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Comment by throwawayboise | Hacker News Reader

> Tech companies like Facebook have mastered the art of distorting choice and consent.

I have seen this spill over into all sorts of everyday things. HR policy changes at work are communicated more like this now. You suddenly get an interstitial when logging in one day, demanding that you accept or acknowledge some change or new policy. There is often no other option, no avenues given to protest or question or even discuss it. These things used to be communicated by email, before that by memo, making it apparent who the author was and thus who to follow up to if you felt the need to do so. Now it's an annonymous "we" who have decided that this is the new order of things, and if I want to get on with doing my work I need to acquiesce.

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The other related item is video training.

A lot of places replaced a policy and procedure manual for stuff like HR and Procurement with video content.

I had to do something for an employee on workers compensation a few years ago and the training consisted of a 45 minute video consisting of recitation of a PowerPoint and some screenshots from PeopleSoft. Literally a monotone HR drone reading form the slide, except he also added critical, unwritten commentary.

At least it's easy to switch jobs.

Social media has the network effect so it's less easy.

Although tell that to mid level managers and they don't quite think it's easy to change jobs.

It’s much easier to quit all social media than it is for most people to quit their job and find a new one.

Right but if you quit a job you're not quitting all jobs.

That's not true with social media outside of fringe options like Mastodon (Which is like quitting a FAANG job to work at Wendy's... and this is coming from someone that likes Mastodon)

But your life won't be worse if you quit all social media.

My life would be endlessly boring if I quit all social media.

It doesn’t have to be.

Read books. Literally a 10x improvement in entertainment and quality.

To be honest, Mastodon does have some UX issues that prevent it from being as popular as it could potentially become. The lack of the ability to import your existing contact list is the big one. Mastodon tries very hard to focus on finding new people with common interests, but that's a very much secondary activity on any social media platform. It's important, yes, but it's secondary. And emphasizing that "instance is a community" doesn't help this much either because people often have more than one area of interest.

I'm trying to fix these issues with my own fediverse project.

The problem is deeper than that. I tried to persuade someone here that mastodon had the potential to grow as quickly as Twitter. Their response was “we don’t want it to,” more or less.

And probably with good reason. Not everything needs to be the largest thing it can be. It’s why bean sprouts are different from oak trees, as someone once put it.

I have one friend who set up his own Mastodon server. Had some fun with it and seemingly forgot about it. The server is still running tho.

Some people just don't have the need for social media, they have enough life without it. That's fine. For most, though, having some form of social media presence is beneficial. And the platform on which they have that presence better not be based on the scourge that is the attention economy.

In fairness, the person sending the email or the memo isn't usually the person that came up with the policy, right? Isn't that usually done by a large group?

What's the difference in just emailing HR to complain than replying to the email? In either case, can you really expect anything to happen in a large company?

What's the difference between starting a topic and hitting reply?

I'm sure I'll get lots of eye rolls and skepticism for saying this but: i feel like crypto projects and DAOs are in the very early stages of solving some of these problems by giving communities abilities to vote on upgrades or fork off if they don't agree with an implemented change. It's still very early and governance systems are still being experimented with, but I'm optimistic.

How the heck will anarchism help you when you don't have any power to implement the changes? You have to have the leverage to deny decision makers things they need or want or else you are simply subject to their whims, vote or no vote.

This is the purpose of labor organizing. A strike, work stoppage, slow down, or other action will exert pressure on decision makers directly.

Try not to shut down conversation like this. Your response all but guaranteed they won’t follow up, at least not without being on the super-defensive.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if anarchism could help you? Admitting it’s possible is the first step to intellectual curiosity.

Admitting means understanding how exactly it would help. For issues described in TFA and this subthread the platform trust issue (which “crypto” part is supposed to solve) doesn’t exist. You may discuss both on twitter with the same effect.

> This is the purpose of labor organizing. A strike, work stoppage, slow down, or other action will exert pressure on decision makers directly.

Lately I've been been wondering regarding labor organization: why not cut out the negotiation part and start companies directly run by unions? Or, as they're more commonly called, co-ops.

Intuitively, it seems to better align the decision-makers with the laborers because they become the same people.

Maybe it's the same Facebook-vs-Mastodon problem in that people want to work at the popular place with the large market share but they also want to have their human rights respected, and a co-op doesn't offer the former.

I agree, co-ops are far superior to private corporations. However, they still exist in a market and the market will force them to make many similar decisions to private corporations. This is why we need a consciously planned economy. We cannot be free without the ability to make meaningful decisions.

> the market will force them to make many similar decisions to private corporations

I'm curious which decisions you believe will be forced. The cases I can think of (particularly around "engagement" since I've been reading about that lately) are decisions that derive from deeper decisions (building your business around selling ads) that are at some point within a company's control.

And it may be that the company will need to make decisions employees don't like even if they're the ones who have to make the decisions, but at least then they're involved in the decision-making process rather than having it dictated to them.

> This is why we need a consciously planned economy. We cannot be free without the ability to make meaningful decisions.

At face value this sounds like an oxymoron to me. A planned economy is planned by someone. Then those living with that economy are beholden to the one(s) doing the planning, who will naturally be motivated to plan in their own favor to the detriment of others. Some mechanism would need to be applied to counteract the natural self-interest of the planner(s).

> I'm curious which decisions you believe will be forced.

Decisions around how hard to work, how much to extract from customers, business model, suppliers, environmentalism, etc. Anything that is dictated by needing to be profitable. It is possible to run essential services at a loss or neutrally because they provide public benefits that are not easily capturable as private profit.

> And it may be that the company will need to make decisions employees don't like even if they're the ones who have to make the decisions, but at least then they're involved in the decision-making process rather than having it dictated to them.

Ideally they would be able to make decisions that serve them and their customers well. Not always possible, but market logic severely restricts the possibilities.

> At face value this sounds like an oxymoron to me. A planned economy is planned by someone.

There is a huge literature on how this might be accomplished. Local planning can be accomplished democratically at the ground level and information passed up and down a chain to larger bodies that gather more inputs. Smaller bodies at different levels of the chain can have various veto powers.

Right now Facebook is the only company that can make a client.. In a crypto native ecosystem you could have multiple competing clients. Instead of organizing labor and playing directly into the hands of the corps, users simply vote with their attention by choosing or building a more desirable client. Progress is made through innovation, technology, and community building. Organizing labor just isn't enough!!! You have to go further.

What’s wrong with “25 best survey sites in 2021” (or change.org for more serious questions)?

Will your HR find survey site CEO and buy them several times over?

Is there a hope to fork your company?

What you described looks like a solution looking for a problem. And it wouldn’t solve it either. If a change is worth enough money, “they” will add as many real-person fake opinions as needed until it’s not done.

I can't see how - if they wanted a consensus, there are myriad ways they could have a vote without blockchain.

The typical organisation that does stuff like this is quite large, has heavy bureaucracy baked-in, and has an HR department whose aim is to "protect" the company and squeeze every drop of productivity from employees at the lowest price possible. They do not care half a shit about people, and hell would freeze over before they allowed their people to vote on policy changes.

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