EffortPost [any]
Things that require more coordination than just showing up and seeing who’s around. And once these groups form, if they’re making something of value, that creation process can be iterated on and improved by anyone in the group. This ability is, in my opinion, at the core of all human social value and creativity. This is the way that people invest in their communities and make their own lives better.
YES. Love this point. Humanity’s ability to collectively organize is how we’ve been able to progress to the extent which we have. It is much less common for a single individual to achieve anything of note by themselves only.
maintenance can also be largely automated (Not shitting on devops people here, they generally try to automate their deployments as much as possible
I think this overlooks one of the causes of this automation, which is the compounding complexity of the architecture needed to service these massive platforms.
Even with a best in class infrastructure and a fully manned department of SREs, you still encounter frequent threats that could escalate into actual system outages or service degradation. There is also the need to continually pace the growth of the infrastructure just far enough ahead of the platform’s growth to anticipate demands without incurring unreasonable costs.
My point here is that total automation to remove the need for sustaining DevOps is of course an ongoing goal of tech capital, but it is not the only driver.
A reciprocal ethos developed where someone expressing a desire for more content would be told to post more. A person wanting more engagement on their posts would be told to engage with others’ posts more.
While there is a gamification aspect that has since been tied into this cycle to further augment, I actually believe this mechanism of mutual engagement is reflective of (although not identical to) in-person social dynamics. If you’re having a conversation with someone and are being one-sided / monopolistic most people will respond by disengaging.
We’ve all had it happen where you rabbithole a bit too much and lose someone. Similarly, talking to a wall or not finding someone to socialize with at a party results in you being more likely to leave that party earlier than you would if you plugged in.
Still reading through, commenting as bits speak to me.
most people don’t even consider that the infrastructure exists
I see this constantly in tech at both the infra and higher levels. Perfect example is the “why don’t you have x feature yet? Should be simple” shit that idiots say.
IMO it comes from this very weird entitlement complex created by the seeming “effortlessness” that the giant platforms are able to roll out new features.
Behind the scenes however, these corporations have billions in venture capital funding and thousands of workers labouring. They build out a release pipeline lined up months in advance to create the illusion of effortless development.
Meanwhile, that dynamic is very different for open source projects that rely on collective contribution. The internalized view of technological advancement as something that just happens without any work from the users of a platform instills itself even in leftists.
The alternative side of this is that constant rapid development isn’t always needed for a project to really be successful, it’s fine for software to just slowly improve in occasional bursts as needed. If no one feels the need to work on a project, then perhaps that shows the project meets enough of the userbases needs at the current moment.
This is probably a tangent, but your comment got my brain going hah
Edit:
It’s a sign of virtual abundance to simply expect infrastructure to exist and be passively confused when it malfunctions
YES! 👏 The laziness and liberalism of “it should just work” completely disrespects and devalues the labour of everyone involved with keeping the infrastructure of these systems up and running. Of course sites should have reliability and good uptime, but taking it for granted and then being enraged at the occasional bug or downtime is anti-worker.