- Twitter: owned by Musk, a fascist
- Blue Sky: funded by Dorsey, a fascist
- Facebook: owned by Zuckerberg, a fascist
- Instagram: owned by Zuckerberg, a fascist
- Threads: owned by Zuckerberg, a fascist
- Post News: funded by Andreessen, a fascist
- TikTok: owned by the Chinese Government I guess?
- Mastodon: owned by nobody and/or everybody! Seize the memes of production!
- The Pre-Internet ‘People Magazine’ Era
- Content from ‘your friends’ kills People Magazine
- Kardashians/Professional ‘friends’ kill real friends
- Algorithmic everyone kills Kardashians
- Next is pure-AI content which beats ‘algorithmic everyone’
Twitter now feels like the Brewster’s Millions of tech
I’d like to share two ‘leaving Twitter’ posts I came across yesterday. Theyoccupy somewhat opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of reasons for the decision. One is cold and rational, as befits an analyst like Benedict Evans. The other is more passionate and emotional, as you’d expect from someone like Douglas Rushkoff.
Let’s take Evans first, who writes:
...The last year swapped stasis for chaos. Stuff breaks at random and you don’t know if it’s a bug or a decision. The advertisers have fled, and no-one knows what will be broken by accident or on purpose tomorrow. The example that’s closest to home for me was that the in-house newsletter product was shut down - and then links to other newsletters were banned. Pick one! It’s hard to see anyone who depends on having a long-term platform investing in anything that Twitter builds, when it might not be there tomorrow.I couldn’t really care less about Twitter’s business model, although I did see the writing on the wall in 2014 when I wrote about what I call ‘software with shareholders’. So poor platform decisions don’t really move me.There are various diagnoses for this. Tesla has sometimes been run in chaos as well, but the pain of that is on the employees, not the customers: you can’t wake up in the middle of the night and decide the car should have five wheels and ship that the next day, but you can make those kinds of decisions in software, and Elon Musk does, all the time. Perhaps it’s a fundamental failure to understand how you run a community. Or something else. But whatever the explanation, Twitter now feels like the Brewster’s Millions of tech - ‘Watch One Man Turn $40bn Into $4 In 24 Months!’
What I am concerned about is reputational damage. Which is why our co-op’s Twitter/X account has been mothballed and will be deleted in January 2024. Being associated with a toxic brand is never a good idea.
So let’s move onto Rushkoff, who starts writing about Twitter/X but ends up (perhaps unhelpfully) generalising:
The uniquely destabilizing aspect of these platforms is that there’s no friction. There are no moderating influences. It’s a bit like running on ice. You go in a certain direction, and then you can’t stop. You just keep sliding in that direction. That’s what happens with social media. There’s no friction, no moderation, no balance. Every idea ends up rushing sliding towards its absolute conclusion immediately. So ideas in progress, things that maybe could be considered together — they end up just going to their logical extremes.I think Rushkoff makes a great point about “ideas in progress”. It used to be the case, before everyone arrived on social media, that you could share things that were unfinished, works in progress, half-baked ideas. These days, people are held to account for things they’ve posted over a decade earlier, as if people don’t learn and grow.[…]
That frictionless quality of this space untethers its users from reality. It’s like an acid trip where the hallucinations can become more compelling than the real. Every thought spins out and magnifies. If you have a fear, it’s as if it is just conjured into reality. Without an intentional set and setting for such an acid trip, one can easily get lost in the turbulence.
I’m pleased to have made the decision a couple of years ago to leave Twitter complete, and to have done so without much fanfare. There are much better spaces to be online, usually in the dark forests. But there are more public places, too. The Fediverse (where you can find me on social.coop, among other spaces) continues to be a good experience for me. More recently, I’ve found Substack Notes to be pretty great.
People used to describe Twitter like a café or bar where you could get involved with, and overhear, great conversations. To extend that analogy, sometimes a bar gets overrun with the wrong kind of person, and so people with any kind of taste move on. It seems like that’s what’s happened now with Twitter.
Sources:
The fragmentation of the (social) web
These days, I lean heavily on Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter to know what’s going on in the areas of social media I don’t pay much attention to. In other words, TikTok, Instagram, and… well, most of it.
However, as Broderick himself points out, nobody really knows what’s going on, and there is no centre, due to the fragmentation of the (social) web. This used to be called ‘balkanization’ but because the 1990s is a long time ago, Broderick has coined the term ‘the Vapor Web’. He claims we’re in a ‘post-viral’ time.
I don’t think ‘The Vapor Web’ will catch on as a term, though. At least not amongst British people and Canadians. We like our ‘u’ too much ;)
My big unified theory of the internet is that the way we use the web is constantly being redefined by conflict and disaster. I brought this up in an interview with Bloomberg last month. If you look back at particularly big years for the web — 2001, the stretch from 2010 to 2012, 2016, 2020, etc. — you typically find moments of big global upheaval arriving right as a suite of new digital tools reach an inflection point with users. Then, suddenly, we have a new way of being online.Source: Is the web actually evaporating? | Garbage DayUnlike previous global conflicts, however, this time around, the defining narrative about online behavior is not just that there is, seemingly, an absence of it, but that it also still, partially, works the way it did 10 years ago. Every millennial is experiencing an overwhelming feeling that, as WIRED recently wrote, “first-gen social media users have nowhere to go,” but that’s not actually true. It’s just that TikTok is where everyone is and TikTok doesn’t work like Facebook or even YouTube. Which is why the White House is agonizing over the popularity of TikTok hashtags right now instead of canceling my student loan debt.
[…]
Let’s do one more, to bring us back to Israel and Palestine. In the last 120 days, the #Israel hashtag has been used around 220,000 times and been viewed three billion times. The #Palestine hashtag has been used 230,000 times and has been viewed around two billion times. Yes, Palestine is slightly more popular on TikTok, but nothing out of line with what outlets like NPR have found by, you know, actually polling Americans along political and generational lines. To say nothing of how minuscule these numbers are when compared to how large TikTok is.
Which is to say that the internet doesn’t make sense in aggregate anymore and trying to view it as a monolith only gives you bad, confusing, and, oftentimes, wrong impressions of what’s actually going on.
The best descriptions of the current state of the web right now were both actually published months before the fighting in the Middle East broke out and written about a completely different topic. Semafor’s Max Tani coined the term, “the fragmentation election,” which was a riff on writer John Herrman’s similar idea, the “nowhere election”. Tani points to declining media institutions and dying platforms as the culprit for all the amorphousness online. And Herrman latches on podcasts and indie media. Both are true, but I think those are all just symptoms. And so, to piggyback off both of them, and go a bit broader (as I typically do), I’m going to call our current moment the Vapor Web. Because there is actually more internet with more happening on it — and with bigger geopolitical stakes — than ever before. And yet, it’s nearly impossible to grab ahold of it because none of it adds up into anything coherent. Simply put, we’re post-viral now.
Image: DALL-E 3
The social semi-permeable membrane
I never used LiveJournal, but I love Ben Werdmuller’s description of it as a place to journal in private with your friends. Although that’s not exactly what Substack provides, the interaction between the longer-form and the shorter form (through Substack Notes) is getting there.
It’s not as if it would be ideal to just have a place for existing friends, as you need new people and ideas to mix things up a bit. So it’s that semi-permeable membrane that makes things interesting: not quite fully public, but not quite fully private.
If you missed its heyday about twenty years ago, LiveJournal was a private blogging community that led to much of what we know as social media. You could follow your friends, and they could follow you back if they wanted; your posts could be shared with the whole world, just with your friends, or with a subset. Every post could host thriving, threaded discussions. You could theme your journal extensively, making it your own. And while you could post photos and other media, it was unapologetically optimized for long-form text. The fact that the whole codebase was also open sourced, paving the way for Dreamwidth and other downstream communities, didn’t hurt at all. Brad Fitzpatrick, its founder, went on to build a stunning number of important web building blocks.Source: Journaling in private with my friends | Ben Werdmuller[…]
Public social networks force us to use a different facet of our identities. In a private space with your friends, nobody really cares about your job, and nobody’s hustling to promote whatever it is they’re working on. Twitter nudged social networking into becoming a space for marketing and brands, which is a ball the new Twitter-a-likes have picked up and carried. Much like the characters from The Breakfast Club, each of the new Twitters has its own stereotypical niche: the nerds, the brands, the rich people, the journalists. But they all feel a little bit like people are trying to sell ideas to you all of the time.
Where next for social media?
There’s nothing new about the idea of a splinternet or original about observing that people are retreating to dark forests of social media. I’m using this post about how social media is changing to also share a few links about Twitter (I’m not calling it “X”)
On Monday, my co-op will be running a proposal as to whether to deactivate our Twitter account. To my mind, we should have done it a long time ago. Engagement is non-existent, the whole thing is now a cesspool of misinformation, and even Bloomberg is publishing articles stating there is a moral case for no longer using it. The results are likely to be negligible.
The trouble is that, although I don’t particularly want there to be another dominant, centralised platform, getting yourself noticed (and getting work) becomes increasingly difficult. I guess this is where the POSSE model comes in: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
In a way, the pluriverse is already here. People can be active on half a dozen social-media apps, using each for a unique purpose and audience. On "public" platforms such as LinkedIn and X, formerly Twitter, I carefully curate my presence and use them exclusively as public-broadcasting tools for promotions and outreach. But for socializing, I retreat to various tight-knit, private groups such as iMessage threads and Instagram's Close Friends list, where I can be more spontaneous and personal in what I say. But while this setup is working OK for now, it's a patchwork solution.Source: The Age of Social Media Is Changing and Entering a Less Toxic Era | Business Insider[…]
But for all its flaws, I have depended on big platforms. My job as a freelance journalist hinges on a public audience and my ability to keep tabs on developing news. The fatigue I have felt is therefore partly fueled by another, more-pressing concern: Which social network should I bank on? It isn’t that I don’t want to post; I just don’t know where to do it anymore.
[…]
I’ve spent the past few months on Mastodon and Bluesky, a Jack Dorsey-backed decentralized social network, and have found them the best bets so far to replace Twitter. Their clutter-free platforms already match the quality of discourse that was on Twitter, albeit not at the same scale. And that’s the only problem with these platforms: They aren’t compatible with each other or big enough on their own to replace today’s giants. While there are efforts to bridge them and allow users to interact across the platforms, none have proved successful.
If these and other decentralized platforms find a way to merge into a larger ecosystem, they will force big platforms to change their tune in order to keep up. And hopefully, that future will yield a more balanced and regulated online lifestyle.
[…]
The other problem is that users have very little control over what they experience online. Studies have found that news overload from social media can cause stress, anxiety, fatigue, and lack of sleep. By democratizing social media, users can turn those negative health effects around by taking more control over who they’re associated with, what they look at in their feeds, and how algorithms are influencing their social experience. And by splintering our time across a variety of platforms — each with a different approach to content moderation — the online communication ecosystem ends up better reflecting the diversity of the people who use it. People who wish to keep their data to themselves can live inside tight-knit circles. Those who don’t want a round-the-clock avalanche of polarizing content can change what their feed shows them. Activists looking to spread a message can still reach millions. The list goes on.
A reward is not 'more email'
I’ve just signed up to support Jay Springett’s work and am looking forward to receiving his zine.
As he points out, it’s a bit odd that getting more email is the core benefit of most subscription platforms. I shall be pondering that.
I say this every time I put a zine out, but I think that this is the way to go – at least for me. I just don’t understand Patreon and Substack rewards being ‘more email’. its baffling.Source: Start Select Reset Zine – Quiet Quests - thejaymoSocial media is collapsing, and as I wrote in the first paper edition of the zine. We are returning to the real. A physical newsletter/zine doesn’t get any realer than that.
Well, when you put it like that...
This came across my timeline earlier this week and it’s a pretty stark reminder / wake-up call. For ‘Mastodon’, of course, read ‘The Fediverse’.
You could add LinkedIn to this list, but then that’s owned by Microsoft, a company who I have detested for fully 25 years.
To recap your options in this crowded social media landscape:Source: 10-Oct-2023 (Tue): Wherein Twitter delenda est | DNA LoungeIf you are worried about picking the "right" Mastodon instance, don't. Just spin the wheel. How about sfba.social or mastodon.social, those are both fine choices.
Social media platforms have been reading the airlines' enshittification handbook
This year, Cory Doctorow has been making waves with his, as usual, spot-on analysis of what’s going on in the world. What he calls ‘enshittification’ happens like this:
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.This article talks about how platforms such as Twitter/X, TikTok, and Instagram are either already charging, or planning to charge, users of their platforms. As the author, Thomas Germain, points out this means that not only are you now the product, you're the customer.
Interestingly, Germain likens what social networks are doing to what airlines have done: deliberately make things worse and then providing a paid upgrade to relieve your pain.
On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta plans to charge European users $17 a month for an ad-free version of Instagram and Facebook. It solidifies a trend that would have seemed absurd just a few years ago: every major social media platform now either has a premium tier or is experimenting with rolling one out. It’s the dawning of a new era, where the tech industry suggests people should pay to look at memes and tweets, and somehow, vast numbers of people break out their credit cards and do it.Source: Welcome to the Age of Paid Social Media | Gizmodo[…]
This is a radical departure from the business model that ran social media for the past few decades, where you offer your eyeballs to the advertising gods in exchange for free connections to friends and content creators. The old cliche goes that if you’re not the customer, your product. Now, it seems, you’re both.
[…]
It’s a system that creates perverse incentives for companies. Social media isn’t the first industry to charge customers for a more comfortable experience. Airlines, for example, offer the tech business a troubling, anti-consumer model. You’ve probably noticed air travel has gotten a lot more unpleasant. That’s by design. Over the last twenty years, airlines have found ways to charge customers for options that used to be free, including checked bags, seat selection, and priority boarding. Legroom, too, is now a way to squeeze travelers for more cash. By 2014, Consumer Reports found that on average, the roomiest seats in coach were several inches tighter than the smallest seats that airlines dared to offer passengers in the 1990s. Airlines have such a stranglehold on our economy that they can make their customers suffer, on purpose, to encourage you to pay for a little relief.
You can probably expect the same on social media. It’s already happening to a certain extent. On YouTube, the serfs who want free videos are now sometimes treated to two or even three unskippable ads, and incessant popups that promise a better life is just a few dollars away.
The Social Media Archipelago
On 1st October, I’ll be transitioning the Thought Shrapnel newsletter to Substack. More about that here. What’s interesting is the ecosystem that’s being created there — including Substack Notes, which is where I came across this post.
I’ve several things to say about this hand-drawn map of the ‘social media archipelago’. First, as the top commenter on the post notes, it’s similar to a classic xkcd cartoon from 2007 and shows how much the landscape has changed.
Second, Chelsea Troy quite rightly points out that we’ve got a Twitter-shaped hole in the internet, which people are filling with either private communities (Slack/Discord), the Fediverse (Mastodon, etc.), or Twitter-like things (Bluesky, etc.)
What I think they’re missing is.. Substack Notes. For someone who loves reading and writing, it’s full of interesting people sharing thoughtful things. You can find my notes here.
To anyone looking to navigate the ongoing perils of social media, it can be a challenging and daunting task. An adventure marked by intense trepidation and foreboding, by fear and doubt. But worry no longer, I have drawn a map.Source: Note by M. E. Rothwell on SubstackI present to you, The Social Media Archipelago.
Whether you’re lost among the Musky Mountains or the Dunk Swamps of Twitterland, or in the selfie-obsessed Forest of Mirrors on the Isle of Insta, I hope this chart can be a helpful guide on your journey. Never again be stranded among the bleak deserts of Facebook, no interesting content in sight. Never again be sucked into the maelstrom of the Doomscroll, forever locked among the whirlpools of cheap dopamine hits.
Instead, look toward the lone peak of innocent hopes, reminiscent of the heady days of the early internet, where healthy conversation and good faith debate may yet flourish. Look to the terra novalis, known to the early cartographers as the mythical land of Substackus Notum.
Or in the common tongue — Substack Notes.
(it was a slow day at work ok)
The punishment for being authentic is becoming someone else’s content
This short piece by Drew Austin reminds me of a couple of links I posted yesterday about Non-places and TikTok’s effect on migration. There are so many quotable parts, including that when it comes to social media, “the only place left to go is outside”.
What I think is interesting is how online and offline used to be seen as completely separate. Then we realised the impact that offline life had on online life, and now we’re seeing the reverse: Instagram, TikTok, etc. having a huge impact on the spaces in which we exist offline.
“In the next few years,” Kyle Chayka tweeted yesterday, “the last desperate search for shreds of authentic local culture will convulse the globe as the internet consumes every interesting quirk and scales it up to the size of TikTok.” That all-too-plausible prediction fits well alongside Chayka’s concept of AirSpace and his observations about overtourism, each examining how social media has come to shape the physical world (or at least vent its noxious exhaust there) instead of merely reflecting it. If AirSpace represents the homogenizing tendency of globally scaled algorithmic platforms like Instagram and Airbnb, which herd everything they touch into aesthetic alignment, then TikTok’s impact seems like the opposite: the cultivation and amplification of difference by a desperate horde of content creators scouring the ends of the earth for new material. The latter ultimately has the same entropic effect as the former, reframing local nuances as temporary viral microtrends that diffuse through culture, form the basis for a thinkpiece or two, and then recede back to their original modest scale. This may be ephemeral but it is pervasive and ongoing. In the contemporary landscape, the punishment for being authentic is becoming someone else’s content.Source: I’m Beginning to See the Light | Kneeling Bus[…]
The illusion that the internet and “real life” are two separate universes has been thoroughly dispelled by now, but the nature of their interaction is complex and evolving. The social media era seems to have already peaked, as I predicted at the end of last year, calling our present moment a “saturation point of cultural self-consciousness that represents the fullest possible synthesis of reality and our digitally mediated perception of it.” The metaverse concept was dead on arrival; there’s nowhere left to go but outside. And that’s what we’re doing: TikTok is the social network for the internet’s decadent era, embodying the worldview that becoming viral content is the highest calling, the end state to which everything aspires and strives. You visit Italy not to enjoy yourself but to help Italy fulfill its destiny as a meme.
It's all about the DMs
I think it’s fascinating that this article uses a zeugma to explain what’s happened to places that we’ve called home online. In other words, we’ve moved from social media to social media with the emphasis on the content and performance rather than the sharing.
The fatigue average people feel when it comes to posting on Instagram has pushed more users toward private posting and closed groups. Features like Close Friends (a private list of people who have access to your content) and the rise of group chats give people a safer place to share memes, gossip with friends, and even meet new people. It's less pressure — they won't mind if I didn't blur out the pimple on my forehead — but this side of Instagram hardly fulfills the original free-flowing promise of social media.Source: Social media is dead | Insider[…]
Despite the efforts of big incumbents and buzzy new apps, the old ways of posting are gone, and people don’t want to go back. Even Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, admitted that users have moved on to direct messages, closed communities, and group chats. Regularly posting content is now largely confined to content creators and influencers, while non-creators are moving toward sharing bits of their lives behind private accounts.
As more people have been confronted with the consequences of constant sharing, social media has become less social and more media — a constellation of entertainment platforms where users consume content but rarely, if ever, create their own. Influencers, marketers, average users, and even social-media executives agree: Social media, as we once knew it, is dead.
[…]
And if Instagram was the bellwether for the rise and fall of the “social” social-media era, it is also a harbinger of this new era. “If you look at how teens spend their time on Instagram, they spend more time in DMs than they do in stories, and they spend more time in stories than they do in feed,” Mosseri said during the “20VC” interview. Given this changing behavior, Mosseri said the platform has shifted its resources to messaging tools. “Actually, at one point a couple years ago, I think I put the entire stories team on messaging,” he said.
Giving advice online without mansplaining
In the last few days I rediscovered this post from Another Angry Woman via someone linking to it. I don’t think I shared it at the time, but it helped me understand how even well-meaning advice can be spectacularly unhelpful.
I’d recommend reading the whole thing, especially if you identify as male. However, the main takeaway for me was to ask if the person wants advice. Most recently, for example, I enquired if someone was “just venting or would like advice based on my experience”. They replied they were just venting.
Remember Clippy from Microsoft Office? You’re just trying to write a letter, and this insufferable little paperclip is popping up constantly with his vapid googly eyes and awful eyebrows and that fucking condescending smirk and his horrid little bendy body and oh god the colour of that speech bubble, like slightly worrying vaginal discharge, and the “it looks like” why is it so passive aggressive why- Sorry, I lost myself there. In short, Clippy was an irritation, and you’re giving someone’s notifications tab the vibes of using Word in 1997, which nobody wants to go back to.Source: How to give advice on the internet without being an utter menace | Another angry woman[…]
There is a gendered element to this, too. Mansplaining is something which most women on the internet have experienced fairly frequently. It is exhausting. It is patronising. It is the background hum of patriarchy.
You might not personally be mansplaining. Maybe you’re not even a man. But those who have been on the receiving end of mansplaining are sensitive to it. Your attempt to help can come across as mansplaining, and throw you straight into the draining and exhausting pile.
[…]
When someone is not asking a question, they probably do not want advice. This means, you have not been invited to give it. Your advice is not welcome. No matter how much you think there’s a solution to their predicament or they could do things a little differently, you’ve not been invited to share your advice. So don’t.
Attempting to quantify the unquantifiable
This article, which I discovered via Sentiers, discusses the rise of ‘Quantitative Aesthetics’, or putting numbers on things you like to prove other people wrong. It’s basically numbers as a shorthand for status, and once you realise it, you see it everywhere. It’s the social media-ification of all of the things.
[T]here’s something called the McNamara Fallacy, a.k.a. the Quantitative Fallacy. It is summarized as “if it cannot be measured, it is not important.” The Heller article made me reflect on how a version of it is now very present, and growing, at the grassroots of taste.Source: How We Ended Up in the Era of ‘Quantitative Aesthetics,’ Where Data Points Dictate Taste | ArtnetOn one level, this is seen in a rise of a kind of wonky obsession with business stats in fandoms, invoked as a way to convey the rightness of artistic opinions—what I want to call Quantitative Aesthetics. (There are actually scientists who study aesthetic preference in labs and use the term “quantitative aesthetics.” I am using it in a more diffuse way.)
It manifests in music. As the New York Times wrote in 2020 of the new age of pop fandom, “devotees compare No. 1s and streaming statistics like sports fans do batting averages, championship, wins and shooting percentages.” Last year, another music writer talked about fans internalizing the number-as-proof-of-value mindset to extreme levels: “I see people forcing themselves to listen to certain songs or albums over and over and over just to raise those numbers, to the point they don’t even get enjoyment out of it anymore.”
The same goes for film lovers, who now seem to strangely know a lot about opening-day grosses and foreign box office, and use the stats to argue for the merits of their preferred product. There was an entire campaign by Marvel super-fans to get Avengers: Endgame to outgross Avatar, as if that would prove that comic-book movies really were the best thing in the world.
On the flip side, indie director James Gray, of Ad Astra fame, recently complained about ordinary cinema-goers using business stats as a proxy for artistic merit: “It tells you something of how indoctrinated we are with capitalism that somebody will say, like, ‘His movies haven’t made a dime!’ It’s like, well, do you own stock in Comcast? Or are you just such a lemming that you think that actually has value to anybody?”
The internet should be a place for connection, surprise, and delight
As new platforms try to imitate existing ones, it becomes more challenging for users to find unique and diverse voices (and content).
So it’s important for users, developers, and investors to encourage innovation and diversity in online spaces, instead of solely focusing on creating platforms that trap users and prioritise profit.
You know, the internet still has the potential to be a place for connection, surprise, and delight. But it requires a collective effort to resist the monopolistic tendencies of a few dominant players.
This kind of duplication isn't just a clear a failure of imagination; it is the kind of innovation that capitalism rewards. Don't make something new, make the same thing that someone else made very successful, but slightly better. To have a proven concept, after all, is to plagiarize. It's annoying to see millions of dollars thrown at making more-or-less literal dupes of internet companies that everyone is already using begrudgingly and with diminishing emotional returns. It's maybe more frustrating to realize that the goals of these companies is the same as their predecessors, which is to make the internet smaller.[…]
The death of Google Reader is much bemoaned by bloggers like myself, many of whom believe that its end was why blogs died. That’s a beautiful revisionist history that I won’t be taking part in here. Google Reader, which was essentially a very well-designed RSS feed with a mild interactive component, died because Google decided they didn’t want to play the game in the way that its founders had said they’d play it. Those ethical foundations proved extremely easy to discard once some shiny new companies, most notably Facebook and Twitter, began raking in billions of dollars.
[…]
The reason the death of Google Reader matters, here, is that it marks a pivotal moment in the deliberate and engineered shrinking of the internet. When Google Reader died, article discovery shifted. People were no longer reading RSS feeds, finding new sites, following them, and being updated when those sites posted. Instead, they were scrolling on the endless feed of Twitter, and (at the time) Facebook, and they got whatever they got.
[…]
It is worth remembering that the internet wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight. Instead, like most everything American enterprise has promised held some new dream, it has turned out to be the same old thing—a dream for a few, and something much more confining for everyone else.
Mourning what we've lost
I found this an eloquent explanation of emotions and feelings I've experienced over the last couple of weeks as the Fediverse has been 'invaded' by people considering themselves 'refugees' from Twitter.
As Hugh Rundle points out in this post, some of us have already mourned what we'd lost with Twitter and had made our home in a comfy, homely new place. There were rules, both implicit and explicit, about how to behave, but now...
For those of us who have been using Mastodon for a while (I started my own Mastodon server 4 years ago), this week has been overwhelming. I've been thinking of metaphors to try to understand why I've found it so upsetting. This is supposed to be what we wanted, right? Yet it feels like something else. Like when you're sitting in a quiet carriage softly chatting with a couple of friends and then an entire platform of football fans get on at Jolimont Station after their team lost. They don't usually catch trains and don't know the protocol. They assume everyone on the train was at the game or at least follows football. They crowd the doors and complain about the seat configuration.
It's not entirely the Twitter people's fault. They've been taught to behave in certain ways. To chase likes and retweets/boosts. To promote themselves. To perform. All of that sort of thing is anathema to most of the people who were on Mastodon a week ago. It was part of the reason many moved to Mastodon in the first place. This means there's been a jarring culture clash all week as a huge murmuration of tweeters descended onto Mastodon in ever increasing waves each day. To the Twitter people it feels like a confusing new world, whilst they mourn their old life on Twitter. They call themselves "refugees", but to the Mastodon locals it feels like a busload of Kontiki tourists just arrived, blundering around yelling at each other and complaining that they don't know how to order room service. We also mourn the world we're losing.
[...]
I was a reasonably early user of Twitter, just as I was a reasonably early user of Mastodon. I've met some of my firmest friends through Twitter, and it helped to shape my career opportunities. So I understand and empathise with those who have been mourning the experience they've had on Twitter — a life they know is now over. But Twitter has slowly been rotting for years — I went through that grieving process myself a couple of years ago and frankly don't really understand what's so different now compared to two weeks ago.
There's another, smaller group of people mourning a social media experience that was destroyed this week — the people who were active on Mastodon and the broader fediverse prior to November 2022. The nightclub has a new brash owner, and the dancefloor has emptied. People are pouring in to the quiet houseparty around the corner, cocktails still in hand, demanding that the music be turned up, walking mud into the carpet, and yelling over the top of the quiet conversation.
All of us lost something this week. It's ok to mourn it.
Source: Home invasion | Hugh Rundle
Image: Joshua Sukoff
Twitter the disaster clown car company
I didn’t forsee Elon Musk buying Twitter when I deactivated my verified account about a year ago. But it was already an algorithmic hellscape.
As this article points out, Big Tech no longer really does very interesting stuff technically. It’s all about the politics these days.
[T]he problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.Source: Welcome to hell, Elon | The Verge[…]
[Y]ou can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.
[…]
The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff. Do you know why YouTube videos are all eight to 10 minutes long? Because that’s how long a video has to be to qualify for a second ad slot in the middle. That’s content moderation, baby — YouTube wants a certain kind of video, and it created incentives to get it. That’s the business you’re in now. The longer you fight it or pretend that you can sell something else, the more Twitter will drag you into the deepest possible muck of defending indefensible speech. And if you turn on a dime and accept that growth requires aggressive content moderation and pushing back against government speech regulations around the country and world, well, we’ll see how your fans react to that.
Image: DALL-E 2
Three components of the public sphere
My views on monarchy are, well, that there shouldn’t be one in my country, nor should there be any in the world. This post by Ethan Zuckerman goes into three levels of reaction around the death of Elizabeth II, but more interestingly explains his thinking behind a new experimental course he’s running this semester.
As I thought through the hundreds of ideas I wanted to share over the course of twenty-something lectures, I’ve centered on three core concepts I want to try and get across. The first is simple: democracy requires a robust and healthy public sphere, and American democracy was designed with that public sphere as a core component.Source: The Monarchy, the Subaltern and the Public Sphere | Ethan ZuckermanSecond – and this one has taken me more time to understand – the public sphere includes at least three components: a way of knowing what’s going on in the world (news), a space for discussing public life, and whatever precursors allow individuals to participate in these discussions. For Habermas’s public sphere, those precursors included being male, wealthy, white, urban and literate… hence the need for Nancy Fraser’s recognition of subaltern counterpublics. Public schooling and libraries are anchored in the idea of enabling people to participate in the public sphere.
The third idea is that as technology and economic models change, all three of these components – the nature of news, discourse, and access – change as well. The obvious change we’re focused on is the displacement of a broadcast public sphere by a highly participatory digital public sphere, but we can see previous moments of upheaval: the rise of mass media with the penny press, the rise of propaganda as broadcast media puts increased control of the public sphere in the hands of corporations and governments.
Three components of the public sphere
My views on monarchy are, well, that there shouldn’t be one in my country, nor should there be any in the world. This post by Ethan Zuckerman goes into three levels of reaction around the death of Elizabeth II, but more interestingly explains his thinking behind a new experimental course he’s running this semester.
As I thought through the hundreds of ideas I wanted to share over the course of twenty-something lectures, I’ve centered on three core concepts I want to try and get across. The first is simple: democracy requires a robust and healthy public sphere, and American democracy was designed with that public sphere as a core component.Source: The Monarchy, the Subaltern and the Public Sphere | Ethan ZuckermanSecond – and this one has taken me more time to understand – the public sphere includes at least three components: a way of knowing what’s going on in the world (news), a space for discussing public life, and whatever precursors allow individuals to participate in these discussions. For Habermas’s public sphere, those precursors included being male, wealthy, white, urban and literate… hence the need for Nancy Fraser’s recognition of subaltern counterpublics. Public schooling and libraries are anchored in the idea of enabling people to participate in the public sphere.
The third idea is that as technology and economic models change, all three of these components – the nature of news, discourse, and access – change as well. The obvious change we’re focused on is the displacement of a broadcast public sphere by a highly participatory digital public sphere, but we can see previous moments of upheaval: the rise of mass media with the penny press, the rise of propaganda as broadcast media puts increased control of the public sphere in the hands of corporations and governments.
Lessin's five steps and the coming AI apocalypse
I’m not really on any of the big centralised social networks any more, but I’m interested in the effect they have on society. Apparently there have been calls recently complaining about, and resisting, changes that Instagram has made.
In this post, Ben Thompson cites Sam Lessin, a former Facebook exec, who suggests we’re at step four of a five-step process.
There's a bit in this post which I think is a pretty deep insight about human behaviour, identity, and the story we like to tell ourselves. Again, it's Thompson quoting Lessin:
I saw someone recently complaining that Facebook was recommending to them…a very crass but probably pretty hilarious video. Their indignant response [was that] “the ranking must be broken.” Here is the thing: the ranking probably isn’t broken. He probably would love that video, but the fact that in order to engage with it he would have to go proactively click makes him feel bad. He doesn’t want to see himself as the type of person that clicks on things like that, even if he would enjoy it.So TikTok and other platforms reducing the need for human interaction to deliver 'engaging' content have the capacity to fundamentally change the way we think about the world.
In another, related, post Charles Arthur scaremongers about how AI-created content will overwhelm us:
I suspect in the future there will be a premium on good, human-generated content and response, but that huge and growing amounts of the content that people watch and look at and read on content networks (“social networks” will become outdated) will be generated automatically, and the humans will be more and more happy about it.As ever, I don’t think we’re ready for this. Not even close.In its way, it sounds like the society in Fahrenheit 451 (that’s 233ºC for Europeans) though without the book burning. There’s no need: why read a book when there’s something fascinating you can watch instead?
Quite what effect this has on social warming is unclear. Possibly it accelerates polarisation, but rather like the Facebook Blenderbot, people are just segmented into their own world, and not shown things that will disturb them. Or, perhaps, they’re shown just enough to annoy them and engage them again if their attention seems to be flagging. After all, if you can generate unlimited content, you can do what you want. And as we know, what the companies who do this want is your attention, all the time.
Sources: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends | Stratechery by Ben Thompson and The approaching tsunami of addictive AI-created content will overwhelm us | Social Warming by Charles Arthur
Social-first searching
I don’t see this as such a weird thing, especially when it comes to food. For example, my wife follows lots of local places on Instagram and will research new places using that app when we travel. I tend to use Google Maps for that kind of thing. Neither of us would start with a regular web search, because context is important.
Even back prior to 2010, I can remember Drew Buddie doing a TeachMeet presentation on ‘Twitter is my Google’. The point is that humans are social creatures. We want recommendations and to see what we could be potentially missing out on…
Nearly 40% of Gen Z prefers searching on TikTok and Instagram over Google Search and Maps, according to Google's internal data first reported by TechCrunch.Source: Nearly Half of Gen Z Prefers TikTok and Instagram Over Google Search | Business InsiderGoogle confirmed this statistic to Insider, saying, “we face robust competition from an array of sources, including general and specialized search engines, as well as dedicated apps."
Good ideas become colonised and domesticated
I’ve got this thought about how every good idea becomes colonised and domesticated. While domestication can be a good thing, because it potentially makes it more accessible to all, it also robs the idea of its radical, transformatory power.
Colonisation, however, is never a positive thing. It’s about renegotiating existing relationships, often through the lens of power, capital, and hegemonic power.
How related the above two paragraphs are to this article in The New Yorker is questionable. But, to me, it’s related. Centralised social media is colonised and domesticated.
Once upon a time, the Internet was predicated on user-generated content. The hope was that ordinary people would take advantage of the Web’s low barrier for publishing to post great things, motivated simply by the joy of open communication. We know now that it didn’t quite pan out that way. User-generated GeoCities pages or blogs gave way to monetized content. Google made the Internet more easily searchable, but, in the early two-thousands, it also began selling ads and allowed other Web sites to easily incorporate its advertising modules. That business model is still what most of the Internet relies on today. Revenue comes not necessarily from the value of content itself but from its ability to attract attention, to get eyeballs on ads, which are most often bought and sold through corporations like Google and Facebook. The rise of social networks in the twenty-tens made this model only more dominant. Our digital posting became concentrated on a few all-encompassing platforms, which relied increasingly on algorithmic feeds. The result for users was more exposure but a loss of agency. We generated content for free, and then Facebook mined it for profit.Source: How the Internet Turned Us Into Content Machines | The New Yorker“Clickbait” has long been the term for misleading, shallow online articles that exist only to sell ads. But on today’s Internet the term could describe content across every field, from the unmarked ads on an influencer’s Instagram page to pseudonymous pop music designed to game the Spotify algorithm. Eichhorn uses the potent term “content capital”—a riff on Pierre Bourdieu’s “cultural capital”—to describe the way in which a fluency in posting online can determine the success, or even the existence, of an artist’s work. Where “cultural capital” describes how particular tastes and reference points confer status, “content capital” connotes an aptitude for creating the kind of ancillary content that the Internet feeds upon. Since so much audience attention is funnelled through social media, the most direct path to success is to cultivate a large digital following. “Cultural producers who, in the past, may have focused on writing books or producing films or making art must now also spend considerable time producing (or paying someone else to produce) content about themselves and their work,” Eichhorn writes. Pop stars log their daily routines on TikTok. Journalists spout banal opinions on Twitter. The best-selling Instapoet Rupi Kaur posts reels and photos of her typewritten poems. All are trapped by the daily pressure to produce ancillary content—memes, selfies, shitposts—to fill an endless void.