Posts about Social Media (RSS, JSON)

4PM — Towards the end of The Gutenberg Parenthesis—in which Jeff Jarvis argues that the internet is too new a medium for us to understand its long-term social impact—he writes:

I worry that we demonize data and regulate its collection more that its exploitation, we might cut ourselves off from the knowledge that can result.

People don’t oppose data collection per se. They oppose data collection as a means to further the agenda of tech-oligarch owned businesses. As such we need to differentiate what data is being collected and more importantly why it is collected.

Is the data collected to build comprehensive psychograms of every user, what they read and for how long, what links they click, and what they share; with goal of extending their stay within walled-garden websites and to sell more advertising and thus to make more money for stake holders? Is the data collected to train AI models to eventually replace salaried humans in creative vocations with to make more money for stake holders? Or is this data collected to study human behaviour, to archive the current cultural, political or technological discourse, so humanity can learn from it now and in future generations.

When we’re discussing intrusive data collection and how to reign it in, we’re not talking about a bunch of scientists trying to understand current and historic events mediated through social media similar to how climatologists drill ice cores into the antarctic shelf to understand the composition the atmosphere throughout history. We’re talking about greedy and morally bankrupt business owners who collect data to manipulate, to deceive, and frankly steal, just to make a buck.

Herein lies the difference.

We don’t live in medieval Florence where the arrival of a new medium led to an explosion of new ideas that few people with power rightly perceive as a threat to their power, and where the better idea eventually prevails. No, we live in a world where greedy billionaires actively curate algorithms so they push engaging but false divisive content on millions of people to sell ads, and more recently to advance their midlife-crisis driven political agendas.

The data is currently collected by the wrong people, those that can afford extensive hardware to store everything that is being said and done online for eternity. But open APIs that allows access to the data are a thing of the past so the data ends up on closed silos, where it’s useful to few but useless to the majority of society now and in the future.

5PM — I do not believe, not even for one second, that Blueksy is billionaire proof. Bluesky has accepted investor money which makes them susceptible to a hostile takeover in some form and, thus far, it’s not a decentralised platform.

I’ve been looking for a piece that critically examines Bluesky’s corporate structure, the people behind their investment rounds and how both might affect Bluesky’s future. “Without Sky: Social Media and the End of Reality” is a pretty good start.

For several reasons, Bluesky has a target painted on its back. First, it has no plausible revenue model that can make it self-supporting anytime soon. Second, it is facing large and quickly-growing costs as it seeks to scale and fend off adversarial attacks. Third, it has attracted a fairly homogeneous audience of exhausted, well-meaning liberals that would be tempting to target for manipulation. And crucially, it already has a board member who has a fiduciary duty to serve a variety of crypto-related interests.

With the most recent investment from Blockchain Capital and Blockchain Capital’s Kinjal Shah subsequently joining Bluesky’s board comes the necessity to make money, at least at some point. If the returns don’t materialise, investors will try to recoup their investments another way; therefore opening the plausible possibility of a billionaire take-over.

If that takeover happened today, there would be no alternative. The AT Protocol allows for decentralisation, but only on paper. There is only one Bluesky instance.

Bluesky is effectively evolving as a centralized service. Until or unless there is a second company or concern competing with Bluesky using the same protocols and able to somehow fund its operations, it is effectively operating as a clone of Twitter, but with a very selective audience, and similar cost structures.

I said it before, Bluesky is not a distributed system, and probably never will be.

6PM — DaftSocial. What a name. It’s a social network where you post via email, but you can only use the subject line.

I love the simplicity: No text formatting. You can post images but you have to upload them first and include the link in your post. There’s no way to follow people or reply to posts but you can subscribe to someone’s RSS feed. Doesn’t this sound more like a blog than a social network? But who’s splitting hair?

For a social network, why not allow following people and send a digest via email once a day? A static list of content that doesn’t grow. Slow down social media to the cadence of a daily newspaper.

1PM — Katie Notopoulos, writing for MIT Technology Review, argues we have a chance to build a new Internet by moving beyond big platforms:

Here’s the good news. We’re in a rare moment when a shift just may be possible; the previously intractable and permanent-­seeming systems and platforms are showing that they can be changed and moved, and something new could actually grow.

Are we really in a moment where change is possible? Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit are still around, and we’ve got Threads now. All these platforms are for engagement and advertising dollars.

A lot of the discussions around re-building a better internet remind me of time about 20 years ago, when tech-savvy early adopters thought the Web is a space of endless opportunity to communicate and build communities. Until conservative techno-optimist bros with deep pockets rolled in to screw up everything. Early adopters moving to alternative platforms now, but why do we think it’s going to be different this time. Why do we think we can hold on to our idealistic spaces?

I’m hopeful but not confident. We’re seeing a resurgence of the personal website, of RSS, and even comments on blogs. But it’s a small group that builds this corner of the internet, many of which have been at the forefront of the blogging revolution. But what about the rest?

Personal websites are hard to maintain, writing thoughtful blog posts is time consuming. What made the likes of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook so successful, besides their addictive content curation, is that it’s easy to set up and account and it’s easy to post. Humans are lazy. The quick thought in the shower must go online now; expanding that thought into nuanced argument is too much effort. So is finding websites, maintaining a list of feeds and reading long-form writing? Why go through the effort when the dishes need to be done, and Threads serves new stuff in easily digestible junks.

Maybe the old silos are emptying at the moment. The internet of the next couple of years might be a more pleasant, more social space. But I’m sure some rich Silicon-Valley bro will step up and create the next VC-funded argument machine.

5PM — In anticipation to the release of Threads, Facebook’s Twitter competitor, Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder, former chief executive, posted a screenshot of Thread’s data-privacy statement from Apple App Store, alongside the smug comment “All your Threads are belong to us”. To which Musk replies “Yeah.”

I find it hard to believe that Twitter is any more privacy-friendly than Facebook, after all both companies rely on detailed user information to sell targeted ads. It’s in their business model. So let’s compare the privacy statements of both both apps, Threads and Twitter, as posted on Apple App Store.

Data Used to Track You

Threads does not provide this information.

Data Linked to You

Third-party advertising

Developer’s Advertising or Marketing

Analytics

Product Personalisation

App functionality

Other purposes

Data Not Linked to You

Third-Party Advertising

Threads does not provide this information.

Developer’s Advertising or Marketing

Threads does not provide this information.

Analytics

Threads does not provide this information.

App Functionality

Threads does not provide this information.

It’s true that Threads collects more information about you, including what feels like more sensitive data, like financial information, health and fitness data, and whatever is behind “Sensitive Info.” It really does look like the Facebook lawyers ticked all of the boxes when they submitted Threads to the app store; just in case, it allows them to move faster and break more things.

But the list of data shared by Twitter is very long too. Dorsey and Musk aren’t in a position to point fingers at anyone when in regards to personal-data collection and sharing. That’s not to defend Facebook’s Threads—they are both equally data-hungry apps.

8AM — Spot-on analysis by Alex Pareene, writing for Defector:

The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader.

The implosion of Twitter and recent shenanigans at Reddit are like a livestream allowing us to observe the decline of once beloved platforms unfold in real time. What we know from history helps us better anticipate the future, and it doesn’t look good:

We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles.

The internet as an information wasteland is a bleak outlook, but one that isn’t off the charts; it’s likely even, given the track record of those who currently drive the development of major platforms. Just look at who’s building Twitter clones at the moment: Instagram, Substack, and I’m sure others are experimenting with similar ideas.

The alternative, as always, is to build your own place, a website, host it somewhere you control or at a least makes it easy to move, and double down on open standards and protocols.

4PM — This post on Mastodon concerning the 15-minute city demonstrates what I’ve been saying all along: When you purely look at how people argue, Mastodon isn’t any different than Twitter.

Here’s the post:

“My hot take on ‘15 minute cities’ is if you can get to the coffee shop within fifteen minutes, but the barrista who makes your drink can’t afford to live closer than a half-hour away, then you live in a theme park.” - Gareth Klieber #cities #urbanism #housing #transit #cycling

The take is not wrong. But it condenses one opinion about a hot-button topic to 278 characters. It’s pointed and missing nuance, which makes it more provocative aiming to receive more interaction, comments and shares. And it worked; it landed on Kottke’s blog, which has tens of thousands of readers.

Mickey Mouse and Goofy won’t be parading down the street at noon if the staff in a coffee shop have to travel more than fifteen minutes to work. The idea of the 15-minute city—to have all important amenities, including work, available within a short walk from your home—that ideal just isn’t fulfilled in the scenario. Although closer to the truth, phrasing it this way sounds rather boring. So many important questions are not asked: Is the ideal 15-minute city even attainable? What needs to happen to change our current cities? What role does public transport play? Would the car-manufacturing lobby play along?

And the replies: Pseudo-philosophic ramblings about privilege. Someone has to point out a small typo, to which the original author obviously needs to reply. Another person says “working class,” and the discussion only spirals around that for a while. Only a few comments dissect the issue with the original statement.

Is that any different from Twitter? Is that the nirvana of civility that the loudest advocates of Mastodon promised a couple of months ago? We’re past the honeymoon period now with Mastodon. A lot of people have joined the platform, and more conversations involve more participants. And the people that were the loudest on Twitter become the loudest on Mastodon: People with a puffed-out sense of mission, confidence and extroversion. None of this is worth moderating; there’s no bullying, nothing illegal or offensive in this conversation. But there’s no exchange of ideas, no listening—it’s people talking at each other instead of with each other.

It’s what drove me away from Twitter three years ago and what drove me away from Facebook before that. The underlying protocols and technology can change, but it will always be humans arguing on the Internet—it won’t ever change.

5PM — Jonathan Crowe of The Map Room blog reflects on 20 years of blogging:

What faded away, I think, was the idea of, and self-identification as, a blogger. Lots of people started blogs in the format’s early years but didn’t keep up with them; social media was a better fit for what they wanted to do. Not many people start a blog qua blog to be a blogger nowadays.

Blogging never disappeared. People still post writing and photos and videos, and they share a window into their lives and thinking. But the gestalt of blogging is different today—on social media—and people now identify content creators. And with the changing self perception, the motivation for publishing stuff online has changed. On a weblog twenty, even ten, years ago, you would share for the sake of sharing, for the sake of documenting, or for the sake of learning:

The idea that someone with an intense interest in a subject but not much knowledge could start a blog as a way to explore the subject—“an exercise in self-education” is what I called it—was something that made sense in 2003. It might be a bit more archaic now

Bloggers publish for themselves first, and the content may or may not be valuable to others. Today, content creators publish to go viral or to build influence and a career.

The form and motivation of online publishing has changed, and so has the content. Online content is shorter now because of platform limitations, but shorter content is also more digestible and easier to share and therefore more likely to go viral. You need to work through a 1,000 word blog post commenting on the current state of the Internet before you share it, and you might not agree with all the arguments, so you might not share it at all. That’s different with a cute photo or a Tweet that reduces a complex topic to a 280-character zinger.

9AM — New York City released a new marketing campaign mark, an obvious nod to the iconic I ♥ New York design by Milton Glaser.

And Twitter, going to great lengths to live up to its reputation, reacted:

• “Graphic designer be like: 8k” — a TV Host/Sports reporter
• “Beyond the questionable design, the wording also doesn’t make sense. Who is ‘we’?” — A technology writer.
• “It looks like a senior school project from Pratt. There’s nothing aesthetically correct about it.” — a screenplay writer.
• “Hopefully we didn’t pay more than $100 for this” — a literary agent and occasional poet.
• “Beyond stupid?” — a Writer, Skewerer, Digital Therapist.
• “If my 12-year old slapped this together for a school assignment, I would take away her phone for a week so it’s a no for me.” — a rural-mothers podcast host.
• “Is this a joke” — the founder of a calendar start-up
• “Hmm. A third grader could do better 🥴” — the founder of an obscure social-media startup.
• “Is this mess real? It looks like it was done by someone who opened Photoshop for the first time.” — someone who hosts a show on Youtube.

As you can see, none of the comments I picked is from people working in a field adjacent to graphic design; I bet few have the knowledge to assess whether the designer selected an appropriate font, whether the balance is right, or whether the design delivers what the pitch promised. It’s a marketing design, for god’s sake; marketing is always 80% bullshit. I won’t affect anyone’s life. Yet people comment like some politician said they would introduce SUV-free roads when elected.

I love how everyone on the Internet has an opinion about everything all the time.

8AM — I like a good, well-worded online rant like this one from Elizabeth Lopatto about websites plastered all over with popups to sign up or chat.

The web is becoming a miserable experience because some salesbro who is trying to meet his KPIs is doing stuff to marginally increase the number of paying customers. (And you know, the hell with the rest of us!) The more each site tries to create its own little walled garden, the less valuable the open web becomes.

This wasn’t always the case; the web used to be different, less commercial, and more fun.

I remember when people just made stuff for fun — as a gift to other people. It seems like there’s less and less of that spirit remaining, and it’s why the internet sucks now.

I disagree. There is still good stuff out there, but it’s less visible in the sea of rubbish on the web today. There are thousands of blogs, for example, but the means to access blogs, or indie websites, generally, has stayed the same for twenty years. It’s still as cumbersome to follow a blog as it was in 2003. Compare that to the ease with which you’re fed content on any social media platform, and you know why everybody wants your email.