I want more Micro Monday recommendations! And I also want more Micro Monday diversity
@hjertnes I’ve just added @penmuse (my writing prompt site) to here if you are looking for a Micro Monday suggestion.
@belle I see at least one new person each week. But I hope that it will become more diverse as we run through all the people everyone follows. I would also like to see less "straight white dudes" in the Micro Monday posts
@hjertnes Same. I mostly don't follow the few Micro Monday suggestions that are new to me because my timeline is already lacking diversity.
@belle I am very actively trying to make my following to be less like me. Micro.blog is better quality posting, but I still want more diversity in the posters.
@timeuser I disagree. I think we can boost diverse voices without needing to know how popular they already are, but focusing on whether they say interesting stuff. I see where you're coming from though.
@hjertnes I think the problem for me is lack of discovery. I look at the Discover section multiple times a day, but it's human-curated and not updated super often, and not especially diverse a lot of the time. As users we have few other discovery options.
@hjertnes I think plenty of people would not like being recommended purely on the basis of filling a diversity quota, and fair enough. But for general discovery and Micro Monday, I think we need better ways to uncover and share more diverse voices among our community.
@hjertnes Although, that's assuming there are plenty of diverse voices here that we're just struggling to find. We don't know the make-up of the whole user-base. Maybe diversity is lacking in general? Wonder if @macgenie can share anything about that?
@belle One would hope. It's such a tough balance of incentives and motivations. The popular get more popular. The invisible stay invisible unless someone popular draws attention to them.
@jeredb That's a cool idea. Maybe trusted people could flag interesting posts for inclusion and the curators could still have final say. I agree it seems unsustainable. It already doesn't update enough for my liking 😏
@timeuser Fair point. I definitely think finding ways to boost the undiscovered voices is important.
@jeredb Although for me, at least, the problem would still be that I have no way to discover new voices besides Discover and my timeline. How does one find these new voices to nominate in the first place?
@jeredb Another positive of that approach, though, would be that the Discover section could end up more representative of the interests of the community at large.
@belle @timeuser @jeredb @hjertnes It's great to see solutions being offered so far. Hopefully we'll all put the work in to make these things happening, whether that's making things to help directly or by taking tangible solutions (not necessarily just ideas since anybody can have those) to @manton and @macgenie.
Feedback is good but I think the owners of the modern web have shown us that it doesn't really get the job done, as opposed to action which at least has a chance of improving things.
@belle @timeuser @jeredb @hjertnes et al ..
one man's ‘diversity’ is another woman's ‘same as it ever was’ so if we can, my votes would be to avoid quotas, and agendas.
maybe also step back and ask is it people, themes or ideas that we want to explore ?
i might not follow jo because I really don’t like sport - and 90% of her stuff is about sport - but heh - turns out she has fascinating insights into the indigenous people of the Amazonian rain forest ... who knew? do i want to follow her now - or work out how to discover her insights through tags / search etc
it's kinda why getting your news from your friends on facebook was always a non starter for me ... i might share the same humor, even like the same music - but I seriously do not get the drivel he writes about whether the world is flat …
onwards .... loving the thinking about how to grow and support @manton @macgenie
@JohnPhilpin I find this is one of the issues with the "following" model of social media in general. I'm rarely interested in every post on every topic from the same person. Blogs seem more focussed so RSS works for me, but microblogs are as random as tweets.
@hjertnes Good point; I’d like to add that although I appear to be a straight white guy, I’m also deaf and bisexual so there are different flavors of diversity. That said I’ve brought up some issues pertaining to the deaf here but there was no interest so I’m not sure what the diversity angle is here.
@JohnPhilpin I'll surface those again later; we have an excellent discussion on diversity in general here as it is. I bought this up to say diversity is not always visibly apparent and to not just follow people for their diversity but to engage on their platforms/issues.
@solari Very good point. This is part of why I push for explicit pronouns. There are lots of kinds of diversity that aren't obvious. I'm not sure what the answer is in terms of uncovering diversity that's not easily seen but I'm open to ideas!
@alice of course, but I would be really annoyed if you got invited to Jurassic Park without telling me 😶
@hjertnes Paleontologists study dinosaurs and such (pre-human life) and archaeologists study human life. Paleontology is a pure science, whereas archaeology is a scientific part of the humanities (like a very science-y kind of history). I defer to the actual archaeologist in the discussion :-) but that’s how I see the distinction.
@alice That’s good, because we know archaeologists are better for fighting Nazis and south Asian cults and for going through ancient portals to other planets ;-) (Oooh, an amphora emoji!)
@alice 😄
Also, serious question I’ve been meaning to ask: what’s your field/area/specialty within archaeology?