OLDaily

Disintegration of Discourse and Decentralised Tools
Ton Zijlstra, Interdependent Thoughts, 2018/10/15

"Social connectedness is a necessary context for discourse," writes Ton Zijlstra, "either stemming from personal connections, or from the setting of the place/event it takes place in. Online discourse often lacks both, discourse crumbles, entropy ensues." As a result, two features are essential for online discourse: our platforms needs to create "a tapestry of overlapping and distinct groups and contexts," and our platforms need to be smaller than the group, meaning that "a group can deploy, alter, maintain, administrate a platform for their specific context." See also, Laura Kalbag, What is Mastodon and why should I use it?

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Anti-social Punishment
Martin Sustrik, LessWrong, 2018/10/15

I wish this study had been replicated in North America. It is nonetheless a fascinating study of cooperative behaviours, albeit under highly artificial conditions. The gist is that while punishing free-riders usually increases cooperation, in some cases the punishment actually reduces cooperation. In cases where the benefit of cooperation are minimized (for example, where corruption empties the common pool before people can benefit) people actively oppose efforts to make them cooperate. The author suggests that the motivation is psychological (" You've punished me for free-riding so now I'll punish you just that you know how it feels!") but I think the response is a much more pragmatic push-back against ineffective forms of cooperation. Via Doug Belshaw.

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Mastodon's 2 Year Anniversary
Eugen Rochko, Mastodon, 2018/10/15

There have been numerous predictions that Mastodon won't last through the end of the year but as it passes its second anniversary it continues to grow, currently sitting at 1,627,557 registered users on 3,460 servers. That's still a tiny fraction of Facebook or even Twitter users, but it's still significant. Where Mastodon has been successful has been in making the interface user-friendly. But the greatest hurdle will be to reach mainstream acceptance despite being a poor platform for celebrities and advertisers to exploit. I view this as a strength, but it's really hard to scale without these.

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There’s more to decentralisation than blockchains and bitcoin
Irina Bolychevsky, Medium, 2018/10/15

Good article on decentralization. The key characteristic I propose is that a system is decentralised to the extent it distributes power. Specifically, the distribution of control, knowledge and capability between many users." The article is more focused on types of decentralization than on how to do it and what it means, but it's useful as an overall introduction.  Related: How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

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On OER and College Bookstores
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2018/10/15

Once concern about open educational resources (OER) is that they might cost the college bookstore its traditional revenue base. But as David Wiley points out, only a small percentage of the cost of a textbook is returned to the bookstore. And this could be made up with, say, print-on-demand service. I would add that this would work for both commercial and non-commercial OER. As Creative Commons recently stated, a school should be able to hire a contractor to reproduce copies of an openly licensed non-commercial work. Here's an example from Kwantlen.

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