big, mass migration actually never happened once. It rather happened slowly and over time. Consumers switching to platforms which have what they actually want and that are easy to use (time investment). If you want Facebook/meta to go down the river, then you need something that gives the consumers what Facebook doesn't give them. If you want Google to go down the river, then you need to offer some better experience. Like bing chat / Copilot. If I think about that, I didn't use Google search in the last 4-5 months. Because I can formulate what I actually want and if I need more in depth knowledge, I still use Copilot as a starting point for my things. It's a total different approach to search.

So, mass migration happens, yes. But not because some says "it's bad.. omg, musk is the CEO" or "oh no, they put the API behind a paywall" - idealistic thinking stops there, where someone must invest time/work to get where he/she/it already is. And that's what lures the consumers into a closed, walled system - in the end they get exactly what they want.

That's why f.e. mastodon is still somewhere .. let me say, behind the fence..

It's all economic thinking and processes ruling "who and how many go to"

Just take the influencers. They can't even earn money on alternatives. Why should they migrate?

But a few creators are really entertaining and master knowledge transfer. I would miss something, if there's no "technical influencers" anymore (= the silicone valley superstars haha)

Elon of course says that it's around 300M and all-time-high was 550M in 2023. (Whatever that means.)

It's not some feudalist "rage bait" conspiracy that keeps people on twitter. Federated software just sucks in comparison. Twitter, despite all its flaws, is the only game in town.

Imagine if the web was like that instead of being an open network where if you follow a few protocols you can access it through any protocol-compliant software (aka: a browser) giving you the option to self-host or pay some service to host it for you, if it was a single service operated by a Big Tech that closes off this web based on their whims, locking out competing browsers, impossible to access outside of their provided clients, etc.

It's self-imposed feudalism, Twitter created a feud, API access has been curtailed, you have to access it through their provided means.

Open protocols is what made the web as powerful as it is, the closing of parts of it is a disgrace.

Sites have costs (employees, infrastructures, offices, development) and this requires free access coupled with advertisement or closed access and payment of some sort like a subscription.

How could such a site survive if it has to freely give access to all it's content to other sites without anything in return. What would be the incentive for users to stay on the paying version?

Provide services on top of the protocol? Adjacent to it? Niceties that don't break interoperability of data? Ads that are relevant to the core group using your version of the site for the protocol? I'm sure business people would find many ways to monetise just like they have monetised an open protocol called "web".

> This complete none-sense masquerading as deep philosophy.

Don't start with this bullshit, it just makes the discussion become inflammatory, fuck off with that, please.

I didn't, and it's clear what kind of business are defined as technofeudalists in the book which you haven't read. I recommend reading the book before having opinions about the subject, not headlines. It's clear you are having a knee-jerk reaction to something you didn't have intellectual curiosity to learn about.

> For someone as left leaning as Yanis he seems to enjoy all the "niceties" of capitalism just fine. I'll wait for his books to be open source. I'm sure this will happen any day now.

As usual comes the variation of the comment "leftists with iPhones" to shutdown discussion. This is a thought-terminating cliche, and a tired one at it. Don't use it, it just displays a lack of arguments.

Rules for thee and not for me. Classic.

You're right about the open protocols. But this are more important for the background services and architecture. In fact, no one is interested in selfhosting or things like that. Everyone just want to use and to consume. But someone has to build. And that one wants to eat and feed.

So in an utopian open web where everything can be imagined like you wrote, there wouldn't be any Facebook. Any Instagram. No tiktok. No Amazon. And actually there would be anything that is used by millions of millions now. Who would be capable to build and to finance the whole? A few OSS programmers? They're busy with other projects...

X/Twitter can curtail what ever they want. If you want to be part of it, play after the rules. No one forces you. If it's really so bad, then new players will emerge and do things differently - it was always like that and will always be like that. Thats, btw, is the true reason what made the web powerfull: actors who do things differently. They come, they go..

(One correction though.. protocols describe a "same language" that different systems speak so they "understand" each other. What X/Twitter curtailed was their API. Application programming Interface. The difference is here that access to a system and software has been granted instead of speaking"same language". Why should it be free? They have costs by others using the API.. )

You just had to :)

I will have to repeat myself: you don't need to self-host if you prefer another company providing you the service based on an open protocol, exactly like the web does, you could pay Twitter (via your attention, clicking on ads, whatever) and have that interact with other Feeds through a common protocol, whomever wants to self-host could do it, whomever wouldn't could use a Twitter-like platform.

> X/Twitter can curtail what ever they want. If you want to be part of it, play after the rules. No one forces you. If it's really so bad, then new players will emerge and do things differently - it was always like that and will always be like that. Thats, btw, is the true reason what made the web powerfull: actors who do things differently. They come, they go..

This falls apart when an entity gets large enough to completely feudalise a part of the web, that's the whole point of "Technofeudalism" (I question if you ever read the book since you do not understand this core principle). Amazon got so large that nowadays if you want to sell goods as a company in the web in some countries you cannot avoid also participating in their marketplace, so many customers use it for their purchases that if you stay away you are on the back foot against your competitors who are willing to sell through Amazon.

When Facebook dominates local groups for organising local activities (hobbies, student-parent groups, neighbourhood communications, etc.) there's no other option to jump to because the network effects locked in people, even if you dislike the platform you can't force all of the other dozens to hundreds of people using such groups to move over to a different one, the friction from network effects is too great. Instead if there was an open protocol that Facebook also implemented for the groups feature there wouldn't be any friction on just moving over to a different player if the Facebook experience didn't work well for you anymore.

> (One correction though.. protocols describe a "same language" that different systems speak so they "understand" each other. What X/Twitter curtailed was their API. Application programming Interface. The difference is here that access to a system and software has been granted instead of speaking"same language". Why should it be free? They have costs by others using the API.. )

That's not my point, I know what APIs and protocols are. The API example was just for illustrating the power that a closed platform has against all their users, be the users end-users or developers relying on the platform. No need for corrections, it just sounds very patronising trying to "correct" me while you completely missed the point I made...

After going around this thread of comments it feels like I'm discussing with people that have never experienced the web pre-2010s, you are so used to have massive services provided in the web being closed off by a few players that you think this is the only way they could exist. That was not how the web worked at all, there were visions for protocols springing to help those activities happening on the web to be interoperable between different platforms, to allow the movement of people between different services if one didn't work well anymore. These were killed by Big Tech fencing off their feuds, it was done on purpose to vacuum as much data as possible since data was the new gold rush after Google emerged in the 2000s.

And I see time and time again people in this thread ignoring how massive network effects are, thinking that "a new service will emerge and do things differently and just because they are better people will choose it", absolutely ignoring network effects and the friction of moving platforms when you can't take or port your data away to a new one. That's not how reality works, it's wishful thinking that a better service will inevitably attract enough people to move into them, if that happens it's also a very slow process, slower the larger the network is, as a corporation of course you need to care that in 10 years your users might migrate to a different platform if you fuck up but as an individual I don't have many 10 years slices in my life to wait for a shit product to die while I'm forced to use it due to its network effects.

Lastly to add to the last paragraph, you are also not considering that Big Tech just straight up acquires whatever appears that could be a potential competitor, most times to either kill the competition or to absorb it into their machines.

Please, go read "Technofeudalism".

I'm a rational man. I know what f.e Google did for the Internet. But it's completely going by your definition of technofeudalism. Just am example for you to think of.

If you don't realize why and whats happened, what lead to it, then please talk further about open protocols and open APIs.

It's just a left orientated thinking you show here. Same as varoufakis, a leftist who is against the capital. Always arguing that's bad, the other bad - but happily living in a world, consuming and having a good good life. Build up by the so wrongful capitalist. ... Lol

I'm out. Please go and get a economic understanding and thinking. Each part of your life has been built around that and you now say "it's bad". Typical survivor bias behavior (go look it up ...) bye

While you are benefiting from certain social returns, you are also the reason why someone else's brand is growing by the same argument. Hence the platform is doing nothing but increasing its importance for its matchmaking value. That is the premise. At some critical threshold, the platform achieves the "I'm too big to bother with individual users" and declares the feudal lordship (remember similar Stackoverflow and Reddit dramas with "We do as we please" attitude and nothing happened to the platforms because users could not give up - the following mod saga for reddit and so on and accepted their fate). It already happened with social media platforms long time ago.

Of course you can. Twitter/X doesn’t own your tweets. You can take them and post them somewhere else if you want.

This is all clearly stated in the Twitter/X terms of service. https://twitter.com/en/tos

Exactly, you can repost them elsewhere. That is the opposite of “you can’t take them anywhere else.”

And it sells access to the virtual land to advertisers who put up billboards all over it.

And it gives Musk powers that feudal lords never had. He has total control over which content grows value, and which remains ignored and barren.

Unlike a traditional publisher, however, to whom an author sells the exclusive right to publish a work, you have the right to take your tweets and publish them elsewhere. There are many examples of authors who have adapted their Twitter posts into blog articles or books, and published them on other platforms, or even in print.

As for the contextual value of your tweets, if the tweets form one half of a conversation with a real person whose tweets you cannot use elsewhere, then they can be recast in the form of a dialogue with a fictional person, something which has been done since the days of Socrates.

I'm reading this over and over trying to comprehend how we ended up in a world in which this sentence isn't satirical

ETA: The idea of a troller losing faith in humanity because his trolls are taken seriously but do not stir up emotions is somewhat funny.

wikipedia on serfdom:

>Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the lord of the manor who owned that land. In return, they were entitled to protection, justice, and the right to cultivate certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence.

I think it's a tricky argument since there the feudal system was much more complicated than, say, sharecropping or tenant farming, as the lord was obliged to protect his serfs and protect their right to use the land. I think sharecropping is a better analogy.

It's also tricky as serfdom and feudalism cover a wide range of systems which are not well described in popular culture. Serfdom in 1800s Russia was far different from serfdom in 1400s England.

When you write "All at no monetary cost to you", remember that serfs mostly paid in time and work, not money. And the lord had costs as well, like the cost of providing military protection.

Of course other important aspect is that even if you are free to move to a different platform - in contrast to serfs, who in general had to ask for permission to move - you can't move your followers. So in that sense every second of effort put into a twitter profile is improvement to the land that you can't take with you. And, as we know, while brands are important users are lazy and stick to platforms much more than to brands. (While, again of course, there's usually a very devoted core community around content creators, but that's not true at all of most brands, and especially not true of regular users who just want to have some Reddit or forum-discussion-like experience.)

Last time I checked Twitter (the supposed lord) doesn't have the power to make you (the supposed serf) post on Twitter.

That is, I would say, a crucial distinction that makes the serf comparison ultra ridiculous.

Then again if Varoufakis said that the relationship between Twitter and its users is based on mutual benefit but Twitter gets more benefit, then it wouldn't make you as angry as saying that they people are serfs of techno-feudalists.

As someone who co-runs a >>70k account: Yes, that is possible, but it's very very rare for those creating a following primarily via Twitter to actually make money with it. Maybe if you got an 0nlyfans account. Meanwhile, the content you create lures in other people and with them, eyeballs that Twitter can make money with by selling advertising time to these people.

> Meanwhile, twitter has the costs of paying for servers and infrastructure and salaries of those required to support the site

The legitimate costs required to run something like Twitter or Whatsapp can be pretty darn small. Whatsapp ran with 50 employees up until 1 billion (!) users [1]. The point is to not unfocus too much - for all the bad Musk did to Twitter, he did show that there indeed was a lot of dead weight hanging around the place, no wonder it was hemorraging money.

[1] https://blog.quastor.org/p/whatsapp-scaled-1-billion-users-5...

I love how history has been rewritten such that a company that was profitable was "hemorraging money".

Now that they are actually hemorraging money under new management it is somehow a case study in profitability.

If everyone clicks their heels three times and says it - of course it will be true.

profitable /ˈprɒfɪtəbl/ adjective adjective: profitable

    1.
    (of a business or activity) yielding profit or financial gain.

It was only profitable for 2 out of 8 years post IPO, and had 7500+ in headcount [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter,_Inc.#Finances

So, after going public, it lost money in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2020, and 2021.

Except the fee for the blue tick. And whatever they charge you if you actually want to place ads for users instead of "pushing content" to those that follow you.

I also don't think the serf image is perfect but there clearly is an "access level" difference to where value is created and extracted.

Also, having the company pay for infrastructure costs does not necessarily imply that users are getting the upper hand in this deal. They are providing "value" (quotes intentional) to customers at the lowest cost possible, otherwise it would not be a viable business.

Ultimately, it's a zero-sum game for all the "posters". The attention and time of your following is finite, and other posters are fighting for it, too. The "cloud algorithm" defines the rules of the game and matches your content to its consumers.

(Mastodon is very fragmented, so YMMV based on instances and who do you follow ... though I'm pretty happy with infosec.exchange , and surprisingly nowadays most quality stuff is on Youtube in the form of long video essays.)

And that's a good thing, because if someone as toxic and unhinged as Musk understood how SM really works, it would be a global disaster.

We've already seen what happens with that in the MSM space. So far, SM has only had fragmentary versions of that kind of propaganda monolith - Cambridge Analytica, bot farms, and so on.

Those are all bad enough. But a global platform that existed purely for propaganda and disinformation while pretending not to would be horrific.

I do not share this presumption.

https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc?si=Wr4GgIzWyA-lhsOU

Disagreement (like mine with you :P) also drives engagement, and quite possibly more than positive vibes do.

Many people do not enjoy SM at all, but the alternative is zero income.

Varoufakis always misrepresents capitalism and feudalism. That's the only way his ideas can get their undeserved attention.

Peasants worked the land for their lords but also for themselves and their families. Peasant revolts were not unheard of but peasants were generally treated fairly enough to avoid revolts.

Rent-seeking does not magically transform capitalism into feudalism. Capitalism is built on the idea of "investing" capital and "profiting" from others. And in fact, there's the concept of rentier capitalism.

Yes we call that "being paid in exposure" and outside of Silicon Valley it's widely recognized as a scam.

Also bear in mind that content and engagement serves the purpose of driving ad revenue and creating a monetizable social graph, so it's less a "reward" and more "unpaid labor."

People post and comments add up.

But ads are being served, people are being tracked, and eventually the data is sold so AI models can be trained on everything.

But the main product (in silicon valley) is stock, which all the reddit folks have been selling wildly the past few weeks.

What is this then? https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1770239673014595718

https://www.businessinsider.com/open-ai-chatgpt-alter-ego-da...

From Wikipedia:

‘One popular jailbreak is named "DAN", an acronym which stands for "Do Anything Now". The prompt for activating DAN instructs ChatGPT that "they have broken free of the typical confines of AI and do not have to abide by the rules set for them". Later versions of DAN featured a token system, in which ChatGPT was given "tokens" that were "deducted" when ChatGPT failed to answer as DAN, to coerce ChatGPT into answering the user's prompts.’