One thing I’ve noticed is that the culture on Twitter now is quite different than it was a decade ago, and the platform has calcified. A decade ago the common adivce for how to connect with people - Tweet often, comment often, follow accounts - connected you with a lot of people, and you would often end up following each other.
I started a new account recently (hadn’t used my old one in years), and doing so now got me just about zero attention. I got zero followers from comments, posts I made, following others, etc. It was like shouting in an empty room. Of course, there were ways to “increase engagement” that I tried and they did increase my follower account - but to what end? At that point it just feels like a weird game where everyone is trying to scam each other.
I tried another social media app recently, and was surprised to find it was like how Twitter used to be. When I followed people, a bunch of people followed me back. A bunch of people reached out to me, so that even though I haven’t put _any_ effort into engagement so far, I’ve made a lot of connections. People there are one social media to be, well, social. On Twitter, it feels like a mercenary game of “What can this person do for me?”/“How can I trick this person into making them think I’ll make them rich/healthy/wealthy/successful.”
Do you really want to be friends with 8 billion people? Let's say you want to be friends with only 500 of them. How should those 500 be selected out of people who see your tweets? It has become a norm in social media, only real-life friends follow you on social media if you are not a famous person, otherwise its a suspicious behaviour. People can have a transient meaningful conversation in the comments section, never to see each other again.
My school teacher jokingly gave a small scenario, he said "Imagine you know everyone in the city, you have to say hi or atleast nod to everyone. Not doing it would be to acknowledge you don't care for them."
> I started a new account recently (hadn’t used my old one in years), and doing so now got me just about zero attention. I got zero followers from comments, posts I made, following others, etc. It was like shouting in an empty room.
Same. I've run my own experiment by paying for a couple months, then letting the subscription lapse, and repeating. I've been through 3 cycles. My conclusion is that if you don't pay, you don't exist. I'm currently not paying, and I don't see doing so any more. Even if I do pay, I have no desire -- and nothing particular to leverage -- to build a serious "presence," so I will always be just another nobody spitting in the wind.
The comment quality standards required for people to reply and/or follow you are higher now. Tweeting often is useless if you have nothing really substantial to say. There are millions of accounts that do that, and they’re mostly noise disguised as signal, but most of the Twitter community has caught on and now auto-filters it out. You’ve gotta get through that auto-filter now with information or insights of substance, and those simply take longer and more effort to generate, there’s no silver bullet.
I’ve found the opposite to be the case myself. When I was only posting substantive Tweets with new info, they wouldn’t be seen 99% of the time. But every so often a Tweet would get seen, gain some traction, be retweeted, people would say it was amazing. And I’d get zero new followers. Like I said, I did find ways to get new followers - but it was through gaming the system.
And this is something I see a lot. There are a ton of accounts that have less than 100 followers that only do substantive Tweets. And the people who keep rehashing the same clickbait have huge followings. Even most of the relatively substantive large accounts spend a ton of time rephrasing Tweets they’ve made before. A high volume mediocre account that games the system somewhat is going to be a lot bigger than an account that only Tweets/comments when they have something substantive to say, at least in my experience.
> comment quality standards required for people to reply and/or follow you are higher now
I really do not find this to be true. The high ones are from blue checks and overwhelming majority of them has no meaning. I do not even mean insulting or something I disagree with, they just don't say anything.
There are very few real responses now and majority of what I see excluding the above are knee jerks super short responses.
Same has happened on HN. Organic submissions don’t necessarily get the attention they did 10 years ago, based on just content.
Also keep in mind that the more informative the submission, the longer people spend on the site, the less upvotes it gets because by the time they return it would have likely scrolled off the screen. Short, punchy things dominate
I think it may have a lot to do with the Twitter subcultures and communities you are following. I made a new Twitter account last month and feel extremely welcomed with conversation and followers. I'm not using it as a generalized social media account where I post random things, only interesting topics within a tighter community.
>I started a new account recently (hadn’t used my old one in years), and doing so now got me just about zero attention. I got zero followers from comments, posts I made, following others, etc.
Not sure if that's because of some recent change.
Many people had the same experience also back a decade ago (and in between). Just because they adviced to "tweet often, comment often, follow accounts" it didn't mean this guaranteed followers, it was just the bare minimum required to be able to get any.
On platforms with much less users (like some "federated" replacements) this is often not the case - connections are more easily made there, but I'd say that's always the case when a social network is much smaller and people try to "build up" their circles (as opposed to when they're spoilled for choice).
It sounds like Mastodon. Or at least, that was my experience with it. People do find you quite easily via the Local Timeline, and engagement tends to be much higher and more authentic even with lower numbers. Just be sure to stay away from the drama.
One thing I've realized about social media, especially X/Twitter, is that it's not a singular place, that is you can have 4 feeds on twitter from different users that might as well be different social media platforms.
I've noticed if you follow the "Indie Hackers" on X then you will get lots of self promotion (ie. "My startup just hit $X/MRR!!, here's how I did it: substack.com...."). On the other hand there are other places like "Finance X" or "Sports X" where you get deep dives about the state of that space from various people.
Moving away from X/Twitter, there's tons of "authentic" content you can find on Youtube, a recent favorite of mine has been watching Peter Santenello[1]. He could be considered a journalist and his whole thing is just going into random communities and talking to people. I especially enjoyed his series about Appalachia and the Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn.
I feel like these conversations condense down to "the death of authenticity... if you want to make money/get mainstream."
There's plenty of people doing it for free, but there's a melancholy from people who saw the myth of "being yourself and getting paid well for it" dissolve.
>the myth of "being yourself and getting paid well for it" dissolve.
Well, most people's selves aren't anything that deserves to be paid well for being it. And a lot of people have crappy selves, especially those wanting to be "influencers".
I'm not sure the "global square" model of Twitter scales well for so many people. Just reading the comments here it seems like a lot of people use Twitter/X defensively. They're constantly scanning for what they think is grift, politics, etc. They have an attitude of "do not disturb me" on X by default. This sort of gruff fatigue is what seems to set in on very large, cacophonous social networks.
I also find Youtube to be a lot healthier, probably because not everyone is incentivized to have an opinion, and it's quite easy to ignore the Comments section. I find the Youtube -> Discord pipeline to be great. I'd love to have an open version of this, something like Peertube/Bitchute -> Matrix, but due to the usual reasons FOSS continues to only appeal to small niches.
> Megathreads about AI, thoughtful, longform narratives that could have been blog posts...
Honestly, the long form tweets became a signal to just ignore that tweet. I unfollow or block users that tweet long form often.
> The people in my feed—most of whom I’m not following, by the way—
Yea, just use the chrono-tab ("following"). Only usable version of Twitter.
> love posting for engagement. Some of them love it so much that they offer courses teaching other people how to do it—which amplifies this godforsaken death spiral even further.
This is so bizarre to watch.
---
I think Twitter is usable only if you stick to the chronological tab which has only your follows and putting non-trivial effort to clean your follows periodically. Unfollow and block people aggressively. Outrage-focused account? Blocked. Grift? Unfollow/block. Random-ass comment pushing some political angle? Block. I block even people that don't share follows if I got to see a tweet I just don't like.
Social media generates a lot of waste, and good platforms provide a way for you to remove the waste from your experience. Otherwise, the end state of these types of networks is LinkedIn: a useful tool hidden beneath the massive pile of social media waste.
> Honestly, the long form tweets became a signal to just ignore that tweet. I unfollow or block users that tweet long form often.
Even though I don't use Twitter much any more, I fully agree here. Whenever I see the "[thread emoji] 1/?" I'm already done.
I can't even fathom why anyone would put the energy in these "thread" style tweets. Twitter content will forever remain fundamentally ephemeral: it's hard to find my own tweets from years back, let alone someone else's I found insightful.
The normal tweet format works well for ephemera, it's a medium for shower thoughts and sloganeering. Similar to how a typical child's sand shovel is correct tool for building sandcastles. Twitter threads feel like someone is handing out full sized shovels for work you know will be lost for ever when the next tide comes in.
>Even though I don't use Twitter much any more, I fully agree here. Whenever I see the "[thread emoji] 1/?" I'm already done.
Some of the best content on Twitter is on threads 1/? - from programming lore, to story telling, to any kind of analysis.
Small tweets are usually just advertising (in different guises), gossip, juvenile attempts at humor, hate, or (at best) some breaking news, you can find elsewhere with more depth.
> Twitter content will forever remain fundamentally ephemeral:
I've bookmarked a "thread of threads" from a user or two. Even that was a half-baked solution though. Since they've started limiting public (not logged in) access again i haven't bothered.
I think this is largely correct. The problem for me is that doing that is a lot of work, and the benefit I get from it doesn't even come close to justifying that work.
> Elon’s political antics chased away a lot of good people. Many of my favorite follows have moved to Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. Also, more and more people are waking up and realizing that social media is actually quite bad for you, and leaving it behind. Good for them. Bad for me.
It's common to blame the move from Twitter on Elon's politics. And that's perfectly valid. I moved away for a much simpler reason. He killed Tweetdeck for anyone not willing to pay $8/month. Regular Twitter hits you with ads (very disruptively), related tweets they know you want to see, and an algorithm that tries to get you hooked on hits of toxicity. Mastodon is pretty close to what I had with Tweetdeck, but less toxic due to lack of quote tweets.
Edit: Rereading this comment, I want to add that the things the author is saying make Twitter bad were to a large extent things we didn't have to deal with when we had Tweetdeck. That's not clear in the original version of my comment.
> It's common to blame the move from Twitter on Elon's politics. And that's perfectly valid. I moved away for a much simpler reason.
The bulk of the people I follow (mostly authors, journalists, and geeks) have moved off or drastically reduced their activity on Twitter and it's almost entirely due to Elon's politics and the changes he's making in support of that world view.
To be fair, that's because he leveled the playing field that was tilted in favor of the elite establishment consensus. They aren't supportive of a platform with free speech. ie, speech one disagrees with. Team Establishment was happy when it censored opposing viewpoints and it's no surprise, although unfortunate, they migrated to regressive platforms where that still occurs.
> To be fair, that's because he leveled the playing field that was tilted in favor of the elite establishment consensus.
Do you really believe this?
Anyway, most of the people I follow left because of the terrible people and bots, sooooo many bots, clogging up their timeline with right wing nonsense.
Why not believe it if it's true? Twitter was systematically working with the government to ban people they (and sometimes by weird comedy of errors, also Russian FSB) want to ban. They were also systematically banning and suppressing people expressing opinions disfavored by the elite consensus.
Bots don't help of course, but the presence of bots doesn't preclude the tilted playing field.
> Why not believe it if it's true? Twitter was systematically working with the government to ban people they (and sometimes by weird comedy of errors, also Russian FSB) want to ban.
That’s still happening. But what does that have to do “elite consensus”?
I have a strong suspicion that from the fact that managers of most major social networks were openly political and all of them to one (the left) side, many people decided this is how the normal situation is - you can only use a service if the owner shares your politics and constantly reaffirms it. When it turned out Elon's politics does not match theirs in some aspects, it was a shock to them - how can we tolerate being associated with a person who disagrees with us?! I don't think that's how functional adults are supposed to behave, but on social media I guess the norms are different.
I definitely think that if the product is good enough people will put up with ideological differences with leadership. Elon made it too easy to leave Twitter in this regard by making the product worse at the same moment he was posting half baked opinions about social issues.
You don't have to wait long until the next story comes out about some famous person who commits suicide or hits rock bottom in some other way. The average person thinks 'why would they do that when they have so many friends?'.
The reality is that even though they might have thousands (or millions) who know their name or will act really excited to see them at their next cocktail party; they have no one to turn to in their real moment of need. They simply don't have deep, long lasting relationships with people who genuinely care about them. They are surrounded by 'suck-ups' who will tell them what they want to hear instead of having a real conversation with meaningful content. When they are in real trouble, all those 'friends' will abandon them at the drop of a hat.
People aren't authentic when they are talking to everyone on the planet at once, unless they are incredibly naive. They are authentic talking to their friends, or family, in private conversations. A lot of people were naive in the early days and it made for amusing conversation, not any longer and these platforms are just about brand management / advertising now.
People are not authentic talking to friends or family in private either. The entire authenticity cult is a creation of modern media and is as much manufactured as "fitting in" is.
In fact, I'd say that it's GOOD that people craft their image, no one genuinely wants to hear your unfiltered thoughts. Usually people who do that are considered socially maladjusted.
I partially agree, but think it's a matter of degrees.
Most of us probably have to do some image-crafting, but the closer the match between the image we craft and our unfiltered-self (if there is such a thing), the better.
I've certainly felt frustrated by people who seemed preoccupied with image-crafting, and by people who seem to have no social awareness or filter.
Edited to add: I think pseudonamous forums like this can be a valuable opportunity to develop the self you want to be with different social constraints from day-to-day life.
Truth is orthogonal to effort. Alice crafted a message. She distilled years of experience into a pithy tweet. Bob crafted a message to round out his brand.
I want to hear what others truly believe.
> The entire authenticity cult is a creation of modern media and is as much manufactured…
Where can I learn more about this? (serious)
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
You call them naive like if it was a bad thing. I for one welcome the naive ones, they don't feel like they are transparently trying to take advantage.
Is that anything like Authenticity in an Advertising Economy?
I have to admit, I've never really understood (or used) Twitter/X. Short form posts lacking depth but very, very timely? The only time I used it very much was early on when I was living in Boston and it was useful to find out if there were subway outages. Lacking depth, timely, but pointedly useful. Somehow that function stopped working after a while. I've no idea why.
I suspect I simply don't understand Twitting. I've never figured it out. Facebook and Youtube figured _me_ out, and they both provide stuff I'm actually interested in. (And yes, I find it mildly disturbing as I use something that I don't really control or understand. But FB and YT actually do work.)
Twitter/X despite several attempts on my part to play its game, simply has never produced much attention or engagement for me.
Hell, I've gotten more use from Instagram than Twitter. Though not much.
For what it's worth, I'm older, in my mid 60s. I do note that FB tends to skew older. Or at least my FB experience does. Possibly an artifact of it's algorithm. But when I click on it's recommendations for "friends" I find the older users active and the younger users accounts a ghost town.
My suspicion is that the changes we are seeing in how social media works with people, especially people of different ages, is a kind of societal immune response. To hark back to my initial reaction to this post, advertising has certainly evolved, and evolved its audience over the last century. It's still here, and still pretty deeply embedded. But what it does and how it does it has changed. Insert your own viral analogy here...
In my experiences with Twitter, if you can find a group of some sort that you interact with a lot, Twitter would try to keep that group of people interacting with each other in some way. So part of Twitter is just "being part of a group" and is usually used as entertainment or self-promotion.
If you are just there for the drama, you'll love it. There's always drama. If you are just there to interact with other music producers, there are enough of them that there's usually something new worth listening to or discuss. If you just want dumb memes, there are also plenty of them.
But very few people are going onto Twitter to "be themselves" in the first place, so looking for true human interaction is a lonely time on Twitter.
> Short form posts lacking depth but very, very timely?
...and funny. That's what was good about the Internet. It was ephemeral, like Geocities gifs and Flash cartoons. Funny posts on Twitter would generate conversations, and quote tweets would allow people to out their own spin on it.
Unfortunately VCs thought it was a billion dollar idea and ran it into the ground by turning it into the internet equivalent of talk radio.
Just abandon these products, they are useless and I think we have all seen enough evidence to suggest they do more harm than good.
Dont start splitting hairs here either, I understand and was there when Twitter was the only way to communicate when governments were putting down protests... There are other tools. Go out there and build them... I wont ever touch a spycloud again while protesting...
This actually infuriates me. All those people who spent the last 20 years building adtech and social media. Thanks! You created a world that is now skeptical of tech and makes the rest of our jobs harder.
Frankly, Id be worried with social and ad tech companies on my resume. I basically throw these away now.
> Frankly, Id be worried with social and ad tech companies on my resume. I basically throw these away now.
I sort of unintentionally ended up in ad tech recently, and deeply regret it. I enjoy the technical issues, but...ironically, anybody who would throw out my resume because it has ad tech on it is exactly the kind of person I would want to work for. C'est le vie, I guess I'll stay in ad tech.
I have tons of gap years, Id rather struggle and fail at my own idea the given in. These experiences ultimately impress employers and clients more than any employer name I list.
Some day it will be seen as a ridiculous thing like Tulip Mania, except in this case it requires much more smarts. Also we needed a ton of STEM smarts to prevent a climate disaster, oops.
Same reason why Wikipedia contributors do not want to be paid, and why cryptocurrency-based wikis failed.
Money is not always the best incentive. It is leaking in every part of our society, sometimes in a destructive way. It's great for innovation and infrastructure, but not for our social life and human rights.
There is no silver bullet. Money works on most contexts, but sometimes reputation, social structure and idealism work too. The open-source culture and Wikipedia are great examples.
Reminds me of Eric Steven Raymond's hacker howto from 2001 [1]
"Like most cultures without a money economy, hackerdom runs on reputation"
PJ Vogt (formerly Reply All) recently did an interesting episode on his new podcast about this exact topic[0]. It's worth a listen. It really helped to clarify some meta-thoughts about how attention works, how media consumption influences us, and how I think about Twitter (and people's relation to it).
Like, at one point, PJ talks about how he's witnessed people at the bar talking to a friend (purportedly), but in a format that seems to be talking to an imaginary twitter audience. The way people talk, communicate, quip, etc on twitter is bleeding into discourse OUTSIDE twitter. I tend to agree as I've seen this. Worse, when I use things like twitter, I find myself being unintentionally obtuse, contrarian, quippy, etc.
You are a product of what you consume. How deep of thoughts can be conveyed in 140/280 characters? And perhaps more importantly: does such a shallow medium give you a proper opportunity to explore your thoughts on a topic before you begin to formulate an opinion/response?
Authenticity and commerce are awkward bedfellows. Just take a look at corporate communications where complete vacuity and obfuscation is the status-quo, way before social media.
The main new thing is virality and actors trying to ride platform algorithms. This has led to a complex three-body system (producers-platform-consumers) the full degenerating dynamics of which we are only gradually discovering.
There must be better ways but they are still to materialize. The fediverse is super cool but that's mostly because it has not yet attracted the crushing attention of commerce.
Would any of the old classics (take your pick from Aristotle to Tolstoy) have been created in a data-driven world? What those authors put out into the world (I think), was what they thought was missing in the world, not what they thought the world wanted to hear. This is getting very hard to do today, even when you're honestly trying to do so, because the data is constantly telling you not to. And the data is necessarily short term an one dimensional, never fully capturing value in the way that our brains organically do.
I don't disagree, but something like Shakespeare's plays or the Odyssey/Iliad probably were refined/changed based on audience responses before they became the fixed works we have now. Dickens (after publication) softened the language towards Jews in the latter parts of Oliver Twist based on reactions he got from acquaintances.
It's hard to evaluate cultural production without the benefit of hindsight. In two hundred years someone will take the best YouTube video produced today (best by their future standards) and be amazed at how great people were in 2023.
It remains possible to produce great original works of art, independent of popular trends. For example, Thomas Pynchon is a modern-day example of an author still creating significant works of literature, who is notably reclusive from the public view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pynchon
I'm more annoyed by this in blogs. Substack started as an anti-Twitter, with long-form intentional communication and calm newsletters. Now, it's slowly shifted to a growth hacker cesspool of pop-ups, recommendations, and dark UI patterns. Beehiv is worse. We've ended up with an explosion of content blogs by people who don't value content.
We wouldn't have to pretend if the Long Tail idea was working. It seems Long Tail doesn't work. If there are 10 books expressing 10 distinct valuable insignts, suddenly comes along a youtube video which combines all these 10 ideas into a nice story and it gets the views and money. Same behaviour as the Netflix Hackathon behaviour, where participating teams merged to combine their strong ideas to win the prize.
> My feed is full of posts that have obviously had more effort put into it than most of what I used to see. Megathreads about AI, thoughtful, longform narratives that could have been blog posts, carefully curated images, and super-positive business updates. It’s mostly engaging stuff.
I think that simply, it is NOT an engaging stuff. That is why author is bored by it. It is content author think "should" be engaging. Seriously, following two are pretty much opposite of engaging: carefully curated images, and super-positive business updates.
These two are definition of the boring. And while the long form narratives have potential to be engaging, just being long form does not make the thing engaging. The content actually have to be engaging.
There's some quote somewhere along the lines of "classical books being the ones you want to have already read" which is basically saying you want the kudos of having reading war and peace, pride and prejudice, les miserables, great expectations, etc, even though you may hate the experience, or have no interest.
This article shoots itself in the foot right at the start. It reveals that the author is in fact just as wrapped up in Twitter as those he critiques. It shows a graph with a person on the left who has "nothing to say" being a mongrel, as if it's bad not to want to insert or even have a personal opinion about everything. There is completely nothing wrong with not getting wrapped up in the BS that is modern western society at large. In fact, it's quite healthy NOT to have an opinion about any of it because you're off doing much better, much healthier things.
One of The Last Psychiatrist's points is that there's no such thing as 'authentic'. From his blog post "How to destroy a marriage (2009)"[1]:
"I know, it's hard to keep those emotions in check after your boss has been riding you all day. Yet then the UPS guy comes to the door and you are instantly nice, bright, warm. "Hey, thanks, have a good one buddy! Go Raiders!" You'll say it's an act, but the other way of looking at it is that you think it's worth faking politeness to the UPS guy, but not to your family. See? Does your family need to see the real, irritable you?"
"Oh, I hear you, my special, special, generation, the one that counts hypocrisy the greatest of all possible sins: "if I can't be myself at home, what's the point?" Because that isn't the real you, there isn't a you. Who you are is what you do. If you come home and are cranky and curt and bossy at home, then you are a jerk. You don't get to say, "I'm a nice person, but I just happen to be irritable every day." Even if you aren't a jerk, what your family sees is a jerk."
My opinion, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, is that Twitter changing its prompt, in 2009, from the ‘small’ “What are you doing?” to the ‘big’ “What’s happening?” sowed the seeds of its change from the authentic and personal thing it was, to the katamari of sound and fury it is now.
I think the Iranian protests in 2009 against election results kicked that off. Twitter at the time was the only way to relay information to the wider world as the government had disabled phone service. Before that Twitter was relatively obscure. Global media coverage happened almost exclusively through people's tweets and photos.
I used to follow quality people posting meaningful stuff. They disappeared. Why? No blue check.
Meanwhile I had to ban the Primerian or whatever the fuck that is because I got his every tweets, responses and memes shoved in my face and I never followed him.
Every tweet is another "10 fact you didn't care about that will shock you" with a thread emoji like I should care.
The use of the words "Attention Economy" is what I personally call the pablumization of a problem.
If we want to address the problem we need to use the correct term: clickbait economy. The internet as we know it, is bought and paid for by clicks. And the way to get more clicks has nothing to do with authenticity. Just the opposite.
Which article would you click on to read
- "More and more Americans sink into poverty"?
- "Trump and Biden have food fight at restaurant?".
And Twitter takes this even further.
`if isdemocrat title = "trump throws food at biden?"
if isrepublican title = "biden throws food at trump?"
if istrump title = "lock em up"
It is actually worse than that, because the clicks are then used to sell you a bill of goods. How you should hate 'xyz'. How you should spend $10,000 for a new desk chair. Or how you need a $1000 a month obesity drug to fix the fact that you have been eating clickbait food?
Tracking ads are toxic. They threaten our personal well being and the well being of our society. They are right up there with air pollution.
Oh wait, no one will want to think about those issues, so why post this comment?
Unfortunately, the loss of authenticity has also overflowed into life outside of the internet. Marketing today is just another word for "telling our customers that our new product or service is exactly what they want, agnostic of reality".
Hype through loud talking is big too, but my mother-in-law has been doing that since before the internet age began.
There are two fundamental problems with social media. The first is the ad-driven revenue model as you pointed out.
The other is the dopamine economy that is driven by getting your stuff to have “engagement”, which is financially reinforced by the ad revenue model.
If any one platform by themselves tries to fix these problems then it will be suicide. The industry as a whole has to do it, and they won’t without regulation.
It’s going to have to be a non-industry move or a radically different model sustained by an interested minority. Federated systems are the other way this can work.
Twitter? Try going out to dinner without your phone. It goes way deeper than any single social platform. The way we relate to technology has become so weird.
I don't know about you, but if I go out with someone for dinner and that someone is constantly on Twitter with their phone, I consider that terribly rude.
And every time you think of reaching for it, think “what evolutionary desire was I about to short circuit, and what important aspect of being a human does that circumvent?”
It was clear when IG made this cutover ~5 years back. It was a fun platform for photographers to share work and make connections with random people throughout the world I'd never know. I even met a few IG friends IRL while traveling oversees.
Slowly with the algorithmic feed and influencers, it became fairly hard to "reach" the people who had organically followed me, or to see the photos of the people I organically followed. Became less of an outlet for my hobby and more of a chore.
Was interesting seeing my "follower" numbers double or triple while my "engagement" numbers went down 90%. Eventually was just family/friends I knew pre-IG, plus random bots.
Seems like the curve of all social media platforms as they monetize & popularize.
Everything boils down to incentives. The idea that people are paid to grab attention is flawed. It has created a cyclone of everyone chasing what's hot while true creators, not the namesake, but people who actually create new stuff, are spun out to the farthest reaches.
Like most things in life. The very best ideas and things are hidden. In someways that's good, but not if those people suffer in silence. If a great work is never read nor seen, is it great?
Advertising, specifically adtech has destroyed the world. It perverted every media and medium. I watch with great anticipation of its impending reversal. We will find ourselves back at a contextual and demographic association sooner than most know.
Maybe this is my own neurospice speaking but...What even is authenticity? Do we even see authenticity in public? Any awareness that we are being observed introduces some amount of Hawthorne effect. Probably the most genuine folks are the introverts and socially averse.
Regional burns are espoused to celebrate "radical self-expression" , and unlike the Big Burn, their smaller size seems to promote authenticity to a greater degree. But even there, people are doing bits or acting out a persona or even just socially experimenting.
Authenticity itself is nebulous. But even taking that into account, there are definitely more harmful and less harmful facades. We pay actors and performers to be inauthentic. But we consider influencer "fake".
Point is, I don't think "authenticity" is the main metric we actually care about. Inauthenticity can be lots of fun for all parties. It's the motivations of the act. It's the second-order authenticity. An actor is authentic in their inauthenticity: there's no hiding that they are putting on an act. But we dislike influencers and the like because while they are (often obviously) inauthentic, they try to hide that fact under a facade trying to make it seem like it's their "real expression".
As a counterpoint, take a youtuber I really enjoy, Ryan McBeth. He does OSINT mostly military-themed current events vids and blogs. I'm sure the Ryan in front of the camera is different than the Ryan I'd meet at the bar: more polished, calculated in choice of words, presenting self in the best light, because that's what we all do in the limelight. But he totally lampshades his sponsored bits: "let me take a few moments to pay the bills". That's the second-order authenticity. Doing a paid sponsor bit is ipso facto inauthentic - it's not something you'd do without the influence of money. But lampshading it tips his hand and humanizes him. Or does it? <vsauce theme> Maybe he's saying that because his shtick is "down to earth authentic guy" and that's what that character would say? (I doubt it, but it's a fun hypothetical).
Famously, "All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players" - Shakespeare
> I'm sure the Ryan in front of the camera is different than the Ryan I'd meet at the bar
I draw the opposite conclusion: I think talking to him at the bar about tanks and war would sound virtually the same as him on youtube. I would only expect him to check his facts and make a mental model of what he intends to say on cam instead of free-handing it (I think this is what Ward Carroll does because he has a different style).
Regarding "what is authenticity", what it makes me think of is everyone whining and moaning on Twitter about having to pay a few bucks for membership. If you were authentic enough to truly believe in what you say, then paying $8/mo is a great investment to get your message out and have a more official platform. However, if you want to enter a proverbial playground and play king of the hill (the game) and shove people around with your views and snide remarks and tribalism, then of course you're not going to pay to use the playground! It's for fun and recreation pretending to follow trends and ideologies.
If you have the ability to sense another human's emotions you can often tell when someone is being authentic or not. Set and setting are also important. Authenticity is closer to honesty about yourself rather than some kind of self-expression. I am still authentic if I don't mention my hobby of collecting records while I am at the gym. I am not authentic if I start making up whatever will impress you.
> But we dislike influencers and the like because while they are (often obviously) inauthentic, they try to hide that fact under a facade trying to make it seem like it's their "real expression".
IMO, most people dislike influencers because they fall into the category of people who are outwardly pathetic. In any sort of human interaction desperation is seen as unattractive and wrong. Influencers are desperation boiled down into the highest concentration. They are fake, inauthentic, not because they aren't who they are but they try so hard to dial up everything about them to it's maximum.
> Doing a paid sponsor bit is ipso facto inauthentic
If I am doing a paid sponsorship for beard care equipment I am authentic. This generalization doesn't fit.
> I'm sure the Ryan in front of the camera is different than the Ryan I'd meet at the bar: more polished, calculated in choice of words, presenting self in the best light, because that's what we all do in the limelight.
Someone who takes the time to create an entire blog dedicated to a topic will likely be 90% similar to what you're reading. Of course there is nuance in human interaction but someone that dedicated to a particular craft will most likely obsess over it even in person.
I understand your post is some sort of philosophical discussion on authenticity. Maybe in some textbook sense you are right. However, I have had more authentic interactions with people than inauthentic interactions. If you're close with anyone at all in your life you have also experienced that. The systemization of everything (through what you call "radical self-expression") is creating a bunch of pseudo-intellectual naval gazing on what is fundamentally a simple topic. Authentic people are honest people. You can often tell right away who is lying and who is not. The computer in your head has hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to help you with that.
Great points. I think fundamentally you and I have different operating definitions of authenticity.
Though I do want to clarify
> The systemization of everything (through what you call "radical self-expression") is creating a bunch of pseudo-intellectual naval gazing
That's not my term, it's a burner term, and has nothing to do with systematization. The Ten Principles are a set of descriptive (not proscriptive) observations about what makes a Burn different from other festival-like gatherings [0].
> fundamentally a simple topic. Authentic people are honest people. You can often tell right away who is lying and who is not. The computer in your head has hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to help you with that.
This is probably the neurospicy rearing it's head. I understand what you mean about "fundamentally a simple topic". But in a lot of ways, it's not simple. To a first order approximation, yes "honesty about who you are" is tantamount to authenticity. Because for most folks, "who you are" is a fairly fixed concept, so being honest (or dishonest) about it is straightforward. But I don't think having a fixed concept of self is a universal experience. For me, (when I'm at my full potential) I'm able to select and deselect attributes of myself to express.
Tl;dr - "masking" making defining "authenticity" challenging for neurodivergent folks.
> Tl;dr - "masking" making defining "authenticity" challenging for neurodivergent folks.
Understood
> But I don't think having a fixed concept of self is a universal experience. For me, (when I'm at my full potential) I'm able to select and deselect attributes of myself to express.
I don't think anyone has a true "self". I am not who I was 10 years ago and neither are you. Physically, sure. Mentally? Metaphysically? Absolutely not. People you interact with aren't stagnant by definition. If they were, you wouldn't be interacting with them. Where the honesty (and the authenticity) comes into play is where who you are now is who you are representing.
As for selecting and deselecting traits I don't think this is inauthentic. It's normal, actually, in that people do this to create connections. I like to think of it like a handshake. We each kind of discuss things we like, we eventually arrive in some consistent state, and now we're "connected". We are still authentic (in that we are still honest) but we have selected certain traits of ours that are similar enough to foster a relationship. Of course, the inauthentic person can exploit this by just replaying back what they hear. This usually doesn't last long though. Someone too similar also raises red flags. An authentic person, IMO, will present with things you like and things you don't like. The balance of that is what makes the relationship between the two. Admitting what appear to be a negative (I don't like X, I think X) is actually a good indicator of an honest person.
What is not really mentioend is that authenticity is not really guaranteed unless you know the people well, from irl meetings following them for a long time (i.e interviews). It´s very hard to find a single source of a platform for "authentic" content or connections. One day a person you know might post something insightful the other time it´s a marketing LinkedIn how to xxxx.
Twitter is not as authentic as it used to be but I think this happens to any platform. Look at facebook.
Something on my mind is how to build a non-toxic engagement model and I am finally getting a clear picture of how to do it.
You can make a pretty good engagement model for Hacker News based on headlines by filtering for posts with > 10 votes and predicting the ratio of comments to votes. The trouble is that "high engagement" posts are frequently clickbait.
I suspect that the trending toots on mastodon.social right now are about a person who got elected to the Speaker of the House who I'd like to call a "clown" but that would be an insult to clowns so I won't. If a trained a model to maximize boosts and favorites I'd create a monster (e.g. if the US was truly a "democracy" today we'd write a constitution enshrining a one-party state, the only disagreement is which party it would be) I know though that I get really good engagements on (low-effort) pictures of flowers that I post as opposed to the sports photos I take which I work really hard at it. That is, there are paths to high engagement that aren't toxic, a model just has to be trained to reward them.
In either case it would take developing a training set of a few thousand non-toxic but high engagement posts, it's probably easier to do that for HN than it is to do it for Mastodon.
It is no secret that Japan already has a website called GIGAZINE that brazenly translates and monetizes stories from Hacker News, often without regard for copyright law. The site is a veritable smorgasbord of clickbait and ads, and it is a prime example of how the internet can be used to exploit intellectual property for profit.
Muted words is a godsend, but I really wish they would allow more than 200 of them, or at least implement word stemming. It's easy to hit the 200 word limit when you have to add singular/plural/possessive/etc. forms of each word separately.
Someone else mentioned about the differences between different categories of content on Twitter and I agree. Mainly, I like Twitter for sports. I have not experienced another platform that gives me this type of interactions with writers, show hosts, players, and other fans. I find Twitter for political stuff to be pretty bad. It's kind of amusing but that no matter how irrational and unhinged sports fans are in the U.S., they aren't as bad as what I see on political Twitter posts. :) I barely follow any tech/startup stuff on Twitter anymore. I'm not sure why, I guess the content just wasn't engaging to me. A side note, I've also bailed on IndieHackers as it seems to have changed (in my opinion) with regards to the type of content that made it cool in the beginning to whatever is going on there now. I guess IH is starting to experience this evolution in content that the author is talking about.
I still read HN though! HN has the most insightful and thoughtful comments/discussions and cause doom scrolling.
I think by now the most efficient social media would be an endless doom scroll with sub 5 second videos that the viewer gets to like or dislike to train the algorithm.
No thinking, just flashing lights straight into the brain.
I'm sure this is what the kids will be watching in 2-10 years. Total mindless entertainment. I'd develop it myself and get rich, if I didn't have a conscience.
Previously I objected to Musk's "Town Square" idea:
>The whole feed based "internet town square" concept is flawed, if anyone have seen an actual European town square you would have noticed that it's nothing like Twitter or similar. In a good town square, you have people minding their own business and the public activities are actually curated(a few agendas that fit in the physical location) and people visit those if they they are interested in.
However, maybe it is a town square but a bad one. Bad town squares are places where everyone tries to sell you something or make you do something and there are plenty of crazy people trying to grab attention and do things you would rather not see.
My "for you" tab is filled with "ChatGPT is great but you are not using it right" posts that look like copycats, the only organic looking content is from anti-vaxxers and all kind of conspiracy theorists and fascist(maybe because ChatGPT refuses to generate such content, therefore the only organic content is that one). Oh an that is organic but not really authentic, that is it is not independent thinkers but solders of a cult or a movement that keep repeating same talking points.
On the other hand, Twitter has become a better product overall thanks to making some stuff like lists more prominent so you have some tools to avoid the crazy town. However, the problem is that even the curated lists are not immune because now the people in those lists are incentivised to grab as much as attention as possible so they can monetise it. Thece are courses and tools made to optimize for that so the content becomes "made for Twitter to boost engagement". Youtube also has it but maybe of the higher production costs and longer to consume content format, a race to the bottom hasn't happen as dramatically. They still can get good engagement by creating higher quality videos.
So what about actual people who don't produce content professionally? The actual authentic content? The authentic discussions are happening in groups of people who know each other(online or offline), that is WhatsApp/Telegram or other channels that allow small groups interact privately.
> However, maybe it is a town square but a bad one. Bad town squares are places where everyone tries to sell you something or make you do something and there are plenty of crazy people trying to grab attention and do things you would rather not see.
This reminds me of La Rambla in Barcelona, basically a tourist trap.
To me, the problems with Twitter were never complicated. The thing Twitter wants you to do with it is not good: it wants you to pay constant attention to a stream of short messages. Occasionally the messages are funny, sometimes they are even insightful, but they are always short and there is never and end to them. I could never imagine how that would make me smarter, wiser, or better informed. I could see how it would help me waste a lot of time, sure. But even if Twitter succeeds beyond their wildest expectations and nothing ever happens that was not exactly according to plan, it still leaves the world a worse place. If you think something makes the world a worse place, my advice is don't do it.
It highlights and optionally collapses "seen" (scrolled past) and "blue checkmark" tweets. If you don't want the seen thing I could patch that out for you.
If you really want to fix your Twitter/YouTube addiction the easiest way I've found to do it is unfollow/unsubscribe/unlike everything, turn off watch history, & install plugins like Control Panel for Twitter and Unhook for YouTube.
A little friction is the best way, agreed. Another thing I do is read Reddit on old.Reddit.com on mobile. I destroyed my login by changing the password to a random string I don’t remember. It’s kind of hard to read and hard to collapse comments correctly. The default subreddits are atrocious. I find that it has cut my Reddit time to about 10m/day.
As I read this it strikes me how powerful addiction and habit are that I still go at all
Social media is a lesson for all of us that sometimes the cost of something isn't readily apparent. It reminds me of Cowslip's Warren in Watership Down - apparently healthy and safe rabbits welcoming in others, with a mortal danger that isn't obvious and somewhat overlooked.
Thankfully we are at that stage with social (and other) media where Bigwig gets caught in a snare and narrowly escapes, and I can look around me and see my fellow people getting caught in these traps. For some people it is too late, for anyone who knows people who have gone too far down the youtube algorithm (like my mother) will know they aren't easily rescued.
I started a twitter a few months ago, and then deleted it after I realized the current meta is to say something extremely vapid and wrong to phish for annoyed engagement.
That is where we are at. Annoying people for follows.
I deleted it the next day.
Online culture is over. As people have improved at debating we have realized half the time you are shadow boxing with someone who doesn't even believe what they are saying. Or hell, anymore it could be a literal bot.
It is bad faith everywhere. It is all a waste of fucking time.
Not to mention the clear brigading and bot-nets on Reddit that makes arguing with the wrong person account suicide.
Just use the internet for what it was meant for: photos of cute animals.
I tweaked all my social media down from following thousands of people to following ~100 that I really know and love.
The result was amazing, a truly transformative social media experience.
I don't care about likes or comments, they are irrelevant to me, I just love seeing what people are up to, I comment and like when I mean it, and I often get to the end of the feed with no more scrolling to do.
I reduced my FB friends from around 3,700 a few years ago, followed by also removing liked pages and groups that no longer interested me or that I had liked out of politeness - and the lovely result of that led me to doing it elsewhere.
Twitter isn't about people connecting, or even about advertisers and making money.
It's about controlling the national conversation. Anything noisy enough on twitter will be picked up by hungry media of all sorts, so a steady stream of disinformation can exhaust any real governance feedback cycle.
Elon bought Twitter so he could be a player in national elections.
(And the death of authenticity hasn't been particularly slow. It may be that people who sacrificed time and loyalty are blind to the possibility that it was a complete waste and a huge mistake to enable this.)
Always amazes me when someone realizes that Twitter is not the real world.
As for the "engaging content" the author describes, I dont find these engaging at all. Nothing is less engaging than a 34 tweet long thread, each tweet being a wall of 800 characters and the actual content reading like some regurgitate, quasi-AI generated platitude.
When you've reached a point where even big company millennial MBAs realize that Twitter is not real and that "likes" don't translate into sales, you can tell that we're at the end of the rope.
One is that you're sacrificing something when you're not your authentic self.
The other is that communication is a two-way street, and people who invest the resources in finding their audience closer to where they are are making their audiences' lives easier, and the attention economy rewards them for that.
I note that most of the YouTube science educators I watch wear makeup, for example (unless they don't show their face at all). And they space their updates to make for a regular-ish pulse of content.
The most insightful piece of analysis I’ve ever seen was at Facebook, from the rockstars who were looking at Instagram for the first time — a couple of years after the acquisition, when it was time to apply some informed strategic thinking.
The graph was super simple but very powerful:
* On the x-axis, you had how many followers (or views) a poster had: me and my 5 followers would be on the left-most bucket, someone popular was in 50-100, 100-200, etc., until the fashion brands, footballers in the 1M+ bucket at the far right of the graph.
- The y-axis was the total number of views over a period.
So, if you tend to see friends posting, there would be a big lump at the left of the graph. If the platform were like traditional media, there would be a lump at the right. As things were, the lump was moving slowly towards the right.
The problem was not that footballers and models don’t make good content — they do. The problem is that if you see that, you don’t post. So, the overall amount of content posted was dropping. Why put your wonky cake next to Amaury Guichon sculpting a peacock with nothing but chocolate and edible paint?
I think there’s a big cultural difference there, one that Americans won’t instinctively appreciate. Of course, you want your cooking show to feature the best of the best, but to keep people engaged? Ask funny people to mess up and tease each other instead. “The Great British Bake-off” isn’t successful because the cakes are world-class. But have people who can riff for five minutes on penis-related puns because a cake looks like it should be blurred to appear on the BBC, and people behind their screen will spout their own joke like it’s a Reddit thread.
> The people in my feed—most of whom I’m not following
Every now and again Twitter switches me to the "For you" tab. I always immediately notice because there are like 5 BuzzFeed-esque tweets in a row from accounts I am not following. I switch back to the "Following" tab, which is still a simple chronological list of tweets from people I follow and Twitter is good again.
I can see why Twitter is losing users if it keeps showing people the algorithmic feed though.
Can empathize. I use the F word a lot in my Tweets because its my natural unfiltered voice but it got me shadow banned. Now that my Twitter growth is just atrophied I'll often find myself thinking about engagement and I hate it.
Anyway if anyone cares for raw unfiltered takes about AI and also hacky projects check out my profile :)
It is interesting, I have almost the opposite experience as the author. I first signed up for twitter 8 years ago, but it never really interested me and I barely used it.
I started using it again around the time that Elon bought it, and I have found it to be both useful and entertaining, depending on what I'm looking for.
I'm very selective about who I follow, and I'm quick to unfollow, mute/block, etc any content that I don't want on my feed.
Yes, browsing twitter these days feels like walking into a toy store where you can buy anything in the store, but everything in it is sold in exchange for time/attention.
The main problem is just the for you feed. Usually I'll mostly get posts from people I know IRL, but browsing a bit down you just get all these viral posts that are super interesting, but I don't have the time/attention to devote into bringing those toys home.
I think Twitter is actually useful because it reveals what people are authentically thinking. If you ever want to stop hero worshiping someone, follow them on Twitter. You'll quickly lose all illusions about their "genius" or supposed expertise on things beyond their narrow sub-specialty, and realize they're a flawed human being like everyone else.
I'm not convinced there is less high quality, highly authentic content, there's a ton, but there just are no longer gate keepers or limiters and everything is mixed together. Instead of skipping past the tabloids at the grocery aisle, that stuff is alongside a brilliant essay in a youtube stream or next to a picture from your mom.
I prefer the blue pill, but know I "should" be taking the red pill for my career.
Regarding authenticity: it has been a social media goal and so on display everywhere for so much time now, that even if there is true authenticity, it has started to feel like marketing which is really sad.
I find 90% of social media interactions to be inauthentic. Communication in massive free-for-all groups is weird. It causes people to want to be right, win, or sell you on something. It’s funny that people would look got truth on divisive argument websites.
Early vs recent 90 Day Fiancé(e) seasons are night and day for this reason. The latest season of Love is Blind features a lot of contestants pointing the "you're here for clout" finger at one another, as though violating the academic integrity of their (self-styled) experiment was beyond the pale.
The complaints about the printing press were _all of them_ valid.
We can look back at the age of the News Publication and see that the concerns of the few were not taken seriously. The lack of concern for those issues, is the same lack of concern over the issues of Social Media.
Those alarmists were _overwhelmingly_ correct in their concerns over mass produced print media.
Those same concerns should be placed with heavier weight on Social Media outlets.
Printing press spam was local, cost money to distribute, and not that many people were literate enough to bother. None of those are true of social media. $8/mo is nothing for a spammer charging $50 a pop for his AI mastery e-course.
It's true but I'm not sure youtube creators ever really claimed to be "authentic", a lot of them are acting as presenters and always have been. Twitter was always more towards "this is the real me"?
I miss the old Youtube when it was so hard to get money from ads that inauthentic channels were actually rare.
Most people just wanted to share stuff likes video games or memes, some dreamed of fame and money of course, but they had no idea how to get there, they filmed with whatever camera they already had without Youtube, they didn't take a loan to invest in a perfect sound studio setup.
Of course, I'm not taking unpaid labor for granted, I really wish they'd get the money they want and deserve from ads, but stayed simple. But because of competition, that's impossible. Now they all look the same, because they got advice directly from the Youtube company on putting red arrows and stupid faces on thumbnails. And jumpcuts.
Good thing there's still 10 year old minecrafters who don't give a damn about all this or can't buy decent equipment, if I can still find their channels through the impenetrable algorithms.
Fiction is cheaper than reality. A lump of slop entitled "delicious sandwich" is cheaper than an actual delicious sandwich. Take away the slop and it's even cheaper.
The same could be said of Airbnb or Etsy, where the original vision of individual, personal inventory was displaced by more profitable, professionally managed, mass produced entities.
> The same could be said of Airbnb or Etsy, where the original vision of individual, personal inventory was displaced by more profitable, professionally managed, mass produced entities.
This is called capitalism. The issue is a bit different here, because Twitter is a social media, not Airbnb nor Etsy.
This reminds me of how Hollywood can't make great films anymore because of test screenings. Authenticity is perceived as weirdness and gets filtered out.
A lot of time when I hear people complain about an "inauthentic experience" in social media, what they really mean is "no one really cares what I say". Personally, I've never seen the appeal of Twitter. It's always been incredibly niche, particularly if you exclude all the people who simply use it for notifications ("I'm now live!").
Here's what I think (normal) people are starting to figure out: a lot of tech companies like to hide behind the Algorithm Defense, which is "We don't curate, suppress or promote anything, it's all The Algorithm [tm]". Google has effectively used this defense for search ranking for decades now.
Thing is, people still decide what goes into that algorithm. You see this in post-Elon Twitter with what I like to call the Blue Check Reply Guys, annoying people who couldn't build an organic audience so pay $8 to be at the top of every reply with their inane drivel. You see this on Tiktok where just mentioning "Palestine", let alone using a related tag, (allegedly) reduces your audience.
People who think they're having an authentic experience on social media I think are fooling themselves and probably living in a bubble. Like probably everyone, they want validation. Twitter in particular is the platform for snark and spouting popular opinions.
I do not enjoy the default economic perspective that when it comes to artistic creation, capitalism will necessarily force all the worst possible negative incentives.
Least of all, if using Twitter as the example, for reasons I will return to.
The history of art and creation is filled to the brim with examples of creatives that refused to fold to the mold, to embrace the trends and incentives of the economy, and stuck to their convictions regardless of the monetary disincentives to do so.
YouTube and TikTok each have stereotypical extremes that gravitate for attention but each have brilliant, unique, relatively long-form (Hours+ on Youtube, 5-10 minutes on TikTok) content that is are basically the singular vision of one human sharing their perspective in a way that does not exist anywhere else. (I like many of you prefer to consume written word, but there is of course a lot to be said that seeing a person speak, and all their emotional intonation contributes something too).
It's hysterical to me that the stereotype for TikTok is still "teenagers dancing" or "gen z making funny faces", when for me it's Philosophers, Lawyers, Activists, Scientists, Technologists, Adventurers, all sharing their passions and perspectives in deep nuanced interesting looks into subjects I know nothing and everything about.
Twitter itself is interesting because this all used to be true about it too, and to a much more constrained way can still be found there. But by and large it was deliberately destroyed by Elon Musk, and the only "creators" that are left are ones that are absolutely there because they are salespeople selling themselves, or basically get rich schemes masquerading as tech content (NFTs -> Generative AI, but in general also a lot of "here's how i made money by selling a course on how to make money")
This very issue is why I haven't had a social media account in years. Even something as benign as posting here on HN entails editing to avoid downvotes.
While we all make necessary and unavoidable judgements, the explicit nature of being judged and acting as a judge on social media lends itself to being inauthentic and narcissistic.
Hans-Georg Moeller has an excellent YouTube channel called Carefree Wandering. There several very good episodes on authenticity and social media.
I hit this just recently here. Discussing a simple math problem that happened to be attached to a political point ended up w/ me getting downvoted by a person who I actually agreed with, but they couldn't see past their own nose to understand what I was saying.
Or just accept some downvotes now and again? They'll stop at -4 anyway. I've hit it (and once in awhile I've probably deserved it), and known some nice thoughtful people IRL who also post here and had it happen on comments I thought were perfectly fine. Sometimes you just hit a weird mood in a thread or whatever; it's not worth worrying about unless the moderators tell you to cool it.
The system of likes/dislikes, upvotes/downvotes, etc are a feedback mechanism specifically designed to leverage the fact that we are predisposed by evolution to worry about that exact thing.
So while I accept it to the extent that I still post here, I feel like 'don't worry about it' completely misses the point of 'it'. It exists specifically for you to worry about.
>Even something as benign as posting here on HN entails editing to avoid downvotes.
Just edit to make sure you are clear in your thoughts put into text. Don't censor yourself, karma points are largely meaningless anyway. You don't get to trade them in for an eraser or anything. Speak your mind, that's the main benefit of the platform.
I occasionally post things that I know will be downvoted to remind myself the votes don't matter.
Ironically, when I do want to say something mildly controversial but I want it to be taken seriously, I just add "I know this will be downvoted to hell but..." and then it is not downvoted. Pro tip.
I call bullshit on "if you're authentic nobody will care". I've been blogging for over 20 years (not on Twitter, Heavens forbid) and never did any promotional stuff and I am fine with amount of engagement I get. If literally nobody would ever engage again, I'd probably still do it. I also read dozens of other blogs, which don't do promotions - somehow I found them. There are probably hundreds of more interesting ones I haven't found and never will - but such is life, you can't earn all the money, eat all the food or read all thd content. I suspect those who complain about it either are in a wrong business or let their ego get ahead of them.
Also, can we get people to stop to confuse whatever weird things happen on Twitter with all the internet and all the economy?
I don’t understand how there is such an assumed 1 to 1 relationship with getting lots of followers and making lots of money. Where the fuck is the money coming from??
Twitter has started giving some users a portion of ad revenue, for ads beside their tweets [1]. Which would presumably mean that more tweets, and more followers, mean more money.
Of course, on most platforms only a tiny fraction of influencers make a decent living. So it's certainly not the case that everyone is making money.
It is not only Elon Musk who is to blame for the decline of Twitter. After all, other social media platforms, such as YouTube, have long been using eye-catching content to generate revenue. Even before Musk's acquisition, Twitter was already engaging in monetization practices such as redirecting users to external sites, allowing influencers to post sponsored tweets, and inadequately moderating content.
“ And yes, on the surface this incentivizes people to create better content. ”
What now? This is where the terms clickbait come from. Content gets more rage inducing to get more clicks thus more money while real journalism disappears behind paywalls.
A system that rewards people with attention will always encourage attention seeking behavior, and when incentivized will also inevitably generate professional attention seeking behavior. It’s not a new concept.
I really like the way Academia of Ideas presets the problem. Link at bottom.
> But a strange thing has occurred with the rise of social media: many people are reverting back to a mechanism of identity formation that resembles sincerity, a mechanism of identity formation which Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio in You and Your Profile, have termed profilicity. Like sincerity, profilicity is other-directed and reliant on the reactions of an audience. With sincerity one’s family and community are the audience that casts judgement on how sincerely, or properly, one plays the pre-determined roles. With profilicity the audience is a generalized peer group consisting of hundreds, thousands or even millions of social media users and this audience plays a somewhat different role than under sincerity: not only does the audience judge the identity one forms, but it also helps shape the very roles one strives to play. For profilicty entails creating profiles on social media through the selective display of pictures and other bits of information, or in a more passive manner merely observing the profiles of admired personalities, and then using these idealized profiles as roles to play in real life. Or as Jeremy Weissman explains in The Crowdsourced Panopticon:
“. . . a simultaneous exchange occurs between the two entities, our digital [profiles] and our in-real-life self. As we broadcast idealized portraits of our in-real-life self online, we then in turn adjust our in-real-life self so as to meet with popular approval when we are broadcast online again. At a certain point, our in-real-life self and digital [profiles] practically merge.”
Jeremy Weissman, The Crowdsourced Panopticon
Forming an identity through the mechanism of profilicity has serious drawbacks. Firstly, it promotes an unhealthy degree of conformity. For to succeed in the world of social media is to conform as a successful profile is measured by metrics such as likes, shares and follows. But profilicity necessitates not just conforming to the preferences of one’s peer group, but also conforming to the standards set by those who manipulate the algorithms of social media, or as Weissman writes:
“Through the ever-increasing gaze of a pervasive audience online, we may become overly pressured, even coerced toward collective opinion, as social media’s mechanism of likes, dislikes, friends, and followers constantly subjects us to the crowd’s judgment along with that gaze.”
Jeremy Weissman, The Crowdsourced Panopticon
By promoting a hyper-conformity, profilicty limits our potential as the generalized peer group of social media users, and the manipulators of social media algorithms, have no interest in many elements that comprise a healthy sense of self. With profilicity if we step too far out of line, if we are too unique, or if our value system diverges too far from what is deemed acceptable, we will be shunned, shamed and ostracized. Appearances, superficialities, and adhering to the values of popular culture are what matter with profilicity, not cultivating a harmonized mind, a healthy body and a fulfilling life. What is more if we live in a sick society, this sickness will be embodied in the preferences of the generalized peer group and so in seeking validation of this crowd, and embodying their preferences, we lock ourselves into a sick sense of self.
“Once we give up our true self to play a role, we are fated to be rejected because we have already rejected ourselves. Yet we will struggle to make the role more successful, hoping to overcome our fate but finding ourselves more enmeshed in it. We are caught in a vicious cycle that keeps closing in, diminishing our life and being.”
>And yes, on the surface this incentivizes people to create better content. The better your content is, the more it gets seen, and the more money you make. And yet, my felt experience of this change is the exact opposite—as people seek more engagement, their content gets worse. What’s going on here?
It always tickles me when terminally online people realize that human connection doesn't scale. It's valuable precisely because it takes a lot of time, energy, and luck to establish. You want authenticity? Go find community in meatspace. You want authenticity online? Talk to those meatspace friends in private group chats.
I agree 100% with what you are saying, but I don't think you need a human connection to have good content. The encyclopedia Brittanica didn't establish a human connection, but it was a valuable resource. An ugly problem with an attention economy is that you are rewarded for seeming useful and interesting, but once the attention has been given, there is no incentive to actually deliver. So we get clickbait headlines and veneer-grade content because that's enough to get the ad dollars, without the investment that original content would require.
To be fair, most web users are happy with the arrangement - they get an endless feed of free tiny doses of dopamine while they avoid the real responsibilities of life. The large-scale effect is decidedly negative, though.
> An ugly problem with an attention economy is that you are rewarded for seeming useful and interesting, but once the attention has been given, there is no incentive to actually deliver
> To be fair, most web users are happy with the arrangement - they get an endless feed of free tiny doses of dopamine while they avoid the real responsibilities of life.
I'd argue it's mostly the latter. Most creators produce content to make money, catering to demand.
Ancient Aliens BS, TikTok reaction videos, blatant staged animal rescues, celebrity drama... this is what the general populace regards as interesting and useful. These are all genuinely popular and sought-after content.
It is a dopamine trap. People want to feel good knowing something special, feel a shared emotional bond, feel the world has good, or that they are almost a socialite... and they'll fight tooth and nail if that perception is challenged.
The harsh reality is that any conversation about what "people" want needs to factor in the fact that half of "the people" are dumber, more simpler-minded than the average person.
No, you and I don't want to look at staged animal rescues or celebrity drama... but if the average person does, then so does at least 50% of the population. We're in the minority.
Yes, but also let's cut people some slack: most people on either side of IQ 100 are spending all their energy at work, and between the job, commute, preparing food, spending time with kids, etc. they only have enough energy to crawl into bed and start the grind again the next day. With that in mind, the popularity of low-effort, high-dopamine entertainment doesn't necessarily imply that most people are simple-minded and just like this - the alternative hypothesis is that they just don't have time and energy for any more complex, richer ways of spending their time.
> half of "the people" are dumber, more simpler-minded than the average person.
Spiders Georg would like a word with you. And 99.99% of people have more than the average number of legs. And "the average person" is not something you can actually imagine. Think about "the average driver". You're actually thinking of an asshole driver, because asshole drivers are more salient. You don't notice "the average driver".
I think we are missing one important point. Communities acclaimatize to ground realities, though it takes time.
In my early experience of social media, people were criticized for not writing correct English. That is almost gone. Infact, now people realize that people belonging to different backgrounds can't be expected to perform in one particular context. There is reverse sort of meme, where non-natives are celebrated for writing perfect English. Similarly, there was debate on how to actually spell Quran or Koran etc. Now people understand the intention behind the words rather than actual grammer or spelling. It takes time for higher level of ideas to percolate social media.
There was a question asked on Quora by a child to her mother, "Why haven't we used all the short words and gave them meaning before using all the long words?"
The simple answer, apart from historical origins of words is "error correction". It is far easier to error correct words which are far apart in spelling and audio space.
Reputation is still valuable over time. Some YouTube creators I ignore irregardless of the thumbnail, while other content creators get a click automatically. The same happens with websites and everywhere else in the attention economy.
> while other content creators get a click automatically.
A number of times now Youtube has shown me a video recommendation that I ignored for days. The thumbnail with that stupid "gobsmacked" expression of the creator (:-O) with some dumb headline in big block letters ("IS GRAVITY A LIE?"). You know what I'm talking about.
Then I finally get around to looking at it closer, and it turns out it's one of my favorite channels with an awesome video! They went with the stupid title and thumbnail because "the algorithm demands it". The actual video itself is great.
These creators get an automatic click from me as well, except when I'm mislead by the thumnail and title into not even realizing it's one of them. Then it takes time for me to discover it. There's been a couple of times where the video I'm mentally spam-filtering appears on the HN front page, and it turns out to be a great video. But had I not seen it here, I would never have clicked on it.
> They went with the stupid title and thumbnail because "the algorithm demands it"
The end result is I don't use their discovery crap at all, because it all looks like garbage I don't care about.
My use of Youtube has become very similar to my use of Xitter - never log in, almost never look at content on their domains, only on other peoples' sites.
I do not understand the gobsmacked face thing. It has been going on for years. There’s no way Google doesn’t know about it. I guess we should assume they… want it that way?
Why would elgooG give a gosh-darn about the amazed facial expression of some of their most popular creators? I assume they care about their metrics, and this drives engagement, especially with younger viewers. And because younger viewers have the most time, that in turn drives hours of YouTube watched, ads viewed, and on and on.
We can assume the metrics, we can see the results, and both seem to line up.
I was going to say the same thing. Low-quality content creators can get away with too many ads and subpar work because they don't rely on repeat business. It's like a tourist shop raising prices and selling fake merchandise because they know their customers are unlikely to come back. In contrast, creators who cultivate a loyal audience must consistently deliver value.
This reflects the cooperation vs betrayal incentives analysed in game theory. Agents are more likely to be loyal to agents that can extract payback, and one-time interactions are free of consequences. Google is to blame for sending people on deep links, they won't form a long term relation with the website. Not advocating against Google, just observing this second order effect.
People say that people use literally to mean figuratively now which is literally the opposite of literally, but I've literally never seen someone use literally to mean figuratively. I have often seen it used to hyperbolize the strength of analogies or generalizations, which means they apply literally somewhat figuratively, but that doesn't mean that they literally mean for literally to mean figuratively.
Literally is literally a point. Figuratively is a point only figuratively, literally it is a continuum. If you're not using literally to literally mean literally, you are literally using it to mean figuratively.
No, if you aren't using it to mean literally, you are using it figuratively, but not necessarily (or ever, IME) to mean figuratively (usually as an intensifier to a statement that is expected to be understood as figurative from context.)
Would you be less likely to interpret it as such if the speaker had omitted "literally"?
I would say that the sentence is an example of hyperbole. "I am so figuratively dead right now it's as if I am literally dead." The meaning of literally, there, remains intact.
In the same way, when someone complains that you left them waiting for "days" we don't say "sometimes days means ten minutes" but that sometimes people exaggerate.
If I say "I literally broke my arm" after I actually broke my arm, that use is completely correct. But you cannot be literally dead and still type a message, unless it's an automated message that you ordered someone/something to send AFTER you died.
If I'm on my regular nightly haunting mission, and I decide to speak to the new owner of the house that I'm haunting, how do I convey to them that I am really, actually, truly dead? I could say, "I'm literally dead", but they would think I'm laughing at their joke they just made!
If the answer to this is to avoid the word "literally", and instead replace it with "really, actually, truly" (like I did above), then I might just decide to retire from haunting.
Linguists call this usage, “the emphatic literally” and the best writers of the past 300 years have used it.
So if it’s good enough for Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Vladimir Nabokov, and David Foster Wallace, then it’s good enough for me. Literally.
None of this is really new. People have sought low-quality high-dopamine content since television was the main medium. Since the spread of radio. Since the development of novels. Probably the beginning of the printing press, writing, or hell, storytelling and spoken language itself.
Each new medium provides more power to dive into this, and each generation panics that we've crossed a never-before-crossed line. And they're correct.
But the problem lies within us as humans. Lightweight diversionary content is just what the majority of us want, and have always wanted. But not 100% of us. Content that's deep, thoughtful, educational, and useful is still being created and consumed at record scales.
"True except now the printing press means trash novels devoid of real artistry can be pumped out without additional effort from the original author." Parents point is that the newness you highlight also isn't new either, strictly speaking. It's all a matter of scale as the effort approaches zero
Scale matters. "No single snowflake blames itself on the avalanche" is a saying for a reason. Little things that seemingly don't matter can built up to the point they become a deadly maelstrom.
The weird part to me is that the ad dollars have to lead to some sort of connection. The ad buyers need you to want something.
Sure, some of it is just scams and politics (yeah yeah the jokes write themselves). But at core there are people who have an actual thing to sell, and people who want to buy things. It may not make them happy in the end but that's up to each of us to figure out for ourselves, and the philosophers.
Somewhere under all that attention is a service or a product. In the end we've got to learn which ones matter to us. That's what the attention is supposed to be for.
I think this is true in the individual level, but less so in the ecosystem as a whole.
I can see how a YouTube channel gets attention-optimized to hell, but then I am able to find content that is genuinely amazing that have survived the temptation to over-optimize for engagement.
At the end of the day I assume this comes down to means of monetization. If someone has some other means of making a living that is not directly tied into the social media platform itself, for example they are independently wealthy, then it's easy for them to create non-over-optimized content.
A common breaking point for creators is the ones where they have job X that makes a decent living, but their content starts getting popular and starts making a decent living. That's where the creator starts running into the 2 masters problem. Do they quit their job and make content only? If they do, will the platform decide to completely screw them over with an algorithm change?
Then you have a 3rd class that is just jumping into content for the purpose of making money by any means possible. All aboard the over-optimization train.
Human connection doesn't scale! But authenticity isn't connection. You do not need to connect with someone to see their authenticity.
I think the original sin of Elon-Twitter is mistaking popularity for authenticity - because by definition authenticity isn't universally recognizable. It's how authentic experience is unexpected, arbitrary, incomplete and often contradictory. People being authentic in a world you're not familiar with looks like...nothing? Often? When The Bear came out it showed the characters drinking out of plastic 'to-go' containers because there's no glass allowed in most commercial kitchens[1]. It had the smell of authenticity - but you wouldn't see it if you didn't know what was authentic already.
Authenticity is just not a "universally recognizable" thing. At the 'whole system' level, if you want to promote it, you should be afraid of nearly universally loved content. That content is usually too 'cooked' to really be authentic. You want the less complete stuff.
This is something I've noticed with documentaries on the furry community. Outsider documentaries always focus on the fursuits. You almost never see someone out of one even though most furries don't own one. Pittsburgh's news outlets always do interview segments during Anthrocon, and it's always fursuiters in suit.
And then from the inside, you get stuff like The Fandom which goes into the real human stories behind the animals rather than gawking at the rarest but most visible aspect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0QaTW3kEY
It's authentic. Someone on the outside would probably recognize the difference (someone doing just another documentary/interview vs someone pointing a camera at her own community), but might not recognize the outside view as inauthentic.
There's an aspect of...how any complex trend will inevitably have some aspects that would appear to outsides like they were included by mistake...but insiders will assure you are essential and typical. You need insiders to guide you because, as outsiders, you can't understand.
I think the ugly truth of it is, just like there's a noticeable difference between shopping at costco and shopping at walmart (because of the annual fee at costco), there's just some people that are going to have an undesirable influence on your community.
The temptation to try and rope in those extra users is often irresistible but to get them you have to tank your content to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Very few growth minded companies or content creators have escaped that trap. It requires prioritizing your principles and long-term outlook over short-term growth which is so antithetical to the typical silicon valley situation trying to tap into and keep the spigot of VC money flowing.
> difference between shopping at costco and shopping at walmart
Could someone please explain to me what is implied here? I've been to the USA only once, and I didn't visit neither a Costco nor a Walmart. The only difference I could point to between them, is that no "Costco people" phenomenon exists on YouTube.
One of your replies got some of it but I think it misses some other factors so I'll take a swing:
Costco requires a yearly membership to shop there, which along with the shopping (if you go for the more expensive membership anyway) also gives you yearly cash back on all your purchases, which if you go there for the essentials you can, really does add up quite a bit. My wife and I get basically everything we can from there and usually end up with about $250 of essentially free money per year, and despite being Costco cash, if you go there and don't spend it all, you just get cash in return. Clearly they want you to use it there, but it is required.
Additionally there's an element of curation, though this is more subjective. Walmart will sell anything they can get their hands on, and Costco by comparison has a reputation for selling not exactly the top end bespoke stuff, but at least good stuff. I can recall maybe 2 times in the entire time I've shopped there for the last 6 years or so that I've gotten something I was disappointed in the quality of.
In addition you have the other things like the free samples everywhere, there's much less impulse buying on offer, it just feels... I don't know, you just feel like they actually give a shit? Maybe not a huge shit but a shit and finding businesses that give even a microscopic shit is pretty hard these days. And along with that, they pay their employees extremely well (in the context of retail anyway).
And also like, it's a bit classist for sure, but I do enjoy that there are no "people of Walmart" there, for the same reason I go to Target instead of Walmart for whatever I can't get at Costco. It seems at times Target's entire business model is knowing people who can will pay about 11% more for everything so they can not go to Walmart, I certainly do and will continue to.
Walmart shoppers are uniquely incapable of existing in an area without being in the way. I've not experienced anything like it in any other store. It's like they're constantly trying to take up as much space as possible.
Between that and Walmart having narrower aisles than most stores, the place feels busy even when there aren't many people in it.
Also, the workers and shoppers alike all seem depressed, which is another thing I've not experienced in any other store. Walmart's weird, sickly lighting and color scheme probably don't help.
It's a miserable place to be in. Mood instantly plummets on entering. Combo of the seemingly intended-to-make-you-feel-bad design, and the people.
It's not even just a poor-people thing. Aldi is fine. Dollar General isn't as depressing. Plus, wal mart didn't used to be so bad, but that was like 20 years ago.
> Between that and Walmart having narrower aisles than most stores, the place feels busy even when there aren't many people in it.
It's not just the stores, the parking lots are like that too. I won't refuse to go to wal-mart, but unless I'm lazy or it's an emergency, I will absolutely drive by one to shop at Target, Best Buy, etc.
Dollar General, universally understaffed, often with random shit stacked up in aisles, quite often just a single soul running the shop, is usually pretty depressing for me.
They are implying that Costco's yearly membership fee filters out poor people, who shop at Walmart instead. They consider these people to be undesirable customers because people with money do not like to associate with them.
I blame it's cold, sterile lighting. I don't know why, but something about Walmart's lights make it feel clinical. More like a laboratory simulating a grocery store and running experiments on the masses. Thus the walmart people (they're plants, obviously)
Costco requires a yearly membership, so I think they are implying that the incentive is different. Costco has a strong incentive for you to leave with a decent time there, and feeling like you got a good deal (mostly through buying items in bulk) so you'll continue to renew your membership year after year.
At Walmart they might organize the store to get you to buy candy at the checkout line, or have a lot of less-than-healty options to tempt you near the essentials, to maximize the profit in that way. Because you're not shopping at Walmart because you want to be.
Disclaimer: I haven't been to Costco at a long time. And they still try to get you in their own way with free samples you can find all over the store.
If there's a stereotype of costco customers, it's probably "middle-aged dads stoked about the fact that they can get a deal on good bulk food and quality products like socks".
Walmarts are full of broke, burnt out people clinging to survival, so it's like bumper cars with buggies due to already stretched attention spans. If you can afford Costco and have a place to put the bulk savings, you're probably a little better off and less harried.
"less harried" is not how I'd describe Costco. Just getting into and out of the one in Seattle is like visiting a theme park. Once you manage to find parking, you give up your personhood. You're now just part of the slowly moving mob with carts.
I was not exaggerating or embellishing about the bumper cart bit. People either come flying out of aisles without looking or they stand there blocking an aisle while ignoring you trying to get through. A slow-moving mob would be an improvement in every way.
This very much depends on the stores location. When I lived close to a Costco in one of the fastest growing towns in the US it was like you described. Now that I live in a slightly faster growing city it's not so much of a menagerie and just more of an event.
Walmart is known for having ... characters in its stores. Think severely obese woman wearing a bikini. Walmart will let anyone in and anyone includes some wild people because wild people exist.
Costco requires a yearly membership and a contract. If you come sauntering in wearing assless chaps you're likely to get kicked out, your contract revoked, and being unable to ever shop there again.
The comparison being made was trying for a specific audience and excluding those outside of that audience (Costco) vs trying to appeal to as large an audience as possible, which means accepting things that most people wouldn't otherwise accept (Walmart).
When MySpace first started getting big I remember people talking about how many friends you could have on it.
And I remember not understanding at all because these weren't friends and who the hell can handle having hundreds or thousands of friends?
I never understood MySpace and in many ways I still don't understand Facebook (I do on a rational level but not an emotional one).
I'd rather have 3-4 lifelong friends than thousands of online friends. And that doesn't mean you can't make real connections with people online, just that doing so takes years of effort just like offline friends, so doesn't scale, just like you said.
> as people seek more engagement, their content gets worse. What’s going on here?
This is a well observed trend where appealing to a broader audience makes the content worse.
People, as individuals, are unique and therefore interesting. Appealing to more than one person relies on what those people have in common.
The more people you try to reach, the less in common they all have. If the content is going to speak to what they all have in common, it becomes very surface level.
Therefore all things that want to get mass approval must be very basic, vague, and shallow. This is the capitalist way of creating content.
Conversely, when real artists struck chords with large groups of people, it was because they stumbled upon something unique that many people shared. This unique thing was then valued by large groups of people, and became culture.
Real culture is hard, not reproducible, not predictable, and initially unprofitable. So it is not valued by capitalism. It happens despite the economy, not because of it.
Art must always start that way, or else it is simply content.
//EDIT
I also want to add that this is not a new thing and it's root cause is not social media. It is any media that is shared, whose goal is a large number of eyeballs. This has happened with every medium and will continue to happen forever.
If you don't like it and want it to stop, then you want more socialist policies.
I am very interested in your take. When Michelangelo sculpted the Pietà, the pain it expressed was a feeling that many people had shared, so it became culture.
But when a teenager makes a tiktok about the pain of being rejected by their crush, and it's a feeling many people have shared, and many people like it, that's basic, vague and shallow.
> When Michelangelo sculpted the Pietà, the pain it expressed was a feeling that many people had shared, so it became culture.
So, first, any art that is funded by the church or a patron is not really in this conversation. The entire economics of that art is outside of the eyeball conversation.
If art that is pre-funded strikes a chord with people, it is the same thing as I said about artists in the past. Like Coltraine or Hendrix, they expressed something unique or personal that it was discovered that all people shared, and it therefore became culture.
There are mounds upon mounds of crappy pre-funded religious art that impacted no-one whatsoever. So Pietra is precisely the opposite of pop art, although that is what it became. Which is what makes it culture.
What makes the tiktok vague and shallow isn't the topic itself, but the awareness that there's already a hundred thousand identical tiktoks expressing the same or similar feelings in roughly the same way.
What makes it "not culture" is that everyone is watching one or few of those hundred thousand fully exchangeable tiktoks.
A thing which is basic, vague and shallow can become an important cultural work too - it just must become known to approximately everyone in a society. It must somehow become the one representative work in its class, so that when someone makes a reference, everyone knows exactly which work is being talked about, and that everyone else knows it too. Being unique is not strictly necessary, but is highly helpful.
There are an awful lot of sculptures/paintings, etc. about the sixth sorrow of mary, and most are pretty interchangeable, imo.
I wonder if the difference with tiktok is that there are thousands of videos about the same thing, everyone sees a few of those thousands, but they see a different few. So even though we're sharing the feeling, culturally, we're not sharing the same artifact.
Like maybe the trouble is that tiktok puts each user into their own custom bubble, and the bubble the user finds themself in is completely opaque - you can't readily compare what you're seeing to what your friends are seeing?
Yeah, this shared artifact - aka "social object" - is the key. It's why the Internet culture is defined by things that "went viral" - because those are the ones everyone saw, and everyone can expect everyone else saw them too.
As for the sculptures and paintings of Mary, etc., I'd say they are all boring and entirely interchangeable, but that's because I have no connection to any of them. Each such work is meaningful to the community that had a personal connection. But I'd say none of them are culturally important, except those individual ones that for some reason (like being very old) become widely known among people outside artifact-adjacent community.
Side point: culture always has a scope. Something may be important cultural object for the city I live in, unremarkable for anyone else in my country, and entirely unknown the rest of the world. With the Internet enabling arts and entertainment on demand, there is little overlap between communities we live in and the entertainment choices of individual community members. We end up having communities with no culture.
Interestingly this is the exact opposite of the usual argument as to why Shakespeare is still popular, i.e. that his work speaks of a deep universal truth about the human condition.
> Conversely, when real artists struck chords with large groups of people, it was because they stumbled upon something unique that many people shared.
Shakespeare has exactly this going on too, though. He contributed like a thousand neologisms to English that actually stuck. That probably doesn't happen unless your art is a bit like science, almost "discovering" something in the collective unconcious rather than an act of invention. When that happens, you have something that's new/unique but also something that is deep/universal. Cubism and surrealism are also like this
There's an argument that Shakespeare didn't coin (all or some of) those phrases or words, that they were in common everyday use at the time but never written down because the type of people who used them couldn't write.
That would still be valuable in disseminating those neologisms further and giving them staying power, but it's less discovery and more documenting.
> Real culture is hard, not reproducible, not predictable, and initially unprofitable. So it is not valued by capitalism. It happens despite the economy, not because of it.
Capitalism is just people making agreements with each other in a legal framework. It 100% does not preclude charitable work, volunteerism, or art. It also doesn't value anything; it's a system where, as much as possible, people can do what they want and pay for things they deem to be valuable.
> If you don't like it and want it to stop, then you want more socialist policies.
I'd say almost everything but capitalism values authoritarianism. E.g. socialism in the end by "society" means "the state".
Society in capitalism is generally separate to markets, e.g. your local community, or charirites, or churches, or sport, or schools. Not bureaucrats taking your effort and doling it out (or not) as they see fit.
You seem to be conflating "systems values" versus "People in the systems values"
Capitalism works best with a non-authoritarian government, but that leaves a lot of different options for implementing how that is handled.
Individual capitalists will almost always push for some of authoritarianism as they become more successful because they will seek to minimize competition.
> You seem to be conflating "systems values" versus "People in the systems values"
How so?
> Individual capitalists will almost always push for some of authoritarianism
Lots will push the other way, because that keeps the engine running smoothly. This is sometimes called "people thinking they're temporarily embarrassed millionaires", but really it's "people knowing the best way (on average) to invent a better future".
In capitalism's case, the name is really informative. At the heart of capitalism lies capital and the ability to invest it, which gives people who own it power to get stuff without doing any work. People without the capital do work for people with capital, so that the may survive (and do more work).
The problem is that direct work is not the only way to contribute, which is why Marx's definition of things is too narrow. Taking risk is also something valuable to reward. As is having the right connections. One or more of these things together make value that a company that can then sell to people who want it. Deciding that risking capital is worth nothing is an incomplete view.
> "Society in capitalism is generally separate to markets, e.g. your local community, or charirites, or churches, or sport, or schools"
Are you saying that sports are not profitable in America? That schools and colleges in America are not run for profit? That churches and charities are not formed primarily for financial/tax benefits? Or that people can't play non-profit basketball in their local park under socialism? Or that capitalism hasn't done a work on the 'local community' by replacing third-places with places that require you to spend money to hang out, for example?
> "Not bureaucrats taking your effort and doling it out (or not) as they see fit."
This is exactly what my employer does? They take value I add, and dole it out (or not) as they see fit.
> Are you saying that sports are not profitable in America? That schools and colleges in America are not run for profit? That churches and charities are not formed primarily for financial/tax benefits? Or that people can't play non-profit basketball in their local park under socialism? Or that capitalism hasn't done a work on the 'local community' by replacing third-places with places that require you to spend money to hang out, for example?
That's correct; I'm not saying those things.
> This is exactly what my employer does? They take value I add, and dole it out (or not) as they see fit.
Then your claim "Society in capitalism is generally separate to markets, e.g. your local community, or charirites, or churches, or sport, or schools." has fallen over. Those things are taken over by capitalism-slash-markets because there is profit to be made, above all other concerns (e.g. the health of football players / brain trauma, the constant advertising, the promotion of players to celebtrities and the association of product with celebrity, etc. etc. These things are community-destroying but profit-making.
This seems highly incomplete. Millions of people play football amongst themselves. Only looking at professional footballers is just the apex fallacy. The fact that a few people are paid to play doesn't negate that cultural reality.
Even then they are voluntarily playing football as probably by far their best option in life. Paid for by hundreds of millions of people who want to watch the best football possible, and will pay for it.
Finally, people choosing to pay for things isn't capitalism taking over culture. Everything about football requires money: paying for a football to go for a kickaout isn't hideous commercialism.
IMO it's bit ironic that people seek maximum diversity within a single platform without taking into account the effort to seek the diversity beyond that platform.
There are online communities beyond X and, event within X you can just choose to track select groups you follow and constantly unfollow what you don't like.
As an aside, I find this phrase funny today. In the past, I would have known you are using the term 'X' to be a generic reference to online communities. Today, I don't know if you are talking specifically about twitter or just a generic online community.
I have few ideas. Why can't people create their own filter bubbles? Lists do that in some sense. How about "For You" tab but for a particular List so that recommendations expand and let me get the feel of that particular List's filter bubble. Why can't I choose to browse Twitter as it appears to a particular category of people e.g. say a mathematician or neuroscientist? Twitter is all public, there is no fear of de-anonymizing anyone if Twitter decides to implement such a feature.
I have a similar line of thinking. However I think it applies generally and that any "broker" (e.g. Amazon) that is not explicitely on your side will be in conflict of interest. The implications are actually deep and wide.
I think it's less to do with the internet and more to do with celebrity. Magazines push relatability and authenticity for a reason. We have to feel like they're relatable or their influence dissipates.
All i can say to this comment is 'lol meat space' I think we should use this principle in more places than talking about twitter. There's just so much nuance of people interacting we take for granted.
Before they tried to figure out why certain schools were always failing (curriculum, etc), they honed in on another very simple cause. Overcrowded classrooms. Soon as you go from 18 kids per room, to 28, you’re in trouble.
The internet didn’t become any more or less of anything. It just scaled the base initial value of numofHumansInvolved to 8 billion. But’s the only thing that scaled, that number.
It’s like scaling water pipes out throughout the city without scaling filtering system also. You are still basically circulating dirty water.
Following and being a leader, with status, from a far, is also a form human connection.
Religions have already for centuries scaled that, mostly by being an idol & not getting personal. Whether that's a priest, or a Tibetan Lama, they normally don't mingle, they do this be not being "authentic" but by representing an idea or principle.
That's what a lot social media "influecners" are trying to accomplish. And what personal branding attempts to do.
Is it wanted? Probably not. But it's definitely somethng that connect to the human psyche.
fyi, I can't get used to the term me*space. I can hardly type it. It articulates a level of contempt for humanity that can only be borne of complete dissociation or deep hatred. I know that's not how it's meant, but I really, really encourage people to avoid using the term.
Strangely, I don't feel the same way when some wisdom traditions remind us that we are mortal (a bag of bones comes to mind), or in response to a number of other diminishing epithets. Weird.
I read it as sort of self-deprecating, a sort of acknowledgment that the speaker is so very online that they think of the physical world their body inhabits as something that explicitly needs to be called out.
I think it is quite funny and want to encourage people to use the term.
Meatspace, to me, is a term that encapsulates the authenticity of being a blood and bone human being and all of the foibles that come with it. Cyberspace, at least so far as social media is concerned, is a perpetual performance where what matters is how strangers feel about you and how they feel about you is often indepedant of what you actually do in meatspace.
To me cyberspace shines with a much stronger contempt for humanity than meatspace. Meatspace simply demands you be the lump of meat that you are while cyberspace demands that you please a judgemental and often quarrelsome mob.
I think it is more about if you want go after general market you need to be bland that is why regular cars and clothes from HM look a same or biggest fast food chains menus look somewhat same.
"Human connection does not scale" is succinctly expressed insight. You identify the follow on implications and what can be done to preserve it. Thank you.
I wonder if the newer generation of gamers can form connections from MMO style guilds like the past generation of gamers did. Everything that I've seen from young gamers today suggests that their motivations for playing games is quite different. Playing just for the sake of playing and socializing on a personal level is not part of it.
I get the impression it is about being seen doing things. If nobody sees you do something it basically never happened. The more people that see you do something the more important it is to them.
Authenticity online USED to come somewhat naturally by virtue of just... starting communities. The reason was that the web was small, and discovery process was more random - that is, less systematic. As a consequence, you almost couldn't help but start forums or blogs or content platforms with hundreds to low thousands of participants. And because those communities were smaller, you were that much more engaged. You recognized the names of the people posting, and understood their brand. So online authenticity used to exist without having to merely import meatspace directly.
But the interesting thing is that there's still nothing that makes it fundamentally impossible to start a relatively small forum nowadays. And there are plenty of those small communities that still exist! And yet... somehow, that's just not good enough, is it? We are all still constantly complaining about the attention economy and the performative nature of online communication. So what gives?
To me, what this says is that it's not good enough for small-band, high authenticity communication to exist. It also needs to be true that broadband, inauthentic communication NOT exist. The simple truth, I think, is that it annoys us when things we don't like manage to capture lots of attention. When you see something you disagree with gathering momentum, it _grates_. There is something fundamental about that; "get over it" isn't going to solve this.
You saw this happen with Reddit: slowly, the most popular subreddits became bigger and bigger cesspits. People always suggested that the way around this was to just ignore the popular stuff and find smaller subreddits to enjoy. But it just never resonated with people as a solution. Ignoring the popular subreddits as a lost cause feels like putting your head in the sand. Don't bother trying to explain to me that you can't fix discourse all by yourself, or that there's no sense in sweating what the front page of reddit looks like. You're not arguing with me! You're arguing with the millions of people's inner id, who see that front page and twitch a little bit.
I think this might speak to some human need to assert our own view of the world and reject untruths that we've already ourselves debunked. When you see somebody pronouncing an old thing you _used_ to believe, your impulse is to warn that person "oh no, I can see why you'd think that, but it's actually more complicated than that for reasons x, y and z." But imagine that you see somebody drowning in falsity and before you can reach them to disabuse them of their misapprehension, thousands and thousands of people crowd around them, agreeing and cheering! And then, before you can push through the crowd and take the podium, they all disperse into the void. You can't call them all back and explain that they just walked away with the wrong information... they're just.. gone. Gone, carrying the virus of bad ideas out into the aether, now sure to awaken somewhere else, like wack-a-mole. Something about human nature finds this situation insufferable. But the twittersphere is perfectly designed to make it _the only way we communicate_!
To bring it home, I think our need to right wrongs is what doesn't scale. We can't all convince everybody of our own world view, but globally networked, systematically visible communication baits us into doing exactly that. Once pandora's box is opened, we can't ignore the temptation to participate, nor can we ignore the constant insult of participating.
>But the interesting thing is that there's still nothing that makes it fundamentally impossible to start a relatively small forum nowadays.
I would disagree. There are a few things that make it exceedingly difficult (though not impossible)
1. Other platforms breathing up all the air in the room. No one's going to be giving your attention if they are being rage baited on twatter all day.
2. DDOS, and attack tools make it easy to blast your site totally off the internet the first time a troll gets pissed at you for one reason or another. You'll end up having to be behind CloudFlare or paying for some service to even exist.
3. If your site does gain the smallest amount of popularity the spammers and the bots will come, and you will spend a lot of time and effort to get rid of it. Eventually you are a worn out husk of a human being as you spend more and more time, money, and effort figuring out what is and isn't authentic on your forum.
"authenticity", "attention economy", "engagement"... This is just stirring the turds around in the cesspool. Deadbird is a net negative in the world, run by sociopath, and has no redeeming value, is actively harmful, but is addictive, like meth. Why do any of you actually care? Do something useful with your time.
Community Notes is the best feature. I wonder why wouldn't original Twitter implement it. Maybe it would deflate the bias they wanted to project on the rest of us.
2021 January - Birdwatch launched with first 1000 users
2022 October - Elon acquires Twitter
2022 November - Birdwatch renamed to Community Notes
2022 December - Community Notes feature made available to tweets around the world
Maybe Elon pushed the release schedule timeline up, but it would not be correct to state that pre-Elon Twitter didn't develop and launch the feature. It had been live for almost 2 years by the time Musk showed up.
I was a fairly early Birdwatch tester; they definitely permitted political posts to be annotated. I can't recall either way on ads; given Musk never made a big "I'm enabling it on ads!" announcement I suspect it was always possible.
(Especially considering you can promote a post after the fact; it's not necessarily an ad to start with.)
When reddit first added fake/branded posts as ads for a short while it was possible for people to post on the branded posts. It was hilarious (vicious roasting of the products and brand) but of course that was quickly locked down.
Community notes was started a long time before musk bought Twitter, it was rolled out progressively before coincidentally getting at full speed around (but still 3 weeks before) the acquisition.
> Maybe it would deflate the bias they wanted to project on the rest of us.
I think that an important thing to understand is that social media generally doesn't project a single bias. It is more dangerous: it creates bubbles that encompass groups of people and then mine their minds for attention. This results in polarization, increased rage, and fake outrage, and the like.
So it isn't really helpful to complain that Twitter is leftwing or rightwing etc.; it amplifies for you whatever you already believe. Even though we can generally accept that people's minds don't really change on big issues (whether online or in person), one big problem with social media is that it disincentives listening to each other. "Distincentivze" is perhaps euphimistic - it puts up hard to penetrate walls between us. We don't listen to each other, even if the other person has a worldview or conviction that we detest.
Community Notes corrects for atleast factual claims right away. I have seen it on ads of products where the product is free and the Community Notes said the product is free only for a week. Here's a thing about fake outrage, for an outrage to be effective the opinion expressed in the tweet multiples the fact vector by a million, but community notes effectively deflates the opinion if it tries to do that. A person getting community noted, in my mind at least, means is ill-informed and not to be trusted.
It's not opinion or votes all the way down. The corrections have to be referenced. So if someone is misrepresenting a fact, it will be community noted and votes will accumulate as all that remains to do is verify the referenced source.
It really is. An unreferenced note may be voted up; a well-referenced one may not. There's certainly no requirement you even click the references to see if they say what's claimed. A misrepresented fact may be noted, and it's certainly not synchronous.
Personally I agree. It’s a social engineering feature and, accordingly, you need a lot of time to see how the system ends up abusing/adapting/repurposing it.
It’s just an easy critique: “they don’t ship fast enough according to my totally uninformed and arbitrary assessment!”
I think even 2021 is late for such a critical feature. It should have been thought of and implemented even earlier. If Twitter can maintain an army of bluecheck mark verifiers, reversing bad community notes could be handed over to them or similar group of people, especially when Twitter's aim was to be goto source of quality information.
I started a new account recently (hadn’t used my old one in years), and doing so now got me just about zero attention. I got zero followers from comments, posts I made, following others, etc. It was like shouting in an empty room. Of course, there were ways to “increase engagement” that I tried and they did increase my follower account - but to what end? At that point it just feels like a weird game where everyone is trying to scam each other.
I tried another social media app recently, and was surprised to find it was like how Twitter used to be. When I followed people, a bunch of people followed me back. A bunch of people reached out to me, so that even though I haven’t put _any_ effort into engagement so far, I’ve made a lot of connections. People there are one social media to be, well, social. On Twitter, it feels like a mercenary game of “What can this person do for me?”/“How can I trick this person into making them think I’ll make them rich/healthy/wealthy/successful.”