liminal 🦠 on Nostr: I'll put my two cents in here. Social networks follow the rule of preferential ...

I'll put my two cents in here. Social networks follow the rule of preferential attachment - newcomers will typically come in and gravitate to accounts with a larger number of followers, and their posts will be the most seen. This is just stating the obvious, but also stating that this is a well known phenomena that has been studied in depth.

Now consider this situation, the biggest accounts get the most attention, and then their posts will be on trending. Their posts biases trending, and anyone that wants to go to trending will see the topics that the biggest accounts are talking about, their comments and try to mimic them to get on trending. We see the homogenization of the trending posts, so you know how it ends up.

Its great that users are coming in through larger accounts, but we need to separate the new users from the big accounts and popular topics so that they aren't in their periphery. What is that solution? No, it's not algorithms. Algorithms can help, but its not the knife we need to cut the network. Say it until your face turns blue - It's communities.