Doctorow has all the wrong opinions about some of my favourite things, like copyright, but I think he nailed this one about how much better writing things online could have been. (Like everyone with a Twitter account, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much better things could have been.
Doctorow:
[In] the early years of internet publishing… we wrote what we wanted to read, and then waited for people who share our interests to show up and read and comment and write their own blogs and newsletters and whatnot.
When the first ad networks came along, they leaned into this model: “Here is a writer whose audience has this approximate composition and interests; if that’s a group you’re trying to reach, then here’s a rate card to show those people ads.”
In the golden years of internet publishing, the point was to find the weirdos who liked the same stuff as you. Freed from commercial imperatives, the focus of the blogosphere was primarily on using your work as a beacon to locate Your People, who were so diffuse and disorganised that there was no other way to find them…
Readers who want to read what you want to write are a gift.
Indeed, they are. The Doc goes off (as he often does) with a spiralling sidewinder argument about other things, primarily the attention economy. And that’s fine. That’s his thing.
But I want to spend a moment on that last line.
Readers who want to read what you want to write are a gift.
You can flip that so easily to 'writers who want to write what you want to read, are also a gift. I like writing what I like, obvs. But I like sharing it even more, which means finding the weirdos who like the same stuff as me.
Twitter was very good at that for a while early on. Not so much later, when it grew large enough for the network effects to start feeding on themselves. I often dreamed about setting up another account just to follow my people, my weirdos. Maybe a hundred of them. Perhaps a hundred and fifty.
But I didn’t, of course, and now here we are.
‘The man in black fled across the desert, and the parody accounts followed him.’
Weirdly, though, I’ve been feeling not entirely bad about losing 80000+ Twitter followers should the whole site collapse. In the same way, I felt weirdly stoked when Facebook shut down my advertising permissions after somebody complained about a column I wrote. Suddenly I couldn’t use the Zuck’s creepy Orwellian algorithms to sell shit, so I no longer felt the need to hang out on the Zuck’s creepy Orwellian hellsite.
I still drop in there once or twice a day to check on messages and read the posts on a couple of barbecue and strength training groups I follow. But do I need to do that? Solid nope.
I half-joked on the bird site the other day that we should all go back to blogging. But I’m thinking I really should. Like seriously. I don’t need 80K ‘followers’ (in itself a profoundly creepy concept when you think about it).
I am reminded of the observation that if your particular individual kink is a one in a million occurrence, then there are seven other people just like you in New York City alone.
Spread that out over the rest of the world and there are some 6 or 8 thousand of you around the planet. Or there could be if the future (that as we know thanks to @GreatDismal is already here), was distributed evenly.
Is that the tribe you’re looking for? Is that the tribe you want to be a part of? A set of clones of yourself and your interests?
For me, I think the answer to those questions is no, not really. That would be boring and stifling both.
Yes, I want some commonality. I want to be comfortable within that community – to the point where I am happy to take some suggestions and follow my nose to discover other things that also interest me.
That’s how I used Twitter in the early days – follow some specific individuals and see where they led me.
And that worked for a while.
But then Twitter got too big and ugly generally and characters like the Trumpenfuhrer came along and derailed it. And don’t get me started on Murdoch and the MSM. And #auspol – what a sewer that is.
I learned to use lists and filters in Tweetdeck so I can try to limit the crap coming at me down my timeline – you put someone on a list and you don’t need to explicitly follow them.
I’ve even managed to eliminate most of the time wasted doomscrolling before the last federal election, but Ukraine is still a trigger for some reason.
And there are other things I wanted to get to here, but it needs more thinking time. Maybe tomorrow.
I wonder what it is about mass that amplifies ugliness in a way it doesn't seem to amplify... er, niceness. Or maybe it does, but we don't feel that as much. There's still things I see on Twitter and even Facebook that make me smile, every day, but the ugliness... man. It's so much louder and more affecting.
There’s some relationship crapola about saying at least five nice things to every bad thing to maintain it, but that ratio is blown all out of proportion with Twitter. How can it ever be nice.
my friend group from high school is an enduring one. We still catch up (bar a few fallen soldiers along the way). We were the eponymous bunch of misfits of about 10. 5 of us would play d&D together, 5 of us were into army/air cadets, 5 were into cars, five were academic, at least one was the school captain, 5 were into art/playing music, 5 were into camping, 5 were into smoking (weed and the cancer sticks), 5 were sport heads (if skating counted as a sport) and music interests was just a complete mix. And it worked because we were all linked through at least 2 or 3 across the many interests. I think that twitter was like that at the start, and then it turned into a rubbish bin and someone lit a match somewhere along the line and now you can't put the fire out. I remember seeing a lot of Cory's stuff on there but you calling them the Doctor has only just now hit my brain that it is Doctor-Ow not Docto-row lol
It's all about finding your tribe, for sure. The right kind of idjits who will laugh at your jokes and appreciate the same type of 'splosions and stand their round when it's their turn. Old blog communities were good for that... the blue bird site, not so much. For all that I hate the echo-chamber nature of things, life was better online when it was much smaller echo chambers driven by passion for something rather than giant echo chambers driving hate against something.
Yeah, one of the conscious changes I made here a while ago was to only post about stuff I like. Never about stuff I hate. I hope it makes a difference, at least to me.
Much easier to do when you're a white middle class male, JB. For the rest of us, shrieking into the void is the only alternative to being swallowed by it, unnoticed.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman ... RIP...line from Almost Famous. - The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.
I'm watching the birdsite shudder and thinking: well, this could be good for me.
I can't quit the drug but can the drug quit me?
Don't know where else I'll get to debate the minutiae of RBA decision statements and ABS data releases with actual economists from different research houses real-time like some kind of econo-wonk specific town-square, but really?
I do wonder if I'd have lasted 6 years work from home without it. But it's a sinkhole now.
Yes! The time sink aspect is something I've been thinking about since Siri tapped me on the shoulder and started whispering how much of my day I was spending there.
Prompted by Lucas' comment about echo chambers and followers: there was a report of some recent research into just how "echo-ey" twitter really is, and it found that it's used quite differently by different groups of people. Apparently most people don't follow dozens of celebrities or influencers or politicians. Maybe one or two tops. Most of the people who do are themselves celebrities or influencers or politicians (or journalists). Point being that apparently most people don't experience social media as an "echo chamber" at all, and probably wonder what all the fuss from journalists is about.
Dunno: I'm not on the bird site myself: I let RSS feed me the news, from actual web pages and blogs, one of which I run myself.
This absolutely tracks anecdotally for me. I've found many delightful people on Twitter because they posted pics of their cats and I followed them for cat content. The expertise and other insights they provided was ultimately a bonus.
For example, I would never have ended up a patreon of Andrew Stafford without first seeing pics of his rag doll cat Priscilla, and then reading his article on birds using fire, and now I'm all in on his music journalism 🤷♀️
Absolutely true. Many of the science/STEM people I followed was because they showed up when I started following Anne Hilburn's cheetah research photos. And one of my favourite palate-cleanser accounts right now is @HourlySnepCub because everyone needs hourly snow leopard cub pix in their life,
See I didn’t know I could get hourly photos of snow leopard cubs and now I have followed the account that makes this happen. Another gift to be grateful to Twitter for (honestly where would we be without Cat Twitter? It’s the BEST 😻)
Twitter has made me LOL and ROFL on days when the whole world feels like it's turning to shit, because there are so many clever, funny, good people on board. I feel less apocalyptic about the spacecant sinking it because those people will still be out there, somewhere, and the nature of social media is that we will find another forum to gather. I've been at a few chat sites that got taken over by malignant narcissists and everyone just left and built another clubhouse with a big sign that says No Shitheads. It can't be that hard to do it on a bigger scale.
I hope that he’ll get bored or frustrated with it long before the rest of Twitter are done mocking him, and that it will survive this current period, but rebuilding the best of Twitter elsewhere is a good plan B 😊
There are some billionaire philanthropists on this little red rock who could purchase it when his little game of monopoly ends in a binfire with the Saudis sending their kneecapping goons after him for all that unpaid interest. I choose to think positive xx
I've now read the Cory Doctorow article, and have a question for you and your tribe: do you think that Cory's "x but not y" feed filtering theory is a straw-man? Is that something to even get excited about enough to try to create some sort of rule in your feed system of choice? Seems like not-a-thing to me. If you (ever) publish something boring or dull I'll just flick to the next thing on the list. I promise not to whinge to you about it!
Oooh, interesting. Given it focuses on 'first hand' info/follows I wonder how it translates across to the chinese-whisper pileon stuff? I feel like a lot of the 'echo chamber' stuff is less 'I follow these news orgs' and more 'all my mates are the same ideological leaning as me, and I get biased third-hand retellings of the drama of the day and retweet that'.
I read something ages ago on echo-chamber stuff and how it fed into tolerance of the other side, and apparently if you live entirely in one side, you feel better about the other side than if you're mostly in one side and read some of the other side as well - if you have a toe in the other camp, it's usually a 'ha ha, look at the idiot' level schadenfreude kinda deal that drives your opinion downward, rather than an open-minded engagement that brings you more toward the center.
80,000+? Great Ghu, man. In Mongol horde terms, that's over 8 tumans ie twice the size of Genghis' army. When you set up #The10000 all those years ago, I thought yes - that could be my tribe: a tuman of our very own.
I am definitely one of your weirdos and I am proud to remain a member of #The10000. I just wish I could get promoted out of the war elephant clean-up unit.
I am reminded of the observation that if your particular individual kink is a one in a million occurrence, then there are seven other people just like you in New York City alone.
Spread that out over the rest of the world and there are some 6 or 8 thousand of you around the planet. Or there could be if the future (that as we know thanks to @GreatDismal is already here), was distributed evenly.
Is that the tribe you’re looking for? Is that the tribe you want to be a part of? A set of clones of yourself and your interests?
For me, I think the answer to those questions is no, not really. That would be boring and stifling both.
Yes, I want some commonality. I want to be comfortable within that community – to the point where I am happy to take some suggestions and follow my nose to discover other things that also interest me.
That’s how I used Twitter in the early days – follow some specific individuals and see where they led me.
And that worked for a while.
But then Twitter got too big and ugly generally and characters like the Trumpenfuhrer came along and derailed it. And don’t get me started on Murdoch and the MSM. And #auspol – what a sewer that is.
I learned to use lists and filters in Tweetdeck so I can try to limit the crap coming at me down my timeline – you put someone on a list and you don’t need to explicitly follow them.
I’ve even managed to eliminate most of the time wasted doomscrolling before the last federal election, but Ukraine is still a trigger for some reason.
And there are other things I wanted to get to here, but it needs more thinking time. Maybe tomorrow.
"But then Twitter got too big and ugly ..."
I wonder what it is about mass that amplifies ugliness in a way it doesn't seem to amplify... er, niceness. Or maybe it does, but we don't feel that as much. There's still things I see on Twitter and even Facebook that make me smile, every day, but the ugliness... man. It's so much louder and more affecting.
There’s some relationship crapola about saying at least five nice things to every bad thing to maintain it, but that ratio is blown all out of proportion with Twitter. How can it ever be nice.
my friend group from high school is an enduring one. We still catch up (bar a few fallen soldiers along the way). We were the eponymous bunch of misfits of about 10. 5 of us would play d&D together, 5 of us were into army/air cadets, 5 were into cars, five were academic, at least one was the school captain, 5 were into art/playing music, 5 were into camping, 5 were into smoking (weed and the cancer sticks), 5 were sport heads (if skating counted as a sport) and music interests was just a complete mix. And it worked because we were all linked through at least 2 or 3 across the many interests. I think that twitter was like that at the start, and then it turned into a rubbish bin and someone lit a match somewhere along the line and now you can't put the fire out. I remember seeing a lot of Cory's stuff on there but you calling them the Doctor has only just now hit my brain that it is Doctor-Ow not Docto-row lol
Your friend group sounds like a Netflix pitch for a series about an ever-changing group of five friends who fight crime or something
lol. Yeah, except they wouldn't be able to set it in the late 80's/90's because we probably couldn't be arsed to care enough.
It's all about finding your tribe, for sure. The right kind of idjits who will laugh at your jokes and appreciate the same type of 'splosions and stand their round when it's their turn. Old blog communities were good for that... the blue bird site, not so much. For all that I hate the echo-chamber nature of things, life was better online when it was much smaller echo chambers driven by passion for something rather than giant echo chambers driving hate against something.
Yeah, one of the conscious changes I made here a while ago was to only post about stuff I like. Never about stuff I hate. I hope it makes a difference, at least to me.
Much easier to do when you're a white middle class male, JB. For the rest of us, shrieking into the void is the only alternative to being swallowed by it, unnoticed.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman ... RIP...line from Almost Famous. - The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.
Shit, that's a great line.
Great movie. One of my top 5
I'm watching the birdsite shudder and thinking: well, this could be good for me.
I can't quit the drug but can the drug quit me?
Don't know where else I'll get to debate the minutiae of RBA decision statements and ABS data releases with actual economists from different research houses real-time like some kind of econo-wonk specific town-square, but really?
I do wonder if I'd have lasted 6 years work from home without it. But it's a sinkhole now.
Yes! The time sink aspect is something I've been thinking about since Siri tapped me on the shoulder and started whispering how much of my day I was spending there.
Prompted by Lucas' comment about echo chambers and followers: there was a report of some recent research into just how "echo-ey" twitter really is, and it found that it's used quite differently by different groups of people. Apparently most people don't follow dozens of celebrities or influencers or politicians. Maybe one or two tops. Most of the people who do are themselves celebrities or influencers or politicians (or journalists). Point being that apparently most people don't experience social media as an "echo chamber" at all, and probably wonder what all the fuss from journalists is about.
Dunno: I'm not on the bird site myself: I let RSS feed me the news, from actual web pages and blogs, one of which I run myself.
This absolutely tracks anecdotally for me. I've found many delightful people on Twitter because they posted pics of their cats and I followed them for cat content. The expertise and other insights they provided was ultimately a bonus.
For example, I would never have ended up a patreon of Andrew Stafford without first seeing pics of his rag doll cat Priscilla, and then reading his article on birds using fire, and now I'm all in on his music journalism 🤷♀️
Absolutely true. Many of the science/STEM people I followed was because they showed up when I started following Anne Hilburn's cheetah research photos. And one of my favourite palate-cleanser accounts right now is @HourlySnepCub because everyone needs hourly snow leopard cub pix in their life,
Hourly Quokkas for me.
You called? Just give me a minute to sharpen my claws. #AttackQuokkas
See I didn’t know I could get hourly photos of snow leopard cubs and now I have followed the account that makes this happen. Another gift to be grateful to Twitter for (honestly where would we be without Cat Twitter? It’s the BEST 😻)
Yep. Follow the kitteh has been a very handy compass for me on the twitters.
It has been the gift that gives in so many wonderful ways!
Twitter has made me LOL and ROFL on days when the whole world feels like it's turning to shit, because there are so many clever, funny, good people on board. I feel less apocalyptic about the spacecant sinking it because those people will still be out there, somewhere, and the nature of social media is that we will find another forum to gather. I've been at a few chat sites that got taken over by malignant narcissists and everyone just left and built another clubhouse with a big sign that says No Shitheads. It can't be that hard to do it on a bigger scale.
I hope that he’ll get bored or frustrated with it long before the rest of Twitter are done mocking him, and that it will survive this current period, but rebuilding the best of Twitter elsewhere is a good plan B 😊
There are some billionaire philanthropists on this little red rock who could purchase it when his little game of monopoly ends in a binfire with the Saudis sending their kneecapping goons after him for all that unpaid interest. I choose to think positive xx
That's genuinely interesting. I'd like to read that study.
The article I read was this one: https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/10/most-people-on-twitter-dont-live-in-political-echo-chambers-but-mostly-because-they-dont-care-enough-to-bother-building-one/
I've now read the Cory Doctorow article, and have a question for you and your tribe: do you think that Cory's "x but not y" feed filtering theory is a straw-man? Is that something to even get excited about enough to try to create some sort of rule in your feed system of choice? Seems like not-a-thing to me. If you (ever) publish something boring or dull I'll just flick to the next thing on the list. I promise not to whinge to you about it!
It sounded like privileged whining to me. I write across genres and topics but I don't expect everyone to follow me everywhere.
Grazie!
Oooh, interesting. Given it focuses on 'first hand' info/follows I wonder how it translates across to the chinese-whisper pileon stuff? I feel like a lot of the 'echo chamber' stuff is less 'I follow these news orgs' and more 'all my mates are the same ideological leaning as me, and I get biased third-hand retellings of the drama of the day and retweet that'.
I read something ages ago on echo-chamber stuff and how it fed into tolerance of the other side, and apparently if you live entirely in one side, you feel better about the other side than if you're mostly in one side and read some of the other side as well - if you have a toe in the other camp, it's usually a 'ha ha, look at the idiot' level schadenfreude kinda deal that drives your opinion downward, rather than an open-minded engagement that brings you more toward the center.
Happy to be one of the weirdos who hangs around just because it's fun and I enjoy the company.
I also have some more serious thoughts on this topic. Let's see if I can articulate them properly in another response a bit later. I'll be back.
I’ll be waiting
80,000+? Great Ghu, man. In Mongol horde terms, that's over 8 tumans ie twice the size of Genghis' army. When you set up #The10000 all those years ago, I thought yes - that could be my tribe: a tuman of our very own.
I am definitely one of your weirdos and I am proud to remain a member of #The10000. I just wish I could get promoted out of the war elephant clean-up unit.
I am 80% on Twitter to read what others have written in long form - 20% for the shitposting. Substack may be a good fit for me
You sound like the perfect reader