Zipf’s law is just a specific example of a power law. Other power laws exist for lots of different things, just with different exponents.

the jury seems out about cities. This paper suggests they don’t follow a other distributions: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264275124002592 , but this one suggests that they do: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2013/12/on-city-size-distribution_g17a2442/5k3tt100wf7j-en.pdf - specifically it suggests they DO follow Zipf’s law, within a given country. Inter-country differences are likely due to different developmental trajectories over time.

Looks like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law

Are there open bugs/feature requests about it?

You can type the hashtag in the URL on the web, and follow it from there.

E.g. https://pixelfed.social/i/web/hashtag/urbanSketching

I wonder if they would be interested in implementing ActivityPub?

Awesome! Ping me when you’re done, if you like. Happy to chat more.

I agree heuristics are a good approach, but I’m not conviced maths people are the ones to do it - at least not alone. There is too much messy sociology at the edges of the problem to ensure good problem specification. Some interdisciplinary approach could kill it though. If you get through that intro article, there’s a short article in the same journal that gives a neat intro the Critical Systems Heuristics, which seems like an excellent wrapper around this kind of approach.

Thanks, I saw that flohmakrt link in another comment too. Excellent!

Does that yrpri site work well?

That’s true of lots of non-federated sites. Anything with an API…

Oooh, awesome, thanks for this link!

A version of this focussed on a gift economy/trading platform (e.g. like freecycle, or the buy nothing groups on facebook) would also be cool.

Also person-to-person buying/selling, rather than business-to-person would be nice to have, like craigslist, reverb.com, gumtree, or used items on ebay.

If this was focused on a craigslist/gumtree style of selling, where most of the actual trade is done off-site/in-person with cash or bank transfers, it would completely side-step the payment processor problem.

Also:

• gift economy/trading platform (e.g. like freecycle)
• buying/selling (e.g. like ebay)
• local community/bioregionalism networks (e.g. what nextdoor should be)

These seem kind of ideal for a federated network, IMO.

I actually think Lemmy would be a pretty decent format for something stackoverflow like - just maybe needs to UI tweaks to minimise the visual space that replies take up, plus maybe answered post flair

Me too, but I’m not paying enough attention to reddit to make me a useful moderator…

I have a maths major, and think in networks, same as you. I agree that that’s a good start to thinking about the problem. It’s basically similar approach to Jay Forrester’s World model, that used system dynamics to model the global economy.

But what you’re doing is building a model, and then proposing using it to make decisions about how to run the world. This would be sensible, except that any model is necessarily a simplification of the real world, and that simplification process is subjective. What you value and care about and think is important defines what you put in the model, and also what you optimise for, and how you interpret the outputs. So your decisions ultimately end up being subjective too.

There are other issues too, such as the fact that any dynamic model like this exhibits complexity, which makes it analytically unsolveable; and chaos, which means numerical predictions will suffer from unpredictability due to the Butterfly effect, and the Hawkmoth effect.

If you want to get a deeper understanding of this stuff, systems thinking is where you need to head. I would recommend this paper as an excellent introduction to the field as a whole: https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.54120%2Fjost.000051 (Open access, about 50 pages)

For the first wave/system dynamics approach, this article is worth a read too (IMO it presents far to simple a picture though): https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/

I don’t think this is a maths problem. It’s a social problem. Monkey brain combined with internet communications is still not a solved problem.

I think part of this is figuring out the values you want to express in the format of any given service (Marshal McLuhan style). You need to figure out what it is you’re trying to build for, and then build systems and tools that optimise towards that. (Corporate social media is failing because it’s only optimised towards profit, and that approach eats itself in the long run).

I posted an issue for mastodon on this recently. I think Lemmy should be asking the same questions.

What was the picture?

Maybe we need a shitRedditBans community here to repost all the stuff that get banned for bad reasons there? Could be risky, I guess, but could be great with some good moderation.

Not a bad set! I would add something related to “funny”.

Also, separating agree (opinion) from accurate (factual) would be nice. But I guess you gotta keep it somewhat simple.

Right, thanks. Still a super useful system, IMO, though I’m sure better versions are possible.

That’s true, but it’s gotta be balanced by limiting the fallout of extreme cases on other users

It doesn’t accumulate and display anywhere though, does it?

Maybe. They might also mean you’re an idiot.

Slashdot used to have a multidimensional voting system that would allow you to up or down vote something based on whether it was funny/insightful/correct, etc (can’t remember the dimension). I wish we had something like that. Sometimes it would be useful to mark a comment as “funny, but also wrong”