I read a post by Dave Winer today titled “Working together“. After some recollections about past social networks, his main examples of working together are two discussions he was involved in on the Threads platform. In the first discussion, he replies to someone, and they have a conversation, sharing knowledge. In the second discussion, he is one of many commenters, and it was not apparent to me that anyone replied to his comment.

So – this set of examples are what I would call normal conversations. I would not call it “working together”, but would call it “talking” (no common purpose, no goal, no real accomplishment). Dave says he wants to “crack the nut of figuring out how to work together”. However, at the same time, Dave blocks people who comment on his social media posts. How can you have a conversation (talking) if you block the other person because you don’t like what they have to offer to the conversation? And for calling Chat-GPT “always up for working with you“, that is a laugh. That should be translated as “Chat-GPT always takes my prompt and gives me some response, and I can take it or leave it, or modify my prompt”.

I would offer this post by Colin Wilson from our collaboration on MyStatusTool as a better example of “working together” – and, I would also add, working together with respect, as opposed to this example of working together.