News broke yesterday that Lex Luthor is going to buy Twitter. You may be able to tell that I have no particular fondness for the guy, but I’m also watching with interest as everyone claims loudly how they’re leaving, without, you know, actually leaving. This panic reminds me a lot of when Yahoo bought tumblr— the platform changed, but it’s still there, and it’s weirder than ever. Whether any of that will happen to twitter, which has had a lot more broad social clout since it hit its stride in the early 2010s, has yet to be seen.
The thing is, whenever anyone has anything interesting to say on Twitter, it gets chopped up into threads, sometimes dozens-long, and I always think to myself, “geez, why don’t you just write a blog post?”
There are reasons of course. I still blame the death of blogging as a broad practice largely on Google and Digg killing the two really-really-good RSS readers, which made it a lot harder to digest the disparate voices I wanted to hear from. Further, social media platforms discourage linking away because they only make money if you stay on the platform. So tweets with outbound links, or facebook posts with outbound links, or whatever, don’t get shown to as many people as tweets with multiples of replies. It’s algorithmically advantageous to thread what should be a blog post.
Good for robots, bad for people.
And I think the internet is better when we prioritize people.
As such, you may have noticed a recent uptick in the number of blog posts I’ve been making lately. I’ve also recently purchased a feed reader that is well reviewed for Mac called Reeder 5.
“But Veronica,” I hear no one say “isn’t blogging completely self-indulgent and doesn’t it bother you that nobody is likely to come read your blog?” Look pal, I’ve been shouting into the void for over 20 years with a readership in the single digits, regardless of which platform I’m doing it on. Why’s that suddenly going to stop me?
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Well said. None of this makes me regret that I never got around to signing up for a Twitter account in the first place. Doesn’t seem like it’s the time to start tweeting now.
Don’t forget:
* It’s hard to get people reading anything more than a handful of paragraphs containing two or three short sentences.
So, threads of 180 character chunks actually work well. They draw people in.
Blog posts that people are not dissimilar. Very short paragraphs, short sentences.
New songs with long intros are no longer successful. Tolkien and Tolstoy probably wouldn’t get book contracts for their well-known works these days. At least not in their usual forms.
@Stephen That’s fair, but that does assume that the point of writing is to get the most eyeballs on it, as opposed to writing for the sake of teasing out the complexity of an idea. Sometimes you just need more than 280 characters, you know?
I’m all for writing single-sentence paragraphs, poeticizing my language for effect, and chunking things out for impact. I’m mostly tired of robots deciding what I get to see by prioritizing my most addictive behaviors.
@Garrett I mean, I’ve been on there since 2007 and I certainly wouldn’t jump on now otherwise.
Right beside you, Veronica! Like images, words shared with intention, in context, change things! Our job is to do our job!
I think there have always been echo chambers and algorithmic prioritising of what you get to see. It’s just less obvious when it’s not on an industrialised scale carried out by computers.
If you hung out with your friendly neighbourhood fascists, you probably read fascist tomes that were recommended by your fellow fascistas, read the recommended fascist newspapers, … Replace fascist by any other “special interest” around which a community may grow and influence people. No computers other than Homo Sapiens social tendencies required.
When we lived in small settlements, most of your news etc. was the echo chamber of your small settlement with whatever external “news” etc. was brought in by travellers.
It’s just more obvious what’s going on and when it can tuned so very quickly and there’s so much of it.
At this point we’re dipping really closely into “what even is free will?” territory. Yes, influences gonna influence, but I think there’s a real qualitative difference between your community’s impact on what you’re attuned to, and an algorithm rapidly trying to to optimize what it shows you based on triangulating what it knows about you with the aggregate data of everyone else it knows. One of these things is going to steer the conversation toward “what hits the strongest outrage/dopamine buttons?” and the other SHOULD, if we’re taking care of each other, allow the conversation time to stare contemplatively into the campfire together.