Cohost & its recent shadiness - page 2 - ☞ ∙ Life on the Web

With Cohost now dead, this has been very interesting to read through and I'm glad I dug it up (leafing through older MelonLand Forum threads, as usual). I had never been a part of the platform, and I hadn't seen a post-mortem, so this pre-mortem was very enlightening, especially since the mysterious funder/silent partner has since locked all their Cohost posts from public view. My belated thanks to OP for sharing the Mastodon thread on this.

Quote from: shevek on August 15, 2023 @697.05

Dropping by for a little because I have found some time

I find the criticism interesting and partially valid. I am a Cohost user since recently.
Though I also wanna offer a different perspective one might have on alternative social media sites, or on Cohost specifically.

While I enjoy supporting things that directly speak to my values and may be radical, new, and anti-capitalist, I think we should also not forget that many people just join social media sites because theyre "not x"; not Twitter, not Tumblr, not Instagram, etc. and bring something new to the table. It sucks that they are not this utopian vision of an online collective or hoster, but nowadays, simply not being Twitter, and being smaller, can be enough for many. That should not be underestimated. Many are content with that already, or are aware that any standards above that are highly unlikely to be fulfilled by now.

I'm also sad that I oftentimes see alternative sites being held to very high standards that are almost impossible to fulfill with small funding, as a small team, as a side project or whatever it may be (depends on the site; Cohost and SpaceHey can be very different in that regard, for example). We are all very used to very rich social media sites, so I get it, but they also have huge legal teams, millions in money, a ton of employees, and are not bound by the morals that smaller alternatives often bind themselves to. That's why bigger sites have better moderation; they have no qualms about traumatizing poor people in developing countries to remove content or train AI to deal with it. They have no qualms about stepping on peoples feet and just autoban stuff with no feedback, no recourse, without asking the community beforehand; they get away with not banning stuff or banning stuff, taking away peoples livelihoods, launching features no one wanted and taking ones away that people liked basically daily and people barely bat an eye anymore.
Meanwhile smaller alternatives must feel like if they make one small misstep with being too overbearing in regards to moderation or not enough, if they position themselves clearly about xyz, they suddenly have 50% less users. This is simply not a reality for the giants anymore.
In regards to not banning someone for harassment that happened elsewhere: Not even the giants ban for off-site content /ever/. I have tried to take Podcasts down from Spotify and tried to take down Patreons for hateful Tweets, nothing. FB and Insta and all those act the same, you cannot even report anything outside of their apps or websites within the report feature. If a user did not do the bannable offense on the platform, there is no precedent anywhere of taking action against the user.

There is no easy solution, I get it; people are allowed to expect things from a company even if it is small, especially if they pay money for it, but I find it very unfortunate nonetheless. They are fighting against giants who had a decade+ to figure it all out and are way past their growing pains. I personally am fine with growing pains on a small alternative site, and I wish more people would be, but I understand if they aren't.

What saddens me the most though is that the mastodon thread mentions:

I personally love all of that and I want them to continue that, and I want more of this. Everywhere.

I am tired of corporate professionalism. I am tired of saving face. I am tired of everyone pretending they are fine, and like that criticism or even customer hate mail didn't hurt, or wasn't disappointing. I'm tired of people pretending they aren't chronically ill, disabled, mentally ill, still grieving a death, in period pain and other stuff. It's messed up for me that cashiers, waiters, and all kinds of people in the daily life can't be open and honest about what day they're having when it is relevant because it would be unprofessional towards me as a customer. I am tired of having to see them as replaceable, characterless, public-safe stand-ins for the brand that always function!
I am tired of having to participate in a culture that does this and engage in playpretend. I hate having to act as if I am productive 100% of the time when I have a week or two where I can't focus much at all. I am tired of pretending the work is interesting all the time. Most people are tired of pretending their job is their passion, and for good reason.

I want to interact with humans, and I want to engage with things made by humans. And humans are like that. And I wanna know how the people whose stuff I use, whose posts I see, whose platform I use really feel if they do decide to share it. And the good part is, when many people around you do this, you start feeling like less of a loser for not being productive that day, that week, that month; because the people around you you admire for all their projects have this too. The public persona who never fails and never gets upset harms us all, because that's who we compare ourselves to and we always fall short. I'm glad the Cohost creators struggle with the same stuff we all do. Makes me feel like less of a freak. Anything else is a view warped by capitalist interests.

This is also a common capitalist talking point. Many people have written about it better than me, but this is derived from ideas like "poor people would stop being poor if they learned how to save/invest/wouldn't spend it on trivial things" and the entitlement of many people who are above poverty thinking they know how to spend funds better than people who are financially struggling, as well as the idea that poor people do not deserve entertainment (aka when people complain that a poor person still has an Xbox). Now, these aren't poor people but a financially struggling business, but the point is similar - employees, even of a startup struggling financially, deserve a liveable wage, and they deserve entertainment, and they deserve to spend their wages without scrutiny. Giving a platform money via a subscription or donation is very obviously not only going to the site directly, because there are humans that need to be paid. I find this view of "they should live barely above the poverty line and not have any enjoyment so they can put as much as possible into the business" by the OP to be wildly dehumanizing and capitalist. I don't want anyone to suffer financially or otherwise for my frivolous entertainment (or at all), and that is what a social media site is.

Something I also don't appreciate is that more or less, it is worded like or strongly implied that the Cohost team is not paying back loans that they have to, and that they somehow scammed their rich friend with this whole thing. Do we know what their agreement looks like? Maybe they don't have to pay it back yet, or conditions have changed. I wouldn't wanna judge that as an outsider. Not to mention that, regardless of if they're friends or not, that rich friend is a venture capitalist - if they weren't before, they are now, by investing in this startup like this. Venture capitalists and investors in general make risky business decisions like that all the time. Many of their investments do not work out. I think too much of the criticism acts as if this friend is somewhat of a victim, when this is based on assumptions and also obfuscates the actual power dynamic between investors and the companies and projects they invest in.

Also, it pretty much ends with the usual Twitter-esque snarky summary tone that a character limit imposes. Sadly.

Edit: It might seem cherrypicked because I only wrote about the stuff I disagree with, but I agree with other criticisms not mentioned here (especially GDPR and account deletion. After all I was the cause for the repeated forum GDPR banner )

This has been very fascinating to read, because I disagree with you entirely on these points. It's given me a perspective I hadn't even considered. I still don't agree with you, but I appreciate you writing this all out, anyway.

It's not a bad thing to present yourself as human and wishing to be friends with the community members who use your platform, but from the sounds of this Mastodon thread (and not having been a user of Cohost ever, I admit that I can't make my own personally informed judgment on this), the co-founders were constantly trying to "humanise" themselves to their users to gain their graces for not executing deliverables. I actually almost barfed out laughing when I read, “Your users don't need to hear about which members of staff are in a polycule together.” Was this in an official staff update, or a personal post? Because if it's the former I don't see why I would need to know who you're fucking in the changelog. “Your users don't need to hear that bug reports make you feel like a failure.” Right. Get therapy. Go buy a DBT workbook or take a CE-eligible course if you can't afford the ongoing costs of therapy. If you have Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria then deal with it. Especially since your start-up is making negative money and I'm assuming your dysfunction is severe enough to actually impede your ability to make your small business/co-op/Twitbler alternative financially viable (and thus impede your ability to have a roof over your head). Begging people to "Please be patient with me" if you're not doing anything to address your own dumpster-fire is pathetic and unproductive. (I'm going to assume they never did get help, since they were too poor to buy groceries apparently and the platform is dead.)

As for criticising the Mastodon poster for being "wildly dehumanising and pro-capitalist" for being disgusted by the Cohouse co-founder/s bragging about going to furry conventions when they can't afford groceries, I can understand why you're upset at the writer--blaming the poor for being poor is not the most thought-provoking, or helpful, argument--, but I also understand the writer. You have a limited number of resources. How do you prioritise things? Do you want the instant gratification of going to a fun con this year or do you save to give your co-op the best chances possible? Am I gonna buy the fursuit or am I going to pay the electricity bill? If I have fifty dollars to buy groceries to feed my family and I use it to buy booze, will my wife divorce me and take the kids, and am I OK with that? Apparently, the co-founders are in a polycule, so they're all OK with these financial decisions and didn't split up.

Quote from: Memory on August 15, 2023 @25.03

The age-old question whether the web revival and the social media replacement movements (which are tightly related) must be explicitly anti-capitalist or not is obviously relevant here too, given that these problems are almost all related to centralization and being a profit-based business; no matter how strongly worded the manifesto or how much someone calls themselves a queer progressive project. I have seen many a great social media replacement (Crabber, SpaceHey, now Cohost) to be headed by a centralized intransparent leader or tightly knit nepotist group of people, and it looks like that just does not work for long.

This is going to be an unpleasant statement (or even a truth), but despite the unpleasantness of it, I think it has to be stated.

Many people who are anti-capitalist don't necessarily know how to make a capitalist venture work. (We don't live under socialism, they're reliant on private capital to start and run their venture, hence why I call Cohost a "capitalist venture".) They may even have trouble functioning as capitalist employees, nevermind being capitalist decision-makers. Many people who are pro-capitalist are also shitty at Business Development, Project Management, Marketing (which isn't just Advertising--), and so on. Running a business is hard, no matter what your political ideology is. And I'm going to venture that the typical radical anti-capitalist hasn't actually had education, training, or experience in starting and managing a successful capitalist venture. A start-up is a completely different beast, you can't compare being a Founder to working for Microsoft. You see this in indie game development all the time: Development Hells and games never even being published because these artists don't actually know how to self-regulate themselves in their relationships with their colleagues, let alone how to run a business. And that's just games, you don't typically need to make sure you understand GDPR and audit legal compliance in order to publish a turn-based RPG.

EDIT: On another note... They had a 3-year-runway, and from what I understand, with no strings attached other than keeping the codebase private? Jesus Christ, how the hell do you waste a 3-year runway like that? Talk about irresponsible! You know how many other start-ups would KILL for that kind of advantage?! The last two start-ups I was in did NOT have a 3-year runway, goddammit! What the hell! They got lucky and they wasted it! Wow...

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