Hit Makers
The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
In his groundbreaking investigation, Atlantic senior editor Derek Thompson uncovers the hidden psychology of why we like what we like and reveals the economics of cultural markets.
Is #Mastodon really viable for the small to medium-sized operator?
We assert, "NO!"
We did something simple. With a Mastodon tab open we hit Ctrl+Shift+E to get the Network Tab. With an inactive thread open in Mastodon, we went to another website to read an article.
An hour passes and what we discovered shocked us. Mastodon somehow justified sending us 55MB of data. The #NetworkTab said 55MB over 1500 requests (53MB transferred).
See our toots about the #ExploreTimeline and displaying boost counts, which encourage botFarms that game the algorithm, and create feedback loops to get user interactions based on perceived #popularity. We warned of it years ago (see #PopularityModel).
Forced Javascript is an anti-feature. Until about a year ago, Mastodon had basic functionality without Javascript.
So many unseen resources being fetched. Cryptomining at least secures the network.
Please stop writing and disseminating "most #popular#programming#languages" articles. Besides the fact that #popularity is a relatively useless criterion to select an implementation by [1], the sources of your data are all terrible, and generally fall into:
-questionnaires sent to #CTOs by #management sites
-undocumented analysis of some large but random #corpus of #code
-#survey questions given to users of some popular tool or website
Is there a list of maybe the 100 most followed accounts on the #fediverse somewhere? I know lots of people don't want to talk about those numbers but it's probably something that big names on other services really want to know. Could they be the most popular person if they joined us? Twitter got a lot of play from that back in the day.
More than 50 people gathered in front of SaskPower Plaza in downtown Regina on Friday afternoon calling on the Crown corporation to transition to clean energy in response to the growing global climate crisis
Dear @feditips dear instance admin @JohanEmpa, dear explainers of the #fediverse, can someone explain to me how the #explore section is made up? I don't assume it's handcrafted by #instanceadmins clicking buttons all day long, but there's a shared #algorithm? Is it based on #popularity, based on what, number of any #interactions? #clicks? #comments? How often is it refreshed? Looks like daily to me on mastodon.green. Please share code!
Have you noticed how youtubers complain about the "algorithm" when they lose subscribers, but they never praise the "algorithm" when they grow in popularity?