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In tech, everyone loves scaling up.
Bigger is almost always viewed as better, and it's the playbook much of the internet has been built on. The idea of scaling also extends beyond the internet of course, but it seems like tech has really embraced scale as a foundational requirement for success.
I'm curious to know what parts of society should be scaled down. In what areas does the idea of 'scaling up' actually produce more harm than good?
Are there any good examples where an industry or some other system has become stronger by scaling down?
140 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 22h
I was going to go with greed but instead I'm going to do echo chambers.
In my work (I'm a FOSS dev) I work with a lot of people that "don't go out much", not even on the internet. They are stuck with their group of likeminded people (often: discord or TG, but also X) and feel averse to anything that doesn't carry the confirmation bias of the groupthink. Algos on social media reinforce this and are anti-social by design, because a reinforced thought pattern, even if it's kinda insane, binds someone to the app for additional dopamine of "being right".
The solution is both simple and at the same time contains massive barriers: go mix with other people, other communities. Don't go shitcoining of course, find something else. There's forums for everything. Don't be afraid to be wrong and you'll get so much stronger.
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Anything mobile phone related, I think. Social media, mobile games, anything that lets us attach to the screen wherever and whenever.
Don't get me wrong. I love computers, I love the internet, I love online stuff. But having it in your pocket everywhere you go can be incredibly damaging to both you as an individual and to social cohesion as a whole. You see it in the young kids who have attention spans of 5 seconds because they're so used to getting instant dopamine hits from their apps 24/7
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30 sats \ 0 replies \ @Cje95 23h
The dopamine addiction is to strong now sadly 🙃
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30 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr OP 23h
For sure. One thing about most addicting internet apps is that they're global in nature. I wonder if the same problems would exist for a hyper-local social app. I suppose dating apps fall into this category, but what else is out there?
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268 sats \ 1 reply \ @OT 23h
Red tape comes to mind.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr OP 23h
Good idea
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58 sats \ 0 replies \ @nout 23h
Doomscrolling and forever chasing the dopamine in the next video...
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188 sats \ 0 replies \ @Cje95 23h
The government expect to do any and everything for people. No one wants to pay taxes and no one wants the government to tell them everything but people seem to love to expect that
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132 sats \ 0 replies \ @nichro 20h
Governance and legislation.
Less power from federal entities, distributed back more towards mayors, small town halls and even neighborhoods.
If the federal government encroaches on your way or life, you can't easily leave. If a town wants to go vegan and ban meat, you can move to the carnivore town, and everyone is happier.
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Many companies are producing products: -with low quality (same price as before but bad plastic for example, -less food (smaller products (by size/gram), shifting a product to another cause cheaper (butter to peanut oil...)
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Governo
Bigger is almost always viewed as better
Obviously not in the drug market
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the corporations as systems of control become stronger as they scale up, at the expense of individual people; constituent people get weaker as a result and thus the collective consciousness also gets weak;
strive to scale down all systems to the level of a single man or woman (or small groups), and they shall become powerful beyond imagination; that's self-governance!
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @orto 10h
Weapons industry .
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Endless scrolling. Getting to the bottom of a page of content used to be a great signal to move on. Now it just doesn't happen on so many sites.
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Honestly? Customer service.
Remember when calling support lines meant talking to an actual human in your town/country and not yelling "REPRESENTATIVE!" into a phone tree or chatting with a confused bot halfway across the globe? Scaling up saved money for sure, but killed soul. Scale it back and suddenly you're not a ticket number, you're Mrs. X from Y Street again. It’s not nostalgic - yet, it’s just… humane.
Some things work better small. Like espresso shots. Or funerals. Or tech support. 😄
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @aljaz 11h
Government.
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0 sats \ 8 replies \ @Lux 18h
Food production
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This makes no sense. Most people eat garbage. We need more fresh, unprocessed, perishable food, hence more food in total as it can't be stored on shelves due to chemicals and processing.
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0 sats \ 6 replies \ @Lux 14h
We need more fresh, unprocessed, perishable food, hence more food in total as it can't be stored on shelves due to chemicals and processing
so more food on shelves that goes bad?
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Fresh food never goes "bad", it can be repurposed.
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0 sats \ 4 replies \ @Lux 14h
it's impossible to scale up food production without sacrificing quality, the environment and health. eat local, know your farmer and how they work, this is the way. a farmer can't scale, it becomes a corporation/factory
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Lol. You think the number of farmers is constant?
Neighborhoods.
We grow up in boxes, go to school in boxes, and move around in boxes from box to box to hang with people we don't really know or trust because it's economically expedient. We know people because we work with them or have a shared interest.
It used to be different. People are wired for community. We are meant to live and work with people we know and trust forever.
Modern architecture and urban design support efficient movement between strangers, which is unhealthy because it isolates us. Housing and workplaces should be smaller and optimized for smaller groups of people who can trust each other because they naturally run into each other.