https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/blob/main/src/contributors/07-ranking-algo.md has some info on that but seems to be focused on post/comment sorting. Maybe community sorting uses a similar mechanism but this isn’t clearly mentioned in the documentation.

edit: trending communities are local communities sorted by “hot” ranking, which is calculated using the logarithm of the number of subscribers and pulled down by the time the community existed.

The ARM example is kind of funny for me due to personal experience. There’s a game called ComPressure, which was originally designed by one of its employees as a recruiting tool. It’s complicated enough to crush Notch’s brain and make him feel dumb, and the developer extends job interview offers to anyone who completes it. The free demo contains the full game… and i’ve deliberately chosen not to finish it despite being the top player in one of its leaderboards.

Originally this was so i could focus on graduating first, but that still hasn’t happened several years later, during which SoftBank ordered a hiring freeze and tried to squeeze out more licensing fees from its customers, who immediately scrambled to RISC-V because they’ve realized the risk in sticking with licensing ARM.

As for razors - the double-edged safety razor was an obvious extension of the single edged safety razor design patented in 1880. Even though the patent expired, Gilette still tried to evergreen it. They got a patent for another improvement to that design (reinforcing the corners of its cap to reduce the likelihood of damage to them) and immediately used that to unsucessfully sue another blade manufacturer for trimming corner pieces of their blades so they could fit that design.

The ease of obtaining a patent, extending its duration with tangential improvements and drowning completely unrelated uses is enough of a problem to make a game developer realize spending multiple times the settlement cost in fighting the patent and making a documentary about it was cheaper in the long run.

Besides copyright and patent law, there’s also trademark law (which i believe may be used in the future to indefinitely extend copyright) and military law (mostly the red cross making illegal use of its trademarks equivalent to a war crime, but also used to supress inventions). The only way i’ve seen this skirted around successfully was with Kenneth Shoulders publishing a book disclosing his findings on ultrafast high-voltage electric discharges to random people he knew nothing about prior to filing a patent on that.

The intellectual property system is the reason we can’t have nice things.

I think there’s multiple reasons behind the recent social media company avalanche, but one of the main ones has been the ability in the past to use market prominence as a source of cheap money to buy out competition. The recent moneychasing after interest rate increases is just the other end of that faustian bargain for the small actors in all of this, but is still far from sufficient to stop the larger ones.

Taking Reddit, they’ve initially ran as an extremely lean company and were able to make their initial $100k in funding from Y Combinator last a whopping 9 years from 2005 to 2014. Next funding round gets them $50M… and the first things they do with it? acquire a chunk of imgur and the entirety of Alien Blue, then get a scapegoat CEO to make unpopular changes. They would then later use another funding round to buy and snuff out Dubsmash.

During that time, Twitter was much worse and did the same with Tweetie, Tweetdeck, Bagcheck, Summify, Posterous, Vine, SnappyTV, Twitpic(in a particularly hostile fashion), Periscope, Highly, Squad, Breaker, Revue, Sphere and Threader.

IMO larger actors will feel some crunch, but they can achieve enough revenue to survive the meltdown and the only hope of stopping them is a large scale government-mandated breakup that is unlikely to happen because the largest ones are now starting attempts at buying out governments with the intention of making competition too difficult or even outright illegal.

This already happened with other fields, such as software copyright. DMCA Section 1201 makes another IBM PC-compatible watershed moment impossible and trusted computing is being used to stifle other competition avenues. Patents have completely locked out 5G communications. Electronic circuits have a significant regulatory overhead cost with EMC testing mandates. The most recent attempt in this trend is in AI regulatory capture.

So far the main holdout left is the EU. Buying out representatives there has mostly failed so far, but led to a pivot where attempts are being made to break it apart by influencing voters (see Cambridge Analytica and Brexit) and promoting puppet candidates. If the EU fails at defending itself from this, there isn’t much that can be done as technology has evolved to the point civil wars no longer have a chance to be successful without major involvement from other states.

Small-scale independent hosting is probably the best way around feeding such actors on the internet, but is being prepared against by slowing down IPv6 adoption to use CGNAT as an excuse to limit self-hosting, with law proposals undermining encryption and reducing privacy from governments being made as a backup plan. This will require some reduction in capabilities as bandwidth and storage remain expensive for individuals, but i don’t think this reduction will remain forever since these limitations also included compute in the past.