Algorithm vs. Community? I Choose Community.

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Last night, just before heading off to bed, I noticed a post in the Motherhood Community (don’t ask how I found it, I don’t remember) from @motherhood giving a challenge for folks to provide unsolicited advice to @theycallmedan and his wife @gabbygoldenxo with respect to raising their new infant son, Baby Ander.

Then I spent a couple late-night hours crafting and posting a response.

I have a personal connection with @theycallmedan, even though we have never met. It was @theycallmedan who first ‘informed me’ about Hive (via an interview he did with someone, that I stumbled across via twitter or some other social media site, several months ago).

A few months later, when my students expressed a desire to dig deeper into understanding the effects of social media on their lives, the government, and the world, I reached out to @theycallmedan and asked him to speak to my students about decentralized social media, to which he graciously agreed.

When I gave him a list of dates, he chose to speak at our first meeting of the semester (2/1/21) because he said his wife was expecting in March and he did not want to commit to anything too close to that timeframe.

Shortly after @theycallmedan engaged with my class and our Free Enterprise Society, I found myself becoming actively involved with Hive, getting to ‘know’ lots of different folks, and periodically conversing with @theycallmedan and a couple of the devs he introduced me to.

The more I interacted, the more I began developing connections with members of the Hive community (even though I do not ‘personally’ know any of them).

You see, when I saw the post from @motherhood, it wasn’t about some random challenge (even though the post involved a challenge that I was responding to), it was about my connection to some people, real people. As such, I wanted to contribute, not because some algorithm had sucked me in, but because I read a post that appealed to my sense of belonging, my sense of community, my sense of wanting to contribute meaningfully to those within that community.

That is why I voluntarily spent another couple hours composing a post recommending parenting advice to someone I have never met in person and only once ever had a voice conversation with; I ended up choosing to stay up until after 3 am even though I would still need to get up at 7:30 am to get my own kids to school.

And I felt a sense of satisfaction about sacrificing sleep to contribute.

This is such a far cry from the too many times when I have found myself staring at my twitter feed at 2 am, bleary-eyed, and wondering where the past 3 hours have gone -- wishing I could have them back!

As I tweeted several weeks ago (and subsequently pinned to my twitter profile):

#Hive is to #twitter as
#BirthdayParties are to #Funerals

Last night’s experience, for me, exemplifies that observation!

I followed the above tweet with a tweet explaining why that is so:

My point above was based on my observation that #twitter serotonin is mostly negative whereas the #Hive neuron boost is almost all positive.

Given the choice, I’m all in with the positive (and have ditched the negative -- with no regrets ).

Those of you on Hive already know this and ‘get’ it, but we need to get this message out to those on twitter, instagram, and elsewhere!


Wishing you the best, Baby Ander and @theycallmedan and @gabbygoldenxo! I willingly and consciously choose you guys over letting some algorithm choose for me!




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14 comments
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Funny story how I came across motherhood community as well.
Yesterday I was looking for the right community to share my first project that we did with the Bulgarian community on hive.

More about it:
This post with the results of “mothers of Hive 2

And in

This video

I manage to support a good cause fully sponsored from Hive.
To support a mother in need in those times of unemployment around the world.

Namaste 🙏
To support

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At Motherhood we did the challenge precisely cause even tho we dont know Dan or his wife personally and have never really interacted with them, we feel so grateful for the support he has given to the community and to Hive in general it feels like we know him and it makes us excited to know he has joined the parenthood club.

Btw even tho is call motherhood, we are open to all kind of parenthood releated content we welcome dads or any caregiver to post in our community and im even think of changing the name to parenthood to be more inclusive (i just feel too attached to motherhood still to let it go just yet) so you are always welcome to post there about your own parenthood experience! 💙

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Saludos profe @trostparadox , muy interesante su post, y es que yo también meditaba en lo mismo, en el tiempo que se invierte de manera abstracta en otras redes sociales, a dónde va nuestro tiempo?, cómo poder recuperarlo?, da tristeza no poder hacerlo, es como una fuente de agua, no se puede parar la corriente. Pasa que cuando consigues personas que sí te leen, tratan de entenderte y te dicen algo, un consejo, una crítica o lo que le gustó de tu publicación, dices, guao, me leyeron, "estoy viva", y eso te impulsa a seguir adelante, a comunicarte más y a seguir dando de ti. comparto lo que dices aquí:

porque leí una publicación que apelaba a mi sentido de pertenencia, mi sentido de comunidad, mi sentido de querer contribuir de manera significativa a aquellos dentro de esa comunidad.

Siempre positivos, siguiendo aquello que nos suma y no lo que nos resta. Y seamos multiplicadores de las cosas buenas que pasan a nuestro alrededor.
Un saludo cordial desde este rinconcito, mucho gusto

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I'm kind of a gamer, moreso when I was little. I went from video games to card games. But Hive reminds me of a game called Everquest. It was the first ever mmorpg. The game felt like a big open endless world where anything is possible. I have the same feeling with Hive. We control our destiny here, what we see, the connections we make. We do not have some AI or 3rd party molding our perception of community. The communities here are raw and real. It feels like we have come full circle. We use to be a peer to peer when communicating. Before long algos turned that on it's head. And now we are past algos back to peer to peer. Thanks for all the advice on parenting, it will come in handy.

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The game felt like a big open endless world where anything is possible.

Sounds a bit like 'The Oasis' in Ready Player One.

My kids were watching Ready Player One yesterday (for the 500th time, maybe) while I was driving them to a soccer tournament. It's the first time I've 'watched' it (in this case, listened to it) since becoming active on Hive. The Battle of Castle Anorak at the end of the film has some resemblance to the battle for decentralization that led to the Hive hardfork from Steem.


The following statement from I-R0k at the start of the battle seems salient:

No man is a failure who has friends.

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#Hive is to #twitter as
#BirthdayParties are to #Funerals

LOL

I wouldn't go that far but I do get the gist of that. I've had some fun moments on Twitter but the problem is that on Twitter my attention is what is being farmed by others. Here, I partly own the farm.


Posted via proofofbrain.io

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I wouldn't go that far but I do get the gist

Yeah, Twitter doesn't allow for nuance.

By and large, communities on Hive operate on an affinity basis (upvote good content, ignore bad content, engage in meaningful dialogue & debate when there's well-written content that you disagree with). Twitter, on the other hand, feels like a cutthroat "we vs they" landscape, where negative vibes rule the day.

Jaron Lanier explains this fairly well in some of his talks (and a little bit in The Social Dilemma movie). The algorithms are (unintentionally) designed to amplify negative feedback, because our built-in (amygdala) negative response mechanism is both quicker and more forceful than our positive response mechanism.

However, the way those algorithms operate is entirely a result of their chosen business models and, as such, is baked into their platforms. That is one of the many reasons I am bullish on Hive; it will be impossible for Twitter to capture or emulate the Hive 'vibe' without completely upending their business model, which is highly unlikely.

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The way social media algorithms work explains much of the current lack of constructive dialogue and toxic polarization. I noticed from the start that Hive is a polite environment or at least much moreso than most Web 2.0 platforms.

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Community is seriously the most powerful aspect of anything. Where you live, growing a business, your friends. Build it in a way that is constructive, supportive and welcoming to others is just as important.


Posted via proofofbrain.io

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Totally agree. Us making the community is the way to go. Forming communities and joining/participating in communities is the way.

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All we can do is continue to build communities and support other communities. I saw you have upvoted a few of the people that were caught up in the downvote stuff recently, I appreciate you helping those posts out. Those people are members of the two communities I am an Admin of (Informationwar and DeepDives). Again, thanks for the help, and if you were interested I made an update post about it with more info.

Thanks!

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This is where community tokens represent a powerful force. Those who disagree with the ethos of the community can downvote all they want, but their downvotes are meaningless when the dissenters own none of the community tokens.

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