God did the world a favor by destroying Twitter.
February 14, 2023 5:32 AM Subscribe
How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. God does the wrath thing a lot in the Old Testament, punishing humans who would challenge divine authority. It makes sense to read the story of Babel in that light. But having lived through the past couple decades of the internet, I believe the story carries a different lesson. I’m an atheist, so take this theory with a grain of salt, or maybe even a pillar: God wasn’t keeping us out of heaven, smiting us for our arrogance. God was protecting us from ourselves.
Other Paul Ford stuff at Ftrain
Other Paul Ford stuff at Ftrain
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
posted by saturday_morning at 5:40 AM on February 14, 2023 [65 favorites]
posted by saturday_morning at 5:40 AM on February 14, 2023 [65 favorites]
Fun not fun thought, that I must be very late in expressing.
What happens if you give ChatGPT twitter access with specific instructions to "do THING to that GROUP", it's a fire hose that can talk back and on twitter feed, there's no distinguishing that from a human.
Elon might have done us a solid by thrashing it, although he didn't do it for this reason.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 5:51 AM on February 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
What happens if you give ChatGPT twitter access with specific instructions to "do THING to that GROUP", it's a fire hose that can talk back and on twitter feed, there's no distinguishing that from a human.
Elon might have done us a solid by thrashing it, although he didn't do it for this reason.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 5:51 AM on February 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
It's paywalled.
Twitter has done a lot of harm, and perhaps the world would be better off without it, but I've noticed that a lot of articles celebrating its demise (which hasn't happened yet) seem to be written by people who seem to have only experienced its negatives. It makes me wonder how they're curating their Twitter experience.
There are some things for which smaller networks don't work as well, such as public safety announcements, political organizing, finding a large enough audience for one's art to make decent money on commissions.
Does the article reckon with these things?
I'm not saying you can't still come down on the side of Twitter being a net detriment to society, but it's starting to feel kind of, hmm, narrow-minded, in a way? Like, it's a very particular perspective on Twitter.
And also, it's looking increasingly like what we're going to get is not no Twitter, but a worse and more unsafe Twitter. Perhaps neglect and mismanagement will gradually drive people away, but that will be a slow process unless there is a looming meltdown that will finally take it all out. People have been predicting that meltdown since the takeover, though.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:10 AM on February 14, 2023 [21 favorites]
Twitter has done a lot of harm, and perhaps the world would be better off without it, but I've noticed that a lot of articles celebrating its demise (which hasn't happened yet) seem to be written by people who seem to have only experienced its negatives. It makes me wonder how they're curating their Twitter experience.
There are some things for which smaller networks don't work as well, such as public safety announcements, political organizing, finding a large enough audience for one's art to make decent money on commissions.
Does the article reckon with these things?
I'm not saying you can't still come down on the side of Twitter being a net detriment to society, but it's starting to feel kind of, hmm, narrow-minded, in a way? Like, it's a very particular perspective on Twitter.
And also, it's looking increasingly like what we're going to get is not no Twitter, but a worse and more unsafe Twitter. Perhaps neglect and mismanagement will gradually drive people away, but that will be a slow process unless there is a looming meltdown that will finally take it all out. People have been predicting that meltdown since the takeover, though.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:10 AM on February 14, 2023 [21 favorites]
My hot take: Mastodon local server feeds are infinitely better than any curated timeline.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 6:18 AM on February 14, 2023 [15 favorites]
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 6:18 AM on February 14, 2023 [15 favorites]
My Twitter is Philadelphia and housing and vaporwave, and it is great. Aside from the occasional YIMBY/NIMBY business it is a spectacular place to interact with other like-minded Philadelphians and get good music recs. Twitter, like life, is what what you make of it.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:27 AM on February 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:27 AM on February 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
> Twitter, like life, is what what you make of it.
You mean, run by untouchable, unaccountable billionaires who can and will make your life miserable at the flick of a switch just because they're bored or want some more money?
posted by parm at 6:40 AM on February 14, 2023 [68 favorites]
You mean, run by untouchable, unaccountable billionaires who can and will make your life miserable at the flick of a switch just because they're bored or want some more money?
posted by parm at 6:40 AM on February 14, 2023 [68 favorites]
Taking the widest possible view of the internet in general, learning how an awful lot of people - whose inner lives would have otherwise remained a mystery to me - think has not been a net plus to my mental health or my opinion of humanity as a whole.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:50 AM on February 14, 2023 [12 favorites]
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:50 AM on February 14, 2023 [12 favorites]
And a Mastodon instance is one pissed off instance admin away from closure. Everything we use is eventually dust, struggle to make the thing better but accept when it's dead. A lot of us have probably been through a few forum/gaming clan blow ups, communities that drift or quietly die, applications that get abandoned (Wave, you were ahead of your time) etc and have seen how these largely play out.
If Philly Vaporwave twitter is rocking for now let Philly Vaporwave twitter rock.
posted by Slackermagee at 6:53 AM on February 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
If Philly Vaporwave twitter is rocking for now let Philly Vaporwave twitter rock.
posted by Slackermagee at 6:53 AM on February 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
I'm not saying you can't still come down on the side of Twitter being a net detriment to society, but it's starting to feel kind of, hmm, narrow-minded, in a way? Like, it's a very particular perspective on Twitter.
Three years and a bit ago I stumbled accidentally into a fandom space on Twitter, and while I'm aware that angry political twitter is still out there, I only briefly catch glimpses of it on trending.
Where I am, its a community of people, mostly pretty young, who are from every timezone worldwide. They're making art, writing essays and fiction, making friends, building connections, helping each other, lifting each other up in ways that really exemplify what the shining promise of social media was.
The whole community is well aware that we're having a party in a burning building, and that one day Twitter might simply cease to exist, and people make the effort to build other spaces - chat spaces, discord - to keep in touch. But Twitter is home base. Its where you find new friends. Its where you organize stuff. Its where people promote each other, and help small artists grow and be able to actually do their art for a living.
Twitter is full of these spaces, thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands. New people find them, get accepted into them every day.
I know there are lots of awful spaces too. But I agree with Kutsuwamushi that any on line space - twitter, mastadon, livejoural, whatever -- is what you make it. If all you see is people being angry, well, you can also actively choose to see something else.
The problem isn't the platform.
posted by anastasiav at 6:56 AM on February 14, 2023 [7 favorites]
Three years and a bit ago I stumbled accidentally into a fandom space on Twitter, and while I'm aware that angry political twitter is still out there, I only briefly catch glimpses of it on trending.
Where I am, its a community of people, mostly pretty young, who are from every timezone worldwide. They're making art, writing essays and fiction, making friends, building connections, helping each other, lifting each other up in ways that really exemplify what the shining promise of social media was.
The whole community is well aware that we're having a party in a burning building, and that one day Twitter might simply cease to exist, and people make the effort to build other spaces - chat spaces, discord - to keep in touch. But Twitter is home base. Its where you find new friends. Its where you organize stuff. Its where people promote each other, and help small artists grow and be able to actually do their art for a living.
Twitter is full of these spaces, thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands. New people find them, get accepted into them every day.
I know there are lots of awful spaces too. But I agree with Kutsuwamushi that any on line space - twitter, mastadon, livejoural, whatever -- is what you make it. If all you see is people being angry, well, you can also actively choose to see something else.
The problem isn't the platform.
posted by anastasiav at 6:56 AM on February 14, 2023 [7 favorites]
The problem isn't the platform.
....Except for the fact that the platform is often actively pushing the people being angry at you because their data wonks have decided that "that's what generates the most engagement".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:59 AM on February 14, 2023 [51 favorites]
....Except for the fact that the platform is often actively pushing the people being angry at you because their data wonks have decided that "that's what generates the most engagement".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:59 AM on February 14, 2023 [51 favorites]
re: Weaponized Spaces, @henryfarrell: "So my and Abe Newman's book, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, is coming out in September."
Networks like SWIFT and dollar clearing were clearly important to global power politics - but no-one really understood how they worked. I was separately interested in network topology thanks to stuff I had absorbed via osmosis from another collaborator, Cosma Shalizi (a statistical physicist in Carnegie Mellon). So we decided to put the two together, under a phrase that was clunky but appealing to academics - 'weaponized interdependence.'posted by kliuless at 7:11 AM on February 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
We'd already used this term in passing - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/12/16/this-is-the-real-reason-why-european-privacy-rules-challenge-the-u-s/ Our basic intuition was (a) that networks bound the global economy together, and (b) that they were increasingly being turned into tools of power coercion. So we started writing...
....Except for the fact that the platform is often actively pushing the people being angry at you because their data wonks have decided that "that's what generates the most engagement".
Sure, but I think people don't pay enough attention to the fact that you can actively push back. Block people. Block hashtags. Block words or phrases. (A few months ago, I started blocking literally every sponsored post / ad I saw on twt and its been both very freeing and also extremely amusing to see what ads twt tries to feed you when you've blocked around 3K of their advertisers) Choose "this trend is harmful or spammy" when you see angry hashtags in trending.
You don't have to passively accept what the twt bird shoves at you. you can and should be pushing back.
posted by anastasiav at 7:24 AM on February 14, 2023 [10 favorites]
Sure, but I think people don't pay enough attention to the fact that you can actively push back. Block people. Block hashtags. Block words or phrases. (A few months ago, I started blocking literally every sponsored post / ad I saw on twt and its been both very freeing and also extremely amusing to see what ads twt tries to feed you when you've blocked around 3K of their advertisers) Choose "this trend is harmful or spammy" when you see angry hashtags in trending.
You don't have to passively accept what the twt bird shoves at you. you can and should be pushing back.
posted by anastasiav at 7:24 AM on February 14, 2023 [10 favorites]
And a Mastodon instance is one pissed off instance admin away from closure.
As opposed to Twitter which is one pissed off owner away from closure.
posted by Mitheral at 7:55 AM on February 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
As opposed to Twitter which is one pissed off owner away from closure.
posted by Mitheral at 7:55 AM on February 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
The problem isn't the platform.
A very large chunk of thought in media theory/criticism disagrees, from "the medium is the message" forward. A medium shapes and influences every single piece of communication that passes through it thus the medium of any communication is always more profoundly influential than the content of any specific communication using that medium. The platform is definitely a huge problem here.
posted by LooseFilter at 7:55 AM on February 14, 2023 [24 favorites]
A very large chunk of thought in media theory/criticism disagrees, from "the medium is the message" forward. A medium shapes and influences every single piece of communication that passes through it thus the medium of any communication is always more profoundly influential than the content of any specific communication using that medium. The platform is definitely a huge problem here.
posted by LooseFilter at 7:55 AM on February 14, 2023 [24 favorites]
Paul Ford is a good dude. "Content polycule" is a great line for the predilection toward intra- and inter-group Discourse that has very much been part of the enthusiasm and friction of mastodon immigration.
Sure, but I think people don't pay enough attention to the fact that you can actively push back. Block people. Block hashtags.
At a local level, that's true: I think any given person can do a lot to curate and tune and filter their personal experience on twitter to shut out the awful. It's what I did with mine for the long years I was active. But you can't personally reverse the systemic effects of top-level decision-making. I think your comment above about everybody knowing they're partying in a burning building gets precisely at it: you can close some doors and put wet rags at the openings and keep the party on a tactical retreat from the growing flames, but you can't actually push back the fire, not on something as centralized as twitter. Moving a couple units over isn't leaving the building, and the building is going to come down.
Which, there's no specific obvious solution there: I personally think folks should if they can find a way to bail early and take the party elsewhere, but I know that if not everybody's agreeing to move at once its tempting to just keep things going as long as you can where you are. Moving might break up the party; it'll definitely splinter it and hurt the vibe short term.
I peeled off even though I loved the party and miss the people there. Some of them have followed me to the new building. There's other cool people there too. It's different, and I still think about sneaking back into the old place because I can hear the old party still going. But it's go now or go later, and the more people go now the better I think.
Plus the building got bought by the worst person in the world and he's gonna keep trying to make everyone inside check out his cool new flamethrower and tell him how cool it is and how rad it feels to be set on fire by it, so, y'know. There's a real fuckin' shelf-life on that party vibe no matter what.
posted by cortex at 8:02 AM on February 14, 2023 [31 favorites]
Sure, but I think people don't pay enough attention to the fact that you can actively push back. Block people. Block hashtags.
At a local level, that's true: I think any given person can do a lot to curate and tune and filter their personal experience on twitter to shut out the awful. It's what I did with mine for the long years I was active. But you can't personally reverse the systemic effects of top-level decision-making. I think your comment above about everybody knowing they're partying in a burning building gets precisely at it: you can close some doors and put wet rags at the openings and keep the party on a tactical retreat from the growing flames, but you can't actually push back the fire, not on something as centralized as twitter. Moving a couple units over isn't leaving the building, and the building is going to come down.
Which, there's no specific obvious solution there: I personally think folks should if they can find a way to bail early and take the party elsewhere, but I know that if not everybody's agreeing to move at once its tempting to just keep things going as long as you can where you are. Moving might break up the party; it'll definitely splinter it and hurt the vibe short term.
I peeled off even though I loved the party and miss the people there. Some of them have followed me to the new building. There's other cool people there too. It's different, and I still think about sneaking back into the old place because I can hear the old party still going. But it's go now or go later, and the more people go now the better I think.
Plus the building got bought by the worst person in the world and he's gonna keep trying to make everyone inside check out his cool new flamethrower and tell him how cool it is and how rad it feels to be set on fire by it, so, y'know. There's a real fuckin' shelf-life on that party vibe no matter what.
posted by cortex at 8:02 AM on February 14, 2023 [31 favorites]
a lot of articles celebrating its demise (which hasn't happened yet) seem to be written by people who seem to have only experienced its negatives.
I've experienced more than a few of its positives, which makes the negatives (quite a few of those in recent months, because Lone Skum wants to push "engagement" by continually recommending people who are deliberately pushing hate messaging) even more striking.
Block people. Block hashtags. Block words or phrases. (A few months ago, I started blocking literally every sponsored post / ad I saw on twt and its been both very freeing and also extremely amusing to see what ads twt tries to feed you when you've blocked around 3K of their advertisers) Choose "this trend is harmful or spammy" when you see angry hashtags in trending.
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television... look, the bird is mostly entertainment for me, and I don't want to have to fucking manage it constantly. If that's your groove, groove on it, do whatcha wanna do and so forth.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:13 AM on February 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
I've experienced more than a few of its positives, which makes the negatives (quite a few of those in recent months, because Lone Skum wants to push "engagement" by continually recommending people who are deliberately pushing hate messaging) even more striking.
Block people. Block hashtags. Block words or phrases. (A few months ago, I started blocking literally every sponsored post / ad I saw on twt and its been both very freeing and also extremely amusing to see what ads twt tries to feed you when you've blocked around 3K of their advertisers) Choose "this trend is harmful or spammy" when you see angry hashtags in trending.
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television... look, the bird is mostly entertainment for me, and I don't want to have to fucking manage it constantly. If that's your groove, groove on it, do whatcha wanna do and so forth.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:13 AM on February 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
Saying block stuff is less useful when it's very likely that block lists are going to be disabled soon
posted by Ferreous at 8:44 AM on February 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by Ferreous at 8:44 AM on February 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
Sure, but I think people don't pay enough attention to the fact that you can actively push back. Block people. Block hashtags. Block words or phrases.
Or they don't know that. Or they do know but it's so god-damn relentless that they give up. Or they do know but they can't find the way to turn that feature on because it is buried so deeply in their settings that it may as well be in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard.”
That is the platform's fault.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:48 AM on February 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
Or they don't know that. Or they do know but it's so god-damn relentless that they give up. Or they do know but they can't find the way to turn that feature on because it is buried so deeply in their settings that it may as well be in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard.”
That is the platform's fault.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:48 AM on February 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
Yeah the very nature of these platforms is to encourage everyone to be enraged at all times. You cannot avoid that logic on a monetized platform because they're only there to sell ad views and rage drives engagement. Nature abhors a vacuum and monetized platforms abhor calm users.
posted by Ferreous at 8:55 AM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Ferreous at 8:55 AM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
aright, I get it, you all disagree with me and that's fine
but understand that the people in the communities I'm in are never going to use Mastadon. If they move anywhere they'll move to Tumblr or Discords, because that's the actual direction that people a lot younger than most of us want to go. (As an aside, I'm always deeply amused by the name Mastadon, because it reminds me that everyone there skews pretty old.)
Conversations like this really strongly remind me why I hardly ever comment on Mefi anymore -- everyone here is so bound up in their anger and fury at the world, and anxious to argue with other people about their own experiences. In this case, ironically, you're all angry about something that you perceive as being designed to make you angry.
posted by anastasiav at 9:00 AM on February 14, 2023 [15 favorites]
but understand that the people in the communities I'm in are never going to use Mastadon. If they move anywhere they'll move to Tumblr or Discords, because that's the actual direction that people a lot younger than most of us want to go. (As an aside, I'm always deeply amused by the name Mastadon, because it reminds me that everyone there skews pretty old.)
Conversations like this really strongly remind me why I hardly ever comment on Mefi anymore -- everyone here is so bound up in their anger and fury at the world, and anxious to argue with other people about their own experiences. In this case, ironically, you're all angry about something that you perceive as being designed to make you angry.
posted by anastasiav at 9:00 AM on February 14, 2023 [15 favorites]
Oh I agree mastodon is mostly a dead end or at best niche product. Discord servers accomplish a similar purpose with far less effort. To your point though, the fact that Twitter, Facebook et al train people to be argumentative carries over to other Internet communities. The poison doesn't stay in one well, it moves into the ground water.
posted by Ferreous at 9:05 AM on February 14, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by Ferreous at 9:05 AM on February 14, 2023 [7 favorites]
Sure, but I think people don't pay enough attention to the fact that you can actively push back. Block people. Block hashtags. Block words or phrases.
I'm not trying to pile on you here (and I'm not angry, really) but while I agree with you that it's possible to use Twitter productively, my problem with Twitter isn't my relationship to Twitter per se, but what I see it doing to people - because yes, the algorithm is designed to make people angry, and I've watched people get sucked into it and become bitter, less open-minded, quick to react rather than reflect, etc. No matter how good I am (or you) at blocking and curating a list of people to follow, that doesn't change how the average Twitter user engages with the platform. And that's what I worry about. If Twitter was redesigned to make productive experiences with it more the rule rather than the exception, that would be awesome. But our elongated muskrat friend (such a good nickname mhoye) isn't going to do that, I'm afraid.
posted by coffeecat at 9:15 AM on February 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
I'm not trying to pile on you here (and I'm not angry, really) but while I agree with you that it's possible to use Twitter productively, my problem with Twitter isn't my relationship to Twitter per se, but what I see it doing to people - because yes, the algorithm is designed to make people angry, and I've watched people get sucked into it and become bitter, less open-minded, quick to react rather than reflect, etc. No matter how good I am (or you) at blocking and curating a list of people to follow, that doesn't change how the average Twitter user engages with the platform. And that's what I worry about. If Twitter was redesigned to make productive experiences with it more the rule rather than the exception, that would be awesome. But our elongated muskrat friend (such a good nickname mhoye) isn't going to do that, I'm afraid.
posted by coffeecat at 9:15 AM on February 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
I have a bunch of friends on a Slack that was created three years ago and hardly anyone uses anymore because they all use Facebook. I've missed events because they use FB to manage invitations, and they don't remember that I'm not on FB, and they don't think to mention the events on the slack. I think I'm the only person in the group who isn't on Facebook. Even now. I'm like ... well, okay. Y'all know it's toxic as hell, reinforces conservative talking points, exists only to show you ads, and any benefit you happen to get is mere happenchance, and they glare at me, virtually, and say they know, they know, jesus, but everyone's on it, I'd never talk to my family again if I quit. Blah.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:19 AM on February 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:19 AM on February 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
To your point though, the fact that Twitter, Facebook et al train people to be argumentative carries over to other Internet communities.
Wait... It's twitter and facebook that trained people to be argumentative on the internet?
posted by 2N2222 at 9:24 AM on February 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
Wait... It's twitter and facebook that trained people to be argumentative on the internet?
posted by 2N2222 at 9:24 AM on February 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
Yeah, pretty much. I had to cave in and use FB for theater because theater shows use them to make announcements and send video/sound files. Though in all honesty, it hasn't been bad since I'm using a fake name and only friend theater people.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:24 AM on February 14, 2023
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:24 AM on February 14, 2023
It's twitter and facebook that trained people to be argumentative on the internet?
Not "trained" as such, more like it encouraged it to a much higher degree than chat room anonymity was able to.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:30 AM on February 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
Not "trained" as such, more like it encouraged it to a much higher degree than chat room anonymity was able to.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:30 AM on February 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
Wait... It's twitter and facebook that trained people to be argumentative on the internet?
It didn't originate arguing on the internet, but it did train people into operating in that mode as a default. The need to be mad, that you have to have a take on everything and defend it to the death, valorizing pile ons; these are things that algorithmic content delivery encourages.
posted by Ferreous at 9:31 AM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
It didn't originate arguing on the internet, but it did train people into operating in that mode as a default. The need to be mad, that you have to have a take on everything and defend it to the death, valorizing pile ons; these are things that algorithmic content delivery encourages.
posted by Ferreous at 9:31 AM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
The problem definitely includes the platform, there is no way around that. Providing safe cover to hate groups and extremists and wrong information is a problem.
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:32 AM on February 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:32 AM on February 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
Wait... It's twitter and facebook that trained people to be argumentative on the internet?
They're what mainstreamed it and ruined the scene. Used to be you had to find out how to use a terminal newsreader and join a few USENET groups if you really wanted to holler at other people non-stop. There was a real sense of effort and responsibility to being an ornery shithead reflexively stuck in intractable, joyless shouting matches with other people who disliked it there just as much as you did.
Now every tom, dick and harry can just fly off the handle willy nilly. There's no craft anymore, no sense of a community to it.
posted by cortex at 9:34 AM on February 14, 2023 [25 favorites]
They're what mainstreamed it and ruined the scene. Used to be you had to find out how to use a terminal newsreader and join a few USENET groups if you really wanted to holler at other people non-stop. There was a real sense of effort and responsibility to being an ornery shithead reflexively stuck in intractable, joyless shouting matches with other people who disliked it there just as much as you did.
Now every tom, dick and harry can just fly off the handle willy nilly. There's no craft anymore, no sense of a community to it.
posted by cortex at 9:34 AM on February 14, 2023 [25 favorites]
This is the point that Ford lost me:
look, the bird is mostly entertainment for me, and I don't want to have to fucking manage it constantly.
I'm glad that you're in a place where social media is just entertainment for you. But for a lot of people, social media is much more, and thus the stakes for them are considerably higher.
It didn't originate arguing on the internet, but it did train people into operating in that mode as a default.
I think this gets the arrow of causality backwards. I think it trained people to that model because the creators themselves were trained on that model.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:35 AM on February 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
Every five or six minutes, someone in the social sciences publishes a PDF with a title like “Humans 95 Percent Happier in Small Towns, Waving at Neighbors and Eating Sandwiches.” When we gather in groups of more than, say, eight, it’s a disaster. Yet there is something fundamental in our nature that desperately wants to get everyone together in one big room, to “solve it.”I don't know about you, but I have heard enough testimony from people who did not 'fit in' these small towns and how for a lot of them those parochial places were hell on earth to realize that those studies tend to have more than a whiff of bullshit around them. And the point of getting people together isn't to "solve it", it's to be able to accomplish things because organization is the force multiplier. (I do think that it's worth noting that Ford lives in Brooklyn, which sort of belies the point - if, as he points out, small town living is healthier for us, why isn't he doing that?)
look, the bird is mostly entertainment for me, and I don't want to have to fucking manage it constantly.
I'm glad that you're in a place where social media is just entertainment for you. But for a lot of people, social media is much more, and thus the stakes for them are considerably higher.
It didn't originate arguing on the internet, but it did train people into operating in that mode as a default.
I think this gets the arrow of causality backwards. I think it trained people to that model because the creators themselves were trained on that model.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:35 AM on February 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
but usenet flame wars weren't shown to random people with no stake in them because getting more people into a flame war is a great way to get ad views. The monetization angle fundamentally changes the dynamic in a way that can't be overstated.
posted by Ferreous at 9:46 AM on February 14, 2023 [16 favorites]
posted by Ferreous at 9:46 AM on February 14, 2023 [16 favorites]
Any medium where there are few consequences for negative/hate/unconstructive speech is going to suffer the exact same fate, from unmoderated Mastodon instances to newspaper letters-to-the-editor, to Facebook, to anonymous notes on bulletin boards.... it's an emergent property of impersonal communication. If you can talk shit and not get hit, probably going to talk more shit.
The important thing to do is make sure there's an adult in the room of some form, to curtail the worst of it, by deleting it or muzzling the offenders. That's how you "get hit" online, you get deplatformed.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:47 AM on February 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
The important thing to do is make sure there's an adult in the room of some form, to curtail the worst of it, by deleting it or muzzling the offenders. That's how you "get hit" online, you get deplatformed.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:47 AM on February 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
I joined Mastodon about a month ago and I'm probably spending more time there than on Twitter now. It's probably about 60/40. The Mastodon stuff is good but I get waaay more info from Twitter. It's still my main source of info for news, science, politics, humor, etc, etc. I don't see any of the bad content. My biggest problem with Twitter is that the interface is so bad; I only ever used Tweetbot before now.
posted by neuron at 9:54 AM on February 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by neuron at 9:54 AM on February 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
To your point though, the fact that Twitter, Facebook et al train people to be argumentative carries over to other Internet communities.
Wait... It's twitter and facebook that trained people to be argumentative on the internet?
It's not "argumentative" that Twitter and Facebook really trained or mainstreamed -- it's encouraging interaction in the form of anger, which is more than just arguing. The Algorithm rewarded people for starting arguments to a much greater degree than any previous platform on the Internet did. The right-wing assholes in particular learned that posting something that gets ratioed was a net benefit for them, because The Algorithm saw the QTs and replies and "thought" Oh, this person is an Important Thinker who needs to be fed into more people's timelines! Every "My wife says that women never feel pleasure from sex!" tweet wound up getting their next "Look, I'm not saying that Those People are all criminals, but when you look at the statistics..." tweet onto people's pages who never saw the "My wife says..." tweet or any of the hilarious dunkings that it engendered.
That didn't happen on Usenet or MeFi or Plastic or comments sections.
posted by Etrigan at 10:02 AM on February 14, 2023 [18 favorites]
Wait... It's twitter and facebook that trained people to be argumentative on the internet?
It's not "argumentative" that Twitter and Facebook really trained or mainstreamed -- it's encouraging interaction in the form of anger, which is more than just arguing. The Algorithm rewarded people for starting arguments to a much greater degree than any previous platform on the Internet did. The right-wing assholes in particular learned that posting something that gets ratioed was a net benefit for them, because The Algorithm saw the QTs and replies and "thought" Oh, this person is an Important Thinker who needs to be fed into more people's timelines! Every "My wife says that women never feel pleasure from sex!" tweet wound up getting their next "Look, I'm not saying that Those People are all criminals, but when you look at the statistics..." tweet onto people's pages who never saw the "My wife says..." tweet or any of the hilarious dunkings that it engendered.
That didn't happen on Usenet or MeFi or Plastic or comments sections.
posted by Etrigan at 10:02 AM on February 14, 2023 [18 favorites]
A few months ago, I started blocking literally every sponsored post / ad I saw on twt
Musk’s Twitter will stop respecting blocks for sponsored tweets without hesitation if it needs to, I’m pretty confident. Probably also for Twitter Blue subscribers (meaning, you’ll have to see their posts, but they won’t have to see yours.)
posted by Horace Rumpole at 10:13 AM on February 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
Musk’s Twitter will stop respecting blocks for sponsored tweets without hesitation if it needs to, I’m pretty confident. Probably also for Twitter Blue subscribers (meaning, you’ll have to see their posts, but they won’t have to see yours.)
posted by Horace Rumpole at 10:13 AM on February 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
I finished The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, by Max Fisher and am once again commending it to those interested in these topics.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 10:17 AM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by gentlyepigrams at 10:17 AM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
That didn't happen on Usenet or MeFi or Plastic or comments sections.
What? Of course it did. Trolls, flamebait, flame wars, all of that didn't originate on Twitter. The chan boards didn't spring from Twitter. Remember pre-Facebook when the general wisdom was that anonymity was the cause of online assholery, and once real names were used people would naturally mellow out?
The comments so far have, frankly, been ridiculous. Posters either weren't around for, or are willfully misremembering, the pre-social media Internet. People have always enjoyed being little pricks stirring up shit online, the only difference is that Twitter let them do it globally instead of their local fora. This article is content-free garbage with this weird "golly gee ain't small town livin' grand" conservative slant.
MetaFilter is uniquely ill-suited for this discussion, and specifically for discussions about Mastodon, because the general MeFi user is basically the ideal potential Mastodon user and therefore incapable of really evaluating the potential and pitfalls of the service and its like.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:21 AM on February 14, 2023 [15 favorites]
What? Of course it did. Trolls, flamebait, flame wars, all of that didn't originate on Twitter. The chan boards didn't spring from Twitter. Remember pre-Facebook when the general wisdom was that anonymity was the cause of online assholery, and once real names were used people would naturally mellow out?
The comments so far have, frankly, been ridiculous. Posters either weren't around for, or are willfully misremembering, the pre-social media Internet. People have always enjoyed being little pricks stirring up shit online, the only difference is that Twitter let them do it globally instead of their local fora. This article is content-free garbage with this weird "golly gee ain't small town livin' grand" conservative slant.
MetaFilter is uniquely ill-suited for this discussion, and specifically for discussions about Mastodon, because the general MeFi user is basically the ideal potential Mastodon user and therefore incapable of really evaluating the potential and pitfalls of the service and its like.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:21 AM on February 14, 2023 [15 favorites]
If they move anywhere they'll move to Tumblr or Discords .... everyone here is so bound up in their anger and fury at the world, and anxious to argue with other people about their own experiences.
I don't entirely understand the contrast you're trying to draw. Outrage and fury is so prevalent a person could arrive at the conclusion that it's Tumblr's stock-in-trade. Discords have a tendency to be somewhat more controlled if they have reasonable mods, but have you seen some of the content that leaks out of the tens-of-thousands userbase ChapoTraphouse-like and/or Gamergate-like Discord servers?
posted by tclark at 10:25 AM on February 14, 2023
I don't entirely understand the contrast you're trying to draw. Outrage and fury is so prevalent a person could arrive at the conclusion that it's Tumblr's stock-in-trade. Discords have a tendency to be somewhat more controlled if they have reasonable mods, but have you seen some of the content that leaks out of the tens-of-thousands userbase ChapoTraphouse-like and/or Gamergate-like Discord servers?
posted by tclark at 10:25 AM on February 14, 2023
Flame wars and dunking happened, algorithmic forefronting didn't. The scale and method of spread are the important thing here. If there's an argumentative post on mefi comments from that post aren't going to end up tacked onto a post about cute hedgehogs.
posted by Ferreous at 10:29 AM on February 14, 2023 [12 favorites]
posted by Ferreous at 10:29 AM on February 14, 2023 [12 favorites]
That didn't happen on Usenet or MeFi or Plastic or comments sections.
What? Of course it did. Trolls, flamebait, flame wars, all of that didn't originate on Twitter.
Yes, trolls and flamebait and flame wars all existed before Twitter. But if you were to post "Look, the numbers clearly show that Xander has killed more vampires than Buffy, so men are better than women" on alt.fan.buffy, you annoyed people who were on alt.fan.buffy. Usenet didn't push that to people who didn't give a shit about Buffy, nor did people who knew people on alt.fan.buffy get their responses dumped into your Usenet experience, nor would your next comment be automatically injected into random people's feeds because clearly you're a Thought Leader. If someone wanted to follow you over to alt.folklore.urban and say "Hey, this shitbird thinks Xander killed more vampires than Buffy", then they at least had to work at it.
posted by Etrigan at 10:50 AM on February 14, 2023 [23 favorites]
What? Of course it did. Trolls, flamebait, flame wars, all of that didn't originate on Twitter.
Yes, trolls and flamebait and flame wars all existed before Twitter. But if you were to post "Look, the numbers clearly show that Xander has killed more vampires than Buffy, so men are better than women" on alt.fan.buffy, you annoyed people who were on alt.fan.buffy. Usenet didn't push that to people who didn't give a shit about Buffy, nor did people who knew people on alt.fan.buffy get their responses dumped into your Usenet experience, nor would your next comment be automatically injected into random people's feeds because clearly you're a Thought Leader. If someone wanted to follow you over to alt.folklore.urban and say "Hey, this shitbird thinks Xander killed more vampires than Buffy", then they at least had to work at it.
posted by Etrigan at 10:50 AM on February 14, 2023 [23 favorites]
I think one factor that separates between the flame wars of old and the flame wars of today is that the old Internet was a separate, fragmented space that you could leave behind. As a misfit kid, I definitely used it as a refuge. Today, those flame wars can follow you into the real world because so many people are now connected to the Internet and use the same websites. The separation largely isn't there anymore.
posted by chinesefood at 10:57 AM on February 14, 2023 [13 favorites]
posted by chinesefood at 10:57 AM on February 14, 2023 [13 favorites]
People have always enjoyed being little pricks stirring up shit online, the only difference is that Twitter let them do it globally instead of their local fora.
Yes. The part I have bolded is exactly our point. No one here is disputing the first part of your sentence (i.e., that people have always enjoyed being dicks online), the part we're trying to point out to you is that Twitter is letting them do that globally, and that is why we blame Twitter.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:01 AM on February 14, 2023 [9 favorites]
Yes. The part I have bolded is exactly our point. No one here is disputing the first part of your sentence (i.e., that people have always enjoyed being dicks online), the part we're trying to point out to you is that Twitter is letting them do that globally, and that is why we blame Twitter.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:01 AM on February 14, 2023 [9 favorites]
I haven't gotten any follow suggestions at all, nor have I been shown hateful speech. That may be because I have so few followers and also don't follow a ton of people. I follow around 120 and have around 90 followers. I block with abandon because I don't need jerks in my feed or mentions. My first time around I followed a lot of people, and it quickly became a toxic cesspit.
I mean, if Twitter takes away the ability to block and mute, yeah, I'll leave. But until then it is a very manageable space from which I've derived value that I definitely can't derive from the alternative platforms.
Hell, this platform doesn't even have block and mute, and is indexed by Google.
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:03 AM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
I mean, if Twitter takes away the ability to block and mute, yeah, I'll leave. But until then it is a very manageable space from which I've derived value that I definitely can't derive from the alternative platforms.
Hell, this platform doesn't even have block and mute, and is indexed by Google.
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:03 AM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
this is the worst take on musk twitter. lots of people use(d) twitter for good, useful, fun things and these are the people getting screwed by a billionaire.
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 11:09 AM on February 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 11:09 AM on February 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
It's a little amusing that this dynamic has shown up in this thread and I've been sucked into it. You and I probably agree 99% on the causes of the current state of the net. And yet I find myself pulled in to argue about the 1% we disagree on. It's a little scary on how easy it is for me to get grabbed by a disagreement that doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
To be fair I don't think this has really been a knife fight or brutal argument at all. Some comments have had a bit of heat but overall it's more of a discussion than a brawl.
That said I don't think I've really anything more to add beyond what I've already said so I'm gonna step back from here on out.
posted by Ferreous at 11:15 AM on February 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
To be fair I don't think this has really been a knife fight or brutal argument at all. Some comments have had a bit of heat but overall it's more of a discussion than a brawl.
That said I don't think I've really anything more to add beyond what I've already said so I'm gonna step back from here on out.
posted by Ferreous at 11:15 AM on February 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
I think people are failing to consider the impact of scale and/or automation, and certain equivalencies fail once you start doing that.
posted by Artw at 11:18 AM on February 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Artw at 11:18 AM on February 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
I disagree with the author on the "beauty" of decentralization in this case. Mastodon looks like social media and acts like social media, so if you come in, sign up under x instance because the name looks cute or it's aligned with a broad interest of yours, and then suddenly you have to move servers because some people you never heard of in your life quarreled... that's not a good user experience!
The Mastodon model might be useful for media corporations; they can create their own instance with their own rules without going through the intermediary of Twitter. However, the audience just isn't there yet for publicizing any actual media, for that you still need Twitter.
posted by kingdead at 11:30 AM on February 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
The Mastodon model might be useful for media corporations; they can create their own instance with their own rules without going through the intermediary of Twitter. However, the audience just isn't there yet for publicizing any actual media, for that you still need Twitter.
posted by kingdead at 11:30 AM on February 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
but I have heard enough testimony from people who did not 'fit in' these small towns and how for a lot of them those parochial places were hell on earth
Otoh I know many such people who move into specific neighborhoods in a big city to live in a community of people like them, and eventually if they’re lucky a supported retirement building for people like them. It may not be the small community that’s wrong, but the wrong community.
posted by clew at 11:32 AM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
Otoh I know many such people who move into specific neighborhoods in a big city to live in a community of people like them, and eventually if they’re lucky a supported retirement building for people like them. It may not be the small community that’s wrong, but the wrong community.
posted by clew at 11:32 AM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
this is the worst take on musk twitter. lots of people use(d) twitter for good, useful, fun things and these are the people getting screwed by a billionaire.
yep, this -- as in almost any community the vast vast majority of people are just out there vibing, doing their thing, enjoying a few cat photos and following their local news or school or whatever, while a small but extremely loud group of people/bots ruin the place.
Like your local community, you have a choice: you can leave them to it, abandon the place, set it on fire, or you can decide to not let those idiots ruin your space.
I appreciate all the people who made the point that people were angry jerks online far before the advent of the FB/twt echosphere, and they'll continue to be angry online after those forums are gone.
My point, which maybe I didn't state clearly enough, idk, is this: in hanging out in an online space that skews younger, I'm with a lot of people who now aggressively curate their experience, because they've learned right away that they can't just be passive consumers -- that they drive the algorithm for themselves, and that the botmachine will show them what they want to see. This is going to be the case wherever you go, whatever tool you use, because there are going to be angry jerks and trolls everywhere. You've got to weed them, whatever space you're in. You are the consumer or the consumed.
posted by anastasiav at 11:34 AM on February 14, 2023
yep, this -- as in almost any community the vast vast majority of people are just out there vibing, doing their thing, enjoying a few cat photos and following their local news or school or whatever, while a small but extremely loud group of people/bots ruin the place.
Like your local community, you have a choice: you can leave them to it, abandon the place, set it on fire, or you can decide to not let those idiots ruin your space.
I appreciate all the people who made the point that people were angry jerks online far before the advent of the FB/twt echosphere, and they'll continue to be angry online after those forums are gone.
My point, which maybe I didn't state clearly enough, idk, is this: in hanging out in an online space that skews younger, I'm with a lot of people who now aggressively curate their experience, because they've learned right away that they can't just be passive consumers -- that they drive the algorithm for themselves, and that the botmachine will show them what they want to see. This is going to be the case wherever you go, whatever tool you use, because there are going to be angry jerks and trolls everywhere. You've got to weed them, whatever space you're in. You are the consumer or the consumed.
posted by anastasiav at 11:34 AM on February 14, 2023
Teegeeack AV Club Secretary: "'ve been on Metafilter since 2000 under a variety of usernames. One of the reason for the variety, is that I'd quietly rage quit after someone was mean to me in a way I didn't handle well. I remember the pile-ons and casual cruelty that occurred here long before Twitter was a gleam in Jack's eye. "
That's one of the reasons I won't create a new account and close this one. I mean, people can change and grow. But if I was an asshole in the past, it's there in MeFi posts and comments. I can't pretend I was NOT an asshole if I leave the record open. The recognition that my history will remain there for all to read has more than once caused me to close a comment window without hitting post, because I realized while writing that maybe it wasn't my conversation to have, or that my voice wasn't necessary there.
I've liked Mastodon in the short time I have been on the platform. One angry admin has already done a rugpull on my instance, but I migrated to a new one with a larger admin team. I get that Facebook and Twitter and the like have a large user mass, but I feel better not being part of it. My wife likes to point out to me "See what you miss by not being on social media?" and sure, I miss the occasional bit of family news - but I also miss the right-wing propaganda, Russian influence, advertising, and endless stream of general troll-level assholery that is the norm on these platforms. If 90% of your time on a platform is spent blocking things and protecting yourself against the abuses of the platform, why the fuck do you keep using it? When I hear things like "My community will never go on platform X instead" I want to ask, well, have you tried to move? Or are you just accepting the inertia? It's like drowning in shit, but being OK with it because you get an occasional gulp of air. We as human beings deserve better treatment from the platforms we use.
I mean, why are you here, instead of, say, Reddit? Smaller audience, better moderation, less tolerance for assholery. This should be the norm, not the exception.
posted by caution live frogs at 12:53 PM on February 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
That's one of the reasons I won't create a new account and close this one. I mean, people can change and grow. But if I was an asshole in the past, it's there in MeFi posts and comments. I can't pretend I was NOT an asshole if I leave the record open. The recognition that my history will remain there for all to read has more than once caused me to close a comment window without hitting post, because I realized while writing that maybe it wasn't my conversation to have, or that my voice wasn't necessary there.
I've liked Mastodon in the short time I have been on the platform. One angry admin has already done a rugpull on my instance, but I migrated to a new one with a larger admin team. I get that Facebook and Twitter and the like have a large user mass, but I feel better not being part of it. My wife likes to point out to me "See what you miss by not being on social media?" and sure, I miss the occasional bit of family news - but I also miss the right-wing propaganda, Russian influence, advertising, and endless stream of general troll-level assholery that is the norm on these platforms. If 90% of your time on a platform is spent blocking things and protecting yourself against the abuses of the platform, why the fuck do you keep using it? When I hear things like "My community will never go on platform X instead" I want to ask, well, have you tried to move? Or are you just accepting the inertia? It's like drowning in shit, but being OK with it because you get an occasional gulp of air. We as human beings deserve better treatment from the platforms we use.
I mean, why are you here, instead of, say, Reddit? Smaller audience, better moderation, less tolerance for assholery. This should be the norm, not the exception.
posted by caution live frogs at 12:53 PM on February 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
It's a little scary on how easy it is for me to get grabbed by a disagreement that doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
Yep, and that's just human nature, nothing about the internet invented that at all. Optimized it in various ways, yes, but not created.
The comments so far have, frankly, been ridiculous.
This kind of extraordinary and total dismissal is what gets my dander up, honestly. All of the comments in this thread, before this bit of wisdom was bestowed, are ridiculous? As in, "deserving or inspiring ridicule; absurd, preposterous, or silly"? That's hyperbolic and dismissive in a way that's pretty insulting to everyone participating in this thread (except, of course, for those with perfect wisdom who deem the rest of our thoughts worthy of ridicule).
I don't mind disagreement, even heated (honest) disagreement, but casual dismissal is the rudest thing I've read so far.
posted by LooseFilter at 1:02 PM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
Yep, and that's just human nature, nothing about the internet invented that at all. Optimized it in various ways, yes, but not created.
The comments so far have, frankly, been ridiculous.
This kind of extraordinary and total dismissal is what gets my dander up, honestly. All of the comments in this thread, before this bit of wisdom was bestowed, are ridiculous? As in, "deserving or inspiring ridicule; absurd, preposterous, or silly"? That's hyperbolic and dismissive in a way that's pretty insulting to everyone participating in this thread (except, of course, for those with perfect wisdom who deem the rest of our thoughts worthy of ridicule).
I don't mind disagreement, even heated (honest) disagreement, but casual dismissal is the rudest thing I've read so far.
posted by LooseFilter at 1:02 PM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
I mean, why are you here, instead of, say, Reddit? Smaller audience, better moderation, less tolerance for assholery. This should be the norm, not the exception.
I'm here for the latter two things, yes - but those are all culture, not size. The problem is not that Reddit is large - it's that its management has argued in the past that enabling the continued abuse of women was the 'virtuous' choice - and you're not fixing a broken moral compass just by making things smaller.
For over half a century, we've been told that we are obliged to break bread with the abusive and the bigoted out of an obligation towards tolerance and "free speech", and we've seen that be used to harm and silence. I've noticed that the places that are actually nice to be in make sure that all members of the community are supported, and do not tolerate abuse.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:10 PM on February 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
I'm here for the latter two things, yes - but those are all culture, not size. The problem is not that Reddit is large - it's that its management has argued in the past that enabling the continued abuse of women was the 'virtuous' choice - and you're not fixing a broken moral compass just by making things smaller.
For over half a century, we've been told that we are obliged to break bread with the abusive and the bigoted out of an obligation towards tolerance and "free speech", and we've seen that be used to harm and silence. I've noticed that the places that are actually nice to be in make sure that all members of the community are supported, and do not tolerate abuse.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:10 PM on February 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
Usenet didn't push that to people who didn't give a shit about Buffy, nor did people who knew people on alt.fan.buffy get their responses dumped into your Usenet experience, nor would your next comment be automatically injected into random people's feeds because clearly you're a Thought Leader.
That's what gets me about Mastodon and I couldn't articulate before--you still have that Thought Leader algorithm that Twitter has. Because it's a smaller audience the politics might be more to your liking but it's still got that hierarchy and jockeying for competition that forums never had, at least officially.
That and the Mastodon long post format reminds me of Facebook.
posted by kingdead at 2:26 PM on February 14, 2023
That's what gets me about Mastodon and I couldn't articulate before--you still have that Thought Leader algorithm that Twitter has. Because it's a smaller audience the politics might be more to your liking but it's still got that hierarchy and jockeying for competition that forums never had, at least officially.
That and the Mastodon long post format reminds me of Facebook.
posted by kingdead at 2:26 PM on February 14, 2023
What Thought Leader algorithm on Mastodon (ActivityPub?) I only see what people or hashtags I follow post. No trending at all.
posted by clew at 2:53 PM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by clew at 2:53 PM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
That's what gets me about Mastodon and I couldn't articulate before--you still have that Thought Leader algorithm that Twitter has. Because it's a smaller audience the politics might be more to your liking but it's still got that hierarchy and jockeying for competition that forums never had, at least officially.
But it's a lot more opt-in. Like, the biggest problem in your feed is gonna people you follow who boost other uninteresting people too often, and you can toggle off boosts from them. There's no central content algo deciding who you want to hear from independent of your directly chosen social graph, which is a big step toward user control. It's still requiring some agency from the user to second-guess their initial follows, but it's a second-order issue, not an endlessly iterative nth-order issue where the central authority can just issue an n+1st superceding order if they think you aren't engaging with the right stuff.
Just like there will always be trolls, there will always be peacocks and clout-chasers. I don't think Masto is a cure-all for this, just as I don't think Paul thinks so either any more than he (who literally points out he is an atheist in the fairly short article) thinks that God literally intervened where VCs fear to tread to destroy twitter. It's not necessary to reduce every situation to a binary either/or, this-or-that choice when looking at these things; people are people wherever you go, it's just that different systems and infrastructure influence that in any given arena on a usually sort of high-dimensional basis where all kinds of things get mixed up.
posted by cortex at 2:57 PM on February 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
But it's a lot more opt-in. Like, the biggest problem in your feed is gonna people you follow who boost other uninteresting people too often, and you can toggle off boosts from them. There's no central content algo deciding who you want to hear from independent of your directly chosen social graph, which is a big step toward user control. It's still requiring some agency from the user to second-guess their initial follows, but it's a second-order issue, not an endlessly iterative nth-order issue where the central authority can just issue an n+1st superceding order if they think you aren't engaging with the right stuff.
Just like there will always be trolls, there will always be peacocks and clout-chasers. I don't think Masto is a cure-all for this, just as I don't think Paul thinks so either any more than he (who literally points out he is an atheist in the fairly short article) thinks that God literally intervened where VCs fear to tread to destroy twitter. It's not necessary to reduce every situation to a binary either/or, this-or-that choice when looking at these things; people are people wherever you go, it's just that different systems and infrastructure influence that in any given arena on a usually sort of high-dimensional basis where all kinds of things get mixed up.
posted by cortex at 2:57 PM on February 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
(I do think that it's worth noting that Ford lives in Brooklyn, which sort of belies the point - if, as he points out, small town living is healthier for us, why isn't he doing that?)
I think he was making a joke.
posted by mecran01 at 3:41 PM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
I think he was making a joke.
posted by mecran01 at 3:41 PM on February 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
I joined Twitter in 2006 and left for Mastodon last year. I don't have any intention right now of going back.
All the other arguments aside, I think Mastodon is the right thing to do. It is a model that I would like to support. I don't have any ads pushed on me or engagement algorithms. I am not in even a small way supporting Elon Musk and his investors. My instance mastodon.coffee is run by a young guy in the Netherlands who also runs his own hosting company. I toss him some euros every now and then.
I'm sort of through with posting content on sites that are then happy to take your freely provided content and then "monetize" it, in other words sell it. This includes Twitter and Facebook but also most review sites such as Yelp, Google, even Goodreads and many others.
posted by vacapinta at 3:03 AM on February 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
All the other arguments aside, I think Mastodon is the right thing to do. It is a model that I would like to support. I don't have any ads pushed on me or engagement algorithms. I am not in even a small way supporting Elon Musk and his investors. My instance mastodon.coffee is run by a young guy in the Netherlands who also runs his own hosting company. I toss him some euros every now and then.
I'm sort of through with posting content on sites that are then happy to take your freely provided content and then "monetize" it, in other words sell it. This includes Twitter and Facebook but also most review sites such as Yelp, Google, even Goodreads and many others.
posted by vacapinta at 3:03 AM on February 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
Good news Firefox users, you are now free.
(As a web developer this does not inspire confidence about a number of things)
posted by Artw at 6:10 AM on February 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
(As a web developer this does not inspire confidence about a number of things)
posted by Artw at 6:10 AM on February 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. Happy people, the kind who eat sandwiches together, are boring. They don’t buy much. Their smartphones are six versions behind and have badly cracked screens. They fix bicycles, then they talk about fixing bicycles, then they show their friend, who just came over for no reason, how they fixed their bicycle, and their friend says, “Wow, good job,” and they make tea. That doesn’t seem like enough to build a town square on.
Man I fucking love that my Mastodon server is basically this. It's my friends talking about the mundane shit in their lives. Nobody's making money off of them, enough of them are donating to the Patreon to pay most of the monthly bills. And if a bunch of my friends are interacting with someone I don't follow, I don't see it unless they explicitly choose to make a post saying "hey check out this cool person". No more of the system trying to shove stuff into my face to give me more Engagement-Creating Content™ that keeps me on the site seeing paid ads crammed between what I'm theoretically there to see.
It's more than enough to build a town square on. A town square's just a place people in a community go to hang out, maybe connect to each other a little, maybe discuss how the town's evolving and how it should be doing this healthily. Having a corporation run it as a for-profit place means every part of the town square is now subtly (or blatantly) aimed at making money for the corporation instead of being a healthy place to live.
posted by egypturnash at 6:24 AM on February 15, 2023 [4 favorites]
Man I fucking love that my Mastodon server is basically this. It's my friends talking about the mundane shit in their lives. Nobody's making money off of them, enough of them are donating to the Patreon to pay most of the monthly bills. And if a bunch of my friends are interacting with someone I don't follow, I don't see it unless they explicitly choose to make a post saying "hey check out this cool person". No more of the system trying to shove stuff into my face to give me more Engagement-Creating Content™ that keeps me on the site seeing paid ads crammed between what I'm theoretically there to see.
It's more than enough to build a town square on. A town square's just a place people in a community go to hang out, maybe connect to each other a little, maybe discuss how the town's evolving and how it should be doing this healthily. Having a corporation run it as a for-profit place means every part of the town square is now subtly (or blatantly) aimed at making money for the corporation instead of being a healthy place to live.
posted by egypturnash at 6:24 AM on February 15, 2023 [4 favorites]
It's a little scary on how easy it is for me to get grabbed by a disagreement that doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
Behavior on social media reminds me of road rage, which certainly predates the Interwebs.
I find it scary myself to see how at times I am moved to anger when driving, largely because the whole thing is anonymous and it's frighteningly easy to see other drivers as 2-dimensional villains.
posted by Ayn Marx at 6:35 AM on February 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
Behavior on social media reminds me of road rage, which certainly predates the Interwebs.
I find it scary myself to see how at times I am moved to anger when driving, largely because the whole thing is anonymous and it's frighteningly easy to see other drivers as 2-dimensional villains.
posted by Ayn Marx at 6:35 AM on February 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
Artw, now that the initial acculturation around things like content warnings has died down, and the people who just could not deal with the ways Mastodon is different from Twitter have left, I don't feel like much has changed. At least not on my instance. I've let it grow a little bit by handing out invitations when existing users ask for one but I haven't thrown the gates open and let it become something that requires serious investment of time and money to moderate; the local timeline is still pretty chill and I think that's important.
I am slightly more likely to get replies to my posts from people using photos of their faces as icons now, especially if I'm involved in a conversation started by someone with a moderate amount of fame from their involvement in the commercial publishing world. It feels slightly less weird than it initially did after all those years running a furry instance and seeing nothing but cartoon animal people outside of posts on #fediblock.
posted by egypturnash at 8:45 AM on February 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
I am slightly more likely to get replies to my posts from people using photos of their faces as icons now, especially if I'm involved in a conversation started by someone with a moderate amount of fame from their involvement in the commercial publishing world. It feels slightly less weird than it initially did after all those years running a furry instance and seeing nothing but cartoon animal people outside of posts on #fediblock.
posted by egypturnash at 8:45 AM on February 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
Cool.
I do worry that now I’m retooting stuff in a more Twitter like way (because I’m seeing more in my feed in a more Twitter like way) I’m fucking up someone else’s feed, but no complaints so far.
My main feature request at this point would be a way to CW other peoples content that I am retooting, which would probably mean quite toots which is the OTHER big bone of contention related to the influx.
posted by Artw at 11:26 AM on February 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
I do worry that now I’m retooting stuff in a more Twitter like way (because I’m seeing more in my feed in a more Twitter like way) I’m fucking up someone else’s feed, but no complaints so far.
My main feature request at this point would be a way to CW other peoples content that I am retooting, which would probably mean quite toots which is the OTHER big bone of contention related to the influx.
posted by Artw at 11:26 AM on February 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
Picking a Mastodon instance was a tough one for me, but I landed on (and landed on hard enough that I'm one of the admins on!) a pretty great instance; it's a nice mix of SF fandom and tech neepery, with a core of tech+security folks in the early user IDs.
Twitter... well, I had the experience anastasiav did; I curated vigorously and found my Twitter experience super enjoyable, but I have no intention of letting my free content drive profit for Musk.
posted by ChrisR at 9:00 PM on February 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
Twitter... well, I had the experience anastasiav did; I curated vigorously and found my Twitter experience super enjoyable, but I have no intention of letting my free content drive profit for Musk.
posted by ChrisR at 9:00 PM on February 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
I just hit the switch that hides EVERYONE’S boosts not log after I started my instance and it’s fucking great. All I see is the stuff the people I follow are posting.
And honestly I think that relabeled XKCD meme would be truer if some of the big, wide blocks were labeled as “95% furries”, being a furry pornographer is a livable gig because there are a LOT of furries in the trenches of the IT world with high pay and weird fantasies. The best time to attack a corporation’s security is probably during a major furry con, because half their best people will be off-duty getting stoned/drunk/etc and cavorting in expensive, bespoke fursuits.
posted by egypturnash at 7:35 AM on February 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
And honestly I think that relabeled XKCD meme would be truer if some of the big, wide blocks were labeled as “95% furries”, being a furry pornographer is a livable gig because there are a LOT of furries in the trenches of the IT world with high pay and weird fantasies. The best time to attack a corporation’s security is probably during a major furry con, because half their best people will be off-duty getting stoned/drunk/etc and cavorting in expensive, bespoke fursuits.
posted by egypturnash at 7:35 AM on February 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
NoxAeternum: "The problem is not that Reddit is large - it's that its management has argued in the past that enabling the continued abuse of women was the 'virtuous' choice - and you're not fixing a broken moral compass just by making things smaller."
Honestly I feel like size of the audience is truly an issue. Bigger crowds makes it easier for assholes to get away with being assholes before they are found out and drowned out. Bigger crowds makes it easier for a small group of assholes to attract and embolden others, resulting in moving the Overton window on that server.
The thing I learned from Twitter and Facebook is pretty simple, really. Not every conversation needs to include everyone. A large public platform (with nothing but monetization at it's core) is not a safe place to make the center of your entire social life.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:23 AM on February 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
Honestly I feel like size of the audience is truly an issue. Bigger crowds makes it easier for assholes to get away with being assholes before they are found out and drowned out. Bigger crowds makes it easier for a small group of assholes to attract and embolden others, resulting in moving the Overton window on that server.
The thing I learned from Twitter and Facebook is pretty simple, really. Not every conversation needs to include everyone. A large public platform (with nothing but monetization at it's core) is not a safe place to make the center of your entire social life.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:23 AM on February 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
Everything will centralize again, and it will seem eternal, as if the tower could never fall. For now, let’s enjoy the scattering.
the polycules, seeking shelter from the monetization storm, recrystalize -- only to be farmed as AI fodder?
@paul@paulkedrosky.com: "It's adorable that people are only slowly realizing that Google search at least fed sites traffic, while chat AI thingies slurp up and summarize content, which they anonymize and feed back, leaving the slurped sites traffic-less and dying. But, innovation. It is, in a way, a tragedy of the commons problem, with no easy way to police 'over grazing' of the information commons, leading to automated over-usage and eventual ecosystem collapse."
posted by kliuless at 1:06 AM on February 17, 2023 [1 favorite]
the polycules, seeking shelter from the monetization storm, recrystalize -- only to be farmed as AI fodder?
@paul@paulkedrosky.com: "It's adorable that people are only slowly realizing that Google search at least fed sites traffic, while chat AI thingies slurp up and summarize content, which they anonymize and feed back, leaving the slurped sites traffic-less and dying. But, innovation. It is, in a way, a tragedy of the commons problem, with no easy way to police 'over grazing' of the information commons, leading to automated over-usage and eventual ecosystem collapse."
posted by kliuless at 1:06 AM on February 17, 2023 [1 favorite]
the miracle of the commons
The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants; a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts; an escalating series of punishments for cheaters; and good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions.
posted by craniac at 7:34 AM on March 5, 2023
The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants; a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts; an escalating series of punishments for cheaters; and good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions.
posted by craniac at 7:34 AM on March 5, 2023
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