I’m worried that the last few weeks have made us think the problem is Twitter’s leadership when maybe the real problem is Twitter.
@hankgreen maybe, but a big part of the problem is also WHO you follow on Twitter
I mean.... Give some of the people on Twitter some credit... They suck too.
@hankgreen Or maybe with the state of mainstream social media as a whole...?
@hankgreen yes 👏 yes 👏 yes 👏
The site drew out the worst in everyone, with or without Elon.
@hankgreen Even before Elon, my experience with the site was lackluster. It was still filled with trolls, bots, and haters. I’m happy to have finally started looking into alternatives
@hankgreen Yeah. It's pretty interesting to see what lessons people are taking from the whole tire fire though.
Maybe it won't matter so much if the John Mastodons of this world keep doing what they've been doing. Most of us flow to whatever's shiniest at the moment.
@hankgreen Imagine it's 1436 CE, and Johannes Gutenberg was as terrible as Elon Musk. . .and he controlled all the printing presses.
It's the leadership.
@hankgreen This is essentially an argument that society is to blame. Which, fair. But then what.
@hankgreen Personally, I think the icky problems of Twitter were how it inevitably turns things into a contest and I'm not feeling that here, yet.
Maybe it's just too early, but I think the fractured nature is a big help
@noicingcupcake I’m trying to think more about the overall negative impact on society. Which certainly does not need to impact everyone (or even most people) for it to be quite bad.
@cfiesler this makes a lot of sense. I just think it’s a very very very hard thing to make better. Even if you take the profit motive out it’s hard.
@hankgreen Twitter always had the problem but doesn't look like current leadership is taking the right direction
@hankgreen I mean the REAL problem is probably just humans in the end.
@hankgreen true, fair, but it also goes back to how it allows echo chambers to be created, since people's experiences can be so vastly different
@hankgreen sure, people will be shallow and inflammatory anywhere. That's how people are. If you as the owner of the social gathering; be it online, in real life, whatever; take the guard rails off and sow confusion and division though, people will rightfully recognize you as some sort of a problem.
@TechConnectify that would certainly be a help. Also helpful is it being smaller.
The issue is the lack of "real" verification. None of this anonymous business, if you really need an anonymous account, it gets approved manually only for a good reason. But otherwise, people know who you are, and your speech has consequences, as it does in the real world.
@hankgreen Part of it is that by the nature of these things, when we post, generally, we’re not talking to a person - we’re talking to the crowd. It’s a really hard way to meaningfully converse.
@hankgreen Platforms make it instant and accessible. The actual problem is that some humans are trash. Used to be, they were limited to the bulletin board in the back hall of that one bowling alley that smelled of piss. Now they're in your feed.
@TechConnectify @hankgreen I never understood why people said quote tweeting was so bad, until I got to mastodon. Hidden quantitative info on posts is huge too.
@hankgreen @TechConnectify I think because this place can't just *decide* to throw inflammatory stuff in your face here unlike the other site it might not have the same problems.
I do think "The Algorithm" is the problem on all the centralized social media sites.
I never got far-right nonsense just by chance in my email box for instance. That might not be a perfect analogy but it kind of works?
@hankgreen @TechConnectify One thing I've noticed on here is that posting feels so much less like shouting in the void because people seem to actually come across my posts (probably via the local feature), which is definitely a feature of it being smaller. But it also gives me a bit extra of a mental barrier before putting things out there, personally.
@hankgreen The lack of QT makes a big difference in reducing toxicity and blatantly performative misreading engagement farming
@hankgreen There was absolutely a culture of combative, snarky, own-obsession taking place on Twitter before all this started. I think the best thing we can do is try to stamp down on that sort of thing here while the site is relatively fresh.
@hankgreen Twitter makes money via engagement, which means they make money by amplifying "Inflammation Entrepreneurs." The same incentives don't strictly apply here. There may be a network effect of something being boosted, but there's a friction there: why would you boost something you think is a bad take? I suspect that inflammatory posts will wither on the vine because there's no algorithm pumping them up.
@hankgreen Honestly I think it's too early to know what it IS — and I'm sure as heck not gonna tell you I think it's the future of social media.
But I am interested in nourishing it. I can imagine some futures here with a lot of possibilities.
@hankgreen
Not sure the size of the blogging matters if there's an algorithm constantly whispering that unique thing that "engages" each one of us.
@hankgreen IMHO it’s the algorithms used to further engagement, amplification, and reach of bad messages that is the issue. Bad ideas no longer decay, they persist and spread due to their controversy alone.
@hankgreen I mean, it WAS much better before the take over for those of us with carefully curated feeds...
@hankgreen This is something I have thought about since you brought it up a few vlogs ago; and i have a feeling it’s to do with community size, I seem to remember covid was manageable in government counties/councils/states/countries up to about the 5-10 million mark. Mastodon has the ability to segregate communities, and the hope is that people do join servers linked to their communities. It does fracture social media, but maybe that is what is needed, fractured and focussed, rather than centralised and general.
@hankgreen Maybe it depends on just how micro the microblogging is. 500 characters allows for a bit more nuance and courtesy I think, yet still tight enough to prevent endless rants.
It also helps that Mastodon doesn't put the metrics of a post front and center, so there's not a constant incentive to perform rather than converse.
But by next year I may feel completely different.
@hankgreen micro-blogging can work but can it work without the emotional hooks of negative tweets?
Not to mention the moderation costs of preventing that seem exponential.
The latter is an easier problem to solve than losing the addictive nature of highly controversial posts and still having the eyeballs to pay the bills.
I still feel Trump may have saved Twitter in 2015/16
@hankgreen this is it for me. I miss a lot about Twitter but it occurs to me that if Twitter survives Musk, even if he fully divests and it becomes a better place, he's exposed the problem with a public square belonging to a private entity (including a "public" company). It will always be vulnerable to this. And I'll be really disappointed if this *isn't* the catalyst for a general move something new and better.
I hope Mastodon is it but mostly I hope it's not Twitter.
@hankgreen I feel like the problem is even more fundamental than that, though. Twitter is a platform for performance and Mastodon is no different in that regard. Some folks are out here performing their lives in public in the hopes of attracting an audience that will connect with that. Others have realized that more extreme versions of that performance tend to get better ratings, so they lean into that. And the easiest paths to that extreme performance are, unfortunately, pretty toxic.
@hankgreen Or it gave people a concrete reason to leave. I knew I should leave for MONTHS, but once he started throwing around actual Nazi language as a joke WITH ACTUAL NAZIS, I left.
@hankgreen Maybe that's the benefit of something like this place: the ephemeral nature of microblogging shouldn't necessarily be coupled to wide discoverability. Not everyone is going to ponder the ramifications of their off-the-cuff remark 5 years down the line when you are running for office, for example. The microblog may need some safeguards.
@hankgreen “Why not both” gif, but also I get how focusing on *just* him as the problem creates more problems.
Someone who comes in and is slightly more chill (not difficult at this point) and people might think they’re okay.
Like I worry people might, based on his response to the new policies, give Jack a free pass he doesn’t deserve.
@hankgreen the same can be said about YouTube, or the internet in general.
Is it perfect? No, but I feel like I have far more control on here over what people & content I engage with.
I don't want to lose the ability to imteract with people whose work & opinions I'm interested in (like you)!
@hankgreen Agreed. :( I'm hoping that between Mastodon (talking to other academics/scientists) and TikTok (talking more to the general public/science communication) I can collectively get much of what I got from Twitter, but this still makes me so much sadder than I realized it would.
@hankgreen From personal experience I haven’t seen anything anywhere near the magnitude of toxicity I encounter on Twitter (though I don’t want to dismiss any one else’s issues on here)
Despite that, any and all issues that exist in the real world will naturally spread into platforms online, and a platform’s culture acts as a filter to manage those issues, so I think the issue is as much with the people who choose to use the platforms as it is the administrations that run them.
@hankgreen While micro-blogging will have some inherent problems, I don't think you can discount the impact that you have when giant social media companies need to start paying the bills and have to turn to advertisers and billionaires to keep the lights on.
@hankgreen I think the general takeaway (at least what I'm seeing here on mastodon) is that the leadership of birdapp has exposed the problems that were there the whole time with centralized, for-profit social media
@hankgreen microblogging definitely lends itself to a whole host of problems, that would be very difficult to solve without some major cultural shifts imo. well, the problem may be more with people in general rather than microblogging necessarily.
@hankgreen It’s always been Twitter. But we thrive on its toxicity sadly 😭
@hankgreen I don't doubt it. I muted a ton of choice words, set my location to a totally different country, and heavily curated my follows just to have a decent time. Anytime I strayed too far off that path, I'd see all the bad things everyone talks about.
Granted I'm just in the retro repair/maker/creator world, but I'm afraid I'll miss out on all the cool things being designed now, especially presented in a language that isn't my own. Forums and discords have their own set of issues. 😔
@hankgreen it's a nice thought. And it's not completely wrong. But it's also not right, I think.
@hankgreen It most definitely is part of the problem, and not exclusive to microblogging, but to discourse in general. Having shitty policies (and a shitty CEO setting policies reactively) compounds the problem.
It's basically the same thing that happened on reddit, when they just kind of let communities do whatever without really enforcing rules for a long time. But then their shitty communities lost them tons of ad revenue and they decided it wasn't worth being hands off anymore.
@hankgreen You are not wrong. Twitter is a great tool, but it can be a place where our worse devils can be swayed by opinions with an ease that would not have happened before Twitter.
@hankgreen @TechConnectify We'll see Eternal September effects at some point. But the fractured but federated nature resembles Reddit to me, and Reddit undergoes the Early Adopter->Cool New Gathering Place->Eternal September->Diaspora cycle repeatedly with subreddits, so I think there's hope there may be a cyclic stability here.
@TechConnectify @hankgreen honestly I wonder if Mastodon will end up being a not great, but very widespread protocol for public conversations and public facing notifications. It doesn’t need to ‘beat’ twitter to do that.
Like email is also a protocol, but for personal notifications and privatish conversations. Everyone has an email, so you can always reach them that way. Most people don’t set up their own server, but use a broadly accessible provider.
So maybe one day almost all public facing people will have a Mastodon account to annouce things and have public conversations. In that case Mastodon doesn’t beat twitter really, it’s just the lowest common denominator option, and that’s ok.
@hankgreen I'm happy my twitter experience was mostly positive. I was able to stay in contact with friends all over and even made some IRL and interweb frenz.
I realize I am not the norm of the twitter experience.
In terms of UX, Mastodon is a confusing disaster of inconsistencies.
Want to find something on Twitter? Just type it in and click what you want.
Want to find something on Mastodon? Type it in, get almost no results, try to figure how how to find federated results on whatever 'fracture' you happen to be on, then click the result...
Oops! That's on a different fracture. Time to make and verify a new account!
I've already lost track of how many accounts I have now.
@hankgreen The problem is that Twitter was never quite bad enough. If it had been broken, people would have left, but it was close enough to what we wanted, and we had just enough belief that Jack or support would listen, that we were willing to keep at it (especially given the investment a lot of people put into it). Elmo breaking the extremely tenuous and always contingent social contract finally gave us the push we needed..
Broke gets fixed, crappy is forever.
https://dandreamsofcoding.com/2013/05/06/broke-gets-fixed-crappy-is-forever/
@hankgreen Twitter itself significantly contributed to breaking the Chief Twit's brain. That's why he bought it.
@hankgreen Lack of consequences is the problem. Supported by the fact that almost all the people starting fires are obsessed with them.
Calling consequences "cancel culture" and dressing up the lack of it as "free speech"
@hankgreen @TechConnectify it also helps that (at least on mas.to) you don't see like counts on the entire thread/replies unless you click into them.
@hankgreen @noicingcupcake Personally I have to disagree in this case. While yes, there was a non-significant part of Twitter that was pretty awful, Twitter also helped enable millions of people to more easily network for job opportunities and freelance work that pretty much any other site on the internet. It might be my optimistic nature talking, but I do believe it did more good than harm to our society in general (even if just slight).
@hankgreen As far as I can tell the platform was always not great but the new "management" has brought all of its problems to the surface. That's why it's hard to tell what's always been an issue and what's new. In that context I think we're lucky to have such an incompetent person running the platform now. Really just unearths all the problems with Twitter and modern social media in general.
@hankgreen I've often wondered what the "right" way to structure a platform would be. Surely not like twitter, but a platform that encourages politeness for example could easily become an equally toxic hugbox.
How does a platform effectively encourage good discourse? ...What even is, good discourse? 🤔
@hankgreen and @TechConnectify connection just having a casual convo about fedi meta is so cute to see. makes my day a bit brighter!
@hankgreen yes, but I still think the leadership can exacerbate the problem
@hankgreen if so, mass migrations are a great outcome
@hankgreen twitter was great from 2008-2015 or so. Met a lot of great people I'm IRL friends with now there. My wife got a good job because of something she tweeted that someone else happened to see. Just has that "main character" problem
@hankgreen @noicingcupcake
Do you think the overall negative impact is inherent to Twitter itself, or the microblog format?
@hankgreen Define what you mean by "Twitter". The platform? The company? Or the user base?
@hankgreen
If it's Twitter, then it's us. That's you, me and all the other users.
So we're the problem. That's why we have wars. Yeah, if you just want to focus on 'problems' it's us.
We do good too. We could focus on that some more instead.
What's your proposal?
Certainly an interesting take, I really enjoyed those that I followed on there. I'd like to think I had carved out a nice little section of the site.
I think it's really user dependent; however, I did see slightly more foolishness slide through the cracks in recent weeks than I had in quite some time.
@hankgreen The real problem was when we let corporations take over our Internet.
@hankgreen no, it was the leadership all along. Always has been.
It's a leadership decision to let nazi on your platform. And other scammer, the nftbros for example.
@hankgreen twitter was always the problem, we were too busy arguing whether or not we or others could stay on it.
Too much power, too centralized
@hankgreen I don't think you're wrong, but I also think that Twitter, as a platform, did a lot of good as well, and it's worth mourning that and trying to salvage the parts of it that we can.
@hankgreen I love how the first of your posts I ever saw on here is pretty much a Twitter thread. Mass Exodus to Mastodon appears to be on its way!
@hankgreen honestly before elon, twitter was going fine for me, probably cause I’m not a public figure and I don’t talk about politics like ever there, just using it for a good time
@hankgreen I think there's a deeper problem: the assumption that a single company (like Twitter, FB, etc) should manage human identities on the web. Human identity should be provided by a decentralized system. Companies like Twitter, FB or Google can still provide their services by authenticating users with such decentralized identity system.
@hankgreen I think the problem is algorithmic boosting mainly. And people jumping into other people's conversations.
Content Moderation is an issue with all SM.
@hankgreen "The" problem is problems.
I wouldn't be too worried about the reputation of twitter-as-hellsite that preceded Elon won't last through and after his involvement. Don't we all know this? Spam, inconsistent TOS application, continual frittering about on fringes of features vs core experience, lack of financial model...
@hankgreen I agree with that. As I've said a long time, the problem with people is people.
@hankgreen Twitter does seem uniquely bad at causing knee-jerk reactions, especially from people who are less familiar with the social dynamics involved. Many posts are emotionally shoot-first-ask-questions-later because it rewards rapid responses over careful and deliberate thought.
@hankgreen can it be both? To be honest I never liked Twitter much. There’s very little room for nuance. Let’s make Mastodon different!
@hankgreen the problem is people staying on Twitter and adamantly refusing to exercise their freedom of choice as a consumer in a market with plenty of options. Give up the bird, she’s dying, just like MySpace did. We all survived.
@hankgreen It's always been a troubled platform. Does executives of the company spending almost all the revenue on holding it together count as being an unsaveable system?
@hankgreen it's kind of like capitalism - with the right people in charge and the right controls and laws, it can be ok, but it's still a system that inherently gives people the worst motivations.
@weblure @TechConnectify @hankgreen You should format this into actionable improvements and open issues for it on the mastodon github so that improvements can be made!
..Or did you just want to complain?
@hankgreen and now you think in the federated timeline :) welcome to the decentralised, real townsquare :)
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@hankgreen The amount of people who just want a "good billionaire" to lead Twitter is shocking.
@hankgreen maybe the main problem is who you follow? when i use facebook with my 7 yo account i feel facebook is the worst platform ever. when i use facebook with my another account i feel it's the best platform, because in case of relatively new account i was aware and filtered a lot what to follow.
@hankgreen I feel like for the normal person if you keep a will maintained time like twitter is great. We have plenty of great positive interactions on there. We can be honest though and admit that there is a lot of trash on there as well. I guess like anything in life you need to weigh the pros and cons
@hankgreen I agree that a significant part of the problem with Twitter is systemic to the medium (the tendency for over-simplification combined with an algorithm that boosts that), but I think an equally important factor in the twitter downfall is the culture endemic to the site. Twitter was already insular and censorious before Elon took over, but I noticed it became even more so after the change in leadership. My experience with Mastodon, however, has been overwhelmingly positive!
@hankgreen I look forward to finding out what problems Mastodon has that we can't conceive of right now because we only ever realize those things in hindsight.
@hankgreen the real Twitter was the friends we made along the way.
@hankgreen I would love to hear your thoughts a couple layers deeper. Was the problem Twitter as a for-profit entity? A publicly traded company? Twitter the product (short form social network)? Twitter the algorithm? Twitter the over-concentration of power? Twitter's leadership and the policies they set?
Saying "the real problem is Twitter" is pithy but not nuanced. You have more than 280 characters here (depending on your instances configuration). Go wild!
@Swedneck @TechConnectify @hankgreen
Sorry, which Github repo for which variation of Mastodon? And what would your solution be for fixing the fundamental flaws behind the service's very foundation? I can't simply conjoin the usernames & passwords of multiple accounts across the array of networks with a pull request. Open source doesn't mean magical.
It'd have to be completely remade from the ground up. So essentially, you're just saying "make your own service if you want something better."
@hankgreen can the problem be both? In addition to trying to shoehorn 19th century regulations on to a 21th century issue? After the rise of monolithic social search and media (Whether Google, Meta or Twitter), the democratic, and largely self-regulating nature of the web and internet has taken a nosedive.
@hankgreen I mean, it's not a proper dichotomy. They can both be problems, and one can certainly compound the other.
@hankgreen Exactly.
Structure has something to do with experience, right?
@hankgreen inherently, the central control makes it a monarchy. Eventually inevitably get a shit king. Nae quin, nae laird, we willnae be fooled again!
@hankgreen it was kinda a harassment engine. I know it's possible to be cancelled elsewhere, but it was like, optimized for it
@hankgreen ...you get the behaviour you tolerate .. applicable to all businesses and institutions . And like attracts like...and so corporate cultures are formed
@hankgreen the fact that I see similar engagement with 20 followers here vs 10k on Twitter would support this theory.. when bots outnumber people a platform stops being a useful medium of discourse
@hankgreen I think that there are some real hard-to-solve problems with Twitter that are mostly, at their root, problems with people. And then there are ALSO some big own-goal problems with leadership that are mostly problems with Elon.
@hankgreen The problem is Twitter, but also the tendency to feel entitled to likes, followers, and attention. Even recent refugees here have flooded the Fedi with desperate entreaties to be followed and liked. When we didn't have these metrics in place, people simply expressed themselves and weren't so keen on character assassination campaigns directed at people who got through to a mass audience. People need to remember that they are largely unremarkable andmediocre. 🤣
@hankgreen respectfully, I view Twitter as mostly a delivery platform, just as any media vehicle thru the ages has been. Most ills, if not all, are a reflection of us, as seen in every nook and cranny of today's world. Education and empathy are lacking everywhere, from social media to the corner bar to state houses. Just my $.02.
@hankgreen or perhaps the idea that anyone can or should own critical infrastructure?
@hankgreen it’s both I’d say. The user base on Twitter is riddled with a lot of shitty people. But at least when have a professional and business ethical ceo it helps keep things under control. Musk is neither ethical or professional, so there is no control.
Dorsey wasn’t perfect, but he at least maintained some professionalism and understood the seriousness of cyber bullying
@hankgreen Don't really care about the blue bird.. Let's focus on the community here :)
