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  • Colin the MathmoColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyz
    Aug 8, 2026, 2:54 PM

    This came up in conversation, but I'm sure the idea has been expressed elsewhere so it's probably credited to someone else.

    However:

    "Wright's Law: the number of users on any platform is inversely proportional to how ethical that platform is."

    Conversation here:

    mathstodon.xyz/@ColinTheMathmo

    Added in edit:

    There is already a "Wright's Law" that talks about manufacturing, so maybe this is:

    "Wright's Law of Social Media".

    But I still hesitate to claim such an obvious principle that everyone will know, even if they haven't articulated it.

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Replies

  • DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz
    Aug 8, 2026, 4:52 PM

    @ColinTheMathmo
    Re: edits: It's great that you're modest and all that, but IMHO you need not hesitate.

    All these laws are things people know in some form before they were articulated; that's *why* they catch on.

    Murphy's Law, for instance, clearly captures a feeling and observation that goes back to the beginning of time.

    (The Universe *is* perverse)

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  • Colin the MathmoColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyz
    Aug 8, 2026, 5:00 PM

    @dougmerritt I hear what you say ...

    Even so, it won't catch on unless *other* people use it. I remember the story about John H Conway who actually wanted to name the Finite Simple Groups that he discovered after himself, but needed a trick to get other people to call the "The Conway Groups".

    So he called them "Point Zero", to be written as ".0", and figured that people would give up called them that and refer to them as "The Conway Groups".

    Then someone, seeing ".0" started to call them "Dotto" ... which caught on.

    Not sure this story is relevant, except in so far as getting other people to call something after oneself is tricky.

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  • ChuckChuckMcManis@chaos.social
    Aug 8, 2026, 5:08 PM

    @ColinTheMathmo Curious about the mechanism behind that understanding. I know that "Public awareness of a specific billionaire is inversely proportional to their level of ethics and integrity." The mechanism is that people doing ethical things with high integrity don't get headlines.

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  • Colin the MathmoColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyz
    Aug 8, 2026, 9:18 PM

    @ChuckMcManis I think the mechanism is that almost all account-acquisition systems are unethical.

    Slurping address books is the least of them, but inappropriate use of data without permission is a standard way to "grow a network".

    People say that "Discovery is Hard" on Mastodon, but that's partly due to the decisions made on ethical grounds about data privacy.

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  • ChuckChuckMcManis@chaos.social
    Aug 8, 2026, 9:26 PM

    @ColinTheMathmo Customer acquisition is a hard problem. But for"almost all" is doing a lot of work there 🙂 I think it is fundamentally impossible to offer a 'free' service as the cost of providing that service is not free. And at the same time, while it would cost little if you had many customers, to cover costs with only a few customers costs more than the 'value' of the service. 1/2

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  • ChuckChuckMcManis@chaos.social
    Aug 8, 2026, 9:28 PM

    @ColinTheMathmo Perhaps what you are reacting to is that the service isn't honest about who its customers are. Kind of like ranchers offering free vacation meadows for beef cows. Similarly a free interaction space for data cows is similarly set up. In both cases the cows don't really know who the real customer is, or what that customer really wants. 2/2

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  • Colin the MathmoColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyz
    Aug 8, 2026, 9:45 PM

    @ChuckMcManis I'm not really sure what you're trying to say, and I'm not sure you understand what I'm trying to say. I certainly don't understand what point you are trying to make with your analogy about ranchers and beef cows.

    The observation basically comes down to this:

    Acquiring customers is (as you say) hard, and if one is in any kind of competitive environment, unethical behaviour will, in general, win. In part this is simply because for most customers the unethical behaviour goes unnoticed ... this is deliberate obfuscation by the platform involved ... but in part it's because people will go "Ooh! Shiny Thing" and not bother looking for any ethical implications.

    Finally, like all similar observations, it's not a quantitative mathematically rigorous formula.

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  • ChuckChuckMcManis@chaos.social
    Aug 8, 2026, 10:20 PM

    @ColinTheMathmo Fair enough. What I was trying to say was that the "customers" of most social media platforms are people involved in the advertising or analytics business. The various people contributing and browing content are just "Data Cows" to be milked of their analytical content. As with other media, the bigger the "audience" the more an analysis or ad agency will pay for the data. 1/2

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  • ChuckChuckMcManis@chaos.social
    Aug 8, 2026, 10:22 PM

    @ColinTheMathmo Getting 'users' (which is to say people to hang around in the application and create actionable data bits) is comparable to buying livestock, or simply tempting it into your meadow with 'free food'. (Slaughterhouses being the customers of beef ranchers.) I've got a variety of things I've noted about the economics of information and should probably publish them somewhere before I die. 2/2

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