BJHanssen

Engagement is merely the ability to, or the degree to which you are able to, maintain interaction with something (a system, a game, a fidget toy, whatever) over time. It has absolutely nothing to do with entertainment, although you can use entertainment as a means of achieving or increasing engagement. However, entertainment is hard. People are entertained by different things to different degrees, and respond to their entertainment in different ways. Engagement on the other hand is a fairly simple behavioural matter and that's a whole field of science (which is mostly bollocks, to be fair, but its lessons can be very effective when applied at scale).

Source: I used to be a behavioural engineer, specifically a gamification specialist. Engagement was the oil I was employed to extract, and entertainment the excuse my field used to pretend what we were (and still are) doing isn't just social manipulation at scale.

I really, really need people to grok the distinction between engagement and entertainment.

This has no business being downvoted, an excellent video from an excellent creator.

Gonna ignore all context for the purposes of answering / contributing to a discussion of a kinda valid underlying question:

There is a disconnect between moderation and membership in an ostensibly democratic social media structure. How could that gap be bridged?

The way I see it, this is basically the representation vs delegation debate, though here it is arguable whether there is even representation. From this perspective, you can draw on a couple of hundred years of theory and practice to arrive at potential structures.

For example, you could have a system where members of a community mark themselves as willing to moderate it, and all members select a willing delegate essentially their ‘moderating power’ to. Mods are then selected by number of delegations, which would be a fluid process because users can redistribute their ‘votes’ at any time. This would make mods immediately answerable to the members.

To make the system less vulnerable to hijacking you would probably need some kind of delay in there so that you wouldn’t suddenly get a mass influx of new users delegating to the same mods to take over the community, and there would likely need to be other measures in place as well. But it would certainly be a neat experiment!

(Just to note, I am not saying the current moderation model is necessarily bad, just figured it would be interesting to consider alternative approaches and have a look at what possible problems there might be in both the current model and any such alternatives.)

Removal of dedicated server functionality in favour of matchmaking was always going to be a horrible, horrible idea. And this is honestly the least of its negative consequences. Even before that there was the requirement of multiplayer servers to be set up through 'official channels' of various sorts, which has this same problem because those are still platforms with maintenance costs that companies will eventually cut.

It's the same platforms vs protocols issue that the fediverse is addressing, just in a different sphere of the internet.

It's pretty well established academically that basically the only way KPIs can actually work toward their intended purpose is if they are changed often and determined by the people doing the work that is ultimately measured. Ongoing measurements should only ever be used as indicators - hence the term *key performance indicators_ - and should never be used as targets. What that means in practice is that you should generally ignore all the individual metrics, and look across all of them instead to see if you can spot trends and anomalies, then investigate these qualitatively with the workers who ultimately produce those data to figure out what is happening and if any intervention is necessary.

The problem is that the higher up you get in the hierarchy, the less of that kind of work there is to do and you end up chasing the people below you for nice numbers to plot into your presentations to make it look like there's a point to your job's existence.

Alternative (and generally easier to understand) formulation: Once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

See: grades, GDP, workplace metrics...

People huffing and puffing about other people not using words the way they expect: "God this wind is terrible, we need to abolish wind or at least make it blow in a different direction"

Honestly, the game is amazing 95% of the time. But Act 3 feels a bit too packed and a bit rushed at the same time. I’ve not been able to complete it because the game consistently crashes for me at a particular point on what amounts to ‘the final run’.

The fact that instead of just leaving the gsme until patched I instead chose to start over with a second character says something about how good the game is otherwise.

You only feel bound by the social contract of the community / communities of which you actually feel part in your day to day. The one-two punch of neoliberal hyper-individualism (and the associated deliberate deconstruction of community) and online communities of special interests leads to people walking about a shared world with widely disparate senses of what their 'social contract' stipulates.

I have autism. First time I had covid, it got bad enough that I ended up in hospital for a week. Mentally, covid did two things; it made me a lot more forgetful in ways that I weren't before, and it ruined my ability to focus. Effectively, due to symptomatic overlap with autism, covid gave me ADHD inattentive type. No signs of it going away, nor would I expect it to. Much of the damage caused by covid is permanent and cumulative with later re-infections, and I really wish people got that point.

First and foremost, treat people like people.