flowingfocus

And besides the current people themselves changing, there are also many other ways in which incentives can change: new people get into the mix (investors, board members, c-level), people leave etc. I recently formulated it like this: As long as an experience of something that I want to have in my life can be influenced by a single entity I have to hope the incentives of that entity do not change drastically.

> They don't want to make you happy or feel good, they want money, at all costs which results in you being angry and toxic.

I agree that the incentives between users and social media don't align. However, there still would be none if there was an incentive for social media to "make users happy" or "make users feel good". As long as a single entity is in in a position to control the experience of all users (for example by deciding which timeline/suggestion algorithms are used) users have to keep track of how the incentive structure of that entity evolve. That means as a user, I want to own my interface to networks (so I get to choose e.g. suggestion algorithms). That's one of the cool things of the fediverse or email. By design, no single entity can make the user experience for all users strictly worse because there is no way to force adoption of something that goes against users incentives.

Thanks for the recommendations!

> Great textbook, I learned all the topology I know from it.

Hatcher's Algebraic Topology was that book for me. https://pi.math.cornell.edu/~hatcher/AT/ATpage.html

Gregor Hohpe called this "Topology from Code" or "Architecture from Code" in a talk he gave at AWS Summit Berlin.