folks over on twitter are complaining that all the twisty little passages full of unique social subcultures have been dissolved into a single global free market of slop. Elon giveth, and Elon taketh away. It seemed like an interesting topic so let's have a thread. How do we bring this back? Should we?
Those of us who cut our teeth on the "free internet" have been experiencing the homogenization into a controlled space for years. Before Elon, there was a lot of momentum behind suppressing "disinformation", "the far right", and so on. There was a lot of funding for this, with full time professionals who spent years hunting down anyone who was too vocally honest. But some of it wasn't just the predictable regime clampdown to control a novel media technology, but something about how the highly linkable world wide web encouraged a voyerism and busybodying that tended to destroy the innocence and careful internal balance of the subcultures that previously inhabited it.
After Elon, this trend continues under other banners. The funding for the "far right" beat seems to have dried up or something, or maybe we all just stopped causing so much trouble. Whatever it is, the atmosphere isn't as oppressive as it was four to seven years ago. But that doesn't mean anyone is having great free-flowing conversations online either. Now everything is caught up in the incentives of "content" production, as monetization has gotten into everything via substack and twitter ad revenue. You start to feel like a low rent TV character who has to dance for your daily peanuts. The danger is less that you get socially ostracized for saying something too real, and more that you get captured by an audience of irrelevant idiots that clap and cheer while you dance and disappear when you don't so that it doesn't matter what you say; you're just wasting your time. When I check the accounts of the people engaging with me on Xitter, I get the feeling of staring into a meaningless void. It feels like there is no longer a discerning online audience with any kind of memory. Just an endless ocean of dancing monkeys and braindead gawkers. So whether commissars or viewers, the trend towards trivialization and meaninglessness continues.
I don't like where this is going. Web as TV. Web as app platform. Web as ocean of piss. Web as panopticon, where if they don't punish you for stepping out of line, it's because there's nothing you can do that could possibly matter.
I have a dream that we can create space where it's possible again to have real discussions among serious people who remember what you tell them. No commissars, no advertisers, no voyerism, just anons pondering the world together. If we're going to move on from that, let it be in the direction of becoming more real, more IRL, more agency-oriented, more seriously consequential. Until then, take me back to the internet of twisty little passages, all different.
So go join a tilde town, go start a gopher site, join IRC or IRCv2 aka Urbit, join a racist gaming forum, make an onion site, join a SSB server, go fuck with websim, join a cult of Rust programmers. What are you waiting for, a map?
>>2087 Obviously that's what we all do when we're not on xitter. This here for example. But the big picture is interesting and worth tracking, and getting worse. What does that mean for all our little corners that are still free of slop? And don't try to tell me urbit actually succeeded in rebooting Usenet or even the high octane blogosphere like Curtis wanted. You can retreat into your little holes, but I'm noting it's a smaller and poorer hole. How are we going to fix that?
I was talking about this with my wife last night shortly before I saw that roon thread going around. Everything feels dead, dying, flattened, and I broadly agree with his diagnosis for x in particular (I think monetization was underemphasized); what he's definitely right about, as far as what made old-twitter special, was fluid meshing of elite discourse and a generally meritocratic path into it, or at least an excellent window for voyeurs. Maybe some of the decline is because the platform is less adversarial now, I'd have to ponder that a bit more.
You're right to focus on the bigger picture though; the entire public web is turning into this. Substack seems like it has the best shot at building something better in the short term but lacks structural defenses for the same kind of issues. The nerd answer is building correct incentives (whatever those are) into open software, the real-world counter is that nothing is anything without network effects and private platforms can burn money for years building it.
>>2089 Your note about elite discourse is important. Twitter used to separate elite-adjacent people from plebs with the bluecheck system. It was really arbitrary and imprecise, but that's what people used it for. And it worked for that. It meant elites had ways of existing on the platform and being recognized as more legitimate than random grafters. But Elon blew it up out of some kind of populist impulse. Now we're all just dancing monkeys.
The other thing roon notes is that "content" and community are somewhat at cross purposes. Elon turned twitter into a content-optimized mass entertainment app, where it used to be stable enough to make friends and reliably see each other's minor stuff. Again, dancing monkeys.
I'm not sure on the adversariality. Being able to express drama and opposition is important for the platform being where people actually interact honestly, but I'm not sure how good it is for the social tone otherwise.
I think what Elon should have done is focused on the elite discourse platform angle, and made the bluecheck even more rigorous, stripping it from the random horde of journalist's friends, etc. He could have made it computed from some combination of reputation among the elite, public figure status, and paying money. Then it becomes a Veblen good and could both make a bunch a money and become even more legitimate. Then he's providing a real service to the elite, and in a position of power over them. Way more interesting, IMO.
>>2088 > You can retreat into your little holes, but I'm noting it's a smaller and poorer hole. How are we going to fix that? Well there's the problem, posting for social capital instead of doing so for the love of the game. Unique twisty passages are dug by people who don't give a shit about playing to the crowd. That the hole is smaller and poorer is a good thing, it keeps out the striver class.
>>2092 When the remaining free internet fora get smaller and poorer, it means it's less worth it. Less likely to encounter important new ideas, less likely to encounter worthwhile comrades. Is this "striver"? It's a lot different than wanting to be a dancing monkey. Sure if you just love the game of shitposting or whatever unique brand of poetry or fanfiction you're into, I'm sure there is plenty of fun to be had. But it's very strange that you seem to be offended by the idea that there's a class of platform that's increasingly missing from the internet.
I honestly don’t see much change over the past few years. Twitter was pretty good but not amazing then, and it’s pretty good but not amazing now. My group chats are much like they were before, maybe a hair sharper. What differences are you guys complaining about, specifically? I know it’s not the 2008 blogosphere golden age of longform, but I’ve yet to hear any concrete claim against 2024 Twitter that matters a lot and wasn’t also true of 2022 Twitter. Maybe I’m not paying attention to the right angle, I don’t know, but here and elsewhere I’ve found the complaints about "slop" and "dancing monkeys" and stuff to be so inchoate I can't engage past "Well that's not my experience".
I suspect roon et al are noticing that their fifteen minutes of fame have passed and blaming the algorithm for it. Sorry, guys, you were a fad, it’s not Elon’s fault that people are noticing your chatbots aren’t actually the god-mind paperclip singleton.
>>2094 heh you may be right about roon's 15 minutes of chatbot gotzen fame. With 2024 vs 2022 I don't know. I've noticed a different vibe and have lost interest in twitter etc for a lot of the reasons mentioned. But it's hard to establish definitively. The change from 2014 to 2024 is pretty noticeable, but that's also a long time and the vibe could be attributed to our own maturation and just general scene and political shifts.
Even if its all in our imagination, though, the topic is useful as a proxy for what kind of social media landscape we would want to build for ourselves. Maybe that's the question OP should have asked. So I'll ask it that way: what infrastructure would make our internet social lives better?
Instead of being nostalgic, it occurred to me that I might give an example of a platform that has survived the social apocalypse...
I have posted intermittently for more than two decades on a forum that was started by British music journalists in 1999. Maybe there are many examples of similar websites, but this is the one I am familiar with. It was always home to a majority that worked in the media, the arts, or in politics, as well as a minority with jobs that afforded them the leisure to devote hours a day to making observations about media, the arts, and politics. The forum's outsized influence on music criticism and its minor celebrity posters were noted in the media, but it has mostly remained a club of insiders. The tone is occasionally vicious. Political dissidents are chased out. Close moderation maintains quality. Restriction to a design that has not evolved since 1999 has helped, I'm sure. It functioned because it captured the interest of people that were, much earlier than most, paid to write things on the internet, who needed for their professions and for their sanity a community of clever people to bounce ideas, jokes, and theories off, and who were willing to pay for the cost of the servers, and who were willing to contribute to the community in less direct ways. I have learned about books and films, and about philosophers, and politics (it occurs to me that I became radicalized by the site after a poster began to send me radical literature [he was later driven off the site for those beliefs]) (as a sixteen-year-old in the middle of nowhere on the Great Plains, I could talk to aging freaks, degenerate musicians, and film critics published in magazines that I knew of, but which my local Chapters would never stock)... I have gotten jobs from it, even. I have made good friends from it.
It has declined. The posts are shorter. There is less volume. There is not much fresh blood. But there remains a community preserved within it, and it will probably be there in some form, still, in a decade.
I wonder if there are lessons to be taken from that forum. It was free and, at least superficially, open to anyone; and it attracted by tight management of style and politics an elite group (white American and British media and political hacks with elite educational backgrounds and moderate progressive politics); it provided, disconnected somewhat from, and on a longer timeline than, the market that most there were forced to work in—selling ideas, publicly or behind-the-scenes—tangible and intangible incentives (intellectual competition with smart people, connections).
I wonder if the sort of person that might have built or contributed to this project, or to any of the others I engaged with in my adolescence and early adulthood, still exists. They must. Perhaps those that have not put their skills, commitment, and connections into more lucrative projects have simply written off the internet as a place for community building.
I fear I don't have much to contribute, but I'm interested in this topic.