The disappearing Insta grid – One Thing:
Snapchat and BeReal understood this preference shift long ago. And now, scrubbing your feed is a way of taking some control back, refusing to put your past on display. It’s a design choice. Embracing negative space. Making anti-brand the brand. Refusing to participate in the popularity contest and the attention economy.
I know… let’s go back to blogging on our own domains (no, seriously)!
I don’t want to end this on a bummer note, but I do think it’s probably time to accept that we have reached the limitations of the social web as it’s currently constructed. It’s likely that TikTok was the last “social” platform and even more likely that all the behaviors that we can do on these platforms have been mapped out already. We can rearrange them and try them out in different orders and react to slight algorithm tweaks, but this is it. This is how people will behave as long the company’s that own and operate the web continue to do so. And it’s probably time to start imagining something else — no, not AI — before we forget how to do it.
The Museum of You – Herbert Lui:
I see a lot of discussion on how people miss blogs, and RSS, and internet culture before what we call Web 2.0 (social media, platforms, ecommerce, etc.) came along and wiped it away.
The best way to pay homage is to bring it back—to set up our own blogs that we control, to preserve our own libraries of content in multiple places so they don’t disappear with social media, to actively document our lives the way we miss and the way we would want to be remembered. We can choose a responsibility, every day, to collect the best of what came before us, to embody it, and to preserve it by sharing its charms with other people.
Much agreed, and this is one of the reasons I’ve kept my own blog and podcast here since 2006. I thought back then, “What if these awesome new tools like MySpace (or early Twitter) somehow go away or fall into the hands of the wrong leaders?”
I read previous posts and thoughts here occasionally and marvel at how naive, bold, brave, or afraid I was at various points in my life. Now looking back on this Museum of Me, I can glimpse previous iterations of my own self and perceptions and not just remember but learn.
Blogs like this, however silly they may seem in the face of social media apps, are powerful places!
I decided to take agency and move on from social media this month after the birth of our daughter. It has been a humbling experience to live in these moments of new life made tangible by her awakening. To walk beside Merianna and be present there with her in these moments is something I never want to forget.
Moving on from social media has already been an epiphany for me in so many ways. I’m sure I’ll be reflecting on that in the coming months here.
This post is worthy of your time to read and reflect as you contemplate your next IG Story or TikTok video…
The difference between creative & uncreative people:
When we satisfy our desire to certify the moment with a Tweet, or a Story, or a text to a friend, or a TikTok video, we sell it short. We reduce the experience to a single, throwaway-able moment, swiped by in a second, and we set the moment free. Even worse, we leave our experience (just born, fragile and fresh) in the hands of others who may not treat it with respect. They might perceive it differently than we do, mock it, minimize it, skew it in our memories, compare it to their own experience, taint it, steal it, rob it of the feelings it initially gave to us in that first, pure moment.
Must read from Mr. Brent Kaneft (our Head of School at Wilson Hall, where I am a teacher)…
So the strange paradox of innovation is that every innovation has the potential to be an existential threat to the physical, social, spiritual, and cognitive development of humans. The allure is the convenience (our brains are always looking to save energy!) and the potentiality innovation offers, but the human cost can be staggering, either immediately or slowly, like the impact of mold secretly growing behind an attractive wallpaper. To return to Tristan Harris’s point: machines are improving as humans downgrade in various ways. As professional educators, we have to ask whether innovation will prove detrimental to the fundamental qualities we want to develop in our students.
Even Facebook gets it…
Meta unspools Threads – The Verge:
It’s an almost unthinkable reversal from Meta’s extremely lucrative walled-garden strategy, which it has employed for its entire history as a company. But Mosseri told me that decentralization is the future of social networks — even if it means that someday a disgruntled Threads user will be able to take the following they build in the app to another network, never to return.
Instagram Threads launched today. It’s a slicker and very nice text-based social platform. It’s basically what Twitter should have become.
I’ve used Twitter since it was TWTTR way back and had the original @sam handle in early 2006. I thought it was magical. And it was. So much of what we thought about making content on the web was changing and evolving.
Then Twitter really took off in 2006 with the tech crowd (as you can see here on this blog with all the posts tagged with “twitter”), and it was seriously magical. I remember staying in a Las Vegas hotel during a tech conference with the late great Wayne Porter when Twitter was still text-based, and him threatening to take my phone out into the desert and shoot it because it would not stop giving 40404 alerts (Twitter’s number) in early 2006.
Track was amazing. You could type “track mullins” into Twitter, and any mention of “mullins” (my hometown) would signal an alert. Amazing. I remember driving to the NASCAR race at Richmond in 2007 with my Blackberry and Twitter track set up… I had the best time.
2007 was a year of exploration. The world discovered Twitter along with social media. We elected a President in 2008 who broadcast his inauguration on social media in January 2009. It felt like we were living in the future. Twitter track, social media casts, Skype… it was all so amazing.
I made a video in early 2007 that I hastily uploaded to YouTube titled “How To Use Twitter,” which had over 2.5 million views and made me a good lump of change before I deleted it. It was the top-ranked video for Twitter at the time. Geez, I loved that platform.
Then… the 2010s happened. I won’t speak of those. But social media went in a different direction.
Now here we are with Threads by Instagram. It is clean and vibrant. It’s what Twitter could have been. But it feels empty and hollow in a way that Twitter never did. It will be a fantastic platform. Threads will completely trounce Twitter and make Elon Musk’s endeavor of purchasing and seemingly detaching Twitter from life support seem vainglorious.
But I will always hold out hope for the Bird. RIP, Twitter. You did well. You ushered in something so unique.
Now may we all return to our own blogs and our own places of content creation and learn the lessons we needed to learn about trusting in the altruism of large corporations when it comes to our human outputs (and why you shouldn’t).
This is painful to read as a long-time Goodreads (and LibraryThing) user from the “before times”…
Goodreads, Amazon’s website for book lovers, causes problems in publishing – The Washington Post:
But after Amazon bought Goodreads, it gradually became clear that the technology was old and the data not well organized, and that a significant investment would be required to bring the site up to speed, according to two former Goodreads employees.
The reason “it feels stuck as a product,” one of the former Goodreads employees said, is because “it was painfully slow to create change.” As a result, proposed features like a recommendation algorithm or a news feed for the Kindle powered by Goodreads were never built.
The Buffet Is Back in the U.S., From Las Vegas to Small Southern Towns – The New York Times:
“The buffet is designed so the TikTokers and the Instagrammers can make their pretty pictures of the food,” Ms. Orner said.
There’s no denying that social media has made it easier to post online, but if you want to make sure that your own voice is being heard, get a domain, then purchase some web hosting and start a blog…
Reddit is introducing controversial charges to developers of third-party apps, which are used to browse the social media platform.
But this has resulted in a backlash, with moderators of some of the biggest subreddits making their communities private for 48 hours in protest.
Almost 3,500 subreddits will be inaccessible as a result.
Source: Reddit blackout: Subreddits to go private on Monday – BBC News
