Thanks for engaging with the premise.
social media sites shift their business structure so that users have to pay for social media usage, but in return they get no ads
I don't think this is that likely just since they would probably lose their young audience pretty quickly especially since that audience would have to rely on their parents paying for the service which I find unlikely.
I was thinking of putting peertube there instead but I didn't think that there'd be an easy solution to getting around hosting costs of video over this short of a period or getting creators to begin moving to that platform when there are upfront costs to posting videos there, less of an audience, and no clear way of gaining consistent revenue which they already have a problem with on Youtube.
Yeah, I do think that Nebula and even stuff like Discord are going to go through the cycle of enshittification but I think that people will still choose to go on those platforms at first and then eventually start moving to alternatives that are more built up later.
Trends that I am missing or inconsistencies in the timeline. Stuff like that.
ignoring several long running trends in technology adoption and user behavior
Which ones?
I honestly don't think that any big company nowadays can collapse (look at how Digg is still a thing) but I do think that they can shift their strategy on how they monetize their users or more generally present content on their platform (like YouTube with shorts). That's partially why I didn't say the fediverse was mainstream and also why I didn't say that those media companies would collapse but instead made a point about where they might try and get their money from instead if advertising dwindled.
Also, I said this wasn't a prediction and made the timeline with a foregone conclusion.
Idk. This is my first time doing it so maybe?
So the most efficient network, would be that which has as many connections as possible, up to a threshold of desired communication quality
I think that the individual's ability to process information does play a role in how many connections that individual should have but the more important role in having fewer connections is to provide protection from social influence which can hinder the creativity process and help stabilize adoption.
So for example, if I had 50 connections and 4 people adopted a new behavior / shared new information I would still be influenced to not take up the behavior because so many of my other connections aren't taking part and it could lead to negative feedback from my other connections, but if I had 6 connections instead that behavior/information would be much more appealing allowing for newer ideas/behaviors to spread in a much more stable way.
Similarly with creativity. If you have a lot of connections that are giving you answers to everything you could think of (and they are decent answers) then there is less of a need to find creative solutions to those problems meaning that new ideas are less likely to be thought of or proposed. Alternatively being surrounded by that much external information siloes you to think about finding a new solution within the things that have already worked.
A further problem to solve, would be the evolution of parameters over time, which could require nodes switching to different combinations of networks and a different number of connections on each.
This is something that they have sort of studied but not in the way you have suggested. They have allowed individuals to change their social connections over time and have noticed that the connections become more centralized and/or the connections are to people who are like them in relevant ways (This point isn't in this paper but it is in some related research). It would be interesting to see what would happen if they actually optimized the network over time to make everyone smarter.
Interesting.
Yes, I find it very interesting too.
If you've seen other posts that I have made you might've noticed that I'm interested in this exact problem and I have been super focused on research that shows having efficient information networks (i.e. centralized networks, a network where only one or a few voices matter, or fully connected networks, a network where everyone can see everyone else opinions) can lead to much lower collective intelligence for the group and having inefficient information networks (networks that have fewer connections, maybe 4-6, and everyone has an equal amount of connections) can lead to a group being able to solve more complex problems.
So in relation to what you pointed out big online communities actually might be making our collective intelligence weaker even though it makes us more connected.
I mean maybe there is a way for a stateless society to beat state violence. Or maybe there is a way to make people replace the inherent authority/trust that they put in the current system and instead start believing in another system making that old system lose its power (parallel society).
Calling out rude behavior might be a way for us to help govern the kind of behavior we want.
Something similar that I have enjoyed reading was The Culture series, but it is sort of arguable on whether or not that is an anarchist society. All of the individuals basically are able to do whatever they want and they live on the principle of live and let live. However, AI minds do tend to have a lot of say on what happens or doesn't so it's sort of blurry on whether everyone is truly free or they are being manipulated. But most in society are living happy and fulfilled lives.
Why?