Post #570696

It’s not enough to trust “good people” to do “good things”. We should always be endeavouring to set up systems and guardrails to make the good, society-enriching decisions easier to make, and conversely the society-damaging ones harder. That’s why I’m so initially distrustful of platforms that are set up with the best of intentions while still operating in a paradigm that makes them susceptible to the same problems that got us here in the first place. Why I’ll keep investing in staying active on actual social platforms like Mastodon and Pixelfed, despite the issues with them, rather than other options that aren’t built with those guardrails in place. “Remember: I knew and trusted the Twitter founders and I still got screwed. It's not enough for the people who run a service to be good people – they also have to take steps to insulate themselves (and their successors) from the kind of drip-drip-drip rationalizations that turn a series of small ethical waivers into a cumulative avalanche of pure wickedness” https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/05/executive-dysfunction/