Exit, Voice, and Platform Loyalty

Effective voice: Beyond exit and affect in online communities - Seth Frey, Nathan Schneider, 2023

Online communities provide ample opportunities for user self-expression but generally lack the means for average users to exercise direct control over community...

Everyone's Packing Up

I see a lot of posts about people leaving platforms. This one about leaving Reddit, this one about leaving WordPress, and a bunch of others about leaving Dis...

X users’ views of politics, experiences on the site differ by party %page%

Most X users say their recent experiences using the platform have been mostly positive or neutral.

Has Substack’s subscription model really “maxed out?”

Scott Carney and Taylor Lorenz posted on Substack about downward subscriber trends they’re seeing. Carney pins it on subscription fatigue and feeling like “The only way to grow is to pillage the paid subscribers from other creators.” Lorenz questions Substack’s direction, saying “more and more like this app is becoming another social media feed.” When we recently wrote about writers who are leaving Substack, they mentioned control, pricing, and the social feature creep among their reasons for choosing competitors like Ghost and Behiiv. [Link: Writers are fleeing the Substack Tax | https://www.theverge.com/tech/927294/substack-tax-ghost-beehiiv | The Verge]

The future for platform holders is cooperation, not just competition | Opinion

When an industry changes -- even quite radically -- it can be hard to pinpoint the moment that the shift began. There a…

Composable Trust, Part 1: Communities Without Credible Exit - Eclectic Corvine Muses

We guarantee that users aren’t subject to platforms. Yet communities are still subject to their stewards. Can we fix this?

The politics of ‘platforms’ - Tarleton Gillespie, 2010

Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what ...

Substack Writers Concerned as Subscriptions ‘Plummet’ Due to Follow Feature

Substack writers are expressing their concerns about the platform’s following feature on social media, which some argue is suppressing their subscription growth.

Field Notes: The Architecture of Rationalization - Aaron Ross Powell

Marginalia on the internet turning bad, platform extraction, and existential restlessness.

Elena Rossini 🌈 (@_elena@mastodon.social)

🚨 New post alert 📝 A deep dive into #WSocial with some fascinating findings: candid statements about their motives, a Greta Thunberg connection, potential AI plans (!!!) Why write about it again? I still had so many questions after publishing my first article. I spent 3 weeks watching every interview I could find and connecting the dots. I hope you'll enjoy this piece: 🔗 : https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-untold-story-about-w-social-unconventional-beginnings-strategic-pitches-conflicting-signals/ #blog #longread #privacy #DataMining #Europe

Indiemusi.ch

The current state of social media leaves us with a lot of questions. How can we stay united as music players amidst of platform monopolies?

Why is Naomi Klein Funding Substack’s Hate Machine?

Writers of good conscience should not be building new media companies on the back of a platform that opportunistically coddles white supremacy.

The politics of purely client-side apps - Paul's Leaflets

There's a surprisingly nuanced discussion in development about the political economy of clients and servers in the Atmosphere

The politics of purely client-side apps - Paul's Leaflets

There's a surprisingly nuanced discussion in development about the political economy of clients and servers in the Atmosphere